There is a short story which could be looked at as a “prequel” of sorts to Handmaid, but serves mainly as a warning about the possibility of a theocracy taking over the US.  “Asylum” by Katherine Kerr, written in 1994.  AFAIK, it is only available in an anthology, “the Years Best Science Fiction; The 12th Annual Collection”, edited by Gardner Dozois, 1995.

Margaret Atwood does not consider The Handmaid’s Tale science fiction, FYI.

Kurt Vonnegut, who does not consider Slaughterhouse Five science fiction, said “I have been a soreheaded occupant of the file drawer labeled science fiction ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” Presumably Margaret Atwood feels the same way.

FUCK! I can’t remember where I heard it, exactly.

But if it will make me sound any more convincing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryx_and_Crake

She doesn’t consider the very science fictiony Oryx and Crake science fiction because it doesn’t deal with things that haven’t been invented yet.

I don’t think anything in the Handmaid’s Tale hadn’t been invented yet, either, so….

My God, Goldberg is an idiot.

Mind you, Glenn Reynold’s pick actually makes a bit of sense.  Hard near-future sf is where we will be living in ten or twenty years time, and Vinge is good at information age issues.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Orange County trilogy would be useful, as well as his series about global warming.

It’s a bit dated, but Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron may be appropriate as well.

Different ideas show up in John Barnes’ Kaleidoscope Century and Mother of Storms and Charlie Stross’s Accelerando - not predictive, but speculative.

I was unduly tickled to be the token female in a question about science fiction.  On one hand, I’m not like a huge sci-fi geek or anything.

What’s with the disclaimer?  I’m totally into science fiction (well, urban fantasy mostly, though I’ve sampled lots of genres) and that doesn’t make me a geek.  It just means I like to read stories by people who push the boundaries of their imagination.  Lots of people love science fiction and don’t walk around with English-Klingon dictionaries.  Jesus.

No one picked Blade Runner?  That paints a rather grim future that we seem to be headed for now.

Vonnegut <u>never</u> impressed me, but I thought Atwood smarter than that.  Plenty of SF doesn’t involve “things not invented yet”.
::eyeroll::

Cyteen, by CJ Cherryh, is probably the most sophisticated political science fiction readily available.  Lady of Mazes, which I have mentioned before, has a great deal to deal with trying to understand political organization around our need to feel true to ourselves.  Richard Morgan’s novels all involve politics to some degree or other, but the novels, Thirteen (which is really Black Man, but, well, for obvious reasons, a different title was insisted on for the American release), and Market Forces both *specifically* explore politics in the context of dystopic forces.

One thing that has struck me as I formed my thoughts for responding to this post.  Science fiction, when looked at from a whole, is extremely hostile to the idea of democracy, and I have absorbed much of that hostility.  Which was an interesting insight for me.  Musing on that, I think that it has much to do with market forces.  Science fiction is, to some degree, about escapism, and it must make the invitation towards that escape.  Thus a key element is getting people to indulge in the lack of limits to their own visions.  Having to consider the opinions and needs of people that aren’t directly involved in your agenda tends to be a bummer. 

Another reason science fiction is hostile to democracy is that so many of these stories are essentially man vs society stories, most of which aren’t just made up conflicts to appeal to self-indulgence (e.g. Ender’s Game).  I have not read The Handmaid’s Tale since my high school teacher assigned me the book, but I’m pretty sure that’s another book of this type, in which democracy enforces the baseness of the masses.  Thinking on it, if Octavia Butler lived in the Marvel Universe, she would almost certainly be on Magneto’s side, at least without the villainous megalomania necessary for comics.  Almost all of her books are pretty firmly about the need to transcend humanity just to be human, just to live.  She wouldn’t have treated Doro with as much sympathy as a true monster can get, otherwise.  But it’s about changes for its own necessity’s sake, regardless of how the rest of humanity might feel.

On the other hand, Ken Mcleod writes from the cynicism of a former true-believer, as does Richard Morgan, I think.  They see the political situation as hopeless until the end of the days in which people with power believes that power comes out of the gun.  Thus they envision worlds in which political democracy withers and other systems garner support, both top-down and bottoms-up.  Nancy Kress also flows this way, but mostly about process in which humanity’s elite have truly arrived, and the lower classes can no longer wrest power back through the destruction of the infrastructure that supports wealth collection.

Science fiction in which democracy is functional, tends to be highly apolitical—space operas, exploration dramas, or something more situational like James Halperin’s The Truth Machine.  Of course, plenty of totalitarian and other dystopias available as well, but even authors who have a very optimistic view of people like Vernor Vinge tends to express democracy more as an anarchy rather than as democracy.  Rainbow’s End is about people employing the public decision-making power in order to manage the chaos of too many people having too much power to upset the carts, and it’s also about the increasing disfunction of secret services who are doing their best to hold everything together.  Peter Watts, who is pessimist, does the same in his Starfish universe.

Science fiction, the best of which, is about telling us about ourselves and our time.  I see through the multitude of author’s eyes, and I have so little faith that we can do what we truly need to do, collectively.  Peasants will munch on our bones, eventually, when we ascend too far from their homely asses.

Johanna Russ “Female Man” and Samuel Delany’s “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand” & the 2nd Neveryon novel. They are both overlooked by both sides of the genre gap. Especially Russ, and she’s brilliant.

Oh god, why did I have to read that link?

First of all, jonah, it’s pretty damn clear the Glory is the hell-goddess to respect.  Second, Joss Whedon never really did a great job on some aspects of this angle, even tho’ I’m in the luv Angel S4 column.  Let’s not go there with obvious crap aspect of your opinion.

Second, could Glen Reynold misunderstand Rainbows End any more?  GAH!!!!!!!!

Lastly, and I freakin’ hate this about all of these polls.  Most of these books are O.L.D.  Just two relatively new books and Amanda’s suggestion isn’t *that* new.  Wall-E and Angel S4, I’ll just politely ignore since those people were fools.

Good lord, Goldberg…Glory’s blackness had nothing to do with that character.  Any beautiful charismatic actress could have been cast in the part. What would Goldberg have said if one of the other actresses from Firefly had been cast instead of Gina Torres?

Amanda -

Here is a link to where I read Atwood saying The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t science fiction.  This interview is published in the back of my copy of the book.

http://www.randomhouse.com/resources/bookgroup/handmaidstale_bgc.html#interview

Anything by Octavia Butler would be on my list.  I think especially Kindred would be good election reading because of the sheer impossibility of her situation, navigating hundreds of years of race relations and traumatic family history.

It’s a wonder Goldberg didn’t latch onto Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold, it seems like the perfect example of the future he fears.

BTW the shorter original version of Ender’s Game that was published in Analog magazine is a damn good story devoid of Card’s subsequent batshittery. One of the best SciFi stories ever and I say this as one who worships at the grave of Stanislaw Lem.

But Atwood, Handmaid is set in the future but is more dystopian than sci-fi. Everyone should be able to understand that.

Sci-fi is about aliens and spaceships?

