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What comes to mind when you hear the words “science fiction” and “feminism” spoken together?

Turn back the clock to the late 18th century, and you’ll find a remarkable mother and daughter who wrote the very first footnotes to that story.

In 1790, at the height of the French Revolution, British thinker Mary Wollstonecraft made her name with A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Two years later, she published her groundbreaking work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she wrote: “My main argument in support of the rights of woman rests on a simple principle … truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice.”

Five years later, Mary Wollstonecraft died of sepsis caused by postpartum infection. The daughter she gave birth to was named after her—and would later marry the poet Percy Shelley. That daughter was Mary Shelley.

In 1816, Mary Shelley and her husband took a vacation with friends at Lake Geneva. Days of relentless rain kept them indoors. Byron suggested that each person write a ghost story as a way to pass the time. In the end, only Mary Shelley’s tale took form as a finished piece.

According to Mary’s recollections, her husband and Byron often engaged in long, searching conversations. During one such talk, they delved into a range of theories, including a rumour that Darwin had once attempted experiments to create life. That discussion lit up her imagination, and that night, “a succession of images” flooded her mind. In a hypnagogic state, she envisioned “a pale-faced student, given over to the black arts, kneeling beside a human form that had been pieced together.” The sight appalled her, yet she also knew—this was the ghost story she had been waiting to tell. This terrifying vision was expanded into a full-length novel, and was subsequently published in 1818 as Frankenstein. In the story, a scientist creates a creature—human, yet not quite human—shunned by society and ultimately driven to take revenge on its creator. Blending science with elements of fantasy, Frankenstein offered a strikingly ahead-of-its-time reflection on scientific ethics, and is now regarded as the first true work of science fiction. Mary went on to write several other works of science fiction, among them The Last Man, first published in 1826 and considered a forerunner of the post-apocalyptic genre. Set in the twenty-first century, the novel depicts a plague that sweeps across the Earth, driving humanity to the brink of extinction and bringing about the collapse of civilization. In a romanticist vein, she rendered the desolation of absolute solitude and offered a warning that was eerily prophetic.

Few have noticed the blood ties shared between these two women. Yet, once the connection is drawn, it becomes easy to see their works in dialogue, answering each other in uncanny harmony.

With an eye to the future, the mother, speaking from a human-rights perspective, envisioned an egalitarian civilization: “Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right.” 

The daughter, however, took a more collected and cautious view, posing the question: Where would science and technology lead the destiny of humankind? And when humanity wields powers beyond our capacity, could we bear the responsibility that comes with them?

In the realm of envisioning and shaping the future, feminism and science fiction share a profound resonance, making them a natural fit. Women have long turned to science fiction as a space for possibility and transformation, just as science fiction has drawn on women for new voices and visions.

 So why is it, then, that even today, we still speak of “women’s science fiction” as if they belonged in a category apart?

The answer lies in the dual challenges women continue to face in both the literary and scientific worlds.

Ⅰ. They Are Not Absent, Only Unseen

Women have only gained access to education—in the broadest sense—for less than a century.

Early forms of education for women were aimed chiefly at shaping them into virtuous wives and good mothers. As recently as half a century ago, female students at the world’s most prestigious universities were still often regarded as being there “to find a husband”. As portrayed in Jane Eyre, one of Britain’s earliest works of women’s literature, the role of governess was among the few occupations available to women in eighteenth-century England, yet it often placed them on the same social footing as servants. Mary Wollstonecraft’s decision to resign from her position as a governess and support herself through writing was a bold gamble in the late eighteenth century, when almost no women managed to do so.

Throughout much of history, a woman’s chance of receiving a good education depended on meeting a rare set of conditions—an affluent family, open-minded parents, and other advantages that kept her from being sidelined. Even those fortunate enough to emerge into public view often faced formidable obstacles. Many exceptional women writers managed to break free from traditional constraints, yet their achievements were either undervalued or entirely overlooked. Frankenstein, for instance, met repeated rejection during its submission process. It was only when Mary submitted it anonymously, with a preface written by Percy, that the novel finally saw publication.

In the century following Mary Shelley, science fiction remained in a nascent state. Apart from a handful of celebrated authors, most writers had only a superficial grasp of scientific theory, and their artistic techniques were often somewhat crude. From the 1920s to the 1960s, American male editors Hugo Gernsback and John Campbell fostered a generation of outstanding science fiction writers, and many of the genre’s most widely known classics were produced during this period. It was in these decades that science fiction began to take on a recognizable form—an era later hailed as the genre’s “Golden Age”.

