Herland

February 11, 2016 2:34 AM

"In 1915 women could neither vote, divorce nor work after marriage, yet in that same year the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman envisaged a revolutionary world populated entirely by women who were intelligent, resourceful and brave." -- For Radio 4 science fiction writer & critic Geoff Ryman looks at the utopian feminist tradition in science fiction, with contributions by Stephanie Saulter, Laurie Penny, Dr Sari Edelstein, Sarah Le Fanu, Dr Caitríona Ní Dhúill and Sarah Hall. Related: ten women who changed sci-fi.
posted by MartinWisse (20 comments total)

In terms of women who changed science fiction (and isn't Pat Cadigan totes adorbs in her coat and docs! I mean, her fiction is many things well beyond totes adorbs but I love her outfit):

1. I know that because English language SF was pretty white up through the nineties it can seem difficult to assemble a list that's not all white people except Octavia Butler. I also know it's inside baseball to add anthologists and editors, but they are so important in pushing careers and formulating ideas about the field. Thus:

Sheree Thomas changed science fiction forever. Her Dark Matter anthologies were truly pathbreaking - I remember seeing the first one and buying it basically after reading 1/3 of the blurb. SF's understanding of itself has been forever changed by anthologies that highlight the work of people of color and the history of POC in the field, and the ones she did were astonishing.

Judith Merril (who is white) was an enormously important editor and anthologizer throughout her long career. She wasn't as explicitly feminist as some people, but she sure did help women's work get noticed and her memoir is important.

I would also include some presses, like Aqueduct (current) and the Women's Press SF imprint. Both were huge. Aqueduct in particular has published important stuff like Vandana Singh's short stories.

If we're including Ann Leckie we can include recent writers who have had major impact...I think we should include Nnedi Okorafor and Nalo Hopkinson (running for bus, can't link) - both have been publishing for much longer than Leckie (Leckie is awesome, I love the Ancillary books, there could have been, like, twenty of them for all of me).

Also, I think there's a lot of important SF criticism by women, but I have to get the bus...
posted by Frowner at 4:57 AM on February 11, 2016 [13 favorites]

I do believe I would have added C. J. Cherryh to the list—her Chanur cycle did an alien PoV really well. Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice deserves all the praise that has been heaped upon it (I finished it just yesterday evening).

That said, growing up in Denmark in the seventies, I read voraciously all the public library SF, I could get my grubby paws on, including quite a bit of then-contemporary feminist SF (none that I recognise from this list), which has, quite deservedly, been lost to the dustbin of history. The “all the mens are dead, now everything is wonderful”-trope got old fast, and Sturgeon's Law applies here as everywhere else.
posted by bouvin at 5:55 AM on February 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness is probably about 80% responsible for the way I think of my own gender. Wish I could get the chance to shake that lady's hand.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 6:00 AM on February 11, 2016

The other thing is that the BBC list misses out on the criticism written by Le Guin and Russ and on Tiptree's letters*. The BBC list says that Russ had a small output (and I don't think that her fiction output was, in fact, particularly small - what do we expect from our writers that five novels, a novella, four short story collections and a kids' book is not enough?) but it totally leaves out her six books of critical essays and her huge body of reviews and other critical writing, now available collected in The Country You Have Never Seen (which is just excellent and a really fun read - it's ideal for airport reading since her prose is so engaging but the pieces are shorter.) Not to mention her fanfic, which is mouldering in an archive somewhere, too embarrassing for the public. (Even though, dude, anything that had Joanna Russ and fanfic would be guaranteed sales forever.)

The “all the mens are dead, now everything is wonderful”-trope got old fast

I actually collect (inasmuch as I can get my hands on it) minor and small press second wave feminist SF, whether good, bad or indifferent. There's certainly a lot of bad and indifferent! (Russ herself wrote a couple of rather scathing reviews of the bad/indifferent.) I kind of get a kick out of it, though, because it's interesting to read as a window onto a time and a milieu, and every once in a while you'll happen on a lost gem of a short story.

