Substance and emotional content introduced depth and meaning into what had often been flat, boy scouts' literature.
Only in the 1960s, a decade that gave birth to much questioning of conventions as well as to many social revolutions (including feminism), women science-fiction writers began to question the very nature of science fiction, and as a result, took it in a completely new direction: software replaced hardware, human relationships replaced technology, social science took the place of the physical sciences. However, they too, like their male colleagues, usually presented housewife heroines, passive, naive, ignorant child-raisers, who solve problems not through their intelligence and daring but through ineptitude or accident.
Catherine Moore, for example, wrote from the male point of view, "a necessity," Pamela Sargent explains, "for anyone who wished to publish in the pulp magazines which had dominated American sf since the 1920s."Ī change began to take place after World War II, when some women science-fiction writers joined the field. In her fine introduction to Women of Wonder, Pamela Sargent, herself a prolific science-fiction writer, calls traditional science fiction "an escapist literature for men and boys." She claims that women have traditionally been discouraged from entering scientific and technological fields, based on two assumptions: first, that women lack the aptitude, and second, that they are essentially intuitive rather than rational, and are "hostile to any kind of intellectual exploration."įew women dared to invade the field and even when they did, they imitated their male colleagues. These writers, naturally, aimed their stories mainly at male readers, mostly young boys who often stopped reading science fiction novels once they grew up. A classic example is the story "Helen O'Loy" by Lester del Rey (1938) which features a man who builds a robot programmed to be a perfect wife. Other writers who did employ female characters pictured the relationships between the heroes and their women largely along the same lines as did the existing society: women as assistants to men, women in the role of entertaining dolls.
Wells, the lions in the genre, had hardly any place for women in their fantasies. With all their invention and often daring imagination, these writers failed to explore alternative roles for women in a future society. Needless to say, all these heroes were virile males served by their followers, the female characters. The heroes that these male writers created were generally immature men seeking to remain forever young and powerful, playing with imaginative and powerful toys, hoping to escape from girls or women, mothers or wives, as well as to avoid the responsibilities of a demanding reality, enclosing themselves in their exclusive men's club. Indeed, in his book Billion Year Spree - The True History of Science Fiction, Brian Aldiss describes the genre as an "all-male escapist power fantasy" and calls its writers "Philistine-male-chauvinist pigs" who work in the "Ghetto of Retarded Boyhood." However, the field has since been dominated by male writers who have made the domain of science fiction almost exclusively male. She wrote Frankenstein in 1818 when she was only nineteen. The first science fiction novel, it is largely agreed, was written by a woman, Mary Shelley, the daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the wife of the English romantic poet Shelley. :: THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS: ITS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION :: The Left Hand Of Darkness: Its Place In The History Of Science Fiction.NOTE: This commentary is FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY and is NOT to be distributed. LeGuin's The Left Hand Of DarknessĪffiliation: Assistant Professor Of English, Pace University Left Hand of Darkness - Study Guide Analysis of Ursula K.