Don’t want to talk about Shulamith? Fine. Get the science fiction out of your system here.
I’ll even start it off:
Heinlein is a fucking sexist knob.
Don’t want to talk about Shulamith? Fine. Get the science fiction out of your system here.
I’ll even start it off:
Heinlein is a fucking sexist knob.
Yes!
God Bless you Twisty. I threw Stranger in a Strange land against the wall five times before I finished it. It was the perfect example of womens liberated sexuality being all about being looked at and desired and not at all about looking or desiring.
At least it didnt have any stupid fucking dragons in it though, I freaking hate dragons.
Heinlein is a fucking sexist knob, you say… His earlier works? His concept of the ideal “Manly manly man’s man” that occasionally (ok, a little too often) decides to be all chivalrous and blah blah blah? Definitely.
At the same time, I find I want to tip my hat to him on some aspects of his later works. The chief aspect of his writing I would like to praise is that, at least as far as the Lazurus Long series is concerned, he has no double standard for male sexuality and female sexuality. It’s all one big happy orgy family, and characters (like Maureen’s mum and neighbors) who consider female sexuality sinful or dirty or whatnot are openly mocked.
Also, Lazurus as a mouthpiece for Heinlein is consistantly in favor of woman bucking a lot of other standard traditional expectations. Most sympathetic female characters are competent with both guns and math, capable of taking care of themselves, and reasonably unconcerned with societal expectations. At the same time, I gotta admit that a lot of this is told from the Great White Male Savior perspective, in which Lazurus, Maureen’s father, etc., train and aid the women in their lives in becoming that way.
Couple points, couple demerits, verdict unclear for me as of yet.
I like sci-fi, some sci-fi. But a few years ago I was ambushed by a disgusting piece of anti-women filth that a male friend foolishly lent me. Let me see, we had the short story based around the protagonist’s desire to wire up women neurologically so that the more terrified they were of physical violence the more sexually excited they got. Then there was the little aside in a story where a man surreptitiously injects his date with a ‘desire-drug’. And it turns out that she knew he did it and didn’t mind so she went and had sex with him anyway. As you do. Then there’s the one where a female character has repeated sex with the protagonist in his car before he proves she’s a baddie and she ends up tied to a chair and killed in some vicious way or other my mind has mercifully blanked out.
This is the first and only book I have ever thrown in the bin after reading. Yes sexist sci-fi turned me into a book-destroying nazi. I believe the author was called John Barnes but it was a while ago.
Before this descends into something about cryonics, could we all remember our host’s admonition to respond to trolls with some ascerbic one-liner (if we hafta) and leave it at that?
Am I right in thinking The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood would is classed as sci-fi? If so, then that has got to be essential cautionary reading for any optimists out there.
I have a little shudder every time I recall the bit where all women’s bank accounts were cancelled overnight. What a patriarchal masterstroke.
The creepies thing about Heinlein is that his intelligent capable women never say no. They are always happy to serve the needs of the father figure. As a young onion I appreciated his ideas and his story telling skill. As an adult I am revolted by his underlying sexist stew. I met him once in Carmel (neighbors) he was truly creepy.
Someone always says, “But the women in Heinlein’s stories are strong!” Um, how strong are you when you’re still totally subservient to a man? No matter how “strong” they are, all the women in his stories feel it absolutely necessary to uncomplainingly cook for, clean up after, coddle, and bear the innumerable progeny of their male overlords. Faugh!
I read a lot of Piers Anthony in junior high (mid-1980s). I enjoyed his whimsical worlds of Xanth and Proton/Phaze, and it was probably not the worst thing a 13-year-old budding feminist could read. I needed to be exposed to it in order to see how the present-day patriarchy mysteriously worms its way into so-called alternate universes and non-human societies. What a coincidence!
If I recall correctly, Anthony’s women characters tended to be what a 12-year-old boy would whack off to: hot bodies, simple, spoiled, manipulative. Looking back, I’m surprised he got away with it. Then again, I remember seeing his books for sale in grocery store checkout lines, so we’re not exactly talking about James Joyce.
I’m purposely avoiding the Firestone post, because I haven’t read it. But I want to someday. And then I want to read the discussions of people more smarterer and more-weller spoken than I.
Ursula LeGuin examines the same interpersonal relationship politics as Heinlein without the sexism.
Can’t stand sci-fi unless it’s dystopic fiction stuff.
Did anyone else think the Handmaid’s Tale was a confused manifestation of patriarchy-eroticizing that only masqueraded as patriarchy-blaming? it struck me more as mashup heterosexist sex fantasy of the “every woman loves a fascist” variety than as feminist literature.
I don’t know if it really counts as sci-fi, though, anyway.
Cycles, you wrote “than I” instead of “than me.” In California, that counts as very well spoken indeed.
I agree that Heinlein is creepy. His female characters are just another version of the male fantasy of “always on” women.
tbw, I’m glad you mentioned LeGuin. Due to the reasons above, I stopped reading sci-fi before becoming broadly exposed to the range of stuff out there. I’ve never read her, or any other women of the sci-fi ilk.
If it’s not hijacking the thread, I’d love to hear what people think of LeGuin, Octavia Butler, etc. I’m sure there are plenty of sexist women writers just as there are plenty of sexist women everythings, but I’d love to hear about writers who are willing to stare the patriarchy in the face, and imagine a world outside it.
Niven is bad too.
One of the (many) things I find particularly interesting about Ursula LeGuin is how she has grown and evolved. I have always loved the Earthsea books, reading them first as a young teen, but, as a budding feminist back there in the 70’s, it started to bother me that the protagonist (Ged) was male, as the only way to become a wizard was to be a celibate male. As she later writes, all of that started bothering her too, because she then added female protagonists who were strong, although complex, conflicted, etc. And Atuwan was the patriarchy laid bare.
I suppose one could quibble and say the Earthsea books are fantasy not science fiction but I read both and see them as related.
One word of advice though: do not, under any circumstances see the travesty that the SiFi channel did that they called Earthsea. I turned it off after about 20 minutes, just to avoid throwing my TV out the window.
Heinlein is a sexist, racist knob. I still haven’t gotten over Farnheim’s Freehold. But in the interest of full disclosure, I became a sci-fi reader because when I was eleven,I picked up one of those for kids* potboilers he wrote.
*i.e., no sex.
I absolutely LOVE Le Guin. I haven’t yet found a book I didn’t like. The best part is, that she writes strong characters. She writes about Feminism without you noticing it, because the story is so well crafted.
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower is the only book of hers I read. I am still not sure wether I liked it.
My dad turned me on to Heinlein bigtime when I was about 15. (If you’ve read Heinlein, you might realize how creepy that is - what with the many subplots dealing with how much all teenage girls want their dads to fuck them - but I didn’t see it at the time.) When you’re young and stupid, his books are pretty sexy and fascinating, and the sci-fi aspects are not terrible (though the idea of people in spaceships using slide rules to calculate their courses is pretty funny).
