By Ernie Mundell, HealthDay News
Researchers are gleaning important insights into miscarriages in women from a longtime four-legged friend: horses. Photo by Adobe Stock/HealthDay News
Researchers are gleaning important insights into miscarriages in women from a longtime four-legged friend: horses.
It shouldn't come as a surprise, since female horses have long pregnancies (11 months) and embryos of both species grow at similar rates, said a team overseen by Mandi de Mestre, a professor of equine medicine at Cornell University in New York.
Their new research found that almost half (42%) of miscarriages and spontaneous abortions that occurred in horses during the first two months of pregnancy were linked to a chromosomal condition called triploidy.
With triploidy, the fetus contains an extra set of chromosomes that can cause complications leading to pregnancy loss, the researchers explained.
So, horses make a good model for human pregnancies because, "over that embryonic period [up to eight weeks from conception], triploidy had rarely been reported in mammals outside of women," de Mestre noted in a Cornell news release.
"The study tells us that over the first six weeks of gestation, this will likely be the primary cause of pregnancy loss following natural conception," she added.
Her team published its findings Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
According to the research team, about 10% to 20% of human pregnancies will end in miscarriage, and chromosomal aberrations are thought to be a major cause.
But until now, scientists haven't had an adequate animal model for human miscarriages. In the new study, they analyzed 256 fetus and placenta samples from veterinarians who had treated horses with failed pregnancies over a period of 10 years.
"We were able to study the impact of chromosome errors across the entire pregnancy in the horse," de Mestre said. "We found that triploidy is only associated with losses in early pregnancy."
Chromosomal errors occurred in 57.9% of pregnancy losses up to day 55 of gestation and in 57.2% of losses between days 56 and 110.
In contrast, only 1.4% of losses between days 111 and the end of pregnancy were associated with chromosomal errors like triploidy.
Aneuploidy -- the gain or loss of a chromosome -- was tied to miscarriages in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, de Mestre's group reported, while deletions or duplications of a segment of a chromosome were largely detected in miscarriages after 110 days.
That mirrored similar findings among women who had miscarried. Most human miscarriages occur at home, the research team noted, so there's little for researchers to work with if they hope to uncover why miscarriages occur.
Using the horse as a model might rectify that situation, they said. Horses' owners typically provide a high level of care and monitoring to their animals during a pregnancy, offering much data that's useful for research.
The new research can certainly help horses.
For example, if it's determined that a major chromosomal error is present early in an equine pregnancy, veterinarians can move to end the pregnancy, de Mestre's team said.
"This research has provided a foundation for understanding the genetic causes of pregnancy loss in horses, often referred to as pregnancy loss of unknown cause," said study co-first author Shebl Salem, a postdoctoral researcher in de Mestre's Equine Pregnancy Lab.
SHE WROTE OF HORSES AND WOMEN
Book Review: Walk to the End of the World, Suzy McKee Charnas (1974)
Gene Szafran’s cover for the 1st edition
5/5 (Masterpiece)
“The men heard, and they rejoiced to find an enemy they could conquer at last. One night, as planned, they pulled all the women from sleep, herded them together, and harangued them, saying, remember, you caused the Wasting” (3).
Suzy McKee Charnas’ Walk to the End of the World (1974) is the first of four novels in The Holdfast Chronicles sequence (1974-1999) that charts the slow forces of change in a post-apocalyptical future where women (“fems”) are chattel. Kate Macdonald, in her wonderful review of Ammonite (1993) characterized Nicola Griffith’s novel as “instantly […] feminist: not stealth, or muted, or sub-conscious.” Walk to the End of the World falls squarely, and powerfully into this category. Told with intensity and vigor, Charnas brands the reader with her vision, a searing and festering landscape where white men have either exterminated the remaining “unmen” (the “Dirties”) or subjugated them (the “fems”) after a manmade cataclysm. Complex societal institutions maintain control in a mostly illiterate world via appeals to collective memory, intensive drug facilitated indoctrination, and the deconstruction of the family unit in favor of exclusively homosocial relationships.
Walk to the End of the World does not hold back its punches—this is a serious and disturbing novel. “Fems” are subjected to horrific violence as slaves to man and are forced to great extremes to survive.
