Feminist Science Fiction and the Next System
Margaret Atwood writes with a feminist lens and focuses on environmental issues. She is famous for spending incredible amounts of time rigorously researching current environmental, social, and economic contexts that could lead (or have led) to catastrophic events. These touchstones form the premise for her “fictional” worlds. She has argued that she doesn’t write sci fi, because in her books everything that happens is grounded in what could happen (or is already beginning to happen) in future dystopian (and utopian) worlds. About writing what she has termed books about “Ustopia,” she reflects:
Ustopia is a world I made up by combining utopia and dystopia – the imagined perfect society and its opposite – because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the other. In addition to being, almost always, a mapped location, Ustopia is also a state of mind, as is every place in literature of whatever kind... -http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwood-road-to-ustopia
Like Atwood, much of Butler’s work is dystopian. In Parable of the Sower, for instance, government has all but collapsed and chaos reigns. The main character, Lauren Olamina, who Butler once compared to “her best self,” grows up in the nearly-collapsed remnant of a Los Angeles suburb. However, as is often the case, the dystopian stands in for specific aspects of our present context and, through the novel, Butler suggests a way forward. For instance, as critic Peter Stillman suggests, a collective community is one of the answers:
Olamina does not look to individualism because individuals on their own are too weak and too vulnerable to survive and prosper for long. She wishes to form a small community, but that community cannot be a collection of disconnected peoples unified primarily by place or property, like her Robledo neighborhood; rather, the community must be a collective project based on the conscious interdependence and agreement of its members, who must know, trust, and be able to work with each other for shared purposes. (Stillman 22) -http://www.jstor.org/stable/20718544?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
A possible way to look at the ways in which sci fi feminists, and also, specifically Black, sci fi, addresses the next system questions might be to ask the women of “Octavia’s Brood” who put together the collection, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, and write and think on this topic lad (https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2015/03/09/rewriting-the-future-using-science-fiction-to-re-envision-justice/), to write a piece.