I think you could easily classify Brave New World as science fiction, so I think Atwood’s definition is a bit off.  Although The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t foreground science, really.  I mean, IIRC, the fundies manage to freeze all women’s bank accounts and the like, but as I recall, that’s about it as far as fancy technological/scientific stuff goes.  Gilead tends to reject technology more than advance it (for example, it’s forbidden to mention that a man can be sterile).

Jonah Goldberg picked “Angel” in no small part because an evil character on there was played by a black actor, which caused him all sorts of immediate associations.

Oh my god, and I thought Amanda was just being snarky.  He really said it!  What a fucking tool.

The Handmaid’s Tale was assigned reading my junior year of high school, and such was my unfamiliarity with the foibles of fundamentalist christianity (and my unexamined privilege re: the patriarchy) that I completely didn’t get it. Or I got it as sci-fi, but not as allegory. And I didn’t think it was very good sci-fi.

I need to read it again; I keep meaning to.

Alas, Atwood’s the Handmaid’s Tale is perennially relevant, so long as the Christian Right’s bizarre misogyny continues its dominance over the Republican party. If anything, this is one of the more hopeful elections (once Obama wins in an electoral landslide, natch*), as we watch Sarah Palin’s brand of fecund slavery become ever less influential over the majority of the U.S. population.

As far as Atwood’s disavowal of the “sci fi” nature of her work is, it is, in my opinion, more in the nature of a marketing declaration, rather than an honest appraisal of the novels. Oryx and Crake, for instance, cannot really be mistaken as anything other than science fiction. Alas, a scifi label dumps you into a different shelf in the book stores: one that many authors (see, e.g., Cormac McCarthy**) are loathe to see their titles.

Finally, as a side note, you don’t have a women’s studies degree? How disappointing! And here I was, thinking you were qualified to comment on “women’s issues”! Heh.

*Not to take it for granted, of course: continue to phone bank, knock on doors, etc. etc.
**Speaking of the science fiction work most relevant to the current election . . . !

L. Timmel Duchamp.  Atwood and Pohl are great suggestions.  Butler’s Parable of the Sower predicted the horrors of Shock Doctrine neoliberalism before most Americans understood it; Delany’s Trouble on Triton, written so he could address the question of why entitled white men are so crazy, is the seminal analysis of a Nice Guy.

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Quite apart from its obvious relevance to and reference to the culture wars in the US, The Handmaidens Tale has a special place in my fairly large collection of sci fi books on its literary merits alone.

Years back I used to read enormous amounts of “Golden Age” sci-fi. Asimov, Blish, Clarke, et al. When I moved in with an art teacher and literary critic he hammered my taste in books constantly and foisted authors like Bukowski, Mailer, Nin, Miller, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Burgess and Vidal on me.

With the sensibility that created, I can’t read more than 3-4 pages of an Asimov short story now without being so appalled at the poor quality of the writing. The paper-thin characters, poorly conceived periphery detail and clumsy sentence construction prevents the immersion that makes reading books so enjoyable. Many once-cherished authors come across as geeky hacks.

It seems like contemporary sci-fi grew out of a literary tradition that valued some kind of Central Innovative Idea over just about everything else - all that other stuff like elegant sentence construction, character depth, measured pace and so on. And although the general quality of the sci-fi writing has improved significantly since the 50’s, there’s still a bias that gives high concept precedence over all other considerations.

Put simply, many much loved sci-fi novels would be considered sub-standard literature if their stories were somehow translated into a non-sci-fi context, on the strength of their other merits. Its still relatively rare to find a sci fi author that you can clearly see is capable of above-par writing with or without novel concepts. And Atwood shines in this respect.

I meant to post as “Farren” above, since that’s my name, but the browser autocomplete put in the last pseudonym used

Someone already mentioned it, but I’d say Octavia Butler’s, “Parable of the Sower”, (& its sequel, “Parable of the Talents”), for a consideration of how things could actually get here.

Science fiction, when looked at from a whole, is extremely hostile to the idea of democracy, and I have absorbed much of that hostility.

I discovered the American twist to this when I went back and re-read Poul Anderson’s The Boat of a Million Years:  American sci-fi was heavily influenced outright by the Libertarian Party (see the Prometheus Award).  I had loved that book about ten years ago, but on re-reading it the political overtones just got annoying.  Going back through my collection I found quite a few titles that deserved a dumping at the used bookstore.  OTOH, I do appreciate my Asimov and Clarke more, as they are often about an Everyman put into a weird technological / mysterious situation and not some political diatribe masked as escapism.

But I do agree with DisappointedMale—I’ve seen no sci-fi ever that has matched the level of say Middlemarch.

Um, any love for vintage Heinlein?  I think the title was “If This Goes On - ” and it described an America in the future where people were too apathetic to vote in order to prevent the ‘Prophet’ Nehemiah Scudder from becoming President.  America became a dictatorial theocracy (is there any other kind?) and it required a Second Revolution to defeat it.

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I recall reading Clarke’s “Cradle” immediately after reading Bukowski’s “Ham on Rye” and had to put the book down on encountering a hopeless description of a romantic moment between two of the characters.  Even accepting that the two characters were scientists and might be convincingly portrayed as serious-minded scholars awkwardly feeling their way through the situation, Clarke’s description was almost comically inept, as if the author himself didn’t have sufficient insight to render other scientists who are awkward in love.

Encountering that shortly after enjoying the visceral, even brutal at times, but undeniably _real_ sexual interactions of Bukowski’s low-brow characters absolutely ruined the book for me. What fascinates me is that Clarke is able to write with an compelling, engaging passion about sophisticated alien starships that can re-assemble themselves in a hundred different ways, but seems incapable of describing even a brief romantic interlude between two humans with any realism.

It reminds me of a friend of my youth, a brilliant physics student who was offered posts at Brown University and CERN on graduation and purportedly was working with math only one other person here in South Africa really understood. We had a conversation one night when he was deep in his cups because his girlfriend (an engineer) broke up with him after he ascribed his emotional distance to “non trivial” issues (a language habit picked up from avoiding hyperbole in the interests of scientific rigor) he was experiencing. In the drunken conversation that followed he said the quest to unlock the most fundamental secrets of the universe had made everything else seem trivial by comparison. Announcements of births in the family, cute puppies and marriages, he said, did not elicit even the slightest tingle of excitement, empathic happiness or even interest. In fact when family members carried on about such things it was like chickens clucking. He knew something was broken, but he didn’t know how to fix it.

I get the sense that writers like Clarke are writing from a similar space.

Jo Walton’s Farthing (link to first chapters)  is a tale showing the insidious creep of fascism wrapped inside a country-house murder mystery.  The more you read on, the more the contemporary relevance hits.

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And once again, Jonah cannot classify a darned thing.  Angel is fantasy, not science fiction.  The man has a complete aversion to calling anything by its correct larger group.  I suppose we should all be thrilled he’s not a zoologist or somesuch, because he’d wind up writing a paper on how a lion is a reptile.

It’s a really good question, though, and I’d have liked to have seen more depth.  SF (and to a lesser extent fantasy) really is the art of the possible.  (And what unforeseen issues can arise from it.)