Brief Plot Summary/Analysis
In the grand historical narrative espoused by the men who control the community of Holdfast, a past rebellion facilitated by “fems” and other unmen overthrew the Ancients, already weakened by the betrayal of their own sons. The survivors blamed the cataclysmic and vaguely understood Wasting that created an impoverished, polluted, and devastated world on the surviving “fems”. The community the emerges is highly regimented and authoritarian. They espouse a “heroic” and “pioneering” tradition—Holdfast is an “anchoring tendril” that holds back the forces of destruction (4). The position of men vs. women is reinforced by this narrative: men must hold back the destructive power of women embodied by the destroyed world and the wastelands that surround Holdfast.
Walk to the End of the World is comprised of five sections placed in chronological order. The first three are from the perspectives of the male characters—Captain Kelmz, Servan D Layo, Eykar Bek. The fourth, is from the perspective of the “fem” Alldera. The fifth and final section is a composite that shifts between the surviving characters and ends, again, with Alldera. The carefully planned structure is wedded to the narratological and ideological aims of the novel. None of the characters fit neatly into the post-Wasting world where rigid binaries—between man vs. woman, Senior vs. Junior, white vs. non-white, man vs. animal—dominate the society in which they restlessly inhabit.
The first character Captain Kelmz, blurs the position between Seniors and Juniors by retaining his position into old age over a band of Rovers, “the powerful defenders of the Seniors and their interests” (10). More dangerously, Kelmz sees other men in “beast shapes.” More than simply a flight of imagination, “to think of the beast was like willfully calling up the ghosts of dead enemies” (8). Man conquers beasts. Men are not beasts. Kelmz’s visions violate this central tenet profoundly troubling his sense of the world.
The second, d Layo the DarkDreamer, “has no company, no order, and no legitimate use to his fellows” (7). He also encourages and facilitates drug induced dreams outside of those taught in the Boyhouse (where all boys are taught to develop their manly souls and survive in the regimented world). Rather than “dreams of victorious battles against monsters” (45), the dreamer is free to dream what his soul desires. Under d Layo’s guidance, Kelmz dreams that he is emasculated and is but a pathetic perversion of other men (46).
The third, Eykar Bek is the Endtendant at Endpath. At Endpath Seniors—and Juniors manipulated by Seniors—end their lives when their “souls [are] ripe for departure” (17). To dream a drug induced dream was to “assure the life of one’s name among younger generations” (17). However, Eykar Bek has other interests—he seeks to uncover the reason why he knows his fathers name. In Holdfast, the “mass-divison of Seniors and Juniors” is more important than blood-ties. All men are brothers, some older, some younger…. In the grand narrative, the Ancients were overthrown by their sons: In a perversion of the Biblical story, “even God’s own Son, in the old story, had earned punishment from his Father” (22). Eykar and d Layo were friends at the Boyhouse. d Layo was thrown out into the Wild while Eykar was condemned to serve at Endpath after the scandal caused by his father. The quest for Eykar’s father forms the thrust of the narrative.
The final character Alldera, although perceived because of her gender by the male characters as a beast suitable for bearing sons and working the fields (56), is highly intelligent and an important cog in the communication networks between groups of desperate women. She leaves her world where woman are forced to be self-sustaining after drastic reductions of food after previous famines blamed on the fems. In an era of incredible deprivation, “fems” build up their numbers due to ingenious methods of preserving their own milk and consuming their own dead (59). The men who see the process declare that “it was too beautiful, too efficient to be a product of the fems’ own thinking” (65). Alldera has ulterior motives for joining the three male main characters in their trek to discover Eykar’s father.
Final Thoughts
Despite the lack of popular awareness of the novel in comparison to later feminist masterpieces such as Russ’ The Female Man (1975*) and Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1984), analysis of Walk to the End of the World does appear in some scholarly circles—for example, Bill Clemente’s article, “Apprehending Identity in the Alldera Novels of Suzy McKee Charnas” in The Utopian Fantastic ed. Martha Bartter (2004).
Feminist importance aside, I will focus on a handful of ideas that really resonated with me and elevate Charnas’ novel to its great heights: the role of songs + chants reinforcing/challenging collective memory and the focus on the ideological underpinnings of the society.
