Decoding Gender in Science Fiction by Brian Atterbery

Like any good book, this one caused me to add a substantial number of new titles to my ever-expanding list of books that I would like to read. Most collections of essays usually have a few that are of less interest than others, but I was impressed by the consistent excellence of these essays. One of my favorite essays explored utopias based upon the exclusion of one gender in favor of the other.

Subsequent essays deal with Campbell's obsession with 'super men,' which most definitely excluded women, and what Attebery terms 'wonder women,' focusing in the latter especially on the writings of one of my favorite pulp age writers, C. For instance, the first two essays deal with proto-SF works of the 19th century and many of the SF stories that came out of the pulp era, especially those produced under the editorship of John W. They proceed roughly in chronological order of the SF being discussed. And what wonderful essays they are! I value these essays both for the brilliant insights each one shows about SF as a whole but for the in depth discussion of the more specific issue addressed by that particular essay. The book does not contained a sustained argument, but instead is a string of tightly connected essays dealing with one or another aspect of gender. Attebery does as good a job of teasing out the various issues raised by gender as one could wish. It is present as an issue even when it is apparently absent. But gender is a more subtle issue than Heinlein's crudities. No attentive reader of Robert Heinlein could miss the homosocial assumptions undergirding Heinlein's world (even a nonfeminist would have to confess that Heinlein is, to coin a phrase, a sexist porcine). Even in the years prior to the publication of THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS issues of gender arose even in books that did not consciously address it.

Increasingly over the past several decades questions of gender have more and more pressing. There are so many reasons to read this book. This is one of the half dozen best books that I have ever read on SF (along with books like those by Darko Suvin, Tom Moylan, Brian Aldiss, Scott Bukatman, and Fredric Jameson), so the lack of previous reviews for this superb book is inexplicable. One of the finest critical discussions of SF that I have read

Decoding Gender in Science Fiction by Brian Atterbery