Contemporary SF reflecting the best of contemporary sensibilities: suggestions

The old sci-fi thread has been getting me down, too many books with misogyny, racism, homophobia and just general obliviousness to the fact that anyone other than straight white dudes did/could ever matter.

While I'm totally committed to pursuing that thread to its (or mine, whichever comes first) bitter end, I'd like very much something to remind me that I don't actually live in 1952, that--dare one hope?--there even may have been some progress.

It would be lovely if anyone and everyone posted here titles that DIDN'T assume inferiority on the basis of sex, gender, race, sexual orientation, dis/ability--preferably not just (or always) by sheer absence of outright abuse, but by actual representation of characters that traditionally get short shrift through underrepresentation and negative representation.

The Handmaid's Tale springs to mind. I'll have to think about it and get back to you regarding other titles.

Explanations would be great! (ETA: if possible, without spoilers. This is really more a question of perhaps UNSPOKEN assumptions and attitudes behind the story. If it needs a spoiler to explain why it's egalitarian etc. it's probably not quite right.) I for one (more so than most of you, probably) am not likely to have read... well, almost anything.

My expectations are that most qualifying titles would be very, very recent--late 20th century to now.

>2 artturnerjr:

Um, not from what I heard of it, unless it has a crashing huge happy end. Is that ironic?

Addendum: I don't want to read about enslaved women, raped women, sexually and otherwise abused women, unless it's a story about how they killed every last dickhead in every last universe, and built a happy entirely parthenogenetic world lasting forever and ever.

Jo Walton's Among Others or any of her other books.
Julian Comstock by Robert Charles Wilson
Kim Stanley Robinson is generally good but I haven't read any of the recent ones.

>5 LolaWalser: Missed this before posting. Among Others might not qualify. Julian Comstock has some war scenes with general mistreatment of women that I don't remember well, but people are actively trying to make things better.

Emma Bull's Territory
Karen Joy Fowler's What I Didn't See and other stories - I didn't care for all of these, but I really liked "Always"
Geoff Ryman's Air - I thought the third world stuff was excellent
Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw - this one is hilarious.
Nola Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring Getting old for your criteria but deals with minorities in Toronto.

>8 aulsmith:

It's not that older books don't qualify, only that I don't expect, going by the shit I've been getting in the old sci fi thread, anything especially good. So instead of people racking their brains for least offensive garbage they loved when they were 12 in 1960, perhaps concentrating on the new, fresh, just out of the factory, would be more likely to render desired results.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson features an egalitarian society on a spaceship. The main protagonist, Freya, is the heir apparent to the ship's (woman) chief engineer - but is at best only average at the math & science talents her parents have. She may even be developmentally delayed, Robinson leaves it vague. However, her ability to connect with other people make her the most important individual in saving the ship.

SFF stories tend to have conflict, often violent. I presume you're OK with that as long as suffering falls on all sorts of characters, and isn't visited on women/queer/person-of-color characters as p0rn or motivation for white, straight, cis men?

Ann Leckie's Ancillary trilogy, Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword, with Ancillary Mercy to be released soon, feature a galactic empire with a dominant culture that places no stress on gender. People do have sexually dimorphic bodies, but their language is ungendered and, in many cases, the reader cannot guess who is male and who female. Desire seems not to be particularly grounded in gender. Leckie is imagining, seems to me, an entirely other system of gender here.

Bad things happen, an interstellar civil war brews, but Leckie doesn't treat her characters' pain as fodder for the reader's sadistic pleasure.

Kameron Hurley's Empire epic fantasy series, Mirror Empire, with Empire Ascendant due out soon, features societies with very different ideas about gender. There's a skilled assassin who is changing from male to female, a matriarchal warrior society where the women are brutal to the men, a peaceful, egalitarian one, etc. Most (all?) people's skin color is brown.

The action here is sometimes quite brutal. The only rape in the first book is a woman who rapes her boy-toy husband, which maybe, sort-of fits your suggestion in #5 above.

>11 dukedom_enough:

Yep, thanks, that's right--I'm not looking for Teletubby land, rather something where egalitarianism is at least generally present/accepted, matter of factly. Conflict is expected--only why would it always be of or coloured by the "sex war" variety, is my complaint.