“BTW, I hope there’s a special hell just for blog spammers”
I guess it would be an infinite department store where the only speech they’re capable of is the text of the spams they posted.

I listened to the audio book version.
http://www.amazon.com/Handmaids-Tale-Margaret-Atwood/dp/0864923414/ref=ed_oe_a
Chilling.

“No one picked Blade Runner?  That paints a rather grim future that we seem to be headed for now.”
If one picked something by PKD, I’d say “A Scanner Darkly” or “The man in the high castle” would be a better choice. The somewhat accurate, if spaced out, portrayal of the real purpose of the “war on drugs” and the odd similarities between the manipulative upper middle class of post-9/11 USA and the colonial Japanese of PKD’s conquered pacifist nation both seem more pertinent to me.
I’ve not read Electric Sheep, though, I must admit.

Unfortunately, good authors are forced to disavow any connection with sf (or “science fiction” but please no “sci-fi” thx) because the moment you cop to it, your book is ghettoized—assimilated to the mass of submoronic swords-n-sorcery, ray-guns-n-jet-packs dreck. (Or even worse—anthropmorphic animals and talking wizard-dragons and such. Horrors. )

At most you might admit to “speculative fiction.” That’s if you want to sell serious literature to the serious kids in the black t-shirts and horn rimmed glasses (or whatever hipsters/humanities grad students wear now).

I want to put in a good word for _Oryx & Crake_, which seems to have passed without the critical or popular acclaim it deserves. As with _Handmaid’s Tale_, it is not hard to imagine a catastrophic near-future Atwood describes in O&C;.

_Surfacing_ is my favorite; that and _Cat’s Eye_ may be her best.

Much as I love Pandagonia, it’s looking to me like most of us here are not and have never been into science fiction as such. Not that there is anything wrong with that. For that matter, these days I pretty much turn up my nose at 99 percent of what I see offered as SF on the bookshelves and spend damn little time rereading old classics. Maybe I’ve finally outgrown it?

But the point of SF makes a lot of criticisms, valid in the context of other forms of literature, of the thin characterization etc irrelevant.

What isn’t irrelevant is the reactionary allegience that even quite progressive SF writers get drawn into, and that the genre as a whole tends to revel in.

The exciting, good part of science fiction is the ability to set the wheels spinning about the basic ground rules of reality, and what distinguishes “science” fiction from the larger genre of fantasy is the impression of plausibility—that somehow a particular fantasy is grounded not in human tradition but some hitherto unappreciated aspect of reality itself that takes us humans by surprise. Given this freewheeling nature and the implied assertion that it is reality itself we are playing with and exploring, it is ominous, though not too surprising given a realistic perception of the nature of modern culture in general and America’s in particular (and as a whole, SF generally has been and remains a largely American phenomenon), that with all this free play the roulette ball tends to land in all too familiar territory, in social terms.

Nevertheless, good SF, even by openly reactionary authors, is subversive.

As an adult, when I read SF I tend to favor CJ Cherryh, because she tends to write about the engagement of radically different world-views.

Cyteen, by the way, while a very good novel and fascinating in its Byzantine politics and the relation of those politics to character and provocatively plausible theories of human motivation, always reads to me as very much a novel of the 1980s. I suppose that her “Foreigner” series, written over the 1990s, will eventually seem just as time-bound—not so much “dated,” as clearly a dialog with the author’s times. A great favorite of mine remains her “Chanur” stories, and as these deal with gender issues with a twist (the leonine Hani have a society that is formally ultra-patriarchial but really one of female rather than male privilege, and the long series explores the evolution of one family’s embrace of male liberation…) I expect they will remain less situatued in a particular authorial time-frame.

But the most subversive book of Cherryh’s I’ve read is Wave Without a Shore, which unlike these blockbuster serials is a very short novel.

Even more than Cherryh, I think the most deeply subversive and reliable author who is comfortable being shelved in the SF section is Ursula LeGuin. LeGuin blew my mind when I was in Jr HS with The Dispossessed, then when I thought I was all liberated and hip in my early 20’s she did it again with Always Coming Home.

Again though—one of her greatest and perhaps least ballyhooed books is quite short and unconnected with the baggage of “series” or “future histories,” fun as that can be—The Lathe of Heaven.

If I understand the purpose of “what SF should you read ‘before the election,’” it is didactic somehow. Well, when most SF authors get didactic they do so on the wrong side, and the good ones, even the avowed reactionaries, always understood it just doesn’t work that way, writing as polemic. That’s why so many of these recommendations would either be right-wing (on threads elsewhere) or are peripheral to the world of science fiction as such.

But I recommend Lathe to anyone who hasn’t read it yet, any time. And yes, in its Zen-Taoist way, I think it is dead on relevant to the current political situation

@shah8

I’m never sure whether the futures envisioned by sci-fi authors and the solutions (if any) offered for any hypothesised social ills are a reflection of the author’s politics or simply a vehicle for generating a plot. I think a fair number of authors dream up societies that tell us nothing about their views on the present.

On the other hand, its fairly obvious that works like The Handmaidens Tale and Animal Farm are constructed around contemporary political and social positions and concerns. And sometimes one’s own strongly held ideals can spoil an otherwise enjoyable author when the penny drops.

But what’s interesting is how often we enjoy in fiction what we disagree with in the real world. I know I like stories about anarchists, rational or not, because, hey, who doesn’t at some level want to abrogate any and all responsibility for the greater good and just do their own thing?

All of which said, I suspect there might be a slight statistical bias among sci-fi authors to consider the mass of humanity somehow inferior, for the reasons hinted at in my earlier post about very sci-, rather than people-focused authors.

I’m surprised that no one picked Parable of the Sower or, more pertinently, Parable of the Talents, by the late Octavia Butler. She rocked the house with those two, and did a lot less hand-wringing over being classified as an sf writer. Of course, when you’re a hugely tall reclusive black queer woman with a MacArthur Fellowship, you pick your battles (and tend to win them).
The genre-hairsplitting is funny, to me, because I too am getting my fancy degree by writing about stuff that, to many people including me, makes me a science fiction geek. I expect some hairsplitting from the Insufferable Music Snob-types, because it comes from a certain intimate and hard-won (and snobby) familiarity with the obscure. But the rest of us should simmer down—blogging is nerdy, we’re all latte-sipping, blog-reading nerds. Hell, Governor Palin doesn’t even read magazines, according to the Couric interview. Have a latte and enjoy the ride, elitists.

“Put simply, many much loved sci-fi novels would be considered sub-standard literature if their stories were somehow translated into a non-sci-fi context, on the strength of their other merits. Its still relatively rare to find a sci fi author that you can clearly see is capable of above-par writing with or without novel concepts. And Atwood shines in this respect. “

Take a look at Iain M Banks. Not read him (save a short excerpt which was lurid and creative but did not involve humanoid sentient beings, making quality of characterization hard to assess) but have had him recommended as an SF author whose characters have depth. You need the M if you want SF.

http://www.iain-banks.net/science-fiction/feersum-endjinn/ is meant to be good, though is written in Scottish dialect in part.

