My Lady Tongue & Other Tales by Lucy Sussex
Lucy Sussex is an Australian writer whom I've actually met. In fact, she gave me the copy of this collection of short fiction when Sharee and I visited her and her partner, Julian Warner, at their Melbourne home just over a decade ago. I've run into her socially in Seattle at least once since then, too.
In any event, I've tagged this post "science fiction," but these stories are mostly not what I would consider science fiction. A lot of them are tales of the uncanny or the weird, frequently with touches of horror. It took me a while to get into what she was up to. My best guess as to why is that her prose is so terse and blunt that the exposition was often hard for me to absorb. I often had to go back and reread earlier parts of the story to figure out what was going on, because I'd missed some clipped clue. This isn't exposition, but here's an example of her pared style: "Shane looked astounded and the lawyer, daggers." Even someone with as blunt a style as Octavia Butler gets her exposition across through repetition, describing the same process over and over in different contexts until the ideas sink in, like tendrils into flesh. However, that's in novels, where space/wordcount is basically unlimited, not in short fiction where space is at a premium.
I'm not going to go into every story in the collection, which would frankly require me to reread most of them to remember the plots. The title story, "My Lady Tongue," which is probably the longest, won the 1989 Ditmar award, which is the award for Best Australian SF handed out at the national science fiction convention. It's the closest thing to a classical science fiction story in the collection, by my standards, reminding me of Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr, and Angela Carter. It's set in an enclave of isolationist dykes who refuse all contact with men. They reproduce through artificial insemination, although they're working on a process to turn eggs into something that fertilize other eggs. In this future, there are circles of less ideological/separationist feminists surrounding this inner core. The protagonist was raised by two woman, or rather born to one and raised by another. She's a troublemaker who is in love with the daughter of a woman who doesn't appreciate trouble. She looks up her biological mother and relates a story about an adventure she had when she was younger, scouting for some territory where the separatists could move to isolate themselves completely from men. Sussex has a satirical eye for ideologues and their contradictions, and the irony of the story is that Raffy (short for Raphael) was rescued by a man on her adventure and forced to spend months in his company while she recovered from an injury. She is furthermore exposed to the poetry of another man, William Shakespeare, in the process. As confused as I sometimes got by the different layers of the society portrayed, I found this an immensely appealing, humanistic, wry story. Of the writers I listed as influences, it seems most closely allied with Angela Carter and her eye for impurity and contradiction, although Carter was a much more sensual prose stylist than Sussex is.
"Red Ochre" is a strange story set in a future Australia where there are mutants, which are related in some mysterious (magical? religious?) way to Aboriginal rock paintings. It's worth noting, perhaps, that another part of my difficulty with understanding her prose sometimes was her copious use of unfamiliar Aussie slang. "Go-To" is a horror story about vivisection, animal rights, and unintended consequences. "The Lipton Village Society" is perhaps a meditation on Utopia and the process of trying to inhabit our ideals, although it can also be read as a story about fandom and its escapist tendencies. "God and Her Black Sense of Humour" starts out being a lark about the '60s groupies who made plaster casts of their rock gods' dicks, and turns into a weird variation on Theodore Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood. Black sense of humor, indeed! Bonus points from me for the bizarre alternative Frank Zappa who seems all too credible as a businessman and curator of cult items. In fact, there's a lot of fun name-dropping in this story, betraying a penchant for arcane research that's on display throughout the book.
Despite my initial difficulties, by the end of the collection I'd been won over by the off-beat ideas, off-beat humor, and embrace of the perverse that I found in Sussex's stories. This is not escapist fiction, but challenging, probing literature.