When I picked up the anthology The 1986 Annual World’s Best SF at a library book sale midway through last year, I wouldn’t have predicted that it would spark an eye-opening week for me. But spark one, it did. That book, with its clunky 80s fonts, led me to reevaluate my a lot of what I’d known about science fiction and about the place of women in that genre.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved sci-fi. My middle school years were defined by works like Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Tracy K. Smith’s Sci-Fi, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle. I now wonder why every author whose sci-fi work I enjoyed had the same middle initial.
Then, last year, I picked up the anthology The 1986 Annual World’s Best SF. I never made it past the two-page introduction. Said introduction was written by Donald A. Wollheim, who used the space to point out three key observations. One: in 1986, more and more of the best new writers and readers in the “fantastic literature” genre were women. Two: women write and read fantasy, and men write and read science fiction. Three: while sci-fi moves us forward as a society, fantasy does the opposite—it’s escapism, and it’s unrealistic. The implication was clear: women don’t write good sci-fi.
This was discovery number one—the unexpected, sudden reminder that a certain degree of respect automatically afforded to male authors, especially in the science fiction genre, is not there for women. As a young woman myself, I wasn’t entirely ignorant on this matter. The bluntness of that division, however, was surprising.
While I put the book down, I couldn’t shake my questions about Wollheim’s point—was there any truth to such reasoning? Did the literary work of women in the mid-1980s do less for mankind than the work of men? Intellectually, I got stuck on such questions. I was in a canoe with only one oar, churning water and spinning in the same circle.
Less than a week later, a very timely guest lecture at an InspiHER meeting reeled me back to shore. The speaker was an English professor at a local university who specialized in science fiction literature and film. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, she told me, had to be the next thing I read.
Flipping the book open to its introduction, I came to my second realization of the month—a realization that rescinded the one prior.
“I write science fiction, and science fiction isn’t about the future. I don’t know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less,” wrote Le Guin.
Le Guin argued that the future is a metaphor and that to call any form of fantastic literature escapism indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the genre. After reading this, the discovery came to me: no one person can define the purpose of art. Likewise, no one person can rank the talent of any group of people at achieving such a purpose.
Eva Buckner is a senior and the ECHO’s opinions editor and columnist. Outside of writing, she babysits and plays volleyball. She is also the vice president of East’s March For Our Lives chapter, and president of LitCon. Eva can be contacted at evahelenbuckner@gmail.com.
