Sci-fi used to be a niche genre, but now Doctor Who is a popular TV show in North America; Star Wars and Star Trek are getting new movies and reboots: and superheroes are currently the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s also a genre that I’m relatively new to. I saw Star Wars episode 4 through 6 as a child, but didn’t see the prequels until I was an adult. I didn’t grow up with Star Trek, and I tend to lean toward the fantasy genre more than any other. However, one thing I am above all is a writer and out of a combination of curiosity, hope to expand my horizons, and boredom, I turned to audiobooks to preoccupy myself at a job that’s all hands and no brains. One link I found brought me to “Top 100 Sci-fi Books” and figuring it was good a place as any, I dived in. I was optimistic for female representation at the beginning; I figured that a genre which focuses on the future and progression would have a lot to say about the politics surrounding gender. I’d read Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic for a university class, and though they don’t focus on gender per se, they both give interesting insights on the human condition. I slowly learned that sci-fi, like fantasy, is very much a man’s world, whether we’re talking about the authors or the characters.   

First, let’s check out the facts of the overall survey of books I’m exploring. I’m covering a wide range of books, the earliest having been published in 1818 (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) to 2006 with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Nearly two centuries is plenty of time to cover a large swath of genres within science fiction including: (post-) apocalyptic, alien invasion/contact, science fantasy (a blending of sci-fi and fantasy, think Star Wars), lost world (a genre typified by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World), hard sci-fi, soft sci-fi (the commonly held distinction between soft and hard sci-fi is similar to the distinction between the hard and soft (social) sciences (“Hard SF”)), military, time travel, cyperpunk, satire, sci-fi horror, and comic sci-fi. Within these 29 books, 15 have less than 3 female characters, with 2 novels (C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz) having no “on-screen” female characters, but all books have male characters. 6 books have female protagonists, though only one book (Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale) has a lone female protagonist, as the other novels either have very large casts with multiple protagonists sharing the spotlight (like Greg Bear’s Eon) while others (like Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book or Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age) have multiple plots that have equal focus. Keeping this in mind, 24 of the 29 books contain at least one female character with motivations outside of, or supporting, a man. However, only 14 novels contain at least one female character who has their own character arc (meaning they grow and change emotionally or mentally over the course of the plot and thus given focus in the novel). Science fiction may give a comparatively (to other genres) large representation of women, but considering the fantastical nature of many of the novels’ plots and concepts, this still seems lacking. These books seem to say: “you can have time travel, aliens, cryogenic sleep, FTL space travel, but complex female characters? Impossible!” This may be in part to the fact that across these 29 books, only 5 books are written by female writers while there are 24 male writers (Lucifer’s Hammer has two male writers while Robert A. Heinlein pops up twice on the list). 

Before beginning a deeper analysis of gender (and gender roles) in sci-fi literature, the following 2 novels are worth mentioning because of historical significance. Scholars have argued the validity of Shelley’s Frankenstein as the first “true” sci-fi book (Aldriss and Windgrove 18). However, there is no ignoring the novel’s impact. At most, Shelley helped cement the direction in which the genre was going to take and in the least, Shelley invented the trope of the mad scientist (161), which is now a common and oft explored trope today. Shelley and earlier women writers of the time’s absence from standard literary histories remind us “that science fiction is not the only thing against which learned men have harboured baseless prejudices” (16).  Edwin A. Abbot’s Flatland is an interesting think piece on its own in how it plays with concepts of dimensions and perspective, and becomes even more interesting when it’s noted for being a satire of Victorian social hierarchy (Steward xiii). Flatland dedicates an entire chapter to women’s place in the setting of Flatland. I don’t feel knowledgeable enough of Victorian social intricacies to comment on the book’s satire of it, but the setting and concept alone may intrigue some. 

Other than complete lack thereof, there are three foci I wish to focus on in explaining how women are represented or framed wrong within these 29 sci-fi novels. The way in which the following novels frame women are as follows: women as plot devices, feminism as evil, and women as primarily sex/romantic objects.

                Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars is probably the easiest example of “woman as plot device” to explain. If you’ve watched Anita Sharkeesian’s “damsel in distress” video in the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series, you get the picture. With the help of A Princess of Mars, let me explain in a few sentences what took those videos an hour and a half: if a female character can be easily replaced by an object (let’s say…the leggy lamp from Christmas Story) and the plot can still move forward, that character is not really a character. Like Arthur Conon Doyle’s Gladys Hungerton in The Lost World, the titular princess of Mars, Dejah Thoris is only present in the plot to motivate the male protagonist. Why is this negative for female characters? Within the binary gender role system, women have been the passive objects while men are the active subjects. The damsel in distress trope—while also being overused and tired—reinforces that idea by having the damsel passive in her own life. John Carter, the protagonist, falls in love with the leggy lamp Dejah Thoris nearly instantly, thus giving the plot motion. To be fair to A Princess of Mars, there are two more female characters who have motivations outside of a male character.

Clifford Simak’s Way Station and Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters have a similar issue in that the female character could be replaced with an item, but they’re not damsels in distress. Way Station’s Lucy Fisher and Puppet Masters’ Mary appear very different on the surface. Lucy is a deaf-mute living under a brutish and abusive hick father and is purity exemplified. She is so pure, she has healing powers. Mary, on the other hand, is a capable, secret agent gunwoman with a tough exterior to hide past psychological scars. Both women mainly exist with one specific trait that’ll move the plot along, and then it’ll move on without them. Before the emergence of “that one thing” they were side characters at best. Mary’s “one thing” is she has repressed memories on how to defeat the parasitic alien invaders, and Lucy’s “one thing” is that she turns out to be the custodian of an ancient relic by miraculous happenstance. This gave the illusion of these characters being granted power, but that’s not necessarily the case. Lucy is almost a non-entity until she’s discovered as the custodian, but then she still does not get major screen time regardless of her apparent significance. Lucy’s emergence as something more than just an apparent helpless deaf-mute is overshadowed by the male protagonist’s story arc, and the same happens in Puppet Masters. As Mary tries to combat psychological scars through therapy in order to recover her repressed memories, the focus remains solely on Sam, because apparently, trained psychologists are not as useful at safely prying out repressed memories as brute determination and “true love.”

Philip K. Dick’s VALIS is perhaps the worst offender of woman as plot device. Women in general are footnotes in VALIS’ plot. Two of Horselover Fat/Phillip’s female friends are fridged (meaning they are killed off for the motivation of a male lead). Their only purpose was to add to the protagonist’s story arc by dying. Even Sophia, a supposed messiah, is killed shortly after meeting Horselover Fat/Phillip, sending Phillip on a worldwide search for the messiah’s reincarnation. VALIS shows that no matter how much of an individual you are (Horselover Fat theorizes that one of his female friends enjoys having cancer for the attention), no matter how important you are (two year old Sophia is the new messiah), as a woman, you can be thrown away if it benefits a man’s story.

                Feminism, and feminists by extension, seem to suffer from an image problem in the mainstream consciousness. The three following novels outright attack the women’s movement within their pages. David Brin’s The Postman, Michael Crichton’s Sphere, and Niven and Pournell’s Lucifer’s Hammer were all published rather close to each other with Lucifer’s Hammer being published in 1977 and the Sphere being published in 1987. Thus, they were written in the decade following the emergence of second-wave feminism. These three novels certainly show their distaste for the movement in a variety of ways. Lucifer’s Hammer is perhaps the most upfront with its antifeminism. When an asteroid hits Earth, one character—a supposed sympathetic good guy—causally makes a comment about how “at least” (with it being the apocalypse and all) the women’s lib movement would be over, and that perspective is never brought up again. Apocalyptic novels do seem to have a theme of conveying strict binary gender roles. Maureen Jellison is a good example of this. Before and after impact, she struggles with depression over wanting to be more than the senator’s daughter and a party girl, but she later simply accepts her fate as broodmare and political bargaining chip.  All the female characters, regardless of who they were before Hammerfall fall into nurturing roles. Many simply become love interests, while others, like the female Russian astronaut (and first woman to survive space) becomes Senator Jellison’s nurse by the end of the book.

