Reconstruction 5.4 (Fall 2005)

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Justine Larbalestier. The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction. Middletown CT: Wesleyan UP, 2002. 295 pp. Softcover. $22.95. ISBN: 081956527X

<1> Science Fiction, writes author Justine Larbalestier, has always told the tale of the battle between the sexes. The battle can be witnessed from afar, as in the grainy 1930’s letter columns in old sci-fi magazines like Astounding where quarrels over innate sexual differences were published and debated, or from up close in today’s literature. Larbalestier declares that the goal of her book is to illustrate how necessary and important this former, pre-70’s period of science fiction (1926 to 1973) is to contemporary feminist science fiction. The pre-70’s time period has been consistently ignored by critics, who fixate on later texts and their more obvious ties to feminism.

<2> Interestingly, Larbalestier traces the development of women’s issues and begins defending her goal by first examining not novels or stories but the sci-fi fans themselves: “I had never heard of fanzines [ . . . ] science fiction was, for me, neither field nor community, but books alone.” Before the 70’s, there were certainly female fans and readers of sci-fi, even female writers, and there were always the males who were thinking about all the ways women should behave. Larbalestier shows us material that would be difficult to get a hold of for many sci-fi fans, including tantalizing reproductions of pages from these early fanzines like the 1939 Futurian News, and she presents to us an intriguing historical lesson of the role of fans and the sci-fi society they began to create, a society vaster than any sci-fi novel, a society that could, in fact, birth authors: “An important part of the discourse of fandom was the idea that it could lead to a professional engagement with science fiction.” She argues, successfully, that the existence of such fans who discussed gender issues effectively created a early precedent for feminist thought—“the mere fact of their presence created a tradition that other women could then become a part of.”

<3> Larbalestier’s point reminds me of Brooks Landon’s, who also demonstrates in his book Science Fiction After 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars that sci-fi readers define sci-fi just as much as its writers. There is quite a difference in each author’s writing style, however. Landon has incredibly clear and lively sentences, as if he is writing an adventure novel in criticism. Larbalestier’s book can be easily described as research-oriented. This description does not just refer to her research-heavy citations of stories and magazines and critics upon critics, but many of her paragraphs are structured so that, one after another, they begin with her summary of some basic point, then a staggering amount of sentences or quotations that support this, as in her very first paragraph which, after its first sentence, is taken up solely by a seven-line quotation. This early top-heavy approach can bring a reader out of the story arc of her argument (where is the battle of the sexes idea in this?), but at other times, it is not a real problem. In fact, her habit of reproducing page-wide facsimiles of referred-to magazines becomes a novelty treat for the reader, who reads the cramped early-century font types of a passage that she’s already explained and feels like he or she is also foraging along on a scientific literary expedition into understanding these sci-fi fossils.

<4> I wish she had briefly mentioned what is taken for granted by many sci-fi readers—that science fiction certainly began before 1900, and is commonly thought of as being brought to life on the altar of Gothic tradition in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and brilliantly realized in the adventures of Wells and Verne. Paul Alkon wrote a whole book on the subject (Science Fiction Before 1900), and while it is important for Larbalestier’s study that she focus on only her pre-70’s period, the way she announces this goal might lead some readers to think that science fiction did not land on this planet until 1926. At one point, she tries to allude to work outside her focus by writing that “the field of science fiction was not the only site during this period where debates about women, sex, sexuality and feminism were taking place,” and follows this with a vague quote by Virginia Woolf. Immediately this awkward paragraph ends, and Larbalestier returns to her main discussion.

<5> Why are the texts of Science Fiction particularly suited to showing us popular representations of the sexes? Because science fiction is a genre which “overtly engages with discourses of knowledge.” The world of sci-fi is able to depict the warring words between men and women precisely because sci-fi does not try to reproduce our world’s reality; as Larbalestier says, “The process of imagining a world in which women are the dominant sex immediately exposes many of the processes that normally operate to keep women subordinate; it renders these processes of power visible.” Larbalestier reels in both sci-fi and non-sci-fi critics, tying them into her textual analyses with aplomb, as in her section “Real Men and Real Women,” where she brings up Judith Butler’s theories on gender and the body and neatly segues into Gardner’s tale “The Last Woman.” In fact, it is in her detailed summaries of these stories and her cogent evaluations of other critics that readers (especially novices) will be amazed. To see a universe of sci-fi unrolled before their eyes, inhabited by decades of fan communities, critics, feminists, dazzling stories and wanna-be stories, all smartly analyzed and put in their architectural place throughout the 20th century, makes parts of the book become a slow and steady page-turner. A more rabbit-paced reader might find this extensiveness too much, but such a reader should be reminded that there are section headings, thank Ford, and anyone can simply skip ahead and nibble on Larbalestier’s next chunky morsel.

<6> The most compelling of these points take us back again and again to her main argument: how the battle between the sexes is represented. She catalogues the dominant and submissive personalities of characters, and importantly points out that the role of woman in sci-fi is essentially constructed, since “for a woman to become part of the heterosexual encounter, she must learn to perform her sex properly.” These are common and vital gender issues, problems that are explored even in non-sci-fi books, for instance the Tony award-winning play by David Henry Hwang M. Butterfly, where the ostensibly female object of the male protagonist’s affections declares, once the audience knows she is in fact a man, “Why, in the Peking Opera, are women’s roles played by men? [. . .] Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.”

<7> It is astonishing to see the incredible (and creative!) amounts of sexism and misogyny that are rampant throughout science-fiction, especially earlier science-fiction, such as the number of stories that try to show men overthrowing the matriarchy, that “female rule is misrule.” Larbalestier groks rightly when she challenges texts that seemingly offer equality between the sexes in their narratives, showing through wonderful and fresh analyses (fresh because she is quoting actually sci-fi stories) that this equality often is deceptive, that supposedly enlightened female characters are merely stuck in the same hetero-normative paradigm by being made to look “virile” and given a “mind like a man.” She also shows a common fallacious theme of such texts: “if only men would treat women better we would not have the tension between the sexes that exists.” These polite author-thrashings and clever plot examinations make this book a long but still engrossing read.

Joe Bisz
CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College

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