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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

What is sci-fi and do women write it?

  
 
Cat Chant
10:15 / 02.03.03
Been leafing idly through the Best SF Book Ever thread and, though I haven't checked rigorously, it does seem that I was the only person to nominate any books by women. I think another poster said, in response to my mentioning that I do often think of boy-SF and girl-SF as slightly different genres, that women write "space opera" rather than "science fiction".

Hence the question. What do you think of as the defining characteristics of science fiction? What do you get from science fiction and why do you read it? Do you think male and female authors tend to write different sorts of science fiction? (What about James Tiptree, Jr?) What sub-genres of science fiction are there? Does anyone have good information or links on the feminist ambitions of writers like Marge Piercy and Lisa Tuttle and why they chose to write science fiction? Do Monique Wittig's books count as SF?

(Oh, and hello, everyone, I'm back now.)
 
 
pointless and uncalled for
12:12 / 02.03.03
The defining characteristics have to be that it is fiction and that the scenario be in some way scientifically different than our own or previous realities. Quite often you will hear of some Sci-Fi that lacks a deeper technological bent as future fantasy etc but these I think are still Sci-Fi but being classified inder sub-genres.

As for the great Man - Woman divide. I think that in generalising terms there is a difference between the way that men and women write Sci-Fi, but to be honest I think that this extends to all fiction to varying degrees. It's possible that Sci-Fi is just the most visible set of differences. For the most part I think that this is something to do with penis extension. I'm fairly convinced that some of the regular offenders are systematically trying to come up with the best in book theory and thus adding a few inches to the size of their literary cock.

Fortunately it doesn't affect all male authors (I would use the term writers but it seems wrong) as the only entertainment I derive from this pathetic display of techno-machismo is when a critic then proceeds to deep-throat the freshly engorged member.

There are some good women Sci-Fi writers out there and I have never been turned off of a book because of the apparent gender of the author.
One of the main problems I perceive with proliferation of women writers in the genre is the accepted level of institutional mysoginy, which is a pity.
 
 
The Photographer in Blowup
18:27 / 02.03.03
Been leafing idly through the Best SF Book Ever thread and, though I haven't checked rigorously, it does seem that I was the only person to nominate any books by women. I think another poster said, in response to my mentioning that I do often think of boy-SF and girl-SF as slightly different genres, that women write "space opera" rather than "science fiction".

Hi, Deva

What is 'space opera,' and how is it different from 'science fiction?'
 
 
The Photographer in Blowup
18:31 / 02.03.03
The defining characteristics have to be that it is fiction and that the scenario be in some way scientifically different than our own or previous realities. Quite often you will hear of some Sci-Fi that lacks a deeper technological bent as future fantasy etc but these I think are still Sci-Fi but being classified inder sub-genres.

Or perhaps some writers are just too lazy to do proper research, and prefer to write fantastic rubbish rather than accurate science.

Of course science fiction is supposed to be beyond 'modern science,' but some writers just make some incredible (as in, not believable) jumps of logic.
 
 
Cat Chant
20:08 / 02.03.03
Rosa: I'm not sure what the difference is. I was referring somewhat lazily to a post of Rizla's in the Best SF Books thread, which differentiates between fantasy/space opera and literary SF:

Hmm.. yeah.. maybe I'm not looking in the right direction or whatever, but, whilst female authors are reasonably well represented on SF shelves these days, it seems to me most of them are writing fantasy/space opera trilogies and the like.. There seem to be very few women working in "literary SF" (ie, the ones that come in slightly-bigger-than-usual paperback format with trendy cover designs).

I'd be interested to know whether this generic divide was perceived by other people. Particularly since Blake's 7 gets called "space opera" a lot (and how not, since it is all about people in fabulous clothing bitching about each other. In space) so I suspect it is a genre I like.
 
 
The Photographer in Blowup
20:36 / 02.03.03
Can't say i ever noticed the difference in the genres due to the gender factor, concerning science fiction/fantasy.

