Nalo Hopkinson

            

In science fiction, female writers are a part of the minority. An even smaller portion of that minority is comprised of women of color. Nalo Hopkinson is among that minority.      

            Noelle Nalo Hopkinson is a Black Jamaican-Canadian science fiction and fantasy writer whose work incorporates her Afro-Caribbean culture, feminist ideas, and Creole vernacular. Her work follows that of Octavia E. Butler in the fact that she uses a strong Black female character as a protagonist in many of her works. She also brings in personal elements to the stories by using her father works and integrating mother-daughter relationships which may mirror her own relationship with her mother.

To fully appreciate her work, one should understand a little about her past. Noelle Nalo Hopkinson was born on December 20, 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica. Her mother Freda was a library technician and her father, Slade, was a noted Guyanese poet, actor, and playwright. Her mother being a library technician led Hopkinson to explore many classic book titles such as Homer’s Iliad, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Philip Sherlock’s West Indian Folk Tales, and other such fantastical tales. As she grew older, Hopkinson’s preference moved towards science fiction leading her to read Frank Herbert’s Dune, Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. This is what piqued her interest in science fiction.

Her science fiction career, however, didn’t begin until 1993. It was in this year that her father died and she began writing her first novel. His influence is seen throughout the novel in epigraphs, characters, and themes. His work “The Woman of Papine” as well as “Ti’Jean and His Brothers”, a play by Derek Walcott, were inspirations for the novel. This first novel was pivotal, because it used the Afro-Caribbean vernacular, Creole, to tell the story rather than the more common proper English. It proved that Creole could be used to tell a story which readers wanted to see.

Since her first novel, Hopkinson has released a variety of works including several novels, short stories, anthologies, and essays. She works to promote feminism as well as supporting other people of color. In conferences she attends, she works to promote people of color by asking that issues relevant to them be presented. She has also done this as a teacher by encouraging students of color to attend college.

Works Cited

n.a. “Nalo Hopkinson- Summary Bibliography.” Isfdb. Isfdb. n.d. Web. 7 Dec. 2015. <http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?1366>

Rutledge, G. “Nalo Hopkinson.” University of Nebraska Lincoln. Faculty Publications: Department of English, 30 May 2002. Web. 7 Dec. 2015. <http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1024&context=englishfacpubs>

Kelby Warren

Kelly Link Author Profile

Deanna Hance

Dec. 7, 2015

Science Fiction for Women

Dr. Melissa Strong

 

Award-Winning Author Kelly Link Author Profile

Kelly Link is an award-winning science fiction/fantasy horror writer with many awards and little awareness about her works. However, she should stand out amongst readers, especially writers-to-be for how she won her awards and boosted her writing career. As a short story writer, she founded her own publishing company known as Small Beer Press to get her works and others like them out into the public and eventually made a collection of nine of her short stories collectively known as "Magic for Beginners". These short stories were so captivating and well-written that they won her the Locus award, the Nebula award, and the British SF award in 2006. Her experience as a writer is exactly what writers-to-be hope for in their own writing careers, though many go through other publishing companies rather than create their own. Her success is inspirational to readers and writers alike, and has earned her many prestigious awards along the way.
            Kelly received her BA from Columbia and her MFA from the University of North Carolina and currently lives in Northampton publishing books through her self-founded company Small Beer Press as well as a bi-yearly "zine" (a new creative writing outlet starting to gain popularity and notoriety amongst younger audienced) known as "Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet" (smallbeerpress.com). Link states in an interview about her book "Get in Trouble", "I live in Northampton, which is a pleasant place to live, and one of the things you really notice when you live there is the way in which students come, and then they go, the town empties out ... If you live in a place with a changing population like that, you start to feel a little bit strange about the fact that you are in that place permanently" (npr.org). This feeling has inspired much of her "night time logic" as she dubs it, while striving for a sense of realism in her horror genre, her logic makes you think, "I don't understand why that made sense, but I feel there was a kind of emotional truth to it" (npr.org)." A lot of people who consider Tahlequah home can relate to this sentiment very well with all the moving traffic of college students going home for the summer, which builds an eerie ghost town feeling for residents who live here year-round.
          In the collection of short stories named "Magic for Beginners", one of the most intriguing science fiction thriller stories is called "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" and gives you an eerie feeling until the very end when the horror really hits home. All of the stories are similar to the stories told in "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark", a very popular collection of short stories that hit popularity in the 1990's among young readers, however, some of Link's stories encompass more science fiction while others lean more toward fantasy, and almost all are geared toward adults with vulgar language and suggestive sexual themes. To read this collection of short horror stories online, go to http://lcrw.net/kellylink/mfb/Kelly_Link_Magic_for.pdf and enjoy the creepy realism that Kelly Link so powerfully used to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up ever so slightly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

"Drift Away Into The Not Quite Dreamy Logic Of 'Get In Trouble'". Author Interviews: NPR. NPR. 4 Feb. 2015. Web. 7 Dec. 2015.

 

Link, Kelly. "Kelly Link Bio".Small Beer Press. smallbeerpress, 2002. Web. 7 Dec. 2015.

 

Link, Kelly. "Magic for Beginners". lcrw. 2005. Web. 7 Dec. 2015.

Deanna Nicole Hance

Alice Bradley Sheldon

Alice Bradley Sheldon was born in 1915 in Chicago, Illinois into a wealthy family. Her father was successful in real estate and her mother was a well-known writer, hunter, and explorer. It was because of her mother that their family went to the Congo when she was only six years old. During this trip Alice saw elephants hunted and eaten and slept in a cot over the carcasses of the game they shot. Her mother even “jokingly offered her blonde daughter in trade for a chief’s ivory bracelet” right in front of her (Hand 42). Despite her admiration for her mother’s spirit and success as a writer, her experiences in the Congo heavily affected her throughout her life and made her question what a woman was supposed to behave like. When she was nine years old she returned with her family and was for some villagers the first Caucasian person they had ever seen. She was not allowed a gun because it was improper for women to bear arms.

