SOURCE: “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?”¹ in Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, July, 1992, pp. 219-35.

In the following essay, Nixon questions the feminism of cyberpunk.

In the 1970s feminist writers made successful intrusions into the genre of the popular SF novel, a genre whose readership, then and now, is assumed to be one who can appreciate, for example, that taking blue mescaline inspires the confidence “you'd feel somatically, the way you'd feel a woman's lips on your cock” (Shirley, Eclipse 74). One hardly needs recourse to Althusserian models to determine who the interpellated reader is here. Suffice it to say, it isn't me. In the '70s Joanna Russ, Marge Piercy, Ursula Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, and Sally Miller Gearhart negotiated—rather boldly, given such a readership—a political and artistic trajectory from '60s feminism to its enthusiastic articulation in specifically...