H.M. Hoover’s cool, competent heroines
Again from the eighties, carried with me through several moves, are the Avon editions of HM Hoover’s The Rains of Eridan, Return to Earth, The Lost Star and Another Heaven, Another Earth.

The Rains of Eridan is my favourite, because of Theodora Leslie and Karen Orlov, the woman-girl team at the center. Theodora is a biologist and explorer, on a solo mission out from her base, trying to find out the reason for an irrational fear that is affecting all three mission bases. She is an independent woman with a reputation for preferring animals to human-beings; some grief in her past is implied, but never explained. She witnesses the murder of the two of the exploration leaders and finds their teenage daughter abandoned. Fear has become murderous insanity in Base 1. Uncertain of what they might face on their return, she and Karen trek on across Eridan, continuing Teo’s exploration of the unspoiled landscape, until the rains begin and they are forced to return to Base 3, where they find the rain has brought great danger, to add to the ever-present fear. The fear, the danger, and the rains are all connected to the life-cycle of Eridan. It’s a fine SF adventure novel, with neat biology, and engaging humans thrown in.

Return to Earth is next: Galen Innes, retiring governor of the MarSat colony, returns to his empty family home on Earth. He is trying to engineer a graceful withdrawal from the political stage so that his unimpressive, but unexceptionable son can establish himself. In the grounds of his home he encounters teenaged Samara Lloyd, heir to one of the great corporations of Earth, and very shortly both of them cross – almost fatally – a powerful cult-leader, the Dolman, and wind up evading and then plotting the Dolman’s downfall together. Another wonderful adult-girl team, with the adult acting as guide and mentor to a very capable teenager.

Another Heaven, Another Earth is set on the fading colony of Xilian, which has almost forgotten its origin as an Earth colony. Earth has not quite forgotten it, but does not believe that Xilian was successfully settled, so when an exploration ship arrives and seventeen-year-old Gareth Michaels encounters a team from the ship in an alien burial ground, the shock is mutual. But the alien burial ground is one of several, each one showing the same mutations the colonists are showing, before they died out; Xilian is toxic to human life. To the explorers, evacuation seems the most humane solution, but to Gareth and her people, a dignified decline is preferable to confinement and dependency on overcrowded Earth. The realization that their own superiors’ agenda is contaminated with greed pushes the wavering survey team to act.

Hoover’s vision of Earth’s future is of great corporations which have become indistinguishable from nations or kingdoms, where the power and wealth are concentrated in old, powerful dynasties. Colonization is an enterprise, in the money-making sense: three of these novels feature exploration missions seeking to discover and earmark territories for exploitation. Her heroines belong to the elite – the most formidable among them, Samara Lloyd ( Return to Earth) is heir and then Director of Continental Lloyd, while Karen Orlov (The Rains of Eridan ), is of “an old and wealthy clan … the result of five hundred years of careful breeding … heir to all they are and were … and a great deal of what they possess.” Lian in The Lost Star, and Gareth in Another Heaven, Another Earth are both members of an intellectual elite (as is Karen): Lian as the daughter of single-minded and accomplished astronomers, and Gareth as the descendent of her colony’s professionals and her settlement’s only doctor.

Yet despite the positioning of her heroines among the elite, which might suggest the author approves or romanticises the future corporation, in the three novels of colonization, the agenda is thwarted. In The Rains of Eridan by the perils of the planet’s unusual biology, explained in the end by the work of Karen and her mentor, Theodora Leslie. In Another Heaven, Another Earth it is by biology and by the would be exploiters’ strained sense of ethics, challenged and awakened by Gareth Michaels and her fellow colonists. And in The Lost Star it is by the discovery made by the young heroine that the supposed animals clustering around the exploration site are intelligent marooned explorers, like themselves.

