The Falling Woman

This intriguing novel won the 1987 Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of the year. This is actually more of a psychological fantasy rather than a work of classical science fiction, although there are clearly science fiction elements present. A female archaeologist working on a dig in Central America is able to identify with the spirit of an ancient Mayan woman. The attempted sacrifice of this woman is apparently linked to the destruction of the Mayan civilization. The archaeologist's ability to link herself with the early inhabitants of an archaeological site has given her great advantages in her field. The interactions between the Mayan, the archeologist, and the archeologist's estranged daughter result in a healing embrace across time. All serious students of science fiction and speculative literature should read this book.

This haunting novel is centered around the theme of the ancient Maya human sacrifice of messengers to the gods. The messenger would be ceremonially thrown as much as 80 feet down into a cenote, a deep water-filled sinkhole. Most of the messengers would die upon impact. The ones who survived would be sacred and become very influential by providing messages from the gods.

Elizabeth is an archaeologist who had a serious psychological event as a young woman, resulting in her hospitalization. Her estranged husband made a bargain that if Elizabeth would not attempt to contact their daughter, he would assist her release from the psychiatric ward. She becomes an accomplished academic and treasure hunter. Twenty years later, while on a dig in the Yucatan, her daughter shows up in an attempt to mend the wounds of her past.

In her own way Elizabeth is a modern version of the messenger of the gods. She survived a serious suicide attempt and now sees ghosts from the past. They direct her to ancient sites and she is considered to be very lucky--if eccentric--by her peers.

This story of the making peace with the past in order to live fully in the present is compelling and well written. At times its portrayal of human relationships is bleak--there are no easy answers or Hallmark moments. Murphy intriguingly questions the boundary between talent and insanity. A challenging yet fulfilling read.

And is a mundane novel as well. This novel should NOT have won the award for what was called the best science fiction novel. 1987, the year of this novel, is thus the start of the Feminist takeover of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), now called the Science fiction and FANTASY Writers of America, and now the S can stand for a myriad of words, Speculative, Sub-par or other S words you can think of.

This book was awarded, possibly, for those that the SFWA thought needed a course in Sensitivity Training. For the Robert Heinlein's, Isaac Asimov's (who wrote in a eulogy of Alfred Bester that maybe young women do not appreciate being pinched on the butt). Now if you're not in dire need of Sensitivity Training, that is if you do NOT pinch the butts of women in the workplace or random women on the street, if you do NOT say to the same women `hey baby nice hooters', if you do NOT take female co-workers at the Christmas party, hike up their skirts and place their buttocks on the photocopy machine to hand out the copies at the next work day... Well let's take it one step further, let's say you're able to do this without difficulty, that you're not like the alcoholic that has to fight to keep everyday from taking that drink, that you don't have to internally fight with yourself not to do these things, that to not do them is automatic. Why? because you're a professional, because you have other things on your mind like your career, or, shocking of shocking, that you're respectful! If you don't do these things, then you DON'T need this feminism shoved down your throat. Ironically I don't know if Pat Murphy is trying to be the anti-Robert Heinlein (the feminist version). In the book there's a part about this married Italian man whose been wooing the female lead character, she ends up sleeping with him and then he promptly dumps her as he's "dedicated to his wife and children" being the good Italian man he is. So instead of taking it out on married men who have affairs, or maybe Catholicism for generating guilt-ridden, loyal, albeit sometimes cheating married men, or goodness forbid herself, she takes it out on you the (hopefully male) reader. How many men during their lives, have seen women make bad sexual (women call it romantic) decisions, when you know what the outcome will be and then they come back afterwards and take it out on you. It's time for women to be accountable for their own poor decisions, no one else, and no backhandedness too. Sure maybe Robert Heinlein and others went too far on the male side of sexual fantasies, but is Pat Murphy's feminism the solution, to swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. I hope the next `fad' in Nebula Awards after Feminism (if that one ever ends considering the myriad of feminist novels that have been awarded the Nebula) would be centralist, with a dampening ideal, without anyone endlessly and endlessly shoving their ideas down someone's unneeded throat. This level of Feminism makes you feel like if your a male, that you're like the proverbial slavemaster, with women in the muck straining in their harness moving some heavy object in unison, while the slavemaster (you, male) cracking the whip and barking out such unreasonable utterances to women such as: "What!, you bought another pair of shoes/clothing/houseplant, you already have 50 of them", or "no, I don't want to paint the bedroom chartreuse", or the horror of horrors to women, "No, I CAN'T read your mind" (duh). And then at night you lock them up in a cage half submerged in muck as they lick the mud of your boots. The first I noticed of Feminism in the awards I think was Bloodchild for the 1984 novelette by Octavia Butler that was an allegory if men got pregnant. And so in the story, humankind has been utterly and hopelessly subjugated by an alien race. This alien race gives birth to their newborn by placing an egg inside a human until it germinates, then surgically removes it. And the aliens overwhelmingly prefer to impregnate males. So the story has I suppose the female equivalents to such a hopeless and unavoidable fate, the airhead that takes as much of the pseudo-narcotic to ease the pain as possible since he's deserved it, the one who tries to fight it but cannot. Oh my lord! Is this what women think of men, that they're subjugated to having a rod shoved into their abdomen, genetic material released, and then they're surgically ripped open later to remove the birth! You wish you could ease their troubled souls, but alas we all have our hands full with our own dealings with life. I have considered the idea that OK, maybe we males one day should hand over control of Society to women to see if they can have a better go at it, but I wouldn't want to hand over the keys to them if this is their bleak and dismal envision of the world.