Charnas explores a variety of ways of reinforcing the master values in a mostly illiterate society. One of more prevalent is the notion of a collective memory (at least propagated by men) that reinforces a grand narrative of the past and thus the position of the present in relation to the past. For example, in the Boyhouse the boys recite the three categories of people (“unmen”) defeated in the post-Wasting world by white man: the “Dirties” i.e. “Gooks, Dagos, Chinks” etc., the “Freaks,” which includes “Faggas, Hibbies, Famlies, Kids; Junkies, Skinheads, Collegeists: Ef-eet Iron-mentalists” and finally “fems” known by “beasts’ names,” “Bird, Cat, Chick, Sow; Filly, Tigress, Bitch, Cow […]” The chant ends with a warning about the dreadful weapons of the unmen, “Cancer, raybees, deedeetee” (112). Man in the present holds back these forces of destruction.
Each social group has their own chants that play into this narrative. Captain Kelmz in order to fight off his visions silently recites the “Chant Protective” that starts with “a reckoning of the size and reach of the Holdfast and of all the fellowship of men living in it” in order to “remind a man of his brothers and of what they expected from him” (8). The ferrymen keep a “Chants Celebratory” which includes the names of the men who dare enter the empty lands to obtain wood for the ferries, “part of a fabric of custom intended to hold ferrycrews together in manly order” (33).
The songs of women fall into different patterns although they serve similar functions in creating collective cohesion. For the women who still have tongues— “muteness in fems was a fashion in demand among masters” (141)—songs, spoken in obfuscated “fem speak,” serve to transmit news. Work songs are more than entertainment, they tell of the hell wrought by the “wonderful knowledge” of men (158). They posit historical narratives counter to those of men: “Those of the unmen who realized what was happening and rose up to fight, the Ancient men slaughtered” (159). Other work songs directly mock the songs of men and the heroic founding of Holdfast, “Heroes […] The unmen are not gone; you are more predictable than the thoughtless beasts, though not as beautiful” (159). Although the chattel of man, songs sung working for their masters are a powerful medium for rebellion.
Charnas also weaves ancient theories of generation and matter into the ideological underpinnings of her society. This creates an unnerving familiarity of thought between ancient Western Thought and this dystopic future. The male soul is a “fragment of eternal energy” that is fixed inside a woman’s body by “the act of intercourse.” As the soul is alien to the woman, her body surrounds it with a physical form in order for the soul to be expelled. Thus, “a man’s life” is a struggle between the “flesh-caged soul” not to be seduced by the concerns of the fem generated “brute-body” (103). Historical narrative combines with pseudo-scientific theories of matter to generate the iron-clad boundaries, enforced by the victors, between genders.
I recommend Walk to the End of the World to all fans of feminist fiction. I fervently hope a more mainstream SF audience will be open to Charnas’ brilliantly conceived world filled with interesting characters, biting prose, and disturbing social systems with twisted philosophical underpinnings. But after reading online reviews and engaging in debates with readers over the years, I cannot help reiterate that a double standard exists when readers approach feminist SF from this era—most readers seem to be fine with other polemical male 60s/70s science fiction authors from across the political spectrum (Robert A. Heinlein, Norman Spinrad, R. A. Lafferty, John Brunner, etc). However, when a woman author takes a dystopic future scenario and weaves a poignant and harrowing experience with a powerful feminist message suddenly it is best avoided. Alas.
Walk to the End of the World is firmly among my top ten 70s SF novels.*
*note: Russ wrote The Female Man earlier but was unable to find a publisher.
*David Pringle placed it in his top 100 SF novels written between 1949 and 1984 [list].
For more book reviews consult the INDEX
5/5 (Masterpiece)
“The men heard, and they rejoiced to find an enemy they could conquer at last. One night, as planned, they pulled all the women from sleep, herded them together, and harangued them, saying, remember, you caused the Wasting” (3).
Suzy McKee Charnas’ Walk to the End of the World (1974) is the first of four novels in The Holdfast Chronicles sequence (1974-1999) that charts the slow forces of change in a post-apocalyptical future where women (“fems”) are chattel. Kate Macdonald, in her wonderful review of Ammonite (1993) characterized Nicola Griffith’s novel as “instantly […] feminist: not stealth, or muted, or sub-conscious.” Walk to the End of the World falls squarely, and powerfully into this category. Told with intensity and vigor, Charnas brands the reader with her vision, a searing and festering landscape where white men have either exterminated the remaining “unmen” (the “Dirties”) or subjugated them (the “fems”) after a manmade cataclysm. Complex societal institutions maintain control in a mostly illiterate world via appeals to collective memory, intensive drug facilitated indoctrination, and the deconstruction of the family unit in favor of exclusively homosocial relationships.