It doesn't have to be some great shakes total system overhaul--so many times reading the old stuff I think of small to tiny changes that could have signalled a whole new world. If this or that character had been a woman or queer or PoC, if after the tale of derring-do the strapping white lads reported to a quietly competent black woman or someone in a wheelchair--minusculosities!

But, sigh, so rare.

Thanks all for suggestions, please keep them coming and as you read too.

>13 dukedom_enough:

Lol!

As I remarked in regard to a different genre, noir, I'm actually surprised at the general absence of "revenge" fantasies by women.

Ian McDonald passes the test, I think. The Dervish House perhaps?

My examples so far are all from the last few years, as you expected. But in the early/mid 1990s, Robinson's Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) followed the growth of an egalitarian society on Mars. Robinson's is contemporary SF's best-known utopian, and he does his best here to imagine how utopia might come about, including, in the second book, the complete constitution the Martian settlers write for the new society (complete with one laugh-out-loud, of course provision).

Somewhere in the third book, someone says something along the lines of: well, we made a lot of mistakes, but at least we eliminated patriarchy and capitalism.

We seem to be in a sort of renaissance of work by younger women, LGBTQ people, and people of color in the field, work that stresses the imagining of a different society even when the story is embedded in a repressive world. I am now feeling embarrassed that I haven't read more of it, although I plead that it has been piling up on my bookshelves. Authors you should seek out included Catherynne Valente (can vouch for Palimpsest - lots and lots and LOTS of non-exploitative sex), N. K. Jemisin, Aliette de Bodard, Geoff Ryman (not so young, he), and Sofia Samatar.

I have Red Mars in the pile. I remember because someone told me it's a trilogy, and there was only the one book, but oh well. Good to know there's something to look forward to!

This is funnily if only very tangentially OT, speaking of "little things" that would signal a very different universe:

I want an inverse spy flick. The spy is a woman. Her whole team is made up of diverse women. All the villains are women. There is only one man in the entire movie and he is a Strong Male Character who is like 25 and decently ripped and has a scene where he slowly steps out of a pool wearing speedos because he is Confident and In Control of His Sexuality. We see his ass when he has to tug down his pants to get at the knife strapped to his thigh. His nipples are always erect for no fucking reason.

They are undercover in a nightclub. In order to keep their cover from being blown, he has to kiss another man.
He knits to relieve stress and to keep his mind sharp. It is never discussed by any of the characters.

He also happens to need to strip down and pole-dance at said club to act as a distraction for the spy woman to snoop around and get the info she needs.
When he is dancing we get to see him from behind as he is lit from the front, from a low angle shot focusing mostly on his butt and bulge.

This is merely an artistic choice, and has nothing to do with sexualising the character, but let’s face it, sex sells, I mean c’mon, right?

Charles Stross is often good on this, despite being a straight white male. Try Halting State, a crime story with a lesbian detective. Or Glasshouse, in which a posthuman being gets confined to a simulation of the US 1950s suburbia where she can't even change her gender, for crying out loud.

>19 LolaWalser: Try The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross. Second in a series but you don't really need to have read the first book.

And for an immediate sample of Catherynne Valente's work, see the novelette "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew". The novel-length expansion of this excellent story, to be called Radiance, is, again, due out soon.

ooh, thanks, I was curious about her...

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith? Planet where a virus kills all males, some women, and leaves the rest changed.
A Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewsi? Biotech, feminist utopia on an ocean planet.
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes? Odd but brilliant book, slightly cyberpunky, slighty fantastic, dark but spirited. It fits your requirement of sympathy for the usually under-and-misrepresented. South African setting.

I'm currently reading The long way to a small angry planet by Becky Chambers. The main character is female, and so is the pilot and one of the two technicians. The cook belongs to a species that starts out female, and then changes to male when they are older. Almost all humans are some variation of brown, due to plenty of interracial mixing in the past. Having even just a more pinkish note to skin color is an indication of originating from a more isolated colony.

