Altered Lives, Altered Loves: Tiptree Award Winner Suzy McKee Charnas

By Denise Dumars     September 22, 2000

Winning the Tiptree Award for feminist science fiction caps a fascinating chapter in the writing life of Suzy McKee Charnas. Thirty years after the writing of the first book in the dystopian Holdfast Chronicles, Charnas finishes the series with THE CONQUEROR'S CHILD, a story of Sorrel, the daughter of the series' heroine Alldera. This novel of searing endings and hopeful beginnings garnered her the prestigious award. How did the Holdfast Chronicles begin? To a reader only familiar with 'The Unicorn Tapestry' novelette and/or the book that contains it, THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY, these Holdfast books seem quite a departure.

'In fact it's the other way around: TAPESTRY was the departure!' Charnas says. 'The first novel I wrote [in the Holdfast Chronicles], WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD, appeared in 1974. After publication of the sequel, MOTHERLINES, in 1978, I took a break from the third volume because I was having a hell of a time with it. On a visit to New York I saw two stage plays about Dracula and, dissatisfied with the way both of them romanticized Dracula, I came up with my own concept of the vampire as a lone predator. That story, sold to Omni Magazine, later became the first chapter and the foundation of the novel THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY, which contains 'Unicorn Tapestry'.'

Feminism is also a part of this story. 'You might notice, though, that TAPESTRY itself has a subtle feminist flavor. Think about who destroys Stoker's Dracula--a posse of brave young men led by a wise old man--and who brings my vampire, Dr. Weyland, to bay--a mixed batch of kids and women. As they say, once you see, you can't unsee again; so everything
that I write is likely to reflect my awareness of gender problems.'

Reading THE CONQUEROR'S CHILD as a stand-alone book, I had many questions about it. Those questions have been answered by going back and reading the previous volumes, so I asked Charnas if she thinks readers can approach the fourth novel as a stand-alone volume.

'I'm not the person to answer that question,' she says. 'There's no way that I can have the same experience, reading CHILD, as the experience of a reader unfamiliar with the series. Some reviewers have said CHILD stands alone; others disagree.'

In CHILD there is plenty of rape--of both men and women. But there's no consensual sex. Relationships that occur are same-sex, between both the heroic Riding Women and the degraded men in the book. Was there pressure to not show same-sex love? 'The only time I ran into editorial pressure was from the editor who bought WALK' she explains. 'She was horrified by MOTHERLINES [the second book] and wrote me a letter saying it was 'unpublishable' and would have to be completely rewritten. She objected most to the mating habits of the Riding Women, declaring in outrage that SF was written for adolescent boys and they should be shielded from such ideas.'

Charnas finesses the question about the depicting of rape vs. consensual sex. 'The question about showing positive love relationships is an interesting one; let's look more closely. The first book does have some, between men. Then there's a book about two all-female societies, in one of which women have what looks to me like consensual relationships that are generally very positive and rewarding to them. In THE FURIES, men and women are at war: consensual heterosexual relationships are pretty much impossible under the circumstances, but Alldera and Beyarra, for example, have a strong love relationships, and I see a protective and caring relationship between Eykar and Setteo that is also sexual,' she elaborates, is referring to two main female characters and then to two main male characters in the saga.

'In CHILD, considering that most of the people in the book have been through a huge, wrenching social change, it didn't seem to me that it was realistic to jump back to some kind of 'normal' set-up. My reading in anthropology suggests that human sexuality and nature are very varied and malleable, and that the removal of extreme social distortion would not automatically send everybody back to some supposed 'natural' default setting of husband, wife, and kiddies. This does sort of happen to a few people, and it seems an increasing possibility for others at the end--note also Sorrel's comments on the later career of the young man Payder as a good lover in high demand in the households of the Free.'

Charnas continues. 'But for the most part, the people in the story, having survived enormously traumatic and extreme experiences, are just beginning to work their way toward any sexual relationships that are positive; and some forms of traditional family relations are beginning to appear. Sorrel, for example, behaves like a loving and protective mother to a little boy who is not even hers. She and her own father establish a difficult relationship in which he ends up acting very much as a parent to her, even to the point of sacrificing another very important relationship in his life to assure not only her safety but the removal of a terrible influence on the whole society's future.'

The behavior of the women in CHILD toward children is shocking; how could a mother, or any woman, for example, allow children to just die off if they're sick or disabled, as the Riding Women do? 'One of the choices I had to make all along was about how much to hark back to the conditions of the first book in order to clarify the roots of the characters' behavior later on. No matter how I chose, I knew that it wouldn't work for all readers. I hope it works for most. One of the things you learn as a novelist is that you cannot control (and, to my mind, should not control) the reactions of readers; you can only tell the story as best you can and hope not to be too badly misunderstood.'