But a sexist knob? Most definitely. All of his female characters are the same - which is pretty much true of the males too - but they are all the same “fertile Myrtle” women - always “on” sexually, all about manipulating the men folks (that kind of “empowered woman” whose empowerment comes from letting men think they run things). They’re smart and capable, sure, but that’s not nearly enough to make it worth reading.
I remember reading Piers Anthony’s “A Spell For Chameleon” in highschool. That would be the one in which the protagonist refers to an exceptionally beautiful woman as (I quote inexactly, as I don’t have the book anymore; as I-don’t-remember-who said, this is not a book to be put aside lightly, but to be thrown with great force) having a body “built for ra- er, love”, and yes, as the context makes perfectly clear, that unfinished word is “rape”. This is the book that introduces a woman who’s sometimes smart, but ugly, and sometimes stupid, but beautiful. The second book in the series has the protagonist taking off on a long journey ’cause his wife (the previously-mentioned changeable woman) is both heavily pregnant and at the ugly phase of her cycle, and he consoles himself that in a week or so she’ll be getting pretty, “just in time for the baby”. ‘Cause you don’t need to have any brains to care for a baby, you know, just a pretty face. Anthony, not to mince words too much, sucks.
The Heinlein book that I most dislike is “Podkayne of Mars”, both in the originally-published version and the even more obnoxious author’s preferred version, due to the obnoxious ending in which the uncle of two kids blames their mother for not paying enough attention to them. Is there a father, you ask? Of course there is. Does he catch any censure here? Of course he doesn’t.
It’s never struck me that Heinlein was as much obsessed with sex as he was, perpetually and monomaniacally, with reproduction. Assembly-line babies, in nearly every late-Heinlein book (yeah, I did stop reading him at some point. Bite my lazy reading ass). Babies babies babies. Legions of pregnant women happily popping out more and ever more babies.
There are in fact two and only two (as far as I can tell) Heinlein women, their prototypes being the omnicompetent and perpetually fertile sexpot and the whiny controlling mother. There are also girls. Goodness knows what they grow up to be.
And why hasn’t anyone mentioned Tiptree’s “The Women Men Don’t See” yet? Hmmm?
I always laugh when people describe Heinlein’s women as “strong and capable” and think his female protagonists were feminist icons. Yeah, they’re strong and capable, but they always happen to be totally hot fuckbunnies for the male protagonists. And anyone who’s read “Friday” has seen the depths of his misogyny.
I liked Heinlein when I was younger, but even then I recognized that all his females were masturbatory Mary Sue characters. Most avid Heinlein fans creep me out.
For feminist fiction, besides Le Guin and Sherri S. Tepper, you might check out Suzette Hadin Elgin.
Topic: Star Trek is neither science nor fiction. Discuss.
Suzette Hayden Elgin - didn’t she do the Ozark Trilogy as well as “Native Tongue”? I seriously need to find the other two books in that; I have “Twelve Fair Kingdoms”, which appeals to me partly, I believe, for the neatness of it all (there’s these families - and each one has certain specific characteristics associated with it - and they each have a castle. It’s kinda like a really well-written board game) and the system she sets up for magic, completely different from that in any other fantasy I’m aware of.
Tepper, to me, tends to creep over the line into making her worlds serve her point, rather than stand as believable worlds on their own (that is, making her worlds fit her premise), but there’s a great deal in “Raising the Stones” and “The Gate to Women’s Country” that bears looking at - a common emphasis in those two on discarding romance and fantasies of heroism.
Do any of you read “Feminist Sci Fi - The Blog”? It’s interesting.
Are we sticking to Sci Fi or going into Fantasy as well? Because if you’re ever bored and can’t sleep, ask me some day about Guy Gaveril Kay. Sky above, what a sexist ass-hat. In all the books I’ve read of his, *none* of the women have any agency at all. And in the Sarantine Mosaic, they all want to sleep with the male protagonist.
I can’t believe I used to think he was a good writer. *sigh*
Suzette Hadin Elgin gets mixed marks from me. Her “Native Tongue” was fascinating reading, and great for explaining how language limits not only what we can express, but even what we can think about. Unfortunately her world-weaving and SF-style speculation fall down a little as compared to her linguistic speculation (which rocks). The problem gets worse with successive books in the series.
Piers Anthony sucks, big-time. His personal favorite obsessions: depressed, self-harming teenaged girls, torture, sex-in-every-conceivable-combination (don’t even get me going on unicorn reproduction), and tee-hee aren’t we naughty behavior from otherwise sensible teens, drive me up a tree every single time. And they’re in Every. Single. Book.
Catherine Asaro creeps me out. I had such high hopes - SF from a female physicist! - but she has this thing for love affairs between people of incredible disparate amounts of power. The 100-year-old (but fit, handsome and powerful!), telepathic guy from the larger universe, falls in love with the 18-year-old, who doesn’t even know there are people on other planets. Not just once, either. Every single love affair she shows is like this. Sometimes the female is the older, more powerful one, but the story I remember where that happened, the male is literally the woman’s slave. It’s definitely not seen as the natural order that he would be more lowly - whereas the nubile teenaged girls just seem to naturally fall for these guys who are so out-of-their league in terms of experience and power that an egalitarian relationship would be utterly impossible.
Did anyone else think the Handmaid’s Tale was a confused manifestation of patriarchy-eroticizing that only masqueraded as patriarchy-blaming? it struck me more as mashup heterosexist sex fantasy of the “every woman loves a fascist†variety than as feminist literature.
Interesting. Atwood’s writing is very female-centered but I’d have a hard time calling it feminist. She’s a feminist, but her writing is full of wily, foolish, flawed, opportunistic people (mostly women) who’d sell out anybody to survive. I though her protagonist in Handmaid’s Tale was very much the I’m-not-a-feminist-but type of person - not very politically before or during her ordeal.
An interesting sci-fi book I read lately (that was a formative experience for my roommate) is “The Legend of Biel.” Some of Twisty’s philosophy about kids reminds me of that book a bit.
A small scattering feminist SF authors I love, some already mentioned, others not:
Octavia Butler (I took a class with her, not long before she died. She spoke eloquently on feminism, race, and politics. I truly believe she was a genius in all the best senses of the word.)
Margaret Atwood
Marge Piercy
James Tiptree, born Alice Sheldon, also wrote as Racoona Sheldon
L. Timmel Duchamp
Nicola Griffith
Samuel Delany
Nalo Hopkinson
Joanna Russ
Ursula LeGuin
Susie McKee Charnas
Justine Larbelestier (non-fiction particularly)
Sherri Tepper (her books are flawed as literature, in my opinion, and the feminist theory as it protrudces into the novels is sometimes, I think, overly simplistic, but her writing is interesting.)
I agree that as sci-fi, Elgin’s books are mediocre at best, and the second book of the “Native Tongue” trilogy was muddled, the third almost incomprehensible. However, I was hooked by the linguistics (I even have one of her Laadan books).
Also agree that Tepper’s stories tend to get a bit heavy-handed in delivering her point.
