I have a fondness for stories about gadgets, computers, and technological wonders, yet I lag badly in adoption of the most basic items such as cell phones and a non-dialup server. And blogging. I am cheap. And lazy... er, busy. So here I go, running after the bandwagon when it has already jumped solar systems. Anyway...
I love near-future science fiction in urban settings extrapolated from present day cities, especially the ones that mix high tech and the grungy underbelly of (post-?) capitalist expansion. Blade Runner aesthetics as cheap thrill and guilty pleasure.
Guilty because often the political analysis behind such world building is either subtly conservative or what I think of as "80s liberal," trying to be down with the oppressed masses but missing some of the finer points of the big picture where economic structure meets culture and intersectionality is a theory with some meat on its bones.
Like the way Blade Runner posits a racially diverse society where everyone is pretty equally skroozled, except blonde/Aryan post-humans are the truly oppressed. Or something.
And the gender politics of cyberpunk often makes me scratch my head, as much as I love many of the classics. There are only so many times I can reread Melissa Scott's back catalog and Nicola Griffith's Slow River, and the few lesbian-flavored novels have their issues too.
In this blog I plan to pick away at issues of world building and plot development from a feministic angle with an amateur sociologist's hat on. Feministic because the standard term is so loaded, and larded, and my card may have expired back in the late 90s when I became a jaded divorce lawyer, I dunno. Anyway. I will talk about books, science fiction and fantasy and whatever else strikes my fancy at the moment, and try to puzzle through the questions of whether what gives aesthetic and/or narrative pleasure is really healthy for all living things or just for some.
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