Book number ninety in Aqueduct Press's 'Conversation Pieces' series of short volumes of feminist science fiction is a little different from those I've previously read and reviewed, but then this isn't a predictable series. What I wasn't expecting was a book that's written by a man, who's retelling a collection of stories by another man, but with a couple of particular spins on them. However, that is exactly what I've got in front of me and it's a fascinating read, even if I don't know much of the why behind it.

The first man is Dennis Danvers, who's an American author who's written a number of novels that fall into various genres: mostly science fiction, but also urban fantasy and general fiction. This is a different genre again, because that second man is Ovid, the Roman poet, who so famously wrote of Roman mythology in his 'Metamorphoses'. That's an odd bedrock for feminist science fiction to be built upon, of course, but I'll get there. For now, let me say that this isn't entirely Roman, as a number of the tales told here stem from Greek mythology too.

The first particular spin is the feminist one that you ought to expect from 'Conversation Pieces', because those myths, which were packed full of prominent female characters we still remember millennia after they were first talked about, tended to be told from the perspectives of men, the women being supporting characters in the men's stories. When did you last read about a female hero to sit alongside Jason and Odysseus? Danvers redresses that balance by framing his stories as from the perspectives of female characters instead, all but one of them told by Mnemosyne, who was the Greek goddess of memory.

So far so good. I'm down with that. The other particular spin is the one I can't explain, because in this book, Mnemosyne is an Appalachian storyteller. Yes, you read that right. Why Mnemosyne is an Appalachian storyteller here I really can't say, but it makes for a folksy new approach to myths that we generally know of in far more epic form. We probably first read them in school, where we'd write homework about them. Then we probably saw them in movies, those heroes pitted against Ray Harryhausen's armies of skeletons, or, later, on television, with Hercules and Xena. Here, we have to picture ourselves sat on a porch somewhere in rural North Carolina, as an old storyteller spins her yarns while we get drunk on her words and good liquor.

I liked the revisionist approach a lot more than I did the new voice. Now, I didn't dislike the latter either, but I can't explain it. These stories flow well in this sort of voice, but it felt like a gimmick and so became less effective with each story that passed. What stuck with me more was how this brought supporting characters to the fore and fleshed out their stories. A great example is found in 'Medea and Jason', because we know what a hero Jason was and how he won the Golden Fleece from Colchis. We don't need to hear that story again. Here, he's only in the story to get Medea, a powerful sorceress and the daughter of the guardian of the Fleece, out of a rut. He's a gorgeous man and a powerful hero, but he's just a prop in her hands and, even when he leaves her, she wins the day.

This approach also emphasises certain truths that we couldn't ever ignore in these myths, even if they were never presented honestly. For instance, the king of the Gods, whether we call him Zeus or Jupiter or something else—Danvers goes with Jove—is a horny bastard who simply can't leave the ladies alone. He's usually pictured as an all-powerful god of gods sitting on his ornate throne and keeping the universe in order. What Danvers highlights here is that he's ruled by his dick and lets it lead him astray in what sometimes seems like every way possible. In 'Europa and Jove', he describes him as "lonely and bored and horny all the time", which is pretty fair, all things told. In this story, though, Europa gets the better of him.

Oddly, my favourite retellings tend to be the later stories in the book, like 'Perseus and Medusa', 'Cupid and Psyche' and 'Medea and Jason'. Maybe I was getting used to the storytelling approach by that point and so should start the book all over again to see if I read the early stories in a new light. Maybe they're just more overt reevaluations that I appreciated better. After all, even in an intentionally feminist retelling, Jove frequently steals the spotlight from whoever we ought to be focused on. It's one thing when his wife, Hera, gets the better of him and another when a mortal like Europa does it.

Another aspect I had to get used to was the copious amount of swearing going on. I never thought that this was a book for children, but I somehow pictured the Appalachian storyteller as more of a family-friendly sort of character, whether one who breezes into town to recount stories for a fee or one who lives there and takes up that rocking chair on the porch to talk to anyone who'll listen. It seems that I was completely wrong in that expectation, because Danvers plays up how most of the myths we know are rooted in someone, probably a god—often Jove—lusting after someone else and satiating that lust either consensually or not. The casual cruelty of the gods is not skimped on here.

My final note is that there are fourteen stories here, thirteen of which unfold in a similar manner. Mnemosyne tells them and they unfold much like the stories we know but from a different angle, most often from the perspective of a female character who was typically overshadowed by a male equivalent. Then there's the fourteenth, which is told by Charon, ferryman across the Styx, from his own perspective. This is where the book finally finds its way to science fiction, which after all is what this 'Conversation Series' is supposed to be.

That makes it a real anomaly in this book. It's clearly science fiction rather than the fantasy we'd perhaps classify mythology as. It's told very much from the male perspective rather than female, even though the other character in it, the very last human left, is a woman. And it's set far into a pessimistic future rather than in the vibrant but distant past. That means that it's not retelling a myth but creating a new one that's very much a commentary on today. It had to be the last story in the book and I have to wonder if it's why the entire volume exists. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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