TITLE: Scheherazade's Facade: Fantastical Tales of Gender Bending, Cross-Dressing, and Transformation
AUTHOR: Michael M. Jones (Editor)
GENRE: Fantasy Anthology
PUBLISHED: 29/09/2012
RATING: ★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: N/A
Review: All right, my darlings, let's have talk about the intersection of gender and sexuality and magic.
Let us discuss genderfluid selkies, slipping out of their skins to play lovers to men and women both! Let us ponder the goddess Isis' role in giving a young woman the body that should be hers. Let us examine dragons who can change from female to male to back again to woo their chosen maidens! Let us cheer for Lady Marmalade ascending to Heaven with wings of rainbow feathers! Let us swoon from the sensual glory that is Tanith Lee writing transgenderism!
Suffice to say, I liked this book very much. Which might not surprise you - I think anyone who reads my reviews has, by now, figured out that issues of gender and sexuality are very near and dear to my heart - but for years I have been extremely wary of anthologies. I do not, as a rule, like short stories very much. They are inherently disappointing; either I don't like them at all, or I wish the author had made a full-length novel out of it. Anthologies containing stories by more than one author are even worse, because I almost never enjoy every story.
This year, though, I've been pleasantly surprised by a number of excellent short story collections, so I finally picked this treasure up. And I am extremely glad I did.
A full list of the stories and their authors...
The Secret Name of the Prince by Alma Alexander
The Daemons of Tairdean Town by CS MacCath
Kambal Kulam by Paolo Chikiamco
Driftwood by Tiffany Trent
Pride by Melissa Mead
Keeping the World on Course by Tanith Lee
A Bitter Taste by Aliette de Bodard
Going Dark by Lyn CA Gardner
The Cloak of Isis by Sunny Moraine
How to Dance While Drowning by Shanna Germain
Treasure and Maidens by Sarah Rees Brennan
Lady Marmalade's Special Place in Hell by David Sklar
Some of these names I have come across before - Tanith Lee and Sarah Rees Brennan are two of my all-time favourite writers and the main reason I risked reading another anthology - but most of them are unfamiliar. Lee and Brennan's stories are worth the price of admission all on their own - one a luscious, baroque description of a couple falling in love where the man is not a man and the woman not a woman, and the other a daring rewrite of the traditional dragon-and-maiden myth - but there are only one or two weak stories here, and none that are terrible. Between them they cover all kinds of different magics and mythologies, from the Indian Mahabarata to the traditional witchcraft of the Philippines, mermaids and demons (and daemons, not at all the same thing), to selkies and Scheherazade. Just on a literary level this collection does beautifully, showcasing a wide variety of talent writing incredibly different stories.
I swam along the shore with my brothers and sisters. We leapt for the joy of sun and air and light. We herded the silver-sided mackerel and smashed through them with wide-open jaws. We took the bonito one at a time and bumped gannets squawking from the waves. We fought the toothed ones and danced with one another endlessly through the tunnels of waves and coral.
But it also succeeds in its attempt to talk about - or inspire talks about - gender. Of course, twelve stories cannot encompass all there is to say about gender, but I think between them they manage to say quite a lot, all without preaching or taking away from the stories. This is not a book about 'issues', although it very easily could have been; it's a collection of stories that feature characters outside the gender norm, and treat those characters as people, not objects to be pitied or defended. Several characters switch back and forth between male and female, while others transform from one to the other permanently; the selkies of Trent's Driftwood seem to have no gender at all and only take on binary genders to interact with humans, which seems much the case of Brennan's dragons in Treasure and Maidens. And though I was happy when various trans* characters were able to gain the bodies they wanted, I was delighted when Lee showcased trans* characters who were not interested in surgery - which some trans* people are not - because this is something I've never seen dealt with in fiction before although it is a real-life issue for some people.
"This outer image we put on, the real one," they said. "The truth of me. Wearing my heart on my sleeve. Wearing my soul on my sleeve."
Love. What is love? Nothing, of course. Although it moves the sun and the other stars, and keeps the spinning world on course.
There are, inevitably, some problematic aspects to one or two stories (perhaps not coincidentally, the stories I found the weakest) although I think this is more an issue of the authors not quite managing to get across to the reader what they meant, rather than genuine blunders. It wasn't clear to me, for example, that the character in Pride was a girl in a boy's body rather than a boy who just desperately wanted to do things considered feminine in that culture - so I wasn't very happy when he was turned into a girl at the end of the story, rather than his people re-examining their strict gender roles. I also wasn't sure whether Ianthe, in another story, was a boy raised as a girl or a girl born in a boy's body coincidentally raised as a girl. It might just be that I missed something, or it might be that the story needed to be clearer on the subject.
Emma felt a sudden strange urge to be a proper hostess - she'd invited a dragon into her apartment and there were toasters all over the floor!
All in all, though, I loved this collection dearly. It doesn't merely comment on one or two gender issues but presents a whole spectrum of them - trans* characters who transition and those who don't, characters who pick both binary genders and those who are outside the binary entirely. Boys who love girls even when those girls are biologically male and girls who love girls but don't know the Lesbian Password; it's all great, and none of it's simple. Except for how it secretly is, because the secret to gender, Scheherazade tells us, is to just go with what works for you. That's all there is to it.
I'd definitely grab this one as a Yuletide gift for any questioning teenager this year, for the record. And then I'd pick up a copy for yourself, because it's simply wonderful, and a fantastic break from all the cookie-cutter fantasy out there. Take a break for some crazy amazing originality. You won't regret it.