Anticipating the January 2012 launch of SufferStone, Book 1 of the Dolvia Saga, author Stella Atrium sat down with Marc Roster, a Chicago radio personality from the public access channel.


Marc Roster: So, you have an interesting premise here; space travel and women living under the veil.

Stella Atrium: Over the decades, sci-fi fans have seen many cultures depicted in stories about offworld adventures. But I have not seen an alien culture where women struggle against the burka.

Marc: Are the female characters also Muslim?

Stella: Desert garb with flowing robes and headgear pre-dates the birth of Mohammad. In the story, the sisters of Arim live on a savannah with a long dry season.

Marc: But the story is meant to reflect issues of global women's rights?

Stella: The cultures for the four tribes are unique to the story with their own languages, along with standards of dress, local animals, gestures of power for the men.

Marc: Of the four sisters, Kyle Le is the youngest, but she's the leader?

Stella: Kyle Le is troubled with the gift of second sight, like flashes of insight for events in the near future. She's an orphan, and her sisters clings to the land her father owned. They have no status in community, only the service of her gift to a tribal leader.

Marc: So Kyle Le takes work at the mill where she meets the story's hero Brian Miller. They fall in love and live happily ever after?

Stella: Not likely. Brian Miller can only run the mill because he doesn't abuse native women. The differences between their cultures are too great.

Marc: In the story's plot, what is the purpose of the Brittany Mill?

Stella: The savannah on Dolvia has what we call a Third World economy. Corporations from Earth have come adventuring through the wormhole to take advantage of the mineral wealth and the cheap labor market. But the tribes are protective, and their women are mostly illiterate. Brittany Mill is where these disparate groups begin to mingle.

Marc: That premise sounds like what happens in many countries here on Earth.

Stella: The dichotomy is delicious. Inside the fantasy genre, I try to present women who need to solve real problems like having no voice in community, or no right to work; no access to capital to start a business. No reinforcement for talent.

My intent was to pry open the archetypes of alien women in sci-fi who are, shall we say, sexually available to the story's hero. You know the types — warrior, witch, street urchin, unavailable princess who sneaks around, armless mermaid. Let's present a few female characters who drive the story and solve problems using the tools at hand.

Marc: You mentioned unique animals. Any dragons?

Stella: (chuckle) No dragons; no fairies. One sister named Terry befriends a wild ketiwhelp, which is similar to an oversized fox. She's later martyred in prison and a tribal myth about her is told in chants.

Marc: So what are the elements of fantasy in the story?

Stella: The savannah is being settled, unevenly, by offworlders who seek fortunes by mining the mineral wealth. They have a network for supply lines through the worm hole to Earth, and introduce futuristic gadgets to indigenous cultures, changing the balance.

Marc: What kind of gadgets?

Stella: Brian Miller communicates offworld using an EAM, or extra atmosphere modem. He shows Kyle Le how to access the transport's library where they call up an image of Dolvia, a blue and green planet with atmosphere and clouds. Kyle Le is very impressed with seeing the whole face of Dolvia.

Marc: So, the story is about culture shock?

Stella: For several cultures, yes. The reader also meets indentured colonists and military personnel stationed on the orbiting transport. Some characters are from a nearby planet and compete for work with the corporations to get ahead. They even adopt English over their own languages and shorten their names for advancement.

Marc: You mean, like people changed their names when they came to America through Ellis Island?

Stella: Examples from our history are illustrative. The pressure to fit in is universal, such as Jews in Spain in the fourteenth century who pretended to practice Catholicism. Or tribal people in South Africa who lived under Western names. Power structures exist everywhere, and the people from the subservient culture use similar strategies to get by and put food on the table.

Marc: So, what's the story's outcome.? Do Kyle Le and Brian Miller hook up?

Stella: Kyle Le is promised for the warrior Cyrus, even though she doesn't like the idea. She's motivated to resist the future planned for her by others. That's why she's open to new ideas like working for wages, and traveling offworld with soldiers.

