Award-winning feminist science-fiction novelist and short story writer, Suzy McKee Charnas, told vivid, often controversial tales with a clear goal of transferring her words into her reader’s brain in full color.
“Generally, I mean it to translate some ideas-pictures-emotions from my brain to yours. Often, I want the work to crack the frame you’ve customarily used to see through when viewing a certain clutch of concepts, so that you can see them differently and have the pleasure of reconsidering something previously settled in your own mind,” she said in an interview with Joan Gordon of Depauw University.
Charnas is best known for her groundbreaking “Holdfast Chronicles,” a four-volume story written over the course of almost thirty years. The series tell the story of a dystopian world in which once-enslaved women conquer their former male masters. The first installment, “Walk to the End of the World” was published in 1974, and the last installment, “The Conqueror's Child” was published in 1999. In her work, she addressed topics of feminist dystopia, separatist societies, war, and reintegration.
Charnas was born in 1939 in Manhattan to artist parents. Despite being raised in a low-income family, she was able to secure an illustrious education. She majored in economics and history at Barnard College and taught for a while in Nigeria as part of the Peace Corps before earning a master’s degree from New York University.
Charnas developed a love of writing as a child. In the days when latch-key kids weren’t as common, she spent her time alone filling pages with stories about gothic westerns while her parents were working. She grew to be successful at writing mysteries, fantasy, horror, and science fiction. She considered sci-fi queen Ursula K. Le Guin to have been a major inspiration for the initiation of her writing career.
Charnas accumulated several prestigious awards throughout her career, including the 1980 Nebula Award for the best novella for “Unicorn Tapestry,” her vampire novella which became part of the popular novel, “The Vampire Tapestry.” “Boobs,” about an angry teenage female werewolf, won the 1989 Hugo award, and “Walk to the End of the World,” “Motherlines,” and “The Conqueror’s Child” were all James Tiptree Jr. Award winners.
Charnas died at 83 of a heart attack on January 6, 2023.