SUZY CHARNAS

CHARNAS--Suzy Mckee. Suzy McKee Charnas, much honored feminist science fiction, fantasy, and nonfiction writer, died of a heart attack at her Albuquerque home on January 2, 2023. She was 83 years old. A brief autobiography on her webpage begins with an immediate indication of her original, witty, no nonsense, unbridled intelligence, and imagination. "I come from a long line of smart, tough, charming Jewish women who married clever but useless husbands, eventually kicked the men out in exasperation, and raised the kids on their own." Both parents were commercial artists in New York City, and when six years old Suzy McKee was already writing and drawing her own comic books. At the High School of Music and Art, and despite living in Midtown Manhattan, she started writing "Westerns." At Barnard College she graduated with a joint major in Economics and History that she felt she needed as "tools to build convincing fictional societies so I could set fantastic adventure stories in them." Her continuing interest in imagining and thinking through other cultures led her to two years in the Peace Corps in Nigeria. There she discovered "how much American education had falsified, misunderstood, or denied outright about human beings, culture, economics, history, and the world in general." Her immersion in Nigeria remained with her and in 1980 published, "Scorched Supper on New Nigeria" on a distant planet, reprinted in her book, "Moonstone and Tiger-Eye" (1992). It also equipped her, "as a white American woman to write about space and the future as inhabited by more kinds of people than just smart white guys doing imaginary techno speak at each other." Returning to New York she earned a Master of Arts in Teaching at NYU and taught several years at New Lincoln High School. There in the late 1960s she met and married the equally clever - but unlike the prior women in the family - the love of her life, Stephen Charnas, a Harvard educated lawyer. In 1972 they escaped to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Stephen spent much of his legal career similarly engaged with other cultures defending Native American communities regarding property issues and water rights. He died after an extended illness in 2018. Between 1970 and 1999 she published 15 (frequently reprinted) books beginning with "Walk to The End of The World" (1974), the first of four linked feminist futurist novels. "Motherlines" (1978), was the second in the series and together they won the Tiptree Award. The next two volumes were "The Furies" (1994), and "The Conqueror's Child" (1999). The four books comprise "The Holdfast Chronicles," set in a future world devastated by wars in which most men had died, but a few still held power in a small patch of livable earth, The Holdfast, where women struggled as slaves. Ultimately, the women take power themselves, corralling the few remaining men for reproductive purposes. The series ends with the women building a utopian society, and the difficulties of maintaining it. During the 30 years writing the Holdfast Chronicles, she also published "The Vampire Tapestry," (1980) which won Nebula 80 Award, and was translated into French, German, Dutch, and Greek, and that she later revised for theatrical productions and a movie script. As well as two other novels: a ghost story "Dorothea Dreams" (1986), and "The Ruby Tear" (1998), a mysterious demonic vampire novel (under a pseudonym, Rebecca Brand). This array of publications was accompanied by four "Young Adult" novels, "The Bronze King" (1985), "The Silver Glove" (1988), and "The Golden Thread" (1989), and "The Kingdom of Kevin Malone (1993). All have women as central characters, and are set in familiar locations in New York City, (the Subway, Central Park, Fifth Avenue, and a local High School), opening for teenagers mind bending, seemingly impossible, future/present worlds of magic, and mystery, good and evil. Most of these books have been frequently reprinted. During this period she also had numerous short stories in the major Science Fiction journals. In "Listening to Brahms" (1986) an astronaut at a concert on a distant planet overhears a conversation between two lizards about the music, and realizes that music is the ultimate medium of expression, even across species. "Boobs" in Asimov's Science Fiction (1989) is another species-crossing tale of a bullied female werewolf that won the Hugo Award for the best short story of the year. Again, in Asimov's Science Fiction (1996) she published "Beauty and the Opera or the Phantom Beast," beginning with Christine falling though the Paris Opera stage floor into the domain of the Phantom, whom she ultimately comes to command. Many of her short stories were reprinted in major Science Fiction and Fantasy journals and collections, including her own collection, "Music of the Night" (2001). Her last two books were non-fiction, both published in 2002. One was "Strange Seas," a searching account of channeling souls, ancestors, and spirits, and the human interface with whales and dolphins. The second was an extraordinary memoire, "My Father's Ghost: The Return of My Old Man and Other Second Chances" (2002). Her father, Robin McKee, had left the family in 1947 when she was eight years old. In 1976, learning that he was seriously ill and impoverished in New York, she brought him to Albuquerque where he died in 1993. Robin brought with him some 40 volumes of journals that he started in 1929, including letters, sketches, and clippings. Drawing on the journals and their time together, "My Father's Ghost" is a loving, thoughtful, and instructive meditation on their inverted parent-child relationship, yet another world that many people experience, but few have written about so movingly.