Feminist Ca

54 / The Secret Feminist Cabal
Brooke-Rose…)” (Aldiss 1975: 349-50; Ellison 1972: 230). Robert Silverberg
was another author to espouse such statements: “about two
thirds of the best SF these days is being written by women” (Silverberg
1979: 82). Even some older authors who had previously appeared
extremely resistant to the “intrusion” of women (as people or characters)
into sf proselytized for women’s beneficial influence. Lester del
Rey welcomed the “emergence” of new women writers in the 1970s;
he comments, “this evolution was probably the healthiest and most
promising for the future” (del Rey 1980: 262). Asimov was another
to proclaim the arrival of women in the mid-1960s, a development
which, he argued, induced enormous changes in the writing of sf.
Writing in 1982, he argues: “It is the feminization of science fiction
that has broadened and deepened the field to the point where sciencefiction
novels can now appear on the bestseller lists.” Asimov claims
that this development was a “good thing” — incidentally reinventing
himself from the adolescent letterhack who vehemently argued
that women equaled sex, to someone who had “always said: Liberate
women — and men will be liberated as well” (Asimov 1982: 608). 20
Asimov’s explanation for the influx of women is a common and generally
accepted one: he attributes it to the influence of mass-media sf,
specifically Star Trek. Nearly every commentator on the 1970s arrival
of women mentions the influence of this TV series. Women’s attraction
to Star Trek is figured in accounts such as Asimov’s in a way that
recalls earlier ideas displayed in the pulps that women’s interest is
dependent on emotional response (rather than scientific interest). Star
Trek’s appeal, according to Asimov, lay in the “human interest” of the
stories, and of course, “they had Mr. Spock… What’s more, Mr. Spock
had pointed ears and, for some reason, this, too, seemed to appeal to
women” (608).
By the late 1970s, critics such as Carter, Robert Scholes, and Eric
Rabkin went beyond welcoming the “feminine influence,” to draw-
20 However, his view could be seen as contributing to an analysis situating the mass
market novel as a “feminized” arena and thus a devalued element of culture. This
opens up possibilities for rather more negative interpretations, not just in terms
of preventing sf from being considered serious literature, but also, in sf terms, the
“pollution” of the hard core or golden age of masculine-type sf, which has been
threatened by literary experiments from the New Wave, by feminist propaganda,
by the softening influence of women’s fantasy, and by the diluted and contaminated
Hollywood versions of sf in the movies. Such a tack is taken by Charles Platt
in “The Rape of Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Eye, vol. 1, no. 5, July 1989, 45-9.