We regularly see whining about why the world imagined by science fiction writers of the so-called Golden Age (i.e., mostly the 1950s) hasn’t come to pass. Where are the flying cars and jet packs? Why don’t we have settlements on the Moon?
And then, of course, we get all the hype around LLMs, as if it is going to become the artificial intelligence we were promised. (Pro tip: it’s not.)
The problem is, I think, that people have focused too much on the wrong science fiction, the technocentric and technophilic stuff that is convinced that computer tech is going to save the world.
Right now, the science fiction writer whose visions are closest to reality is Octavia Butler, particularly the world she wrote about in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. While that world is certainly not as much fun to contemplate as living on the Moon, it does have a great deal to recommend it in terms of how things might happen.
I’m fairly sure she meant it as a warning (or perhaps saw it all too clearly); certainly nobody except a few of the grifters currently in power wanted to see it.
Recently the creepy guy who leads the Groypers (and no, I don’t know what that means nor do I want to know) got on a podcast and said that all women – and that includes white ones and maybe even the Kristi Noems and Pam Bondis – should be rounded up and put into gulags, with the ones who would be good breeders (I assume he means the white ones, since he’s an extreme racist as well as misogynist) moved to a birthing gulag.
And that got me to thinking about another science fiction writer: Suzy McKee Charnas.
I mean, you’d almost think he’d read her four-book series, The Holdfast Chronicles, which takes place in a world that does just that with women and includes the racism as well.
I haven’t read those books in a long time, but I’ve just started to re-read them now because they are, in fact, relevant. In fact, I suspect they are even more relevant than The Handmaid’s Tale. Though I hope they aren’t quite as close to reality as Parable of the Sower.
I’m currently reading the first book, Walk to the End of the World, and I have to say that the male world she depicts is the kind of toxic masculinity on steroids that such men seem to want. I recall thinking it was too extreme when I first read it, but given current events, I’m no longer sure about that.
I wish Suzy was still with us to discuss that point.
These books are set after an apocalypse; given that the first one was originally published in 1974, probably a nuclear war.
It’s going to take me awhile to read them all, so I’ll probably have more to say later. But that got me to thinking that perhaps the science fiction that we need to be reading to understand what’s going on in our world might be the strong feminist work that started to become visible in the 1970s.
While I’m not one of those people who argue that you must read the canon to write science fiction or even to read it seriously, I also think it’s really important to pay attention to history and literature is part of understanding history.
Given that the absolute best feminist fiction of the 1970s was written as science fiction – most of the non-SF was unreadable, though the nonfiction was excellent – it’s worth checking it out to understand where the second wave came from, what it was about, and even what it did.
Of course, people didn’t stop writing feminist science fiction in the 1980s. Aqueduct Press – my publisher – has been publishing incredible feminist work since 2003. And many books that aren’t labeled as feminist have clearly been affected by the changes the movement brought about.
We’ve come a long way since having a woman in a character role formerly reserved for men was considered state of the art.
I don’t think extremists running the US right now are going to be able to wipe out all the progress that’s been made on gender. The pretense that the Civil Rights laws prohibit DEI can only go so far before they become laughable.
But it is worthwhile to understand that some of those people don’t just want women in their place, but think their place should be a breeding farm and prison.
Suzy saw that kind of thinking and also thought about what women could do about it. This particular series is disturbing, but very powerful. It is still in print, but it should be more widely known.
A dozen years ago or so I was at WisCon, and went to an academic presentation on transgressive women. Suzy was also there. I found the presentation – which focused on erotic fiction involving vampires and werewolves – very disappointing. It felt like a joke, especially when Suzy had written a series of books on women who were far more transgressive.
I asked the presenter why she hadn’t considered Suzy’s work, and it turned out she was unaware of it. It disturbed me so much I wrote about it for that year’s WisCon Chronicles and I’m still upset all these years later. (I should note that Suzy just shrugged it off, though I don’t think the presentation impressed her either.)
The women in the Holdfast Chronicles are transgressive as hell. It’s a good time to pay attention to them.