This latest recovered writing is a 749-word book review of Marleen S. Barr’s first novel Oy Pioneer! that I wrote back in 2006 when I was a masters student at the University of Liverpool. I tried unsuccessfully to get the review published at the time.
Before writing the review, I had met Marleen at the 2006 Science Fiction Research Association conference in White Plains, New York–the first big conference that I presented at. I was on the same panel with her and the SFRA President Dave Mead. They were both kind to me and offered encouragement, but Marleen really took me under her wing. After I got back to Atlanta, I purchased Marleen’s novel from Amazon on 17 July 2006. I shipped her novel with some other books to Liverpool, which is where I read it and wrote the review below–going through several drafts.
We haven’t published the program yet for the Ninth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium, but it’s safe for me to say that Marleen will be giving the keynote address at this year’s event and we are certainly lucky for it!
Jason W. Ellis
Book Review of Marleen S. Barr’s Oy Pioneer!
29 October 2006
Estranging Slipstream Narrative in Barr’s Oy Pioneer!
Marleen S. Barr’s first novel, Oy Pioneer!1is a fantastical romp (both literally and figuratively) that follows the trials and escapades of professor Sondra Lear, a feminist science fiction (SF) scholar. Sondra employs wit and panache to take on a second German Fulbright, maternal niggling, a husband hunt (related to the niggling), and a backwater state university deserving of air attacks straight out of Star Wars. The text is constructed with verisimilar elements taken from Barr’s own life mixed with a heavy dose of comedy, postmodern remixing, SF, and the fantastic.
Barr creates a work of slipstream fiction in writing Oy Pioneer!, because it is an estranging fictional work that is situated at a crossroads of genres including anonymous memoir, comedy, SF, and fantasy. Additionally, it is the estrangement that Barr generates that makes this novel so compelling and difficult to put down.
The author maintains two types of estrangement throughout the text. The first is the estrangement that Sondra encounters in everyday life. This takes the form of cultural alienation while visiting foreign countries for work and conferences, as well as the preternatural ability of her mother, who Sondra comically calls Herbert,2 to almost literally reach out and touch her when it is least convenient or appropriate. The second form of estrangement arrives from a vector of the fantastic. Sondra’s life is bombarded by science fictional and fantasy elements throughout the narrative, but these images culminate into a climax of cultural icons in the last third of the novel. This includes cavorting with flying vampires, strafing backwater state universities in X-Wing starfighters, and living with a talking horse.
In parallel with Barr’s estrangement are story elements that academics and non-academics, inclusive of both men and women, can identify with. This parallel thread is Sondra’s search for a husband. However, it is this universally acknowledged search for a mate, which Barr once again estranges from the normal through comedic situations and fantastic departures. Despite the disconnect between Sondra’s rendezvous and an average reader’s assumptions about dating in the here-and-now, there is still material with which Barr’s audience can connect to. There are professional entanglements with former partners, juggling a professional career and a personal life, as well as keeping her mother’s interminable harassment at bay.
For the male reader, there is another level of estrangement that obviously comes from the fact that the novel is written by a woman about a woman, who shares many professional and personal characteristics with the author. On the one hand, the novel reveals how one woman, the character Sondra, acts and thinks in the wild and mixed-up world in which she exists. On the other, the book reveals much about a woman, the author, who I have only met once at an academic conference. In a sense, the novel is analogous to an anonymously written blog that seems eerily closer to fact than fiction. However, it is this destabilizing realization that attracts the reader to continue reading the blog, or in this case, the novel.
I realize that my academic trajectory is far different from that of Barr and her novel’s protagonist, Sondra, but as a beginning scholar, I find this novel interesting to read also for the estranging reality of academia. This novel is like a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for academic scholars and in particular, feminist SF scholars. In between the lines, I clearly made out the phrase, “Don’t Panic!”
I recommend Oy Pioneer! to anyone with a sense of humor, as well as humanities academics. Barr’s work of slipstream fiction is laudable for doubly being so. First, it combines the memoir, comedy, SF, and fantasy into a cohesive work that supplies laughs and dizziness brought about by cognitive estrangement. Additionally, it slips through potentially rocky streams of readers’ assumptions that might come about, because a feminist SF scholar wrote the novel about a feminist SF scholar. Therefore, Barr accomplishes a great feat by using slipstream narrative to tell the whimsical story of Sondra Lear that engages an educated readership comprised of both women and men alike, which assuredly will enjoy such an entertaining novel!
1 Barr, Marleen S., Oy Pioneer! (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).
2 Admittedly, I am on a first name basis with my father, Bud, and I called my maternal grandmother by her first name, Wilma. However, my mother insisted that I always call her, “Mom.”
