February 4th, 2008
by
tycho garen
I’m one of the new bloggers here and I take it that introductory posts are customary. Here it goes. A lot of this is biography and background, so skip to the end for a–only slightly–more succinct description of my feminist SF interests.
I’ve always been a geek, and a science fiction fan. My mother always read science fiction when I was a kid, and though we have always been drawn (mostly) very different kinds of SF, I consider her my root into science fiction (and I suppose it’s fair to say feminism as well.) For some reason, that I can’t quite recall, I got it in my head that I wanted to write pretty early, and I wrote an utterly horrible hundred-thousand word manuscript for an only slightly less horrible SF novel that I completed a few months before I turned 17.
Then all of my time evaporated into finishing high school, coming out, and going to college, and whatever else seemed really important to my 18 year old self. My writing interest turned to writing the mainstream gay teenager novel which I imagined as a sort of retelling of The Great Gatsby1. Needless to say, life intervened (thankfully) and I spent a number of years emersed in academe (though the last year has been a hiatus of sorts, I hope to return again soon.) I’m a social scientist, but I had a second major in Women’s and Gender Studies, this lens has a profound effect on my outlook.
Though I’m sure it was clear at the time, between coming out and going to school, I basically withdrew from science fiction. My college had a huge SF community (particularly for such a small school,) and I had nothing to do with it, which is sort of a shame. It was like I was trying too hard to be earnest and being into science fiction didn’t fit with that personal project.
As part of my WS coursework, I took a literature class on Sexuality and Race, where we read among other things Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and some of Samuel Delany’s Biography. It felt like coming home, and I think I wrote at least one paper that drew on something Delany wrote every semester since then. I still wasn’t writing, and I think the whole “too earnest for SF” thing was still very much an issue. A year ago, during my last semester I realized that I hadn’t read any of Delany’s fiction, and so when I ordered my books I spent a few extra dollars on a Delany book which lead to a few Tiptree books2, and I remembered reading Melissa Scott’s “Silence Leigh” trilogy twice when I was in high school, so I picked up Trouble and Her Friends, which I loved so incredibly much.
One thing led to another, and now here I am.
Somewhere in there I’ve started writing again, and of course I’m spending a lot of time catching up on all of the classics that I didn’t read as a kid, and all the books I didn’t read when I was too earnest/cool for SF when I was in school.
My writing, at the moment, deals mostly with ideas about our history and the past, particularly as it shapes cultural ideas about things like gender and sexuality. I must also confess to having a nearly unhealthy compulsion for stories about revolutionary movements, which I think comes from a similar feminist impulse.
At the moment I’m working on the edits for a novella, that I hope to be able to begin shopping around early this spring. I’m also working on a sort of experimental hypertext project that is sort of an object oriented3 novel. And I’m ramping up for the second season of a group serial for one of those revolution-themed stories that I’m so fond of serial story that I’m so fond of.
In other lives, I’m a knitter, and Morris Dancer, as if I weren’t eccentric enough as it is. I blog, perhaps too much, at my blog tychoish.com about knitting, academia, technology, writing, science fiction, and whatever else seems incredibly important to me at the moment.
For this blog I’m interested in thinking more (and more coherently) about reactions to genre trends inside and outside of SF readers/writers, which I think often parallels other discussions of interest to feminists. And I am of course interested in queer issues related to science fiction, and so I suspect that this will occupy some of my attention as well. I really look forward to being able to explore things with you.
Cheers, tycho