I in fact would recommend reading Bloodchild and Pat Murphy's 1987 Nebula winning short fiction novelette "Rachel in Love", the latter found in Nebula Awards 23. They both have science fiction elements and the feminism is different and one gets to read what the fuss is about. They're shorter works too, so the sacrifice in personal time isn't as great. However, where these stories have science fiction elements, this book, The Falling Woman has NONE. It is what would now be called Speculative Fiction. You know what speculative fiction is?, it's fiction. Vanity Fair, The Tale of Two Cities would be considered speculative fiction. Why? because the author created characters that didn't exist and speculates what would happen if they did. Period. Though they may not give the Nebula to Dickens: This is the best of times, this is the worst of times, what, two simultaneous co-existing alternate universes?; it smacks too much of science fiction and that's the one thing the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) would NOT give an award to. What you think, I sound too hard edged serious, then waste your precious time reading this crap and the novels of the ensuing 3 years the Nebula was given to. And it just doesn't end. In 1996 they decided to give it to a lesbian book, as if the four straight years of awards to feminism (1987-1990) wasn't enough, and then to a romance novel by Catherine Asaro. It just goes on and on. It isn't "new"; it isn't a "novel" idea. We all have jobs, schoolwork, responsibilities up to our eyeballs, and we (used to) trust the SFWA to guide us in the one novel (or two including the Hugo winner) we can fit in to read a year. And they fail miserably. They wouldn't just get an F, it would be a Z-. The Nebula Awards post-1987 are no longer to be trusted in worthwhile science fiction. I pray on my knees to the heavens above for the existence of the Hugo Awards, at least there is now one entity that can guide those that wish to read science fiction. Since Ursula K. LeGuin, one of the greatest science fiction writers of any gender, turned to Feminist writing, no female SF writer can now be trusted. This may leave out some worthy books to read, but the rewards of what's not read far, far exceeds what could be read. I know, you're thinking this could sound like censorship. No, it's not. Anyone can write whatever novel they want. You just don't have to read it. No, it doesn't mean your excluding anything from yourself. Read a few Nebula novelettes, or read, Jane Austin, Wind and Wuthering, if you want to read something from a female author, at least it's literature. If you're reading this, and you want to read science fiction, reading a novel by a female author post-1987 has such a paltry percentage of probability of satisfying that. And it's not just denying yourself bleak, film-noir-ish sci-fi scenarios. I reread William Tenn's great Of Men and Monsters that had possibly one of the bleakest scenarios for humankind, and in the end it's turned into a hopeful surprising and brilliant victory.