I can second Leckie's Ancillary Justice and Chambers's The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. While the former isn't quite as interesting gender-wise as has been claimed, it is a nice progressive space opera - unlike the Corey ones. The Chambers does some nice things with cultural sensitivity, but it does read a little like Firefly fanfic. I didn't like Hurley's fantasy, The Mirror Empire, but her earlier sf trilogy, the Bel Dame Apocrypha, which opens with God's War, I thought very good. Carolyn Ives Gilman's Dark Orbit is an excellent first contact/sf mystery novel, with an intriguing idea at its core. Her earlier fantasy duology, Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, is an excellent treatment of colonialism in a fantasy world. Nina Allen's The Race is an interesting novel built up of four novellas. I'm not convinced they quite gel together, but it's beautifully written. There's Justina Robson's Glorious Angels, which I've not read myself yet but have heard good things about - and I like her writing a lot anyway (you could even try her Quantum Gravity series, which starts with Keeping It Real). Finally, a mention of my favourite writer, Gwyneth Jones, who last novel was a sophisticated literary space opera, Spirit, or the Princess of Bois Dormant.

>19 LolaWalser:

For KSR the Science in the Capital books are also pretty good. They start with Forty Signs of Rain.

For Stross Rule 34 is an interesting one. All the main protagonists are LGBT apart from the villain. He deliberately inverts many of the usual cliches we see.

Tricia Sullivan is worth reading. Maybe Maul. The story has two main threads. One tells of two teenage girls obsessing over designer fashions and who are in a violent turf war with another gang. The other is of the experiments being run on one of few remaining men. Shadowboxer is a YA book about a young female kickboxer and includes sections set in Thailand. But her other books are great too.

>20 dukedom_enough: Charles Stross is often good on this, despite being a straight white male.

That's because he isn't. He is bisexual and has talked about his sexuality in a number of places on the net.

Alistair Reynolds ?? Not particularly noticed any patriarchy there, and you've a fair range of books to choose from. Don't think there's much in the way of homosexual relationships, but then there aren't that many sexual relationships there anyway. A good preponderance of strong female characters.

>29 reading_fox: You just beat me to it, reading_fox. I was about to specifically mention Pushing ice, which features a female captain of an asteroid mining ship, and her rival, also female. It's only a couple of years since I read it, but I don't recollect particular focus on minorities or racial groups one way or the other. I equally don't recollect the two female leads being particularly stereotyped.

And what about C.J. Cherryh?

(Edited for wobbly touchstone...)

>30 RobertDay:

There is also the Poseidon's Children books which have a lot of Kenyan protagonists. Plenty of strong female characters too.

>32 andyl: Oh yes - I hadn't gotten around to them yet, and I can't remember all the blurb plot summaries from the TBR pile!

>20 dukedom_enough:

The reflections on gender roles in Glasshouse reminded me rather a lot of Theodore Sturgeon's much earlier Venus Plus X.

Exxxxcellent! Thanks all, keep 'em coming. The touchstone list works well enough as a list, no? Pity it's not by alpha...

>4 LolaWalser:

No, not meant to be ironic - just thinking in terms of SF written from a feminist viewpoint, and the (female) protagonist's resilience in the face of extreme repression. Regarding a happy ending, the book's epilogue implies (quoting from Wikipedia here) "that, following the collapse of the theocratic Republic of Gilead, a more equal society re-emerged with a restoration of full rights of women and freedom of religion."

It's an excellent novel, but it's probably not what you're looking for here. My apologies.

Wow, this is active!

One I haven't seen mentioned yet is Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor - an alien spacecraft crashlands in the ocean off Lagos. All the human characters are Nigerian, and racial diversity is something I haven't seen a lot of yet in this thread.

I'll second the recommendation for The Jennifer Morgue in response to 19. The applicability is not at all obvious at first, but trust me.

Much later in the series, the most recent book The Annihilation Score is doing some very interesting things with the stupid "Strong Female Character" trope that I've seen people mention positively even in this thread, that there's a particular way that female characters can be Strong (which always seems to involve being sexy and good with weapons). The protagonist is a fortyish woman who, wrestling with the onset of middle-aged female invisibility, finds that it becomes a literal superpower. This one really does require the previous books for backstory, and it is not at all a pleasant universe, but the ways in which it's unpleasant are not at all gendered; the Lovecraftian horrors attempting to invade the universe aren't sexist.