At eighteen Alice impulsively married and spent six years in a dysfunctional marriage. After that marriage dissolved she enlisted in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAPC). May 1945 she was transferred to Europe where she met Colonel Huntington, “Ting” Sheldon. Alice “challenged Colonel Sheldon to a game of chess played blindfolded, and won. He fell in love” (Sturgis 1).

For many years Alice had tried unsuccessfully to be a painter and writer. She wrote feminist protests under the pseudonym Mrs. Huntington D. Sheldon. She wanted to be a successful science fiction writer but the genre was male dominated and she knew her work would not be looked at in the same light. While at the supermarket she saw a jar of Tiptree Jam and with her husband’s addition of Jr. James Tiptree Jr. was born. She wanted a name that editors would not remember rejecting. What she didn’t expect was that by the end of 1967 she would have sold three stories. Her mother presented Alice with an impossible standard. That combined with her experiences in the Congo made her feel inadequate as a female writer. Tiptree wrote in a way that expressed everything she couldn't.

James Tiptree Jr. wrote stories “about women's alienation in a world of men, and was held up as an example of a male feminist, a man who understood” (Phillips). Even being sympathetic towards women he was considered to be so manly that there was no doubt that he was a man and not in fact a sixty year old woman. Tiptree’s most famous work is “The Men Women Don’t See”. Other works include “All the Kinds of Yes” and “A Momentary Taste of Being”. 



Despite having been married to two men in her life, Alice struggled with her sexuality. She had tried unsuccessfully to engage in sexual relationships with women. Through her creation of Tiptree she was allowed to engage in flirtation through her letter correspondents with women. She suffered from a lack of identity and gave her an outlet to be entirely free in her writing and express her affinity for women.

Like any story she had written, Alice had a say in how her life ended. Her and her husband made a pact that when they became too old they would end their lives together. In 1987 Alice shot her husband and then herself. They were found holding hands in their bed. After her death, in 1991 the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award was created to expand the ideas people have about gender in literature.

Works Cited

"Go Ask Alice." Fantasy & Science Fiction 111.4/5 (2006): 40-50. Academic Search Premier. Web.

      

        7 Dec.2015.

Phillips, Julie. "The Secret Sci-Fi Life of Alice B.Sheldon." Npr. N.p., 15 July 2011. Web. 07 Dec.

        

         2015.

Sturgis, Susanna J. "The Man Who Didn't Exist. (Cover Story)." Women's Review Of Books 23.6

       

        (2006): 34. Academic Search Premier. Web. 7 Dec. 2015.

By Farrah Jones

Leigh Brackett

            Leigh Brackett was an author of science fiction and crime mystery novels, as well as several screen plays. She is most commonly known for her screenwriting for The Empire Strikes Back, a sequel to the first Star Wars movie. However, she greatly contributed to the science fiction genre and has received little credit for doing so. One of Brackett’s most noteworthy contribution to the genre is that she was one of the first female authors to write a novel, The Long Tomorrow, set in a post-apocalyptic society. Although Brackett wrote more crime mystery novels than science fiction, she enjoyed writing science fiction more.

            Brackett first began writing at nine years old, when she would write down events for possible sequels of movies. She, however, did not consider this writing to be serious and considers her “serious” writing to have begun when she was thirteen.

            Before Brackett’s first published work, she wrote several novels, short stories, and poems. Ray Bradbury, whom she had known since she was a child, encouraged her to pursue science fiction as a genre. Her first published science fiction work was not a novel, but instead was a short story for a magazine. She published several more short stories to magazines in the following few years. Brackett’s first published novel was a crime mystery novel, which eventually led her to screenwriting.

            All of Brackett’s science fiction novels had several recurring themes. First, the protagonist is usually a male who is in a hostile environment. The protagonist is often an alien but not always. The antagonist is usually a strong-willed independent female who complicates the mission of the protagonist. The antagonists in her novels usually bring destruction or peril. Another theme throughout Brackett’s novels is exploring what it means to be a human surrounded only by aliens. This theme is established in The Starmen, one of Brackett’s first science fiction novels, and is seen in most of her novels published after this.

            The Long Tomorrow is Brackett’s most well-known work. The novel is more in-depth than most of her other novels in concern to the issues it covers. While it is less dramatic than some of her others works, it is popular due to the themes of “destructive science and blind faith” (Batman) present throughout.

            While Brackett wrote more crime mystery novels in her literary career, it is her science fiction works that are the more well-known of the two. Still, she has not received near the amount of credit needed for her outstanding work in the genre. Writing novels with strong female characters was not something that most women had done during Brackett’s time, and she should be applauded for her fearlessness in doing so.

                                                                                                                       

Works Cited

Batman, Alex. "Leigh (Douglass) Brackett." Twentieth-Century American Science-Fiction Writers. Ed. David Cowart and Thomas L. Wymer. Detroit: Gale, 1981. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 8. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Dec. 2015.

Sallis, James. "Martian Quest: the Early Brackett." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Dec. 2003: 28+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Dec. 2015.

Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward. "Leigh (Douglass) Brackett." American Screenwriters. Ed. Robert E. Morsberger and Randall Clark. Detroit: Gale, 1984. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 26. Literature Resource Center. Web. 6 Dec. 2015.

Skyler Conley