Foxwell—I second your endorsement of _Lathe_. Still a sentimental favorite. I even like the movie version, early synthesizer soundtrack and all. I wouldn’t mind a future of decentralized politics, extreme technological and cultural eclecticism, and wise, friendly space aliens.

Oh, and another recommendation not really related to the list in the OP. I recently read Ursula le Guin’s “Left Hand of Darkness”. I really liked it. I got the impression it’s not her greatest work, but I found it utterly absorbing for some reason. I mention it because the whole book is a meditation on the origins of gender politics.

“All of which said, I suspect there might be a slight statistical bias among sci-fi authors to consider the mass of humanity somehow inferior”

You may want to read more sci-fi especially the anthology books in which the writer talks decades or years later about his work.

Heinlein, Piers Anthony are quite vocal of what they had to put up with from editors and publishers if they had black characters as heroes or any black characters at all. Sci-fi authors didn’t concentrate on the human relationship element because guess what that wasn’t what the readers wanted. 

“In fact when family members carried on about such things it was like chickens clucking. “

That is because it is like chickens clucking. It’s like having teenage girls talk to each other over the telephone 99% of it is each other repeating the other’s words. An hour long conservation in reality only boils down to two minutes of meaningfull conversation.

As for the critic you may ask yourself why it is that such people as literary critic proclaim authors to be worthy of reading yet when presented with the author’s work with just a few characters changed reject the books as being unsaleable and heap the same criticisms as they did on your sci-fi works. There have been a number of such tests over the years and the supposed great works all get rejected by the critics and publishers.

@me and MikeEss

I’m doing a PKD marathon at the moment and its hard work. Its decades since I read Dick and it seemed like a good idea when I last visited the bookstore to pick up three or four of his books (Maze of Death, The Game Players of Titan ... I’ve forgotten what the other two titles are).

I must admit I bought them on the basis of all the movies based on his work rather than any memory of his writing (Scanner Darkly, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report). Having finished Maze of Death, I’m not sure I’ll have the enthusiasm to finish The Game Players of Titan. The movie versions owe a lot to the talented writers who turned the books into screenplays.

One thing that really, really, really grates me is that PKD, for all his great concepts, still projects conservative social values into the future as if there has been no trajectory of change in the recent past. The personalities and roles of his male and female characters reflect a mindset that is seemingly oblivious to feminism. For such an otherwise imaginative author, writing in the 60’s and 70’s, to write this way, it strikes me that he must have been either willfully ignorant of the trends around him or outright hostile towards them.

The contrast between the implicit values in the work of PDK and, for instance, the ultra-free, ultra-relative values in Iain M Banks’ Culture novels and other contemporary sci fi authors, is striking, to the detriment of the former.

@me

I’ve read practically everything Banks has written (including all his non-sci fi stuff) - see my last comment. He’s an excellent writer with an extraordinary imagination. I think “Feersum Enjin”, though difficult reading (everything’s spelled phonetically) is my favorite.

Farren. Sure. IMO, PKD was writing about the 40s and 50s, and occasionally what he saw around him in the 60s and 70s (even when he was writing in the 80s). He was drug addled, paranoid and mentally ill. The merit in his books mostly comes from the encompassing vision, visceral insight into the operation of mind, imagination and expectation and the lurid immediacy of descriptions, not delicately resonant prose or forward looking social commentary.

@tootiredoftheright

I have read an extraordinary amount of sci fi. I’m also a stereotypical computer programmer geek who decided to spend a few years living in Bohemia, meeting as many poets, painters, et al as possible and avoiding computers altogether, to develop the human intuitions I realised I was clearly lacking.

And my friend convinced me of the obvious inferiority of that so-called Golden Age sci-fi only by providing contrasting examples. The remaining insight (that the author’s in question clearly had the same empathy deficit I’d recognised in myself) came from me. The authors in question seem to me to be obvious far to left brain and lacking a lot of understanding of other human beings.

The “chickens clucking” thing I also understand, but I disagree with the inferences you seem to have drawn from it. A common mistake among the overly left-brained is to assume the only point of speech is the communication of facts. Its not

Like much of Dick’s work (in my experience). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is best read for the fascinating ideas he presents, rather than the quality of the writing itself.  In many ways Blade Runner is a much better telling of the story, although it is still problematic in several respects.

I saw the movie first and while I liked it, after reading the book I was disappointed that the movie left out all the interesting ideas. I agree that generally you read Dick for his ideas, this is true of lots of genre fiction largely because the books were written quickly, for a living, at per-word rates. Dick generally has some great ideas but the novels aren’t as fully developed as literary novels usually are. The later stuff is better but it’s also more far-out.

I’m not really an SF fan, I love Dick and Lem and there are some other novels here and there which I like but in general I find the genre a turn-off. I discovered Jonathan Lethem because his books were next to Stanislaw Lem’s on the shelf but I imagine he was glad to graduate from the scifi and mystery sections to the fiction shelf.

My pick for Dick novel most relevant to the election would be The Penultimate Truth where a conspiracy of “Yance-men” fronted by a computer simulacrum president convinces the population of “Wes-Dem” that World War III is still going on while they’re stuck living in underground cities.

John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up or Stand on Zanzibar would be apropos as well, if anyone’s still worried about the environment.

@me: actually the Left Hand of Darkness strikes me as more relevant than you might think.  I’ve never sat down and actually analyzed the book, but she asks some very interesting questions about what exactly it means to love one’s country and how rigid gender roles play into politics and war.

The introduction, where she gets very grumpy with some readers who completely missed the point of the book, is also a very good primer on what science fiction/speculative fiction is really all about at its best: like fiction in general at its best, it’s a thought-experiment that uses imaginative elements to say something to and about us here and now.  Handmaid’s Tale is definitely SF under that definition, although personally I found it so heavy-handed it was difficult to finish (although that was years and years ago, and I should probably give it another try).

Glad to see at least one shout out for LeGuin. Who, by the way, has done many essays on the anti-democratic nature of much sci fi.  Left Hand of Darkness is one of her better works, in my opinion, but I think she really shines in the novella/short story category. As a short story I cannot over-recommend “The Matter of Seggri” which is one of the more funny, tragic, and moving condemnations of sexism—in this case, on a planet dominated by women—that I have ever read.

Butler was a wonderfully vital writer, but the way she looks at brutality so head-on is devastating—you know she’s absolutely right, but it’s hard (for me) to re-read her often, because I have a hard time staying distant from the things being done to her characters.

I got the impression it’s not her greatest work, but I found it utterly absorbing for some reason. Me, Michael Dirda, the eponymous book critic at the Washington Post would disagree. He considers it a masterpiece. So would John Updike, who wrote that Ursula K. LeGuin should be considered one of America’s greatest writers, not just scifi writers, based on that book and some of her short stories.

I’m surprised that on a feminist site, no one has mentioned Sherri Tepper. Gate to Women’s Country is a must read. So is Grass.

I want to put in a good word for _Oryx & Crake_, which seems to have passed without the critical or popular acclaim it deserves.

