The Future Is Female! Volume Two, The 1970s: More Classic Science Fiction Storie s by Women


Book Description

Go back to The Future Is Female in this all new collection of wildly entertaining stories by the trailblazing feminist writers who transformed American science fiction in the 1970s In the 1970s, feminist authors created a new mode of science fiction in defiance of the “baboon patriarchy”—Ursula Le Guin’s words—that had long dominated the genre, imagining futures that are still visionary. In this sequel to her groundbreaking 2018 anthology The Future is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, SF-expert Lisa Yaszek offers a time machine back to the decade when far-sighted rebels changed science fiction forever with stories that made female community, agency, and sexuality central to the American future. Here are twenty-three wild, witty, and wonderful classics that dramatize the liberating energies of the 1970s: Sonya Dorman, “Bitching It” (1971) Kate Wilhelm, “The Funeral” (1972) Joanna Russ, “When It Changed” (1972) NEBULA AWARD Miriam Allen deFord, “A Way Out”(1973) Vonda N. McIntyre, “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” (1973) NEBULA James Tiptree, Jr., “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973) HUGO AWARD Kathleen Sky, “Lament of the Keeku Bird” (1973) Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Day Before the Revolution” (1974) NEBULA & LOCUS AWARD Eleanor Arnason, “The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons” (1974) Kathleen M. Sidney, “The Anthropologist” (1975) Marta Randall, “A Scarab in the City of Time” (1975) Elinor Busby, “A Time to Kill” (1977) Raccoona Sheldon, “The Screwfly Solution” (1977) NEBULA AWARD Pamela Sargent, “If Ever I Should Leave You” (1974) Joan D. Vinge, “View from a Height” (1978) M. Lucie Chin, “The Best Is Yet to Be” (1978) Lisa Tuttle, “Wives” (1979) Connie Willis, “Daisy, In the Sun” (1979)




The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pio neers to Ursula K. Le Guin


Book Description

Space-opera heroines, gender-bending aliens, post-apocalyptic pregnancies, changeling children, interplanetary battles of the sexes, and much more: a groundbreaking new collection of classic American science fiction by women from the 1920s to the 1960s SF-expert Lisa Yaszek presents the biggest and best survey of the female tradition in American science fiction ever published, a thrilling collection of twenty-five classic tales. From Pulp Era pioneers to New Wave experimentalists, here are over two dozen brilliant writers ripe for discovery and rediscovery, including Leslie F. Stone, Judith Merril, Leigh Brackett, Kit Reed, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr., and Ursula K. Le Guin. Imagining strange worlds and unexpected futures, looking into and beyond new technologies and scientific discoveries, in utopian fantasies and tales of cosmic horror, these women created and shaped speculative fiction as surely as their male counterparts. Their provocative, mind-blowing stories combine to form a thrilling multidimensional voyage of literary-feminist exploration and recovery. CONTENTS Introduction by LISA YASZEK CLARE WINGER HARRIS The Miracle of the Lily (1928) LESLIE F. STONE The Conquest of Gola (1931) C. L. MOORE The Black God’s Kiss (1934) LESLIE PERRI Space Episode (1941) JUDITH MERRIL That Only a Mother (1948) WILMAR H. SHIRAS In Hiding (1948) KATHERINE MACLEAN Contagion (1950) MARGARET ST. CLAIR The Inhabited Men (1951) ZENNA HENDERSON Ararat (1952) ANDREW NORTH All Cats Are Gray (1953) ALICE ELEANOR JONES Created He Them (1955) MILDRED CLINGERMAN Mr. Sakrison’s Halt (1956) LEIGH BRACKETT All the Colors of the Rainbow (1957) CAROL EMSHWILLER Pelt (1958) ROSEL GEORGE BROWN Car Pool (1959) ELISABETH MANN BORGESE For Sale, Reasonable (1959) DORIS PITKIN BUCK Birth of a Gardner (1961) ALICE GLASER The Tunnel Ahead (1961) KIT REED The New You (1962) JOHN JAY WELLS & MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY Another Rib (1963) SONYA DORMAN When I Was Miss Dow (1966) KATE WILHELM Baby, You Were Great (1967) JOANNA RUSS The Barbarian (1968) JAMES TIPTREE JR. The Last Flight of Dr. Ain (1969) URSULA K. LE GUIN Nine Lives (1969)




The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction


Book Description

The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction is the first large-scale reference work of its kind, critically assessing the relations of gender and genre in science fiction (SF) especially—but not exclusively—as explored in speculative art by women and LGBTQ+ artists across the world. This global volume builds upon the traditions of interdisciplinary inquiry by connecting established topics in gender studies and science fiction studies with emergent ideas from researchers in different media. Taken together, they challenge conventional generic boundaries; provide new ways of approaching familiar texts; recover lost artists and introduce new ones; connect the revival of old, hate-based politics with the increasing visibility of imagined futures for all; and show how SF stories about new kinds of gender relations inspire new models of artistic, technoscientific, and political practice. Their chapters are grouped into five conversations—about the history of gender and genre, theoretical frameworks, subjectivities, medias and transmedialities, and transtemporalities—that are central to discussions of gender and SF in the current moment. A range of both emerging and established names in media, literature, and cultural studies engage with a huge diversity of topics including eco-criticism, animal studies, cyborg and posthumanist theory, masculinity, critical race studies, Indigenous futurisms, Black girlhood, and gaming. This is an essential resource for students and scholars studying gender, sexuality, and/or science fiction.




