Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Womens Science Fiction [Paperback]

In this groundbreaking cultural history, Lisa Yaszek recovers a lost tradition of womens 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 womens lives, loves, and work were being transformed by new sciences and technologies, thus establishing womens place in the American future imaginary.Yaszek shows how the authors of galactic suburbia rewrote midcentury cultures assumptions about womens 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 worlds 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 womens 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.?

"Galactic Suburbia, on the one hand, serves as a rich reference resource for studying relatively unknown female science-fiction writers and, on the other, makes nuanced arguments about the formation of literary genres, women's work, domesticity, and scientific endeavors. Yaszek's book is not to be missed by scholars of science fiction and gender studies." —H. Austin Booth, author of Reload: Rethinking Women & Cyberculture

Lisa Yaszekis associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture; Director of theScience, Technology, and Culture degree program; and Curator of l+