I’ve read it but didn’t think it was that great… Some reviewers have made the point that Atwood is actually doing rather clichéd sf and some familiarity with the genre might have helped avoid the worst pitfalls. (And “New New York” doesn’t sound edgy after they did it on Futurama, for crying out loud)

The interplay of the characters in Oryx & Crake reminds me somehow of M John Harrison’s Signs of Life, which I thought was a much subtler and better near-future genetic-engineering story.

Guys, that’s not Glory, that’s Jasmine.  Glory is a character from “Buffy,” and a blonde, blue-eyed, white character at that.  You were confusing the hell out of me until I went to the link.

And, no, I’m not surprised that the only message Jonah got from that character was “Black people is evil!” and not, say, “What price would we be willing to pay for world peace?”

Joss Whedon does have a bit of a libertarian streak (see “Firefly”/Serenity), but it’s definitely a left-leaning one, so the whole question of free will in the Jasmine story was what interested him.

I vote for Them.  I read it the summer before 7th grade.  Think 1984 on steroids.

For entertainment, I like scifi (as I’ve been reading it for decades, I’ll stick with that label thanks).  Specifically, Bujold, Ringo, Moon and a few others.  A lot of the newer stuff is just horrible junk, but so was much of the older stuff.

I think some of you are misinterpreting what Vonnegut was saying-he was protesting being labelled science fiction because critics tend to piss all over the genre, and he really wasn’t into that kind of…quirk. He wasn’t saying there was anythong wrong with SF. Also-Slaughterhouse Five is SF? I…totally didn’t get that at all. I suppose I should go back and reread it, though it wasn’t particularly memorable the first time.

I read a lot of SF and Fantasy, and the vast majority of it is written by women-for a very good reason. They tend to get more into the characters, the relationships-in other words, they seem better able to wrap a STORY around their brilliant ideas.

I’m going to put in my two cents for Sheri S. Tepper, particularly The Gate to Women’s Country, James Tiptree Jr.‘s short story ‘Houston, Houston, Do you Read?, and Katherine V. Forrest’s Daughters of a Coral Dawn, and Daughters of an Amber Noon*. They serve to remind violent, misogynist men that we can do quite well without them.

*Don’t, for the love of your preferred deity or deities, read Daughters of an Emerald Dusk. It just RUINS the awesomeness of the first two books.

The HBO series “Masters of Horror” adapted James Tiptree Jr.‘s short story “The Screwfly Solution”, which is a creepy patriarchy-gone-wild story about human extinction coming by way of pervasive misogyny.

The story can be found at http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/sheldon/sheldon1.html
Personally, I think the TV adaptation actually works better in some ways.

For those of you who aren’t SF fans, James Tiptree Jr, nee Alice Sheldon, was one of the first women to write SF, and often wrote on feminist themes and gender issues.

One point I do have to make with Octavia Butler.  She’s not precisely a soft-core sci-fi author.  She’s hard science fiction, but the hardness had to do with power-relationships.  Much like LeGuin’s more hard-core work.  Anyways, however as good the Sower duology is, those are books you really shouldn’t start with.  You should start with the 1985 short story “Bloodchild”.  Sci-fi/horror, but it is so smashingly true that it’s really a better work to introduce (especially guys) people to feminist science fiction than Atwood or Tepper.  Much better than Atwood’s classic in terms of plot (what I remember of it, some of which was wrong as pointed out above).  All you have to do is accept a premise, which is very believable, and everything flows from there.  Also, have fun comparing it to the obvious movie that it mirrors.  Anyways, the point is that it’s really easy to miss what Octavia *really* does, if you’re not familiar with her work, and Parables is very concentrated about the nature of power and people’s relationship with it.  The Wild Seed trilogy is so much comic book/gothic fun (what Heroes should be—but which would utterly terrify the whitebread sort), and the Xenogenesis trilogy is more sophisticated and sexual, even for Butler.

My fault on the Glory/Jasmine confusion.  I was trying to say that Glory was a better hell-goddess than Jasmine.  Also Glory was a character that with a few mods, got really badass in my imagination.  A hellgoddess Nike would be so many worlds of awesome…

I really hate Sherri S. Tepper.  I think she’s a ghetto-feminist writer who can’t hold a candle to others who are more deserving of attention, like Marge Piercy.  I’d even read Melanie Rawn!  By the way, Melanie (may I call you Melanie?)...don’t write another fucking book until you finish that final fucking book in the Exiles trilogy.  I don’t care if you post some stupid cliffnotes with a big THE END to it, but FINISH IT!  It’s been 14 years already and people are *STILL* waiting!!!!  Leaving a clifthanger going on forever is just so nasty!
/me breathes heavily

and yes, I’m deeply, deeply pissed that Octavia Butler had to die, especially after writing the first of what probably would have been another very satisfying set of reads.

I loved the Handmaid’s Tale- I got to read it and write a report on it in advanced English class in 10th grade (I think- but I am old so it could have been 11th). It’s a life-changing and perspective changing book-especially for those of us who have been fortunate enough to grow up with Roe always in place.
It’s been a book that I bring up to people who think that the right to choose isn’t important- it is- it’s one of the cornerstones to women’s rights in this country IMHO. And one that, like many women’s rights, is in constant peril.

There’s another really interesting sci-fi book that I discovered a few years ago- so far I’ve only been able to find the first of the trilogy at the Seattle Public Library- Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin.

There are a lot of elements of Handmaid’s Tale in it- women are only prized for their “abilities” and completely servile the rest of the time. I tend to think that it was inspired by Handmaid’s Tale since I think it was written afterward (I could be wrong).

I highly recommend this one Amanda!

Glad to see at least one shout out for LeGuin. Who, by the way, has done many essays on the anti-democratic nature of much sci fi.

Her non-fiction is a joy to read.  I particularly love how willing she is to re-examine her own previous positions and work - she has another essay looking back on Left Hand of Darkness where she says that not including homosexuality in the Gethenian culture was an oversight that she regrets very much. 

And although it’s totally unrelated I have to say that her opinion of C.S. Lewis vs. Tolkien made me do a little happy dance.

Testing because this is the second time posting from my home machine that it just hasn’t registered the comment

I had a problem with both Native Tongue (and its sequels) and some of Sheri Tepper’s work, in that they really kind of go overboard with “women good, men bad.” In Native Tongue, a supposed “scientific discovery” that women are intellectually inferior to men leads to two hundred years of extreme patriarchy despite high technology, but since she’s obviously making the point that women *aren’t* inferior to men, the notion that “science” would be allowed to support that belief for two hundred years in a highly technologically advanced culture seems to me to miss the difference between science and religion; people are *always* rechecking the facts in science, because you make your name by disproving the people who have come before you. So you can have egregious examples of sexism or racism or any ism in science, but they don’t *stay*. Some young turk would have come along to make a name for himself by “proving” that women are just as smart as men just *because* it would totally upend their society and scientists like to do that shit. But no—because women aren’t allowed to be scientists, no scientist could possibly want to disprove the central, egregiously wrong, “fact” of their society. Also, “all languages are invented by men”, so when a language is invented by women it magically becomes a wonderful tool that promotes peace, love and understanding. Because the fact that women are the ones who talk to the people who acquire language in the first place cannot possibly imply that women have any role in inventing language themselves, no.