Walk to the End of the World does not hold back its punches—this is a serious and disturbing novel. “Fems” are subjected to horrific violence as slaves to man and are forced to great extremes to survive.
Brief Plot Summary/Analysis
In the grand historical narrative espoused by the men who control the community of Holdfast, a past rebellion facilitated by “fems” and other unmen overthrew the Ancients, already weakened by the betrayal of their own sons. The survivors blamed the cataclysmic and vaguely understood Wasting that created an impoverished, polluted, and devastated world on the surviving “fems”. The community the emerges is highly regimented and authoritarian. They espouse a “heroic” and “pioneering” tradition—Holdfast is an “anchoring tendril” that holds back the forces of destruction (4). The position of men vs. women is reinforced by this narrative: men must hold back the destructive power of women embodied by the destroyed world and the wastelands that surround Holdfast.
Walk to the End of the World is comprised of five sections placed in chronological order. The first three are from the perspectives of the male characters—Captain Kelmz, Servan D Layo, Eykar Bek. The fourth, is from the perspective of the “fem” Alldera. The fifth and final section is a composite that shifts between the surviving characters and ends, again, with Alldera. The carefully planned structure is wedded to the narratological and ideological aims of the novel. None of the characters fit neatly into the post-Wasting world where rigid binaries—between man vs. woman, Senior vs. Junior, white vs. non-white, man vs. animal—dominate the society in which they restlessly inhabit.
The first character Captain Kelmz, blurs the position between Seniors and Juniors by retaining his position into old age over a band of Rovers, “the powerful defenders of the Seniors and their interests” (10). More dangerously, Kelmz sees other men in “beast shapes.” More than simply a flight of imagination, “to think of the beast was like willfully calling up the ghosts of dead enemies” (8). Man conquers beasts. Men are not beasts. Kelmz’s visions violate this central tenet profoundly troubling his sense of the world.
The second, d Layo the DarkDreamer, “has no company, no order, and no legitimate use to his fellows” (7). He also encourages and facilitates drug induced dreams outside of those taught in the Boyhouse (where all boys are taught to develop their manly souls and survive in the regimented world). Rather than “dreams of victorious battles against monsters” (45), the dreamer is free to dream what his soul desires. Under d Layo’s guidance, Kelmz dreams that he is emasculated and is but a pathetic perversion of other men (46).
The third, Eykar Bek is the Endtendant at Endpath. At Endpath Seniors—and Juniors manipulated by Seniors—end their lives when their “souls [are] ripe for departure” (17). To dream a drug induced dream was to “assure the life of one’s name among younger generations” (17). However, Eykar Bek has other interests—he seeks to uncover the reason why he knows his fathers name. In Holdfast, the “mass-divison of Seniors and Juniors” is more important than blood-ties. All men are brothers, some older, some younger…. In the grand narrative, the Ancients were overthrown by their sons: In a perversion of the Biblical story, “even God’s own Son, in the old story, had earned punishment from his Father” (22). Eykar and d Layo were friends at the Boyhouse. d Layo was thrown out into the Wild while Eykar was condemned to serve at Endpath after the scandal caused by his father. The quest for Eykar’s father forms the thrust of the narrative.
The final character Alldera, although perceived because of her gender by the male characters as a beast suitable for bearing sons and working the fields (56), is highly intelligent and an important cog in the communication networks between groups of desperate women. She leaves her world where woman are forced to be self-sustaining after drastic reductions of food after previous famines blamed on the fems. In an era of incredible deprivation, “fems” build up their numbers due to ingenious methods of preserving their own milk and consuming their own dead (59). The men who see the process declare that “it was too beautiful, too efficient to be a product of the fems’ own thinking” (65). Alldera has ulterior motives for joining the three male main characters in their trek to discover Eykar’s father.
Final Thoughts
Despite the lack of popular awareness of the novel in comparison to later feminist masterpieces such as Russ’ The Female Man (1975*) and Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1984), analysis of Walk to the End of the World does appear in some scholarly circles—for example, Bill Clemente’s article, “Apprehending Identity in the Alldera Novels of Suzy McKee Charnas” in The Utopian Fantastic ed. Martha Bartter (2004).
