Jody After the War by Edward Bryant (Orbit #10, 1972) opens with the narrator and Jody walking on a mountainside trail until they get to a picnic site overlooking Denver (one of the cities that survived a nuclear war). During this we get some backstory about the conflict, learn how the couple met, and see them discuss her PTSD and unwillingness to have children because of what she saw at one of the target cities.
Eventually, after munching through more related angst and the picnic, the narrator tells her he knows what he is letting himself in for and that he still wants marry her and move to Seattle.
A short slice-of-life/relationship fragment. Early-ish Bryant; he would do better work than this.
* (Mediocre). 2,200 words. Story link.
When It Changed by Joanna Russ
When It Changed by Joanna Russ (Again, Dangerous Visions, 1972) has an opening passage that describes the narrator’s fast-driving wife Katy and her engineering skills before speculating about how long it will be before one their daughters, Yuriko, goes off on a seemingly rite-of-passage trip to kill a cougar or bear armed only with a knife (there is also mention of the narrator having fought three duels). Then the story flips (1972) reader expectation about the narrator’s sex (she is female not male) by revealing that something awful has happened: men have returned to Whileaway.
The middle section of the story details the meeting between the narrator and the four men who have landed (“I can only say they were apes with human faces”, “muscled like bulls”, “I thought they would be good-looking!”), and we soon discover that men died out in a plague on Whileaway six centuries earlier. The rest of their conversation is mostly made up of the men’s patronising observations of Whileaway society and the women’s bridling and hostility, something which culminates when Katy feels that one of the men has insulted the couple and she tries to shoot him. The narrator manages to knock her wife’s laser-rifle off-target at the last moment.
The story concludes with the narrator giving an extended elegy for her planet and its society:
But men are coming to Whileaway. Lately I sit up nights and worry about the men who will come to this planet, about my two daughters and Betta Katharinason, about what will happen to Katy, to me, to my life. Our ancestors’ journals are one long cry of pain and I suppose I ought to be glad now but one can’t throw away six centuries, or even (as I have lately discovered) thirty-four years. Sometimes I laugh at the question those four men hedged about all evening and never quite dared to ask, looking at the lot of us, hicks in overalls, farmers in canvas pants and plain shirts: Which of you plays the role of the man? As if we had to produce a carbon copy of their mistakes! I doubt very much that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. I do not like to think of myself mocked, of Katy deferred to as if she were weak, of Yuki made to feel unimportant or silly, of my other children cheated of their full humanity or turned into strangers.
Well, at least the Earthmen won’t be killing them in duels.
There are a number of things that I don’t like about this piece or don’t think work: first, it is a polemic and not a story: second, its misandry (see the comments above and the general “men will ruin everything” vibe of the last pages); third, the culture the women have developed (or have allowed to develop) on Whileaway seems very odd—it is possible that women could develop a violent society (the teenage bear hunting, the duelling, the attempting shooting after the perceived insult), but it seems rather unlikely; fourth, the story (what there is of it) doesn’t address the issue that most of the women on Whileaway would probably be sexually attracted to any male settlers (six hundred years of cultural conditioning isn’t going to trump three hundred thousand years of evolution); finally, the more interesting story would have been what happened when the men actually arrived, not the temper tantrum that takes place beforehand.
The story went on to win the Nebula Award but it was only a finalist for the Hugo and Locus Awards. I would suggest it is an excellent example of a story getting its awards or nominations for surfing the zeitgeist—the Equal Rights Amendment had recently been passed in the USA and the ratification process had just begun.
I didn’t think much of this story when I first read it in the late-seventies and I thought even less of it this time around.
* (Mediocre). 3,350 words. Story link.