Science fiction is a broad category including anything from low-budget monster movies to the sophisticated speculative fiction of Samuel R.Delany or Ursula K.Le Guin. The genre’s ability to investigate social roles and identities was formally marked in 1991 by the creation of the James Tiptree, Jr, Award, honouring fiction that explores and expands ideas about gender. The Tiptree Award took its name from the pen-name of Alice Sheldon, whose own work throws considerable light on the subject and who successfully masqueraded as a male for ten years. It called attention to a tradition begun by Mary Shelley, who wrote what is arguably the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein. While feminist writers such as Le Guin and Joanna Russ have received more attention for their fictional explorations of women’s roles, SF has also been in the forefront in investigating images of masculinity.
Many science fiction stories offer two versions of the male hero: the man of action and the man of science. Hollywood’s simplified form of the genre usually favours the action hero. Flash Gordon gets the girl and the screen time, while Dr Zarkov remains a semi-trustworthy, secondary figure. Glasses-wearing scientists are revealed as hopelessly naive in a universe full of monsters. SF’s men of action are mostly interchangeable with heroic males from other popular forms such as the Western. However, the tension between the fighting hero and his brainier counterpart is specific to science fiction and is one reason this genre has become a particularly powerful tool for questioning gender.
Within print SF, the macho hero is much less likely to triumph over the scientist. Even in the early days of science fiction magazines, when such character types as the square-jawed space captain were first developed, writers tended to take an ironic view of the masculine ideal he represented. In a 1937 story called ‘Forgetfulness’, John W.Campbell, Jr, created versions of both the scientist and the action hero. The latter is typically ‘tall and powerful, his muscular figure in trim Interstellar Expedition uniform’ (22). He dismisses his scientist colleague as having no part to play in conquering the pastoral world of Rhth. Yet it is the astronomer who figures out that the gentle people of Rhth are, in reality, far more powerful than their wouldbe invaders. The aggressive Commander comes across as a blustering fool, while the quiet scientist salvages at least a bit of knowledge from the disastrous campaign.
The same masculine roles reappear in more exaggerated form in R.A.Lafferty’s 1966 story ‘Nine hundred grandmothers’. The scientist hero’s commander complains that ‘Nobody can be a hero with a name like Ceran Swicegood!’ (142) and suggests he copy his redubbed colleague George Blood: ‘Though the hair on George’s chest was a graft job, yet that and his new name has turned him from a boy to a man’ (142).
Such parodic self-awareness is a function of the way SF story ideas are traded around and elaborated like jazz tunes. It also reflects the genre’s combination of high-level intellectual content with more-or-less formulaic storytelling. One source of intellectual infusions is the scientific study of gender. From Darwinian sexual competition to computer-simulated sex, SF has frequently drawn on current thinking about sexual difference. The investigation of masculinity, in particular, has generated a number of fictional tropes, including the superman story, the single-sex utopia (or dystopia), the world of androgynes, and the post-human future.
In the typical superman story, a mutant hero struggles against human rivals, using superior intellect to gain power and win the girl. Philip K. Dick’s story The Golden Man’ (1954) tweaks this scenario by positing a superman with strength, agility, preternatural beauty—and few brains. The implication is that a hypermale is not necessarily a superior human being.
All-female societies have been a useful tool for feminist writers, starting with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915). Fewer writers have used the single-sex trope to explore masculinity, but Katherine Burdekin (Swastika Night, 1937), Lois McMaster Bujold (Ethan of Athos, 1986), Ursula K. Le Guin (the Tiptree-winning ‘The matter of Seggri’, 1994), and Eleanor Arnason (Ring of Swords, 1993) extrapolate societies based on a wide range of male behaviours, from Burdekin’s erotically charged violence to Bujold’s pairbonding and nurturing.
The best-known SF treatment of androgyny is Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). She was anticipated by Theodore Sturgeon, in Venus Plus X (1960), which not only imagines a society with no sexual difference and no resulting imbalance of power or opportunity, but also depicts the resistance of a male observer to what he perceives as loss of phallic prerogatives. Samuel R.Delany’s Triton (1976) and John Varley’s ‘Options’ (1986) posit a kind of androgyny in the form of easy and complete sexual change.
Gender is entirely elective for computersimulated beings like those in Greg Egan’s Permutation City (1994). In the post-human world of cyborgs, bioengineered bodies and virtual reality, one’s sexuality is no more fixed than one’s form. Writers who have led the exploration of post-human existence include William Gibson (whose cyber-cowboys can be read either as simple retreads of or ironic commentaries on older masculine ideals), Raphael Carter, Gwyneth Jones and Geoff Ryman.
References and further reading
Attebery, B. (2002) Decoding Gender in Sdence Fiction, New York: Routledge.
Campbell, J. (as Stuart, D.) [1937] (1946) ‘Forgetfulness’, in R.Healy and J.McComas (eds) Adventures in Time and Space, New York: Random House, pp. 21–46.
Delany, S. (1994) Silent Interviews, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Press.
Garber, E. and Paleo, L. (1990) Uranian Worlds, Boston, MA: Hall.
Lafferty, R. [1966] (1993) ‘Nine hundred grandmothers’, in Ursula L.Le Guin and Brian Attebery (eds) The Norton Book of Science Fiction, New York: Norton, pp. 142–50.
Larbalestier, J. (2002) The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Press.
Roberts, R. (1993) A New Spedes: Gender and Science in Sdence Fiction, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
