Woman Alive by Susan Ertz

I have only read one Susan Ertz novel before Woman Alive (1935) and it was a good, fairly traditional novel about generations of a family tangled up in domestic disputes and hopes. Nothing very unexpected, though a good version of that kind of thing. Ertz was pretty prolific, and nothing in that novel would have led me to imagine what I’d find in Woman Alive – which is a sci-fi dystopia.

It starts off in the present day, with a man sent by time machine into the distant future (erm, 1985). I’d say Ertz lingers a little too long on the mechanics of the thing – or, rather, it’s done pretty quickly but with more details than we need, because the time travel is pretty irrelevant and just a way to get us into 1985. (Two things to note: isn’t it interesting that it’s only one year off Orwell’s more-famous Nineteen Eighty-Four? and also, more personally, to the year I was born.)

What is happening in 1985, in the United States of Europe(!)? Well, our narrator can explain:

A new gas has been secretly manufactured by the attackers against which the people attacked had no defence. It was called, from its greenish-grey colour – it was not, like most gases, invisible – celadon gas, and it poisoned as well as burned. The destriction of property had ceased to be one of the objects of war; only the destruction of life was aimed at.

[…]

The bodies of those it killed generated a disease – a sort of by-product of the gas itself – which proved to be highly contagious and invariably fatal, but – and was the fact with which the entire world was now faced – fatal only to women. Within twelve hours of the launching of that brief war, which lasted only eight, women began to drop dead in the streets, in their houses, in the fields, in aeroplanes, everywhere. Some of them succumbed at once; others lingered on for days.

There is no escape from this sudden plague. ‘Women were isolated, sent up in captive balloons, taken to the tops of high mountains, injected with every known serum, but death came to them all.’ Across the whole of the earth, all women and girls perish.

And, of course, this means that the human race will be over – not immediately, not for the life-span of the youngest boys alive at the time of the crisis, but eventually. Much of the world grinds to a halt, and Ertz is interesting on the professions that continue and those that give up:

Only the painters and the scientists, it appeared, were going on with their work as before. The happiest, most absorbing, and pleasantest of all the arts furnished its own rewards. The world might end, but painters went on painting because it was so much pleasanter to paint than not to paint. Scientists, too, were able to forget mankind’s doom in their researches, their almost divine interest and passion for truth providing momentum enough to carry them through even such a monstrous tragedy as this. 

It felt quite telling, in current discussions of AI, that the very creative professions that AI is trying to replace are the ones that Ertz sees as essential no matter waht.

BUT – the title of the novel might have clued you in that all is not as it seems. There is one woman alive after all.

Again, Ertz is keen to give us some back story about how this woman has survived – something to do with an all-purpose innoculation given previously by a doctor, who then sadly died before he could pass it on to anyone else – but, again, it scarcely matters. The important thing is, the narrator and a couple of other men discover the existence of the woman: Stella. She is the sole woman in the world. And what a predicament to be in.

Soon, the world’s nations are feuding for the chance to have a man from their country be the father of the new generations of humankind. Things quickly turned militaristic. Stella finds herself celebrated as a queen – and yet expected to do the whims of powerful men. Her wishes are scarcely considered – until she takes a stand.

I enjoyed the ways in which Ertz thought through the likely responses to something of this nature, not least the proliferation of nay-sayers and conspiracy theorists. Leaflets are distributed denying that Stella truly is a woman, and can’t you imagine this sort of faction existing? We’ve already discovered they exist in almost any crisis. The leaflet reads…

“Men! You are easily fooled. This is not a woman at all, but a boy dressed up. It is a shameful trick on the part of the British Prime Ministre [sic] for the glory of Britain. There are no women. Go back to your homes. It is nothing but a hoax, perfidious and indecent.”

I haven’t even mentioned the boy in Stella’s care, and the other men who feature – there are villains and heroes – because this is really Stella’s book. She is forthright and determined, while also ill-equipped (as who would not be?) to deal with this mantle. Ertz has created a memorable heroine you’ll certainly be cheering on.

Woman Alive is an enjoyable, well-written, often rather clever novel that whirls past. Written during a period where the next world war seemed likely if not impossible, it does also respond well to the rising emnities between countries. My only wish is that Woman Alive had been a little more substantial. It’s a novella and is over almost as soon as it has properly begun – not least because we spend precious time, as discussed, on the mechanics of the sci-fi. It is very rare that I ask for a novel to be longer, but I think Ertz’s ingenious idea deserved more space for exploring it, and more development for the people involved.

But what an unusual find for 1935! And how (almost) totally forgotten it seems to be. I think Woman Alive makes interesting reading alongside dystopian sci-fi classics of the period – and is certainly more atuned to the specific plight of women in these sorts of futures than most books are. It does not have the substance of Nineteen Eighty-Four and other novels that are better-remembered, but it is still very much worth remembering as a moment in the history of early/mid-century dystopian fiction.

Oh, and one final point – throughout are wonderful illustrations by Bip Pares that I think do a brilliant job of combining futurism with a distinctively 1930s Art Deco style, with hints of Fascism in there too. I think Woman Alive is worth hunting out for the illustrations alone – here are a couple of them.