Feminist science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction focused on such feminist themes as: gender inequality, sexuality, race, economics, reproduction, and environment. Feminist SF is political because of its tendency to critique the dominant culture. Some of the most notable feminist science fiction works have illustrated these themes using utopias to explore a society in which gender differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, or dystopias to explore worlds in which gender inequalities are intensified, thus asserting a need for feminist work to continue.
Science fiction and fantasy serve as important vehicles for feminist thought, particularly as bridges between theory and practice. No other genres so actively invite representations of the ultimate goals of feminism: worlds free of sexism, worlds in which women's contributions are recognized and valued, worlds that explore the diversity of women's desire and sexuality, and worlds that move beyond gender.
Joanna Russ was an American writer, academic and feminist. She is the author of a number of works of science fiction, fantasy and feminist literary criticism such as How to Suppress Women's Writing, as well as a contemporary novel, On Strike Against God, and one children's book, Kittatinny. She is best known for The Female Man, a novel combining utopian fiction and satire, and the story "When It Changed".
Speculative and science fiction writers have often addressed the social, political, technological, and biological consequences of pregnancy and reproduction through the exploration of possible futures or alternative realities.
Thaddeus Maxim Eugene (Ted) Dikty was an American editor who also played a role as one of the earliest science fiction anthologists, and as a publisher.
Zenna Chlarson Henderson was an American elementary school teacher and science fiction and fantasy author. Her first story was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1951. Her work is cited as pre-feminist, often featuring middle-aged women, children, and their relationships, but with stereotyped gender roles. Many of her stories center around human aliens called "The People", who have special powers. Henderson was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 for her novelette Captivity. Science fiction authors Lois McMaster Bujold, Orson Scott Card, Connie Willis, Dale Bailey, and Kathy Tyers have cited her as an influence on their work.
Wonder Stories was an early American science fiction magazine which was published under several titles from 1929 to 1955. It was founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1929 after he had lost control of his first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, when his media company Experimenter Publishing went bankrupt. Within a few months of the bankruptcy, Gernsback launched three new magazines: Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Stories, and Science Wonder Quarterly.
Éliane Taïeb, née Grimaître, was a French science fiction writer who published under the pen names Gilles Thomas and Julia Verlanger.
Jupiter, the largest planet in the Solar System, has appeared in works of fiction across several centuries. The way the planet has been depicted has evolved as more has become known about its composition; it was initially portrayed as being entirely solid, later as having a high-pressure atmosphere with a solid surface underneath, and finally as being entirely gaseous. It was a popular setting during the pulp era of science fiction. Life on the planet has variously been depicted as identical to humans, larger versions of humans, and non-human. Non-human life on Jupiter has been portrayed as primitive in some works and more advanced than humans in others.
Gender has been an important theme explored in speculative fiction. The genres that make up speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, supernatural fiction, horror, superhero fiction, science fantasy and related genres, have always offered the opportunity for writers to explore social conventions, including gender, gender roles, and beliefs about gender. Like all literary forms, the science fiction genre reflects the popular perceptions of the eras in which individual creators were writing; and those creators' responses to gender stereotypes and gender roles.
Clare Winger Harris was a pioneering science fiction writer whose short stories were published during the 1920s. She is credited as the first woman to publish stories under her own name in science fiction magazines. Harris began publishing stories in 1926 and soon became popular with readers, with most of her fiction appearing in the influential magazine Amazing Stories. She published a total of twelve stories, all but one of which were collected in 1947 as Away From the Here and Now; a full collection was not published until 2019 when The Artificial Man and Other Stories appeared. Her stories, which often feature strong female characters, have been reprinted in anthologies such as Library of America's The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women and Wesleyan University Press's Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction.
She and Allan is a novel by H. Rider Haggard, first published in 1921. It brought together his two most popular characters, Ayesha from his 1887 novel She, and Allan Quatermain from his 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines. Umslopogaas from Nada the Lily (1892) also appears in the novel as a major character. Along with the other three novels in the Ayesha series, She and Allan was adapted into the 1935 film She. She and Allan is the third story in the Ayesha series and the fifteenth in the Quatermain series.
Feminist literature is fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry, which supports the feminist goals of defining, establishing, and defending equal civil, political, economic, and social rights for women. It often identifies women's roles as unequal to those of men – particularly as regarding status, privilege, and power – and generally portrays the consequences to women, men, families, communities, and societies as undesirable.
Arqtiq: A Story of the Marvels at the North Pole is a feminist utopian adventure novel, published in 1899 by its author, Anna Adolph. The book was one element in the major wave of utopian and dystopian fiction that marked the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Inez Haynes Irwin was an American feminist author, journalist, member of the National Women's Party, and president of the Authors Guild. Many of her works were published under her former name Inez Haynes Gillmore. She wrote over 40 books and was active in the suffragist movement in the early 1900s. Irwin was a "rebellious and daring woman", but referred to herself as "the most timid of created beings". She died at the age of 97.
The role of women in speculative fiction has changed a great deal since the early to mid-20th century. There are several aspects to women's roles, including their participation as authors of speculative fiction and their role in science fiction fandom. Regarding authorship, in 1948, 10–15% of science fiction writers were female. Women's role in speculative fiction has grown since then, and in 1999, women comprised 36% of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's professional members. Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley has been called the first science fiction novel, although women wrote utopian novels even before that, with Margaret Cavendish publishing the first in the seventeenth century. Early published fantasy was written by and for any gender. However, speculative fiction, with science fiction in particular, has traditionally been viewed as a male-oriented genre.
Lucile Taylor Hansen was an American writer of science fiction and popular science articles and books who used a male writing persona for the early part of her career. She is the author of eight short stories, nearly sixty nonfiction articles popularizing anthropology and geology, and three nonfiction books.
Amazing Stories Quarterly was a U.S. science fiction pulp magazine that was published between 1928 and 1934. It was launched by Hugo Gernsback as a companion to his Amazing Stories, the first science fiction magazine, which had begun publishing in April 1926. Amazing Stories had been successful enough for Gernsback to try a single issue of an Amazing Stories Annual in 1927, which had sold well, and he decided to follow it up with a quarterly magazine. The first issue of Amazing Stories Quarterly was dated Winter 1928 and carried a reprint of the 1899 version of H.G. Wells' When the Sleeper Wakes. Gernsback's policy of running a novel in each issue was popular with his readership, though the choice of Wells' novel was less so. Over the next five issues, only one more reprint appeared: Gernsback's own novel Ralph 124C 41+, in the Winter 1929 issue. Gernsback went bankrupt in early 1929, and lost control of both Amazing Stories and Amazing Stories Quarterly; associate editor T. O'Conor Sloane then took over as editor. The magazine began to run into financial difficulties in 1932, and the schedule became irregular; the last issue was dated Fall 1934.
Sophie Wenzel Ellis was an American writer. She was an early female author of "pulp" science fiction stories.
Lilith Lorraine was the pen-name of Mary Maude Dunn Wright an American pulp fiction author, poet, journalist and editor.
Leslie Frances Silberberg, known by the pen name Leslie F. Stone, was an American writer and one of the first women science fiction pulp writers, contributing over 20 stories to science fiction magazines between 1929 and 1940.