In the mid eighties or thereabouts an author called Zibby Oneal wrote three near-perfect YA novels, The Language of Goldfish, A Formal Feeling and In Summer Light. Carrie Stokes (The Language of Goldfish ) is a sensitive, artistic thirteen-year-old in retreat from what others consider the ordinary steps in growing up – wearing a bra, attending junior dances, liking popular music with its explicit sexuality, awareness of adults’ sexual lives. She is not ready to take a teenager’s place in the affluent, hurried society in which she lives. She translates her fragmentation and longing into art – strange abstracts filled with motion and paintings of an imaginary island – and though she breaks down, by the end of the novel she is venturing on a tentative reconciliation with maturity, offering up the secrets and magic of her own childhood world – the language of goldfish – to a younger girl. The novel is a delicate, subtle critique of American society and its social and sexual pressures on the young.

Attack of the Zombie Girls
This theme had its impetus in a novel I read nearly two years ago, which led to a sustained rant in my journal. To wit: “Unwed eighteen year old girl has baby, gives it up for adoption, is hospitalized with post-natal depression, lives among weird kids, discharged to family Christmas – roaring father, shrieking demented granny, retarded brother. Papa roars. Granny shrieks girl is dead and she stinks. Brother clings and pesters. Girlfriend drags her to parties. Former boyfriend nags at her about baby. She vomits. He’s happy. She realizes he thinks she’s won: the whole idea was to make the woman vomit. Granny gets sicker. Novel ends. The world outside the mental ward and the family does not exist – I derived no idea of the time-period of the novel. The protagonist knows what she does not want – her miserable situation. But she makes no progress away from it.” Much lauded for its sensitivity, quirkiness, etc – it reminded me of the title of a critique of Joyce Carol Oates female characters of the 60s and 70s “A Necessary Blankness”. It probably wouldn’t have ticked me off quite so much but that it was praised and ballyhooed and my reaction was, like, do we need more of this? I know elements of our culture still have trouble with women who are not blank and passive, but I thought overall we’d evolved.

Therefore I had the idea of a “no zombie girls” (as in “no polluting”) page, wherein I could highlight books with young female characters who were active and vital. But I was having trouble getting round to it, until along came the Blog.

First entry would be Tessa Duder’s Alex Quartet (Alex, Alex in Winter, Alessandra: Alex in Rome, Songs for Alex), four novels about a fictional New Zealand champion swimmer in 1960, and one of the best portraits I’ve read of gifted youth – both in Alex and the young man who later comes into her life, who is an opera singer with potential for stardom. Alex is multitalented – she’s a performer as well as an athlete, and is aiming for law. She’s intense, and a risk-taker, constantly pushing her abilities to their limit and beyond, achieving and failing and achieving again. And by virtue of being who she is – tall, athletic, outspoken, and lower-class – she comes repeatedly into conflict with the conservative New Zealand society of 1959/1960 – the historical setting is one of the most interesting aspects of the book.

I like books set in cities I have lived in, particularly when the author is brave enough to go into real detail. The density of literati living in and passing through Boston means that I have a wealth of books to renew my fading memories of that city. Before I left Ottawa, I picked up the first two books by Karen Irving (actually, I wandered into a local bookshop and found her signing books.) She writes about the Ottawa I lived in, in and around Bank street and the Glebe, right down to the buses, and I’m sure I know the building that Katy has her office in. Hence picking up the third Katy Klein Mystery was a no-brainer.

Because not only do I get to play virtual tourist, I like her heroine and I like her writing style. Heroine first: intriguingly – and the reason that this scientist would probably never have picked up the books on her own – she’s an astrologist. Was a psychologist, eventually burned out in the aftermath of sexual harrassment, and turned to astrology as a means of helping people without the therapeutic burden, or the need to deal with insitutional politics. She’s on the vulnerable side, tends to retreat rather than to confront, but will fight fiercely when cornered or to protect the people she cares about. In Mars she is reeling from the repercussions of events in the previous book, and desperately trying not to be drawn towards danger and loss again; though she’s neither a coward nor a whiner, she simply has been through too much. She seems quite real: an ordinary woman of sensitivity and conscience who doubts her own strength.

As to the writing, Irving’s style is clean, descriptive (uses colour), and can rise to passages of considerable emotional intensity, as in the closing pages of Jupiter’s Daughter where the discovery of the murderer proves tragic, for the murderer and for Katy