The first ‘New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Colour’ collection that editor Nisi Shawl published in 2019 gave me nine memorable speculative fiction stories, so I started ‘New Suns 2’, published in March 2023, with high expectations. Even so, I was surprised at how good ‘The Farmer’s Wife and the Faerie Queen’ was. It made me want to stand up and applaud.

It starts off in the traditional way of fairy tales:

“Once, long ago and in a faraway place, there was a farmer who lived what he thought was the perfect life.”

The first hint that the story isn’t going along the traditional Brothers Grimm route comes in the next rest of the paragraph when we hear what the farmer thinks of as ‘perfect’ and how he came to lose it.

“He had a beautiful wife, a strong son, and a dutiful daughter. He had abundant crops, enough food to eat and to sell, and lived in the most bountiful valley in the county. He had everything he wanted and no complaints. Until the day the Queen of the Faeries came to town.”

It turns out the Queen of the Faeries had come to steal away the farmer’s twelve-year-old son but had agreed to take the farmer’s wife instead.

What follows initially appears to be a story about the poor farmer setting out on a quest to get his wife back. Except that the careful reader would notice that when the farmer says to himself:

“I’m gonna save my wife, save my family, and get my perfect life back. Even if I haveta to fight the Faerie Queen to do it.”

His main motivation is on getting back his perfect life. He needs his wife back because he can’t handle the kids, his eight-year-old daughter can’t cook and, inexplicably, his mother refuses to move in and take care of them all.

I loved that the story didn’t follow the usual path not because the farmer was too cowardly to get the job done – although he was – but because the women in the story, the farmer’s wife, the farmer’s mother, the wise woman who lives in the woods and even the Faerie Queen are all women who have an unblinkered view of men and a willingness to collaborate with each other. The three mortal women have learned, through their experience as both wife and mother that some men, although handsome and charismatic are

“…not at all interested in being a husband, a father, a responsible adult, or a person who could restrain himself around the young women.”

Titania, Queen of all Faerie had a weakness for pretty boys. She also had a soft spot for the mortal women that these men abuse. So…

“…Titania made it her duty to relieve the mortal world of a few of its pretty boys every now and then. The ones she could tell were not growing into respectful men who would make their mortal mothers proud and their mortal wives feel loved.”

She knows which pretty boys will grow up to be these kinds of men through

“…little tells in their behavior. The way they treated their mamas, the lack of care they gave to their sisters, the undercurrent of disrespect shown to their aunties. All done with a smile, dimples emphasized, charm ratcheted up higher and higher, knowing they could get away with anything.”

I won’t spoil the story by giving the plot away but I did find myself smiling at the conclusion.

Then I found myself wondering what made this fairy tale different from the usual folklore fare and I realised it was that this fairy tale had real women in it and those women had their eyes open and had a plan for dealing with what they saw.

Thirty years ago, I remember buying a copy of James Garner’s ‘Politically Correct Bedtime Stories’ (for those of you not born then, politically correct was the phrase the right wing used then to express the disdain they now achieve with ‘woke’). The stories were funny and they did their bit to satirise the way bedtime stories embed patriarchal ideas in the minds of the young but they didn’t really provide an alternative.

‘The Farmer’s Wife and the Faerie Queen’ doesn’t debunk the patriarchy, it kicks its arse and laughs while it does it.

Who could resist a Titania who, when asked why she doesn’t just warn women rather than steal the boys, laughs and says,

“Even when I warn them, mortal women rarely listen. They have to learn, just like you did, that some men ain’t shit.”?

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