Also, I could not admire the women in the story since they kept slaves. Only after I read the first book and understood how degraded the women were in that society, could I then see that their behavior in CHILD is actually an improvement. 'I try not to cheat by concocting easy (but false) answers to tough questions,' she explains. 'Example: A) Suffering improves character, as in, slaves learn to be better people who would never, themselves, hold slaves. B) Suffering often embitters and destabilizes people, and those who have been abused often internalize the abuse and pass it on to others over whom they have control: they have to learn to do better than has been done to them; it doesn't just come naturally. Having read a good deal of history, I chose the second, more realistic answer over the smoother, sweeter, first one.'

Some reviewers have called this society 'a feminist utopia,' even though these are dystopian stories nowhere any reasonable definition of a utopia! Charnas agrees, but explains the other reaction. 'I think for some women whose life experiences with men have been particularly bad, the separatist society of the Riding Women does read as a Utopia. It isn't one for me; I've had a good heterosexual marriage for over thirty years, so that society is less appealing to me. The life doesn't offer enough choices for my taste. The same would be true of any 'primitive' society, though. Margaret Meade once defined 'primitive' as offering fewer choices, and I go along with that and prefer the less primitive for my own life.'

She addresses the issue of Dystopia--and reveals its origins in the real world. ' The society of the men (and the dependent society of the fems [as women are called]) in WALK was a deliberately satirical creation. I was furious, at the time, with the arrogant criminality of the Nixon gang, and I had just read about the secret underground city outside DC where the governing elite were supposed to run and hide while the rest of us got crisped by nuclear bombs. The only one to refuse this option was Justice William O. Douglas, who declined when he learned that the men in question would not be allowed to take their wives to safety with them, which is how the story got into the news in the first place (yes, the hide-out still exists). I decided to take the descendants of the ones who would say yes and make them come out and face the results of their ancestors' actions in a barren future where they would have to live by the exact inverse of their ancestors' values: homosexuality is the norm; hallucinogens are a social institution; the economy runs on a sort of socialist-syndicalist plan; and everybody eats seaweed farmed in the Japanese manner and lives at the level of a third world village.'

Still, the more things change... 'It got a lot more serious when I realized that the only thing that hadn't been reversed in my satirical future was discrimination against women, and the persistence and exaggeration of that kind of thinking became the subtext of the book. WALK grew to exemplify a classic SF pattern, the one created by the question, 'What will happen if this goes on?' It's about sexism driven to the farthest extreme I could think of, so that maybe we could recognize the dangers of the milder sexism that we (in America, at any rate) still live with every day, and do more about it. The crippled society of the escaped fems in MOTHERLINES was built on considerations of how difficult it is for people who have been oppressed to actually become free even when they have escaped their oppressors.'

She adds, 'The Riding Women were my take on the idea of a society of Amazons, but lifted out of the context of deeply patriarchal and sexist Greek mythology and set loose to be what it could be on its own. The society of the Bayo-born in CHILD is simply another option for undercutting, as it were, the masculine push for social domination as we see it today. The Pool Towns were a 'normal' society of hetero families that falls to a tougher, meaner culture; and what the Free are building at the end of that book is, well, something very much more positive, I think, than much of what passes for 'normal' today.'

Charnas explains the transformation of this society over the course of the four books in the series. 'Look at it this way: The people of the Holdfast move from a situation in which pretty much everybody is miserable and half-crazed, to one in which at least the female half of society is autonomous and living a life of reasonable cooperation, productivity, and satisfaction; while the remaining men are beginning to understand that they must redefine what a man is in order to attain parity in that society. From that point of view--my point of view, actually--I'd say the arc of the whole story is distinctly upbeat. No, their problems are not solved, but at least people are thinking toward humane solutions, and acting on ideas, and to me that is Utopia--because I don't believe in perfection in human society anyway.'

What makes The Holdfast Chronicles--despite their sometimes uncomfortable subject matterso compelling? 'Frankly, I think it's the fact that I do take on real, hard problems, and I don't fudge them by imposing easy answers on the characters. I didn't set out to prove a point; people who write propaganda start out with the end in mind, the point already given, and then twist the story to support that end. I started out with questionswhat if sexism as we know it went to its furthest extreme? What if there were Amazons in the futurehow would they live? How does a slave find leadership qualities in herself? How might truly free women deal with power among themselves? And many, many moreand followed along as my characters grappled with them and worked out answers that make sense to them. Honest struggle by flawed, realistic characters always makes the most interesting fiction to me, so that's what I try to write.'

