Charnas is best known, however, for her feminist science fiction tetralogy, which includes Walk to the End of the World, Motherlines, The Furies, and The Conqueror's Child, set in a post-nuclear holocaust future in which women are literally enslaved by men. "Charnas's fiction presents an exaggerated vision of sexism's consequences," observed Marleen S. Barr in Twentieth-Century Science Fiction Writers, concluding that "many readers, men and women, might be taken aback by the controversial content of Charnas's novels." Charnas is also the author of The Vampire Tapestry, which Don D'Ammassa called in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers "one of the most original and highly regarded vampire novels of all time."
Charnas was born in 1939, the eldest of three daughters born to artist parents on Manhattan's West Side. Her mother was a textile designer, while her father enjoyed a career as an animator and children's book illustrator. There was something about her father's career in publishing that lured Charnas into thinking about writing her own books one day, as she recalled in an interview published on the Science Fiction Fantasy World Web site. "I knew this very, very early, and the sign of it that I remember is that I used to swipe the blank booklets called 'dummies' that my illustrator father used to layout pictures for children's books and I'd write in stories and I'd fill them with drawings and text of my own."
Served in Peace Corps
Her father left the family when Charnas was just eight years old, but much later, when Charnas was an adult and living in New Mexico, he came to live with her and her husband for twenty years.
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