Piers Anthony is probably the most sexist scifi author this side of John Norman.
I was wondering what your readers think of Maureen McHugh. She’s been compared to LeGuin and she’s won the Tiptree Award for her first novel, “China Mountain Zhang”.
I found “Mission Child” a bit grim, but I really enjoyed her recent collection of short stories. I’m not sure if she can be considered a feminist, more of a techno-humanist.
“Piers Anthony is probably the most sexist scifi author this side of John Norman.” — well, there’s the dude who wrote the Gor novels.
Connie Willis also rocks, although I think she rejects the label of feminist science fiction writer, because of some incident with Joanna Russ at one of the first wiscons where she was told something along the lines of she was not feminist enough. I seem to recall there was an implication that it was indecent of her to write stories about housewives, but I could be wrong about that. I don’t know for sure that Connie rejects the label of feminist writer, though, just that I know there’s tension there. Anyway, as a feminist, I enjoy the heck out of her work.
I haven’t read Maureen McHugh, though I think she taught at one of the Clarions recently.
LeGuin-yes! She lives in my city and we’re big here on local everything. I once was on jury duty at the same time as she was (she got picked but I didn’t) and Lathe of Heaven used Portland as its locale. I recently reread Left Hand of Darkness which was about people whose genders change depending on who they’re with when they go into a form of estrus so everyone could be fathers *and* mothers if they wanted. Most if not all of her stuff examines gender roles.
Someone a long time ago lent me stories by Spider Robinson-some were pretty amusing but there was a lot of odd sex in them. I found out recently that he was (is?) associated with the Farm, a cult-like or former cult that in the beginning was anti-coupleist and also anti-birth control but seems to have become something else. All sounded creepy to me.
One of the best feminist alternate worlds I ever read was the Psalm of Herod/Sword of Mary pair by Esther Friesner. Depressing as all hell, but great nonetheless.
It’s so far in the future that several evolutionary stages have occurred, with massive famine that led to infertility in women, who become incapable of having penetrative sex except at certain times. An entirely new religion has been built around this, with Herod seen a saint who killed the babies so Jesus could live, and so forth.
Now, things are slowly changing again.
A lighter read on a similar topic is Barbara Hambly’s Sisters of the Raven/Circle of the Moon. It’s set in a desert country, where the weather, healing and so forth were all performed by male wizards. The women are in a very subservient position. But something happens, and the women become the ones able to do magic. Many people aren’t happy about this.
I read Stranger in a Strange Land in the 70’s and was not able to finish it due to the ridiculous direction it took at the end. I forgot about this until I got it on audio book for my teenager, and listened all the way through and see no reason to change my opinion. As far as I’m concerned, Heinlein just copied the Playboy mansion for his novel’s version of utopia. That and the christ-like sacrificial “death” of it’s protagonist makes it total sexist drivel. “Grok” is still a cool concept, though.
My kid lost interest, too, thankfully.
“I am only an egg” is the only thing I still appreciate about Heinlein, and I dislike him so intensely that I prefer to think someone else said it to him and he used it in Stranger.
Stranger in a Strange Land is the only Heinlein I read, and it definitely follows what everyone here has been saying. What I think is interesting about it, is that its message is basically “Free Love: Yes!” and I have certainly felt that Feminism and Sexual equality often gets tied together with Free Love. But as SISL shows, I think, Free Love isn’t necessarily feminist, especially when you are talking mostly about the women being perpetualy “on” as discussed above.
re: Guy Gavriel Kay - I have only read the Fionnavar books and I loved them, and didn’t notice what you point out about the agency issues. I’ll have to think about that.
I, too, liked Heinlein as a youngster. I also liked Spider Robinson and Tom Robbins and other dude writers that I can’t stomach at all now. I got the posthumous Heinlein-Robinson book recently and gave up in disgust after the first couple of chapters.
Heinlein’s female characters (like Tom Robbins’) strike me as puppets, a fantasy of how he would like women to be. Which is, I supposed, his prerogative as a writer.
I’m a big Tiptree fan, as well as Johanna Russ. A couple of dude writers I currently like are A.A. Attanasio and Jonathan Carrol.
Off now, on a rowboat with the women men don’t see.
I also enjoyed Spider Robinson. He’s not perfect, but definitely a more feminist sci-fi author than most i’ve seen. I’ve never heard about the Farm connection though. That doesn’t seem to jibe with what i’ve read from him, although I don’t recall any specific mentions of birth control.
In addition, the guy who wrote the Stainless Steel Rat books (i forget his name) showed a remarkable degree of sensitivity in his women characters, and has a section on a planet with extremely strict, but reversed, gender roles that certainly seems to be poking fun at the patriarchy, including one man wailing that Mom wanted him to be a tomgirl but his biological place is in the kitchen.
Ledasmom: And why hasn’t anyone mentioned Tiptree’s “The Women Men Don’t See†yet? Hmmm?
I was going to! As soon as I finished the thread. Most of the authors I love have been mentioned; I got started on them (and SciFi, which I had until that point ignored) with the Women of Wonder series, specifically devoted to women scifi authors:
http://www.amazon.com/Women-Wonder-V41-Pamela-Sargent/dp/039471041X
HIGHLY recommended for beginners, and I think the whole series has recently been reformatted and reissued.
George R R Martin is a brilliant writer. His character development is exquisite.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Lessing.
When I was a wee B. Dagger, for one whole summer my father parked me in a university library (my stepmother was finishing her doctorate), that had a large collection of pulp science fiction novels and complete sets of journals like Amazing Stories. What a blissful summer!
As a teen, I wept over The Left Hand of Darkness. It’s more moving for gay children, I’m sure.
You know who’s a real dick? That guy who wrote Ender’s Game .
Anybody ever try reading Orsen Scott Card? I threw his celebrated “Ender’s Game” across the room. He seems to feel that he needs to remind us how weak and non-aggressive women are….every other page and how women who don’t fit the model are “different”.
Pony! Lessing, yes! Her autobiography is terrific too.
Has anyone read any of Doris Lessing’s sci-fi? The only one I’ve read is the Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five which I highly recommend. Also recommend Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It.
Am a fan of Battlestar Gallactica and very sorry to see the Kara Thrace character (apparently) gone from the show. She kicked some serious ass.
P.S. Marge has a nifty web site.
I noticed there has been no mention of Asimov yet. When I was a young innocent he was my favorite, until one day when I realized there seemed to be no place for women in his universes. He consistently wrote around patriarchal subjects with barely a nod to the other half of the human race. Even in Foundation, when he leads you to believe that a female might save the day, in the end it was a female being controlled by a male and forced to save the day. After that epiphany my poor stomach just couldn’t take him any more.
p.s. Left Hand is one of my all time faves, I think it should be taught in literature classes for its prose as well as content.
I only read the teen Heinlein, but then as a teenly dude it was all “teenly dudes with werewithall to go to moon, defeat Nazis!”
All the fascism that seemed to seep out kind of turned me off the rest. He seems like certainly a knob.