Jo Walton's My Real Children is one of the best books I've read recently; it's SF by way of being alternate history, following two timelines of a woman's life, and questioning which one is "real". The woman in question is bi, and the book spans her lifetime, so you see an older woman as a protagonist which is damn rare in SF. This has realistic, well-written, rounded characters, not by-the-numbers stereotyped Strong Female Characters.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu would be an interesting juxtaposition with the older stuff you're reading; it's in many ways in the spirit of old American and British SF, but the author is Chinese (it's the first major SF work to be translated from Chinese to English) and so are most of the characters. So the defaults are different.

Thanks!

It will be some weeks before I can get to reading, but my intention is to look up all of them.

>34 paradoxosalpha: From what I remember of Glasshouse, the novel pretty quickly ditched the gender exploration aspect and turned into a pretty ordinary hard sf action-adventure.

>37 lorax: The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo, but surely the first major Chinese sf work translated into English was The Fat Years, altho it wasn't actually marketed as sf in the UK.

>37 lorax: Isn't Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor? My public library promised to buy it for me, but it's been "on order" for months. I don't know what the holdup is. Okorafor has some other excellent novels, too. I especially liked Akata Witch.

>41 tardis:

Sorry, brainfart, I was just reading Jemisin this morning and she was on my mind.

I like everything of Okorafor's I've read, but most of it is fantasy while Lagoon is unquestionably science fiction.

Most of what I would recommend is already covered here, but I don't know that anyone's mentioned Lock In by John Scalzi. The protagonist's gender is ambiguous, and it's sort of about society better recognizing and integrating people with physical disabilities (but with body snatching and robot avatars). There's also a major subplot involving the Navajo community on a reservation.

And for one classic author who has always been more representative, try Babel-17 or other works by Samuel R. Delany. Some of them are a little dated in terms of aesthetics, but most hold up pretty well.

>39 iansales: pretty quickly ditched the gender exploration aspect and turned into a pretty ordinary hard sf action-adventure.

It's funny what qualifies as "hard" sf these days. It wasn't so much an issue of "exploration" in Glasshouse as it was sustained analogy by juxtaposition, with the elements juxtaposed being a) rigid gender roles of the 20th-century US sort, and b) totalitarian control by escaped war criminals.

Anyway, if you wanted a book to read for the gender issues, I'd take the Sturgeon over the Stross. Venus Plus X is more about contrasts (gender-dismal present vs. gender-enlightened future) than comparisons, although that contrast is part of the frame of Stross's story too. I just found an interesting resonance there.

>43 Euryale:

Finally a book I've read, Babel-17! Yes, from what little I've read (only Stars in my pockets like grains of sand in addition so far), I think Delany can be relied on to want to show a more egalitarian world. Or, at least he seems more interested (than most) in traditionally marginalized characters.

I've several Delanys in the pile (that other thread)...

Incidentally, his autobiographical Motion of light in water is very interesting and it talks about how he started writing science fiction, what publishing it was like then etc.

Yes, Babel-17 is a winner.

Sounds like I'll have to add Motion of light in water to my wishlist!

>47 Euryale: There's a sequel, which I've not read, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.

How could I have forgotten Octavia Butler? I haven't read all her work yet (mostly because I'm saving some of them for times of need: I'm pretty much guaranteed to like them and I don't want to squander that), but I believe all of them work. I think some people might have issues with Fledgling (although the protagonist is old, she looks like a young girl). But in any case, her main characters tend to be black women.

I love anything by Sheri S. Tepper. Grass is a classic, Gibbon's Decline and Fall is one of my favorites which in part explores what drives relationships and attitudes and violence when sex is taken out of the equation due to a worldwide loss of libido, The Family Tree is sort of an ecological tale and Beauty is a fascinating fantasy with a much different take on Sleeping Beauty. I loved them all and all have strong female protagonists.

For dystopias, I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is a wonderful story told from the perspective of a young girl whose conscious memory begins as she is imprisoned with a group of women and whose entire life is spent outside the company of men.

There are like five editions of Motion of Light in Water. He kept adding stuff. Try to get the latest.

I thought we were talking speculative fiction, not science fiction when I made my lists. I'll strike out all the Fantasy.

All that outer space allows by Ian Sales, a feminist alternate history of the space program

>52 AlanPoulter:

Cooool.

