Queen and Games Mistress
Emily A. Bernhard Jackson reviews new editions of Irene Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth and Susan Ertz’s Woman Alive as evidence that women and gender-nonconforming writers have a deeper history in science fiction and literary utopia than is often recognized. She finds Clyde’s women-only Armeria imaginatively and materially distinctive but fundamentally conservative, especially in its monarchy, rigid class hierarchy, child barter, and unchallenged slave labor. Ertz’s novel has a more preposterous premise—a games mistress becomes the last surviving woman and Queen of England—but Jackson argues that it succeeds through its attractive vision of technological and social reform, psychological insight, intrigue, and romance. Their republication recovers neglected feminist speculative fiction, though the two works offer sharply different social visions.