Salon.com > Elizabeth Hand

Femininjas: Women in fiction fight back

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:30:00 +0000

In Stieg Larsson’s best-selling Millennium series—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.—a disaffected teenaged rape survivor, Lisbeth Salander, kicks ass and takes names. Readers and critics hailed Larsson’s creation as groundbreaking. To pick just one representative case, Michiko Kakutani, in her review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, calls Salander “one of the most original characters in a thriller to come along in a while: . . . the vulnerable victim turned vigilante; a willfully antisocial girl.” One would think the critics had never seen a woman in pants before, let alone one who can hold her own against the patriarchy.

Remembering Thomas M. Disch

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:49:00 +0000

Few people make a successful career of contemplating death and suicide; fewer still approach the subject with the genuine ebullience and elegant despair of the prolific, criminally underappreciated writer Thomas M. Disch, who shot himself in his Union Square apartment, in New York, on the Fourth of July. Disch was a seminal figure in science fiction's New Wave, the iconoclastic 1960s movement that gave the genre a literary pedigree and popularized the term "speculative fiction." His books influenced writers such as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem; his dystopias "Camp Concentration" and "334" are considered science fiction classics, along with his greatest novel, "On Wings of Song," a beautiful, dark meditation on the power and limits of transcendence through art.

In meth we trust

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:08:00 +0000

Heroin, developed in 1898 by a chemist at the Bayer Laboratory in Germany, derived its name from the German "heroisch" (heroic), and despite everything we know about the horrors of heroin addiction, smack still manages to be marketed as sexy in advertising and art. Whereas "meth" rhymes with "death" and sounds like "mess": an ugly word for an ugly drug that seems unlikely to benefit from an image update anytime soon.

Even its myth of origin is tainted, deriving from a probably apocryphal story of the drug's development by Hitler's chemists to fuel a robotic, remorseless army of Nazi storm troopers. So says Frank Owen in "No Speed Limit: The Highs and Lows of Meth," his gripping sociocultural history of a substance that has demonstrated a malevolent, near-viral ability to adapt to shifts in taste, popularity, population, production and distribution.

The synthetic methamphetamine has a horticultural analog in ephedra vulgaris, used for millennia by the Chinese as an herbal remedy for asthma and other breathing ailments. In 1887, a Japanese scientist identified ephedra's active ingredient, ephedrine, a chemical similar to adrenaline. The same year, the German L. Edeleano used ephedrine as the base to create phenylisopropylamine, now known as amphetamine.