August 20, 2019
Being a chronicle of the voyages through the realm of the fantastic, recording a summary of the journey through perilous islands to bohemian cities. As we take a brief tavern break, a welcome respite from the wilderness of words, let’s take a moment to reflect upon our journey through the year. This month marks the second year of our arduous,…
July 11, 2017
This Month On Changing the Map As we’ve discussed in previous columns, the upside of using fantastic fiction as a forum for feminist thinking is that readers are so immersed in a strange world that they don’t realize they’re learning something important. The downside? That whatever an author might write about women and their struggles may seem dated and irrelevant…
June 13, 2017
This Month On Changing the Map This month we return to Justine Larbalestier’s excellent collection of feminist science fiction stories and essays, Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Three stories in her anthology perfectly illustrate one of the most compelling themes in fantastic feminist fiction of the 1970’s and 1980’s: sex, and how it affected women then,…
January 10, 2017
This month on Changing the Map So if the turn of the twentieth century produced the First Wave of speculative feminist fiction (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rokeya Hossain), and the late 1960’s ushered in the great Second Wave (Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood), what was happening in the middle of the century? Who were the speculative feminist writers…
December 13, 2016
In This Month’s Changing the Map Gentle readers, why are there so many more dystopias than utopias in fantastic fiction? We’ve seen a staggering resurgence of dystopic movies, books, and television shows, all portraying terrifying and depressing futures. Zombies, ecological disasters, oppressive political regimes, alien overlords… and that’s the short list. So what’s up? Do our inner cynics find it easier to…
November 10, 2016
We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. —Ursula K Le Guin I took the October death of novelist Sheri S. Tepper hard. You couldn’t call her passing at 87 early or unnatural. And although she never achieved the star status of her literary equals,…