Authorpreneur Dashboard – J K Spenser
Females of Vulvar
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Tobias Hart, an archaeologist, is abducted by aliens from a Native American historical site in New Mexico. He wakes to find himself on a barbaric alien planet, Vulvar, where females rule and all men are slaves. After Hart is enslaved, the planet's mysterious divine beings choose him for a perilous assignment, offering him freedom and transport back to Earth if he succeeds. While Hart knows his chances of living through the mission are small, he accepts the assignment, desperate to return to his own planet.
Book Bubbles from Females of Vulvar
Cultural Origins of Gynotopian Genres
Did you know the imagining of all-female worlds has recurred again and again in literature throughout the centuries? The first serious attempt at dreaming up a gynotopic society came from protofeminist Christine de Pizan in the Middle Ages (c.1405). The storyline proposed a city constructed entirely by women – one ruled entirely by women, every one of whom was virtuous, chaste and pure. Christine’s city presents and shelters women as goddesses. Like Pygmalion, who was uninterested in real women, she sculpts the perfect female so that men can worship the illusion. In this sense Christine was very much a traditionalist attempting to uphold and entrench all the privileges enjoyed by her gender since chivalric love had been introduced. Thus, Females of Vulvar is a new take on an idea that has literally been around for ages.
Where Vision Stops
This morning, while reading the latest reader review on the newest book in this series, something struck me. Book reviews can be more important than you may think. Authors know book reviews give books greater visibility and a greater chance of getting found by more readers. That can lead to more book sales. That’s always nice, but it isn’t why reader reviews are so important. Reader reviews tend to be personal, focusing on the individual reader’s experience while reading the book. This gives an author invaluable insight into how well or how poorly they did in meeting the reader's expectations. After all, writing is more than an exercise in storytelling. A fiction writer’s goal is not only to entertain. On most days, most of us wake up in the same room, with the same hairstyle, wearing the same clothes. We see the same stuff. Reality always has a place where vision stops—where walls, mountains, trees, or even the curvature of the Earth won’t let us see further. Fiction can release us for a time from our mortal bonds and allow us to see beyond the usual horizons. When I read a reader’s review, I learn how effective I’ve been in helping an individual reader accomplish that. And that is what is most important.
What If Females Ruled?
THE vast majority of cultures in our world are patriarchies, where men are more likely than women to hold positions of social, economic, and political power. It might be tempting to assume that this is the natural state of affairs, perhaps because men are, on average, stronger than women. But, what if there was a world where the culture was instead a matriarchy, where females were more likely to hold positions of social, economic, and political power? Or perhaps, taking it a step further, where women held ALL the power. What if women ruled? What if they imposed such an extreme form of female led culture that all men were slaves and existed only to perform the most menial forms of labor? What would such a society look like, especially if it existed on a primitive, dystopian world only six hundred years removed from a devastating world war that had almost destroyed the planet? Contemplating these premises prompted me to write Females of Vulvar, the inaugural novel in a new dark fantasy science fiction series set on an alien planet called Vulvar. In the series I imagine what life might be like in a world like the one I described above, a world where females rule.
