On Fri, 14 Nov 1997, Keri Stone wrote:
> Hi,
>
> One of my collegues has asked me for some recommendations for his class next
> semester. I teach in a private high school (the students are fairly
> sophisticated readers). He is interested in novels, short stories and essays
> by women I know that they currently read Gibson and Stephenson and some
> other cyberpunk novels, and he is disturbed because he does not have any
> female authors. Although I read a ton of sci-fi, I mostly stay away from
> cyberpunk so I wasn't sure what to recommend. I guess it doesn't have to be
> cyberpunk, but it should cretainly focus on technology of the future.
Delurking to second whoever nominated Piercy's _He, She and It_ (or _Body
of Glass_ as we get it over here in Britain). ONe of the more interesting
things about the novel is the way it explicitly connects social impacts of
imagined future tech with a long history of man's (sic) meddling with
nature and the body via the Golem myth, and in doing so broadens out the
idea of 'technology' to include any such meddling. I love this book, and
hate the way it gets overlooked in cyberpunk writing, which can then be
simply categorised as boystown visions (which admittedly much of it
is...).
I also just finished reading K Stanley Robinson's _THe Gold Coast_ which
deals nicely with future tech in terms of two main strands - first, the
dominance of a car economy, and all its horrific fall out (physical,
social, psychological), and second, the expansion and intensification of
the military industrial complex. I don't know whether I should actually
recommend this, since to be honest I found it a bit of a drag to read
(god, it must have taken me near a month to get through, and I kept
putting it off to read more pressing things like the local paper, cereal
packets, etc) - also I kind of hated the assumption that the mid-21
centry would feature nuclear families in which the gender roles of my
grandparents were dully acted out, but friends love it and I really
enjoyed the
other novels in the 'ORange County' trilogy. On balance, worth a look.
A quick re-introduction cos it's sooo long since I engaged with this list:
I'm Lisa and doing post grad work at York University England on utopian
fiction
and
environmentalist visions of sustainable futures. I've been carefully
noting potentially useful texts from everyone, so thanks, but I don't get
enough time to read anywhere near enough to keep up with this list. Back
to the sidelines, I suppose...
Lisa
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