What happened to all the women in science fiction?
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Chicago, as you’re aware, is the city of the future, the inevitable metropolis, the place the East Coasters will fall back to when Brooklyn sinks and West Coasters will retreat to when the Earth crumbles. We are demographically diverse and heavily surveilled, we understand better than most the pain of postindustrialization, driverless vehicles will be here sooner than later, and our climate is less likely to devour us tomorrow. According to Bloomberg recently, the future, at least in the United States, “looks a lot like Chicago.”
Apparently in the interest of prep work, science fiction is having a moment here.
The new One Book, One Chicago read is “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick, who was born in Chicago and died at 53 in 1982, after a life marked by paranoia, drug abuse and existential epiphany; his stories, adapted into “Minority Report,” “Total Recall” and the “Blade Runner” movies, as well as TV’s “The Man in the High Castle,” have served arguably as the foundation for the way we speculate about things to come.
You’ve heard of him.
Meanwhile, across Chicago theaters this fall and next spring, “Frankenstein” is being revived in no less than four productions, marking the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s seminal work of sci-fi — many scholars claim Shelley’s novel is the prototype of all science fiction.
They are the architects of our future.
And yet, between Shelley and Dick, which is about 150 years, what happened to all the women in science fiction? There were alien races, endless post-apocalypses, robots, futuristic utopias; there were male writers named Asimov and Bradbury and Verne and Wells; since 1968, writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood have become best-selling names; the “Star Wars” franchise, on screen and off, is now steered largely by women; the Otherworld Theatre, dedicated to sci-fi and fantasy productions, founded by Tiffany Keane Schaefer, opened a new home last summer in Wrigleyville; not to mention, science fiction and comic cons, once seen as exclusive turf for the man-child living in his parent’s basement, have been approaching gender parity.
So what happened to Alice Bradley Sheldon?
She grew up in Chicago and attended the Lab Schools at the University of Chicago, exhibited paintings at the Art Institute, worked as an art critic at the Chicago Sun, served as a major in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War II, joined the nascent CIA in the 1950s, then later died in a murder-suicide pact with her husband — oh, and somewhere in there, she wrote science fiction under a pseudonym, James Tiptree Jr.
What happened to Elisabeth Mann Borgese?
Daughter of German novelist Thomas Mann, she moved to Chicago in the 1940s, raised her children here, eventually becoming a Canadian citizen and an early influence on how the United Nations and municipalities regard maritime environmental issues. She also wrote science fiction, often concerned about the future of work and automation.
Amazing, prescient lives.
Clare Winger Harris, who attended Lake View High School on the North Side, is considered the first woman to write science fiction stories for science fiction magazines (which for decades were the splashiest home of the genre); she was considered one of the stars, but identified herself as an Illinois housewife. One of her early stories is about an alien invasion that ends with a woman leaving her boyfriend for another world, where she’s appreciated and figures out how to save Earth. Said Lisa Yaszek, professor of science fiction studies at Georgia Tech: “Winger was thinking like Princess Leia, who grabbed a gun to rescue herself when she realized Luke and Han were idiots — women writing science fiction in the ’20s often had heroines sigh, ‘OK, fine, I’ll do it.’”
Never heard of Clare Winger Harris?
Me neither.
But two new books — “The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women,” edited by Yaszek for the prestigious Library of America series, and “Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction,” by Oak Park-based writer Alec Nevala-Lee — go a ways toward explaining why, putting passed-over literary history in new, smart context.
One explanation, Yaszek said, is simple: Women science fiction writers didn’t really go anywhere.
Part of her research is on “recovery of lost voices in science fiction,” and in early 20th century, she said, there were around 300 female writers contributing to Weird Tales, Wonder Stories and other pulps. Keeping with conventions of the time, they were often at home with kids, writing between child care, or if they were teachers, writing while their students were hunched over classwork, Yaszek said. They often came from families of scientists and engineers, and arrived to the genre before a glass ceiling was built. Leigh Brackett was among the most influential sci-fi writers of either gender, prolific from the ’40s to the ’70s, and even better known as a screenwriter, collaborating on “The Big Sleep” with William Faulkner, and co-writing “Rio Bravo” and “The Empire Strikes Back.”
