Content area
Full Text
I: Prologue
I am a feminist skeptic, looking for "chinks" in the science fiction criticism "machine." This was not my intention when I began studying women's science fiction and fantasy in academic earnest about fifteen years ago. Like other feminist readers of the mid-eighties, I was looking for some meaning for the condition of living, as James Tiptree puts it, "by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine" (154). The "you" involved was not "men" but a society so strongly knitted to gender roles that they seemed natural. Women's science fiction and other women's fantasy genres offered me fresh perspectives compatible with the values and goals of feminism. Like many science fiction readers, I was already familiar with the classics of women's science fiction, including Mary Shelley's feminist-friendly study of the effects of mastering nature without attending to ethical concerns. I had also read purposefully-feminist tales, such as Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See." Specifically, these two texts spoke to me then. Tiptree's text evoked a sense of bittersweet liberation while Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus evoked an odd sympathy for the creature, odd because my sympathy was as one woman for another.
Today, I would say that fifteen years ago my sensibility was romantic. Specifically, at the time I sensed that something of what I understood to be the natural order had been lost in the accumulating detritus of gender roles, and these texts spoke to that loss. When Don Fenton, the narrator of Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See," comments on Ruth Parson's and her daughter's willing departure with aliens, his yearning is palpable. "How could a woman," he moans, "live among unknown monsters, to say good-by to her home, her world?" (164). Having lost the attention of Woman is bad enough, but to have lost out to a monster is, to Don Fenton, insane. And that is exactly how he describes Ruth. As far as Don is concerned, she's insane for turning from the man to whom she should become attached. He translates his yearning into what he calls a "mad scenario" (146), thus refusing the romantic version of Ruth's escape. However, a reader is allowed to enjoy the romantic version, that of a woman who escapes the...