Feminist SciFi/Fantasy

Thinking about this because of the conversation about Battlestar Galactica, but also 'cause I'm having a conversation with Kat in email about it.

SciFi just seems like the natural genre to me to explore things about gender and relationships, maybe not outside of our own culture, but taking our own culture and defamiliarising it in some way.  

Not sure what exactly to get started as a discussion, but I thought maybe I'd list some things I've liked and get some recommendations from other people--and maybe we could get a discussion going if we find we've all read something, or all agree to read something...

(I'm remembering that Kat and I might have talked about gender in the Twilightners novels--we could go back to that discussion too.)

I read a lot of short stories first--one collection that got me started was Aurora: Beyond Equality.  And one of the ones that stood out in that collection was "When it Changed" by Joanna Russ--about a planet settled by humans but on which all the men had been killed by a gender specific plague.

That short story eventually developed into The Female Man which is somewhat dated, but still good.  It has four female characters in alternative universes who are all versions of each other.  They start being able to travel to each other's worlds and meet--one is the main character from "When it Changed," one is a stand-in for the author on a 1970s earth, one is on an earth in which the depression and the War in Europe is till going on into the 1960s-70s, and one is in world where men and women are at war with one another.

Another classic from about that same time is Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy about a woman being held in an insane asylum for beating up her niece's pimp--she time travels--not physically, but mentally to a utopian future.  But then she also sees a dystopian one and realizes that either could evolve out of her present.

There are lots by Ursula LeGuin that are good.  I especially like Left Hand of Darkness about a world in which the human beings do not have any gender most of the time.  They enter a period called "kemmer" in which they are fertile, and it's only then that they have gender, and they can have a male gender in one kemmer and a female one in another.  LeGuin imagines interesting ways that this would affect their culture in much more far reaching ways than just family or romance.

LeGuin also has a short story collection which is completely centered on imagining different gendered worlds, or worlds in which gender hierarchies, or marriage arrangements are different than ours that is called The Birthday of the World.

There's a whole series of short story collections named after James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon).  Many of Sheldon's great short stories are featured in Aurora.  There is both the James Tiptree Award Antholigies and then this separate short story collection Flying Cups and Saucers.

Kind of merging into fantasy a bit, but I love Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Shattered Chain--which I guess isn't available as a separate book anymore but only as part of the trilogy Saga of the Renunciates--which is too bad 'cause I really only find the first book to be great.   It's told from the perspective of three different women on the planet Darkover--one is a fairly traditional woman who has hired a female band of "renunciates" to help her rescue her sister who was kidnapped and forced into a marriage.  Renunciates are women who renounce the traditonal female role and live/work together.  Another part is told by an earth woman who is posing as a renunciate to try to locate a fellow earth compantion who's been lost.  And a third part is told by the niece of the first woman--a child in the first part of the story--who has decided to become renunciate.

There's short story collection by different authors called Renunciates of Darkover  that I like a lot.

Bradley also has a collection of stories about a female wizard who has to hide her gender called Lythande.  And Lythande is a minor character in one of my favorite short stories by Vonda McIntyre called "Looking for Satan"--which is about a group of lovers who are travelling together from the hills into the city to find one of their group who's been taken to be exhibted as a freak.

And on a lighter note, there are all the Chicks in Chain Mail and Chicks and Chained Males and The Chick is in the Mail series.

One more SF short story series--there were a bunch of these that came out as Women of Wonder, More Women of Wonder, New Women of Wonder--they've all been anthologized into two volumes: Women of Wonder (classic and contemporary).

A fairly recent novel that I liked was A Woman of the Iron People by Eleanor Aronson, which is about an earth woman studying non-human sentient beings.  The people of the planet she is studying have very different notions of gender.  She is befriended by "A Woman of the Iron People" who is an outcast and thinks of herself as possibly a "pervert" because she wants to have an ongoing relationship with a male of the species outside of the mating period.