Charnas discusses why she believes CHILD was chosen as a Tiptree award winner. 'Their remarks on 'gender-bending,' which is what they look for, suggest that the mark is continually moving as our society moves in its understanding of what gender is and how it operates. Just having a female protagonist who's a space pilot might once have qualified a story for the Tiptree; it's a pretty common trope in SF now, so that's no longer sufficient. An element of thinking that is radical for the year the book is published is probably part of the answer.'

Clearly the mainstream media have not kept pace with the Tiptree judges. 'What interests me is that at least one review (in Kirkus) dismissed CHILD as offering nothing new. It seems to me that saying that some of the responsibility for fixing gender problems is men's responsibility to deal with among themselves is an unusual one. We have all tended to make an assumption, I think, that fixing our gender problems is women's job because women are the ones who point out the problem in the first place. We let men assign social matters to women's 'sphere' and then blame women for not 'solving' them. I think this story takes us to a place where it's clear that at least half of the solution has to come from men: men have to figure out for themselves how to be full members of a society, instead of dominators of a destructive hierarchy. Unfortunately, that still seems to be a radical notion. So maybe that had something to do with the book winning the Tiptree.'

A recent rereading of 'The Unicorn Tapestry,' proved as interesting today as it was in the '80s, but finding the novel it spawned was hard. 'That book has been in (re-)print since 1993 with a small local publisher, Living Batch Books, which is really one guy who ran a great bookstore here in Albuquerque for many years, and who knew my novel because he'd been teaching a course at the University of New Mexico on horror in novels and films. I told him that the publisher had let it go out of print because it wasn't making billions of bucks, and he said, 'I'll publish it,' and he did and continues to. The phone number of UNM Press is 1-800-249-7737.'

Charnas' take on vampires is widely imitated. 'Frankly, my vampire is still revolutionary, as far as I can see. He was conceived as not a suave, seductive aristocrat or glamorous punk, or a musty, claw-fingered revenant, but as one of a predatory species with a long, long life-span. The book allows him to utilize, confront, or be victimized himself by various predatory strains in our own culture. Also, I think there was and is a special tension created in the book by the fact that while I designed Weyland as an anti-romantic version of an over-romanticized figure, the power of our romantic longing is such that there is a romantic flavor to his story and his fate anyway. That victory of cultural desire over authorial intention gives the story a particular resonance that I think readers respond to. And the book is subtle and funny, qualities that account for the fact that it's still in print and sellingit was initially published in 1981!'

CHILD is billed as the last book in the series. Is Charnas absolutely, positively sure that there won't be another one? After the award, people may well be clamoring for more, and it would be nice to see the conclusion of Alldera's story.

'There's a charming (and possibly accurate) theory that women writers are more inclined to write books with 'open' endings than men, partly because women so often deal with the on-going, not to say never-ending chores of life,' says Charnas. 'I took pains to leave the future of the New Holdfast in fairly chaotic transition, because to me that's how real life is, and I wanted the story to feel real. I've been living with them in my head for thirty yearstime for a break. Mind you, I have a vague notion that sometime (in my old age?) I might dip into the New Holdfast as it might develop in a couple of hundred years or more; but the danger of that is that people will insist that whatever I come up with is the only way things could have gone, and I'd rather leave things open for our imaginations to range around.'

For whom would Charnas recommend the Holdfast Chronicles? 'Anyone who sees that for us to progress or even to survive as a species, we have got to get past the 'We do it because we can, no matter how destructive it is' mentality of advanced technological patriarchal societies. I figure lots of people are aware of this, and they read SF to help them think about it in new ways. I'm also writing for women who want SF with women characters playing important and surprising, provocative roles in a story that addresses issues of concern to forward-thinking people of all genders. And it's for everybody who likes a good, rich, strong story with elements of novelty to make it more interesting than most. It's sure not the same old, same old, and I think readers will agree!'

Charnas recaps the 30-year saga. 'It was a strange experience, to do this story over a period of 30 years, with the characters aging roughly thirty years during that time so that the whole thing takes place in real time as if I were watching it out of the window or something, in a parallel universe where they were living their (fictional) lives at the same pace that I lived mine. Because of that real-time dimension, maybe, some critics feel that the books reflect (without my having designed this, consciously) the developments of American feminist thought and politics during the lasts quarter of the 20th century. And now that it's done, the whole thing moves away from me at a very rapid rate; when I reread parts of the books they feel familiar but not like something of mine, in the way that a little story like 'Boobs' stays on a sort of intimate level with me, with a compartment of my childhood self that I drew on to write that story. TAPESTRY's a bit like that, too. But that happened with these books much faster, maybe because the people became so real to me that I don't feel now that I have much insight into them. It's their story, and they are off in some other dimension carrying it on somehow. Kinda lonesome and turned-loose feeling, sometimes. I mean, I liked those folks--even the worst of them. And I don't know what comes next, but I'm sure it's going to be interestingto me, anyway.'