The Image of Women in Science Fiction

Science fiction is What If literature. All sorts of definitions have been proposed by people in the field, but they all contain both The What If and The Serious Explanation; that is, science fiction shows things not as they characteristically or habitually are but as they might be, and for this “might be” the author must offer a rational, serious, consistent explanation, one that does not (in Samuel Delany's phrase) offend against what is known to be known. Science fiction writers can't be experts in all disciplines, but they ought at least to be up to the level of the New York Times Sunday science page. If the author offers marvels and does not explain them, or if he explains them playfully and not seriously, or if the explanation offends against what the author knows to be true, you are dealing with fantasy and not science fiction. True, the fields tend to blur into each other and the borderland is a pleasant and gleeful place, but generally you can tell where you are. Examples:

J. R. R. Tolkien writes fantasy. He offends against all sorts of archaeological, geological, paleontological, and linguistic evidence which he undoubtedly knows as well as anyone else does.

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote science fiction. He explained his marvels seriously and he explained them as well as he could. At the time he wrote, his stories did in fact conflict with what was known to be known, but he didn't know that. He wrote bad science fiction.

Ray Bradbury writes both science fiction and fantasy, often in the same story. He doesn't seem to care.

Science fiction comprises a grand variety of common properties: the fourth dimension, hyperspace (whatever that is), the colonization of other worlds, nuclear catastrophe, time travel (now out of fashion), interstellar exploration, mutated supermen, alien races, and so on. The sciences treated range from the “hard” or exact sciences (astronomy, physics) through the life sciences (biology, biochemistry, neurology) through the “soft” or inexact sciences (ethology, ecology) to disciplines that are still in the descriptive or philosophical stage and may never become exact (history, for example).