Future Females

"A justification for paying serious attention to science fiction may by now be necessary only for other literary critics and scholars. Still, the question of why a book addressing itself to science fiction has to be faced briefly." This comment, the opening statement of Darko Suvins' recent book, is of concern to Professor Barr, editor of this volume, since Future Females is addressing itself to women in science fiction. Metaphorically speaking, if the mere mention of the genre causes a ruffling of academic feathers, then, relating to women is analogous to placing all those simply ruffled feathers in front of a wind machine. Everyone will not welcome a volume where science fiction is viewed in terms of women, but Professor Barr felt such a volume is needed. As Roger Schlobin's bibliography indicates, women are certainly contributing continuously to the science fiction field. This collection of essays illuminates some of this fiction.

Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New-Wave Trajectory, edited by Marleen S. Barr, is the first combined science fiction critical anthology and short story collection to focus upon black women via written and visual texts. The volume creates a dialogue with existing theories of Afro-Futurism in order to generate fresh ideas about how to apply race to science fiction studies in terms of gender. The contributors, including Hortense Spillers, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Steven Barnes, formulate a woman-centered Afro-Futurism by repositioning previously excluded fiction to redefine science fiction as a broader fantastic endeavor. They articulate a platform for scholars to mount a vigorous argument in favor of redefining science fiction to encompass varieties of fantastic writing and, therefore, to include a range of black women's writing that would otherwise be excluded. Afro-Future Females builds upon Barr's previous work in black science fiction and fills a gap in the literature. It is the first critical anthology to address the "blackness" of outer space fiction in terms of feminism, emphasizing that it is necessary to revise the very nature of a genre that has been constructed in such a way as to exclude its new black participants. Black science fiction writers alter genre conventions to change how we read and define science fiction itself. The work's main point: black science fiction is the most exciting literature of the nascent twenty-first century.

In 2020, the lives of Australian women changed irrevocably. With insight, intelligence and empathy, Jane Gilmore, Santilla Chingaipe and Emily J. Brooks explore this through the lenses of work, love and body, and ask: Will the Australia of tomorrow be more equal than the one we were born into? Or will women and girls remain left behind? While our country was shrouded in smoke in the early months of 2020, Australian women went about their daily business. They worked, studied, cleaned, did school runs, made meals. And they postponed looking after themselves because life got in the way. Then, in March, Australians were told to lock down. For all the talk of equality, it was primarily women who held the health of our communities in their hands as they took on the essential jobs to care, to nurse and to teach, despite an invisible danger. One year later, women across the country would march on behalf of those who were not safe in workplaces and their own homes. Never before has change been thrust so abruptly on modern Australian women - 2020 impacted our working lives, relationships and our health and wellbeing. And as a growing number of women agitate for change, it is time to demand what women want. So where do we go from here? One thing is very clear: the future is now, and it is female.

A classic of Japanese speculative fiction that blurs the line between consumption and creation when a cyborg assumes the form and spirit of a murdered child Until he escaped, he had been called “Sample B #3,” but he had never liked this name. That would surprise them—that he could feel one way or another about it. He was designed to reshape himself based on whatever life forms he ingested; he was not made to think, and certainly not to assume the shape of a repair technician whose cells he had sampled and then simply walk out of the secure compound. Artificial Intelligence is all too real in this classic of Japanese science fiction by Mariko Ōhara. Jonah, a child murdered by her mother, has become the spirit of an AI-controlled house where the rogue cyborg once known as Sample B #3 takes refuge and, making a meal of the dead girl buried under the house, takes Jonah’s form. On faraway Planet Caritas, an outpost of human civilization, the female AI system that governs society has become insane. Meanwhile, the threat of the Adiaptron Empire, the machine race that #3 was built to fight, remains. With the familiar strangeness of a fairy tale, Ōhara’s novel traverses the mysterious distance between body and mind, between the mechanics of life and the ghost in the machine, between the infinitesimal and infinity. The child as mother, the mother as monster, the monster as hero: this shape-shifting story of nourishment, nurture, and parturition is a rare feminist work of speculative fiction and received the prestigious Seiun (Nebula) Award in 1991. Hybrid Child is the first English translation of a major work of science fiction by a female Japanese author.

Volume 1 in the two volume set about overcoming the odds in African American Education.

New Criticism and Pedagogical Directions for Contemporary Black Women Writers is a collection of critical and pedagogical essays that shed new light on the creative depths of Black women writers. On the one hand, some Black women writers have been heavily anthologized, they have more often than not been restricted by critical metanarratives. Some of their works have been lionized while others remain neglected. On the other hand, some Black women writers have been ignored and understudied. This collection corrects the gaps in our critical thinking about Black women writers by introducing them to a new generation of undergraduate and graduate students, and by presenting pedagogical essays to our colleagues currently working in the field.

A group of respected analysts of health issues considers the economic forces impacting the surging health care market and examines the ultimate fairness of an intergenerational contract dictating that tomorrow's workers foot the bill for today's elderly."--BOOK JACKET. "Written for the general reader and offering innovative ideas for policy revision along with critical new data on health care economics, this comprehensive volume provides a timely and thoughtful deliberation on the precarious future of Medicare."--BOOK JACKET.

Dystopian narrative is a product of the social ferment of the twentieth century. A hundred years of war, famine, disease, state terror, genocide, ecocide, and the depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. From the classical works by E. M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, through the new maps of hell in postwar science fiction, and most recently in the dystopian turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this narrative machine has produced challenging cognitive maps of the given historical situation by way of imaginary societies which are even worse than those that lie outside their authors' and readers' doors.In Scraps of the Untainted Sky , Tom Moylan offers a thorough investigation of the history and aesthetics of dystopia. To situate his study, Moylan sets out the methodological paradigm that developed within the interdisciplinary fields of science fiction studies and utopian studies as they grow out of the oppositional political culture of the 1960 and 1970s (the context that produced the project of cultural studies itself). He then presents a thorough account of the textual structure and formal operations of the dystopian text. From there, he focuses on the new science-fictional dystopias that emerged in the context of the economic, political, and cultural convulsions of the 1980s and 1990s, and he examines in detail three of these new "critical dystopias:" Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower , and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It .With its detailed, documented, and yet accessible presentation, Scraps of the Untainted Sky will be of interest to established scholars as well as students and general readers who are seeking an in-depth introduction to this important area of cultural production.