But in Astounding magazine, she would be identified as a lady writer, said Nevala-Lee.
His book is a kind of collective biography with John Campbell, the editor of Astounding, as the complicated sun around which sci-fi legends like Asimov and Heinlein orbited. Nevala-Lee told me, “There is a powerful case that it is hard to understand how science fiction evolved without understanding (Campbell). My take is the writing in the genre would have gotten better anyway, but the human mind hadn’t been a subject of science fiction until he came along. Campbell pushes it from laser guns to psychology, human behavior, social change.” He developed the careers of Asimov (“I, Robot”) and Heinlein (“Stranger in a Strange Land”) and Hubbard, whose would eventually create Scientology. Campbell had been an influential writer himself (his 1938 story “Who Goes There?” was adapted to movies as “The Thing”), and a devotee of theoretical next-next-generation technologies.
“He was also racist,” Nevala-Lee said, “and sort of sexist and basically kind of a problem.”
Indeed, Yaszek said Campbell and his circle of writers and proponents helped erect the glass ceiling that science fiction still wrestles with today. She said stories and ideas in his magazine were “stylistically sophisticated” — she doesn’t discount his hand in the development of a more thoughtful, literary approach to sci-fi — but in the end, Campbell constructs an anti-feminist cadre that turns off more female writers than it hires, discouraging many from the business. Later, when old issues become harder to find — this was pre-internet, remember — the best-known authors became the writers who appear in anthologies, often edited by those same editors who would exclude women.
Campbell, in other words, was both catalyst and hurdle.
Which was a mid-20th-century paradox, and remains an irony now, seen in the trolls unleashed last winter against “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” which dared to have a diverse cast and strong female point of view. Some of the most future-minded, socially progressive storytelling at times attracts some of the most socially conservative people.
Yaszek said that science fiction magazines before World War II were often liberal enough to publish advertising promoting birth control. After the war, Heinlein, among the most popular midcentury authors of any genre, had gone from a hard left-leaning ideology to something closer to libertarianism. And Campbell, Nevala-Lee writes in his book, turned sharply into a loud bigot, even writing once in a letter to “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry that “slavery, under certain circumstances, could be beneficial.”
Campbell liked to “push against progressive tendencies of his readers, but it burst out during the civil rights movement and Vietnam,” Nevala-Lee said. “His technique was to question assumptions constantly — but select assumptions. If you want to defend him, you might say he should be judged by the standards of his times, but he was a man of the future, and if you are interested in ethics and sociology of science fiction, if you only welcome white male engineers to the conversation, that’s very skewed. He had the power to make female writers and black writers and many others a priority, and it wasn’t important to him. It set back the genre. And that’s also his legacy.”
Like many histories, science fiction history is incomplete.
It tends to be linked, as Nevala-Lee put it, to these “big, dominant personalities” like Campbell and Hubbard, who had the gumption to use science fiction to start a religion.
But consider Clare Winger Harris again.
By 1931 Harris had stopped writing to raise her children, but still sent a letter to Wonder Stories outlining many of the possible directions for science fiction — giant insects, man-eating plants, environmental collapse, artificial intelligence. Many of which remain Hollywood cornerstones, Yaszek notes. “Men wanted to write about spaceships and women wanted to write about those too,” she said, “but historically they were turning science fiction to new subjects, like the impact of technology on homes and myths about appearances. Women sci-fi writers were the first to note how technology can impact our relationships.”
Basically, from “Black Mirror” to “Westworld,” that’s your Sunday nights.
Today, Yaszek says, about 30 percent of science fiction writers are female; in fact, for the past three years, N.K. Jemisin, a female African-American psychologist whose works often addresses class and race, has won the Hugo Award for best science-fiction novel. “Whether you like science fiction or not, it is the air that we breathe today,” Yaszek said. “It is the way we talk about our hopes and fears for the future, and if you’re not bringing in women, people of color, that’s a flat vision. But what’s amazing is, in the past people who didn’t see themselves represented in that future dropped out and walked away from trying to become part of it, and I don’t see anyone backing down today.”
Campbell rightly predicted the future.
He just didn’t understand who would take part.
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Source: https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-ent-books-sci-fi-women-1104-story.html
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