Posted: 11th April 2011 by Adam in Uncategorized
- The essay I mentioned and read from in class a week or two ago, Samuel Delany’s “Racism and Science Fiction,” is available online. It’s very much worth a read, as an attempt to think through the science fiction community’s troubled relationship to race, the odd blinders SF seems to have about some kinds of otherness even as it interrogates other kinds of otherness. Relatedly, here‘s Janelle Monáe (who I wish we’d had time to talk about week before last) on androids, the singularity, music, and otherness.
- Given that SF has almost as troubled a relationship to gender as it does to race, Sady Doyle’s “Ellen Ripley Saved My Life” is also an excellent read, about (among other things) why Joss Whedon and the Alien movies are great (if complicatedly so), particularly for girls and women. Again, given how strange it is that SF is simultaneously a) primarily a white boy’s arena and b) invested in estranging, denaturalizing, and shattering norms, this seems like a useful thing to think through. Relatedly, here‘s Joss Whedon’s fantastic Equality Now speech, re: “all these strong women characters.”
