Kameron Hurley - Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

Brutal Women: The Short Stuff

By Kameron Hurley

www.kameronhurley.com

Tablesof Contents

Bonus

Women are not inherentlypassive or peaceful.

Were not inherently anythingbut human.

-Robin Morgan

These are not particularly goodstories. What you see here is what you get: a struggling writers juvenilia,from the first clunking story I published when I was 17 to to the bizarrewomen-and-war story that got me into Years Best SF 12, and all thecrazy stuff in between.

Writing stuff is easy. Writingstuff people actually want to read is infinitely harder. Much of it is simplyfinding your audience. And not sucking at your craft. The lumbering old SF/Fmags never did like any of my stuff. It wasnt until the gender-bendingslipstream Strange Horizons Magazine started gaining steam that Idiscovered the stuff that I wrote actually had an audience.

I collected my first rejection slipat fifteen. The editor had scrawled a note across the top of the manuscriptsaying that cockroaches put her off her lunch, and there were far too manycockroaches in the story for her taste. I still have that rejection slip, andabout a hundred others, fifteen years later.

Ive always written violentstories. Not always stories with a focus on exploring feminist themes (in fact,many of my stories can be seen as anti-feminist, particularly the early ones,much to my chagrin). The times Ive tried to write about other things painters and princesses and cockroaches, oh my I didnt have very much fundoing it. And I didnt publish any of those crappy stories with any morefrequency than my brutal women ones.

At some point my princessesstarting hacking off peoples heads. The painters had same-sex love affairs.And the cockroaches developed a taste for human flesh.

I had a lot more fun writing those.

And I finally started selling them.

In my early writing life, I wrotewhat Id call Sword and Sorceress type stories. This type was popularized byMarion Zimmer Bradleys Sword and Sorceress anthologies and hereponymous fantasy magazine. The stories had strong female protagonists who ranaround in skimpy armor and/or did magic while engaged in some kind of quest orrevenge or McGuffin-type plot.

I worked very hard at emulatingthese (see Once, There Were Wolves). It wasnt until Id received fiveyears of rejections from the magazine and the anthologies that I finally threwin the towel. The problem was, I didnt understand plot. I didnt understandtension. And I really hated writing about syrupy nice heroines who wereexpected to save their children and/or tribes and/or kingdoms.

It wasnt until I went to theClarion West writers workshop in 2000 that I got up the courage to writestories I was really interested in. The story that got me into the workshop wasabout some defective clones that had been tailored to terraform a world, andwhose programming was starting to unravel. My female protagonist was a passiveblank slate goaded into action by her revolutionary brother. I kept wonderingwhy she wasnt more interesting.

At Clarion, I decided to writesomething different. I liked the idea of a desert country where the sand ateyour blood. Sounds cool, right? And maybe women were immune to it somehow? Andmaybe you could, like, literally control the world with blood? And it waswomens blood that gave them power? It gave me an excuse to write a storywith mostly female characters in it.

I dashed off a story about aknife-weilding nomadic military leader who had joined with a foreigner totopple her beloved desert matriarchy (see Women and Ladies, Blood and Sand).I wanted somebody who had joined with the bad guys against her former way oflife. Somebody who had sold out. That seemed like an interesting person muchmore interesting than the princess who just blindly goes off to save herkingdom the way shes expected to.

At the end of the workshop sessionof my story, author Geoff Ryman, our instructor for the week, looked at me fromacross the critique circle and said, flatly, I find this story personallyoffensive I think it suffers from a failure of the imagination.

It was both the best and worstthing Id ever heard about anything Id written. I wrote syrupy, forgettablestories that barely invited a single personal scrawl from overworked magazineeditors, not stuff that offended people.

I wanted to inspire something inpeople. I just wasnt sure loathing was it.

Where this obsession with violencecomes from, I dont know, but after Clarion I started to delve deeply intoreal-life applications of violence and the history of violence across manycultures, which formed the basis of my undergrad and graduate work at theUniversity of Alaska-Fairbanks and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal in Durban,South Africa. Strength and violence is how people gained, took, and maintainedpower, and that fascinated me. Argue that its actually wealth that gets youthe power and youll find that that wealth is generally amassed throughstrategic applications of strength and violence.

What I must have internalized earlyon is that in order to have and wield power, people needed to be physicallystrong. Scary. Those who arent physically strong should be wealthy or wilyenough to be able to control strong people.

I find this idea fascinating. Notbecause its a revolutionary idea (its pretty obvious), but because I wantedto know if the world would be different if power was meted out differently.What would happen when a traditionally oppressed group got a lot more physicalpower? Would they be just as bad as the old guys? And if they had all thisphysical power, where did it come from? How did they maintain it? One groupcant maintain power over another without enslaving itself.

This led to the inevitable.

How would that look if women hadthe power?

So I started writing other types ofstories. Stories about war and death and bugs and women. Strong women, angrywomen, powerful women, bloody women, brutal women. Theyre the gritty fightersand morally fucked-up wretches that weve seen battling it out on other worldsfor eons as men. They have their own non-standard genders, prejudices, fears,and morals. And they arent generally ours.

Every one of us is capable of greatviolence. Great mercy. Great kindness. Great despair. What we choose to tellpeople is an acceptable expression of these characteristics varies by cultureand class and race, and gender, and a hundred other things. But collectively,we as a culture decide just how much (and in what ways) were allowed to emotebefore were no longer loved. Before were shunned. Before we cut the odd onesaway from the herd so we can start building it into whatever image of the waythings are we desire.

In these stories, the herd has beenculled in an entirely different way. And the why and the how of it is what madewriting these stories so damn fun.

I hope you enjoy reading them atleast half as much as I enjoyed hacking them together.

The Red House

Dayton, Ohio

December, 2010

Gods War

January 2011

Night Shade Books

Nyx had already been to hell.One prayer more or less wouldnt make any difference...

On a ravaged, contaminated world, acenturies-old holy war rages. Fought by a bloody mix of mercenaries, magicians,and conscripted soldiers, the origins of the war are shady and complex, buttheres one thing everybody agrees on...

Theres not a chance in hell ofending it.

Nyx is a former government assassinwho makes a living cutting off heads for cash. But when a dubious deal betweenher government and an alien gene pirate goes bad, Nyxs ugly past makes her thetop pick for a covert recovery. The head they want her to bring home could endthe war -- but at what price?