However, i have noticed that there aren't that many women writing sci-fi nowadays - strangely enough though, there are more women writing crime stories in the lines of Agatha Christie than men - if you notice carefully, male authors have a trend to go after Raymond Chandler's sort of crime stories instead.

I know it has nothing to do with the thread, but it's just an observation i made some time ago.
 
 
Mourne Kransky
20:45 / 02.03.03
too lazy to do proper research, and prefer to write fantastic rubbish rather than accurate science

I think you're very dismissive of much of the valuable body of imaginative fiction which clusters under the Science Fiction banner, L M Rosa. I get some knowledge of hard science in some SF but I wouldn't have that as a guide to judging its value as fiction. Otherwise I'd stick to textbooks.

I've been slowly working my way through the huge back catalogue of Ursula K Le Guin for some time now, particularly the Earthsea and Ekumen books. I have enjoyed both, although the former might be better slotted onto the Fantasy shelves. The latter, however, are unquestionably great pieces of Science Fiction, projecting into a future where scientific advance makes certain basic assumptions in life quite other and looking in depth at the ways other worlds and societies would or could be influenced by the social implications, the "soft science", which follow in the train of scientific progress.

At the moment I'm reading The Telling which focuses on religious and spiritual systems under pressure from scientific advance which the Ekumen (something like an interplanetary federation) delivers to much less advanced worlds. The same themes, concentrating more on social structures and ecological concerns, ran through her excellent Left Hand of Darkness.

In many ways the sex of the author is irrelevant but she does return time after time to the interaction between the sexes and throws spanners beautifully into the works. This is particularly so in Left Hand where she imagines a world where everyone is truly hermaphrodite and deals at legnth with the ramifications of that for an entire race and their social organisation.

In The Telling there's similar emphasis on a much more homogenous world than we would recognise, where the concept of xenophobia does not operate.

I think a woman might be much more likely to focus so heavily on those aspects in Science Fiction and might perhaps focus less on the "hard science" and the boys' toys of the Star Wars mythos. I say might be because obviously there are many exceptions to that generalisation.

I don't see much Space Opera in her Ekumen books, although I wouldn't particularly disparage that genre.
 
 
Wyrd
22:31 / 02.03.03
Women SF writers (all whom I've read and usually enjoyed):

Maureen F. McHugh
Vonda McIntyre
James Tiptree Jr/Alice B. Sheldon
Nicola Griffith
Pat Cadigan
Octavia E. Butler
Nalo Hopkinson
Suzy McKee Charnas
Joanna Russ
Sheri S. Tepper
Tanith Lee
Gwyneth Jones
Ursula LeGuin

There's a very comprehensive list of women SF authors at the feministsf.org web site.
 
 
Lurid Archive
22:45 / 02.03.03
Been leafing idly through the Best SF Book Ever thread and, though I haven't checked rigorously, it does seem that I was the only person to nominate any books by women.

I think I was the first person on that thread to mention our mate Ursula. yay for me, do I get a gold star?

I think it is pretty clear that there is a whole association of science with the male - bogus, obviously but it is there. I don't think you've got anything with the "space opera" versus "science fiction" dichotomy. I'll give it a think, but my inital reaction is if there is a sterotype, it probably works the other way.

As for the whole hard science stuff... on the whole I can't stand it. Its the whole business of saying that something is a chaotic AI fractal that is supposed to impress. It just doesn't work if you know what the words mean. Would I impress you if I told you such and such a poem was a really big number? No, I mean really big.

Oh welcome back, dear.
 
 
at the scarwash
03:14 / 03.03.03
I think Connie Willis is pretty much the shiz-nit. Her sci fi is character-driven, but very well-researched. Nalo Hopkins is okay. I like her language
 
 
The Monkey
03:37 / 03.03.03
The "K" in Ursula K. LeGuin is as in Kroeber, as in the big wheel in post-WWII cultural anthropology, and her works reflect that. Her experimentation with and attention to the construction of social structures in her books is pretty amazing viewed in that light...expanding towards the speculative limits of social science while still grounded in monographic and theoretical data from the field.

