Abstract
In 1972, US science fiction writer Joanna Russ famously argued that science fiction (sf) should be ‘the perfect literary mode in which to explore (and explode) our assumptions about “innate” values and “natural” social arrangements … about differences between men and women, about family structure, about sex, about gender roles’. She continues ‘but speculation … about gender roles, does not exist at all.1 Russ’s pessimism about the possibilities offered by sf is echoed in commentaries on the history of the genre in the UK, such as the following by Colin Greenland: ‘Any survey of sf before 1970 would show that, by an overwhelming majority, it was written by men for men — or, some would say, adolescent boys. Female writers are memorable because they were exceptional, often using ambiguous names or male pseudonyms like women novelists of the nineteenth century.2 The views expressed here might imply that the flowering of women’s sf writing was in fact to take place from the mid 1970s onwards, outside the scope of this volume.3
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Notes
Joanna Russ, ‘The Image of Women in Science Fiction’ in Images of Women in Fiction ed. by Susan C. Cornillon (Bowling Green: Bowling Green Popular Press, 1972), p. 94 (p. 80).
Colin Greenland, The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British ‘New Wave’ in Science Fiction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 26.
Marleen Barr, Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory (London: Greenwood, 1987)
Marleen Barr, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)
Justine Larbalestier, Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Middletown: C. T: Wesleyan University Press, 2006)
Sarah LeFanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (London: Women’s Press, 1988)
Hilary Rose, ‘Dreaming the Future’, in Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994)
Jenny Wolmark, Aliens and Others: Science Fiction, Feminism and Postmodernism (London: Harvester, 1993).
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientifi c Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), p. 6.
Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961), p. 156.
Raymond Williams, ‘Science Fiction’ in Tenses of Imagination: Raymond Williams on Science Fiction, Utopia and Dystopia ed. by Andrew Milner (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 13–19 (p. 16).
Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (London: Polity Press, 2005), p. 3. Luckhurst considers ‘Feminism and Science Fiction’ on pages 180–97 at the end of his chapter on the 1970s.
Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Londa Schiebinger, Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology and Medicine (Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 4.
See Christine Finn, ‘Jacquetta Hawkes’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/view/article/61934> [accessed 13 March 2015].
Mike Ashley, Transformations: The Story of the Science Fiction Magazines from 1950 to 1970 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), pp. 81–2. Much of the information about magazine and paperback publication in this chapter comes from Ashley’s book.
J. G. Ballard, ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’, New Worlds, 118 (1962), 2–3, 116–18.
Margot Bennett, The Long Way Back (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1957), p. 191.
Clare Hanson ‘Reproduction, Genetics, and Eugenics in the Fiction of Doris Lessing’, Contemporary Women’s Writing, 1 (2007), 1–2, 171–84.
Marghanita Laski, The Offshore Island (London: The Cresset Press, 1959), p. 57.
Alison Light, ‘Daphne du Maurier’s Romance with the Past’ in Forever England: Feminity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 156–207 (p. 156).
Du Maurier’s own issues with her ambivalent place in English establishment culture, as well as with her sexuality and gender identity, are discussed well in Nina Auerbach, Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993)
Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993)
Margaret Forster, Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik, Daphne du Maurier: Writing, Identity and the Gothic Imagination (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997).
Brian Aldiss, ‘Introduction’ to Anna Kavan, Ice (London: Pan Books, 1973), pp. 5–10 (pp. 7–8).
Hilary Rubinstein, ‘Introduction’ to Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (London: New English Library, 1976), p. 8.
Clare Hanson, Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-war Britain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 131.
Susan M. Squier, ‘Naomi Mitchison: The Feminist Art of Making Things Difficult’, Afterword to Naomi Mitchison, Solution Three (New York: The Feminist Press, 1995), pp. 161–79 (p. 175).
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Watkins, S. (2017). Science Fiction. In: Hanson, C., Watkins, S. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945–1975. History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-47736-1_17
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