Joanna Russ was among the first women writers to challenge this state of affairs. Emerging with her 1968 debut Picnic on Paradise, she went on to publish a series of science fiction works. At the time, the field of science fiction was almost entirely dominated by men. Although Russ was highly regarded in the realm of feminist science fiction, she was never truly recognised or embraced by the broader science fiction community or by the American literary mainstream. In a sense, this mirrored the very thesis of her 1983 work of literary criticism, How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Drawing on century-spanning case studies across  literature, theater, painting, and other arts, the book incisively exposed the systematic suppression of women by Western patriarchal culture—how, out of ignorance or malice, people have so often ignored or devalued women writers’ achievements and stifled their creative ambitions.

In the book, Joanna Russ identified eleven distinct methods of “suppression,” including but not limited to: “She shouldn’t be writing,” “She isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art,” “She had help,” “She isn’t feminine enough, not a proper lady,” and “She has overcome the weakness of her sex and writes as well as a man,”… among others. She also observed that whether in anthologies or university reading lists, women writers were consistently treated as marginal figures—“there are always enough to make up that 5 percent, but never so many as to exceed 8 percent.”

Joanna Russ, too, was not always confident. She recalled how, during her college days, she had firmly believed that her work “clearly didn’t belong to ‘great literature.’” Fortunately, she kept writing anyway. “I made a deliberate decision to write things no one understood,” she said. “So I chose to write realist works disguised as fantasy—which is to say, science fiction.”

Whatever the subject matter, it is not hard to see why so many women writers published anonymously or under male identities. Joanna herself faced rejection; one editor turned her down with the explanation that “books by women science fiction writers wouldn’t sell.” From nineteenth-century figures like George Eliot and Emily Brontë, to twentieth-century authors such as Lilith Lorraine and James Tiptree Jr., and on to J.K. Rowling, who published Harry Potter under a gender-neutral name—the pattern is clear. As Lilith Lorraine once put it, “if the editors and publishers knew I was a woman, they wouldn’t pay me more than half what they” did then.

In addition, women science fiction writers face yet another barrier beyond those that confront writers in other genres: ever since the Golden Age, a prevailing belief has held that science fiction requires a solid grounding in scientific theory—a field long assumed, by stereotype, to lie outside women’s strengths. As a result, notions of “women can’t write science fiction” became entrenched.

But if they are never given the opportunity to acquire sufficient scientific knowledge, how can they be expected to write science fiction? And if society denies them the very capacity to master such knowledge, how can the science fiction they do write ever gain recognition?

The history of science is far from lacking in great women whose contributions have been hidden from view. This phenomenon is known as the “Matilda Effect.” There is a tendency for people to overlook, or ignore the achievements of women, even as to crediting their work to the men around them, leaving them to vanish from the historical record.

In fact, women’s experiences themselves contain a wealth of literary motifs, and every story told from their eyes holds the potential to inspire a work of science fiction.

For example, while programming remains a male-dominated profession even today, the world’s first programmer was in fact a woman—mathematician Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first program for Charles Babbage’s early prototype of the Difference Engine. In the 1950s, when computers were still in their infancy, NASA employed large numbers of Black women as “human computers”—amongst them, Katherine Johnson emerged, playing a pivotal role in calculating critical orbital trajectories for space missions. She never gave up signing her own name on reports, breaking through the twin barriers of racial segregation and gender discrimination through sheer ability. In 2019, inspired by her story, a novel about women scientists breaking gender barriers, The Calculating Stars, clinched the Nebula Award.

In 1974, virologist Alice S. Huang and her colleagues published the first data-based study on the career challenges faced by women with doctoral degrees in biology. The study found that women advanced more slowly than men and earned less at every stage, with the income gap widening as career status increased. At the time, women earned on average only 68% of the salary of male counterparts with the same qualifications. A few years later, a university student named Joan Slonczewski graduated from the Department of Biology. Starting in 1984, she taught biology at the prestigious Kenyon College in the United States. In 1986, her science fiction novel A Door into Ocean was published. Set on an oceanic planet inhabited entirely by women, the book depicted a society with highly advanced life sciences and a rigorously constructed worldview that left readers in awe.

