The Falling Woman
by Pat Murphy
Summary
Elizabeth Butler is an archaeologist in her fifties with a reputation for unorthodox conclusions, a history of psychiatric hospitalisation after a suicide attempt, and a private ability she has never once mentioned professionally: at dawn and dusk she can see the shadows of the people who used to live at the site she is digging. They go about their business. They do not see her.
She is eight weeks into a season at Dzibilchaltun in the Yucatan, needing a significant find to keep the funding, when two things happen. A Maya priestess among the shadows looks up and speaks to her, which none of them has ever done. And her daughter Diane arrives unannounced, having just buried the father Elizabeth walked out on twenty years earlier.
The priestess offers Elizabeth exactly what she needs: where to dig, what she will find, what it means. The price is a sacrifice, and the priestess is clear about which one.
Murphy alternates between Elizabeth's chapters and Diane's, so the reader gets the archaeologist who abandoned her child and the child, and neither account is dishonest.
Around three hundred pages, atmospheric and slow, with the dig routine, the heat, the students, the trench notes and the site itself rendered precisely enough to feel like fieldwork rather than adventure.
The novel never settles whether Elizabeth is seeing the past or is unwell, and it declines to settle it right through the ending, which is either the point or the frustration depending on the reader.
Best for readers who want quiet archaeological fantasy in which the supernatural is never proved, and a mother and daughter written without either being made the villain of the other's story.
Historical Context & Significance
The Falling Woman won the 1987 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and Pat Murphy took a second Nebula the same year for the novelette Rachel in Love, a rare double.
She worked for years at the Exploratorium, the San Francisco science museum, writing about science for the public, and the archaeological method in the novel is presented as method rather than as adventure.
In 1991 she co founded the James Tiptree Jr Award, now the Otherwise Award, announcing it in a speech at WisCon in 1991, to honour fiction that expands or explores understandings of gender. That award has since gone to one book elsewhere on this list, Joe Haldeman's Camouflage, and is probably her largest single effect on the field.