Sheri Tepper has been known to basically say that a man’s desire to know who is his biological father, or his biological child, is the root of all evil. Seriously. That was the point of one of her books. She thinks that men explicitly want to have sex with virgins because it’s painful for the virgins, that up to 50% of all people are born sociopathic (or at the very least you can have a “sociopath gene” that makes half of all the children in a particular family selfish monsters for no good reason), and that a society that segregates men from women could get away with having, and possibly should have, all children *actually* be fathered by the tiny percentage of men who are not lured by the glorification of war and who choose to spend their lives “serving” women instead. She can be seriously misandrist sometimes.

On the other hand, Tepper *does* have some great stuff—like the bug aliens who need to implant their young in hosts, but are highly ethical and normally always ask permission. Except when they get to Earth, they see perfect hosts—middle-aged human males—who believe so strongly in the sanctity of unborn sentient life that they believe women should not be allowed to have abortions, and they take from this that of course these men would agree to be hosts for their young, since they believe in the sanctity of life so strongly, so they implant essentially the entire Republican party with bug alien babies that cause excruciating pain to the hosts upon removal. And some of her horror rings painfully accurately, like the planet where the old men find out that murdering young women can make them live forever, so they kill off male babies (who would otherwise compete for the young women), marry the young women, isolate them from family who’d care, and kill them.

I loved Native Tongue when I was a radfem teenager, but I can’t get past the plot holes anymore; Tepper is more uneven for me in that I often still do love her and yet want to whack her over the head to rein her in when she gets ridiculous, which is often.

For feminist science fiction, I used to love Vonda McIntyre—haven’t read her in years, so I don’t know if she’s dated or not, but she speculates on futures where everyone uses biocontrol to manage their own fertility, and feminism is fully realized—people just assume that men and women are equals. I found that much more compelling as a child and young woman than the kind of feminist SF that’s all about how awful it is when men dominate women; it said it was possible to imagine a world where that isn’t the case.

Joan Slonczewski.  Srsly.

Another ditto for Left Hand of Darkness. Also the Gate to Women’s Country, although I find the government espoused in the book to be…well, sketchy. (To be fair to Tepper, she notes that those in power have issues with it themselves.) It’s a good read anyways.

Also, this is fantasy but since fantasy and science fiction hang out under the ginormous speculative fiction umbrella, I’m adding it anyways. Terry Pratchett’s Jingo and Monstrous Regiment are his two books about war. Monstrous Regiment takes on sexism as well, and was the one I was initially thinking of recommending since I’m in the process of re-reading it for the zillionth time. Jingo is actually my favourite, but I think some will find the intersection of war and feminism in Monstrous Regiment more interesting. It’s also a better place to start if you’ve never been introduced to the Discworld books before, as it’s one of the semi-stand-alones. The main character was raised in a fundamentalist theocracy wherein the local god/religion keeps adding more and more restrictive rules for people to live by. Meanwhile the country is at war with EVERY other country it can possibly be at war with, because after all, they are God’s chosen people and the other countries are wrong wrong wrong about everything. (Sound familiar?) Terry Pratchett writes humourously and touchingly about war, sexism, religion, and trying to keep your family together in the midst of the world’s upheaval.

Oh, and if you are looking for feminist SF, try Lois Bujold. Specifically try Ethan of Athos which is MADE of awesome—the main character is a guy coming from a planet of all men, that believes religiously-speaking that women are the vessel of iniquity. Needless to say once the poor boy ventures out into the universe he’s in for a bit of a shock.

Also Cordelia Vorkosigan, and her son, Miles, are two of my favourite characters EVER. You can read the two Cordelia books (wherein she kicks ass and takes names) in the omnibus Cordelia’s Honor, and the first of the Miles books is The Warrior’s Apprentice.

One of my favourite bits comes late in the series, when an off-planet scientist is impressed with Cordelia’s having been a survey captain for Beta Colony (the California of the universe and the most scientifically inclined system) and is going on about her qualifications. Somebody notes that on Barrayar (a patriarchal military inclined planet where Miles grew up) that isn’t what Cordelia is most known for. (She’s a countess by virtue of marriage.) And the scientist guy sniffs that women are wasted on Barrayar.

Also the series uses uterine replicators a lot. (Advocates note that it reduces the health burden on the mother.) Has a number of what I like to call Tiptree moments, where the prevailing expectation about gender roles is turned over.

Bujold is one of my favourite authors, right up there with the aforementioned Terry Pratchett.

Also Cordelia Vorkosigan, and her son, Miles, are two of my favourite characters EVER. You can read the two Cordelia books (wherein she kicks ass and takes names) in the omnibus Cordelia’s Honor, and the first of the Miles books is The Warrior’s Apprentice.

“You’re a Betan!  You can’t do—”

Heh.  I also love Bujold.  I was disappointed by Diplomatic Immunity, though—why did it seem like a good idea to suddenly make Ekaterin a wimpy, annoying, passive character?

My number one recommendation is not sci-fi, but an essay: George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (available online). 1984 needs to be reread every once in a while, if only to be reminded about The Memory Hole, Two Minute Hates, the language and class issues, and more. Yes, it is dated, but so? Zamyatin’s We is another classic dystopian novel, even more dated (5 years after the Russian Revolution).

Gwyneth Jones, White Queen series, much reflection on colonialism, gender, and more.

Mary Gentle, Witchbreed duo, devastating novel of politics, colonialism, gender, and outsiders’ ability to trigger a society’s destruction.

Stanislaw Lem, variety of themes, Futurological Conference comes to mind as apropos.

So far, everyone I have mentioned is foreign (3 British, 1 Russian, 1 Pole).

Everyone has mentioned Butler’s Parables, for good reason.

Native Tongue series had some interesting speculation about language, but a good bit of it was broad satire. Tepper’s works all seemed to me to be satires, and the quality is variable. By and large, her earlier work is better. Tepper was executive director of a Planned Parenthood for many years, so she’s had a gutful of men’s inhumanity to women.

Also-Slaughterhouse Five is SF? I…totally didn’t get that at all.

Well, it has time travel and aliens in it.

My memory of A Handmaid’s Tale is a little fuzzy, but one thing I do remember that really struck me at the time was Atwood’s implied critique of cultural relativism.  At the conclusion of the book and the conclusion of the historians’ listening to the handmaid’s story, they decide that they can’t judge what happened in the past as it was a different time and a different culture—which is a whole lot of bullshit whether you’re talking about history or current events.

I swear I only read Slaughterhouse Five a few years ago, so that goes to show you how utterly unmemorable it was for me-I forgot it had aliens!

As for Tepper, I wouldn’t want to assume that the stuff in her books is what she believes, unless she has actually said so. I tend to view her books as exaggerations of the way people feel/act. I’m straight, but I also consider men to be frequently…irrelevant. They just aren’t, as a gender, an important part of my life, though some, as individuals, are friends and relatives. I used to be a goddess-worshipping pagan, a Dianic Wiccan, so that may be part of it. I don’t see Tepper as being misandrist, I see it more as…not considering men to an important part of her worldview. I see it as a way of pointing out that men do not have to be at the centre of everything-our lives, or our stories. Men can be an afterthought, or not thought of at all. Does that make sense?

