In this groundbreaking cultural history, Lisa Yaszek recovers a lost tradition of women’s science fiction that flourished after 1945. This new kind of science fiction was set in a place
called galactic suburbia, a literary frontier that was home to nearly 300 women writers. These authors explored how women’s lives, loves, and work were being transformed by new sciences and
technologies, thus establishing women’s place in the American future imaginary.
Yaszek shows how the authors of galactic suburbia rewrote midcentury culture’s assumptions about women’s domestic, political, and scientific lives. Her case studies of luminaries such as
Judith Merril, Carol Emshwiller, and Anne McCaffrey and lesser-known authors such as Alice Eleanor Jones, Mildred Clingerman, and Doris Pitkin Buck demonstrate how galactic suburbia is the
world’s first literary tradition to explore the changing relations of gender, science, and society.
Galactic Suburbia challenges conventional literary histories that posit men as the progenitors of modern science fiction and women as followers who turned to the genre only after the advent
of the women’s liberation movement. As
Yaszek demonstrates, stories written by women about women in galactic suburbia anticipated the development of both feminist science fiction and domestic science fiction written by men.
