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( ( ( 53 ( 1949, when she published her first story in Astounding, but remarkably little criticism has been published on her work. Most recently, in July 2011, MacLean was awarded the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award for her decades of short stories, novellas, and novels centering on bioscience , psychology, and communication theory (MacLean 2011). As a female author who began publishing in the midcentury pulp and digest magazines , had a background in science, and frequently based her stories on recent scientific discoveries or developments, she paved the way in science fiction for later science-trained women writers, such as biologists Joan Slonczewski, whose Sharers in A Door Into Ocean (1986) have altered their own bodies through symbiosis to take oxygen from seawater, and Vonda N. McIntyre, who explored biotechnology in the award-winning Dreamsnake (1978). Another woman writer who incorporated cutting-edge scientific ideas into her fiction was Octavia Butler, whose gene traders in the Xenogenesis series (also known collectivelyas Lilith’s Brood, 1987–1989) direct their own mutation through borrowing genetic material from the alien races they meet and partner with in their space travels.1 In the lead essay for this collection, Brian Attebery offers an overarching term to help explain the pleasure we derive from science fiction as a genre: parabolas are narrative patterns that “integrate narrative needs, scientific information, and metacommentary on the genre itself” (chapter 1). In discussing the relationship of gender to the genre, Joanna Russ posits that science fiction enables women’s writing because these stories are “myths of human intelligence and adaptability” that center on human rather than gendered problem solving (1972, 17–18). The basis for these myths of human intelligence and the pleasure we take in the genre is science , what Darko Suvin terms the “novum”: the imagined (or newly dis4 Katherine MacLean’s Short Science Fiction and Cytology Science as Parabola Jane donaWertH Katherine MacLean has been writing science fiction (sf) since 54 ) ) ) ParaBles of Politics and PoWer covered) scientific concept around which a science fiction story is centered .2 Indeed, feminist science theorists point out that science is itself a story. For example, Donna Haraway maintains that biology is a story “conceived and authored by a word from the father” (1981, 470); she also argues that “life sciences and social sciences . . . [are] story-laden, . . . composed through complex, historically specific storytelling practices” (1986, 79).3 Similarly, Anne Fausto-Sterling reveals that embryology as it is currently taught is a “story”—an “active story about the male, a passive or absent story about the female,” the “cultural story of maleness or femaleness imprinted on our knowledge” (1988).4 Science is not only central to the problem-solving stories of science fiction but also a means of exploring cultural anxieties about technological and social change. In this chapter, I explore the parabolic story of twentieth-century cell reproduction in the short fiction of Katherine MacLean as part of a tradition of revising the story of science. One of the myths about science fiction is that there are two categories: “hard” science fiction that emphasizes science as the source of aesthetic pleasure for the fiction and “soft” science fiction that emphasizes character . And the myth maintains, of course, that male writers are hard and female writers are soft.5 A similar myth designates early science fiction in the pulp and digest magazines of the 1920s to 1950s as male territory, with few women trespassers. In actuality, both women and men whowrite science fiction manipulate representations of science to explore anxieties about such technological and intellectual discovery.6 Women, moreover, have published all along, appearing beside men in the pulp and digest magazines. But often, women approached science with a difference, because science was tacitly forbidden towomen for the first half of the twentieth century (Donawerth 1997, xx–xxi, 1–4). That is still true of some areas of science, where female participation is below 10 percent: engineering , physics, and computer science. Michel Foucault reminds us that the self is also built by means of a variety of technologies, and Teresa de Lauretis has extended that concept to gender. For women writers, anxiety about science or technology and anxiety about gender are inextricably mixed because they are telling a forbidden story of science; at the same time—or even as a consequence of telling a scientific story—they are exploring possibilities of social change for women.7 As a result, in science fiction, science parabolas authorize [3.135.219.166] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 03...

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