You don't have to read this book.

I know, you have your little checklist of Nebula Award winners and you're reading the novels and checking them off one by one and now you've come to 1987 and Falling Woman. The problem is that you're considering the Nebula Award winners to be science fiction and nothing can be further from the truth. If the award winners happen to be science fiction then that just happens to be pure coincidence. And this novel is not science fiction, nor fantasy that would be of any interest to science fiction readers. The 80's saw some changes to science fiction, particularly William Gibson's Neuromancer and the start of cyberpunk. It seems in the confusion of this, maybe feminists saw the advantage and decided to propel their agenda.

It's not completely hopeless for those wishing to read science fiction, but now it takes some work. So unlike women, but like the hopeful plot Of Men and Monsters against overwhelming odds, I'm going to try to optimistically offer some suggestions on what can be done about the Feminism gone rampant within the Nebula awards voting process. Considering the SFWA is comprised half, more or less, of women, they will collude on novels written by female authors making the Nebula Award a political commentary rather than an award to the best science fiction novel of the year. And The Falling Woman reeks of the stench of politics. But there are the Nebula novel nominees. For the year of this novel, 1987, there are six total nominees (and this is another thing, it's supposed to be FIVE nominees, but year after the year the SFWA can't even get this right, every year they have six or even seven nominees; the Nebula jury being allowed to add a novel of their choice, which means some random novel decided by a handful of, or who knows maybe one, person get to add his OR HER personal favorite novel and they won't reveal which one it is, so who knows maybe The Falling Woman was this undeserved addition), the other five novel nominees are written by men. It's a fair possibility that one of these novels deserved be called the Best Science Fiction Novel of 1987, that the women colluded on the one female written novel, and the men were split between the other five choices. A telling of the true science fiction winner would be to see who came in second. My sources do not list that, but a copy of "A History of the Hugo, Nebula and International Fantasy Awards" by Franson and DeVore for this year may have that information. And so if you're wanting to get your science fiction fix for this year and realize that the Nebula winners fails dismally at this, then here are those choices with what I know about them:

- The Uplift War by David Brin, this won the 1988 Hugo novel award so you probably already read it. If not, it's worth reading, quick summary: it's about species being intellectually advanced and humans select chimps to mentally advance as a species. And there's an alien species war going on. This is clearly, thankfully, science fiction.

- The Forge of God by Greg Bear. I haven't read this yet, but I have it on order. Apparently it has a buzz after all these years and has been through several reprints, usually a sign of a good novel, at least a popular one. It's about two alien races, one trying to completely, utterly destroy the earth, and the other trying to save humanity or some shred of it. So far this sounds like science fiction.

- When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger. I also have this on order. It apparently is a cyberpunk sub-genre novel. Set in a Muslim country with the usual dismal but technologically advanced settings and a somewhat amoral protagonist.

- Solder of the Mist by George Wolfe. I don't know much about this. An Amazon search should show up more. Gene Wolfe won awards for his Autarch/Conciliator series.

- Vergil in Averno by Avram Davidson. I also don't know much about this one, but knowledge is just an Amazon search away. He writes a lot about some character calls Esterhazy.

Oh yeah, the plot of The Falling Woman was about some ghost/being/entity/something that haunts/visits the female lead character with the Something being the reason the novel was selected to be awarded the once shining, awe-inspiring, but now mud-raked and fetid Nebula award.

This is a fantastic book, but falls into the "Speculative Fiction" category as upposed to traditional F&SF, which for me made it all the more endearing. It is a wonderful character and relationship study of mother and daughter. The charaterization is so authentic that these two women really come to life. Even down to the manorisms of the mother's smoking habit. The way she pauses to light each cigarette.
The mother is a famous archeologist who had little time for her daughters upbringing. Reluctantly her, now adult, daughter joins her on a dig of the Mayan ruins. Ghosts of the past, both the Mayans, and the mother and daughter, mix to bring the two women closer together.
One of the most unique aspects of this book is that the two women take turns telling the story, so that each chapter swithes back and forth between opposite view points.