I'll throw Connie Willis onto that list, by the way, because "To Say Nothing of the Dog" is one of the best books ever written, in or out of the genre. Last I checked, she was also one of the most winningest authors of sci-fi awards. I'm not sure how to quantify her approach to science, though.

I'd say the link between female-ness and "space opera" is tenuous, as I'm guessing that it's a correlation established *after* the critiquer has selectively ignored a lot of the male writers that would fall into that group (not that I really understand the term "space opera).
 
 
Cat Chant
07:34 / 03.03.03
Hoorah! Gender is a red herring! That's what I like to hear.

So what is sci-fi, why do you read it, what sub-genres or characteristics of the genre do you like/do you hate and why? What do you get out of it?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
09:12 / 03.03.03
"Space Opera", as far as I understand it, is meant to be a largely dismissive term meaning "soap opera in space". To put it another way, I was once told by an editor of a small science fiction magazine that, for him, science fiction had to have scientific elements that were vital to the plot and structure fo the piece; therefore, if somebody was communicating with somebody else using a colony of telepathic microbes implanted into their heads, that doesn't make it science fiction if they just behave exactly as mobile phones would. His presentation of this argument was a lot less coherent than that, but that was the general gist, and that, I think, ties into L.M Rosa's thesis that "hard" science fiction is somehow a more pure class than "soft".

However, as stories that trace the lives, sufferings and loves of people and families across generations, a la the Forsyte saga or other "soapy" works of literature, it seems to me that the works of Frank Herbert, EE Smith, and Isaac Asimov all contain plenty of examples of space opera. And, when Xoc says I think a woman might be much more likely to focus so heavily on those aspects in Science Fiction and might perhaps focus less on the "hard science" and the boys' toys of the Star Wars mythos, it reminds me that the physics of the Star Wars universe are so weird that at any moment one expects to hear Han Solo muttering "to get out of this one, we're going to need beans. Magic beans. Deploy the magic beans, Chewie!" We're not talking about scientific verisimilitude here, but topoi - handheld energy projectiles valid topos even though they do not currently exist, people adopting more fluid positions to gender through scientific reconstruction invalid or "soft" topos, even though the technology currentyl in existence is already shifting gender constructions.

Will have a think about what SF I like and why - might it be worthwhile to go back to the "best sci-fi novel of all time" thread?
 
 
Cat Chant
11:00 / 03.03.03
We're not talking about scientific verisimilitude here, but topoi

Ooh, interesting. Also reminds me that of all the panels I went to at Redemption (B5/B7 con), the one which got the most controversial was the one on "continuity": in response to all the physicists bemoaning the jarring effects of bad science in sci-fi, I mentioned that one of the things that ruined Babylon 5 for me was the incoherence of its social system (two series of breast-beating and innuendo over the Talia/Ivanova relationship and no visible gay couples at all, let alone the persistence of a rigidly binary gender system: then all of a sudden we're told that gay marriage is legal?). Anyway, everyone got very upset and told me that legalizing gay marriage would just involve increased "tolerance" (presumably on the part of the het hegemony - or maybe on the part of anti-marriage queers like me?), and would not lead to or require any adjustments in the general (heterocentric) social system.

Which isn't a book, sorry.
 
 
rizla mission
13:47 / 03.03.03
To go rather violently off-topic for a bit:

Or perhaps some writers are just too lazy to do proper research, and prefer to write fantastic rubbish rather than accurate science.