Without so many outstanding women who came before us, and without broader public awareness of their existence, how will the next generation of women perceive their own ability to pursue science or to write? As Joanna once wrote: “The consequence of a lack of role models is this: if no one has succeeded before us, why should we believe we can succeed now? And if there is no hope of success, why should we strive at all?”

Let us now turn to Alice Sheldon. During World War II, she served as an intelligence analyst in the U.S. military. In 1952, she joined the CIA, before later returning to academia and earning a Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1967. She wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr., partly for reasons of professional secrecy, but also, as she put it, because “in my life, there have been too many occasions when I was the first woman in some profession.” Although her works bore a distinctly feminist sensibility, critics—before her identity was revealed—compared James Tiptree Jr. to Hemingway, praising “his” masculinity. Sheldon herself responded: “Men have so preempted the area of human experience that when you write about universal motives, you are assumed to be ‘writing like a man’.””Notably, since 1992, the James Tiptree Jr. Award has been presented annually at the Wisconsin Science Fiction Convention, founded through the efforts of science fiction authors Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler, to honour works of the fantastic that expand or explore traditional ideas of gender.

As Mu Ming writes in the preface to her short story collection Wanzhuan Huan, “Like gardening, programming, science fiction, and many other fields once pioneered or led by women, only for women to be later excluded, suppressed, or obscured, after long years of labour and waiting, the mothers of invention have finally gained recognition. The storytelling tape has reclaimed the pronoun that belongs to ‘her.’”¹

Women writers, scientists, and authors of science fiction, like the beings they imagine into life, take root in the soil of prejudice and emerge from the realm of the impossible. It was through the unyielding perseverance of countless women that the road has been slowly, steadily cleared for those yet to come.

II. Why They Choose Sci-Fi Utopia

Is it enough to proclaim lofty ideals—“Women must be independent,” “Women must be confident”—and encourage them to rely solely on their own efforts? Hardly.

On June 12, 2025, the World Economic Forum released its Global Gender Gap Report 2025. It found that the global gender gap had narrowed to 68.8%; at the current rate, achieving full gender equality would still take 123 years.

Many might recall the “MeToo” movement that gained momentum in 2017. Sexual harassment and assault occurs so frequently because society and culture have long assumed that men may “possess” and “use” women’s bodies, with little regard for the women’s own will.

Why are women so often objectified and treated as tools?

Why is our gap to true gender equality so stubbornly hard to bridge?

As early as 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had already laid bare the subordinate status of women in The Second Sex: “In French, one often uses the term le sexe to refer to women, which means that in the eyes of men she is ‘a being with sex.’” Few works can rival the breadth of this monumental study, which ranges from biology and psychoanalysis to historical materialism, literature, and religion. Within rules, knowledge, and culture largely created by men, Beauvoir uncovered the root cause of women’s relegation to “the second sex”: the problem lies in women being continually bound to the family. The Global Gender Gap Report 2025 likewise notes that women are 55.2% more likely than men to experience career interruptions, primarily because of family care responsibilities.

The idea that “because women have wombs, and all women should devote themselves to husband and child” may sound absurd, yet it remains a widespread social belief. Beauvoir argued that both “motherhood” and “femininity” are not innate but are formed through social conditioning. A woman’s biological traits do not automatically mean she has either the obligation or the capacity to take on the socially defined role of mother. “Motherhood often turns women into slaves in the truest sense, confining them within the home. Therefore, this practice of motherhood—this traditional division of labour between men and women—must come to an end.”

The traditional division of labour between men and women—“men in charge of the outside, women of the inside”—has long cast housework, childbirth, and child-rearing as duties belonging solely to women. Friedrich Engels, Marx’s longtime intellectual partner and a male thinker, made a famous observation in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: “The overthrow of mother-right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also, and the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude … slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children”.

And now, in the 21st century, when the laws of most countries and regions uphold equal rights for women and men, when gender equality in the workplace seems within reach, and when women have access to far more professions than in the past, why does the income gap still persist? If a woman wishes to have what a man can—marriage, children, and a career at the same time—what would she face?

In 2023, Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, conducted a systematic study. In her book Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey toward Equity, she traces the choices and consequences faced by four generations of women as they navigated between career and family.