I’ve only read the first 4 Earthsea novels by LeGuin and they are excellent, especially the fact that she starts with the usual Patriarchy and then slowly examines the hell out of it it very natural ways. It is only off-putting to those that don’t want to think about it. I need to read the latest. Maybe I will get it from Amazon. I never have time for anything.
Oooh, Nicola Griffith — another very dark writer (didn’t someone say they only liked dystopias — these are for you). I thought Slow River particularly good, but then I like SF that looks at things we take for granted in the west (like an available, clean water supply) and extrapolates to what happens when the way’s we’re fucking up the earth comes to it’s natural conclusion.
She’s strayed over into mysteries, which is OK because I like them too, and my oh my can she write steamy lesbian sex scenes.
Of course, it’s all theoretical for me until I finish this damn doctorate — pleasure reading? What’s that?
However one of my few guilty pleasures is Battlestar Gallactica - talk about character development! As for Kira Thrace/Starbuck being gone — don’t bet on it. I think it’s just another plot twist. But it is such torture to watch the show in real time: the SciFi channel is clearly aimed at boys of a certain age and proclivities. All the sexed-up pornolicious babes in the commercials. And “male enhancement cream? eeeeew.
Suzette Haden Elgin has a Live Journal (http://ozarque.livejournal.com/) where she discusses sci-fi, linguistics, feminism, and aging (among other things). She maintains a nice, friendly community there. But I agree with the general assessment of her fiction.
I’d agree about Tepper, too, although I find myself keeping an eye out for her new novels, nonetheless. Interesting ideas, and I keep hoping one of her new books will be as startling to me as The Gate to Women’s Country or Beauty was.
So, what about Elizabeth Moon and other similar writers? You know, space operas with strong warrior women? Are they feminist? They don’t tend to address gender roles much at all, but they also don’t tend to be annoying in the classical Heinlein-esque fashion. Are they copping out?
I think Orson Scott Card has just gotten kookier with the years. Personally, I never liked any of his novels, but some of his short stories (I’m thinking of ‘The Porcelain Salamander’ and ‘Unaccompanied Sonata’) are really beautiful. Also, the concept of ‘making’ as laid out in the Alvin Maker books (even if it was only for the boys) was an awesome one.
I second (or seventeenth!) LeGuin — I read all of the Earthsea books in a row (only a year or two ago) and just loved how the last few books totally turned everything you thought you understood on its head.
What was that book of stories/essays she did all about marriages? That was pretty interesting, too.
I have to second thebewilderness’ endorsement of Martin. I’m in the first half of A Clash of Kings and I’m just overjoyed about his characters. There are few main characters that lack dimension, and more than a few female characters who actually do something and have real thoughts and opinions. Why, it’s almost as if Martin were writing about people!
Mostly, I’m excited that none of the characters from the previous book have lost any dimension. Don’t spoil it for me if they do in the later books, I’m reading as quickly as I can.
On the subject of Niven, I’d also like to say that Ringworld would have been a wonderful book if Niven had ditched the idea of having any women in it. It was an intriguing premise, and fairly original delivery, except for Teela. Teela is a character who has perfect luck, she is so lucky that she’s never been hurt seriously in her life. So what does Niven propose as the solution to this specimen of unpunished womanhood? Why, the Universe sets about to teach her common sense by trying to kill her. Teela is completely lacking in common sense because
she’s never been punished for being a womanshe’s lived her life accident-free. She gets the dudely heroes into danger, nearly gets them killed, and has to be repeatedly rescued because she’s an idiot. I would rather read a book that featured no women whatsoever than one that featured such an immense defamation of my gender. I wondered if Niven had even met a woman in his lifetime, so dead-set was he to portray one as a visitor from planet stupid. Twelve year old fanfic writers with War and Peace thick portfolio’s of Mary-Sue self-insertion write more beliveable women.That’s all the vitriol I can muster today for the dudely institution of writing green-skinned slave women from the planet sexbot. I have to discontinue my abuse of the hyphen and it’s sisters in punctuation, but I may return with some relevant things to say about televised Sci-Fi when I’ve had some time to sleep and recharge my daily allotment of spelling errors.
Yeh BDL, trust me to come up with someone only you and I recognize. I haven’t read her SF series. I made my way UP to that series and stopped reading her back then as I began to focus on Canadian writing. Now well, maybe books on cd.
She recently started a blog.
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html
Last month I went through all her titles to pick out the ones I had missed over the years and gorged myself.
Now see, I was disappointed in the George Martin books. I thought the sex roles were fairly stereotypical in them. One swordswoman, one.
I was disappointed in Susannah Clarke’s book too. Jane Austen is a million times more of a feminist, examining class and gender.
I would actually class Catherine Asaro as a feminist author or at least an author a lot of whose books could be read as feminist.
She does go in for relationships with serious power differentials but she has multiple books where the women is in the powerful position and it is seen as natural, usually because of the culture from which the characters are from.
The culture of the ‘main’ universe is one that was historically matriarchal but had come around to equality about on the level of today’s society. So you have traditional female generals that just can’t seem to deal with males as anything but mates/sexual objects, etc. I think it’s a fascinating deconstruction of cultural assumptions.
Also, I like how the male characters are always sexualized and admired and desired in her books, even more so then the female characters.
I haven’t seen anyone mention Andre Norton yet. She might not have been a feminist beacon, but for me, who grew up reading pretty much exclusively sci-fi/fantasy, she was a breath of fresh air.
Robin McKinley is good too. Although pretty definitely fantasy not sci-fi. However she’s funny and smart and her female characters tend to be autonomous beings. Which is rare in the genre.
Ann Mccaffrey. Also more fantasy than sci-fi, and most aimed at pre-teen and teen readers. Which is good in a way since she can write female characters that think, form complete sentences and sometimes don’t have to find a man to find happiness.
Ursula LeGuin (’cause really, she can’t be mentioned enough)
Marge Piercy is also a good read.
Marion Zimmer Bradley. Totally fantasy, but I have a hard time talking about sci-fi without bringing in fantasy.
I’m too cheap to invest in cable, but the show “Firefly” that was on some time ago is pretty good. You can get it on DVD now. Certainly not patriarchy free, but fun. And had the possibility of bringing up some interesting themes on gender and such. Unfortunately it was cancelled.
Liz Williams is pretty interesting, especially that she doesn’t base everything in america or america-in-space. pretty heteronormative but still adventurous in some ways. _Empire of Bones_ is my favorite, followed by Darkland
Tricial Sullivan’s MAUL is also interesting in its distillation of youth culture, consumer capitalism, and technology-mediated reality
LeGuin, yes, hooray. Ditto Octavia Butler
I enjoy Tepper despite her kinda formulaic style, maybe it’s closer to junk food scifi, it’s mostly my recreational reading, but not as sexist as other scifi! _Grass_ is my favorite (although genderwise much more conventional than some others).
