Editorializing

3 Comments

It occurred to me last night that not everyone who reads this journal reads SH, and thus that I ought to provide a pointer from here to my latest editorial, titled "The Future of Sex." I think that my thesis got a little muddled under the weight of attempts to throw in a bunch of related stuff, as I'm wont to do, so I restated it more pithily on the SH Forum page:

I feel that societies portrayed in fictional future worlds should be at least as sexually diverse as modern American society, unless there's a good reason for them not to be.

But the main thing y'all should read if you're into gender-issues-in-sf stuff is "Both/And: Science Fiction and the Question of Changing Gender," by Sherryl Vint. I loved the title when we first published it, and was intrigued that it discussed my two main examples of transsexuality in science fiction (Delany's Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (formerly known as merely Triton) and Varley's Steel Beach), but somehow didn't get around to reading it. While I was writing the editorial, I Googled for those two book titles and followed the link to this article and got halfway through it before I realized that it was in fact something we'd published. (Go us!) Good stuff. It addresses the unease I had with the gender roles in Steel Beach, and makes me think that I probably gave Triton too short shrift (because I read it as doing much the same kinds of things with gender that the Varley book did).

3 Responses to “Editorializing”

  1. Karen

    Vint’s article addresses some of the problems I had with Steel Beach when I read it too. As it happens, I read the book for a class in Science Fiction… taught by Samuel R. Delany! (I don’t recall Chip’s take on the gender essentialism, but then he had his hands full just getting a classful of Comparative Literature students to handle basic SF tropes.)

    reply

  2. David Moles

    You’ll probably see this anyway, Jed, but I started writing a response and it ended up growing until I thought I might as well put it up here instead.

    Though I think the problem I’m talking about there is really kind of tangential to what you’re asking for.

    reply

  3. metasilk

    From your SH editorial: ” I can’t help noticing that in all three of these works, every human character with an onscreen romantic and/or sexual relationship is interested only in “the opposite gender” (whatever that means in a world where sex changes are easy and cheap), and that there are no long-term romantic and/or sexual relationships involving more than two people (cheating on a monogamous relationship doesn’t count here), and that at least one member of each couple gets extremely jealous if the other member even expresses interest in anyone else.

    I see this limited view of relationships elsewhere in science fiction as well.”

    I think the key word is RELATIONSHIP. And that makes me wonder how much of that is the authors’ emotional imagination, more than an issue of sexuality or gender? Can those be discussed separatelly at all, though? I don’t know.

    reply

Join the Conversation