Oh, and word on the Marge Piercy-Woman on the Edge of Time was eye-opening, and Sex Wars quite deliciously pointed out the hypocrisy of moral crusaders.

I am not at all surprised that Jonah Goldberg a) thinks “Angel” is science fiction, and b) likes the worst season of it because it has an evil black character.  Anyway, if Jasmine is based on any real-life figure, it’s gotta be Oprah.  Lots of touchy-feely talk, gains absolute power with a nationwide TV broadcast, impervious to bullets…

When I moved in with an art teacher and literary critic he hammered my taste in books

I dated a guy like this once, except he was an artist AND a musician, which is like a many-layered douche cake. It’s really, really tiresome to have your taste constantly criticized.

I heart Bujold.  Although I have to agree with Mnemosyne…for some reason her female characters (Cordelia, Ekaterin) are dynamic and ass-kicking - UNTIL they get married, at which point the narrative still holds them in sky-high esteem but completely ceases to do anything interesting with them.  Very weird.

I’m glad that some-one pointed out the Glory-Jasmine disconnect.  Whew!  Gina Torres has been absolutely amazing in every single thing I’ve sen her in.  Her acting elevated some of the dumb-assery needed for the plot—not the worst season of Angel, but up there—to work.

I love Tepper’s early adult work (the young adult adult stuff she wrote early on isn’t bad, but it’s not great), but she went through an awful period (culminating in “Gibson’s Decline and Fall”).  She seems to be writing much better, not near so didactic lately.

LeGuin has a collection of longish stories (“The Birthday of the World”), most of which look at sex (and love) from a number of different angles.  The best 2 are set on O, the planet in “A Fisherman of the Inland Sea”, with 2 genders and 2 “modalities”, which makes coupling difficult, to say the least.  The language and stories are pretty graphic, especially for LeGuin, but “Unchosen Love” is one of the best SF stories EVAH!

In the LeGuin pantheon I’d like to add Always Coming Home which might be useful for people thinking about a politics that isn’t entirely based on consumption.

Also a vote for Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage which is clumsy and dated but also very useful for fostering (among the archetypal sf-reading types) the notion that we are all bit players in one another’s dramas.

I think the antidemocratic streak in so much sf (including the space operas and such, where there’s an aristocracy or a kleptocracy or anything but a functioning democracy) is in significant part a result not only of the author/protagonist as uebermensch thing but also because it’s effing hard to write about democracies in ways that a) make the fact that they’re democracies important and b) aren’t intensely boring. Dictatorships and apocalypses and hereditary nobilities and blah blah blah are so much easier to use—it’s like Churchill said.

Ami: I sort of see your point, although I am going to point out that Cordelia kicks ass after marriage too. (Spoiler alert. I’m trying not to spoil major points about the books, but some minor plot points will show up based upon my analysis of the female roles.)

The events of Barrayar (the book, not the planet) are pretty much about her determination to not be dependant on males for action. She’s Bothari’s moral guide, Gregor’s foster parent, and without giving too much away, even goes up against Aral when push comes to shove on a particular issue. (Aral later says she was right, and backs her against his dad, who has issues with Cordelia’s non-traditional ways.)

And Elena continues to be a captain of a starship after marriage, ranking over her husband who is a technical officer. She figures prominently, along with Quinn and Taura in the books dealing with Mark.

Ekaterin is more problematic. I liked what Bujold did with her in Civil Campaign, but Diplomatic Immunity didn’t utilize her enough, I think. And even when women do choose wifehood, Bujold is careful to show that it’s not the be-all and end-all. (Look at the relationship between Kudelka and Dru. The bit in Civil Campaign where Dru’s explaining some hard truths about marriage to Kareen is interesting.) I do think Bujold’s characters accurately reflect the culture from whence they derive though…it’s not as common on Barrayar, for example, for women to pursue careers. Ekaterin’s aunt is viewed as an anomaly in the society they have. But the galaxy women, with more feminist standards, feel free to turn Miles down and to build their lives around their own choices. Both Quinn and Rowan are an example of this. (And I regard Elli as a major character, at least as major as Ekaterin. She just chose not to be “rewarded” with a man.)

Mind you, I still like Ekaterin’s character…I just want to see Bujold expand it.

I think what I like about Bujold is that her characters can choose to become wives or not, but they aren’t defined as wives. Some do. Some don’t. (Rowan and Quinn.) But for all women, there’s a diversity of roles in their societies. Both good and bad, minor and major characters, they are all given motivations which don’t necessarily always revolve around a guy.  Laisa is not just future Empress, but also a whiz at finance. Elli Quinn rises through the mercenary ranks because of her competence, not her looks. Ekaterin’s aunt holds down a job as a prominent historian at a university. Cordelia’s mother continues to publish in medical journals. (You see her briefly featured in one of Ethan’s medical journals in Ethan of Athos.)  Lily and Rowan Durona pretty much run an entire scientific team. Kareen wants to go to school to be a therapist.  Martya has a good head for business, and so on.

Even accepting that the two characters were scientists and might be convincingly portrayed as serious-minded scholars awkwardly feeling their way through the situation, Clarke’s description was almost comically inept, as if the author himself didn’t have sufficient insight to render other scientists who are awkward in love.

Er, I’m at least 75% sure Clarke was gay, and deeply, deeply quiet about it (if not completely closeted).

“Put simply, many much loved sci-fi novels would be considered sub-standard literature if their stories were somehow translated into a non-sci-fi context, on the strength of their other merits. Its still relatively rare to find a sci fi author that you can clearly see is capable of above-par writing with or without novel concepts. And Atwood shines in this respect. “

Mmm - you might want to check out Michael Marshall Smith, and Nick Harkaway’s “The Gone Away World”.

Heh.  I also love Bujold.  I was disappointed by Diplomatic Immunity, though—why did it seem like a good idea to suddenly make Ekaterin a wimpy, annoying, passive character?

I point out that, unlike Miles, Ekaterin does not have long experience in being a hero(ine).  She has spent most of her time as, well, a housewife and gardener.  When push came to shove in “Komarr”, she rose to the occasion very nicely.

Personally, I think she took a serious and unrealistic step backwards between “Komarr” and “A Civil Campaign” in order to drive the latter.  yes, she’s been damaged by her marriage - but she wasn’t an idiot when first introduced.

Miles, of course, has always been an idiot.

Personally, I think she took a serious and unrealistic step backwards between “Komarr” and “A Civil Campaign” in order to drive the latter.  yes, she’s been damaged by her marriage - but she wasn’t an idiot when first introduced.