>52 AlanPoulter:

The payoff is even better if you have read the other volumes of the Apollo Quartet. Women are all that prominent in the first two novellas but they are a key part of Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above

>52 AlanPoulter: and >54 andyl: A small point of order: Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above features an all-female astronaut corps based on the Mercury 13, but All That Outer Space Allows imagines a 1960s in which science fiction is seen as a women's genre.

Jack McDevitt's Priscilla Hutchins' novels, The Engines of God, Deepsix, and so on.

I'm sixty pages into Newton's Wake, and it has a female protagonist. She's in trouble, but by virtue of being a protagonist, not a woman.

There are BT-passes, equanimity about sexual preference, etc.

>55 iansales:

Then Will The Great Ocean Wash Deep Above features an all-female astronaut corps based on the Mercury 13,

adds to wishlist

Um, I see it's listed as the fourth in a series. Does it stand alone?

>58 lorax: It's the third in the quartet. Yes, it stands alone, all four do - although you get more of a pay-off from the final book if you've read the previous three.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet Civilian space ship adventures in a diverse galactic federation.

City of Pearl Earth encounter aliens as it explores other worlds. Can the first contact team negotiate peace?

The Best of All Possible Worlds the mostly male survivors of a destroyed planet seek mates on a backwater planet. jen.e. moore review summed up my thought so accurately I think we must have been split at birth.

Love Minus Eighty corpsicles who cannot afford resurrection . find themselves briefly revived for interviews by Rich men who are looking for mail order brides. Worth while even if the corpuscles themselves are damseled.

Valor's Choice Tanya Huff is better known for her fantasy perhaps, but she writes solid Space Opera.

Commitment hour about a town whose people chose their gender as they approach adulthood.

Triton What do you do if even Male White Privilege can't give you a sense of self worth.

Anything by Octavia Butler she is constantly looking for the borders of humanity and failing to find it.

I second tottman's recommendation of Sheri S Tepper.

In particular, The Gate to Women's Country, whilst explicitly set in the kind of society the OP doesn't want, is all about exploring the consequences of traditional sexual roles.

>61 david_c:

I think the stuff about 'gay syndrome' and a cure for homosexuality in that book would count against it. OK I know it was supposed to be dystopian but I do know people who have been put off Tepper by The Gate To Women's Country.

I assume you've read LeGuin. Have you tried Sarah Zettel? I liked Fool's War quite well and think it qualifies.

The Vorkosigan universe has lots of what you're looking for.

Lois McMaster Bujold can offer you Athos, a world that chose to be men-only; Cetaganda, a world single-mindedly crafting beyond humanity; Jackson's Whole, the mostly criminal exploiters of genetic manipulation; Beta, with three genders and very advanced theories of gender roles; and Barrayar, with mediaeval concepts of gender and genetics, but facing the rest of the settled galaxy again after a time of isolation.

The two female spacecraft captains (and biologists) in Benford's The Sunborn succeed in furthering their careers and circumstantially remain free from gender bias. The author appears to maintain that gender bias in the future still exists and is overcome by feats of caprice, fame, wealth, or other positions of power already established. Don't think this work altogether qualifies, but the two female captains are the most developed and multi-dimensional characters in the novel.

>28 andyl: Belated reply: I didn't know that, interesting.

Thanks for continuing with the suggestions. I got recently Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon--I think someone above mentioned it? Not sure when I'll get to it but I'm starting to collect these titles...

Incidentally, is it just my ignorance, or is it that there seems to be a significant dearth of works (relative to what dominates the market) with gender/race egalitarian visions of the future? I don't mean just works where such visions are the point, the focus of the story, but works that would tacitly assume it. Maybe especially the latter (are rare)?

If this is true, more or less, why would it be? I can think of some possibilities--that most people use sf to work out problems of the "real world"; that for most of sf's history most authors hardly noticed gender, race etc. inequalities; that authors--and the public--see as necessary conflict arising from these inequalities...

I get all that, but I'm surprised that there wouldn't be more wish-fulfilment fantasies where our current situation would be left far behind.

I read The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne recently. It's set in the Arabian Sea with an Indian Brahmin woman traversing a massive wave energy project but there are alternating chapters with a young African girl travelling from West Africa to Ethiopia. These two are the main characters and, of course, they are linked but it will take you to the end of the book to figure out how (and maybe not even then).