As a lifelong SF reader who's never given a flying fuck about science, I'd claim it's the "fantastic rubbish" that's the point of the genre, and all those writers who drone on for pages about rocket engines and quantum physics can go die if they don't have any cool new fictional concepts to pull out of their musings.

ahem.

back on topic:

In terms of literary form, I don't actually see a strict dichotomy between "science fiction" and "space opera" - there are innumerable writers who combine elements of both, and I don't think I've ever encountered an example of the latter that's been completely removed from elements of the former.

My previous post, as quoted by Deva, refers more to the way books are marketed - thick, stubby paperbacks packaged in the manner of cheap fantasy trilogies vs. tall, thin, expensive books packaged in a way that screams "this is literature, dammit!". I think the distinction's got more to do with subject matter and assumed audience than with literary form/merit.

Quite what this means in terms of gender beyond the general observation that there often seems to be a higher concentration of female writers in the former category, I don't pretend to know.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
16:21 / 03.03.03
I find it terribly discriminatory that we have to distinguish between male and female writers in any genre. I'm not saying it isn't necessary, just that it's shameful. Makes me presume that I have to read female SF writers just because I am female and who wants to be boxed in to that awful feminine passive cliche that I spend too many hours a day thinking about already.

I suspect that my favourite female character within the SF genre is Melpomene Murray in Barnes' Orbital Resonance. He does a damn good job in representing an isolated teenage girl with a bunch of defunct adults around her. Usually I yawn when I pick up anything written by him so that's a whole mass of praise. Where am I going with this - good question - erm, I don't think that male and female writers do have different takes on SF. Take Cadigan, cyberpunk writer, her early work is very much on a par with Neuromancer and in my humble opinion far more accessible.

Shit Farscape - I haven't finished but I don't have time - later.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
13:51 / 05.03.03
HELLO? Doris fucking Lessing?
 
 
8===>Q: alyn
17:29 / 05.03.03
Nancy Kress writes good "hard" sf, though its right-wingy flavor can be a bit sour. Anyway, science fiction is a marketing category, not an artistic one. There are dozens of "mainstream" writers using sf themes and vice versa. I'd have thought books like Gene Wolfe's SOLDIER IN THE MIST, which is a historical fantasy about gods and such where nothing happens that can't be scientifically rationalized, or, I dunno, Margaret Atwood, would have put the kibosh on this angle of discussion a long time ago.
 
 
at the scarwash
22:11 / 05.03.03
I think that there is something that women bring to writing, in any genre, that is different from what men bring. A man couldn't have written To Say Nothing of the Dog any more than a man could have written Orlando. This something is fairly difficult to quantify, and any attempt to do so will generally bring a hail of cocoanuts down on my head from the critics in the trees all around me. I don't think that it's something that can really be described, and maybe it doesn't need to be. Maybe it's enough just to recognize it.
 
 
sleazenation
07:49 / 06.03.03
Just to open up a new seem in this interesting mineface - where does magical realism come into this? is it part of 'soft' Sci Fi, something distinct of itself or a area or shifting sands?
 
 
Cavatina
10:23 / 06.03.03
I don't think it comes within the category of Sci Fi. I see magic realism as difficult to pin down as a genre; but it seems frequently to depend for its effects on a mixing and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic, arcane, magical or surrealistic. Think of the work of Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, Laura Esquivel ...

The term itself originated in the mid 1920s in discussion of the somewhat surrealistic work of a number of German painters of the time. In the 1940s magischer Realismus came to be associated with particular types of fiction - the quasi-surrealistic fiction of the Austrian, George Saiko, for example - but it really wasn't until the 70s and 80s that 'magic realism' had the critical currency it has nowadays.
 
 
Cat Chant
13:45 / 08.03.03
Can I reformulate my question, then, and ask:

What do you think science fiction is for (entertainment? titillation? opening up new spaces for thought? wanking over? adding an extra layer of world-building to an otherwise traditional literary or realistic novel?), and how do, have, or might feminist ways of thinking interact with those functions, ambitions and effects?

