In sci-fi, “there’s no barrier as to what female characters can achieve,” says Marie Octobre, associate professor and librarian at the Gill Library in Brooklyn. “In reading these stories, the next generation will not limit themselves to what society says women should or should not do.”

https://self-e.libraryjournal.com/aliens-among-us-the-gender-gap-in-science-fiction/

In this post, SF author J.K. Ullrich chronicles the gender gap in SF. Much of the post is similar to other articles I have read (and posted on this website), but one thing that struck out to me was the quote above. I think it’s important to acknowledge how representation of female characters conquering galaxies and making scientific breakthroughs inspires female readers. All across this website I have been talking about how important representation is in this kind of large, ambiguous societal way, i.e. representation is important because people of all genders, sexualities, races deserve to be seen and to see themselves. This is all true, but there is also this added level of inspiration. We usually only think about that in real world examples (seeing a female Congressperson inspires a female president of the future), but this quote points out that it’s also true for fictional characters. For example, astronaut Mae Jemison was inspired by a female Star Trek character and I think that’s pretty important, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/spotlight/artificial-intelligence?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_NN_p_20200409&instance_id=17491&nl=morning-briefing&regi_id=82553027&section=whatElse&segment_id=24428&te=1&user_id=9c32837964b3f5f34cca5259f75fff17

The New York Times published a “special report” on AI, detailing AI’s functions throughout our lives. One piece discusses the use of AI in sports, while another describes how scientists are using AI to learn about the ocean. Spending a little time on this publication and reading just a few of the pieces was fascinating and eye-opening. I’m reminded of tropes in some of the short stories we have read in which humans become entirely dependent on robots. For now, I am excited by all of the potential uses and good that AI can provide for us. Certainly, it is a lot more efficient to use machine learning to search through 180,000 hours of underwater recordings than to do it through manpower alone. But, seeing all of these applications of AI in one place makes you think. When will we go too far? I believe it’s only a matter of time before AI is involved in everything that we do. The article on AI in sports begs the question: at what point am I no longer watching sports and marveling at what the human body can achieve, but rather what machines can? This special report from the NYT is not exactly science fiction, but I think seeing all of these stories on AI in a major publication shows that the themes and questions SF authors have dealt with for decades regarding AI-human interaction are no longer a problem of the future or the fictional.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/where-are-all-the-queer-men-in-sci-fi/

This is an interesting blog post that comments on the observation that there seems to be a lack of queer male SF characters and storylines. As much of my previous posts have pointed out, SF started out really male, really white, and really straight. More recently (as some of my posts have also highlighted), women, people of color, and queer people have started to take over the genre (okay, maybe not take over, but definitely work towards it). This post by Ross Johnson points out that the increase in queer characters in SF is incredible, but those characters are overwhelmingly women. It’s interesting that this is the case, considering the historical male dominance of SF. Maybe queer women have been more motivated to write SF as a reaction to a lack of representation of both their gender and their sexuality. After all, isn’t a queer strong female lead the opposite of typical golden age SF? I hope that queer men and non-binary characters get more representation in SF and I think they will. I think that for right now, the queer women are leading the revamp of SF, and that’s okay. Either way, the future of representation in SF is looking a lot brighter than the past.

Above is a picture of a Science Fiction and Fantasy bookstore in Stockholm, Sweden. I studied abroad in Stockholm for four months last year and this was one of my favorite places to pop into with my friends  when we got out of class or were wandering Stockholm on the weekends. The store is pretty extensive with collections of SF and fantasy books as well as a lot of merchandise from various fan favorite series. The best part about this store, which you can’t quite tell from the photo, is the location. This store is on the main street of Gamla Stan which translates to “old town.” While the much of the rest of Stockholm fits the typical vision of modern Scandinavia, Gamla Stan has narrow cobblestone streets and squares with vibrantly colored buildings. It is where Stockholm was founded in 1252. To find an SF store in the heart of this historical section of the city was certainly a surprise and the juxtaposition is fascinating. While Science Fiction Bokhandeln itself is not at all “distinctly Swedish,” it will always be something that is distinct and memorable in my experience of Sweden.

I recently finished reading Joanna Russ’s novel The Female Man. The novel was not at all what I expected, but I still really enjoyed it. Russ interweaves four stories into a complicated premise that is not explained until late in the novel. The four stories feature four women– Joanna, Jeannine, Janet, and Jael– who live in parallel worlds and are all different versions of each other. Joanna lives on Earth in the 1970s; Jeannine lives on Earth in an America with an altered history in which the Great Depression never ended; Janet lives on the planet Whileaway and is the protagonist from the short story “When it Changed;” and Jael lives in a dystopia in which men and women waged war against each other and have separated into different nations. The women all come together across their parallel universes and it is interesting to observe their interactions and the differences and similarities of women in all of the worlds. I enjoyed the overall plot of the book, but I think the aspect of the novel that is the most powerful is not the SF setting and premise, but the way that Russ uses the novel to write a sort of feminist manifesto. The novel is riddled with quotable sections that I was highlighting left and right that apply to what it is like to be a woman today regardless of what world the character was set in. Furthermore, I thought Russ was extremely daring with her depictions of female sexuality, particularly lesbian relationships. She did not hold back or use innuendos despite the time that she was writing in and she portrayed queer women relationships and sexuality in an honest way that is often only seen with heterosexual relationships.

I was incredibly moved by Octavia Butler’s short story “Speech Sounds.” From the minute I read the blurb before the story and learned that it “imagines a dystopic near-future Los Angeles ravaged by a virus…” I was hooked, given the current climate. Yes, COVID-19 does not destroy people’s ability to read, write, and speak, but it was incredibly eerie reading Butler’s vision of a virus-ravaged city. One quote that really stuck out to me was:

“The illness, if it was an illness, had cut even the living off from one another, As it swept over the country, people hardly had time to lay blame on the Soviets (though they were falling silent along with the rest of the world), on a new virus, a new pollutant, radiation, divine retribution…” (Butler, 871).

