On Tue, 29 Apr 1997, Tonya Browning wrote:
> Sarah Lefanu (great critic BTW) has discussed this polarity:
> Soft mean[s] concerned with the new sciences such as psychology,
> linguistics, ecology (and sociology and town planning), with a critique of
> the uses of technology, and with the social structures of the future. Hard
> SF was associated with the traditional male writer: soft, of course, was
> what the women were" ("Sex, Sub-atomic Particles and Sociology" 179).
and...
> respected arena of hard science fiction as a result. Feminist revisions of
> what constitutes soft science fiction have been to the genre's benefit, but
> the problem of synthesis still remains.
>
> Tonya
I totally agree with you Tonya. So then, one (not the only) feminist
project in sf is for women writers to take up the challenge of writing
about high-technology future scenarios with an eye to feminist issues and
understandings of the humanities and social sciences. While some authors
have done this with fantastic results, there are still very few women
writing high-tech futures, cyberpunk, or space exploration focussed
fiction compared to the emergence of strong women writers in other parts
of the fantasy/sf genre.
I think one of the most insidious trends in modern science fiction is the
assumption that by whatever point in the future an author is concerned
with sexism will have inevitably vanished. While this is of course
preferable to much of the more blatantly sexist sf that revels in the
resurgence of unchallenged patriarchy, or other worlds of extreme sexism,
it adds to the complacency that makes challenging sexism today so very
difficult. The theory goes like this (I'm sure you're all too familiar
with it), history is on a unilinear trajectory of progress and improvement,
and having set the wheels in motion towards the equality of the sexes, the
future will just inevitably achieve sexual equality. It's the Gene
Roddenberry view of the world underlying the Star Trek series (and many
others). More often that not it's a good excuse for male authors to
ignore issues of sex, or similarly race, or sexual orientation, for that
matter any issues of social inequality and conflict.
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