Published in 2021 (first published 1988)
255 pages
Sarah Lefanu was born on the east coast of Scotland, was brought up there and in East Africa, and now lives in the west country. In the 1980s and 1990s she was Senior Editor at The Women’s Press, where she was responsible for their innovative and highly-regarded science fiction list. From 2004 to 2009 she was Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival. She continues to chair events for the LitFest on a regular basis, and also for the Bristol Festival of Ideas. Sarah teaches on the BA degree in English Literature and Community Engagement at the University of Bristol. She has been a judge for the James Tiptree Award (an annual award for works of SF and fantasy that expand and explore the understanding of gender), and for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.
What is this book about?
Awarded the prestigious MLA Emily Toth Award (1990).
The title of this book comes from a line of dialogue in The Women Men Don’t See, a short story by the late great James Tiptree Jr (aka Alice Sheldon and Raccoona Sheldon): What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.
So you thought science fiction was a boys’ own zone? Think again. In this classic work of science fiction criticism – winner, when it was first published, of a prestigious MLA award – Sarah LeFanu looks at the work of a whole range of science fiction writers and explores the fusion of a feminist political worldview with the myriad possibilities of science fictional otherworlds. With individual chapters on the work of Suzy McKee Charnas, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Tiptree herself, and a new preface from the author.
“It is a classic, a milestone work which puts women back into the history from which we’ve been scored out, and is essential for anyone interested in writing, in the canon, in women, in genre and in history.” (www.huffingtonpost.co.uk)
“Ranges widely with great intelligence…LeFanu has done something important for us, whoever we may be, male or female.” (Locus)
Highly readable, containing much valuable comment, not only on the four writers who figure in Part Two (Tiptree, Charnas, Le Guin and Russ) but also on many other women writers and, indeed, on the nature of SF itself.” (Paperback Inferno)
