Science Fiction is all about imagining a different reality. Whether that be spaceships, laser beams, or rights for women.
A common misperception is that sci-fi has always been a genre dominated by men and male protagonists; however, this is not the case. There is some speculation in regards to when the science fiction genre was born, yet many consider the creator of the first sci-fi/horror novel to be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein in 1816, though even before this Margaret Cavendish wrote The Blazing World in 1666.
Although not necessarily the first sci-fi writer, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has experienced great acclaim for centuries–and for good reason. Shelley openly explored themes of death, isolation, and moral ambiguity. She has since inspired countless authors, including Ursula Le Guin–whose writing challenges the constrictive social norms of binary gender. Also, like those of her time and before, Octavia E. Butler has succeeded in using gender and race as a means of exploration as well as a call to action. These women’s lives influenced their writing in a multitude of ways, which is why many scholars throughout history have analyzed their personal journeys of growth, inspiration, and loss that led them to new and alternate realities.
Here is a good start to the timeline of major science-fiction authors, and here is a list of exclusively female writers.
Prominent Authors: Mary Shelley
When Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus in 1816, she wrote it in response to a challenge. Her father was the famous philosopher William Godwin and it was at a dinner party her father had hosted, with guests such as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, where the challenge was posed for each esteemed writer to come up with the best ghost story. In the end, Mary Shelley (then known as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) won, as her early draft of Frankenstein captivated its first audience.
Yet for such a young woman–only eighteen at the time– the themes she wrote about were incredibly complex and macabre. Her life began tragically, as her famous feminist mother died only a month after her birth, a death she would mourn for the rest of her days. When she met and fell in love with the great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, their romance was only accepted after the tragic suicide of his estranged wife. She continued to experience the loss of three of her four children as well as her half sister.
Plagued by death and grief, Shelley’s dark themes were a cathartic release; the juxtapositions of the living and the dead within her work, as well as the question of morality continue to spark debate to this day. The character of Frankenstein’s monster begs the question: what does it mean to be human, to be alive? Moreover, are humans fundamentally good beings? These questions appear again in Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler’s brilliant contributions to science fiction, where similarly complex topics are asked, such as: what are gender and race? Why do they exist? [Mary Shelley-Source] [Mary Shelley-Source 2]
Usula Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969 during the second wave feminist movement in the United States, where gender was a heated topic for almost everyone.
Facing her fair share of rejection of publishers refusing to take a woman seriously, let alone a woman writing in the genre of science fiction, LeGuin was determined to share her game-changing novels. As a daughter of a female writer herself, Le Guin knew the value of a good story, and had been inspired from a young age to create her own nonconventional worlds. The Left Hand of Darkness, in addition to the Earthsea Chronicles, are Ursula Le Guin’s best known works. The Left Hand of Darkness and other books in the Hainish Cycle take place in a solar system with many planets whose different environmental factors led to the androgyny and nonbinary nature of the race named the Gethenians.
Her mainstream challenging of social norms opened doors previously percieved as closed for other feminist and nonbinary authors to began grappling with questions of identity, morality, social hierarchy, and even religion. By the end of her life, Ursula LeGuin had written dozens of award-winning novels, poems, and children’s books that had changed the science fiction world forever. These issues brought alien distopias down to earth, as it were. [Ursula Le Guin-Source]
A facet of science-fiction is the exploration of dystopian worlds that provide insight into the future of our own–no author was more talented at predicting these all-too-real conditions than Octavia Butler. Before her death in 2006, Butler wrote over two dozen novels and short stories that illustrated many scenarios unsettlingly similar to our current political and social climate. From a young age, Butler was surrounded by books brought home from her mother who worked as a maid during the era of segregation in California–books that would transport her to worlds beyond what was possible, at least for now.
These books drove her to create stories of her own that imagined protagonists as empowered black women, as gender fluid shape-shifters, and so on. These works, though fantastical, were also rooted in the struggles of society during her lifetime, and provided essential insight into the Civil Rights Movement and second-wave feminism.
