Finally, my student researchers—all members of the digital nomad generation, who have grown up believing that all the information they could ever want is at their fingertips—were shocked to realize that sometimes historical information is not that easily available. They were particularly annoyed with the differing levels of security in state birth, marriage, and death records and so, in good Georgia Tech engineering fashion, ended up writing programs to help navigate different state systems, which I have to say was pretty darn cool.

  Other than the time frame, what were the things that determined if a piece would go into The Future Is Female volume 2?

  While FIF1 was broad in scope, mapping all the different kinds of science fiction that women wrote in the opening and middle decades of the 20th century, I knew that the story I wanted to tell in this volume was the rise of feminist science fiction as a distinct mode of speculative storytelling, complete with its own authors, editors, fans, cons, and publishing venues. So, the first question I asked was if and how a story embodied the energies of 1970s feminism. Sometimes the answer wasn’t obvious: nobody was writing stories directly about abortion or Title IX; instead, I needed to look for stories more generally about bodily autonomy and gendered patterns of education.

  The other major question I asked was: does this story have literary merit as well as big ideas? Literary merit is something that Library of America has insisted on from the start, and that is sometimes challenging to negotiate: early science fiction authors often saw themselves as forging a “literature of engineers” defined by its lack of literary frippery—the narrative equivalent of a blueprint with no architectural detail. We had a few tussles over this with volume 1 but fortunately, volume 2 focuses on an era when science fiction authors were increasingly graduating from college with literary degrees and experimenting with avant-garde and postmodern writing techniques, so it was much easier to agree on what counted as good science fiction.

  What are a few of the stories that you would have liked to include in this book, and why?

  There were indeed several stories we were excited to include but did not, for various reasons. We initially planned to include Octavia E. Butler’s “Childfinder” and Phyllis Eisenstein’s “Attachment” but were not able to do so due to copyright issues. My commissioning editor and I were also very intrigued by Lisa Tuttle’s “Stone Circle,” which we thought was a chilling anticipation of cyberpunk but swapped it out for “Wives” when my student research team vetoed it as Just Too Much for This Moment in History. And we were all torn between two Vonda McIntyre stories: “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” and “Wings.” The latter is a gorgeous love story between a very old and a very young alien and everyone should read it, but ultimately, we agreed that the big idea at the center of “Of Mist” (bioengeering snakes as medical tools) was so cool we had to go with that story.

  I also wanted to include some non-fiction essays in this volume as well. After all, this is the era of the feminist manifesto, and the women of science fiction generated some really good ones! In my fantasy world, we would have included Joanna Russ’s “The Image of Women in Science Fiction” (which lays out the problem of how poorly women are often represented in genre works) and “Some Recent Feminist Utopias” (which provides one of the first and I think still best definitions of feminist science fiction). Ursula K. Le Guin’s “American SF and the Other” is another important feminist assessment of science fiction that reminds us, amongst other things, that “about 53 percent of the Brotherhood of Man is the Sisterhood of Woman” and should be reflected as such in culture.

  I would also have loved to share with readers some of the essays about her transition that Jessica Amanda Salmonson published in fanzines like Mom’s Apple Pie. We tend to think of trans authors as relative newcomers to genre fiction, but Salmonson’s story reminds us that trans women, like cis women, have long called the science fiction community home. Finally, I would love to have included poetry in this collection—after all, this is the moment when Suzette Haden Elgin founds the Science Fiction Poetry Association and Marilyn Hacker’s “Prayer for my Daughter” opens Virginia Kidd’s Millennial Women anthology.

  One thing you talk about in the introduction is that in the 1970s women became much more visible in general. What we are seeing nowadays, with the increased visibility of a number of historically marginalized groups, is a certain amount of backlash. Did the rising visibility of women in science fiction through the 70s also come with reactionary backlash from within the science fiction community?

  Sadly, these things do indeed go in cycles. In the early 1970s—the heyday of New Wave science fiction and the feminist revival—male authors were often champions of women’s science fiction: Brian Aldiss and Harlan Ellison claimed that “the best writers in SF today are the women”; Isaac Asimov was publicly impressed with Ann McCaffrey’s status as a New York Times bestseller, claiming that you couldn’t argue with that kind of money, and Robert Silverberg co-edited the last volumes of his prestigious New Dimensions series with Marta Randall. Joan Vinge recalls being “very proud” of her male counterparts, who seemed to be embracing women as equals more quickly than men outside the science fiction community.

  But then the backlash against feminism that swept the US in the 1980s swept through the science fiction community as well. Silverberg threatened to quit New Dimensions if Randall did an all-female issue; Asimov sexually molested Randall while she was SFWA president; Bruce Sterling infamously claimed that nothing important happened in 1970s science fiction, thereby erasing the achievements of an entire generation of women writers and prompting leading feminist fan Jeanne Gomoll to write the infamous “Open Letter to Joanna Russ” in which she despairingly concludes that she has yet another item to add to Russ’s list of strategies historically used by male authors to discredit women’s literary accomplishments: it’s not that they didn’t really write it, or that they had help, or that they could only do it once, but that they wrote it—and “it was a boring fad.”

