Memories of the BodyTales of Desire and Transformation
Lisa Tuttle
Severn House hardback, 256 pages, £12.99
Published May 1992
ISBN 0727843125
Grafton paperback, 210 pages, £5.99
Published September 1992
ISBN 0586213627
Review by David Clark (1992)
Lisa Tuttle’s third collection of short stories (mostly, there’s one novella, ‘The Wound’ – can we just say collection of stories? A novella is just a long story that isn’t a novel, after all) is SF, say Grafton. That’s OK as a definition, but only up to a point. There’s some crossover with horror here, the book’s title is presumably meant to refer to the predilection for ‘body horror’, seen in such stories as ‘A Birthday’ and ‘The Colonization of Edwin Beal’. This is a long-running theme – these stories stretch from 1977, though mostly we’ve got late 80s to date.
The other big theme is feminism and gender politics; Tuttle did write an Encyclopedia
of Feminism. There’s plenty of parallel non-fiction
work in the period covered by this collection. ‘Husbands’ paints a world
in which women have mastered parthenogenesis and the extinction of men
has followed. It’s one of those stories. The aforementioned ‘The
Wound’
concerns itself with redefining gay male sexuality. ‘Lizard Lust’ is
about the nature of men. (I think Tuttle may be a bit worried about
men.) ‘Bits and Pieces’ is about a woman building the perfect mate.
Well, there isn’t enough of this stuff about. Not all of
Memories of the Body is like this: ‘The Spirit Cabinet’ is a
ghost story. ‘Dead Television’ is SF contact with the dead; in ‘Riding
the Nightmare’ one woman’s reality is affected by dreams. Anyway who cares about the genre, I care about the themes. This is a collection of stories by one writer, a writer that I’m interested in. That may be because of speculative fictional ideas, it may be because of her feminism, or for some other reason altogether. My only criticism is that I’d rather have had 3 collections coming one after another chronologically rather than in generic groupings; A Spaceship Built of Stone is SF, apparently (haven’t read it) and A Nest of Nightmares is horror. I suppose they have to market these things, and they are from different publishers. It’s still pretty good going to get three collections of stories published to only two novels. And it’s refreshing to find an intelligent, ingenious writer who doesn’t stretch her work out to a pre-set novel length all the time.