Specifically, the wages of men and women are close when they first graduate from university—but about ten years later, the income gap gradually becomes more pronounced. Goldin found that this shift typically begins within a year or two after the birth of a child, and that childbirth almost invariably has a negative impact on women’s careers.

Goldin pointed out that the fundamental challenge for women seeking to balance career and family lies in the conflict over time. For women, the so-called prime years for childbirth are also the prime years for career development. Yet in any household, if earning a sufficient income requires one person to sacrifice their career to some extent and focus on the family, that person is most often the woman. Even when employed, taking maternity leave, breastfeeding leave, or parental leave, and being constantly available to meet a child’s needs, can hinder both promotion and earnings.

Naturally, both partners make sacrifices: men give up time with their families, while women give up part of their careers. It is important to note, however, that work is always more conducive to a person’s ability to earn an independent living, while motherhood is concerned solely with selfless giving, with little connection to personal fulfillment and creative work. Moreover, women perform 75% of the world’s unpaid care work, including care for young children and the elderly. According to estimates by McKinsey & Company, this is equivalent to an annual contribution of 10 trillion USD to global GDP.

And what if a woman wishes to work from home? In The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind‑Baby Problem, biographer Julie Phillips documents the struggles of many women writers caught between creation and childcare: once they have children, it becomes difficult to secure the same uninterrupted creative space that men enjoy. Children interrupt endlessly; some women, desperate to concentrate, lock themselves away or place their children on the fire escape—only to endure constant censure from others and self-reproach for “not being a good mother”. Ursula K. Le Guin was able to write while raising children in part because her husband shared some of the childcare responsibilities. She recalled, “Nobody can do two full-time jobs: writing is a full-time job, and taking care of kids is another. But two people can do three full-time jobs.” Even so, when she unexpectedly became pregnant with her third child, Le Guin fell into a deep depression.

In sum, the challenges women face are structural and systemic. To ignore this and place the entire burden of independence solely on the shoulders of women is to be unfair.

When Ursula K. Le Guin first began writing, most novel protagonists were male, and she naturally wrote stories about men. Later, as she moved from fantasy to science fiction, she gradually found herself unable to continue writing from a male perspective. “It was a radical revision from within of my whole enterprise in writing, and for a while I thought it was going to silence me. But I think if I hadn’t gone through with it and learned how to write from my own being as a woman, I probably would have stopped writing.”

A woman’s own lived experience is, in fact, an essential component of women’s writing. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, published in 2019 and translated into Chinese in 2022, draws on extensive data to reveal the explicit and implicit discrimination women face across every sphere of life. Three themes recur throughout the book: women’s bodies, women’s unpaid care work, and male violence against women. Together, they form a constellation of lived experience that, for countless women, are at once beyond words and impossible to replace.

Feminism strives to build a more equal and inclusive society—an undertaking that is itself both subversive and utopian in spirit. As noted in Criticism and Construction of Science Literature (which includes excerpts from Future Females: A Critical Anthology, 1981), it was predicted that “science fiction will become a major trend in contemporary feminist thought.” For many women writers, science fiction has become a vital outlet for expression.

Perhaps this is why women science fiction writers so often, without prior agreement, explore similar themes: artificial wombs that can free women from the burdens of childbirth, all-female societies sustained by parthenogenesis, childcare systems in which responsibility is shared across society, and worlds where gender relations differ from those of the present. With their pens, they pierce the hollow filter named “greatness” that covers over pain, carving into reality’s walls openings that let in glimmers of light, revealing the cracks in what has long been taken for granted.

Octavia E. Butler, an African American writer, pioneered the genre of Afrofuturism, as the first Black woman to publish works of science fiction. When she began writing, the field was dominated almost entirely by white men, while Black women were mired in the double bind of racial and gender discrimination. Butler’s grandmother had worked for white employers on a plantation where there were no schools for Black children; it was her grandmother who taught her mother to read and write. Widowed, her mother raised Butler on her own and nurtured her love of reading. In adolescence, Butler was bullied for her appearance and at one point longed to “disappear” from view—yet,to her dismay, she found herself standing six feet tall.

Fortunately, Octavia never truly disappeared. In 1999, she penned in her journal: “I never bought into my invisibility or non-existence as a Black person. As a female and as an African-American, I wrote myself into the world. I wrote myself into the present, the future, and the past.”

