Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy ed. by Jane B. Weedman (review)

122Rocky Mountain Review The essays of the section "Myth and Culture" recreate the mythical vision of woman in the Caribbean literary tradition. For Matiás Montes Huidobro the female image of the Puerto Rican and Cuban contemporary theatre is closely associated to the concept of hieros gamos, which unites woman and divinity to mythical and metaphorical concepts that transform the woman as object into a positive image associated with wisdom and power. The next essay studies female characters of several Cuban novels of the nineteenth century which present both the vision of the mulata as an object of sexual desire and the conflictual relationships between sexuality and power. Loma V. Williams' analysis points out that the protagonists of these novels are mulatas, victims of social and sexual oppression, who cannot escape this condition even though they appear as idealized and desired pleasure objects. In the last sections of the book, Carmelo Virgilio analyzes some of the elements which construct Mistral's poetic world and focuses on the poem "Fruta" in order to show that the mythical image of woman as mother is independent from the biological concept of maternity. A formalistic study of the images and structure of the poem lead to an expanding interpretation of woman as myth, symbolized by the creative mother of the poem. Naomi Lindstrom's own contribution is an interesting discussion of the mythical representation of woman in Latin American literature and society. Lindstrom identifies certain aspects of Roberto ArIt's work in which female characters are able to intervene in their own demythifying process, creating the possibility of a new mythic image beyond the traditional masculine models. The collection ends with Candace Slater on female stereotypical roles in the Brazilian tradition of "Cordel literature," and studies in detail one of the works, The Valiant ViIeIa, in order to show how ambiguities are created in the representation of different sexes. Each essay of the collection Woman as Myth and Metaphor offers a personal focus and tone. One cannot say that the assemblage of works successfully achieves the task of bringing a well defined critical conclusion concerning the mythical image of woman in Latin American literature. However, in general, the quality of the individual works and the organization of the essays by the editors make this anthology a paradigm for future works and a necessary tool for students and researchers. FLORA SCHIMINOVICH Barnard College JANE B. WEEDMAN, ed. Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Lubbock: Texas Tech Press, 1985. 250 p. This collection from the Sixteenth Annual Comparative Literature Symposium at Texas Tech University joins a recent flood of critical anthologies in the field of fantastic literature. Though the price of the volume ($50) will probably limit its audience to research libraries, the theme is timely and the entries intriguing and authoritative. Some of the essays deal with women as characters in science fiction or fantasy; others with such authors as Joanna Russ, Doris Lessing, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and linguist and satirist Suzette Haden Elgin. Historical surveys and close examina- Book Reviews123 tions of particular works make up the bulk of the book. Not all the subject matter is purely literary: related arts are taken up in Marilyn Mumford's rather superficial inventory of science fiction illustration and Rebecca Bell-Metereau's more substantial analysis of the film Alien. The symposium's keynote speakers contribute two of the most thought provoking pieces. Marion Zimmer Bradley's is a personal view of the development of feminist science fiction and of "Responsibilities and Temptations of Women Science Fiction Writers." She points out that she and other female readers of the genre in the 1930s and 40s turned to it to get away from "women's fiction" — the rigidly defined roleplaying of The Ladies' Home Journal. The frustration was in finding characters to identify with in the kind of stories they wanted to read. "We wanted to be the adventurer," she says, "to be women, like Catherine [Moore]'s first female protagonist Jirel of Joiry, and we feared being the beautiful vampire of Shambleau [another Moore creation]" (27). The heroines of both Samuel Delaney, the other keynote speaker, and the subject of his discussion here, Joanna...