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This is not only anti-corporate ranting. It happens to be a function of the human animal that when people are given power over you, whether as employers or governments or even as condo associations or family members or lovers, they continue to test the limits of that power until you say, “No, that’s all you get, no more, the line is drawn here.”
In this article, I’m going to tell you about illusion, expectation, and the lies that your brain sometimes tells you. And I’ll explain how those lies relate to science fiction, the women who are destroying it, and the future of our society. But before I get to all that, I’ll start with a story that is also a puzzle.
To me, clones are nothing more than glorified offspring—they have identical genes, but they’re shaped by their experiences just as we were shaped by ours. My clone, in a different environment, would be very different person. The question I always asked myself was: Who are these people who are so eager to clone themselves?
I’m fascinated by the idea of Distributed Arbitrage and the forecasting, and I know I’m not done with Spencer or Megan. I’m not sure what it’s going to look like, but I think I’ve got the beginnings of a novel in me. And at the end of the day, I want to hear that William Gibson read my book and liked it.
In the ten years that I’ve been actively participating in the science fiction community, I’ve seen the field change…. At the same time, there are places where it feels like the field had taken a step back from the work I remembered reading as a teenager. It feels very much like a case of “the more things change .” So, I decided to ask some women who had been there. Please welcome Ursula K. Le Guin, Pat Cadigan, Ellen Datlow, and Nancy Kress.
I’m fascinated by the concept of AI and—if we ever do create sentient machines—where the line will be drawn between human and machine. I don’t think it will be human goodness that will set us apart from computer brains, but rather the dark side of human nature: our neuroses, our crimes of passion.
The opportunity for me to invite other artists to be a part of the project was nothing short of breathtaking. Li Grabensetter with her beautiful handling of inks and watercolors, Elizabeth Leggett with her brilliant digital renderings, Christine Mitzuk’s rich painterly style, and Hillary Pearlman’s fantastical tinkering bring the fiction in this issue depth and texture
I think of the story as a response to Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, and to similar science fiction of the era. A lot of that fiction reflects the paranoia of privilege—fear of a more (theoretically) egalitarian political system like communism, fear of external threats because the straight white men of the time simply assumed they would continue to dominate women and people of color within their own societies, and so on.
Why “Women Destroy Science Fiction”? My hope is that one or more of these stories will reach a reader who never realized that kind of story is science fiction, too, and will seek out more like it. And I hope that one or more will convince those writers—the fantasists, the poets, the ones more comfortable in Middle Earth or the Midwest than on Mars—that they, too, can create science fiction stories and participate in the expansion of the field.
A huge team of amazing women came together to assemble the Women Destroy Science Fiction! special issue (along with a few guys who helped out in some non-editorial roles). So here’s a huge THANK YOU to everyone who helped out putting the issue together. In addition to all of the wonderful authors who contributor to the issue, here’s a list of all the people who had a role in making the issue happen.
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