Heinlein - I remember, as a teen, starting a book called Fifth Column in which the “Pan-Asians” invade America, with their inscrutable ways and their hara-kiri and their different genetic makeup, so let me add “virulently racist” to the knob description. trust me, you do not want to read that filth.
Feminist utopian fiction, all the way. Firestone lamented about the lack of it. It’s the only sci-fi I read.
I have always had a morbid fascination with Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” the short story about the death of an automated house.
Granted–Mr. Heinlein could be a sexist knob.
Keep in mind, however, that the male “spokesmen” of Heinlein’s novels are (usually) proved wrong within one or more contexts of the novel. A good deal of the conflict of those novels consists of differences between the old man/narrator and the current culture.
And if you buy a good deal of Firestone’s book, many of the things that she foresees as the result of a successful feminist revolution are (as I’ve stated elsewhere) predicted in Heinlein: banishment of the incest taboo, pansexuality, true gender equality, artificial gestation and birth. One of the better portrayals of the evolution of a woman’s life from a status of property to the matriarch of a powerful family occurs in To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
Yes! on Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne McCarthy and I’ll add Mercedes Lackey as another fantasy teen writer who had excellent female characters.
Strangely I had classed Andre Norton with Piers Anthony in my head as one of those authors I had really enjoyed when younger but had started seeing too many issue with as I grew older. Perhaps I’m misremembering as I can’t remember what particular feminist issues I had with Norton of the top of my head.
Though I stray towards Fantasy rather than Sci-Fi (in my brain, it’s all under the umbrella SF/F), I have to add the YA author Tamora Pierce. Young Lady Coming of Age Stories…I have a very serious weakness for books about girls fighting the fictional patriarchy through the clever use of pretending to be their twin brother/having magical powers/being really awesomely strong and kicking ass. After I graduated from college and was forced to leave the Adamless Eden that is a seven sisters’ school, I spent a few weeks reading and rereading the Tortall books in a vain effort to ignore the patriarchy’s ubiquitous hold on my life. Also, reading about Lady Knights Challenging Their Leaders’ Perceptions of Girls really gets the heart pumpin’ and reading to Hate the Patriarchy with renewed vigor.
As a young blamer-in-the-making, I spent much time with Patricia C. Wrede’s Dealing with Dragons, and the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, which are not only about Young Princesses who run away to become the Chief Cook and Librarian of the King of Dragons (who asserts that the human contrivance of gendering monarchal rulers is really quite strange).
Actually, the two most influential books of my life (no, seriously), Jane and the Dragon and The Princess and the Dragon, were picture books about subverting the patriarchy. With dragons.
I heard some radio guy talking about “The Handmaid’s Tale†couple years ago, who had asked women to call his show. He said the British women mostly thought it was very interesting. Canadian women said they thought it very frightening. American women wondered how long they had.
I think it is absolutely a feminist work. Atwood had traveled in the Middle East around the time of the Islamic revolution and saw what happened to the women there and it was one of the main inspirations for the novel. If many of the women seem opportunistic it was because she was trying to show how crucial it is to patriarchy that women be used to repress other women.
I very much enjoyed Marge Piercy’s “He, She and It.†Especially It.
A website for feminist sf, utopian fiction and fantasy:
http://feministsf.org/
Ursula Le Guin and Robin McKinley do a fantastic job with their female heroes. Awesome! I loved McKinley from the beginning because her heroes were female, and when you’re in fifth grade, having female heroes is awesome. (Well, at least it was for me.)
Nancy Kress is hard scifi, and she deals more with economics, but her protagonists, Leisha, Miri, Jennifer–all female, all autonomous and all intelligent and intelligently written. (Though her take on humanity does become depressing further on in the Beggars trilogy.)
Battlestar Galactica - love it. Roslyn, Starbuck, Caprica Six, Number Three–wow. I heart strong women, especially those who buck the hierarchy.
(Am I the only one who loves how Kara flouts patriarchal notions of “combat” as being restricted to men only?)
I love you, Twisty, all the more so for expanding into scifi. :-)
I read an absurd amount of sci-fi/fantasy as a teen-ager. I read really fast, and I didn’t watch TV, and I love me some escapism.
I remember gradually coming to the realization that all the books I was reading had imported their gender roles wholesale. All the aliens looked funny, but their gender was instantly recognizable. It drives me crazy. Ann McCaffrey, who at least has lots of lead female characters, is terrible in this regard. So is David Eddings, but that’s not so surprising. Even Octavia Butler does a lot of essentializing about gender, though she’s so smart she can basically get away with it and be interesting anyway.
LeGuin is, of course, amazing. But she’s also a serious art fiction writer, so, you know, I expect that. McKinley’s stuff is ok on gender, and fun, if not the best-written. Kate Elliott’s pretty good - the nomadic people in the Jaran books have a pretty strict gender system, but it doesn’t really line up with our gender roles. They’re matriarchal and matrilineal and rape is completely unheard of, to the point that when the nomadic warleader is adjudicating a case in a neighboring city learns that a guy has raped a woman, he immediately cuts off said guy’s head. On the other hand, the non-Jaran books of hers I read were appallingly boring, so I never learned anything about their gender roles. Mercedes Lackey’s books are all set in this really blah blah fantasy world with talking horses who radiate goodness and mages and air sprites and shit, but her gender roles beat the pants off McCaffrey’s, at least in terms of ultra-commercial sci-fi. Pretty much all of her books pass the Mo Movie Measure.
The thing that gets me is when people claim they’re making things up, but in fact use the same old same old. This happens all the time, and pretty much all the writers I just mentioned do it except LeGuin (who borrows stuff to tell us more about our world and our own myths, not because she can’t come up with anything better). The gender roles get me, but so do the Tolkien rip-offs and the aliens who are basically just like us, only silver, and the pseudo-medieval social structures and clothes. Oh, and everyone’s white. You’re inventing a whole world here! You get your own metaphysics! Do something interesting! Best on that count that I’ve read recently were C.J. Cherryh, whose Foreigner series has aliens who are primarily different from humans in having a completely different, basically incomprehensible emotional make-up (even though they don’t look that different), the Philip Pullman books (great cosmology, better worked-out than anyone except Tolkien), and the Sabriel/Lirael books, which are about death and magic involving the dead and a teen-age girl (but not really in a titillating kind of way).
Enough with the parentheses! Conclusion: sci-fi is just like other fiction, only it’s more frustrating when it’s boring because the author had so many damn options.
Maria Doria Russell
This thread makes me resolve to: finally really finish my gender-queering sci fi books, so that we blamers who love a good geek story can have another little stack of paperbacks.
Ok, now I am definitely a feminist. And also a Sci-Fi geek, I even work in a bookstore that specializes in Sci-Fi. But I happen to like Heinlein despite his somewhat sexist overtones. But (and I may get flamed for this) you have to take into account the time period. I mean to “condemn” Heinlein for being sexist, is kind of like condemning people in the middle ages for being violent. At least in my opinion. Heinlein is a product of his time. I really like a lot of the insight that is found in Stranger in a Strange Land such as the fact that laughter actually stems from “hurting” and the word “Grok” is a classic. I do agree that the ending kind of disappointed me, but I don’t like to throw the whole thing out.