Marc: Well, we certainly look forward to reading reviews for this unique story. Our time is up now, but I enjoyed the talk.

Stella: Thank you.

The Appeal of Thelma & Louise; a buddy movie about two women on the run

Stella Atrium 11.11.11
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The 20th anniversary of Thelma & Louise was in February 2011.

Critics claimed the movie directed by Ridley Scott broke stereotypes and allowed female characters to step out of a corseted past into liberated action.  Never mind the movie presents women acting like men would act.  Never mind that Thelma robs a store only after she receives instruction from a drifter.

Once again, the characters we love don't solve problems the way women solve them, but rather ape the actions of the men. Where are their mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, best friends, daughters?

Movies about women must appeal to men, even when the male characters are secondary, as with a sympathetic policeman played by Harvey Keitel and ex-boyfriend played by Michael Madsen. The movie audience was mostly men, and they liked the idea of women on a lark with 2% body fat and oversized handguns.  We still have the standard scenes for car chases, gun violence, fiery explosions, and a hero's ending.  The twist is that women get to blow up stuff.

Except are they liberated? Or... are they just acting like a guy would act in similar situation?  Maybe a woman would find other ways to hide by changing her looks and blending in, or entering a brothel where the police never investigate.

In Thelma & Louise a struggling waitress and repressed housewife take off one day while the husband is fishing.  They stop to cat-around at a dance hall, and Thelma (Geena Davis) is pressured by a drunken cowboy who Louise (Susan Sarandon) shoots with her Texas-purchased gun. Adventures on the run after the feminist statement include picking up a drifter, scaring a truck driver, packing a cop into his car trunk, calling home to bring down the police, and sprinting toward the Mexican border.

The 1974 movie Thunderbolt & Lightfoot (Clint Eastwood and Jeff Bridges) depicted drifters in a similar socio-economic strata.
Lightfoot is beaten by bad guys who pursue them, and the tension between Lightfoot and Thunderbolt is tentative friendship built on a common need to escape jeopardy.  They end badly, too, when Lightfoot dies of injuries from the beating.  We expect less of this movie, though, and treasure it for the performances.

What social wrong was righted in Thelma & Louise?  Besides the eye-candy, what did we learn about ourselves? I'm reminded of the old adage that "she acted like a man because she was treated like a woman".

The scenes are well played, especially when Thelma says, "Something broke inside me," but Thelma & Louise is ultimately unsatisfying.

I object mostly to the ending when the pair drive over a cliff rather than return to society and face jail time.

Many have claimed this ending shows that there's no place in real life for rogue women; except Thelma and Louise aren't acting like women.  The pair is acting like they think the men would act, all the way to driving off into the sunset.  

Young women today mention Thelma & Louise as a shining example of liberated acts, of improvising, of getting a little of her own back.  I despair for our young girls who have few role models and must fit behavior into unnatural patterns to find acceptance among peers who believe that women should act like the guys.  

Feminism in Science Fiction
posted 9/2/2011 by Stella Atrium 
author@stellaatrium.com,  www.StellaAtrium.com
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A personal polemic about approaches to writing action adventure stories with women protagonists:

As a young person, I struggled with the label of feminism. I could not identify with leaders of the movement among wealthy married liberal (white) women who expressed outrage at being excluded from high-paying jobs. I also didn't embrace the liberal causes that allocated my limited resources for new citizens or to the less fortunate.




What really burned me (then and now) is that liberal women claim to speak for all women. I know advances for health care and job opportunities have been gained due to their work, but the organizations actively REJECT views from women with different political agendas.

I could not call myself a conservative, though, since I embraced independence for women in areas of finances, pay rates, travel, property ownership, and reproductive rights. I spent time as a young person arguing for nuanced definitions about the differences between liberated and liberal.

Additionally, since I live in Chicago, many groups for women were populated by women of color who brought with them old rhetoric from the civil rights movement, like they are locked in a time warp or something. I felt unwelcome, more than pushed out, since I was viewed as automatic competition for the few empowerment jobs the movement could carve out on a local level.