Mmm ... it seemed reasonably realistic to me, especially since one of the sub-themes of that book (as pixelfish pointed out) is that marriage can be pretty horrible for women on Barrayar if they’re not careful who they marry because it’s still so patriarchial.  Ekaterin wanted to strike out on her own and be her own person for a while but Miles wanted to try and nail her down as quickly as possible before someone else swooped in and stole her away.  That whole tension you have to deal with when you’re trying to date (or marry) when one of you is coming out of a bad relationship.  And he did make some really, really bad (and potentially relationship-killing) decisions.

Pretty much all of the women in that book struggle to find their independence, including the one who finds it by getting her sex changed from female to male so she can inherit her late brother’s title.  Maybe it’s just a really girly theme. 

I was thinking of her going from “Oh, I’ll make a pass at the Count” at the end of Komar to “I never ever thought of this guy that way” in ‘A Civil Campaign” as a particular example. i can understand a “run away, run away” reaction after coming out of a bad marriage like hers, but she seemed unrealistically naive about Miles’ intentions.

Pretty much all of the women in that book struggle to find their independence, including the one who finds it by getting her sex changed from female to male so she can inherit her late brother’s title.  Maybe it’s just a really girly theme.  wink

Well, the central arc of the series is Miles doing the same. And, for that matter, spreading it around.

Wanna see what happens to ThatIdiotIvan tho, to make *him* grow up…

/me scratches his head…

You know, her recent fantasy work actually has been outstanding to pretty damn good.  With very highly fleshed out women in and out of marriages.  Diplomatic Immunity, if it does have issues, is probably quite standalone. 

Miles Universe isn’t the only one in Bujold’s universal imagination.

Er, I’m at least 75% sure Clarke was gay, and deeply, deeply quiet about it (if not completely closeted)

He was a pederast, it’s partly why he lived in Sri Lanka, he could engage in his predilection there with a minimum of attention.

I only know The Handmaid’s Tale via Poul Ruders terrific opera.  There’s a recording of it and it’s a quite powerful piece.  It was done in Minnesota last year, I wanted to go but didn’t have the money.

Ron Goulart was the first SF author, AFIAK, who mentioned anti-abortion terrorists in his mostly comic visions of the future, FWIW.

Henry, do you have any more mud to sling?

Clarke was attracted to Sri Lanka for the scuba diving, it is true that he was gay, but not all gays are pederasts.

Mnemosyne said:
Heh.  I also love Bujold.  I was disappointed by Diplomatic Immunity, though—why did it seem like a good idea to suddenly make Ekaterin a wimpy, annoying, passive character?

Word. I read somewhere that Bujold thought when she was writing it that she couldn’t make it another Miles POV/Ekaterin POV novel (c.f. Komar and Civil Campaign) and only realised once she’d completed it that she could have done it - although maybe differently. To which my reaction was “Aargh!” She hints at Ekaterin’s actions towards the end of the novel but we never actually get to see her *acting* in the novel. Extremely annoying, and I speak as someone who loves her writing. She is writing a new Miles novel though so will be interesting to see what she does with it.

Agree with shah8 on Bujold’s other fantasy work. The first two Chalion novels are particularly fine and Ista is almost my favourite fantasy character ever.

On Tepper, I think she’s a bit hit and miss. I particularly admire Beauty, an often quite horrific take on fairytales and their endings. “Going down to happyland…” shudder. I never could get through Gate to Women’s Country though.

Farren you might be interested in an essay Bujold wrote on the intersection (or lack thereof) between Sci-fi and Romance writing and how the two are gendered male and female (this is subtext in the essay) almost by virtue of the things they pay attention to. Her most recent writing is a fantasy tetralogy but which is premised around a romance type plot and writing style. She has found the fan reaction to this writing most amusing and interesting. Link to essay is here http://www.dendarii.com/denver08.html

RE: Bujold: Ista is pretty awesome as a character. She’s also a middle-aged woman whose kids are grown, which is something rare in fantasy literature. I also dig the Sharing Knife books, which are definitely more romance driven, but still completely wonderful in terms of drawing characters. She’s particularly good at doing “culture shock” pieces, where two cultures with differing mores and values butt up against each other.

Alara Rogers:

Sheri Tepper has been known to basically say that a man’s desire to know who is his biological father, or his biological child, is the root of all evil. Seriously.

Heh, that’s funny since I just read Ilium/Olympos by Dan Simmons and his point was more or less the opposite. (Among other things, a future machine-dependent society where fathers are unknown learns about heroism and fatherhood from the ancient Greeks)

JC:

On Tepper, I think she’s a bit hit and miss. I particularly admire Beauty, an often quite horrific take on fairytales and their endings. “Going down to happyland…” shudder.

I tried to enjoy this book (I liked the way the multiple fairytales ‘coming true’ was gradually revealed) but the preachiness was too much at times. The hating on horror writers was just too weird. (Hasn’t Tepper written horror herself?)

She wrote (in the mouth of the naive Beauty but seemed to reflect Tepper’s opinion:) “There were times, I remember, when we said certain things were unspeakable. Fantasies too horrible for words. Imaginings too gross for description.” Isn’t this a very silly thing to say when the earliest known versions of the fairy tales Tepper borrows were total gorefests? What about Titus Andronicus? When was this mythical age of innocent fiction?

LeGuin’s relatively recent The Telling. A totalitarian society (modeled on China) attempts to obliterate traditions of its mountainous poverty stricken colony (modeled on Tibet). It’s better than this description.

Kelly Eskridge’s Solitaire. Lots of themes in this one, corporate personalities and group interactions, terrorist (real or set up) as celebrity, show trials, prison/torture as integral part of governing and limiting dissent.

Anything by L. Timmel Duchamp is worth reading at any time.

It may seem as if I read only SFF by women about women, gender, orientation, and the occasional classic by men, but I do read Wolfe, Robert Charles Wilson, Ted Chiang, and a few others. Chip Delany is a “classic”, in that he’s pretty much retired from mainstream SFF.  (His more recent fiction has been explicit gay fiction/erotica).

If you’re going to talk about LeGuin, I think “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” is striking, although more politically relevant in good times than in bad. It’s almost the reverse of a disutopian novel. She gives us a short story which portrays a utopia, but one which comes at a price.

btw, I would have been more likely to read authors who claimed the science fiction genre. Thanks to threads like this, I learn about people who write in a genre I like.

Hmm windy, I wouldn’t so much see that as Tepper’s views, but more as part of a critique of the romaticisation of fairytales as children’s stories in much the same way as the right romaticises the 1950s as an idyllic (and completely mythical) past. That kind of melancholic longing for a past that never was almost underlies the whole story because the beginning of the novel is set in just that kind of idyll and it is only from the hindsight of the end of the novel that we understand that it never was that way. Or anyway, that’s how I remember it. It’s a few years since I read it. I never noticed any hate on horror writers but as I’m not much of a reader of the horror genre perhaps I just missed it.

One writer no-one seems to have mentioned is China Miéville. I loved Perdido Street Station but also enjoyed his other novels. His politics is obviously interwoven into plot and characterisation but not in an obtrusive or ‘preachy’ way. I also think his writing is very good (in response to Farren above). It’s defnitely purple but in a good way. I loved the opening chapter’s description of the basket tumbling down between the roofs which serves as a way of introducing the reader to the landscape of the novel.