Abstract
In this chapter, Calvin develops the first of four modes of FESF, in which epistemological concerns are raised by means of the plot of the novel or story. In order to critique social, cultural, and political practices, the plots of feminist science fiction frequently foreground questions of epistemology. To illustrate the ways in which the plots of FESF raise epistemological concerns, Calvin examines works by Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, L. Timmel Duchamp, and Larissa Lai.
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- 1.
Certainly, some epistemologists are skeptical of this formulation. Some might argue whether or not the external world exists, and some argue that any access we have to that world is always and irredeemably mediated by our senses, our minds, and our language.
- 2.
Certainly, science fiction is not the only form of literature that favors the linear. I only mean to suggest that the emphasis on plot lends itself to a linear narrative form, as it does for much of genre literature.
- 3.
As noted in Chapter One, genre is defined by a set of codes, which include the forms and conventions of writing and reading a text. While some adhere fairly strictly to those codes, some writers will push against or stretch some of those conventions. Some amount of formal innovation has always been present. However, formal experimentation was part and parcel of the New Wave. See, for example, works by Colin Greenland, The Entropy Exhibition (1983); Damien Broderick, Reading by Starlight (1995); Rob Latham, “The New Wave” (2005); and David M. Higgins, “The New Wave of SF” (2013).
- 4.
I am not suggesting that any of these characteristics are necessarily bad; however, these are the criteria by which SF is often criticized.
- 5.
Brooks’s book is fraught with troubling issues: unsustainable claims regarding the history of narrative, the underlying assumptions about narrative and desire, and the tendency to take the male form as the norm. Nevertheless, zhe does illustrate (some of) the ways in which the form that the narrative takes is both rooted in and contributes to cultural beliefs and practices.
- 6.
Clarke Olney’s (1958) essay on Poe explicitly ties zher work to science fiction, calling zher a “pioneer” of the genre.
- 7.
In an interview, when asked what zhe hopes zher readers will take away from zher writing, zhe responded: “I am always hoping that people will understand something about those we define as the ‘other,’ whoever we are in this society, and be willing to enter their experiences and to understand something about what it is like for a woman who is homeless instead of just missing her. To be able to understand what kind of damage class does in this society. You want people to be willing to enter the experience of characters whose problems are different than their own so they can achieve empathy. Or whose problems are very similar to their own so they can find themselves validated” (Gifford 23).
- 8.
The Patternist books are nearly silent on literary ontological questions. The structures of the society remain in the background in many of the novels. The literary ontological is much more prevalent in the Xenogenesis series, in which a brand new society is being created, and the characters often wonder how they fit into it.
- 9.
As Adele Newson (1989) notes in zher review of Dawn, the narrative “[s]ubstitue[s] blacks for fellow humans and whites for captors and the parallel [is] clear” (391).
- 10.
The novella originally ran in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in May 1995. It was republished in chapbook form by Aqueduct Press in 2008.
- 11.
Lai’s novel draws from (or parallels) Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” in a number of ways. Here, the manufactured laborers fit into Haraway’s informatics of domination, as does the Sonia’s response to it. They “reject any assumption of Western domination” (Morris 90).
- 12.
Here, the laborers parallel Haraway’s “homework economy.”
- 13.
For more on the connections between Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein, and Eldon Tyrell, see Ritch Calvin, “Reading the Modern Myth” (1999).
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Calvin, R. (2016). Chapter Two The First Mode of FESF: Epistemology and Plot. In: Feminist Science Fiction and Feminist Epistemology. Studies in Global Science Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32470-8_3
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