Just the same, in my stories I was actively solving problems for female characters  and how they perceive/ define/ object to/ and address the world outside of family circles. I wanted to spout the party line for empowerment; I just didn't agree with it.

The few principles I had identified and wanted to implement in my stories included:

• Women make decisions in groups so the reader needs to meet the sister, auntie, daughters, cousins and friends of the heroine
• Stories about women take place over decades and are often resolved by a grown son who finally addresses a long-simmering outrage
• Women must solve problems using limited resources and with no voice in the public square
• Women are often undercut by other women
• With all these obstacles, women draw culture through hard times (while the men are killing each other) and make-do with the remnants of holocaust

Recently, I have been heartened by what I find among feminist bloggers in the sci-fi world who have noticed the slights toward women in formula stories that are the daily fare of sci-fi novels and movies. Here our views about empowerment of women overlap.

One example is the Bechdel test that demands more scenes in movies where the female characters interact with each other.

Another discussion asks why sci-fi stories that take place on new worlds ignore where babies come from and why that's important.

Time was... the outrage I felt when reading a novel or viewing a movie in my favorite genre was not reinforced by friends. The classic example is Princess Leia in Star Wars who, as it turns out, was a twin to Luke Skywalker. In the first movie, Darth Vadar, later identified as their father, held Leia hostage on the unfinished death star and ordered her torture. Vadar didn't feel movement within the force while in her presence even though he was aware of Luke from two solar systems away. Go figure.

My recent exploration of the expanding world of book bloggers has been a delight. While I am glad to find I am not isolated due to my ideas about how female protagonists see/feel/address the world, I began to suspect I had found a cache of women among sci-fi feminists who as a group are isolated.

Part of the reason I cannot call myself a feminist is because I fear the adults will send us to another room to complain while they go about the business of managing the world. Until you have been disregarded in a business setting as not ready to sit at the table where decisions are made, or automatically called a trouble-maker, this sense of righteous indignation may escape you. I make no apology.

Professor Kay Vandergrift from Rutgers University supplied a few answers that settled my suspicions, especially about women and literary criticism.

"In the past several decades both literary criticism and the theory that supports that criticism have shifted from a base in the literary community of readers and writers to the scholarly community of professors and university students. In the process, literary theory has become more fragmented and, many would say, more isolated, both from the literary works themselves and from the readers and writers connected to those works in the non-academic world."

Vandergrift offers a few parameters [bullet points added] for developing literary criticism, talking most closely about stories for young people.

• "Theories are judged by their applicability and their usefulness.
• As new phenomena are created or discovered or existing ones perceived in new ways, theory is revised to assimilate this new information...
• Each theory opens our eyes to new perceptions and new perspectives, but
• [each theory] conceals as well as reveals certain aspects of the literary work and the literary experience.
• Each offers a system of useful, but incomplete, organizing constructs which continually lead to new solutions, new problems, and new theories."

These standards articulate the measures by which I want to critique stories about women, and the standards offer good direction for how I want to develop action adventure stories with female protagonists.

For example, a few stories find an audience because they are about the silence of women. The first that comes to mind is The Piano.

SYNOPSIS: A mute woman along with her young daughter, and her prized piano, are sent to 1850s New Zealand for an arranged marriage to a wealthy landowner, and she's soon lusted after by a local worker on the plantation. (source: internet movie database)

A good friend claimed the story was about a woman who was raped, so he didn't have to care since the movie belonged in the category of women's issues. One sequence in the movie does show a sexual assault by the husband before he cuts off one of the mute wife's fingers so she can no longer play the piano.

In truth the story is about how Ada McGrath (the Holly Hunter character) overcame oppression. She overcame sleepwalking. She gained security for her daughter. She gained the lover she wanted. She gained a better living situation where she could indulge her musical talent. The rape was an act of control from the husband and only symptomatic to the larger oppression.

So stream of incidents don't classify The Piano as a rape movie similar to The Accused where Jodie Foster's character is gang-raped in a bar.