I should probably go and check out what became of the arguing/debating thread in the Head Shop, but I'm interested that a lot of the responses to this thread feel to me slightly dismissive and/or defensive, spending time on establishing that the posters aren't buying into an assumed divide between soft-female and hard-male SF, rather than getting to the interesting bits about the interactions between science-fiction's traditions of imagining society otherwise and feminisms'. I don't mean to sound patronizing or something, I'm just trying to work out how I can set up threads more successfully in future, because I get the feeling I quite often set up my opening posts in an unhelpful way, provoking slightly defensive responses. My own suspicion is that this is because I work on the assumption that, for example, of course most posters will not think there is an inherent distinction between the sexes and will be interested in thinking with me about why, in that case, feminist science fiction can be perceived as grouped off in a parallel genre to or subset of "mainstream" science fiction, but I never make that assumption clear so I sound attacking or reductive or something.

Which has nothing to do with feminist sci-fi, of course. Sorry. Carry on. And can anyone tell me anything about Samuel Delaney? He's a name that shows up a lot in connection with the feminist SF "canon" of the 70s (well, with Joanna Russ & Octavia Butler, anyway).

And Chairman Maominstoat - could you expand a bit on "Doris fucking Lessing"? I haven't read much of her sci-fi, apart from Memoirs of a Survivor, so I'd be interested to know how she fits into the history/boundaries of the genre.
 
 
Lurid Archive
14:53 / 08.03.03
What do you think science fiction is for (entertainment? titillation? opening up new spaces for thought? wanking over? adding an extra layer of world-building to an otherwise traditional literary or realistic novel?), and how do, have, or might feminist ways of thinking interact with those functions, ambitions and effects?

Why is it for anything, any more than any other type of fiction? It is a loose description of a type of fiction involving future, fantastical and science oriented scenarios. Different people will see it as having different functions, including the ones you mention. As such, I'm not sure I really see the point of your question. Different feminist writers will have different motives that will be realised in different ways within scifi. Some will want to entertain and will find feminsism peripheral to that exercise, others will find it an important aspect of their creative template.

Some writers will want to explore the ramifications of feminism and/or some aspect of the theory within a scifi genre. Others will see the form of writing as an expression of feminism. Are there strands that tie these together? Yes and no, IMO. A writer who is a feminist need not obviously express these views. A feminist writer might, but isn't this all too individual to really pin down? Or are we specifically talking about scifi novels which somehow advance feminism?

Perhaps I should get to

the interesting bits about the interactions between science-fiction's traditions of imagining society otherwise and feminisms'

I think there is a danger of imagining either scifi or feminism as monolithic. As has been said, scifi is about the present and so political concerns of today are explored in imagined worlds of tomorrow. But this is so vague and general that it can be adopted by any political or philosophical stance. One might argue that scifi has an obsession with progress and technology, but this is often protrayed negatively. One can look at the traditions of scifi and see how they interact with feminism - tricky, not a historical constant, though probably informed by associations of hard techy male and soft feely female. I'm not saying much, perhaps because I'm not really convinced that

feminist science fiction can be perceived as grouped off in a parallel genre to or subset of "mainstream" science fiction

Perhaps I should think about it a bit more, but I guess I'd like to understand the question as more than an analysis of an arbitrary division.
 
 
Cat Chant
15:31 / 08.03.03
Different people will see it as having different functions, including the ones you mention. As such, I'm not sure I really see the point of your question.

Um... to find out what different functions different people see it as having. Honestly. Simple as that. I'm not after an "essence" of science-fiction, to be proposed, counter-proposed, argued, agreed on and "proven" by posters in teleological debate: I'm after different, co-existing, multiple accounts of what science fiction does for different, co-existing, multiple readers. (This also does a great deal to explain to me why my opening posts so often fail, incidentally: thanks. Maybe I will add to all my abstracts: "you don't have to be right, you just have to be..." I'm not sure what, actually. Honest? Rigorous? Intelligible? Striving?)

And I know I should answer my own questions.
 
  
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