Michael Crichton’s Sphere perhaps has the most subtle jab at feminism through the character of Elizabeth Halpern, the token female scientist on a deep sea mission. One fact that seemed unique to me in this novel is how all the navy crew members operating on the base—from the cook to the engineer—are women. They are mainly squid fodder latter. Elizabeth Halpern is a straw feminist at their finest. A straw feminist is “a character whose ‘feminism’ is drawn only for purposes of either proving the character wrong or mocking them” (“Straw Feminist”). Until the climax of the novel, Elizabeth is portrayed as a tough, blunt woman who doesn’t take shit. It is repeatedly mentioned how she exercises in order to gain power and strength, ultimately making her sound butch like a stereotypical feminist. Any objections she or Harry Adams (the only African American character) bring up about how their treatment may be a result of their gender or race respectively are cast aside by the other characters. We later find out that a majority of Elizabeth’s rage stems from her affair with a scientific mentor who stole her work and received credit for it. The protagonist Norman puts the blame mainly on her for her loss of recognition and barely considers that Elizabeth has a point: over the course of history, many male scientists have taken credit for female scientists’ discoveries, such as Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Ester Lederberg, and Lise Meitner just to name a few (Lee). At the novel’s climax, Norman has abandoned an unconscious Harry and a murderous Elizabeth (believing that Norman is the cause for all the reality warping deaths) but then returns because of second thoughts. On returning, Harry’s awake and it’s Elizabeth who has become deadweight: all her pervious strength and resolve has vanished and her personality (which has been consistent up to this point) changes utterly to make her a passive character as Harry and Norman have to carry her off the station.

The Postman gives the most runtime to feminism as a concept. Dena, a female scientist, discovered a relic of the world before the nuclear war: feminist theory. She uses it to gain a female following who want to help fight in the war. The idea is immediately shot down by Gordon, who seems astounded by the notion of women fighting. While trying to give women a voice, strict gender roles are enforced about how women need to be a judge of men and a moral centre. The women’s army, called the Scouts, decides to take action without the blessing of Gordon, as if he’s the main authority on military even though he’s masquerading as a postman. Dena’s plan involves entering enemy bases (in which women are treated like chattel) to be captured and inform the women there that they could be living better lives. By the time Gordon discovers this plot, it’s too late: all the scouts have been slaughtered. Gordon undermines this plan, saying it was a stupid, failed tragedy. However, subtext suggests otherwise. The following quote succinctly describes the attitude towards feminism in Postman:   

The story told of a band of forty women—crazy women, many contended—who had shared among themselves a secret vow; to do anything and everything to end a terrible war, and end it before all the good men died trying to save them. They acted out of love, some explained. Others said they did it for their country. There was even a rumor that the women had looked on their odyssey to Hell as a form of penance, in order to make up for some past failing of womankind. Interpretations varied, but the overall moral was always the same, whether spread by word of mouth or by U.S. Mail. From hamlet to village to farmstead, mothers and daughters and wives read the letters and listened to the words—and passed them on. (“The Postman Quotes.”)

Condescension, lamentation, and optimism all rolled up into one paragraph: these women who risked their lives (in a manner that many men in the novel do) are “crazy” or “doing it for love” or “for their country” or as “penance for womankind’s failings.” In other words, women’s identity and motivations are defined around men. In the end, I don’t think their plot failed: The scouts knew how men would react to them being killed. It spurred them into action, and also perhaps inspired other women to do more. Throughout it all however, Gordon retains that this selfless act was stupid and unnecessary, undermining any positive, original message the book could have had in regards to feminism, women, and sci-fi.                                   

