Virginia Gerstenfeld
Virginia Gerstenfeld | |
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| Born | 20 April 1916 Narona, Alscia |
| Died | 20 January 2004 (aged 87) |
| Occupation |
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| Years active | 1939–2004 |
Virginia Gerstenfeld (Gylic transcription: Virginia Gerystenfelyt; 20 April 1916 – 20 January 2004) was a Gylian chemist, biochemist, engineer, writer, and politician. She was one of Gylias' most successful and influential science fiction authors, and is particularly known for her social science fiction work.
Considered a pioneer of social science fiction and New Wave science fiction, her works were politically-charged and used science fiction settings to speculate on social, political, and economic ideas. She rejected descriptions of her writing as utopian or dystopian, arguing that she simply sought to present well-realised, fully thought-through scenarios. Her sympathies for anarchism, countercultures, and freethought shaped her writing, and made her a sometimes acerbic critic of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction.
In addition to her science fiction, Virginia wrote non-fiction prolifically, tackling various scientific and non-scientific topics, and was a long-serving member of the Gylian Senate, where she was a member of the fine arts salon.
Biography
Virginia Gerstenfeld was born on 20 April 1916 in Narona, which she later described humorously in her memoirs as "either Alscia's smallest large city, or largest small city." She was of German descent, and had a younger brother.
She described her parents' background as "rather tragic", as they had experienced poverty in Xevden before Alscia was established. As a result, her parents instilled their children from an early age with an awareness of their status as "lucky Gylians" and a strong emphasis on self-improvement.
After finishing secondary school, Virginia enrolled in the Border Guard and attended its naval academy, where she studied chemistry, biochemistry, and engineering. She saw some action during the Alscian Border War as part of the Border Guard's blockade and harrassment of Xevdenite shipping.
Following Alscia's accession to the Free Territories, she officially became a member of the People's Army. She served in the Liberation War, and was modest about her service, describing herself as "just a member of the PA like all the others." However, her biographers revealed that she was elected commander by her unit on a few occasions, and once received an official commendation from Hạ Tử Trân, the famous "Two-Gunned Girl General".
She also continued her studies during the war, although she never formally earned a degree due to the Free Territories' complete reorganisation of education.
After the war, she settled in Narsiad, home to Anca Déuréy University. She became a fixture at the university, intermittently working as a lecturer, researcher, chemist, and advisor. She was very fond of the university, and felt a kinship with its young, politically radical students; several of her short stories and novels featured affectionate parodies of Anca Déuréy University. She was nicknamed "Professor Virginia" due to her demeanour, a nickname she discouraged because she was not actually a professor or held a degree.
Writing career
Virginia began writing during the war, and published her first short story in 1946, with her first novel appearing in 1948. Although constrained by the wartime rationing, her career quickly took off in the Free Territories: she published 14 short stories in 1952 alone. By the war's end, she was well-established as Gylias' leading science fiction writer. She was a prolific contributor to The New World, and her fiction was published in general interest magazines like L'Petit Écho, Silhouette, teen, Downtown, Mişeyáke Metro Mail, Surface, The Current, and The Travelling Companion.
She was primarily a science fiction writer, and specialised in the social and soft genres, later coming to be identified with the New Wave science fiction movement. Her writing style was characterised by a high degree of experimentation and artistic sensibility, with frequent use of pastiche, pop culture references, humour, irony, and a propensity for misfits, rebels, and eccentrics as lead characters. She took full advantage of the "applied avant-garde" ideal promoted by the Golden Revolution and the boom in illustration as an art form — the Gauchic and psychedelic-tinged illustrations for her stories were just as essential to her success as the writing.
One of her trademarks was using the pillow book and epistolary format, fleshing out her stories with quotes from fictional documents. She had a talent for imitating the format of official documents and scientific papers, owing to her professional career. She became famous for her highly detailed worldbuilding, which at times overshadowed plot.
While her first novel used exposition extensively due to its premise of a character being brought into the future, she later turned against the method, saying, "I sometimes forgot I was writing a story instead of delivering a lecture." Instead, she favoured preparing the background extensively and then "writing the story from inside" without giving readers an "easy way in", finding that this method captured "an appropriate sense of defamiliarisation."
She avoided setting her works in specific years, and joked that "predictions should be left to oracles and divinators". Instead, she jokingly specified the time of day her stories took place, or used fanciful terms, such as borrowing from existing zodiacs, era name traditions, or naming years after incumbent officeholders. This allowed her works to be set in unspecified futures, and thus avoid retrofuturism. In 2000, she wrote a critical analysis of Looking Backward for Radix, and ended it with the quip, "Anyone who's criticised me for never using a number year in my stories — what do you say now?".
Virginia's fiction is best known for its interrogation of socioeconomic systems. She explored various ideas for social organisation in her work, including social credit, mutualism, gift economy, voluntaryism, and free association. She generally depicted systems based on "emancipated markets" and showed an enthusiasm for decentralised planning. Her œuvre was unified by an anarchist sensibility — she stated in an interview, "My only concern with technology is how it can empower people and abolish alienation and exploitation." She enjoyed the challenge of pondering all implications of a scenario, and was strongly critical of authoritarianism, elitism, snobbery, and monopoly.