Can you describe movies that meet a similar standard for changing attitudes toward women? Let's discuss...

Prime Suspect as Newest in Lineup of Women as Cops and Lawyers
9/23/11 by Stella Atrium

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Maria Bello has been on TV episodes of cop shows so often, she seem familiar to the audience in her first starring role in Prime Suspect as Det. Jane Timoney, a tough homicide detective who gives as well as she has to take from the sexist boy's club in the NYC squad room.

Somehow Bello comes off as older and meaner that Kelli Giddish as Annie Frost in Chase, and with none of the personal quirks that enliven Kyra Sedgwick's performances in The Closer. 

Bello is often cast as the female heavy, in fact.  She played the hard-nosed dog trainer in Jane Austen Book Club who gets the sweet guy almost in spite of herself.  She has been cast opposite A-list actors in the movies, often as the unhelpful wife.

Johnny Depp -- Secret Window - unsympathetic wife
Mel Gibson - Payback - junkie ex-wife
Viggo Mortensen -A History of Violence - long-suffering wife

Prime Suspect is placed in a NYC squad room with alcohol slurping, snide comment dropping, probably cursing, definitely resentful co-workers.  Even Aidan Quinn, as Bello's boss, looks like he gained 20 pounds to fit the stereotype of Irish Catholic cop.

Bello's snap-brim hat is a nice touch, but too reminiscent of a 1960 cop show with Frank Sinatra titled The Detective.  The new series seems stuck in the previous decade because Jane Timoney is the ONLY woman at work.  Her female nemesis, the mother of the boyfriend's son, folds her hand with the first threat. 

This addition to the lineup of women as cops and lawyers is the more gritty, harder-hitting, less forgiving flavor.  At least it's not Charlie's Angels that premiered the same night. 

Nim's Island & The Tempest

9/23/2011 by Stella Atrium
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Nim's Island as a Remix of Shakespeare's The Tempest : a comparison to show the dominance of archetypes

I have written elsewhere that story archetypes are a straight jacket where especially women characters are relegated to a limited number of roles.  Some formulas for action adventure stories are so rigid we can see them work across genres.  The example offered in that earlier discussion was the similar plotlines for the first Muppet Movie and The Outlaw Josey Wales.  (see explanation below)

Another example of how old stories are reworked for fresh audiences can be found in Nims' Island, especially the 2008 movie based on the novel by Wendy Orr. I assert this story (perhaps unconsciously) is a re-working of The Tempest by Shakespeare, which is itself a reworking of archetypes from fairy tales. The similarities are striking.

(see response from Wendy Orr below)

In Shakespeare's final play, Prospero is an old sorcerer exiled with his daughter Miranda to a Mediterranean island where he frees Ariel (a water spirit) and enslaves Caliban (a lost tribesmen).  Prospero protects Miranda from the truth about his past by keeping her isolated, and he does NOT train her as a sorceress. 

Even when the story is handled by a female director (Julie Jaymor in 2010) where Prospero becomes Prospera (played by Helen Mirren), Miranda is NOT trained in sorcery. Prospera spends considerably more time guiding Ariel into new dimensions than she spends with her daughter's education.  The archetypal princess must be kept unschooled and without work in order to keep her sexually innocent.  But... we speak to gender bias extensively in other discussions. 

On Nim's Island in the South Pacific biologist Jack Rusoe (played by Gerald Butler) leaves his young daughter alone while he goes on a two-day excursion to find glow-in-the-dark plankton. They have a pact to keep the island a secret and both fear the return of a ship called the Buccaneer that carries the taint of knowledge of the world. 

Novelist Wendy Orr invests Nim with curiosity and problem-solving skills beyond her maturity, and allows Nim to manage saving the new turtles, connecting the internet, and blogging with a pulp fiction writer in San Francisco named Alex Rover (played with little humor by Jodie Foster).