Addressing issues of both race and gender, her short story Bloodchild tells a disturbing tale in which an alien species, after invading Earth, uses men’s bodies as hosts for their eggs. The idea was inspired by the botfly, an insect that lays its eggs in the wounds of other creatures. Drawing on this image, Butler crafted chilling scenes of male “pregnancy” that struck a deep chord with many female readers with its visceral realism. In the story, the male protagonist chooses to become pregnant not out of competitiveness or coercion but—as is the case for many women in real life—because he has fallen in love with someone, and now lives dependent on that person’s promises. The alien species remarks, “I’ve never seen a human who could witness the entire birth process and remain calm … Humans should be protected from seeing it.” In reality, human societies have likewise shielded young women from seeing childbirth’s toll, avoiding open discussion of its physical costs. In her afterword, Butler wrote: “I have always wanted to explore what it would feel like if men found themselves in an utterly impossible position.”

Seeing the struggles of both past and present, a new generation of women writers likewise felt a similar necessity to write. South Korean science fiction writer Kim Cho-yeop, after entering graduate school in chemistry, found that staying the course was even harder than becoming a woman scientist in the first place. Overwork, unequal pay, and the clash between childcare and career continue to block many women’s paths to their dreams. In recent years, a series of crimes against women in South Korea has also come to light, prompting, in Kim’s words, the realization that “we cannot go on living like this.”

And so she turned to writing science fiction. In her short story Missing from Stacks, people are able to recreate the “minds” of deceased loved ones in a library. Newly pregnant, Ji Min longs to see her mother again, who had once suffered from postpartum depression. But she discovers that her mother’s index has been deleted—she is gone. The only way to awaken her is to find a personal belonging of hers, yet her mother has left behind nothing of meaning. “She had lived that way, and she had departed that way, and now she is someone who does not exist.” In the end, Ji Min learns that her mother had worked at a publishing house, but was laid off during maternity leave. “Once you have a child, you’ll stop working anyway. It has always been that way.” Guided by a book cover her mother once designed as an index, Ji Min finally finds her again.

For countless women writers, science fiction is a laboratory for feminism. It allows them to satirize the present without being accused of striking too directly; to rewrite the rules and construct new, logically coherent power structures; to make invisible forms of oppression visible.

It is worth emphasizing that many feminists do not advocate solely for the liberation of women, but also for the freedom of men from the constraints of traditional masculinity. Mary Wollstonecraft once wrote: “The view that demands women be submissive turns back upon men… Men yield to the power of superiors in exchange for fleeting pleasures.” From this, we can infer that a gender-equal society would be a more equal society for all.

“The world could be otherwise.” This sentiment, more than anything, is why they cannot stop writing.

III. Why Science Fiction Needs Women

How to Suppress Women’s Writing recounts an old anecdote: a professor at Georgetown University once titled her literature course White Male Writers. The title alone was enough to land the class on the front page of the newspaper.

For a long time, male experiences and perspectives have been treated as universal, mainstream, and grand in scope. By contrast, any creative work labeled as “female” is often dismissed as niche or insignificant. Yet women make up half the world’s population—a world without the female gaze is in fact an incomplete one. Gender bias, present across all fields, profoundly shapes the way everyone sees the world.

As early as 1936, Virginia Woolf wrote bluntly in Three Guineas, “Science it would seem is not sexless; she is a man, a father and infected too.” During the transition from the second to the third wave of feminism, more and more people began to ask: Is knowledge itself shaped by gender bias? And is what we call an objective stance merely a male one in disguise?

Since the 1980s, feminist scholars have moved into the fields of science and technology, critiquing the dominance of masculine thought and beginning to envision a technological culture grounded in feminist values.

Take biology, for example. In Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution and the Female Animal, British zoologist Lucy Cooke reveals how male-centric perspectives in biology often project gender stereotypes onto the animal world. Many researchers focus only on evidence that supports the idea of passive females, sometimes going so far as to consciously or unconsciously, as she puts it, “dream up ever more torturous excuses to explain away female behaviours that deviate from the standard stereotype.”

“A sexist mythology has been baked into biology, and it distorts the way we perceive female animals,” Lucy writes.  “… Not all animal societies are dominated by males by any means; alpha females have evolved across a variety of classes … and their authority ranges from benevolent … to brutal.”