I would also like to echo what The Stranger said about his Lazurus Long series.
I do understand the feeling of feathers being ruffled though. It is difficult not to groan, grumble and roll one’s eyes at certain things. I do that when I watch the original Star Trek Series. But still, (and maybe this makes me a bad feminist) I LIKE the original Star Trek, and I like Heinlein.
If you want SERIOUS digusting misogynistic sexist tripe, then read any novel in John Norman’s Chronicles of Gor Series. Seriously, everytime I randomly open the page of one of those books, there is some barbarian woman slave in chains begging to be mistreated, beaten and raped and getting ridiculously turned on for the protaganist. It is beyond offensive because it is just so ridiculous. That man definitely has issues. And the thing is, whenever we get the books in stock (we buy them used), they almost IMMEDIATELY get sold, usually via the internet. Whatever ones we get, people will buy ALL of them at once. I have to wonder about those people. For those unfamiliar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gor
The picture on tha cover and some of the titles really say it all.
But my absolute favorite all time author is Spider Robinson. I actually got to meet him once in our store and he is SUCH a great guy. He is exactly the type of person you would expect from reading his books. He has a great vision and I find his books to echo certain spiritual truths.
I am also very fond of the Kushiel’s Series by Jacqueline Carey, with the very tough and very sexual Phaedre, the spy, consort, masochist chosen by the gods.. Very fun read. It is more fantasy than Sci-Fi, but I really like it a lot.
I like the later LeGuin a lot, and Octavia Butler and Nancy Kress. Cripes did I dislike Doris Lessing’s recent “The Sweetest Dream” though… Of course, it is not sci-fi. Unlke BDL (and Echidne of the Snakes, if I recall correctly), I DID like Susannah Clarke’s book, a lot. But fiction with footnotes would sort of have a natural appeal to a geek like me. And I thought there was a lot of subversive feminism going on, but I can understand how not everyone would read it that way.
NB: The popular tween/teen trilogy (actually so far it is just a two-ogy) of “Eragon” and “Eldest” by Christopher Paolina are fun reads if you approach them as anthropological inquiries.
Alie, thanks for the suggestions, I happen to have two dragon-loving-subvert-the-patriarchy daughters who would love some new reads.
“Actually, the two most influential books of my life (no, seriously), Jane and the Dragon and The Princess and the Dragon, were picture books about subverting the patriarchy. With dragons.”
The younger is as-of-yet innocent in the ways of the patriarchy so we try our best to provide opportunity for the strengths and finesse to be inserted before they are needed, without causing in her the cynicism we have developed from fighting the good fight just yet.
The elder of the two and avid SF fan has no time for patriarchal nonsense. She seems to have been born to cut to the chase and surgically remove, by what-ever means, any offending or demeaning content she comes across. (needless to say the kid is ever-so popular here in the South)
Our greatest fear as parents is that the younger daughter will become a cheerleader. The thought makes my hair stand on end.
Anybody read Pat Murphy? Not directly feminist-but Fun Stuff! I remember one I read some time ago called The City, Not Long After. It took place in San Francisco after a plague had wiped out a majority of the population. A battle developed between the leftover “free-spirits and artists” and an outside tyrant. Art ultimately saves the day and one of the main warriors is a woman named Jax who tags rather than kills her opponents. She’s also written a YA novel called Nadya set in pioneer days whose main character is a bi-sexual werewolf.
Pat Murphy is great! The City Not Long After is on my list of stuff to read. But with school I don’t have any time to read fun stuff. :(
I’d like to further laud Ursula K. LeGuin and Octavia Butler. They are simply teh awesome.
I’m a huge, huge fan of George R. R. Martin. Also, there’s a lot more than one swordswoman. Off the top of my head, I can think of Brienne the swordswoman, another northwoman with a mace, Arya as a fencer in training, the sand snakes of Dorne, the spearwives of the wildlings, the I-forget-the-clan’s-name of the mountain tribes that’s all female… I know I’m forgetting some others, too. There’s also speculation that Lyanna Stark fought in a tourney prior to Robert’s takeover.
I don’t think he’s actually attempting to be explicitly feminist, but I don’t think it’s sexist, either.
Oh, and there’s also a lady in the Vale of Arryn as well who fights in her own right. And Asha, who is basically presented as the best heir to the throne of the Iron Islands, and who is a more capable warrior, captain, and admiral than her brother, certainly. I’ll probably think of more examples when I try and get to sleep, of course.
As a general rule, I’d say Martin treats women who try and buck societal expectations with sympathy, and it’s framed as a negative trait for men to restrict them. Arya is of course the ultimate tomboy, and one of very very very few truly and completely sympathetic characters.
And I’d like to point out (can’t believe I forgot this) that I lifted my posting name pretty much directly from the dominant theology in Martin’s Westeros. The classic clerics-and-priests-lawful-good religion practiced throughout the medieval-europe-y part of the world is called the Faith, and they worship the Seven (who are supposed to be seven aspects of the same god). Three are considered female traits (maiden, mother, crone), three are considered male traits (father, warrior, smith), and the seventh… well, that’s the Stranger.
I think the deal with Atwood is that she writes her female leads in a way that you *almost* empathize with them. One of the things I liked about her writing was that her characters’ “bad” choices were really excellent illustrations of how a woman’s choices can never be made in a vacuum; that they are all within the patriarchal construct. Her Handmaid’s Tale does a nice job of separating women into their patriarchally-approved functions, but none of these functions make women happy.
‘But boss, contraception is a *girl’s* responsibility.’
Actual quote from ‘I Will Fear No Evil’. Yep, Heinlein was a knob.
What do people here think of Joanna Russ’ ‘The Female Man’?
Thank goodness! I wasn’t the only one! Years ago, some friends insisted that I read “Stranger in a Strange Land” for some reason having to do with individuality and peace and love or something. In any case, I thought “cool” and read it. I could’t get fifty pages into it. At the time, I hadn’t developed much of a feminist conciousness, Heinlein just offended me with these female characters that I remember describing as “bimbos.” All of my friends were horrified. How could I not like this fabulous book? Now that I think about it, they were all dudes.
As for Atwood, I do find her characters in general tend to be passive; but I don’t think that she is saying that women themselves are passive. The passivity of her characters seems to underscore the patriarchy in which they live and which has rendered them unable to act without truly revolutionary behavior.
I haven’t read sci-fi or fantasy since the 1980s; but it seems to me that the genre has much more room for creating a feminist vision of the world and experimenting with concepts of gender simply because the authors are not bound by contemporary society.
By the way, would Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s _Herland_ fit into this anywhere?
“Ann Mccaffrey. Also more fantasy than sci-fi, and most aimed at pre-teen and teen readers. Which is good in a way since she can write female characters that think, form complete sentences and sometimes don’t have to find a man to find happiness.”