Nim Ruscoe (Abigail Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine) spends the time alone with favorite pets that include a dancing sea lion named Selkie that does the heavy lifting for rescuing stranded sojourners in shark infested waters, and a pelican named Galileo that flies back-and-forth between the island and Jack Rusoe who has got himself lost in a sinking sailboat. Jack works magic by using the tools at hand to make a raft and limp home.

We can easily see how Selkie serves as Caliban, and Galileo is Ariel from The Tempest. Galileo is the hero of the story, in fact. He piles fish in the boat for Jack to eat. He snatches Jack's tool belt away from Nim on the island so Jack can rig a sail before Galileo guides Jack home.

Now the good part. 

In The Tempest, Prince Ferdinand is separated from the other sailors who have "undergone a sea change" and wash up on the island.  Ferdinand "exchanges eyes" with Miranda and, by way of Prospero's magic, becomes her slave like Caliban is Prospero's slave.

Of course, Alex Rover and Nim Rusoe cannot provide sexual tension similar to the plotline in The Tempest, because the audience knows from the get-go that Alex Rover is for Jack Rusco.  The fictional character featured in all of Rover's novels is played by Gerald Butler, just in case the viewer could miss the archetypal assumption. This imaginary friend is, in fact, her slave.

In the absence of Nim's father, then, Alex Rover provides advice about keeping a wound clean and commits to leaving her own comfort zone in San Francisco to tolerate the many travel venues, including a sinking rowboat, to undergo a sea change (leaving behind her agoraphobia and dependence on an imaginary friend) and get washed up on the island. 

In fact, Alex Rover spends a few hours on The Buccaneer with the troublesome captain and the events director (similar to the separate story line of Stephano and Trinculo) before she is separated from the other sailors and arrives alone and without technical support to begin to solve real world problems alongside Nim. 

Alex Rover and Jack Rusco don't meet until the final scene of the movie because, in these archetypal fairy tales, all tension flows away when the mating couple touch (read: Sleepless in Seattle). In The Tempest, the final act is about reconciliation and wedding preparations.  Although the speeches are very fine and often quoted, the story unravels into a simple masque.

Even Peter Greenway's engaging version titled Prospero's Books with the aging Sir John Gielgud spent two-thirds of the movie time with images of a less-than-traditional wedding feast while a peeing cherub sang in a painful octave. 

So an additional scene of fragmented storyline is inserted in Nim's Island when the Buccaneer arrives while Nim is alone. The captain and events director bring tourists ashore who treat the pristine beach as a backdrop for a Hawaiian luau.  The tourists obligingly run for the lifeboats when Nim catapults lizards and geckos into their midst from the safety of the treeline. 

Inside this action scene one tourist, a boy about Nim's age named Edmund (Maddison Joyce), sees her and enters the jungle to confront her about what she's doing to his parents and the other "pirates".

In this well-written scene, Nim claims that Edmund and all real people aren't what she had imagined from the stories she read. These would be the stories written by Alex Rover who studiously avoided contact with real people while writing in San Francisco. Nim and Edmund seem to argue, but are really engaged in discovery, even touching each other's face for assurance the other is real. 

Critics complained that Nim's Island provides too many "plastic" events such as Nim riding the back of the sea lion through the island surf. But I feel the level of improbable events is on par with the original work by Shakespeare, and the farcical elements also mirror the precursor story.

The real change here, or growth in our use of archetypes, is that Nim has intelligence, curiosity, warmth, problem-solving skills, and a community of helpers who allow her to make decisions in committee. 

Kudos to Wendy Orr!

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Kermit as Josey Wales

In the first Muppet Movie, Kermit is pushed from his equilibrium in the swamp by bad guys who want him to serve as spokesperson for selling froglegs.  Kermit goes on adventure and accumulates several sidekicks including a love interest in Miss Piggy, all the time relentlessly pursued by these same bad guys. Kermit and friends find a new place to settle, but first must negotiate with the tribes who already populate Hollywood.  Before Kermit can win the love interest, he must confront the ultimate bad guy and vanquish him. 

Watch The Outlaw Josey Wales and see if you can find the exact same sequence of events.