I would add Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald to the list.

>67 LolaWalser: ...more wish-fulfilment fantasies where our current situation would be left far behind.

For some reason, The Last Letter by Fiona Lehn comes to mind. Now I wish I had written a review so that I would remember why it did?!

Reporting that I read one of the books suggested here, Tooth and claw by Jo Walton, and that I enjoyed it very much. "Delightful" probably gets bandied around a lot in its connection.

Although the model of Regency society meant that we still dealt with a situation in which females are subservient and "secondary", casting it with dragons made it at once hilarious and subversive.

The reading happened "accidentally", I bought it and meant to set aside, but then read the first page just to check it out... and sat down for the whole thing.

>71 LolaWalser: Supposedly it's also a pastiche of Trollope but not having read him I couldn't say.

>73 justifiedsinner:

Well, Walton specifically says it is, so that's good enough for me. See http://www.jowaltonbooks.com/books/tooth-and-claw/ ; she basically says the only way she could make Trollope's characters (especially the women) be realistic was to make them be dragons.

Oh good! I'm just finishing up Barchester Towers and have ordered Tooth and Claw. How serendipitous.

>73 justifiedsinner:, >74 lorax:

Ha, does this mean it counts as having read Trollope? ;) Somehow I never felt the call... But now that you mentioned it, I saw an adaptation of Barchester Towers ages ago, and a parson/curate/vicar character(s) figured prominently. Not a nice parson person, IIRC.

P.S. Apologies to history buffs for tossing around terms such as "Regency" so lightly. ;) I suppose the romance in the book reminded me of the only template I'm familiar with, Georgette Heyer's books.

More on Tooth and Claw.

I tried to read Framley Parsonage after reading Tooth and Claw, but I thought Trollope heavy-handed, where Walton is so charming I couldn't get very far.

I guess I need to check out Tooth and Claw, since I'm a big Trollope fan.
No one should try the Barsetshire series by reading Framley Parsonage. It's the weakest except for The Small House at Allington (which is maddening). Read the first two: The Warden and Barchester Towers - if just one, Barchester Towers. They were written as "slice of life" novels, with strong ethical themes, but of course now they read like historical novels.

Back to Walton, since I'm totally unqualified to talk about Trollope, I'd recommend here highly - everything she's written is very different (although, of course, books within a series are similar to each other). Her early Sulien novels aren't as strong as her later work - My Real Children is devastating, and Among Others is catnip for anyone who grew up as an awkward SF-loving bookworm, which I expect includes most of us here.

I don't personally know how many of these books will meet your criteria, but I think a good place to look is this list of "100 Must-Read Sci-Fi/Fantasy books by female authors" I just found.

http://bookriot.com/2016/05/02/100-must-read-sci-fi-fantasy-novels-by-female-aut...

>80 kaydern:

Thanks! I've read six on that list, and have several more unread. Of the ones I've read--I know I liked The dispossessed but I read it very long ago. The hearing trumpet is a curious addition, I wouldn't call it sf, but it's very entertaining. I liked Strange & Norrell very much. I don't remember much about McKinley's Sunshine except that it was finely written and that the relationship between the female protagonist and the sexy male vampire was, mercifully, platonic.

I didn't care for A wrinkle in time at all, and, while I respect Rowling's achievement, I think her female representation and characterization of women has serious problems.

I put together a list of 20th century sf novels by women a few years ago: https://iansales.com/2014/04/07/the-sf-mistresswork-list-revised/

>82 iansales:

Thanks to you too. There are quite a few authors, let alone titles, on that list that I've never heard of. This:

Although there were around sixty women actively writing science fiction or fantasy in the 1940s, I can’t find a sf novel written by any of them which was published in that decade.

reminds me of something that came up as a recommendation recently but, um, I've forgotten all details--anyway, somebody's thesis (probably) published as a book, a university press, about how there were many more women writing sci-fi in the "golden" age (1930s-40s) than is now credited. Does it ring any bells at all? I know it's one of those "it was a... blue... book" propositions... Male author.

>82 iansales: >83 LolaWalser: I remember reading something in the last several years about an article(?) listing 300+ women authors from the early years of SF.

>83 LolaWalser: and >84 dukedom_enough: Could you be thinking of this - Partners in Wonder? It's not blue, though...