  Of course, I’d point out that even that was not the science fiction community’s first encounter with feminist backlash. After universal suffrage in 1920, feminist backlash swept the United States (often in the form of new laws that allowed employers to fire women if they got married or pregnant) and eventually the science fiction community, as a new generation of young male editors, led by John W. Campbell, loudly claimed that women could not write science fiction while quietly erasing pioneering women from the first generation of science fiction anthologies. Even Frederic Pohl eventually wrote on his blog that there were no women science fiction writers in the genre’s early days—this, despite the fact that he married two different women science fiction writers! One of my goals with the FIF series is to illuminate these cycles of history in hopes that we can finally learn from and break free of them.

  You also talk about the progression of feminism and science fiction through that same period. Which are the stories in this volume that you feel are still the most relevant to today’s issues, and to the needs and expressions of today’s feminism?

  Broadly speaking, feminists today continue earlier projects to create political, economic, social, and scientific equity for women. But contemporary feminists extend those projects in three specific ways: by using transmedia activism to connect with other women and expose the injustices of patriarchy (think of the Everyday Sexism Project and the #MeToo movement); exploring the diversity of women’s experiences at the transnational level (something enabled by transmedia activism!); and allying themselves with trans rights activists who argue for expanded notions of womanhood, sex, and gender.

  We see the seeds of all these interests in FIF2. James Tiptree, Jr.’s “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” provides an early critique of what we now call influencer culture, while Joan D. Vinge’s “View from a Height” explores how technology can foster surprising new and tender ways of connecting with one another across vast distances. Marta Randall’s “A Scarab in the City of Time” revolves around an archaeologist of color who finds herself trapped in a white supremacist dome and who hopes to escape by connecting with young people who dream of a different and more open future, while the hermaphroditic aliens who are forced to pass as sexy human females by their human male conquerors in Lisa Tuttle’s “Wives” speak to all people who have been asked to deny their true selves and to inhabit sexed and gendered identities not of their own making.

  Some of the stories featured in FIF2 might speak to readers in more immediate terms as well. In many ways, Vinge’s “View from a Height”—which relates the tale of an isolated astronaut traveling to the edge of the galaxy with nothing but intermittent radio connections to Earth—captures the feelings of isolation, desolation, and intermittent hope that many of us felt throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. And unfortunately, since the fall of Roe in June 2022, stories about who controls our reproductive futures, such as Kate Wilhelm’s “The Funeral” and Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” feel more relevant than ever.

  But we were sure to include tales that resonate with the many other good and hopeful things we see happening around us today as well. Pamela Sargent’s “If Ever I Should Leave You” and Cynthia Felice’s “No One Said Forever” imagine that women and men work together to create new and more nourishing futures for each other and the families they make together; Miriam Allen Deford’s “A Way Out,” Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Day Before the Revolution,” and M. Lucie Chin’s “The Best is Yet to Be” celebrate the newfound political and sexual power of older women; Eleanor Arnason’s “The Warlord of Saturn’s Moons” and Gayle N. Netzer’s “Hey, Lilith!” remind us that even in the darkest of times, women can take comfort in the pleasures of art and one another’s company.

  Are there stories here that may surprise some readers, and how so?

  I think readers will be surprised by how many of these stories celebrate women at stages of their lives not usually represented in science fiction. With the exception of a few naïve girl children who stowed away on rocket ships at their peril, most of the women featured in early- and mid-20th-century science fiction tended to be young and defined by their relation to reproduction. So, you got your nubile scientist’s daughters or lab assistants/love interests, your married-with-children-but-still-young! Housewife heroines, and your sexy but scary beautiful alien monsters—who, once again, were somehow always, magically, between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five. Little wonder that Joanna Russ once wryly noted there were plenty of images of women in science fiction, but very few women! Feminist authors set out to change that.

  And indeed, the authors featured in FIF2 give their readers very different female characters! For instance, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s “Frog Pond” imagines that young mutant girls might inherit the postapocalyptic Earth; Connie Willis’s “Daisy, In the Sun” explores the universe-shattering power of a teenager experiencing her first period; Sonya Dorman Hess’s “Bitchin’ It” celebrates female lust across species; Kathleen Sky’s “Lament of the Keeku Bird” follows the adventures of a menopausal alien searching for a new life after motherhood; M. Lucie Chin’s “The Best is Yet to Be” shows how women, like men, might enjoy sex, drugs, and politics until the day they die. None of these are topics that showed up in earlier science fictional stories about women as love interests, lab assistants, or beautiful alien monsters, and quite honestly, we still don’t address many of these topics extensively or well in culture today.

  Are there one or two stories in this volume that you feel will challenge readers more than others, and how so?

  One of the most aesthetically challenging stories readers will encounter is Sonya Dorman Hess’s “Bitchin’ It,” which was originally published in Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker’s notorious Quark magazine. I don’t know how to explain it except as “happy housewife heroine fiction meets feminist utopia meets 1970s porn film, with dogs and Jell-O.” To say it is an avant-garde stylistic experiment is something of an understatement, but it’s a wonderfully chaotic, strange, and estranging celebration of female sexuality (in humans and dogs alike). Oh, and it’s also about the satisfaction of hanging new curtains.