Of course, life was never easy for Butler, who had to balance many jobs at once, and was often underestimated due to her sex and race. Yet after the modest success of her 1975 novel Patternmaster, which envisioned a dystopian world that brought together themes of hierarchy and unity, she traveled across the country to Maryland, and found even more fame and recognition after she published her next work, Kindred.
Butler envisioned worlds that validated and brought to the forefront the struggles of everyday black people, while using fantastical backdrops to tell their complex stories. Today she is known for her afrofuristic themes, with many of her novels being read in university classes regarding queer theory, Black feminism, and disability studies. [Octavia E. Butler-Source 1] [Afrofuturism]
Use of Utopias and Dystopias
These women, and countless other authors, have used their writing to develop the idea of utopian and dystopian worlds. By imagining a world with true, universal human rights, or a society without gender and racism, these women strove to prove that anything was possible.
A utopian world is one that is perfect in every way–but in the process of creating those perfect worlds, dystopias are often born instead. For all the fantastical characters and settings they describe, they are ultimately commenting on our current world and it’s ugly realities hidden beneath the surface. They further present the question, is a utopian world possible? What makes our current world dystopic? As Ursula Le Guin says in her interview with “The Nation’’, “The future in science fiction is just a metaphor for now.” For More information on utopias, check out this TedEd video.
As women and authors, Shelley, LeGuin, and Butler along with countless more feminists work not just for entertainment, they write for the larger community of activism. Activism is a way to gain support for a cause but rarely is it done alone. Margaret Kick and Kathryn Sikkink elaborate in “Transnational Advocacy Networks in International Politics” (from Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, 1998).
Authors in sci-fi are like the transnational networks that Keck and Sikkink discuss, in that they also use the four typologies of persuasion: 1) information politics, 2) symbolic politics, 3) leverage politics, 4) accountability politics. When authors like Shelley, Le Guin, and Butler present the issues most prominent in their lives, they present the information “where it will have the most impact” (p. 281). That space is the public who has the power to influence society.
Furthermore, they use symbols in their writing to make the point that utopias or dystopias really aren’t that different from where we are today. When using leverage politics in writing, authors tend to “call out” major actors such as state regimes, as Margaret Atwood does in her “Handmaid’s Tale”. This can be done explicitly as Atwood does or implicitly as seen in some of LeGuin’s work. Similarly for accountability politics, authors don’t have the power to hold states to their policies; however, they are able to conjure public support behind an issue. For example, if a government claims to have eliminated all racist and sexist language from its governing documents but has not, then an author may use that in a novel to push the government for change.
Sci-Fi for the Real World
When imagining a better world, a world where governments and organizations are held accountable for their actions towards people of color and female-identifying people, we can look to these feminist writers for inspiration. These women paved the way for visionaries from all walks of life to have hope for a better future. Science fiction is an instrument of societal rebuilding, and it can have enormous impact on the way people choose to engage in the world.
Science fiction also has the capacity to challenge racist, sexist, and heteronormative norms that hold our society back from unity and prosperity. In promoting feminism, authors like Le Guin and Butler normalize equality of the sexes, and even allow future generations to take the reins, as it were, and normalize gender fluidity, androgyny, and non-binary people.
As we grow in awareness and knowledge throughout our transformative years at college, we can harken back to these trailblazers and the messages they left in their books. These messages tell us we are powerful in our femininity, that humans are infinitely complex and changing, and that change is necessary for a better future. We can build many aspects of the better worlds laid out before us–and we can learn from the dystopias as well. Our story as humans is far from over, it is not too late for us to embark on a new chapter.
https://www.bl.uk/people/mary-shelley#
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-wollstonecraft-shelley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_vzSgkjBEI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a6kbU88wu0
https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/writing-the-future-a-timeline-of-science-fiction-literature/zjfv6v4
https://library.sdsu.edu/scua/new-notable/early-female-authors-science-fictionfantasy-0
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200317-why-octavia-e-butlers-novels-are-so-relevant-today
https://haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu/afrofuturism/
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/biography
Keck, Margaret E., Sikkink, Katheryn. “Transnational Advocacy Networks in International Politics”, Activists Beyond Borders:Advocacy Networks in International Politics, 1998. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.
