7) ‘The Science of Herself’ by Karen Joy Fowler
Mary Anning made it into Jules Verne’s books in the guise of her monsters, but never into Austen’s. She wouldn’t have made sense there with her bits of gothic history, her lightning, her science, her creatures. She wouldn’t make sense in any story until the story changed.
Pioneer palaeontologist Mary Anning, novelist Jane Austen, and the protagonist of Austen’s novel Persuasion, Anne Elliot, all exist in the town of Lyme Regis in the same space and time. Karen Joy Fowler has put them there, and as the three figures circle each other – two real, the third the imaginative creation of the second – we are bound with each word by the feeling that they could have met, this could really have happened, even though it couldn’t have done.
‘The Science of Herself’ is not science fiction as such – but it is a piece of speculative fiction of the most superior quality. The elegance of Fowler’s conceit, the flawless overlapping of fact with fiction, the vital sense of place – these aspects of the story among others make this work both captivating as story, informative as history and supremely admirable as a work of art. The writing is – well, just magnificent, really. The kind of writing that makes you want to give up and pushes you forward simultaneously. Fowler just rocks.