A review by morgandhu
The Other Half of the Sky by Athena Andreadis, Kay T. Holt

4.0

The Other Half of the Sky is one of several recent projects aimed at encouraging sff writing that includes women as diverse characters with all the range of characterisations, goals, abilities, occupations and agency that male characters have - in short, that write women as full humans. The title is taken from a Chinese saying (famously quoted by Mao Zedong) that women hold up half the sky - in sff, we have seen much of the half of the sky that men hold up, but relatively little of that held up by women. This anthology shows us some of the other half.

As editor Athena Andreadis observes in her Introduction,

"Science fiction wishes to be the genre of imaginative extrapolation. So it has come to pass that SF writers have conjured all kinds of planetary systems, ecologies, lifeforms and societies; FTL, stable wormholes, time travel, teleporters, ansibles; clones, uploading, downloading, genetic tinkering, nanotechnology; virtual reality, remote sensing, telepathy, telekinesis, precognition.

Yet the same universe-spanning visionaries seem to have difficulty envisioning women (or other “non-defaults,” for that matter) as full humans—that is, not defined by their helpmate/mother role but as rounded people fully engaged in their vocations and wider network of relationships and, furthermore, people who can be heroes, not merely heroines."


This anthology has women who can be heroes - and women who can be all sorts of other things, too. There truly is not a weak story in this anthology, and the range of stories is such that everyone will find something that hits their fancy.

For me, the memorable stories were:

Finders, Melissa Scott - in a future where salvage from the wreckage of ancient starfarers is the highest currency, a woman with a terminal disability leads a team seeking the rarest of treasures.

Bad Day on Boscobel, Alexander Jablokov - on a hollow asteroid habitat, a beleaguered social worker uncovers a thread to her home, with help of her rebellious daughter and a female agent from Mars.

Mission of Greed, Sue Lange - a survey ship finds sentient life on a planet rich in uranium, but will the greed of some of the crew lead to its destruction?

The Waiting Stars, Aliette De Bodard - can the consciousness of a being that ranged the stars as a Mindship be happy when returned to a body of flesh?

The Shape of Thought, Ken Liu - humans seeking a new planet to settle on are welcomed by a people with such a different way of thinking that only the most flexible of humans can approach an understanding of them.

Cathedral - one woman will sacrifice anything to make sure that humans don't lose their last chance to travel among the planets.