If I were to write a dissertation, I think I would want to try to write something about a feminist separatist aesthetic. There's a lot of eighties feminist SF, in particular (and I can't think of the damn title of the story that's online that would perfectly illustrate this) where I just do not get it at all, and yet everyone says it's great and it's hugely canonnical - stories that to be are incredibly weird and flat and sort of boringly lesbian separatist. But at the same time, those stories intrigue me - there's something going on there that is just outside my ability to see it, and if I had the time and discipline I'd like to figure out what that is.

On another note, just on Monday Strange Horizons reviewed The Feminist Utopia Project, which looks (like a lot of recent purpose-built anthologies of mixed material) to be kind of uneven but interesting. I've read a bunch of the recent ones, and I think it's really important to have patience with them - some of the stories are not always that great, but taken as a gestalt, the books are really pushing SF in different directions. After these books, it gets harder to claim legitimacy for bog-standard male-dominated, white-dominated, overwhelmingly straight, overwhelmingly cis, overwhelmingly able-bodied, etc etc science fiction worlds.

*Also, as usual, we leave out that James Tiptree murdered her husband and committed suicide, and as far as I can tell it was an ableist murder justified by reference to his perfectly survivable health conditions but prompted by her depression. I feel horribly sorry for her and hate to bring it up, but I also feel that as feminists we must not flinch from stuff like this. Hugo Schwyzer is a pariah (at least in a lot of circles) for attempting a murder/suicide as a young man while a heroin addict, and it bothers me that feminists generally don't want to examine the situation when one of our own does something dubious. We always tell her story very sympathetically - she really loved him, she was depressed, he was ill - but we'd never let that stand if it was, say, Heinlein who'd murdered his wife and killed himself.
posted by Frowner at 6:15 AM on February 11, 2016 [12 favorites]

Herland was the first piece of feminist lit I read. It was life changing for me. Thank you Frowner for adding to the list.

Hugo Schwyzer is a pariah (at least in a lot of circles) for attempting a murder/suicide as a young man while a heroin addict
HS is a pariah for many, many more reasons than that.
posted by Sophie1 at 6:25 AM on February 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

This is as good a place as any to mention that February is Women in Horror Month.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:26 AM on February 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I'm not trying to stan for Schwyzer, who is terrible and should not be rehabilitiated; I'm sorry it came off that way. It just worries me that Tiptree (whose work I like and own! Whose biography I have! Whose stories I teach!) did something that is so similar to what he did but it gets swept under the rug because we like her work. I'm not saying that Tiptree should be, like, banned, or that her last action invalidates her work - just that it's something that I think we should acknowledge and wrestle with, not politely ignore.
posted by Frowner at 6:29 AM on February 11, 2016 [8 favorites]

One woman SF author I rarely see mentioned is Phyllis Gotlieb, but I find something incredibly compelling about her work and I actually think it's the same sort of human insight and faint tinge of body horror that I enjoy in Tiptree and in a male author like Cordwainer Smith. Her stuff languishes on used-bookstore shelves but I snap it up whenever I can.
posted by selfnoise at 6:49 AM on February 11, 2016

There is so much good stuff out there that I need to read.
posted by emjaybee at 6:52 AM on February 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Joanna Russ's work is amazing. I've raved about the wonderful/experimental/influential feminist mindfuck The Female Man multiple times here before, so will leave it at that.
posted by mediareport at 7:05 AM on February 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

As someone who isn't into sci-if, this was an extremely informative link. Thank you for my education.
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 7:18 AM on February 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness is probably about 80% responsible for the way I think of my own gender.

Be sure to read her excellent essay, "Is Gender Necessary? (Redux)" in the 1989 collection Dancing at the Edge of the World, in which she revisits her initial, somewhat defensive, response to sharp feminist criticism of Left Hand in the early 1970s, acknowledging in hindsight that many of the criticisms were on point. It's a beautiful, intelligent and humble essay that will change the way you think about that classic book.
posted by mediareport at 7:19 AM on February 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

My list would also include C. S. Friedman, Sharon Shinn, Valarie Friedrich, and Susan R. Matthews. They perhaps didn't change SF, but they are all damn good. Only Friedrich is no longer writing.

