Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Reviews
- Essays
- Letters
- Sinister Wisdom, 11, fall 1970
- Village Voice, October 1972
- Signs, winter 1977
- Signs, II:4, 1977
- Frontiers, IV:2, 1979
- Chrysalis, No. 9, fall 1979
- “Feminist Review,” The New Women's Times, February 29–March 13 1980
- Gay Community Center Newsletter, July 1980
- Women and SF: Three Letters
- Written to Venom, November 27 1981
- Sojourner, 10:8, June 1985
- The Women's Review of Books, II:9, June 1995
- The Women's Review of Books, III:6, March 1986
- The Seattle Source, April 11 1986
- The Women's Review of Books, III:12, September 1986
- The Women's Review of Books, IV:10–11, July/August 1987
- Lesbian Ethics, 2:3, summer 1987
- Gay Community News, January 22–28 1989
- The Women's Review of Books, VI:7, April 1989
- SFRA Newsletter, No. 172, November 1989
- Extrapolation, 31:1, spring 1990
- Publication of the Modern Language Association, March 1992
- Sojourner: The Women's Forum, September 1993
- The Lesbian Review of Books, I:3, 1995
- Index of Books and Authors Reviewed
Written to Venom, November 27 1981
from Letters
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Reviews
- Essays
- Letters
- Sinister Wisdom, 11, fall 1970
- Village Voice, October 1972
- Signs, winter 1977
- Signs, II:4, 1977
- Frontiers, IV:2, 1979
- Chrysalis, No. 9, fall 1979
- “Feminist Review,” The New Women's Times, February 29–March 13 1980
- Gay Community Center Newsletter, July 1980
- Women and SF: Three Letters
- Written to Venom, November 27 1981
- Sojourner, 10:8, June 1985
- The Women's Review of Books, II:9, June 1995
- The Women's Review of Books, III:6, March 1986
- The Seattle Source, April 11 1986
- The Women's Review of Books, III:12, September 1986
- The Women's Review of Books, IV:10–11, July/August 1987
- Lesbian Ethics, 2:3, summer 1987
- Gay Community News, January 22–28 1989
- The Women's Review of Books, VI:7, April 1989
- SFRA Newsletter, No. 172, November 1989
- Extrapolation, 31:1, spring 1990
- Publication of the Modern Language Association, March 1992
- Sojourner: The Women's Forum, September 1993
- The Lesbian Review of Books, I:3, 1995
- Index of Books and Authors Reviewed
Summary
Author's Note
Venom: the Magazine of Killer Reviews appeared in 1981, a sportive little publication perpetrated by science fiction writers who remained anonymous somewhere in San Francisco. To be published in Venom, an author had to write a pseudonymous and nasty review of one of her or his own works. Then one was allowed to submit killer reviews of others' work. Unfortunately, by that fall, the magazine editors, overburdened with work, had quit publishing it and so this letter was never printed. I still think Elizabeth Lynn was involved. She won't say.
Dear Vipers,
Another of those forced marriages of brutality, gynecology, and Raymond Chandler came my way only two days before Venom appeared, one “Dark Angel” by Edward Bryant. In this one a witch (get that? that's what all this talk about Women's Lib comes to; give a woman any power at all and [a] she'll be irrational and dangerous and [b] up to no good) makes pregnant the man who got her pregnant twenty years before and then abandoned her. In Myrna Lamb's play “What Have You Done For Me Lately?,” which uses the same plot device, the man is a U.S. Senator who's led a public campaign against women's right to abortion (after abandoning the woman – a doctor, Edward, not a witch – who nearly died in labor with his child). But everybody knows what Women's Lib really wants – brutality, viciousness, and a prose style stolen from a Bogart flick, a bad one. “He hurried. I was dry and it hurt. I made him use spittle” (p. 163). “Everybody can have one mistake, I told myself. One only. I suddenly wanted to leave the elevator, the hotel, Phoenix. I didn't want to go back to Denver. I wanted to go anywhere else” (p. 171). Myrna Lamb provides her male character with an abortion, after an elaborate discussion of the ethics of abortion; Ed knows that's sentimentality and provides his with no birth canal and a pregnancy nobody but he and the witch can see. Yeah, I guess they get some weird kick out of it, but this one's got me so mad I can't even be witty about it.
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- Information
- The Country You Have Never SeenEssays and Reviews, pp. 270 - 271Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007