The debate topic of women’s objectification in the media is nothing new to anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of feminism. This is not to say a female character cannot be in a romantic or sexual relationship if she wants to be a “good” character, but again, context and framing are immensely important. Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon is perhaps the least sinister way that women are objectified in this survey. In fiction, it is my belief that immersion is key: the reader must believe the fantastical world you have created and feel a part of its universe. The time Morgan takes off to textually pan up and down women’s bodies and describe them took me out of this immersion. Altered Carbon performs textual male gaze at its finest. As a woman, the only thing I could think during these scenes was: “it’s really obvious a straight man wrote this,” which really brings one out of the moment. For an example, here is Kovac’s reaction to meeting the wife of an alleged murder victim: “she was beautiful, in a sea, sand, and sun sort of way, and the short shorts and leotard she was wearing displayed the fact to maximal affect. [ . . .] Exuberant breasts framed the fabric of the leotard” (Morgan). One could argue that with this story being from Kovac’s first person point of view, the male gaze displayed in the text is an acceptable way to add to Kovac’s character. Whether this is true or not still leaves this reality: many of the books we looked at so far may alienate some women from reading them because of how their fictional representations are treated.      

Robert A. Heinlein’s The Door into Summer and Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat both play with interesting concepts. The Door into Summer analyzes some consequences of putting yourself in cryogenic sleep while Stainless Steel Rat decides to take a comedic look at the sci-fi genre. What is problematic for both these books is how their female characters are placed within the novel’s universe. In both books, the female characters exist only as love interests. Door into Summer has a total of two female characters, and suffers hard from the Madonna-Whore complex. Belle, the protagonist Daniel’s first love interest, turns out to be a fraud artist who seduces men to achieve her own ends, is immensely vain, and is the main villain of the novel while Ricky, Daniel’s ex-business partner’s 11 year old daughter, is the picture of chastity and Daniel states that other than his cat, she is his only friend (he meets Ricky at her girl scout camp, for gods’ sake). In a story where there is time travel, you can see where this is heading. Daniel meets up with Belle to revel in her loss of youth—thus losing all her apparent power even though Belle is shown to also be immensely intelligent and conniving—and goes onto marry Ricky, now grown up. To me, this comes off as bordering on pedophilia. It is true that Ricky is of age when they marry, but it’s not realistic to expect an 11 year old to wait ten years until she’s older (but not too old), to enter the sleep and marry Daniel in the future. In the course of those ten years, she wouldn’t change her mind? And while she was of age, Daniel has known her only as a child; there was no area for building an adult relationship in the time Ricky woke up and they got married. Technically deemed legal, it seems squicky to me.

Stainless Steel Rat’s main villain, Angelina is similar to Belle in some ways. What is perhaps refreshing about her is that she has no scruples in murdering, even reveling in it, to get her way. A lot of female villains are made more morally ambiguous to their male counterparts and not allowed to be a straight-up bad guy. It’s when you find out why she is so evil that’ll make a lot of female readers groan: she was born unattractive, so began committing crimes to pay for cosmetic surgery. Even with her murderous tendencies and obvious psychological trauma (not to mention the multiple times she’s tried to have the male protagonist killed), she ends up in a relationship with the titular Stainless Steel Rat. Thus showing that no matter how unrealistic a pairing might be, if there is only one or two women in the story, they must end up with the man.     

Philip Jose Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go and Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan are both mainly on here for the way they deal with the issue of rape. To Your Scattered Bodies Go is a history enthusiast’s wet dream as the setting basically has famous people from many different time periods thrown together to see what happens. Not too into the beginning of the book, the main character, Richard Francis Bacon and Alice Liddell come under the influence of a drug and have sex together. The day after, Liddell is shocked and ashamed this has happened to her, and feels she has cheated on her husband and let go of her (Victorian-era) morals. For the rest of her time with Bacon, she is shown as stand-offish and irritated by him, which is understandable. However, this novel is from Bacon’s perspective, not Liddell’s, and he mostly shrugs it off and can’t understand why she’s so upset. Liddell is later killed off, so Bacon doesn’t have to face any ramifications. Similarly, Malachi Constant in Sirens of Titan rapes Beatrice Rumfoord, and afterwards is even shown feeling bad about it, but his and her mind are soon erased, meaning no one has to face consequences or responsibility. Beatrice has a son by the rape as well, which must have been an upsetting ordeal when she didn’t remember how she conceived him. Sirens of Titan plays with the idea of fate and free will, akin to a Greek tragedy, but for a book that is in overall comedic and even child-like at moments, this seems unnecessary. Rape is a crime that is facing epidemic levels globally, and it seems mainstream media (not just sci-fi) is very loathe to use it in any other way other than a plot point.          

