Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Biology in the Top 10 Science Fiction Stories by Women

In 2003 Gwyneth Jones wrote a column for the Guardian listing her top 10 science fiction picks by women writers. Many of her choices have strong biology themes:

• Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness takes place on the planet Gethen, where the inhabitants are androgynes who can become either male or female during their fertile period.

• In Kate Wilhelm's Where Late The Sweet Birds Sang: A Novel cloning is developed to save the human race after the environment has been destroyed.

• CJ Cherryh's Cyteen is "about domination and slavery, the monsters power makes and the twisted lives of the children born to perpetuate the dynasties" with genetic engineering and cloning central to the story.

• Kathleen Ann Goonan's Light Music is "a tour of the consequences of Lynn Margulis's radical thinking on evolution. This is how we could see ourselves if we weren't Darwin's slaves: every self a community, every human being a symbiote city, a node in the richly permeable network of life on Earth."

Read Jones' entire list
.

(via io9)
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1 comment:

  1. Wow! I've been looking for a link like this! I have my own blog, The Writer's Daily Grind. You can find it at

    http://www.writersdailygrind.blogspot.com

    Furthermore, my WIP is science fiction, and the science fiction is biological/evolutionary. And I'm female. I don't expect that I will ever achieve the status of Ursula Le Guin, a writer I very much admire. But I'm out there writing. And I try to be scientific. So I'm really happy I found your blog!
    Anne Gilbert

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