Feminist importance aside, I will focus on a handful of ideas that really resonated with me and elevate Charnas’ novel to its great heights: the role of songs + chants reinforcing/challenging collective memory and the focus on the ideological underpinnings of the society.
Charnas explores a variety of ways of reinforcing the master values in a mostly illiterate society. One of more prevalent is the notion of a collective memory (at least propagated by men) that reinforces a grand narrative of the past and thus the position of the present in relation to the past. For example, in the Boyhouse the boys recite the three categories of people (“unmen”) defeated in the post-Wasting world by white man: the “Dirties” i.e. “Gooks, Dagos, Chinks” etc., the “Freaks,” which includes “Faggas, Hibbies, Famlies, Kids; Junkies, Skinheads, Collegeists: Ef-eet Iron-mentalists” and finally “fems” known by “beasts’ names,” “Bird, Cat, Chick, Sow; Filly, Tigress, Bitch, Cow […]” The chant ends with a warning about the dreadful weapons of the unmen, “Cancer, raybees, deedeetee” (112). Man in the present holds back these forces of destruction.
Each social group has their own chants that play into this narrative. Captain Kelmz in order to fight off his visions silently recites the “Chant Protective” that starts with “a reckoning of the size and reach of the Holdfast and of all the fellowship of men living in it” in order to “remind a man of his brothers and of what they expected from him” (8). The ferrymen keep a “Chants Celebratory” which includes the names of the men who dare enter the empty lands to obtain wood for the ferries, “part of a fabric of custom intended to hold ferrycrews together in manly order” (33).
The songs of women fall into different patterns although they serve similar functions in creating collective cohesion. For the women who still have tongues— “muteness in fems was a fashion in demand among masters” (141)—songs, spoken in obfuscated “fem speak,” serve to transmit news. Work songs are more than entertainment, they tell of the hell wrought by the “wonderful knowledge” of men (158). They posit historical narratives counter to those of men: “Those of the unmen who realized what was happening and rose up to fight, the Ancient men slaughtered” (159). Other work songs directly mock the songs of men and the heroic founding of Holdfast, “Heroes […] The unmen are not gone; you are more predictable than the thoughtless beasts, though not as beautiful” (159). Although the chattel of man, songs sung working for their masters are a powerful medium for rebellion.
Charnas also weaves ancient theories of generation and matter into the ideological underpinnings of her society. This creates an unnerving familiarity of thought between ancient Western Thought and this dystopic future. The male soul is a “fragment of eternal energy” that is fixed inside a woman’s body by “the act of intercourse.” As the soul is alien to the woman, her body surrounds it with a physical form in order for the soul to be expelled. Thus, “a man’s life” is a struggle between the “flesh-caged soul” not to be seduced by the concerns of the fem generated “brute-body” (103). Historical narrative combines with pseudo-scientific theories of matter to generate the iron-clad boundaries, enforced by the victors, between genders.
I recommend Walk to the End of the World to all fans of feminist fiction. I fervently hope a more mainstream SF audience will be open to Charnas’ brilliantly conceived world filled with interesting characters, biting prose, and disturbing social systems with twisted philosophical underpinnings. But after reading online reviews and engaging in debates with readers over the years, I cannot help reiterate that a double standard exists when readers approach feminist SF from this era—most readers seem to be fine with other polemical male 60s/70s science fiction authors from across the political spectrum (Robert A. Heinlein, Norman Spinrad, R. A. Lafferty, John Brunner, etc). However, when a woman author takes a dystopic future scenario and weaves a poignant and harrowing experience with a powerful feminist message suddenly it is best avoided. Alas.
Walk to the End of the World is firmly among my top ten 70s SF novels.*
*note: Russ wrote The Female Man earlier but was unable to find a publisher.
*David Pringle placed it in his top 100 SF novels written between 1949 and 1984 [list].
For more book reviews consult the INDEX
OBIT
She was best known for the Holdfast Chronicles, a series about a dystopic world in which once-enslaved women conquer their former male masters.
Suzy McKee Charnas in an undated photo. One reviewer wrote that her four-novel series “reflects 25 years of the development of feminism.”
Credit...Tachyon Publications
By Richard Sandomir
Published March 10, 2023
Suzy McKee Charnas, an award-winning feminist science fiction writer who in a four-novel series created a post-holocaust, male-dominated society called the Holdfast that is liberated by an army of women, died on Jan. 2 at her home in Albuquerque. She was 83.
