Thoughts on feminist dystopias and The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

Don't let the cover fool you, this book
 is way better than The Road.

OK, in theory, I don't like dystopias. (5 stars to The Book of the Unnamed Midwife! Author Meg Elison is attending Norwescon *waves muppet arms*, March 29-April 1, Seattle)

I think we need more utopias and optimistic science fiction. Like this.

We need to imagine the future we want, the people we would like to be.

I love science fiction for its power (I believe!) to create the future. People read stuff, get ideas, they make it happen.

But utopias offer a writing challenge. If everything is so great, where's the plot? I loved Ursula K. Le Guin's excellent essay on writing utopias "Utopiyin, Utopiyang" in her collection No Time to Spare.

Now dystopias could be useful as warnings, as cautionary tales as, "No! Wait! If this, then that..." and they are fascinating as "What if?" and "What would I do in this world?" scenarios. But sometimes it seems like people are missing the "dys" in dystopia (using them as playbooks and making the world in the image of 1984, The Man in High Castle, The Handmaid's Tale — Gee, no thanks!). OK, more likely the people doing this stuff aren't reading...

In practice, I read a lot of dystopias.

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go makes me swoon. I can't stop talking about Ninni Holmqvist's The Unit.

People keep writing dystopias and some are really, really good — so I read them. Of course!

Grr, just don't get me started about Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006) — dark, cold, bleak, a repetition of bad people behaving at their worst. I preferred Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, because it was first (1924), Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (1966) and Russell Hoban's weird and inventive Ridley Walker (1980).

So, here I am reading The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. Positive buzz nudged it onto my TBR list.

But I'm reluctant, thinking here's another dystopia: Things are bad. People are bad. There's rape.

As usual, I'm thinking the people I know wouldn't be this way, right? The SCA folks, the returned Peace Corps volunteers, Burners...we wouldn't collapse because we couldn't have Oreos, or whatever.  Would we? Hell, no! It wouldn't be the end of the world. It would be the beginning.

In a post-apocalyptic world, I would unite,
share resources, be humane
and start anew: not eat you.
(I was a Peace Corps volunteer. I can garden.)

We'd come together like people do in disaster scenarios à la Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell. Please! Relentlessly, irrepressibly optimistic.

Also, I'm not loving this protagonist. Why not, though? She's a woman, surviving and acting bravely. She's from the left coast like me. She loves to read, combing through the rubble of civilation for novels. She's cynical, but I think I probably agree with her. I suspect the trouble is, the way we are sometimes irritated by our mothers or female bosses, maybe she reminds me too much of myself (of whom I am intensely, inordinately critical).

The problem is: We don't see her through the eyes of the people who know and love her. They're dead. Her problem is: The people she loves are dead. It's a bleak world. All the babies are dying so maybe it really is the end of the world. It's not like she's at her best. Likable isn't her priority — it's survival, obvs.

On the plus side, this book moves along at a clip, reads effortlessly = well written.

Wisely, the book starts with a scene that hints the author is going somewhere, somewhere interesting. It's enough bait that I keep going.

I never consider putting the book down, but when I talk to my spouse about it I don't have much to say.

"It's a dystopia."
"It's a dystopia; and now there are Mormons. Huh..." 

Then, wham! I got to the scene — spoiler: this scene (I love this post by the author!). It elevated the entire book for me. Suddenly, I got it. It all came together.  I went from "huh" to "I love this book!" Spouse heard all about it. From there, it just kept getting better.

This reminds me of my reading experience with Monique Truong's Bitter in the Mouth.

By the end, I was ready to go ahead and start the next book in the series (In theory, I don't like series either. I'd rather be reading new voices. But I made a mistake waiting to read the second book in Becky Chambers' Wayfarer series, so I added The Book of Etta to my TBR list posthaste).

I'm in the middle of The Book of Etta: The author expands on the ideas she explores in The Road to Nowhere #1 fearlessly. It's great. 

Sadly, part of the reason this book resonated so much with me is that we're living in a dystopia with rampant, inescapable and disheartening levels of misogyny and an entrenched patriarchal culture.

Important related digression... 

Why didn't I read this book sooner?

I've been paying attention to #MeToo in the animal rights movement, #ARMeToo, with horror.

Another and another and another wake up call. Wasn't I already awake? Oh, crap!

Here I am, making the same mistake, losing track of my surroundings. Getting lost in the dominant culture. I've read and talked about these men's ideas and books...giving those voices influence (in my sphere of thought) even when I had doubts. I wish I hadn't.

Doubts =:

• Why are all the heroes and most prominent voices white men? 
• Why are traits more associated with traditional and masculine culture more highly valued?

Even within a counterculture movement which (must be!) rooted in compassion, our misogynistic, patriarchal culture wreaks havoc. It's definitively dystopian.

Much love to UKL.

"5. The values of patriarchy are buried in the very plots of our stories. New plots are needed." — Karen Joy Fowler, Ten Things I Learned From Ursula K. Le Guin

In response, I'm amplifying women and POC voices on my social feeds, Twitter and TBRLists, and shifting my support, donations and speech, to organizations run and founded by women.

More than ever, I'll be reading and talking about books by women in 2018. Like this one. To be continued...

That said: I just finished Sam J. Miller's (Excellent!) The Art of Starving and I'm slow reading (about a page a day) Alan Marshall's (Phenomenal!) Ecotopia 2121 and will blog about it when I finish. 

Now, back to The Book of the Unnamed Midwife... 

Have you noticed how men dominate dystopias? That's particularly the case in The Book of the Unnamed Midwife where the plague kills more women than men.

What if in an apocalypse mostly women survived? Well, I've read a lot of those, too. The thing is: those are feminist utopias, generally places you might want to visit.

Seven things I loved about The Book of the Unnamed Midwife:

•  A feminist dystopia which addresses maternal and infant mortality.
• The Planned Parenthood shout-out: “Good old Planned Parenthood. Saved my life.” 
• The Peace Corps shout-out: "Peace Corps kids in Africa realized they could not swim home, would never see home again."
• The hospice shout-out: "She established the hospice and trained attendants so that when Old Maria began to show the signs of cancer, there was a network in place to see her mercifully to her death."
• The escalating structure pulled me right into the next book.
• Did I mention this scene? 
• Hey, utopia! I see you...