>85 iansales:

By gum, you found it! Wow, showing mad prices on Amazon--probably explains why I didn't pick it up.

From Amazon: "Davin finds that at least 203 female authors, under their own female names, published over a thousand stories in science fiction magazines between 1926 and 1965. This work explores the distinctly different form of science fiction that females produced—one that was both more utopian and more empathetic than that of their male counterparts. Partners in Wonder presents, for the first time, a complete bibliography of every story published by women writers in science fiction magazines from 1926 to 1965 and brief biographies on 133 of these women writers. It is thus the most comprehensive source of information on early women science fiction writers yet available and of great importance to scholars of women's studies, popular culture, and English literature as well as science fiction."

If you go to the, ahem, LT's competitor's site, there's an "open preview" feature that seems to give the whole of introduction.

Davin's main thesis seems to be that women not only were "present" in the early days of science fiction but that they were also welcomed by male colleagues. While the former may be arguably correct, if we take his findings about published stories as THE index of "presence", the latter seems to me less certain. Most to the point (I think), how do we explain that this "presence" of women in the early days got so forgotten? "Presence" obviously doesn't entail influence. But was this because this work (as, let's face it, a lot of early sf by anyone) was ephemeral, insignificant, or was there (also) some active suppression of--I don't know, memory, mention?--of specifically women authors? How many people got one or even a few stories published in myriad magazines back in the golden age--of magazines--and were never heard from again?

While I'm very interested in those finds, I get the feeling that Davin, like so many thesis-seekers, proceeds by ever so slightly exaggerating the situation (EVERYONE is saying there were NO women writing science fiction in the past! There were--and--there was NO SEXISM, NO EXCLUSION, AT ALL! Except from Asimov, who was {quote} a Neanderthal in his attitudes to women.") so that his punchline seems more novel and important.

>86 LolaWalser: It's certainly true that the contribution of women to science fiction in the past has been significantly downplayed - Andre Norton and Zenna Henderson were big sellers back in the 1950s, for example. Most put this erasure down to the cyberpunks and a backlash against the feminist sf that started to appear in the early 1970s. It doesn't help that the various awards - which most people take as emblematic of the various decades - shortlisted men far more than they did women.

Justine Larbalestier in The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction makes the interesting point that women tended not to be involved in fandom* as much as the men - the only women at conventions, for example, were either spouses or had industry ties to genre (writers, editors, etc). She also suggest that women readers of the various magazine wrote fewer letters of comment, since they were less interested in engaging with the stories in the same manner as the male readers (eg, critiquing the science or central premise). It's worth noting that Judith Merril, a hugely important and influential figure in science fiction from the 1940s through to the 1970s is these days mostly forgotten.

On the other hand, in Galactic Suburbia, Lisa Yaszek makes the case that feminist sf writers of the late 1960s and early 1970s also downplayed the presence of women in earlier decades because they felt the stories written by those women - 'That Only A Mother', or 'Created He Them', for example - ran counter to the feminists' cause.

Here a list of some more critical works on women in sf: https://iansales.com/2014/07/04/women-writing-sf-critical-works/

(I did a lot of research on the subject for my novel All That Outer Space Allows, since the protagonist is a science fiction author as well as the wife of an Apollo astronaut.)

* This is pre-1970s, of course. During the 1960s, the number of women reading science fiction increased massively.

>87 iansales:

Very interesting, thanks. I have Larbalestier's book but as with so many other, not getting to it yet.

Judith Merril is at least commemorated here in Toronto: http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/merril/

I love the place (it's in the Lillian H. Smith branch, downtown close to Chinatown and Kensington Market) but it's only once in a blue moon I manage to visit there for any length of time.

Off the top of my head, I can only think of The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. For anyone who successfully avoided it, it's about any army of the future where all genders are equal. Some of the attitudes that are expressed are a little anti-heterosexual, but I like to think of it as a plea for tolerance.

>89 EnsignRamsey:

Although I would hardly call it 'Contemporary' as it was published in 1974.

>89 EnsignRamsey: I didn't think it was anti-heterosexual at all. I thought we as readers were supposed to feel horror at what had happened to the protagonist's society and culture once he had returned home after decades/centuries away.