About Sisterland (48 page)

“I know I’m not. I know Faithful won’t be. And if you believe you’re free, you don’t understand what freedom is.”

She recognised the truth in his words. Temptation and fear assailed her in equal measure.

“You think it will be like your forest. There’s no guarantee. It might be desolate. It might be violent. You think you’ll be surrounded by nature – you see yourself breathing in air so pure it slices your lungs. How do you know Outsideland will be anything like that? How do you know it even has trees?”

“I don’t. But I’m willing to risk it.”

“What about Faithful?”

“She’ll be happy with us. I don’t want her growing up here. Being part of this. Turned into a living lie.”

“Couldn’t you wait for things to improve? Sisterland is still evolving.”

His hold on her loosened, but he tried once more in a voice grown weary. “Imagine what it might be like for the three of us in Outsideland. Use your imagination, Constance. Don’t let it wither.”

“How can you be sure you want what’s out there more than this?”

“I don’t know anything for sure.” He let his arms fall to his sides, and took a step back from her. “I had a pet squirrel in my forest. I fed it, stroked it, loved it. But it was still my pet. Here, I’m yours.”

“Don’t say that, Harper. Don’t be so hard on yourself. On us. Look, let’s take that trip to your forest we used to talk about. I promise I’ll make it happen this time. We could stay for a few months. Maybe we could even arrange to split our time between the forest and Harmony. I’ll talk to the Co-Equals about it.”

Shoulders hunched, he walked to the window, straining for a glimpse of the treetops. “They wouldn’t let us stay in the forest. They’d tell you they couldn’t manage without you. And you’d believe them. You haven’t been listening to me, Constance. We’re not free here. Every day, we fade a little more.”

She threw an arm over her eyes, blocking out the sight of him. “I don’t want to leave. I’m making a difference here.”

No further words were spoken for a time.

At last, he looked back into the room at her. “I love you, Constance, but I can’t stay in Sisterland with you any longer.”

It was the first time he had said he loved her. Always, Constance had wanted to hear him speak of it. Now, his love had the finality of farewell.

“What will I do?” she wailed.

He trained his eyes on her in a look which did not waver. Even now, the hope in them was a gift to her. She understood what he was telling her.

Choose.

“If it wasn’t for Faithful, I’d go with you,” she whispered. “How can we take a child to Outsideland?”

“It’s because of Faithful we must go.”

Constance tried to picture what living in Sisterland without Harper would be like. She’d have Faithful – no matter what he said, he wouldn’t be able to take their daughter away unless Constance was willing to let her go. And she never would. She’d have her work. She’d have Devotion and Goodwill. Life would go on. There’d be compensations.

Then she dared to imagine the world he was conjuring up. A world beyond Sisterland. Unknown. Foreign. Terrifying. But with possibilities.

Harper sensed her indecision. He left the window, moved towards her and cupped her chin in his palm. “Say yes.”

And it hit her, with the power of seduction and the directness of truth. There was no choice but to leave Sisterland. Not for Harper’s sake, or even Faithful’s, but for her own. Constance hovered at the point of no return, and tumbled in.

“Yes.”

It did not feel like a departure. Rather, an arrival.

GLOSSARY

Babyfusion: pregnancy

Beloved: Sisterland’s founder

Beloved’s Pearls
: A book advising children how to be good Sisterlanders

Blankout: blinds

Bodies: fitness instructors

Boyplace: training camp for boys

Buzz: light rail system

Co-Equals: Ruling body which replaced the Nine

Co-keeper: a new class of memory-keeper without personal experience of the memories they share

Comtel: a communications tool with a small screen worn on the left thumb. It acts as a messaging service and is also a security device, admitting wearers to work and the home

Egglight: egg-shaped, portable source of light

Els: elements, the unit of currency

Entscreen: TV with channels controlled by the Nine

Flicker: someone who works in Moe Express dispensing emotions

Girlplace: school and living quarters for girls

Himtime: mating

Keeper (also memory-keeper): a cohort of the oldest people in Sisterland who pass on authorised memories

Listeners/Listening: counsellors/counselling sessions where indoctrination is reinforced

Matingplace: where women mate with men

Meets: men chosen to mate

Medshop: pharmacy

Mindmap: read minds

Moe: emotion

Nine: Sisterland’s ruling body

Oneser: apartment for one person

Other: life partner

Pearl: someone who is prim and proper

Peers: Sisterland’s police

Pop-up: a bed

PS days/era: Pre-Sisterland

Scrutineer: guard

Shadow-moeing: flashbacks to emotions no longer freely available

Shaper: a thought-shaper, part persuader and part propagandist, trained to put the most positive spin on all Nine decisions

Shaperhaus: shaper headquarters

Sig: a signifier or identity strip lasered onto the outer wrist of a woman’s right hand which gives details such as name and occupation

Silkenspeak: Sisterland propaganda

Sistercentral: seat of government

Skin: face mask worn to protect women from the environment

Source: mother

Sourcingplace: maternity hospital

Stifstat: weapon which sends electric shot into the brain, causing temporary paralysis

Threeser: three-person apartment, extremely rare

Thought-cruncher: someone who disposes of unsuitable thoughts

Transer: electric-powered carriers in which men are transported

Twoser: apartment designed for two people

Voicebox: loudhailer

Wheeler: a tricycle

Interview with the author

Q: Can you reduce
About Sisterland
to one sentence?