As for female characters written by male science fiction authors, they often differ little from those found across other genres—shallow in personality, lacking agency, and largely cast as sexy lamps waiting to be loved or rescued. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in American SF and the Other, “The women’s movement made most of us aware of one thing: science fiction either ignored women altogether, or portrayed them as screaming dolls being raped by monsters, or as spinster lady scientists who had lost their sex drive to hypertrophied intellectual organs. At best, they were the loyal young wife or mistress to the brilliantly talented male protagonist.”

At the same time, in the works of most male authors, even societies situated in the most distant futures remain patriarchal. Their visions of gender relations rarely move beyond the framework of contemporary reality. Male writer and critic Kingsley Amis observed in New Maps of Hell: “Though it may go against the grain to admit it, science-fiction writers are evidently satisfied with the sexual status quo.” Joanna Russ shared this view, as did Sarah LeFanu, author of In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction. They both argued that the best science fiction all hold  a rational skepticism of all things, meaning that science fiction writers, of all people, should not swallow tradition whole.

We can say, then, that patriarchy is built on the belief that men are inherently superior to women, while feminism begins with a suspicion of the supposed “naturalness” of the patriarchal world. It is within this dynamic where science fiction, in particular, has provided women writers optimal spaces to speak politically, and to put feminist ideas into practice.

Every field needs women, and science fiction is no exception. As shown in studies cited by Invisible Women, female journalists and writers are more likely to center women’s perspectives and reference women’s voices. In 2015, for instance, 69% of American women biographers wrote about female subjects, compared to just 6% of their male counterparts.

So, what does the female perspective bring to science fiction? It brings not only more complex and multidimensional female characters, but also deeper insight and reflections on human society. In science fiction, women can speak openly about the experience of being female, give voices to hidden ambitions, imagine societies built on equality—or ones that tilt in favor of women—and create new rules for future worlds.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin created the planet Gethen, whose inhabitants have no fixed sex except during certain days each month, when they temporarily become either male or female. Her novella The Matter of Seggri goes even further, imagining a gender-flipped world in which men——granted the “privilege” of not having to work—are “protected” by women, who hold the power to govern society.

Ursula K. Le Guin imagined the ansible, a device for instantaneous communication across space and time, long before the invention of computers or smartphones. The male author Orson Scott Card later adopted this concept in Ender’s Game. Le Guin’s work extended far beyond the realm of natural science; she often explored the coexistence of  politics and society with technology, creating a more integrated vision of scientific imagination. Le Guin was also deeply influenced by Daoist philosophy. She favoured a worldview shaped by the Daoist principle that “the way of the way is patterned on what is naturally so,” rather than one centered on human dominance. Drawing on the concept of yin and yang, she argued that traditional utopias—those designed from the top down by a select few—represent a masculine, or yang, model. What we must seek instead, she suggested, is a yin utopia².

For over a century, women writers have imagined countless utopias inhabited solely by women. These stories often introduce a male outsider or a parallel world as a point of contrast, emphasizing the beauty and possibility of all-female societies. They do not simply reverse gender roles, but instead develop new premises by preserving and probing fundamental biological differences between the sexes. These works are startling in both their foresight and their unflinching clarity.

In Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the all-female nation is peace-loving and free of war. The women neither blush nor feign weakness; they choose freely whether to become mothers, and share child-rearing responsibilities as a collective. When three men stumble into this society, they regard the women with a mix of fear and condescension. The novel, written with biting irony, mocks their desire to dominate.

Meanwhile, James Tiptree Jr.’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read? reads like a space-age counterpart to Herland—but this time, the male intruders don’t get the chance to fall in love. Instead, their violence leads to their own destruction.

Joanna Russ’s The Female Man imagines the intersection of four parallel worlds: the real world of the 1970s, a society where men and women are segregated and at war, a world where women face extreme oppression, and another inhabited solely by women. The novel gives voice to women’s outrage at their condition, while capturing the fierce resolve with which they rebuild who they are.