The Feminine Future


Book Description

Tales by Ethel Watts Mumford, Edith Nesbit, Clare Winger Harris, and others envision a feminist society in another dimension, a man who converts himself into a cyborg, a robot housemaid, and many other intriguing scenarios.




Sisters of Tomorrow


Book Description

Anthology of stories, essays, poems, and illustrations by the women of early science fiction For nearly half a century, feminist scholars, writers, and fans have successfully challenged the notion that science fiction is all about "boys and their toys," pointing to authors such as Mary Shelley, Clare Winger Harris, and Judith Merril as proof that women have always been part of the genre. Continuing this tradition, Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction offers readers a comprehensive selection of works by genre luminaries, including author C. L. Moore, artist Margaret Brundage, and others who were well known in their day, including poet Julia Boynton Green, science journalist L. Taylor Hansen, and editor Mary Gnaedinger. Providing insightful commentary and context, this anthology documents how women in the early twentieth century contributed to the pulp-magazine community and showcases the content they produced, including short stories, editorial work, illustrations, poetry, and science journalism. Yaszek and Sharp's critical annotation and author biographies link women's work in the early science fiction community to larger patterns of feminine literary and cultural production in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. In a concluding essay, the award-winning author Kathleen Ann Goonan considers such work in relation to the history of women in science and engineering and to the contemporary science fiction community itself.




Daughters of Earth


Book Description

Women's contributions to science fiction have been lasting and important. This is a collection of 11 key stories, alongside 11 essays that explore the stories' contexts, meanings, and theoretical implications. Organized chronologically, it aims to create a different canon of feminist science fiction and examines the theory that addresses it.




The Female Man


Book Description

Four alternate selves from radically different realities come together in this “dazzling” and “trailblazing work” (The Washington Post). Widely acknowledged as Joanna Russ’s masterpiece, The Female Man is the suspenseful, surprising, darkly witty, and boldly subversive chronicle of what happens when Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael—all living in parallel worlds—meet. Librarian Jeannine is waiting for marriage in a past where the Depression never ended, Janet lives on a utopian Earth with an all-female population, Joanna is a feminist in the 1970s, and Jael is a warrior with claws and teeth on an Earth where male and female societies are at war with each other. When the four women begin traveling to one another’s worlds, their preconceptions on gender and identity are forever challenged. With “palpable anger . . . leavened by wit and humor” (The New York Times), Russ both employs and upends genre conventions to deliver a wickedly satiric and exhilarating version of when worlds collide and women get woke. This ebook includes the Nebula Award–winning bonus short story “When It Changed,” set in the world of The Female Man.




The Self Wired


Book Description

First Published in 2002. Advanced technologies challenge conventional understandings of the human subject by transforming the body into a conduit between external forces and the internal psyche. This title discusses the intense controversy about how to best understand and represent human subjectivity in a technology-intensive era. Yaszek provides an overview by linking specific modes of identity and agency to engagement with specific manifestations of technology itself.




Woman on the Edge of Time


Book Description

Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before. Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow. Praise for Woman on the Edge of Time “This is one of those rare novels that leave us different people at the end than we were at the beginning. Whether you are reading Marge Piercy’s great work again or for the first time, it will remind you that we are creating the future with every choice we make.”—Gloria Steinem “An ambitious, unusual novel about the possibilities for moral courage in contemporary society.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer “A stunning, even astonishing novel . . . marvelous and compelling.”—Publishers Weekly “Connie Ramos’s world is cuttingly real.”—Newsweek “Absorbing and exciting.”—The New York Times Book Review




Galactic Suburbia


Book Description

In this groundbreaking cultural history, Lisa Yaszek recovers a lost tradition of women's science fiction that flourished after 1945. This new kind of science fiction was set in a place called galactic suburbia, a literary frontier that was home to nearly 300 women writers. These authors explored how women's lives, loves, and work were being transformed by new sciences and technologies, thus establishing women's place in the American future imaginary.Yaszek shows how the authors of galactic suburbia rewrote midcentury culture's assumptions about women's domestic, political, and scientific lives. Her case studies of luminaries such as Judith Merril, Carol Emshwiller, and Anne McCaffrey and lesser-known authors such as Alice Eleanor Jones, Mildred Clingerman, and Doris Pitkin Buck demonstrate how galactic suburbia is the world's first literary tradition to explore the changing relations of gender, science, and society.Galactic Suburbia challenges conventional literary histories that posit men as the progenitors of modern science fiction and women as followers who turned to the genre only after the advent of the women's liberation movement. AsYaszek demonstrates, stories written by women about women in galactic suburbia anticipated the development of both feminist science fiction and domestic science fiction written by men.