As I said at the beginning of this piece, sci-fi is not only about hypothetical futures, but about progression too. Some of the above novels, while not handling female characters particularly well, are trying to say something about the nature of technology, science, and humanity’s relationship within it. The following novels do this as well, but also remember to bring gender into the mix. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is specifically about societal structures surrounding gender. The other books, while not discussing the nature of gender dynamics as bluntly as Atwood, highlight the role women can play in sci-fi when they are given breath to be just as equal, diverse, and fleshed-out characters as their male counterparts.

Handmaid’s Tale is set in a theocracy dystopia in which fertility in men is at an all-time low, and so young, fertile women were taken from their families and own children to be placed into the home of an upper-class family to basically be the commander’s (patriarch of the family’s) broodmare. The story follows one such Handmaid, going through her daily routine and her anxiety and fear at being found out in trying to escape. The setting is puritanical: pornography, lingerie, and other items once used to enhance sexual pleasure are black market items and the option for abortion is a thing of the past. The handmaid, while not being a quote-on-quote “strong female character” is complex in how she toes the line between wanting to live a safe, albeit caged life and wanting to break free of the handmaiden’s red cloak. Handmaiden’s Tale is unique in the sense that out of all the novels I’ve read for this essay up to this point, it contains a character—a friend from the main character’s past—who may be a lesbian. It’s not outwardly stated, something that may have gotten her killed in this setting, but little hints dropped suggest it to readers. The main focus of the book seems to rest on deconstruction of binary gender roles, and themes of agency, sexuality, classism, racism, and reproductive rights.      

Though not a perfect way of getting around discussing gender, one option to those writing is to put a coat of female paint on a body without considering how society may affect the psychology of a person based on their identity. While this doesn’t allow the author to deconstruct gender, it does allow for women to be seen as equal to men within the universe created. John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War does this with interesting results. Set in a world were Earth is trying to colonize planets across galaxies, the age of recruitment into the Colonial Defense Forces is 75, the thinking being that an older person with wisdom and experience is a more valuable soldier than a 20-something full of bravado. Upon entering the forces and travelling into space, the senior recruits are given new, young, and enhanced bodies, effectively making everyone equal on a biological level. Because of this, you have women seen as equal to men in the military, and even taking up some leadership roles. In fact, the first squad captain John Perry has off the training base is a woman and is shown to be just as competent in leadership as men in similar roles. One could argue that, with the group Perry is a part of being split equally between men and women, and them pairing off almost immediately, that this could be an example of women as sexual/romantic objects, but that isn’t the female characters’ only function in the plot. For example, in the latter half of the book, we are introduced to the character of Jane Sagan, a member of a Special Forces unit. Because Perry’s wife signed up with him but died before she could be recruited, her DNA sample was used in creating Sagan, who is only physically 6 years old and has no memories of Perry. Her first reaction upon this revelation is to attack Perry, but she later becomes curious to the life her DNA inhabited before her consciousness was in it. Again, she is shown to be a fierce, competent soldier before this twist is revealed, showing her as more than just a romantic interest. Greg Bear’s Eon is similar in that, on the research base located on an asteroid, women, and not just white women (some Chinese), are seen as competent scientists and leaders. A woman is head of the commission that coordinates exploration of “the stone” and she sends Patricia Vasquez, a young theoretical physicist often described for her brilliance, to the stone. Vasquez does at one point get kidnapped, but she is no means a damsel in distress, and the man who pursues her does so not out of a sense of chivalry, but a sense of duty of the head of commission to keep her safe.           