Elizabeth Butler is a successful archaeologist and a riveting lecturer and author. Her secret - she can see ghosts of those native peoples that lived in her digs in the distant past. Is she crazy? She questions her own sanity at times, trying to take her own life and abandoning her family (including her young daughter) because she is not sane by corporate America's standards. She is much more at home in the dirt and bugs of the Yucatan peninsula, but her most recent dig is different - one of the ghosts starts speaking to her. The ghost is a priestess of the Mayan moon goddess and as such has blood on her hands - she has led human sacrifice rites and has herself performed the coup de grace in her ceremonies. It is clear that this ghost wants a sacrifice of Elizabeth, but of what type?

Enter Elizabeth's daughter Diane, fresh off a messy break-up and the death of her father, her sole care-giver growing up. Diane arrives at the dig fearing that she is going crazy - she too has the family gift for seeing the shadows, but it's not well developed. Will Diane be the sacrifice required of the ancient priestess? Will Diane go crazy before she accepts her gift? These are the questions that the novel asks, and we are carried along as the dig progresses, simultaneously with the power of the priestess over Elizabeth.

This novel won the Nebula award, granted by science fiction writers, as the best book of the year. The book is clearly not science fiction, but then, neither was Zahn's "This Immortal," a book I thoroughly enjoyed. No, the problem with this book is that it has such a promising setup, but then bogs down in melodrama. Since it's written in the first person (alternately Elizabeth and Diane), the entire novel rests on the sincerity and believability of the main 2 characters. Unfortunately, I never really believed in the characters (especially Elizabeth), so they never earned their right to act in bizarre and self-distructive ways. Similarly, the book treats luck as if it is a tangible, physical force like gravity, but the author uses it a cause for otherwise implausible events.

Finally, there were some scientific and/or philosophical incongruities. For example, for someone who so thoroughly understands the Mayan calendar, it's irritating that she apparently doesn't understand that its origin comes from the fact that the Earth's period of revolution about the sun is not exactly 365 days (it's slightly longer). Likewise, she unwisely groups Mayan and Christian religions together as both being based on human sacrifice when there seems to me to be a fundamental difference. One (divine) sacrifice as a symbol is different that the Mayan idea of lives as divine finance (the more sacrifices, the more power the god will gain). Likewise, consider Abraham's experience when God told him NOT to sacrifice his son. This point wouldn't be so irritating if it was developed, but it's not, like some other philosophical teasers the author introduces and then neglects.

Basically, my enjoyment of the book decreased the more of it I read. I grew more and more impatient with the characters and the plotline. A promising idea eventually degenerated into melodrama, when such a good idea deserves better.

"The Falling Woman" by Pat Murphy, © 1986

Definitely an interesting book It is not everyday you get into the mind of a crazy person. Elizabeth Butler is eccentric, to say the least, maybe, truly, crazy. The great part of this story is the weaving of her daughter, Diane, and her story. They have stories that revolve around each other (we know this from seeing both sides), they find each other to be oddly interested in the other, but, in some ways, they find each other difficult.
They have been estranged for most of the daughter's life because of the eccentric antics of the mother were objected to by the father, naturally. Then, after the daughter grew up, she did not try to find or get to know her mother, until now. She broke up with her (married) boyfriend. She quit her job (where the former boyfriend worked as well), flew of to find her Mom. She had some idea of where she was, the Mexican peninsula, Yucatan.
Elizabeth is an archaeologist studying the ancient Mayan culture. She is on site when her daughter shows up. She and her partner, Anthony Baker, are in the middle of the Yucatan excavating an old Mayan city. The story develops the relationship of people to the world and each other. Where is the greater good: the people and culture, or just future generations?
The best part of this story is the understanding of what makes a person 'crazy.' Like in "Les Miserables" where the cop chasing Jean commits suicide, this author takes you into the mind of a person and makes it seem to be the only real thing there is with no apology. It makes you feel like maybe there is something we are missing in our ordinary, real world.

