For the Washington Post I wrote a little about Carol Emshwiller, a true and brilliant weirdo, and a new collection of her stories, Moon Songs:1
In his anthology “Dangerous Visions,” Harlan Ellison wrote that the award-winning Emshwiller (1921-2019) was “the first writer I ever encountered who said she wrote to please herself whom I believed.” In the same piece, he quotes her as saying, “I like interesting failures better than works where the artist always knows exactly what he’s doing.” As Ellison is quick to say, the story in question (“Sex and/or Mr. Morrison”) is not a failure, but part of what makes Emshwiller’s work both compelling and frustrating is the way that it seems to operate by a hidden, different set of rules about what it means to succeed or fail. You can respond to Emshwiller’s work by throwing it across the room, but you can’t suggest it might have benefited from being written in another way. These stories must be accepted or rejected in some total sense.
Read it here.
One thing about most good writers is that the comment “they aren’t like anything else” is not one hundred percent true. They have resemblances to their peers (who are not always their contemporaries). Sometimes, however, you read a writer where this is really, really true. Carol Emshwiller is not like anything else.
I recently acquired a little book of Tiptree’s poetry and was surprised and a little moved to find a (not very good but still) poem, “S.O.S. Found in an SF Bottle,” about other women in science fiction that includes this passage:
Salve: Joanna of the rocks; Ursula of the waters; Kate burning, burning; Salve: Fierce Vonda; Quinn indomitable; desperate Suzy; wild Kit; Carol- almost-beyond-humaness; dead Shirley.…
This litany being Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Vonda McIntyre, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Suzy McKee Charnas, Kit Reed, Carol Emshwiller, and (I assume?) Shirley Jackson.2
If you want to read Emshwiller, Moon Songs is a good place to start, but I also have to recommend her novels Carmen Dog and The Mount. (Her novels might actually be easier places to start than her short stories, because while they are short for novels, she can’t do the same kind of highly compressed weirdness that she can achieve in a short space.) And if you want to get all of Carol Emshwiller’s short stories in one go, there’s a two volume set from Nonstop Books that is easiest to get if purchased directly from them. Personally, I would (1) buy Moon Songs and the novel of your choice (2) lend Moon Songs to your friend (3) buy the two volume set when your friend keeps it. You can work a novel into the process as the spirit moves you.
Carol Emshwiller was also married to Ed Emshwiller, a SFF artist (among many other things), and modeled for lots of his artwork. As painted by her husband, Carol Eshwiller often looks a little like Elizabeth Taylor:
Is she wearing lime green eyeshadow in that first one? Something to consider…. You can also see a bunch of his covers here.
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If Russ is stone, Le Guin water, and Wilhelm fire, one does wonder—does this make Tiptree “air”? Anyway.…