“I took classes taught by an elderly woman who wrote children’s stories. She was polite about the science fiction and fantasy that I kept handing in, but she finally asked in exasperation, ‘Can’t you write anything normal?” Octavia E. Butler, Introduction, Bloodchild and Other Stories
A handful of women writers entered the genres of science fiction and fantasy in the late 1960s and through the ’80s. Their influences can be felt throughout literature today. Among them (not in any order) Anne McCaffrey, Leigh Brackett, Andre Norton, Diana Paxson, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler, Diana Wynne Jones, Patricia McKillip, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
This issue will explore how these women writers blazed unique trails and shaped modern speculative fiction, from telepathic dragons to robots to space travel to post-apocalyptic landscapes.
The work of Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler in particular has influenced writers across literary and genre fiction through the many important themes explored in their novels and short fiction. From their early works published in the 1970s to her final works in the 2000s the publishing community saw significant improvement in the inclusion of minority and women’s voices in speculative and genre fiction. The ideas these writers explored, gender, race, Kropotkinist anarchism, non-human intelligence, closed systems, revolution, and entrainment, and the diversity of characters shocked editors and critics while effectively uplifting and encouraging marginalized voices. The unending support of regional ecosystems through novels and short fiction influenced a generation.
One cannot discuss Le Guin’s influence without discussing her criticism regarding the increasing commodification of books and her biting critique of the division between “literary” fiction and “genre” fiction.
This issue will be devoted to the works of speculative fiction, its influences, specifically these trailblazing writers and those they have subsequently influenced in the modern works of speculative and literary fiction. And, beyond, in scholarly research in philosophy, the political, social and human sciences, in activism and the arts in general.
Topics to consider:
- How the early women writers have influenced subsequent writers in speculative fiction and beyond.
- In the Hainish novels, Le Guin discusses “great, immediate affinity” with anarchist thinkers Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman. She stated, in her essays, that “Odonism is anarchism,” mentioning parallels with Emma Goldman, Taoism and Percy Bysshe Shelley. For Le Guin, anarchism’s “principal target is the authoritarian State. How did LeGuin present her philosophy of anarchism in her body of work? How have later writers in genre and literary fiction carried those ideas forward? Or not…?
- How Taoist and non-violent activism influenced LeGuin’s fiction and the development of the anarchist philosophy in “The Dispossessed ”.
- “They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
When is the right action to “walk away”?
- Ecological themes within these writers’ corpus and their successor’s works.
- Octavia Butler wrote of dystopian landscapes and the rise of authoritarianism in the same breath as evolution and symbiosis, how is her work being carried forward in speculative fiction today?
- McIntyre, LeGuin, Tepper, and others’ influence on modern ecological and social activism.
- Feminism and gender in science fiction and fantasy within and after the publication of The Left Hand of Darkness.
- Mythic themes within this body of work.
- Pern has Master Harper Robinton, Westria has Silverhair the Wanderer, opera, singing crystals, spacefaring troubadours, singing wizards and chanting faeries, how does music, particularly the folk & ballad traditions, influence and inform these writers’ works?