Elizabeth is a troubled woman archeologist. She left behind her husband and daughter to pursue a dream. She also sees the shades of the past. Are they just visions of what once was, or are they ghosts? This haunts her through her life and she wonders about her own sanity.
Her daughter Diane comes to the latest archeological dig in search of her mother. Why did her mother really leave her? What haunts her, troubles her? Diane seeks to understand her mother while just barely able to bury her own resentment for the abandonment she experienced.
This story, however, isn't just about family dynamics, or lack thereof. This is a story of the present which abruptly becomes entwined with the past. One of Elizabeth's visions see her and talks to her. Elizabeth and Diane become embroiled in a dangerous game where they may not survive. Can love triumph over the danger they face? You'll have to read this WONDERFUL book to find out. This was a truly satisfying read that kept me up past my bedtime and wishing for more. Read this book!

Given all the hubbub surrounding this book, I found it quite disappointing. I admit that space opera is my favorite sub-genre, but I also enjoy the occasional "little" book, and really looked forward to reading this one.

This book had a profound view of how I look at the world around me. Pat Murphy made me conscious of the layers of history - for places and for people. In some ways, it has the same feel to it as Zenna Henderson's "The People: No Different Flesh". When you read it, you know you are reading something original and unique and rare.

I read this book probably thirty plus years ago, but felt it deserved at least one more five star review. From my feeble memory, a woman archaeologist is on a dig in South American. She is intelligent, independent, and has the gift/curse of seeing the shadows of the past. As she drinks her morning coffee, she may see an Aztec woman walking by carrying a basket or an old man crouching by a pile of shells. There are mysteries in the book that are tied to past events, both recent and long ago. This is an incredibly well written book with unforgettable characters and gives you the sense of being in the story. The author writes beautiful prose. It is a joy to read.

Archaeologist Elizabeth Butler has a secret: she can see the shades of people from the past, going about their daily activities. This talent has led to plenty of "lucky hunches" in her career but also to questions about her sanity. Normally she just sees the past scenes playing out in front of her but cannot affect them in any way. But while excavating the Maya city of Dzibilchaltún, she encounters a shade who can speak to her: Zuhuy-kak, a priestess of the Maya moon goddess. The Maya believed that time is cyclic, and Zuhuy-kak sees in Liz a chance to bring certain events in her own life full circle.

At the same time, Liz's daughter Diane has come to Dzibilchaltún to see her mother, from whom she has been estranged for many years. The two women try warily to build a relationship even as strange occurrences mount up and Liz begins to fear for Diane's safety. "You will find here only what you bring," Liz tells us at the beginning of _The Falling Woman_, and Liz and Diane have brought a complex tangle of love, hatred, fear, and guilt.

Both women keep their emotional distance from the reader, though, for most of the book. This is consistent with the characters' personalities and histories, and this reserve is skillfully evoked in Pat Murphy's prose. Sentences are often clipped, and until late in the novel there's little internal monologue about emotions. Instead the narration focuses on gestures, dialogue, and the external sights that the women see -- at least until emotion breaks through the metaphorical dam at the intense climax.

_The Falling Woman_ is an insightful novel about mother/daughter relationships and about culturally relative definitions of sanity. Another issue, that of conquest or colonialism, is not explicitly discussed yet is ever-present. The conquest of the Maya by the Toltecs loomed large in Zuhuy-kak's life, and in the present day, it's hard to miss that the Maya still live in the area and that Maya laborers are doing most of the unsung physical work at Dzibilchaltún.

The ending is satisfactory, if slightly open-ended, and through my own lenses I can't help but see it as perfectly fitting. The ending Murphy wrote, to me, is the resolution of the mistake Zuhuy-kak really made as opposed to the mistake she thinks she made.

As I write this, it's 2011 and there's a great deal of buzz about the Maya, due to the persistent legend that the Maya calendar predicts the end of the world in 2012. In fact, when I walked into my workplace cafeteria to read some of _The Falling Woman_ during lunch, a television was playing a History Channel special about the Maya. (I couldn't hear a word of it, but it provided some stunning visuals to go with my reading!) In the spirit of everything coming around again, perhaps now is a good time to rediscover this thought-provoking book.