I think my word cloud of the sites that I viewed over the course of the semester accurately reflects what I have focused on and taken away from my searching. Alongside “science fiction,” some of the biggest words include “author,” “women,” “black,” “feminist,” “gender,” and “social.” One of the most interesting things to me about science fiction is how it deals with social issues in our world today. How do authors reimagine or critique current views on race and gender? I think it’s important that the people asking these questions have something critical to say as well. That’s why this semester I focused on women authors and authors of color.

It’s interesting, but not surprising, to me that “author” is one of the biggest terms. This is because I believe that the author is very important to the work. They are not just names written under the title. I think the author and the author’s experiences do a lot to inform the text and how we should read the text. The biggest author name on the word cloud is “Butler.” Octavia Butler is the perfect example of a science fiction writer who thinks critically about social issues and works representation into her writing. This is what I hope the future of SF looks like. The past, in my opinion, is too homogenous, too white, too cis, too straight, too male. I’m not saying people that are cis white heterosexual men should not write science fiction. I’m saying that people who aren’t should and, regardless of what the author’s biography looks like, every author should write characters who better represent our own diverse society.