I said (among other things)
- The territory you claim for feminism seems to consist of:
-Ignorance
-Superstition
-Religion
-Fantasy
Looking back, I realize this sounds like I am slandering fantasy --
what I meant to say was that theoretically, one could write fantasy without
any basis in reality, but you could not really write sf that way. (Of
course, in practice good fantasy writers seem to know a lot about horses, and
cities, and geography, while bad science fiction writers often get their
material directly from bad science fiction...)
Regarding women and hard sf: the name Linda Nagata came up recently. I
just finished her first novel, _The Bohr Maker_. The Maker of the title is a
nanotech gimmick that gives its posessor the power to read minds, heal the
sick, change their bodily form, and what have you. When a dying genetically
altered human tries to steal it to cure himself, the Maker ends up infecting
an impoverished prostitute and giving her the powers of a god. And the chase
is on, through an elaborate and colorful future world.
I enjoyed it, but I don't think it's hard sf. The Bohr Maker seemed too
much like a miracle and not at all like a machine. I had the same feeling
with this book that I did with Kathleen Ann Goonan's _Queen City Jazz_, that
nanotechnology was being used as a convenient explanation of what would
otherwise be full-blown science fantasy. I'm sure someone out there will say
that future tech will *be* a miracle, and that these stories are therefore
more realistic than more conservative treatments of nanotech; that may be
so, but they are still not hard sf.
I'd love to hear what other readers of these two books might think.
Daniel Krashin
"Call the Navy, there's a Sub in my subjectivity!"
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:09 PDT