kate_nepveu | Readercon: The Works of Naomi Mitchison (Reply)

A panel I was on, so usual sketchy-notes disclaimer.

The Works of Naomi Mitchison

Memorial GOH Naomi Mitchison came to SFF late in her writing career, after achieving success with her historical fiction (The Corn King and the Spring Queen; 1931). Her retelling of the Grail legend in the tone of a tabloid journalist, To the Chapel Perilous (1955), presaged much of contemporary urban fantasy with its irreverent modern twist on the old story. Mitchison's anthropological and political interests made for unique works that explored the difficulty of recording history while hurtling into the future (Memoirs of a Spacewoman, 1962), the downsides of food surpluses (Not by Bread Alone, 1983), and the ramifications of cloning (Solution Three, 1975). Join us in exploring the works of her long and storied career.

Amal El-Mohtar, Kate Nepveu (moderator), Lila Garrott, Max Gladstone, Rebecca Fraimow

This was so, so much fun, as you would expect from a lineup like that.

panel notes

Before the panel we were showing each other the back cover copy on the reprint editions of To the Chapel Perilous and Memoirs of a Spacewoman, which are really something: Chapel says twice that Tolkien didn't like it! Memoirs is all, it's not the icky kind of science fiction, honest!!! So I passed my copy of Chapel around the audience as we got started.

I started by asking the panelists which book they were most excited to talk about, and to my surprise it was To the Chapel Perilous.

I gave a little elevator pitch for the book, which ran something like: the book opens with two tabloid reporters waiting outside the Chapel Perilous, where they've seen many knights enter, many knights leave as failures, some of whom they've interviewed and taken pictures of. And then, they see like twenty or thirty knights leave, all of them with Grails. And they look at each other and say, well, heck, we can't print that: who are we going to say found The Grail? And they decide on Galahad. Again, that's chapter one.

I took fairly detailed notes about this discussion, and what I have is:

It's about the rise of fascism. It's very funny and playful. It's about trying to make sense of a world that doesn't, as is the theme of Arthurian 20th century stories.

It slides register, from very modern to just lines from Malory.

It has this sense of a keen intelligence moving throughout it, analogous to a puppeteer behind a puppet show: the point of a show is to see the puppets, but every so often you get a glimpse of the puppeteer.

Lila has a crackpot theory, which he thinks cannot be confirmed except by interviewing the principals, that its direct descendant is ... Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Which everyone immediately acclaimed, because both are deeply familiar with the various Arthuriana legends, have zero nostalgia, and are into journalism.

Mitchison is sympathetic to the characters unlike, for instance, Twain, and also refuses to collapse into satire.

Someone commented that if you took the text in the vacuum, it would be very hard to date it, it could have been published any time between when it was and today.

Which I agreed with and used as a segue to talk about Memoirs of a Spacewoman. This was published in 1962 and was very definitely feminist: the narrator has children by multiple different fathers, raises them for a year and then goes off to travel at relativistic light speeds to make first contact with aliens, saying "it's so good to get back to work!" But then she says things like, I just think women are intrinsically better at communication, and I'm like, you so badly need second-wave feminism.

Anyway, the way I've been elevator-pitching this book is, possibly the least strange thing that happens is that the narrator, Mary, has an intense communicative experience with a Martian—who communicate by touch, including on/with their sex organs—and has a virgin birth as a result.

(She also has an ecstatic Christian vision, but doesn't practice religion (I should've said about Chapel that the text is very critical of the Church and very sympathetic to pagans) and explicitly says that at one point she thought she might adopt Islam, which was very striking. One of the fathers of her children is also Black, which is great but also the way she talks about his beauty was pretty uncomfortable.)

I managed to take zero notes on our discussion of this book except that there's no military on these exploratory/first-contact missions (the only bad guys are people who want to mine for minerals). What I can recall is discussing how the book is very insistent that to communicate, Mary has to change; for instance, in order to make contact with a five-armed radially-symmetric species, she has to give up binary thinking, to the point where she can't snap-answer a yes/no question. (Also, it's not clear until about 3/4 through the book that Mary is using telepathy, which is just one example of the ways that Mitchison is truly writing genre: she just drops background info in and expects you to pick it up.)

It's also very much about motherhood; besides the virgin birth, they make contact with a species that grafts itself onto other organisms, which of course Mary volunteers for. It's not only about motherhood, though; the explorers have a serious non-interference principle, which forms the basis for a significant plot episode and a lot of contemplation. This and Chapel are both skinny books but absolutely dense, despite feeling very breezy, which is really impressive.

Possibly around here Rebecca mentioned Mitchison as a political writer and thinker, having read some of her memories, including her WWII diaries? I have in my notes "community, connection; better world, working toward, working out (the idea of)."

Then we talked about Travel Light, with Amal recapping her beautiful essay about it, which I strogly recommend. People noted that the slide from myth to history in the book is kind of like that from childhood to adulthood. I noted that the fictional country that Halla meets people from, Marob, is the subject of her much earlier giant historical novel, The Corn King and the Spring Queen, which also does the same slide (one of the main characters is comforted to know that she can return to Marob where magic works, unlike out in Sparta or Egypt).

Someone asked if Mitchison could be in conversation with/compared to/etc. Hope Mirrlees and Dorothy Dunnett, and we agreed; other authors we suggested were Dunsany and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Lila talked briefly about two books no-one else had read; Barbarian Stories, which is a fiction collection linked by the topic of the title, people encountering people they initially think are barbarians throughout history and into the future, and The Delicate Fire, which is about the retaking of a city by displaced former slaves.

And Max mentioned "The Fourth Pig," which is a chilling retelling of The Three Little Pigs in the context of the rise of fascism (part of the collection of the same title).

To my intense vexation, the small press reprinting her works doesn't do ebooks, so there are only five of her works available in that format: