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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.
We could not have put this issue together without the help and support of our wonderful Kickstarter backers—all 2801 of them! One of the secondary Kickstarter rewards allowed backers to add their name to a list of donors that would appear in the published issue. About half of our backers chose this reward. We’re excited to recognize them here.
I spent a lot of time at the aquarium! I love the ocean. The mysteries of the deep sea are one of my favorite things to explore when I get bored. So I really just used several years of cumulative research, all in the same place.
I’m the sort of person who can easily accidentally vanish into writing for weekends at a time, and never manage to see the sun. I’d say the major difference between me and Maureen is that I really try to avoid falling into that mode unless I have a project to finish. For her, it’s her default mode and pretty much her entire mechanism for coping with the world.
Forget the booster rockets, forget asteroid collisions, forget weightlessness, forget radiation dangers, all of that is bunk when I put intelligence on a laser beam and shoot the laser beam to the stars, and then at the other end there is a relay station which absorbs the laser beam and puts all this memory into a robot, and so you can then begin to feel and live on another star system. So this idea was inspired by Isaac Asimov and other science fiction writers, but now we think it could be possible.
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