Sci Fi Genres: Feminist Science Fiction
From LoveToKnow Sci-Fi
Feminist Sci-Fi - the What If Playground
Science fiction is at its best when it examines or dissects and reconfigures social constructs. What if Charles Babbage invented the computer during Victoria's reign (The Difference Engine)? What if cyberspace was as real as real space? (Snow Crash, Tad Williams' epic ... series and every Matrix movie). Nowhere is sci-fi's what-if potential explored to as good an effect as in so-called 'feminist sci-fi'.
Here are two examples of the genre.
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
Atwood isn't a 'sci-fi' writer by anyone's definition, although she has written several 'speculative' novels. Her genre is usually thought of as 'literary' (ie classy) fiction, and sci-fi remains a bit of a ghetto, respect-wise at least. And yet The Handmaid's Tale employs a classic use of the science fiction theme: What if human fertility suddenly crashed.
This theme was explored in, among other books, Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, in which humanity turned to cloning to preserve the species.
Atwood's solution is darker. A Christian Fundamentalist sect takes control of the US and institutes a new social order, in which women who are still fertile are parcelled out to the men as 'handmaids', to bear children to be raised by the infertile wives of the rulers. The Handmaid's Tale is one woman's story of life inside such a social structure.
The ruling men use an Old Testament tale to justify what is essentially human slavery, and like all people who presume to legislate the morals of others are ultimate hypocrites in how they choose to live. The Handmaid's Tale's heroine plots to escape to the free North (presumably Canada) but her fate is left unresolved at story's end.
The Gate to Women's Country, by Sheri Tepper
Sheri Tepper posits a different future, one in which, after some nameless apocalypse, the women decide you just can't trust men to run anything. Thus, they build their own walled towns, in which they live with their daughters, in a roughly 18th century level of technology. Each town has its own garrison, or armed encampment, in which the men live with their sons.
The men guard the women's town in return for the produce of the women's agriculture and technology, and periodically throughout the year, the genders meet and mingle and find ways to continue the species.
Boys of five are turned over to their fathers of record, to be raised in a warrior tradition. Girls are taught trades and professions.
The story centers on Stavia, daughter of the leader of Marthatown, as she grows from the age of ten to womanhood, discovering the secrets of the matriarchy. The Marthatown's people undertake an exploration of their surrounding area, encountering a group of patriarchal polygamists not unlike the sects that still proliferate in Utah and Arizona today.
The clash between the two societies and Stavia's growing understanding of the nature of the benevolent dictatorship run by her mother is cast in relief by the women's ritualizing of Euripides' classic play, The Trojan Women.
Sheri Tepper is a science fiction author of some note, and most of her novels feature feminist themes of some sort.
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