            Unfortunately, diversity of race is something that these sci-fi novels struggle at, never advancing much further beyond some token appearances from Black or Asian characters. Discussing race and ethnicity in sci-fi would take a whole other essay. What I can discuss here is diversity of character beyond that of sexual object, romantic interest, straw-women, or plot device. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age is one of few female majority books I read, and Julian May’s The Many-Colored Land boast many female characters of different types ranging across a spectrum of morality. Diamond Age has two main plots that it flips back and forth between: one follows John Percival Hackworth and his social downfall after making an illegal copy of his creation, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive, educational storybook, and then loses it. The second is a bildungsroman of Nell, the lower class little girl who receives the stolen copy. Nell goes from a lower class 4 year old who can barely fend for herself into an educated, self-sufficient young woman over the course of the novel, commanding an army of Han Chinese girls who have also read the primer. There’s also Tequila, Nell’s oft abused, and abusive mother; Fiona Hackworth, Hackworth’s daughter and motivation for making the illegal primer; Gwendolyn Hackworth, her mother; Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw, like Fiona, a friend of Nell’s and an owner of a primer, and shows how the primer can affect others differently; Miss Matheson, this book’s Dumbledore; Miss Stricken, a very authoritarian teacher; and more. These characters exist across the morality spectrum, to being seen as enemies, like Miss Stricken; friends, like Fiona and Elizabeth; and the morally ambiguous like Tequila. Many-Colored Land does something similar with its female characters. You have one woman with powerful metaphysical powers, an aggressive, talented athlete, a calm pacifist of a nun, an evil, coercive alien, and a major leader of the resistance. That last one, Madame Guderian, is an especially interesting character to me. She begins by being defined by her husband, the inventor of a portal that can take people to Pliocene epoch Europe. However, she uses that invention to become a successful business woman and declared a saint after she enters the portal herself later in life. She begins in a typical role, and becomes something so much more by becoming her own character.              

Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book is another of a majority female cast, and focuses on the trials of undergraduate Kivrin Engle as she is sent back in time to study the middle ages during the 14^th century, but is sent many years after projected and must live through the Black Death as the people in the future are unable to get her back due to their own epidemic breakout. The Doomsday Book is a good character study of Kivrin as she goes from optimistic student to a traumatized veteran of one of the worst epidemics to ever plague the planet. Doomsday Book is also special because Kivrin is one of few female characters in sci-fi who time travels in her own right (Stross). The medieval manor that Kivrin ends up in hosts a variety of female characters: the eldest daughter Rosemond facing an impending marriage with an older man she doesn’t love; Imeyne, the mother of the lady of the house who is constantly lording over everyone as their supposed superior; the lady of house, Eliwys who waits for her husband to come home while also having an implied affair with one of his men; Agnes, the rambunctious, adorable, and one of a few realistic portrayals of children; Mary Ahrens, the selfless great aunt who is also a brilliant doctor in the present, trying to squash the epidemic; Mrs. Gaddson, a religious zealot and overprotective mother; the bell ringers; and many more. Furthermore, something unique is given to Kivrin which is a given for many male characters: she exists as a medieval student first and foremost (Walton). She is not defined by her relationships to others, as many female characters are.   

            Over the course of 29 audiobooks, I have encountered a sleuth of male and female characters. The male characters face their own
tropes—often regarding a need to protect others in some sort of “chosen one” narrative in which they have few flaws (i.e. Battlefield Earth’s Johnny Goodfellow)—but women face a particular problem. Across all media, women struggle to have serious representation and sci-fi is no exception. There are many brilliant female characters in sci-fi cinema and TV people can point out as exceptions to the rule: Buffy Summers, Uhura, Starbuck, Martha Jones, Ripley, etc., but that’s the problem: they are the exception, not the status quo. Sci-fi has many brilliant female writers, from Mary Shelley to Ursula K. Guin, and many memorable female characters like Kivrin Engle, the Handmaids, Nell, and many more, but like their screen counterparts, they are the textual exception. Sci-fi is on the rise, as is much of geek
culture, and as one famous geeky quote goes: “with great power, comes great responsibility.” How will sci-fi decide to wield its?