A Taste for Fantasy

For the past five years I've been a closet reader of fiction of a particular sort. I've been unwilling before now to confess my secret taste in what some have referred to variously as speculative or fantasy fiction. My gush in the past over a few favorite books in this genre has only met with stares.

If it's not fiction by Terri MacMillan or E. Lynn Harris, most of my friends can't relate.

What is speculative or fantasy fiction? The genre can cover a wide range of books from science fiction to horror, from fantasy novels to historical fiction. Speculative fiction takes the reader (and writer) into a world of magic, mystery, fantasy, science - where it's believed that things happen for a purpose. I prefer speculative historical fiction that looks back to the past for explanations as opposed to science fiction which typically looks to the future for solutions.

What I love most about my favorite speculative and fantasy fiction writers is that they invite you into a world where sex and gender roles are called into question, a world where it's possible for women to possess magical power (at least in feminist speculative fiction), a world where evil is a power to be battled against, and a world where mystery is a force that warrants respect. If you enjoy the stories of the bible, there's no reason why you wouldn't enjoy speculative fiction too. It wasn't until I got into reading these books that I realized how much of a hypocrite and snob I've been in the past about such literature. I wouldn't be caught dead reading fiction that dealt with magic and vampires, even though I'd grown up watching sitcoms like "Bewitched" and "The Flying Nun" and have sat glued to the big screen watching "Carrie," "Beloved," "Star Trek," and the rest. What's up with that? I finally decided that good books are those that take you into worlds you otherwise would never think to travel to and open up for you new ways of seeing your own world, new ways of thinking about life and the meaning of life, and new ways of seeing and understanding people you'd already categorized and tucked away as unimportant.

Here are some of my favorite books:.

It took Marion Zimmer Bradley's retelling of the legend of King Arthur from the perspective of the women in The Mists of Avalon that first baited and hooked me. I loved reading Zimmer Bradley's reinterpretation of the women behind Arthur's legendary throne. I learned a lot from her description of the clash between old world goddess worship and patriarchal Christian religion, and her recreation of a time in history when women were thought to have magical powers.

What can I say? There's no explaining one's taste in reading. Especially one's taste in fiction. Not really. It's personal.

After Mists came Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, a fictionalized retelling of the Leah, Rachel, and Jacob love triangle, told from the perspective of Leah and Jacob's daughter, Dinah. Diamant restored dignity to Leah, love to Rachel and Leah's relations as sisters, and even a semblance of humanity to their shared husband Jacob. I will never read (nor preach) Genesis 29 the same again. Best of all, I closed The Red Tent with a richer understanding of the life women share in polygamous societies and its potential advantages to women who live in primitive cultures.

Of course, you can't talk about the light The Red Tent sheds on women in the book of Genesis without also mentioning the refreshing touch Living Water brings to the women who people the New Testament gospels, chiefly the woman at the well. It's refreshing in Living Water to see how the women who interacted with Jesus come to life and purpose in the hands of Obery Hendricks a New Testament scholar who happens also to be an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Finally, there's my newest all time favorite author, Tananarive Due. Hers is not a genre of writing we typically associate with African American women writers. Due specializes in what some call dark or horror fiction (yet another subcategory of speculative fiction). I want to thank my friends at SisterSpace in Washington, DC for turning me on to Due. When my friend Cassandra thrust Due's first novel, My Soul to Keep, in my hand last December, little did I know that I could get wrapped up in reading about black women wrestling with vampires, My Soul to Keep; about a mysterious life giving blood that dates back to Christ, The Living Blood, that heals contemporary AIDS patients; and about haunted houses in the northwest, The Good House.

So you see: women of faith can read, learn from, and draw inspiration from a wide range of books. I can't help think of the first woman in the bible who's mentioned as a reader, the prophet Huldah in 2 Kings 22. Because of Huldah's reputation as a scholar, a thinker, and a reader with broad knowledge about God, books, and ancient faith, the chief officials brought a dusty law scroll recently uncovered during Temple repairs before her hoping that she could decipher the origins and meaning of the scroll. And she did. Huldah knew that there was something to be learned about God, life, and faith in every book if you read closely.

Renita J. Weems, Ph.D.