Whenever I see a list with Octavia E. Butler on it I am saddened anew by her passing.
posted by cjorgensen at 7:30 AM on February 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

A really cool project in LA was just announced celebrating Octavia Butler -- Radio Imagination:

Radio Imagination celebrates the life and work of Pasadena science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006). Organized by Clockshop, the program centers on ten contemporary art and literary commissions that explore Butler’s archive at the Huntington Library. New work will premiere alongside performances, film screenings, and literary events throughout the year.

Recognition of Butler’s influence across artistic disciplines and her contribution to the Los Angeles cultural landscape is long overdue. Radio Imagination will bridge Butler’s groundbreaking fiction with contemporary conversations about the future of Los Angeles. The series will span 2016, the tenth anniversary of the writer’s death.

Radio Imagination artists and writers will conduct first-hand research in Butler’s archive at the Huntington Library and create new work based on their research. New poetry and creative nonfiction by Tisa Bryant, Lynell George, Robin Coste Lewis, and Fred Moten will premiere at a public reading event. New contemporary artworks by Laylah Ali, Courtesy the Artists (Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade), Mendi + Keith Obadike, Connie Samaras, and Cauleen Smith will be presented at an exhibition at Armory Center for the Arts (October 1, 2016–January 7, 2017).

posted by Celsius1414 at 9:48 AM on February 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

I would really have liked to see Kate Wilhelm on the list. She's been doing mostly mysteries for the last few decades, but many of her SF novels (Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, for instance) were groundbreaking. That, coupled with her decades of extraordinary teaching and mentorship, really ought to have earned her a place here.

I would also have loved for C. L. Moore and Karen Joy Fowler to get mentions.
posted by palmcorder_yajna at 2:37 PM on February 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

Does anyone have a BBC iPlayer PID (program ID) number for the raw media file? (I want to grab a copy for offline listening but am relying on the command-line get_iplayer tool and a VPN because I'm out of the UK and probably not back until it expires from iPayer ...)
posted by cstross at 3:41 PM on February 11, 2016

The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk is an epic feminist SF saga worth reading. Starhawk is not really a fixture in the current SF universe, so I wouldn't expect her on a SF list, but that one book is impressive.
posted by ovvl at 6:14 PM on February 11, 2016

I worked a long long day so I could start to clear the decks ahead of a three day weekend and every cell of my being was longing to crash ...

But I couldn't resist dropping by when I saw a post referencing Charlotte Perkins Gilman who I love. And now this SF noob* has a massive list of writers to check out and books to put on hold at the library (and maybe to buy if I realize I can't live without them), thanks to the insights of everyone here. This is why I love this place.

* Except for Margaret Atwood ... And I also and always recommend Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, though I'll leave it up to you to decide what category it falls into. It's a novel based on the selkie myth, and it's sad and dark and hilarious and somehow delightful, all at the same time.
posted by virago at 8:19 PM on February 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'd agree with most of the comments, so many great female sci-fi writers, and there's one or two on the top ten list that I respect but don't necessarily agree with and I'd substitute my own choices. However, Madeleine L'Engle was hugely influential and the anti-fascist/authoritarian themes in "A Wrinkle in Time" have greatly influenced me. For instance:

"...Chucky drones on about the glories of the planet of Camazotz, and how it's a perfect place because everyone is exactly the same, without the troubles caused by free will. They pass a room where they see the off-beat boy from earlier, screaming in pain as he gets shock therapy to make him bounce his ball in time with the rhythm."
posted by mdrosen at 3:24 AM on February 14, 2016 [1 favorite]

I loved the Wrinkle In Time series and I always wondered why L'Engle isn't usually included in lists of women sci-fi writers.
posted by LizBoBiz at 1:36 PM on February 16, 2016