“Rather than seeing the feminist activity within fandom as something that has grown from within fandom and is pulling it apart[...]” she wrote, “I conceive of the growing awareness as a part of fandom that has at last opened up […] that is not pulling fandom apart, but in fact is drawing people into fandom, revitalizing fandom! Certainly that relates to the reasons I became involved in fandom. (Working on Janus gave me a chance to explore and articulate connections between feminism and the literature I had grown up with. Science fiction gave me a forum to imagine and dream in ways that are very important to anyone who is interested in creating a new world…)”
Super interesting that the discussions of diversity and talking about diversity in scifi was discussed on its merits to the fandom even from the 1970s. It's often depicted that this "diversity discussions is ruining scifi" is a recent concern against some sudden assault of social justice onto the genre, when it might just be that it's been ongoing for generations of scifi fans.
The Left Hand of Darkness was published in 1969. TFA's illustration is from a novel published in 1975. I can remember reading some scifi short story in which one of the main characters was trans basically as soon as I could read without vocalizing... so about 1982, '83? and that was something off a clearance pile at a used bookstore... This stuff has been around a long time. It wasn't always so blatantly political, though. The LessWrong folks are right about this one. [0]
In the past, whenever someone got pissed off enough to make a stink about some challenging detail of scifi, most fans just laughed at them. We should do that still. It's fine to criticize the less evolved assumptions embedded in old "space opera"-type stuff (or, really, more recent stuff like The Windup Girl, yeesh...), and it's fine to have tastes that don't perfectly mesh with such progressive authors as e.g. Miéville, so long as we don't take our own feelings too seriously.
It gets about a thousand attendees each year, which makes it similar to, or slightly larger than, Eastercon, the UK's national SF convention. I know a few people from the UK who go. My generaly impression is that it's very highly regarded.
Maybe, I don't know. I wasn't alive in 1970s and I don't know what those discussions are. I know that the writer here is addressing the concerns that feminism is driving people from the scifi fandom. That seems equivalent to the concerns I see in modern day? I might totally be wrong though.
The discussions were thought "settled", until an external faction deliberately unsettled them. It used to be possible to quietly forget that John W Campbell was a white supremacist so long as the idea was firmly discredited. But now the culture war has to be fought everywhere.
People keep forgetting that a certain deliberately multi racial equal opportunity sci fi TV series was first broadcast in 1966.
From what I can tell 60's and 70's sci-fi and even some fantasy was always pretty progressive as far as those concerns go. Earlier sci-fi was less so, but that era had a lot of writers involved in the counter culture of the time, which tended to be fairly progressive.
One of my favourite authors, Michael Moorcock, wrote a lot of things I'm surprised I don't see mentioned more often. The Jerry Cornelius chronicles were about a character that changes race, gender, and orientation throughout his stories and covers a lot of social issues of the time. It's also just a really trippy fucked up series of books. Same with the dancers at the end of time series.
Super interesting that the discussions of diversity and talking about diversity in scifi was discussed on its merits to the fandom even from the 1970s. It's often depicted that this "diversity discussions is ruining scifi" is a recent concern against some sudden assault of social justice onto the genre, when it might just be that it's been ongoing for generations of scifi fans.