In response to coffeeandink’s post on “The erasure of women writers in sf & fantasy“.

There are times I wonder whether, at some point when I was not looking, I slipped between timelines, and wound up in an alternative time-line where a whole body of fiction and criticism that I distinctly remember reading just didn’t exist.

I’m talking about the (yes, I am going to do it, I’m going to use the f-word) feminist science fiction of the sixties, seventies, and even the eighties.

I recall my first moment of wondering, reading a blog exchange bemoaning the lack of “women’s SF”, where strength was not defined by physical aggression. I pointed out that that “women’s SF” had actually existed for a long time, and gave some references, but had to stop and reattach my jaw when one of the respondents characterized “feministic SF” as being the very kind of “kicking butt” SF she didn’t want. Away, whisk, whisk, went the complex imaginative renegotiations of masculinity and femininity by both female and male authors.

Then this week, on Tor.com, an essay on dystopian fiction and control of reproduction, which discussed a range of novels without acknowledging that they were part of an extended dialogue by writers, literary scholars, sociologists, and bioethicists dissecting that very subject which went back decades. And of course the f-word was not mentioned.

And this gem, from the Independent (Title: “How women are winning sci-fi’s battle of the sexes“), which has had me doing a slow burn since it showed up in my twitter feed. I was reminded of a slightly exasperated review of a film about a woman leaving her unsatisfying marriage and seeking independence, where the reviewer remarked on the perpetual first steps phenomenon in Hollywood films – Liberation (what it was called back then) being constantly reset to the beginning.

Hello, women have been writing SF for as long as there’s been a field. Hello, we ditched the Barbarella stereotype in the seventies. Hello, we never went away. Hello, I was actually there, in the 90s.

Or maybe I wasn’t, not in this timeline.