---item---
storytitle:
firstname: M. John
lastname: Harrison
booktitle: Light
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Victor Gollancz (UK)
year: 
htmldescription: 
<p><cite>Light</cite> is a stunning work that's part space opera and part Something
Else.  Some of us found the protagonists (a physicist and serial
killer; a mass-murdering pirate; a VR addict) to be unlikable; others
found them brutal, cruel, self-deluded, but completely real, people
about whom we cared deeply.  All the characters are shaped in ways that
very specifically have to do with the structuring and exploration of
gender.  The male characters are in love with ostentatious masculinity
as a thing that's sometimes joyful and sometimes horrifying; the
female characters are often consumed with fierce denial of their
bodies and their own femaleness.  Hanging over all of this is the
enigmatic figure of the Shrander, whose gender identity, like so much
else, is ambigous and complicated.  <cite>Light</cite> is rich, horrible, sad,
and absurd, and says a lot about how the body and sex inform one's
humanity.  It will reward rereading.</p>

---item---
storytitle: Stories for Men
firstname: John
lastname: Kessel
booktitle: 
periodical: Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine
date: 200210
publisher: 
year: 
htmldescription: 
<p>"Stories for Men" is a story about masculinity, about how individuals
define themselves in the context of kinship and community, and about
how we construct gender roles by telling ourselves stories.  The story
begins with a female-centered society that mirrors some of our
assumptions about social power relations between men and women, and
then explicitly refers to our own society's assumptions (in the main
character's encounter with a twentieth-century fiction anthology) in a
way that makes those assumptions seem new and strange.  It reexamines
those tales of outcasts and lone heroes and manly individualism within
the context of a story of community.  It raises questions about the
links between connectedness and exclusion, consensus and stifling
conformity, patriarchal protectiveness and sociopathy.  "Stories for
Men" is a short work, one that's more subtle than it first appears.</p>