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The following panel discussion was held as part of the When It Changed conference on 2 December 2022. The panellists were the award-winning authors and editors, Nicola Griffith and Nisi Shawl, and the head of Handheld Press, Kate Macdonald. In the chair was Una McCormack, the author and co-founder of Gold SF, which will be publishing Vonda McIntyre's uncollected short stories in spring 2024. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Una McCormack: I'd like to start by thinking about Vonda McIntyre's early novels, The Exile Waiting (1975) and Dreamsnake (1978), which made her reputation. Kate, you brought The Exile Waiting back into print so it would be good to hear what impressed you about this book.
Kate Macdonald: Well, I encountered Vonda and The Exile Waiting and Dreamsnake at the same time. I was seventeen, working in Aberdeen's first comic and science fiction bookshop, the most northerly shop of its kind in the British Isles at the time, and I was in my first year at university. I had read mainly Tolkien and Anne McCaffrey and Ursula Le Guin - that was my fantasy background. So I was selling these comics, and in 1981 comic art had not really met feminism, as far as I was aware, and I was surrounded by images of extremely busty women and an awful lot of sexualisation which really annoyed me. At the back of the shop we had the books, and I was wandering around, changing book covers and sorting things out. And then, oh look! these two books have been restocked! And I thought, good God! this is by a woman, but they don't have bosoms all overthem. What's happening?! I bought them at a discount and took them home, and I read them and I re-read them, and they became my talisman. This is what science fiction and fantasy can be. It doesn't matter about the sex. It doesn't matter about the gender. That is how I discovered The Exile Waiting, and at that young age it was pretty seminal for my development as a reader. At the same time as I discovered Vonda, I was studying science fiction at university and being introduced to the canon of science fiction that I had...