She could speak German, English, French, Italian, Latin, and Hellene, and freely mixed them in a code-switching style common to Gylians. One of her famous short stories depicted a dictatorship run by linguistic prescriptivists, resisted by descriptivist rebels. She was a stickler for accurate translations and frequently asked for others' help; Quenminese author Đổng Mộng Thanh recalled attending a literary convention and being asked by Virginia to translate a phrase into Quenminese for her current project.
In addition to science fiction, she also wrote much non-fiction, contributing essays and editorials to many publications, and embracing a role as a public intellectual. One biographer wrote that she had "an admirable commitment to keeping up with popular culture and the youth": she supported the Groovy Gylias scene, embraced rock and roll as the "new musical vernacular", and later in life proudly owned a computer, communicated through the internet, and wrote video game reviews for GameCentral and Level.
She wrote scripts or served as a consultant for many science fiction films and series. One of her unrealised projects was the screenplay for a science fiction musical starring the Beaties, for which she was approached by Haruka Morishima in late 1974. Haruka had a vague idea for a plot about a band whose members discover they are being impersonated by a group of extraterrestrials. Virginia wrote the screenplay, which she felt had turned out well, but the project never got off the ground. She later discussed the experience in a review of Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, joking that Daft Punk were "excellent mind-readers".
Political career
Virginia ran for the Senate in 1962, and was elected for Herlan as an independent supported by Veterans for a Just Peace. She won re-election in 1969, 1976, 1980, 1985, 1990, and 1995.
In the Senate, she was a member of the fine arts salon, and was known for her service on the Permanent Committee on Culture, Arts and Leisure, Permanent Committee on Science and Technology, and Permanent Committee on Defense. She generally aligned herself with the market anarchist faction of the Senate, being close to Union of Independents founder Ţaisa Eşal.
As a Senator, Virginia advocated public support of the arts, decentralised planning, and feminism and gender revolution. She participated in Project Nous, and was a strong defender of Gylias' regulated drug policy. She was a prominent spokesperson for Liberation War veterans' interests, and was known for her speeches invoking the memory of the war to support and encourage the Golden Revolution.
She also served on the Public Advisory Council after it was established in 1987. She retired from the Senate when it was reformed to a sortition-based system in 2000.
Public image
Virginia was known as the doyenne of Gylian science fiction, and cultivated a public image to match. Margot Fontaine, one of her colleagues in the fine arts salon, described her as "an anarchist–individualist", and said she was "very self-disciplined and straight-arrow". She always appeared neatly dressed in the Senate, and lived by the ethos of "everything which is not forbidden is allowed". She had red hair, and was described by Ţaisa Eşal as "the living image of the redheaded, strong-willed, self-sufficient characters that populate her stories".
Science fiction
An inspiration and ally of New Wave science fiction, Virginia had a famously stormy relationship with the science fiction genre, particularly foreign scenes. She abhorred the Golden Age of science fiction, arguing that its authors were "illiterate ignorants who can't write literature, have never met women, and care too much about their precious technology to ever interact with humans."
She lambasted science fiction's pretension to being a "literature of ideas" and argued that it was instead profoundly conservative and even reactionary, populated by "repulsive creeps, sexists, bigots, reactionaries, and PFA trash", and driven by totalitarian impulses, manifested in science fiction authors' preoccupation with technology and rigidly conformist societies.
Virginia especially abhorred military science fiction and the trend of militarism and "thoughtless jingoism" in science fiction stories. At one science fiction convention, she pointedly arrived to a panel wearing her Border Guard uniform, and demanded, "How many of you immature bastards sitting around fantasising about war have actually fought in one?".
Virginia's emphasis on literary experimentation, explicit depictions of sexuality and drug use, and use of working-class or misfit point-of-view characters served to further separate her from the sci-fi power fantasies she found reprehensible. Her relentless criticism of "traditional" science fiction and insulting rhetoric led her to engage in polemics with other science fiction authors throughout her career. When she was asked to contribute an editorial to the launch of a Delkoran science fiction magazine in 1963, she obliged with arguably her best-known "manifesto":
"Destroy the science fiction establishment by any means necessary! We must drive right-wingers out of science fiction forever, preferably through purges, beatings, and summary executions. Reactionaries must be taught that science fiction is not theirs and never will be, and must fear it. Science fiction is ideal for starting a culture war, which we know how to wage and how to win."
Death
Virginia died on 20 January 2004 of natural causes in her apartment in Narsiad.
Personal life
She was married, with no children. Outside of writing, academia, and politics, her interests included reading, gardening, cooking, and music.
Legacy
Virginia is one of Gylias' most influential science fiction authors, being one of the most frequently cited as influence among science fiction writers, and her impact extended throughout Gylian pop culture. She imprinted the prefigurativism of the Free Territories onto science fiction, helping establish social science fiction and New Wave science fiction as its dominant styles in Gylias, and steering Gylian science fiction away from space exploration and technology towards a focus on social issues, "inner space", revolution, and alternatives to prevailing socioeconomic systems.
Her emphasis on worldbuilding and working out the implications of a scenario in full have been cited as an influence by many, such as the creators of Valérian et Laureline and Poly-Space.