Quote of the day:

Thank God she doesn’t have to be confirmed by the Senate.
—Herbert Hoover, on the birth of his granddaughter

I’ve previously written about Connie Willis but I inadvertently selected a story of hers that I wasn’t able to link to. So I thought I should correct that. So I present “Even the Queen”, a story about, um, well, it’s about, uh, oh, I’ll just say it’s a humorous conversation among several generations of women, mothers and daughters and in-laws. It hardly even qualifies as a science fiction story except the conversation revolves around a fictional drug and the story did win the Hugo Award in 1993 for Best Short Story as well as the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. 

I’ll let Connie Willis tell you what it’s about. This is from her introduction to the story in her collection Impossible Things.

I’VE GOTTEN A BUNCH OF FLACK RECENTLY FOR NOT writing about Women’s Issues. You hear a lot of this kind of talk these days—as if we were dogs and cats and parakeets instead of people, and had not only different things on our minds but different mental processes altogether.

Shakespeare also gets flack, in his case for being a Dead White Elizabethan Male, which apparently limits him to addressing only Dead White Elizabethan Male Issues. (Are there any? What on earth are they?)

I hate this kind of literary demagoguery. Anyone who’s ever read Shakespeare knows he had bigger fish to fry than Elizabethan Issues. He wrote about Human Issues—fear and ambition and guilt and regret and love—the issues that trouble and delight all of us, women included. And the only ones I want to write about.

But, as I say, I’ve been getting all this flack, and I thought to myself, “Fine. They want me to write about Women’s Issues. I’ll write about Women’s Issues. I’ll write about The Women’s Issue.” So I did. I hope they’re happy.

So now you know what the story is about. All I’ll add is that I thought it was very funny and I laughed out loud more than once, but not everybody has the same sense of humor, of course. I did think that it dealt very realistically with multi-generational mother-daughter issues, but then as I’m neither a mother nor a daughter, perhaps I’m not the best judge.

The story can be found in Willis’s story collection Impossible Things.

I also link to the archive of its original magazine appearance in the April 1992 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. It only takes about ten or fifteen minutes to read.

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