Todd Suomela's List: Radical SF

The argument of the piece (discounting some broader sociological claims) goes something like this. We are seeing a hybridization of Genre (i.e. SF, or as Kunkel calls it, ‘sci fi’) and Literature around a small set of shared tropes, which is a Very Bad Thing, because it vitiates Literature’s fascination with the complexity of the individual, and turns Literary Fiction into a higher class of potboiler.

What happened in the world of Science Fiction between 1970 and 1980? There are 30 hotlinks here to authors, magazines, films, or television items elsewhere in the Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide or beyond.

The book's divided in four sections. The first one, Stimuli, brings fiction from the forefathers of the New Weird. The second part, Evidence, is dedicated to the weirdos themselves: fiction by China Miéville, Jay Lake, Steph Swainston, etc. The third, Symposium, brings the original electronic discussion that ignited the whole thing back in 2003, plus articles by Michael Cisco, K.J. Bishop and European editors' interpretations of the term. Finally, in Laboratory, seven authors on the fringe of New Weird share their visions about it in fiction form.

That Only a Feminist: Reflections on Women, Feminism and Science Fiction, 1818-1960, 2002 by L. Timmel Ducamp

Welcome! This blog is a forum for discussing all things Aqueductian. Conversation, of course, is one of our themes, derived from the notion of feminist sf as a conversation, as explored in "For a Genealogy of Feminist SF: Reflections on Women, Feminism, and Science Fiction, 1818-1960" (reprinted in The Grand Conversation, Vol. 1 of the Conversation Pieces series and available online as an essay titled "That Only A Feminist"). So please do comment freely and often, and if you're interested in making a guest post, write to conversation@aqueductpress.com.

In writing Native Tongue I tried to set out a number of those measures for the reader. The incidents that you mention in your question were examples. There are the legislative methods for subjugation and oppression, as in the two Constitutional changes; there are the medical methods, as in the denial of money for breast reconstruction. Those were far more effective methods-- and far more likely to be permanent methods -- for keeping women down than physical violence could ever be. With physical violence, there comes a day when the victims turn on the oppressors because there's nothing left to lose and nothing could be worse than the status quo; it can take many many years for that to happen, but it always does. The nonviolent methods are quite a different matter, and far more effective; much of the time, the victims don't even notice what's happening.

book review by L. Timmel Duchamp

What is it about science fiction? Why are there so many left-wing science fiction novels? Why does science fiction stay so disreputable no matter how many "literary" writers--Margaret Atwood, Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin--publish science fiction novels? What does science fiction do?