This semester has completely changed my perception of science fiction. It has also shown me that I just might be a much bigger fan of the genre than I thought. 

Before taking this class, if I had been asked to define science fiction, I probably would have simplified it to a type of fiction with futuristic elements and space travel. If asked for examples of works of science fiction, I would have only been able to offer those that have amassed major fame in the media, like Star Wars or The Hunger Games. Now, the biggest challenge is attempting to define science fiction at all. While now I would be able to offer more sophisticated terms like “cognitive estrangement” and “anti-anti-utopia,” I still struggle to find a way to describe the genre. Therefore, in the first featured blog post, I leave it up to John D’Aquino to share his thoughts on the matter. As you will see, John argues in his blog post that sf (science fiction) as a genre can really be defined in any way we see fit, given the presence of cognitive estrangement. Cognitive estrangement has been a main focus of course discussions over the entire semester, and that is why I wanted to lead my collection of posts with this one. Plus, John makes a very convincing argument about the whole Star Wars as science fiction question. 

The next two blog posts that follow open up a discourse of sf in the context of the Cold War. While the Cold War is included in the title of the course and was also a focal point of class discussions, I feel less confident in my ability to speak to the Cold War context. However, I do offer a brief summary of the cultural differences between the United States and the Eastern Bloc which led to different styles of sf. Most importantly, this post speaks to sf as a means of cultural and societal critique. At the same time, many of the sf works we have read over the semester stand to undergo critique of their adherence to the sexist and misogynistic treatment of female characters. Especially in the context of the Cold War, the emergence of the simple yet superhuman Soviet New Man lent itself to the tokenization of women as objects of submission and desire. I speak to this in the third blog post, citing Elana Gomel to further this point. 

At this point in my curation process, it was difficult to decide what would come next. However, before delving deeper into the themes of science fiction that are breached in the second and third blog posts, I wanted to discuss the actual process of reading sf and how that process can differ from reading regular, or mundane, fiction. In this respect, Samuel Delany is the king of sf. In his essay “About 5,750 Words,” Delany walks the reader through the particulars of reading sf texts, even going so far as to read each word one by one. Delany pays immense attention to the ways in which a single word choice could change the entire meaning of a text, with sf texts offering meanings that would never occur in mundane fiction. He gives the now widely-cited example of a man turning on his left side which, within the context of sf could mean a man turning on his left side in his sleep, but it could also mean a man who is half android pushing a button on the left side of his body to turn it on. While I don’t summarize Delany’s article in-depth in the blog post, I attempt to employ the same type of close reading skills in my close reading of three sentences from his own novel, Trouble on Triton. In this class, I have often taken extra care to read texts ‘between the lines,’ and I thought that, due to the heightened focus on word choices in science fiction, it would be useful to give a demonstration of the type of close reading I have been improving on this semester.

Much to the same effect as word choice, language is a personal topic of interest that I tended to focus on throughout the semester in my posts and class discussions– especially when it comes to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. This was my favorite novel of the semester, which came as no surprise to me, seeing as I was most intrigued by this book the first time I took a look at the class syllabus. Mainly, I was interested because it was the only novel of the semester that was written by a woman, and in a male-dominated field like sf, I’ll take what I can get in terms of strong female representation. Moreover, I feel a rather personal connection to Ursula K. Le Guin, given that just like she was, I am a student of the French language, with particular interest in French Renaissance literature. Though I could spend pages comparing and contrasting the themes and writing styles of Renaissance works of the likes of Marguerite de Navarre and the sf triumphs of Le Guin, I have focused instead on Le Guin’s manipulation of language. With my fifth blog post, I have chosen a guest. In his post, Masato Hirakata discusses the societal importance of the language structures created by Le Guin. In the post of mine that immediately follows, I expand on these ideas, specifically through the lens of sexual language and gender (in)equality. In this post (#6), I begin a critique of Le Guin which I expand on later. I find it important to note here that Samuel Delany has also written a detailed critique of Le Guin’s language and her manipulation of the themes of gender and sexuality in his essay To Read the Dispossessed. I recommend this essay for those who are interested in Le Guin’s writing but find it falls a little flat in terms of her raising questions about sexism and misogyny, but not necessarily answering them. 

Unfortunately, when women are the minority in sf, it becomes easier to focus on critique. Though it can lead to bouts of pessimism, I think it’s still important to have the conversation about women in sf and how they too can fall into the trap of using harmful gender stereotypes and tropes in their pieces. For this reason, I have chosen for the seventh post to feature a blog post from Megan Barber, who gives a thoughtful summary of Joanna Russ’ article “The Image of Women in Science Fiction.” In addition to a nice summary of Russ’ article, Megan offers a meaningful analysis of gender in the texts we have read this semester, mainly focusing on objectification of women as pawns to be used by men. Notably, Megan says, “I thought this essay was really interesting because it gave me the vocabulary to articulate why I found so many of our readings to be sexist and dehumanizing towards women.” In her post, Megan cites Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a text in which women are particularly objectified, and I am in complete agreement. While I certainly have a lot to say about the designation of women as sexual objects in this book, in the eighth featured blog post, I really speak more to the expendability of women as objects. In the novel, women both human and android alike take on the characteristic of artificiality, which says much more about the author and ingrained misogynistic beliefs than anything else. 

Ultimately, my intense interest in Ursula K. Le Guin and the topics of gender and feminism have culminated in the final blog post of this collection, which revisits my connection to Le Guin. Moreover, I discuss this connection in terms of feminist views and societal expectations of women. Without giving too much away, I talk about the background research I have done on Le Guin which has influenced my perception of her as a symbol (or rather, non-symbol) of the women’s movement. On the other hand, I try my best to reject my own harmful expectations of Le Guin, given that not every woman has the desire or the responsibility to center their writing around feminism or being ‘politically-correct.’ To this effect, I make another note of Le Guin’s use of language, which, though colorful and sophisticated, can be considered slightly perturbing at times. At least in the works mentioned, I characterize Le Guin as a product of her time period (this being the 1970s in this instance).  

All things considered, my interaction with sf theory and texts has helped me consistently place a lens on the misrepresentation and objectification of women in sf, while all the same finding some enjoyment in each text. I intend to continue my exploration of sf even after the end of the semester, with a goal to discover more texts that center gender equality and female characters without leaning on sexist tropes. This being said, though it has been met with criticism from Joanna Russ in “The Image of Women in Science Fiction,” I plan to begin my post-semester exploration with Le Guin’s novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. Seeing as in this novel Le Guin explores what a society entirely without gender could look like, I predict it will be a good starting point. 

As you make your way through this curated collection, I encourage you to make your own attempt to define science fiction, and see if this definition changes throughout your reading. Additionally, if you are like me and are coming in with little knowledge about the vastly diverse world of sf and its origins, I strongly recommend that you check out each of the texts mentioned for yourself. Perhaps your opinions will be similar to mine, or perhaps you will focus on aspects of the texts that did not make the cut of this curation.

Either way, I can assure you that sf has something to offer everybody, and that is the real beauty of the genre.