The Other Side

Dear Editors,

Sarah Lefanu's Feminism and Science Fiction may not be the kind of book Rob Latham wants Lefanu to write but I believe it is, nonetheless, a good and important book. Lefanu has written a book not about feminism but a search for the possibilities of feminism in science fiction. The book is feminism. Perhaps Latham's hostility to the work springs from his lack of acquaintance with the last twenty years of feminist theory in the U.S. and elsewhere. This is knowledge rarely found in the academy. Acceptance there of the French school of Psychoanalyse et Politique and associated work oriented toward Freud and Lacan omits most of French feminism (which is quite different from the kind popularized here in the academy) and almost all of the rich tradition originating outside the academy in the last two decades of U.S. and British writing. Some other questions Latham's review suggests:

What's wrong with eclectism? Criticism isn't a science, nor does it proceed by everyone's accepting certain basic principles and reasoning deductively therefrom.

Why demand a definition of “science fiction”? Genres always have clear, pointable-at centers and fuzzy boundaries.

In the absence of any kind of comprehensive account of women's writing in English of the last two centuries – all we have had is pounds of criticism applied to a penn'orth of canon – should we trust anything besides the kind of particular readings Lefanu does so well? There is such a long tradition of women's work and there are some pioneers – see, for example, Susan Koppelman's work.

Although Latham praises Lefanu for her particular readings, he also accuses her of “unsubstantiated claims,” “accusations,” “sneering,” and “smugness.” It is true that Lefanu does not soothe or flatter – she is angry at men as a privileged class and makes no bones about it – but her anger does not necessarily impugn the truth of her generalizations. That science fiction has been a male preserve since the 1920s is hardly a debatable statement. And I join Lefanu in much of her anger, and her cynicism about the sudden popularity of female heroes in male writers' science fiction.