Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction

In this groundbreaking cultural history, Lisa Yaszek recovers a lost tradition of women's science fiction that flourished after 1945. This new kind of science fiction was set in a place called galactic suburbia, a literary frontier that was home to nearly 300 women writers. These authors explored how women's lives, loves, and work were being transformed by new sciences and technologies, thus establishing women's place in the American future imaginary.Yaszek shows how the authors of galactic suburbia rewrote midcentury culture's assumptions about women's domestic, political, and scientific lives. Her case studies of luminaries such as Judith Merril, Carol Emshwiller, and Anne McCaffrey and lesser-known authors such as Alice Eleanor Jones, Mildred Clingerman, and Doris Pitkin Buck demonstrate how galactic suburbia is the world's first literary tradition to explore the changing relations of gender, science, and society.Galactic Suburbia challenges conventional literary histories that posit men as the progenitors of modern science fiction and women as followers who turned to the genre only after the advent of the women's liberation movement. AsYaszek demonstrates, stories written by women about women in galactic suburbia anticipated the development of both feminist science fiction and domestic science fiction written by men.

Author: Lisa Yaszek
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: 01/01/2008
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.84lbs
Size: 9.02h x 6.26w x 0.66d
ISBN13: 9780814251645
ISBN10: 0814251641
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Women Authors
- Literary Criticism | Science Fiction & Fantasy

About the Author
Lisa Yaszek is associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture; Director of the

Science, Technology, and Culture degree program; and Curator of the Bud Foote Science Fiction Collection at the Georgia Institute of Technology.