I really don’t think she’s a feminist writer — at this point. I reread the first Pern book recently, and it includes rape-to-acquiescence sex and romaticization of violence against women. I realize those things were more acceptable when the novel was written, and that the novella it was based on appeared in that bastion of boys-with-toys SF Analog, but I wouldn’t hand it to a pre-teen as a feminist book without some sort of preface.
Heinlein’s sexism may be read-through-able because of the era he was writing in, but I think it’s incredibly invisible to a lot of the male SF fans I talk to. When I say it’s sexist, I always have a fight on my hands. In that context, I think it’s important to talk about Heinlein as sexist — because otherwise his ideas get a pass as being mainstream and acceptable. (though I guess sexism is mainstream, if not acceptable)
Second Nancy Kress, Mary Doria Russel. Also, Pat Caddigan for cyberpunk authors. And Nisi Shawl, co-author of _Writing the Other_, publishes work that challenges conceptions of race and gender, placing black women at the center of the stories.
I don’t know if I agree that Octavia essentializes about gender. She seems to have believed in human biology as a determining factor of behavior more strongly than I do, personally, but the women she wrote defied a lot of conventions — often cold and withdrawn — and she was very interested in examining situations where women were in control (the story in Bloodchild about the diggers, her last novel, Fledgling).
I spent 1968-1974 surviving adolescence by reading every science fiction and fantasy book in three libraries. The writers who blew my head open were Samuel R Delany, Ursula K Leguin and Joanna Russ. Later I discovered Octavia Butler. My favorite Connie Willis book is Lincoln’s Dreams.
Although I have liked Doris Lessing’s fiction and memoir, I couldn’t finish her excursions into science fiction. I suppose I should try again.
Ann, as the mother of another dragon-loving young girl, I hated reading Eragon with her because I thought it was so sexist. I was secretly proud of her for figuring it out herself later on.
I think the most interesting sf writing on gender that I’ve come across recently in in Greg Egan’s Distress. Androgyny is one of the threads in a complex novle about biology, technology, ethics, and physics GUT (grand unified theory).
I can’t stand George Martin, but it’s mainly because I don’t much like fantasy. The only authors I can think of who really took the fantasy paradigm apart are Joanna Russ (in the Alyx books) and Samuel Delaney (in the Neveryon books).
typos abound
is in
novel, not novle
I am BEGGING, people: No Battlestar Galactica spoilers!? Please? I don’t have the Battlestar Galactica channel so I’m a season behind and I will weep copious fracking tears if you all go on a Starbuck tangent.
Pretty please?
Now, let me put in a good word for Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain series, about the aftermath of genetically engineered superhumans.
Has anyone read David Weber’s Honor Harrington books, which feature a female starship captain? He tries very hard to imagine a world where gender simply does not matter. I wouldn’t say he entirely succeeds - his understanding of females (from my admittedly male POV) has a couple minor issues, but it’s a very credible effort. If you like “Galactic Empire” science fiction with lots of space battles you’ll have a very good time. I’d suggest starting with “On Basilisk Station” or “Honor of the Queen.”
Alex
i third samuel r. delany, especially dhalgren! in the young adult category phillip pullman’s “golden compass” trilogy is a great humanist fantasy. and maybe it is just me, but frank herbert’s “dune” universe had some fascinating and complicted female characters, i am thinking of both the fremen women and the bene gesserit.
Emotenote: Actually, the two most influential books of my life (no, seriously), Jane and the Dragon and The Princess and the Dragon, were picture books about subverting the patriarchy. With dragons.
My daughter’s favorite along those lines was The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch:
http://robertmunsch.com/books.cfm?bookid=27
For adult stuff, anything by CJ Cherryh is wonderful, and I also like Joan D. Vinge. Doris Piserchia is excellent too, but very scary and dark, almost horror really. With aliens.
While it’s true Heinlein is writing from a more sexist time, it’s not like all writers from that time felt as invested in indulging sexist fantasies as Heinlein clearly was. He spent an awful lot of effort on that crap.
And I second the point that even if I was comfortable excusing him then I definitely shouldn’t excuse the readers who fail to see that it is sexist now.
For all her faults, I am eternally grateful to Mercedes Lackey for being the first author I read whose books delt with sexuality, because they portrayed a much more positive and proactive picture of female sexuality than anything else I read for years after I first picked up “Arrows Flight” at age 11.
I would also like to mention that Robin Hobb’s “Liveship Traders” trilogy rocks on many levels, especially in its portrayal of strong, complex, and unique female characters.
I enjoyed Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy, but found myself wondering what the heck happened to Lyra’s personality in the second book.
Anyone who has suffered through “Eragon” may wish to check out this page:
http://eragon-sporkings.wikispaces.com/
“My favorite Connie Willis book is Lincoln’s Dreams.”
That’s really interesting! I’m pretty sure it was her first. I read it a couple years ago, before I took from Connie at Clarion West, and it definitely kept me flipping through the pages. My favorite of hers is definitely _Doomsday Book_, though. What do you like about _Lincoln’s Dreams_, particularly?
If we’re talking dragons, I gotta bring up The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede.
http://www.amazon.com/Enchanted-Forest-Chronicles-Dealing-Searching/dp/0152050523/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/105-2864023-2368403?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173165344&sr=8-2
Non-typical princess annoyed by typical princess stuff runs away and becomes a dragon’s princess. Dragon society has a king and queen, but these are jobs and not determined by gender. The Princess is intellectual, having learned latin and scholarly habits over her parent’s objections, competent in nearly everything she puts her mind to, and considers chivalrous knights to be an obnoxious nuisance. Witches are generally good, and wizards are generally evil. Lots of fun is poked at modern society along the way in a very witty fashion. Very, very wonderful series.
*Dream Snake* Vonda MacIntyre: Excellent. Women keeping knowledge alive after the death of the Patriarchy! Don’t miss it!
*The Snow Queen* Joan D. Vinge: a Queen and her clone. Beautiful, imaginative, adventurous.
Marge Piercy *Woman on the Edge of Time*, *He, She, It*, not just for her SF but for everything she has written.
Octavia Butler, sadly and untimely dead after falling on an icy sidewalk in Seattle: *Lilith’s Brood* I believe it’s part of a trilogy. I can’t find my book right now.
http://www.pensitoreview.com/2006/02/27/octavia-butler-dies-after-accident/
And
Carol Severance *Reef Song,* *Demon Drums,* *Sorcerous Sea:* Water worlds with genetically altered inhabitants, woman warriors, lots of adventure. She’s my neighbor, too, and comes to my parties!
I ran across a few excerpts-or-stories by Joanna Russ. She created the world Whileaway, where men died in a plague some [n] years back, the social structure changed and the women survived and thrived, and now here we are, with men returning to the planet.
What really got me was the parts where one of the other-world men would interview one of the Whileaway women.
M: So, how have yall gotten along, not being married for [n] years?
W: What the devil are you talking about? I have a wife and a daughter at home!
Not even outrage, just the sheer bafflement of these guys assuming so, so much about their society.
