“This book deserves serious consideration because of the viewpoint character (a teenage girl on a space station) and because of the changes Barnes postulates in people living in a new environment. It’s very good science fiction; excellent speculation. Quirky and interesting politics. He’s done a fine job of imagining what living in his creation would be like.”

Karen disqualified this one early, because she administers the Tiptree with Pat Murphy, but the judges didn’t let her keep it off the shortlist. “Every bit as distinguished as The White Queen. After eight years of cyberpunk as a more masculine than feminine endeavor, two very strong writers [Fowler and Jones] have invented a feminist reply. In so doing, they’ve made a long overdue contribution to the great dialog of the SF field.”

“Gentle not only successfully blurs the gender lines around rape, she raises all the questions so prevalent in contemporary culture about date rape, marital rape, and other situations where the lines are blurred. … One of the best things about the book is that the protagonist understands what she’s done, and why, and through that, comes to understand what the rapist did, and why. Gentle also, in the relationship between the protagonist and her husband, deals with two [essential] gender issues (or at least relationship issues)-love without beauty and love in a context of controlled jealousy.”

“Women of various ages and stages and forms struggle over a most basic and grand ‘magical’ achievement, the accomplishment of the winter solstice and release towards spring. A victory is won without the toot of a single war-horn or clash of battle, and it works-without argument, without over-protection, without polemic of any kind, but just by being told, and well-told.”

“Women tend to talk differently from men … Part of the reason women speak differently is because their concerns are different. I think that Piercy has taken on cyberpunk and made it answer the questions that women are most likely to ask about the future. Shira and Malkah, the protagonists, are not sleazoid-underworld-street-samurai; they’re women who’d like to raise a kid successfully as well as jack in. … This was new; it is not a minor triumph.”