Her cousin David Szanton said the cause was a heart attack. Her death was not widely reported at the time.
Ms. Charnas, whose books were well regarded but who by her account did not make a living from her writing, was best known for her science fiction. But she also wrote vampire fiction, young-adult fantasy novels with women as central characters, and a memoir about taking care of her father in his later years after a long period of estrangement.
In an epic that began with “Walk to the End of the World” (1974) and concluded 25 years later with “The Conqueror’s Child,” Ms. Charnas conceived a dystopic world in which an escaped female slave, Alldera, leads the rebellious Free Fems to brutally conquer and enslave their former male masters. The men had faulted women for the near-destruction of humanity, called the Wasting.
Image
The Holdfast Chronicles, as the series is called, is unique in feminist science fiction “in that it reflects 25 years of the development of feminism,” Dunja M. Mohr wrote in the journal Science Fiction Studies in 1999.
“Investigating the raging war of the sexes,” she added, “Charnas does not shy away from describing the slow — and sometimes grim — process of change leading from dystopia to utopia, the painful purging of psychological and physical violence involved.”
How The Times decides who gets an obituary. There is no formula, scoring system or checklist in determining the news value of a life. We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects. If you know of someone who might be a candidate for a Times obituary, please suggest it here.
Learn more about our process.
The fantasy novelist Polly Shulman wrote in Salon in 2000 that the Holdfast Chronicles “fall squarely in the tradition of feminist utopias/dystopias that produced Joanna Russ’s ‘The Female Man’ or Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ nourishing writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Sheri S. Tepper.”
Ms. Charnas did not set out to write a feminist novel. In an interview with SnackReads, a digital publisher of short fiction, she said “Walk to the End of the World” began as a satire about how top political leaders in Washington would behave while confined to bunkers during a nuclear war and “waiting,” as she put it, “for the results of their stupidity to wipe out the rest of the world so they could come out and repopulate it with the assistants they were sleeping with.”
While the book was in progress, she described the story to a women’s consciousness-raising group in New Mexico, explaining that “everybody in the foreground is male” and all the women were slaves.
Then she had an epiphany.
“What are you doing sitting in this room, full of women, talking about women as half the population and writing this story that’s only about the guys?” she recalled saying to herself. “The women in your story are there, but they don’t have a word to say. Not one of them. So I went back and rewrote the whole thing, and this time I gave one of the women, Alldera, a voice, and she told part of the story, and the book changed completely. It became a feminist text.”
The other books in the Holdfast series are “Motherlines” (1978) and “The Furies” (1994). “The Conqueror’s Child” won the 1999 James Tiptree Jr. Award (now called the Otherwise), a literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that explore gender.
She also won two other science fiction and fantasy awards: a Nebula for a novella, “Unicorn Tapestry,” which is a chapter in her 1980 novel, “The Vampire Tapestry,” and the basis for her play, “Vampire Dreams”; and a Hugo for “Boobs,” a short story.
Image
By Richard Sandomir
Published March 10, 2023
Suzy McKee Charnas, an award-winning feminist science fiction writer who in a four-novel series created a post-holocaust, male-dominated society called the Holdfast that is liberated by an army of women, died on Jan. 2 at her home in Albuquerque. She was 83.
Her cousin David Szanton said the cause was a heart attack. Her death was not widely reported at the time.
Ms. Charnas, whose books were well regarded but who by her account did not make a living from her writing, was best known for her science fiction. But she also wrote vampire fiction, young-adult fantasy novels with women as central characters, and a memoir about taking care of her father in his later years after a long period of estrangement.
In an epic that began with “Walk to the End of the World” (1974) and concluded 25 years later with “The Conqueror’s Child,” Ms. Charnas conceived a dystopic world in which an escaped female slave, Alldera, leads the rebellious Free Fems to brutally conquer and enslave their former male masters. The men had faulted women for the near-destruction of humanity, called the Wasting.
Image
“The Slave and the Free,” encompassed the first two books in Ms. Charnas’s series “The Holdfast Chronicles.”
Credit...Macmillan
The Holdfast Chronicles, as the series is called, is unique in feminist science fiction “in that it reflects 25 years of the development of feminism,” Dunja M. Mohr wrote in the journal Science Fiction Studies in 1999.
