The Future is Female! Volume Two: The 1970s
Ed. by Lisa Yaszek
This book is a follow-up to a previous anthology published by the prestigious Library of America that showcased classic science fiction stories by women from SF’s pulp era through the golden age. You can now get both volumes together as an attractive boxed set, though they’re also great as standalones.
Chronologically, we pick up here where the first book left off, with some names like Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) carrying over. But much in the literary landscape has changed. In the first book SF was in the process of being fashioned into its modern form and the writers were pioneers breaking new genre ground. In this collection we’re deeper into SF’s New Wave and the stories have become more overtly political, drawing on the politics and cultural energy of second-wave feminism in its heyday.
In general, the longer pieces tend to be the best because they allow for more ambiguity in the messaging, while the shorter ones involve more obvious sloganeering. Overall, however, editor Lisa Yaszek has come up with a great mix and, as is the case with most such historical anthologies, the real treat is in discovering some terrific but less well-known works by authors now largely forgotten.
With a title like that, complete with exclamation mark, you’d be forgiven for expecting nothing subtle in this terrific anthology of 25 SF stories written by women between 1928 and 1969. But this period – and most of the stories here come from the “Atomic age” of the 1950s and ‘60s – was just before the more explicit and political feminism of that movement’s second wave, and subtlety was still the order of the day. As Leigh Brackett remarked of what was happening at the time, “you can get away with practically anything [in SF] as long as it’s well and subtly done.”
You’d be forgiven for thinking that expanding the boundaries of science fiction away from a predominantly “white, male and American” point of view is all about going woke, for good or ill. But an alertness to prejudice and calls for social justice are not primarily what editor Lavie Tidhar is about in this second of his Best of World SF volumes.
In recent years, perhaps feeling that established literary genres aren’t already vague enough, some people have adopted the term “speculative fiction” as an alternative to “science fiction.” Whatever the new label’s merits, it’s fair to say that some SF is more geared toward an imaginative sort of forecasting of what the future might actually have in store, which is the direction taken by the stories collected in the series of anthologies put out by MIT Press that started out as Twelve Tomorrows and of which Tomorrow’s Parties is the latest instalment.
I don’t think Weird Science was the most popular EC Comics title, though it shares the same sense of schlocky fun and pulp formula as Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror and in many ways holds up better than either of those series. The editors also insisted on at least some degree of genre purity: “Our policy will always be to give you REAL science-fiction! No ‘cops and robbers’ or ‘cowboys and Indians’ in spaceships!” Those exclamation marks were very much the house style.
The introduction to this collection of pieces by Robert Sheckley calls them “perfect stories of their type.” The type in this case being SF, mainly published in Galaxy Magazine in the 1950s. In other words, pure pulp. But they are indeed perfect examples of that type. They’re great pulp fiction.
I was unfamiliar with the stories of Stanislaw Lem, so this selection of new translations helped fill quite a hole in my reading. I came away feeling that Lem needed more room (though some of these stories almost qualify as novellas), but even so there’s much here to chew on.
The Martian Chronicles was published in 1950, the same year as that other great “fix-up” of short stories “pretending to be a novel,” Isaac Asimov’s 
While acknowledging the contributions of Karel Čapek, whose 
Alex on SF 