  Who are the feminist writers (or what are the feminist works) that a lot of people don’t know about and may not have heard of, but that you wish had received more notability?

  Vonda N. McIntyre—well known and loved in the SF community, but we need to find more ways to get her stories to people—especially young people—outside that community. She has important things to say about alternate ways of engaging Western science and technology—and about possible alternatives to Western technoscience itself! Important and timely today.

  Do you feel that fantasy as a genre saw mirrored feminist progress with science fiction? And where does horror fall into all of this?

  Whew, those are big topics that I take an entire semester to cover in my “Women in Speculative Fiction” class! The short answer is yes: women have always contributed to fantasy and horror, but the revival of feminism in the 1960s and 70s contributed to the rise of distinctly feminist identities and storytelling practices in both. This is especially evident in the fantasy of the 1970s—authors such as Tanith Lee turned the conventions of fantasy upside down with monstrous females who refuse to be pitied or saved by men and female knights who successfully negotiate both tribal and gendered politics; editors such as Jessica Amanda Salmonson compiled the first anthologies and first “herstories” of female fantasy writers. And of course, many of the women writing dystopian science fiction in the 1970s were essentially writing horror fiction as well—what could be more horrifying for women than tales of sexual enslavement (Lisa Tuttle’s “Wives”), forced breeding (Russ’s “When It Changed” and Wilhelm’s “The Funeral”), and female genocide (Racoona Sheldon’s “The Screwfly Solution”)?

  Having said that, women such as Anne Rice and Angela Carter brought feminist sensibilities to their vampire and grim fairy tales, reworking the masculinist conventions of those genres to demonstrate the humanity of those who are so often dismissed as monsters while celebrating female desire and alternate models of sexuality. This trend comes to full fruition in Black women’s horror, beginning with Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and Wild Seed around the same time.

  Did science fiction cinema through the seventies trace a similar path as literature? Was it a mirror or was it left behind?

  The 1970s was the decade when science fiction became Hollywood big business, with the proliferation of both what we now call “blockbuster” and “smart science fiction” films. Perhaps not surprisingly, “smart science fiction films”—that is, movies that revolved around big ideas as much if not more than action, including Omega Man, Silent Running, and Soylent Green—tended to be fairly pointed in their techno-social critique, much like New Wave science fiction.

  The 1970s also marks the beginning of feminist science fiction filmmaking, with Dara Birnbaum’s experimental video, “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” (1978) and, if we’re willing to stretch things a bit to talk about “The Long 1970s,” Lizzie Borden’s feature-length film, Born in Flames (1983), both of which, like their print feminist counterparts, identify patriarchy as the root of technoscientific modernity’s ills.

  Many of the big-budget blockbuster movies of the 1970s—including Star Wars, Alien, and Star Trek—also draw energy from the literary and political experiments of science fiction’s New Wave. Star Trek is easily the most properly science fictional and the most techno optimistic of the three, but was utterly groundbreaking in its own moment, as it was the first TV show and then film franchise to imagine a future where space work is a respectable, middle-class, professional option anyone can train for—and that the space professionals of the future will indeed come from all races, classes, and genders. Star Wars gave us technological spectacle like the pulp serials of yore, but also an urgent anti-Vietnam War message about what happens when you turn men into weapons. Meanwhile, the Alien franchise gave audiences their first sustained Hollywood critique of capitalist greed as it sacrifices human life in the name of corporate profit. And of course, all three of these franchises nodded to the feminist revival with their strong female protagonists.

  But from the beginning, critique in those blockbuster films tended to be more muted than in their smart science fiction counterparts, in large part because blockbuster films are hugely expensive and expected to make back their financial investment very quickly. This often leads (and still leads) blockbuster directors to make their films as much of “open texts” as possible, diluting their techno-social messages to appeal to the widest audience possible; that is how people of all political stripes can identify with Star Wars’ rebels and against the Empire.

  From the beginning, smart and blockbuster science fiction films tended to differ in their approach to genre as well. Smart science fiction films tended to be more fully realized genre films, following and adding to the conventions of science fiction created by the genre community itself. By way of contrast, blockbuster films, have, from the very beginning, mixed science fiction with other genres such as fantasy, gothic horror, and even the samurai tale. This resulted in groundbreaking aesthetic statements that appealed to a wide audience, but also often eclipsed any serious message within the films themselves.

  One of the other things you talked about in the introduction was the role of anthologies as being important to the feminist movement in science fiction. Do you see anthologies as the same kind of space for sociocultural discourse and social change?

  I think anthologies are more important spaces for sociocultural exploration than ever before. Anthologies first emerged in the US in the 1940s when science fiction, as a distinct popular genre with roots in turn of the century magazine culture, was suddenly old enough to have its own history, central enough to the American imagination to be of interest to many readers, and big enough that no one person could reasonably expect to read it all by themselves. From the beginning, these volumes enabled the science fiction community to create a history of its own, and they provided newcomers with a roadmap to what that community considered its finest and most important works of art.

 

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