“Investigating the raging war of the sexes,” she added, “Charnas does not shy away from describing the slow — and sometimes grim — process of change leading from dystopia to utopia, the painful purging of psychological and physical violence involved.”
How The Times decides who gets an obituary. There is no formula, scoring system or checklist in determining the news value of a life. We investigate, research and ask around before settling on our subjects. If you know of someone who might be a candidate for a Times obituary, please suggest it here.
Learn more about our process.
The fantasy novelist Polly Shulman wrote in Salon in 2000 that the Holdfast Chronicles “fall squarely in the tradition of feminist utopias/dystopias that produced Joanna Russ’s ‘The Female Man’ or Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ nourishing writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Sheri S. Tepper.”
Ms. Charnas did not set out to write a feminist novel. In an interview with SnackReads, a digital publisher of short fiction, she said “Walk to the End of the World” began as a satire about how top political leaders in Washington would behave while confined to bunkers during a nuclear war and “waiting,” as she put it, “for the results of their stupidity to wipe out the rest of the world so they could come out and repopulate it with the assistants they were sleeping with.”
While the book was in progress, she described the story to a women’s consciousness-raising group in New Mexico, explaining that “everybody in the foreground is male” and all the women were slaves.
Then she had an epiphany.
“What are you doing sitting in this room, full of women, talking about women as half the population and writing this story that’s only about the guys?” she recalled saying to herself. “The women in your story are there, but they don’t have a word to say. Not one of them. So I went back and rewrote the whole thing, and this time I gave one of the women, Alldera, a voice, and she told part of the story, and the book changed completely. It became a feminist text.”
The other books in the Holdfast series are “Motherlines” (1978) and “The Furies” (1994). “The Conqueror’s Child” won the 1999 James Tiptree Jr. Award (now called the Otherwise), a literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that explore gender.
She also won two other science fiction and fantasy awards: a Nebula for a novella, “Unicorn Tapestry,” which is a chapter in her 1980 novel, “The Vampire Tapestry,” and the basis for her play, “Vampire Dreams”; and a Hugo for “Boobs,” a short story.
Image
“The Vampire Tapestry” (1980) was the wellspring for a play by Ms. Charnas, “Vampire Dreams.”Credit...Macmillan
“Suzy, to me, was a lot like David Bowie,” said Jane Lindskold, a science fiction and fantasy writer who knew Ms. Charnas from a writers’ group in Albuquerque. “She followed her own muse. She could have just written only vampire books, but she did what she wanted to do.”
Suzy McKee was born on Oct. 22, 1939, in Manhattan. Her parents, Robin and Maxine (Szanton) McKee, were commercial artists who worked at home but divorced when Suzy was 8 years old. Suzy was a voracious reader who also wrote and illustrated stories, often about cowboys.
“It wasn’t that much of a step from that to making up and writing down stories intended for unfolding in other people’s heads — the first true magic I can remember encountering in my life,” Ms. Charnas said in an interview with the journal Science Fiction Studies in 1999.
After graduating from Barnard College in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and history — subjects she believed would help her build convincing fictional societies in her novels — she joined the Peace Corps and taught in Nigeria for two years before earning a master’s in teaching from New York University in 1965.
She taught at a private school in Manhattan for a few years before joining Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital as a curriculum writer for a drug-treatment program in secondary schools. She married Stephen Charnas, a lawyer, in 1968, and soon after moved to Albuquerque.
Ms. Charnas had been an occasional fan of science fiction but began writing in the genre only after reading Ursula Le Guin’s 1969 novel, “The Left Hand of Darkness,” which explored gender themes.
“The book was a mindblower,” Ms. Charnas told SnackReads, “not just for me, but for a lot of women, who said, ‘Holy crap, look what this woman did! Look what she’s talking about!’”
Science fiction was not the only genre Ms. Charnas explored. In “The Vampire Tapestry,” she created Dr. Edward Weyland, a vampire posing as an anthropology professor.
Writing in The Washington Post, the fantasy writer Elizabeth A. Lynn praised the novel, saying it “works on many levels — as pure adventure, as social description, as psychological drama and as a passionate exploration of the web that links instinct, morality and culture. It is a serious, startling and revolutionary work.”
The director Guillermo del Toro, who is known for his science fiction and horror films, was an admirer of “The Vampire Tapestry.” He called it “flawless” on Twitter in 2015 and, after Ms. Charnas’s death, said, “It may be her masterpiece.”
“Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms” (2004), a collection of her short work, includes a story that rethinks “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Beauty and the Beast.” In another, an astronaut at a concert on a faraway planet listens to two lizards discussing the music.
Ms. Charnas is survived by her sisters, Liza McKee and Patricia Powers. Her husband died in 2018.
Her last book was “My Father’s Ghost: The Return of My Old Man and Other Second Chances” (2002), about how she and her husband brought her long-absent father — he had left her family when she was a child — to live on their property in Albuquerque, and her struggle to get to know him over nearly 20 years.
“The person who came to live next door to me was less my father than my father’s ghost: the ghost of my father as I had known him and imagined him all my life,” she wrote. “He was also, I suspect, the ghost of the man he himself had set out to be but never became.”
She added, “Well, I’m a lucky devil: He was a good ghost, an instructive ghost.”
Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer. He previously wrote about sports media and sports business. He is also the author of several books, including “The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic.” More about Richard Sandomir
“Suzy, to me, was a lot like David Bowie,” said Jane Lindskold, a science fiction and fantasy writer who knew Ms. Charnas from a writers’ group in Albuquerque. “She followed her own muse. She could have just written only vampire books, but she did what she wanted to do.”
Suzy McKee was born on Oct. 22, 1939, in Manhattan. Her parents, Robin and Maxine (Szanton) McKee, were commercial artists who worked at home but divorced when Suzy was 8 years old. Suzy was a voracious reader who also wrote and illustrated stories, often about cowboys.
“It wasn’t that much of a step from that to making up and writing down stories intended for unfolding in other people’s heads — the first true magic I can remember encountering in my life,” Ms. Charnas said in an interview with the journal Science Fiction Studies in 1999.
After graduating from Barnard College in 1961 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and history — subjects she believed would help her build convincing fictional societies in her novels — she joined the Peace Corps and taught in Nigeria for two years before earning a master’s in teaching from New York University in 1965.
She taught at a private school in Manhattan for a few years before joining Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital as a curriculum writer for a drug-treatment program in secondary schools. She married Stephen Charnas, a lawyer, in 1968, and soon after moved to Albuquerque.
Ms. Charnas had been an occasional fan of science fiction but began writing in the genre only after reading Ursula Le Guin’s 1969 novel, “The Left Hand of Darkness,” which explored gender themes.
“The book was a mindblower,” Ms. Charnas told SnackReads, “not just for me, but for a lot of women, who said, ‘Holy crap, look what this woman did! Look what she’s talking about!’”
Science fiction was not the only genre Ms. Charnas explored. In “The Vampire Tapestry,” she created Dr. Edward Weyland, a vampire posing as an anthropology professor.
Writing in The Washington Post, the fantasy writer Elizabeth A. Lynn praised the novel, saying it “works on many levels — as pure adventure, as social description, as psychological drama and as a passionate exploration of the web that links instinct, morality and culture. It is a serious, startling and revolutionary work.”
The director Guillermo del Toro, who is known for his science fiction and horror films, was an admirer of “The Vampire Tapestry.” He called it “flawless” on Twitter in 2015 and, after Ms. Charnas’s death, said, “It may be her masterpiece.”
“Stagestruck Vampires and Other Phantasms” (2004), a collection of her short work, includes a story that rethinks “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Beauty and the Beast.” In another, an astronaut at a concert on a faraway planet listens to two lizards discussing the music.
Ms. Charnas is survived by her sisters, Liza McKee and Patricia Powers. Her husband died in 2018.
Her last book was “My Father’s Ghost: The Return of My Old Man and Other Second Chances” (2002), about how she and her husband brought her long-absent father — he had left her family when she was a child — to live on their property in Albuquerque, and her struggle to get to know him over nearly 20 years.
“The person who came to live next door to me was less my father than my father’s ghost: the ghost of my father as I had known him and imagined him all my life,” she wrote. “He was also, I suspect, the ghost of the man he himself had set out to be but never became.”
She added, “Well, I’m a lucky devil: He was a good ghost, an instructive ghost.”
Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer. He previously wrote about sports media and sports business. He is also the author of several books, including “The Pride of the Yankees: Lou Gehrig, Gary Cooper and the Making of a Classic.” More about Richard Sandomir
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