A: I can reduce it to one word: extremism.

Q: Where did the idea for the novel come from?

A: It sprang from a book called
Herland
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), an American writer, feminist, social activist and lecturer who urged economic independence for women. Her ideas were radical and ahead of their time. She also wrote a chilling short story about madness called
The Yellow Wallpaper
.  She isn’t particularly known for humour, but
Herland
is a satire, and very funny. It was written in 1915, and tells the story of three male explorers who stumble on an all-female community in the Amazon jungle and are amazed to discover it’s a utopia. Anyhow, it set me to thinking. And the more I reflected, the more I decided that an all-female community wouldn't be utopian. Quite the reverse. And then I had to explain why.

Q:
Why did you position men as a secondary gender in the story rather than just do away with them altogether?

A: I wanted to explore extremism in action, and needed men to show them being treated as slaves – and how this diminished women as well as men. I'm also conscious of what happens when communities or tribes or are kept apart because I grew up in the north of Ireland during the Troubles. It's never a sound principle to segregate people, or to allow them to self-segregate, because the other side becomes reduced to stereotypes.    

Q: Did you set out to write a sci-fi novel?

A: Not at all, although as a student I read Philip K Dick’s
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
which was the basis for the film
Blade Runner
, and was hooked in by his vision. And who doesn’t love Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale?
I had no choice but to set the novel in the future because I wanted to show what a society would be like where women had been in power for a century or so. However, I made a deliberate decision not to have too much by way of futuristic trappings, bar practical odds and ends like the comtel.

Q: Why does your world mistrust emotions or ‘moes’?

A: Women are always being told they are too emotional and the implications are that it holds them back. Successful women seem to be better able to keep a rein on their emotional responses. I wondered what would happen if emotion suppression was taken to extremes.

Q:
Did you set out to make the Nine so totalitarian? 

A: Yes, because when I look about the world I see how power corrupts people. Even relatively mild-mannered people undergo a transition and start to inhabit ivory towers. They become convinced they are incapable of being wrong, and stop taking advice. I wonder if they don’t become afflicted with temporary insanity?

Q: Your characters have unusual names such as Innocence, Goodwill and Devotion. Is there a reason for that?

A: I wanted them all to have so-called virtue names. But I also chose Constance because of the revolutionary countess, Constance de Markievicz, a woman ahead of her time. Silence came about because I’ve never forgotten meeting a little girl called Silence in the US at a wedding: it occurred to me that her name would be perfect for a character in a book, but it had to be the right character and the right book. I spend a lot of time thinking about names and often change them several times during rewrites.

Q: How did you dream up terms such as peers, meets, Himtime, and so on?

A: Sometimes friends who read early drafts suggested them, sometimes I fiddled about with various words shunted together until I came up with them myself. It was a wonderful distraction from writing. With MUM I was thinking of the antithesis to motherhood, and hoped the juxtaposition would make it more chilling; the same goes for all the mothers like the Mating Mother, and so on. Motherhood has always been regarded as such a sacred condition, so I wondered how would it be if these mothers didn’t have the best interests of citizens at heart? But insisted they did?

Q: Do you have a favourite character?

A: Modesty – she started life as a minor character but her role became more important with each rewrite. She just muscled her way into the story. I expect she’s on course to run some future version of Sisterland. I also became fond of the memory-keeper,
Honour
, and was sorry to have to kill her off. But she had to go. No room for sentiment when it comes to plot.

Q: What were you trying to convey with the memory-keepers?

A: That memory is highly selective. We all choose what to retain and what to suppress of our own memories, to some extent. But what if the State undertook to do it for us? What kind of society would that produce? 

Q: Two dates are mentioned in your novel: June 29 and August 24, Memoryday and Sisterday respectively. Is there any significance?

A: They are the dates of my parents’ birthdays. I like to slide family references into my books. Both my parents are dead so they’ll never know I did it. But I know. It’s also a way of testing whether my
brothers read through to the end – I’m presuming my sister will.

Q: Do Harper and Constance escape to Outsideland?

A: I really don’t know – I have an open mind about it. It’s possible they do. Equally, it’s possible they are captured, in which case Faithful would be taken away from them and they’d be discontinued. I don’t think Constance would be given another chance: it would be regarded as too great a betrayal. We’ll never know which outcome met their escape plan, but what matters is they had one. 

Book Club Topics

1. How easily did you enter the fictional world of
Sisterland
?

2. Are there any characters you particularly disapprove of or admire? How did you feel about the Shaper Mother? The Nine? Silence? Harper?

3. How does Constance change during the course of the book?

4. What did you notice about Constance’s evolving relationship with Harper? In matingplace? After the Silent Revolution?

5
. Why do you think the author decided to tell the story through Constance’s eyes? Who else could she have chosen?

6. Which themes are being explored?

7. What is the author saying about memories? And emotions?

8. Some of the characters discuss symbols during the narrative. Which symbols does the author use and why?

9. Do you have a favourite passage and why?

10. What did you make of boyplace/girlplace, matingplace and segregation of women and men, with permits needed to attempt babyfusion?