Feminists & "escapist fare" Aliens and others Jenny Wolmark

[alice wellintown]

But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the laws of nature --
of space, time, thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself --
then we risk being judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently
Serious. . .  .It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of
Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good
people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunits,
murder, being a pretext for a logical puzzle, is hardly ever an
irrational act. In science fiction, where entire worlds may be
generated from simple sets of axioms, the constraints of our own
everyday world are routinely transcended. In each of these cases we
know better. We say, "But the world isn't like that." These genres, by
insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and
so they get redlined under the label "escapist fare."
This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in
which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable
flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our
history.
--Pynchon, Luddite,  1984

Ten years later (1994), In _Aliens and others: science fiction,
feminism and postmodernism_ Jenny Wolmark examines the escapist fair
issue. She notes that since 1970 SF has been politicized by feminist
SF writers and by critics; she notes what is obvious enough to us some
24 years after P's Luddite essay, that the "escapist fair" label has
much to do with bodice ripping romance  . . .Identity & Gender. And,
while this work is much dated, and walks us back through roads taken
too many times---defining postmodernism and sf and late-capitalism and
blah blah blah been there and done duh done done, what's of interest
to a feminist reading of IV is the discussion of the erosion in the
80s of the higher ground taken in the 70s by women.