Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction (review)

Lisa Yaszek's Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women's Science Fiction is a welcome intervention on two fronts. First, it contributes to a reconsideration of the history of the genre of science fiction (SF) by recovering, as its subtitle suggests, a rich and largely forgotten tradition of women's SF "by authors who began their writing careers after World War II but before the revival of feminism in the mid-1960s" (p. 15). And second, it participates in a more general burgeoning scholarly exploration of U.S. culture in the cold war moment by showing how these women authors used SF as a vehicle to map and interrogate their brave new world, with its original "technoscientific, social, and moral orders" (p. 6), and in particular the place of women within it.

Yaszek's focus is on the work of writers whose SF stories and novels are set in "galactic suburbia," a term coined by Joanna Russ to refer dismissively to SF visions of "high-tech, far futures where gender relations still look suspiciously like those of 'present-day, white, middle-class suburbia'" (pp. 3-4). However, whereas Russ is deeply critical of these fictions and aims to distinguish her own feminist SF from them, Yaszek reverses this polarity and argues that women SF writers in this moment "used stories about romance, marriage, and motherhood set in galactic suburbia" as a powerful tool to investigate "hopes and fears about the emergence of a technocultural world order," one that "hinged on what were then new understandings and representations of sex and gender" (p. 4). These women experienced "technocultural life in a manner that was both more humble and more profound: through the industrialization of the home" (p. 8). Precisely because "these women spent so much time alone in the home with their machines," Yaszek further argues, "they experienced a certain kind of technologically enhanced subjectivity even more intensely than those men who labored with both machines and other humans" (p. 11). Finally, it was the needs of the cold war—both for the home to serve as "the first lines of defense against communist encroachment onto American soil," and for women to increasingly enter the workplace in "technoscientific professions" (p. 13)—that further transformed the position of women in U.S. society and provided the raw materials for these original fictions.

There are two contexts in which we can situate Yaszek's intervention. First, the book continues the labors of what she rightly refers to as "one of the oldest and arguably still most important dictates of feminist scholarship: to recover women's history in all its forms" (p. 5). In this respect, the book succeeds admirably. By reading these works as contributions to the significant SF subgenre of galactic suburbia, Yaszek is able both to cast new light on the work of familiar authors, such as Carol Emshwiller, Shirley Jackson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey, and, most importantly here, Judith Merril, as well as recover the work of now forgotten mid-century writers like Alice Eleanor Jones, Doris Pitkin Buck, and Mildred Clingerman. Assuming that many of her readers will be unfamiliar with both these authors and their fiction, Yaszek spends a good deal of time summarizing their stories and novels. At the same time, however, she does a superb job of, as she puts it, "connecting stories about women's work in galactic suburbia to cultural histories of women's work in America" (p. 7). As her extensive footnotes bear out, she has carefully worked through the scholarship in this field, and this enables her to offer a richly nuanced context for understanding these SF works and the original ways "they enabled women writers to engage in debates over some of the most pressing political and cultural issues of the day" (p. 65).

At the same time, Yaszek's study needs to be understood as furthering the kinds of transvaluative labors of cultural studies more generally. In his landmark volume Archaeologies of...