I’ll throw my vote behind the Honor Harrington books being, not feminist, but good for all genders, with a strong female protagonist. Of the ’space navy’ subset of sci-fi, Honor Harrington is the cream of the crop, and after the first book does get into gender issues of different societies.
If you’re looking for really well written sci-fi, you should check out Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books…Skip the first, rather less well written Shards of Honor, and jump right in with Barryar. Even if you choose not to continue to the later books, that one is a great read. (The series was not written sequentially, and Bujold’s writing style just got better and better with practice, right up until the most recent fantasy she put out, which I found to be on the mediocre side. She’s recently also become fascinated by older men with young women…)
I have to agree that Anne McCaffrey is not really a ‘feminist’ author, that Piers Anthony writes gender stereotyped rubbish (ugh, Cluster), and that Orson Scott Card is a bore. Also a boor…I really just want to say jerk. Mercedes Lackey also had a rise and fall in the quality of her novels.
I have to admit…I’ve never managed to make it all the way through a Heinlein novel.
Mercedes Lackey: Djiril has it right on. She wrote the first non-hetero love story I read.
George R R Martin: Does not copy and past his female characters, or the male ones.
A big problem I have with fantasy is that powerful women tend to be either fairy godmother good or devil bitch bad.
Martin’s women are all over the place- acting on different motivations, rising, falling, and actually being the story- not props.
The worst: Terry Goodkind.
This guy hates women.
Any female character who is around long enough to get named will be raped, killed, or both.
On the theme of disenfranchisement of children (this sits somewhere between the Firestone theatre and this thread but better to muddy the waters here I guess); Helen DeWitt’s “The Last Samurai” takes this as one of its main themes and has something to say about an education system that infantilises children in perpetuity. Helen Dewitt is an extraordinary author. Needless to say she has received little or no recognition and was treated with scorn by the gatekeepers over at the Orange Prize for the cardinal sin of not being recognizably a “women’s author”. If I read her oblique site correctly she had another book quietly killed off by publishers in the wake of 9/11.
I´m probably wrong for so many reasons but how about John Varley and the Gaen Trilogy? or Janet Morris Kerion saga?
Robin Hobbs the Fool character in twoo trilogies was intriguing in it´s lack of clear “male” or “female” identification.
Orson Scott Card is of course a Mormon and makes no claims to be a feminist.
“A stranger in a strange Land” is a document of the time, and part of the the attempt to free sex from SIN (you´d have to have grown up in the 50´s to really understand this) and is today insipid but it did have a purpose at the time. And of course it´s based on the playboy mansion.
Heinleins later books also reflect the times (the 70´s) and the derailment of sexual liberation which became just a masturbatory male fantasy.
Much worse I feel was the rewrite of “Stranger in a Strange land” which was the book “the Dice Man” which is still very popular. And disgusting.
To me Dorris Lessing does not write science fiction but is the typical excellent author slumming in a genre they don´t belong in, writing for an audience which would not normally read in that genre. I felt that the story she told had been already told before, but maybe not as well or deeply.
Despite some measure of increased awareness I still cling to my Barsoom books, sorry, Iknow better but sometimes I still want to be John Carter. Mea Culpa.
I’m afraid I may have missed it, if anyone’s already mentioned it, but what do ya’ll think of William Gibson? Anyone read his latest, “Pattern Recognition?”
How about John Varley? The universe he constructed in “Steel Beach” and “The Golden Globe” is one in which genders exist, but are freely chosen (People periodically undergo full-body-replacement that restores youth, and they get to pick their sex. Most of the longer-lived have been both sexes a few times over.) There isn’t any power relationship; it’s simply a matter of taste and personal choice to play the gender game on one team or the other or both. (I don’t recall if anyone gets the choice to not play at all.)
Gender exists but for fun and games only, freely chosen, changes/experimentation welcome, no coersive power imbalance; is that the Twisty Revolution?
I’ll just say this about Heinlein: “Starship Troopers” was my first awareness of the seductive power of fascism. It’s an example of how a society can so easily choose it provided that there is an outside enemy, one utterly inhuman, implacable, and beneath contempt. As long as such an enemy exists, society will embrace a militarist regime. In the real world, of course, no such enemy exists; without it, militarism is meaningless.
If only that message had relevance today. Nah, that’s crazy talk.
(Unfortunately, most of the dudes I knew who read it saw it as an endorsement of militarism. Some praised it for this, others condemned it, but they all kind of missed that part in political sf, where you compare it to the real world to read the message.)
Anyway, this was all pretty heady stuff for a 16 year old pothead. I’m just sayin’.
Yes, he’s sexist as hell. In my own adolescent, hormone-drenched, patriarchally priveleged state, even I found it offensive. So, yeah, it’s way over the top for today’s standards.
Battlestar Galactica - love it. Roslyn, Starbuck, Caprica Six, Number Three–wow. I heart strong women, especially those who buck the hierarchy.
(Am I the only one who loves how Kara flouts patriarchal notions of “combat†as being restricted to men only?)
No, you’re not. But it reminds me: that was another idea Heinlein explored in Starship Troopers, by the way. His women were still his patriarchal view of women, but they were also tough as nails, and held in high regard with absolutely no restrictions on their combat roles. In his vision of a gender-neutral military, men and women lived, ate, showered, slept, and (naturally) fucked together.
Their status as men and women were secondary to their status as soldiers.
This world was still totally hierarchical and macho and violent, of course. This was the military, after all. But it wasn’t sexist, per se. It’s probably about as close to feminist as Heinlein was capable of coming.
“Seattle: *Lilith’s Brood* I believe it’s part of a trilogy. I can’t find my book right now.”
Lilith’s Brood is the name of the trilogy. The titles of the books are Dawn, Imago, and Adulthood Rites.
*
I second the recommendation of Vonda McIntyre.
Also, I’m not sure anyone has mentioned Elizabeth Bear’s work. I haven’t really read much, but people swear by her as a feminist author. The same goes for Andre Norton and C.J. Cherryh.
Ruth Nestvold, on the other hand, makes my heart go pitter pat. She writes primarily short stories, and I believe she has many available for free online.
“Orson Scott Card is of course a Mormon and makes no claims to be a feminist.”
I believe he once referred to Connie Willis’ short story “All My Darling Daughters” as being evil.
Mercedes Lackey, again, hasn’t held up for me, but mostly because almost every single protagonist character gets raped at some point. It’s a bit much. That aside, she wrote the first book that had explicitly m/m relationships in it that I read, and I still love the Vanyel Series (aka: Vanyel: The Angsting) with all my not-really-no-longer-a-teenager soul. Oh, the angst!
MZB herself I don’t like, but her Sword and Sorceress anthologies have a lot of really good stuff in them, and I highly recommend them. They started a lot of new writers in the realm of being published.
Hmm… Didn’t Ester Freisner edit anthologies called “Chicks in Chainmail”? Those are pretty good, too.
And I second the Terry Goodkind Is Creepy thing.
Tan