Change out “Soviets” for “Chinese” and you get a picture of our world today. It is interesting to me, but not at all surprising given Cold War sentiment, that Butler chose to include this line of “blaming” another country for the pandemic.

As a neuroscience major, another part of this story that was intriguing to me was the ways in which different characters lost communicative abilities. Rye could no longer read or write, but she could speak fluently, as we see her do at the end. Obsidian, on the other hand, can read, but cannot speak. These difficulties do not map perfectly onto the two main types of aphasia: Broca’s and Wernicke’s. Broca’s aphasia is when a person knows what they want to say, but cannot communicate it. Wernicke’s aphasia is when a person can speak in fluent syntax and grammar, but they have lost comprehension ability and their words have no meaning. One part of language in the brain that does map on more accurately to this story is the idea of the children being able to speak if someone can teach them. This has to do with the critical period in which children have to be exposed to and taught language by a certain point in development or else they will never be able to learn it. I really enjoyed how Butler included this in the story and I was pleasantly surprised that the story ended with hope, which I feel is often not what you find at the end of an SF story.

So far this semester, I have been exploring issues of sexuality, gender, and race on this website. To do this, I’ve mostly been highlighting and reading about authors that aren’t straight white men and I’ve found some really incredible authors, but the authors featured in these posts are not an accurate representation of SF writers as a whole. I just read these two articles about the lack of women writers in SF:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/aug/08/science-fiction-invisible-women-recognition-status

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2013/08/speculative-fiction-has-sexism-problem/312355/

I was struck by a few points. The data speak for themselves regarding the numbers of women who are nominated for awards in SF, but one thing that the stood out to me was a quote from Liz Williams who is a judge for the Clarke award:

“As a feminist, I am opposed to including women writers in shortlists just because they are female: the work has got to hold its own in its field: we can discuss whether that field is a level one or not, but when you’re judging a work, you’re obliged to deal with what you’ve got, and to me, that means regardless of any ideological criteria.”

I agree with Williams: the definition of a feminist is believing in equality. And I don’t want women to get special privileges or be considered for awards just because they are women. I definitely don’t want that. But, that doesn’t mean we can ignore the structural issues that still lead to the same data. If we are treating women SF authors equal to men in awards noms (as Williams claims), then why are the numbers so lopsided? There has to be an underlying cause. As we would say in the sciences, the proportions are significantly different from 50:50. I think the issues are endless: women’s works are being cast aside as fantasy, women authors are turning to other genres because they see the way women are treated in SF, women are having a hard time getting published… the list goes on.

I guess I don’t know the solution, but I do know that I want future generations not to have to specifically seek out women SF authors. Yes, there are a handful of great ones (Le Guin, Butler, Russ), but these authors should not be highlighted because they are women. They should be praised as some of the greatest SF authors of all time regardless. To me, it’s just an added benefit that they are women. I hope the next generation of SF writers is more equally distributed, but to make that happen structural change needs to occur.

https://www.tor.com/2014/01/21/post-binary-gender-in-sf-introduction/

In this short essay, Alex Dally MacFarlane discusses post-binary gender in SF. While she does critique The Left Hand of Darkness, I really agree with her argument. A book published in 1968 should not still be the revolutionary, quintessential example of post-binary SF, especially with LHOD written that way it is (not exactly highlighting non-binary characters). I think LHOD was incredibly important for its time and for today, but to me it was not revolutionary when I read it. As a liberal person in the 21st century, the idea of a non-binary race was not groundbreaking. Yes, for some readers it still is and always will be, but why can’t we move past LHOD and highlight other post-binary SF texts? We do have to do some digging for this and it is our responsibility to bring those texts to the forefront. I’m excited to see what I find.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/25/dystopian-dreams-how-feminist-science-fiction-predicted-the-future

This piece in The Guardian discusses the origins of feminist SF and some of the most influential feminist SF utopias. The author, Naomi Alderman (a feminist SF writer herself), also grapples with the utopian/dystopian divide. She writes that “Every utopia contains a dystopia. Every dystopia contains a utopia.” Her novel, The Power, imagines a world where women acquire the power to electrocute others and they use this new power as men use their less explicit, but still as frightening power in our society. The women choose to use this power for violence and play, against men and women alike. When asked if her novel is dystopic, Alderman says “only if you’re a man.” This answer makes you think: if a world where women have this power (that is meant to mimic the powers and privileges men have in our world) is dystopic for men, then isn’t our current world dystopic for women? I appreciated Alderman’s discussion of The Handmaid’s Tale in this article as well. She hits on the part of Atwood’s masterpiece (and its TV adaptation) that has disturbed me since the first time I opened the novel in high school: it is all too real. It is all entirely possible. It has all happened before. I found this article to be a very interesting and insightful commentary on feminist SF. It forced me to think about how a utopia for one is always a dystopia for another. Furthermore, it added a few titles to my reading list that I’m excited to get to (The Power, The Female Man, “The Matter of Sergei”).

“Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.”

http://theliterarylink.com/leguinintro.html

The above quote comes from Ursula K. Le Guin’s introduction to her novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. In this introduction, she talks about what science fiction really is and two major misconceptions about science fiction: 1) that it is “escapist” and 2) that it is extrapolative and predicts the future. I think the quote that “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive” is incredibly accurate, especially when we look at Le Guin’s SF. I read this introduction when I read LHOD before this class, before really thinking about what SF is. Now, I keep returning to this introduction and this quote specifically. I think that Le Guin’s commentary on SF rings truer and truer to me with each new SF story that I read.