"Best feminist science-fiction novel in recent decades".

My review of "Ghostwriters" by "M J Maloney", (Dr Gabrielle Malcolm).

After 50 years of reading science-fiction, I feel I can recognize a good dystopian story, especially when it's written from a feminist perspective, by a woman.

“Ghostwriters” by “M.J.Maloney” is hands down the best I've read since “When it Changed” by Joanna Russ in 1972, (when I was 12 years old).

Russ's hopeful, but ultimately tragic all-female planet, where survivors of a crashed space ship learned to use Parthenogenesis and created an ideal (for them) society, was always my yardstick for feminist science fiction.

I am very aware that I was lucky to have been a teenager in the golden age of 2nd-wave feminism, which informed female fiction of the time. Sheri S. Tepper's “The Gate to Women's Country”(1988), and the extraordinary “Children of Men” by P.D. James in 1992, both ran Russ a good joint second.

But others? Well, “The Handmaid's Tale” by Margaret Atwood (1985), apologies to those of you who love it, seemed to me, as a SF reader, to be unoriginal. Katherine Burdekin's hideously realistic “Swastika Night” (1937) had already got there, nearly 50 years before.

Like all female SF writers back then, Burdekin had to publish under a male pen-name, “Murray Constantine". The Guardian called her book “A companion piece to ‘1984’”. She really got down into the dirt of what a warrior society where women are nothing but cattle, in a modern European country, would actually look like. You can find it in your library, in the SF Masterworks series.

And the many women writers who decided that the Plandemic lockdowns of 2020 was the perfect time to write their SF masterpieces? Well, I've been busy reading them over the last 3 years, from the library. Transhumanism and AI tearing human families apart is a common theme, not so much a forecast of an SF future, as a reflection of what's already happening.

I've felt irritated at the prevalence of woke-isms in these recent women's semi-science fiction novels. They toe the party line on the “Climate Change” and “Trans” agendas - even if this has been enforced by their publishers, which it often seems it has, because it so often jars with the storyline. There seems to be little new thinking outside the box - which is, after all, what we turn to SF for.

So to find a woman writing from both a feminist view, AND without dollops of woke nonsense throughout, was a blessed relief!

“Ghostwriters” is Dr Gabrielle Malcolm's first SF book, and just like with P.D.James who was known as a detective-mystery writer before “Children of Men”, it's like a break-out from their previous works, a dazzling display, as if everything in their creative life was building up to this unexpected crescendo of imagination.

Here's Dr Malcolm's “real-life” literary credentials. https://www.keanekataria.co.uk/authors/gabrielle-malcolm/

I found her book on a visit to the most picturesque of the South Cotswolds towns, Bradford-on-Avon, a few weeks ago. It was being promoted as “by a local writer", so I bought a (signed) copy without knowing the writer was a woman. I found the book so gripping that I had to re-read it, and looked up who this amazing new voice on the SF scene actually is.

I am not surprised this scholarly lady has published her first SF novel under an ambiguous “is it a bloke” pen-name, so as not to confuse her original readership - and it's a pleasing nod to all those women writers in the genre who HAD to do this, back in the day, just to get published.

I'm not going to tell you the story of “Ghostwriters”, because I really want you to read it yourself! It's set in a near-future England, maybe 100 years after an unspecified societal collapse.

Women are the heroes of this desperate world, they are the leaders, the thinkers, the healers, the warriors, the matriarchs, and the resisters. And because the author is herself a historian, they are also the historians, and preservers of a language to tell it with.

The men in the tale exist only as villains!

Which is only proper, considering who is responsible for the destruction of Mother Earth in OUR reality.

There are themes Dr Malcolm has used which are familiar to us from other writers - the idea of isolated groups of humans living in the abandoned London Underground is not a new one, and rapid mutation/degeneration of humans in contained societies has been a staple of the great Stephen Baxter's SF for many years.

But she cleverly draws in examples from real history. The leaving of inspiring notes on scraps of paper in public places is a reminder of both the White Rose resisters in Nazi Germany, and the modern RadFem women's movement (we call it “stickering”)!

The male eccentric, who lives in his shack in the overgrown park, is immediately recognisable as the British police officers who infiltrated left-wing groups, even to the extent of having sexual relationships and babies with the activist women.

(I've often wondered if those old children's fables, which warned of not going near the “witch” in the tumbledown cottage in the woods, was not only about poor old women, with their cats, but also male sexual predators. Who maybe had been banished, and lived out their fetishes on the edges of society)?

The crumbling London her protagonists scrape a living in, rapidly disappearing under the jungle (strong echoes of J G Ballard's “The Drowned World” (1962)), is not blamed on climate change as such, but as Re-Wilding run amok, which is a nice twist.

And the flooding of London would occur naturally, with a total breakdown of infrastructure, and the loss of knowledge and will to maintain the Thames Barrier and the pumping system in the Underground.

So I urge you to get hold of a copy of this book, you will not regret it. I hope it will win awards, and one day have the same recognition as The Handmaid's Tale, or Children of Men.

“Ghostwriters" by “M J Maloney” (Gabrielle Malcolm) published in paperback and ebooks, 2023 by Goldsmith's Press, University of London. ISBN 978-1-913380-78-6

The illustration at the top is originally to a poem by Luke Hartnak, in his book “The Evolution of a Soul”. It's called “Held together by the forces of the World”.

You can see more of my artwork on my website, radicalcartoons.com & on my YouTube channel, on GETTR and spinster.xyz (all as Radical Cartoons). My book, “2020, The Year We Were All Cancelled” is still available on Amazon.