A Universe of One's Own

Posted July 9, 2019

External Article: The New York Review of Books

Georgia Tech School of Literature, Media, and Communication Professor Lisa Yaszek's science fiction anthology The Future is Female was reviewed by The New York Review of Books in "A Universe of One's Own", July 18.

Excerpt:

“Write me a creature who thinks as well as a man, or better than a man, but not like a man.” This was the challenge the influential science-fiction editor John Campbell famously issued his authors in the 1940s. It was aimed at producing aliens as fully formed as the interstellar human travelers who encounter them. Isaac Asimov thought the best example was a creature named Tweel from Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” a story from 1934 that preceded the dictum. But the instruction also has the feel of a riddle, and neither Campbell nor Asimov considered its most obvious answer: a woman.

The School of Literature, Media, and Communication is a unit of Georgia Tech's Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Read the full article.