Ian Sales - All That Outer Space Allows

Ginny is feeling lazy today. She likes to think she has an excellent work ethic when it comes to her writing, but some days she finds it hard to muster the enthusiasm to bang on the keys of her typewriter. Especially when she has just read something she thinks she can never approach in quality—and that, she sadly realises, is true of the Saxton story in the magazine she is holding. Josephine Saxton is a new writer, from England, and this is her debut in print. Ginny only wishes her first published story, just four years ago in Fantastic , had been as good.

The blow to her confidence decides her: she will leave her current work in progress until tomorrow; today she will catch up on her correspondence, she owes letters to Ursula, Judith and Doris, and she really ought to fire off a missive to Cele at Fantastic with her thoughts on the issue she has just read.

After she has showered and dressed in slacks and shirt, she finds herself outside on the patio, gazing east across the roofs of Wherry Housing toward the Air Force Base and Rogers Dry Lake, and beyond it the high desert stretching to the horizon, where the Calico Mountains dance in the pastel haze of distance. As she watches, a jet fighter powers up from one of the runways and though it is more than a mile and a half from her, she can tell from its delta wing it is a F-102 or F-106. Its throaty roar crowds the lapis lazuli sky, there’s a quick flash of mirror-bright aluminum as the aircraft banks, and then it seems to fade from view as it flies away from her. She wonders if it’s Walden in the cockpit, she has no idea what he does from day to day once he enters the base; officially, he’s a research test pilot in the Fighter Test Group, but she doesn’t know what he researches, which fighters he test pilots. Not the North American X-15, she knows that much, an aircraft which intrigues her because it is also a spaceship—it has flown more than fifty miles above the Earth, right at the edge of space, at over 4,000 miles per hour. And it even looks like a spaceship, like a rocket, as much at home in vacuum as it is in atmosphere. She would like to know more about the X-15 but it’s a sensitive subject in the house. Walden has tried to get on the program but has been refused, and he wears the refusal badly. Perhaps that’s why he was so keen to apply to become an astronaut.

Ginny is a California girl, a real one, born and bred in San Diego in Southern California, not one of those “dolls by a palm tree in the sand” from that song on the radio. She has history in this landscape of deserts and canyons and mesas, though she grew up beside the limitless plain of the Pacific. Here in the Mojave she is hemmed in by mountains, they encircle her world, her flat and arid world, where the small towns are so far apart they might as well belong to their own individual Earths. Standing here, gazing in the direction of Arizona, she finds it easy to believe Edwards is the only human place in the world, a lonely oasis of civilisation—and she knows her husband thinks of it as a technological haven in a world held back from the best science and engineering can offer by the short-sightedness of others. To some degree, she thinks he may be right. But she is also a housewife, and she lives in a world in which bed linen must be changed, clothes laundered, meals cooked and checkbooks balanced. She envies Walden his freedom to ignore all that—because she manages his world.

And now she really must get on with her letter-writing, although the lawn looks like it needs mowing and the end of the yard is beginning to look a little untidy…

“The only women in the group beside myself were Virginia Kidd and Donald Wollheim’s wife Elsie, who wrote a little and was nominally called a Futurian.”

“Gernsback claims he had as many female readers as male, but far fewer women became actively involved with fandom than men. Despite their numbers, the main route to fandom—having your letters published—was blocked to them, perhaps, as Gernsback implies, because they were less interested in engaging with the science of science fiction than men.”

“Not only was the female viewpoint unappreciated in most of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, but also women were generally relegated to the position of “things”, window dressing, or forced to assume attitudes in the corner, out of the way.”

“What sort of person writes science fiction? He—it is “she” once in about fifty times—very seldom depends wholly on the writing of science fiction for his living.”

“A few women, such as C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett, were working in the field earlier; Katherine MacLean entered the fray in 1949 in Astounding.”

“But at the same time [science fiction] has always reflected and continues to reflect a particular type of authority, that of men over women.”

On Fridays, Ginny drives into Lancaster to do the weekly shopping; there’s a commissary on the base but its stock is better-suited to bachelors. Ginny and Walden only have the one car, of course, the Impala, so she accompanies him onto the base and then drives the car back home. He won’t let her drive him to work, he has to be behind the wheel, though she’s a perfectly good driver, not that he will ever admit it.

Since Ginny has to make Walden’s breakfast and be ready to leave when he does, she wakes earlier than him in order to shower, dress and make up. She slides out of bed, leaving a sleeping Walden, who breathes as though he were engaged in an endless sequence of underwater dives, and pads across the bedroom to the bathroom. She showers, she washes her hair, she checks her legs and underarms to see if they need shaving; she towels herself dry and wraps it about her torso, and makes turban of a second towel for her hair. She heads for the second bedroom—which is her room in much the same way the third bedroom is Walden’s den. He thinks her room contains only clothes and cosmetics and shoes (her wardrobe is not as big as Walden believes it is)—but her closet is actually filled with back-issues of science fiction magazines, nor does he notice the bookcase holding science fiction paperbacks and a few hardcovers. There is no desk, however, only a dressing-table with a triptych of mirrors on its top. Ginny sits before this and minutely inspects her face…

By the time Walden appears in the kitchen, washed and uniformed, Ginny is dressed in a lemon yellow short-sleeved A-line summer dress, bought in San Diego during her last visit and not made from a pattern as the other wives would have done (although Ginny is not, perversely, jealous of their facility with sewing machine, needle and thread), face powdered, eyelashes mascaraed and mouth lipsticked, and her purse waiting on the table in the hall. She dishes out Walden’s breakfast and watches him eat it while she sips a coffee. She does not need to glance at her watch to know if they are on schedule—Walden is military, his life is ruled by schedule; he entered the kitchen at the same time he does every weekday, he takes as long to eat his eggs, bacon, hash browns and pancakes as he always does, he pushes back his chair, drains the last of his coffee, and says, Time to go, hon—right on schedule.

And because it is Friday, she replies, yes, dear. And she rises to her feet, puts his plate and cup, and her own cup, in the sink to be washed later, follows him into the hallway, where she slides on her sunglasses, picks up her purse, and tock-tock-tocks out of the house and into the carport, and waits deferentially while Walden locks up behind her. Once he has slid behind the steering-wheel, she joins him in the car and sits there waiting compliantly as he gives the ignition key a quick, confident twist.