Author's Note

First, Susan Gubar wrote a good essay about women's science fiction. It was published in Science-fiction Studies. Then I wrote to the journal saying Good-oh and added stuff (letter one). Then Linda Leith wrote back and said things about my letter (you want to make men secondary, men and women are opposites which need to be reconciled, etc.). So I wrote another letter (academics enjoy this sort of thing). The “Flasher” books to which I refer in letter two was part of an essay I wrote, published in Science-fiction Studies in 1980. It is available (if you want to find it) in To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction, a collection of my essays published by Indiana University Press in 1995. The title of the essay was “Amor Vincit Foeminam : The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction.”

Susan Gubar's essay was so good that I'd like to add a few details which would enrich Gubar's case. (1) Rockets are seen by fans not as “womblike” (p. 17) but phallic. Vonnegut thinks so, too, in his bitter satire “The Great Space Fuck.” (2) In Juniper Time Wilhelm is more explicit and political than Moore: the heroine pretends to decipher an “alien” code which is, in truth a human (male) fake. Her real “alien” allies are those complete outsiders in the white, male, technological world: native Americans. (3) The ultimate, conscious use of woman-as-alien is of course Tiptree's “Houston, Houston. Do you Read?” in which the “alien” women, asked “What do you call yourselves?” by the male narrator, answer matter-of-factly, “mankind.” It's a pity the focus and length of Gubar's article precluded exploring these examples.

But Gubar is thoughtless in using the word “tradition,” which implies that the writers in question have read and been influenced by each other. One would have to prove such connections, which in some cases (e.g. Lessing) might be difficult. I suspect that until the late 1960s we had not a tradition, but scattered cases of parallel evolution. One must not assume a purely literary ancestry for phenomena.