Dystopian fiction is also a vital part of feminist science fiction. By imagining worst-case futures, these works expose the dangers of gender inequality while also critiquing colonialism, racism, and Western-centrism. Canadian author Margaret Atwood once noted, “The majority of dystopias … have been written by men and the point of view has been male.”. In response, she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, envisioning a society in which women hold virtually no power. Amidst plummeting birthrates caused by widespread pollution, the Republic of Gilead strips women who remain fertile of their rights to education and employment, reduced to mere reproductive vessels. What makes the novel especially chilling is how closely some aspects mirror real-world backsliding on women’s rights. In 2019, Atwood published a more hopeful sequel, The Testaments, in which three women aid one another in secret and ultimately expose the crimes of Gilead. Among them, the most touchingly haunting figure is probably  Aunt Lydia—a woman who maneuvers within a regime ruled by men, a character at once complex, conflicted, and disturbingly compelling.

Margaret Atwood places great value on the humanities. “Science is about knowledge,” she says, “but fiction is about feeling.” Science is a tool, and how we choose to use it—whether for good or for harm—is a question that lies at the heart of human society. “Every technology we develop,” she writes, “is an extension of one of our own senses or capabilities”.

In the harsh future imagined by Suzette Haden Elgin in Native Tongue, women remain fiercely determined, continuing to resist oppression. Set in the United States of 2205, the novel depicts a society where women have been stripped of all rights and reduced to the status of male dependents. Yet in secret, a group of women creates a new language that captures emotions and experiences beyond the reach of male-dominated speech. With this hidden tongue, they begin to organise their resistance.

Women writers have also delved deeply into the body. Possessing a uterus means experiencing menstruation and childbirth—realities that men cannot fully comprehend—which creates a naturally closer connection between women and their bodies. In Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jeanette Winterson uses a nonlinear, time-bending narrative to explore the relationship between love and the body. Singaporean author Neon Yang, in The Black Tides of Heaven, examines gender identity and queer intimacy with equal insight.

In recent years, a growing number of women writers have placed female protagonists at the center of their science fiction, telling stories that go beyond gender relations. These works often carry a quiet, woman-centered perspective, and convey a nuanced emotional depth.

In The Emissary, Yoko Tawada envisions a Japan ravaged by nuclear disaster, where the young have grown weak and the elderly no longer die—making the old who now shoulder the burden of care. At the same time, as if in retribution for the long history of sex-selective abortion, humanity begins to mutate—with each person undergoing one or two gender changes in their lifetime. Through a lens distinctly informed by female experience, the novel explores disability, familial ethics, and the complications of caregiving.

Korean, as a language, often omits subjects and pronouns. Unless specified, readers typically assume the characters to be male. But in Kim Choyeop’s short story collection If We Cannot Move at the Speed of Light, all seven protagonists are women. “I’ve always been disappointed by how few stories are told from the perspective of female scientists and researchers,” she says, “so I tried to fill that gap in my own writing.”

Chinese author Gu Shi expresses a similar awareness: “If I don’t write of women myself, male writers won’t either. And if my science fiction as a Chinese author contains no Chinese culture, others might simply treat Chinese culture as nothing more than an orientalist spectacle.” Her collection Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition, features multiple women who hold their own in every sense. In The MagiMirror Algorithm, for example, she portrays a foul-mouthed, misogynistic old man—a character that resonated deeply with readers who had faced similar experiences. Other writers such as Mu Ming (Wanzhuan Huan) and Dong Xinyuan (Bian He and the Jade) have likewise created brave, determined women who push the boundaries of science on their own terms.

However, as writer and science fiction critic Gwyneth Jones points out, women’s science fiction is not necessarily the same as feminist science fiction. The former tends to portray strong female individuals in a gentler light, while the latter is more concerned with probing structures of social relations.

As Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once said, feminism is a big， raucous, inclusive party. Science fiction, when told through women’s eyes, can take on equally many forms. Feminism has never been a war between the sexes; it is a call for equality. The female perspective completes the human experience and deepens our imagination of the future. Women’s writing should not be seen as a branch of science fiction, but rather a vital force in reshaping what the future could be.

As more women step into the world of science fiction, the future opens, wider and more limitless than ever before. Read their stories. Or better yet, pick up the pen and write your own. Each of us carries the power to drive that change forward.

1. Editor’s Note: The quote is in reference to an anecdote mentioned in the preface of Wanzhuan Huan. There, the author reflects on becoming enamoured by hearing her very first story from a cassette player, which featured a narrator with a beautiful female voice. However, rather than resembling a familiar human tone, like that of her mother or grandmother, the tape’s narrator was instead made in imitation of a mechanical tone. In the collection, Mu Ming’s stories contains futures where AI has replaced human-led creation. However, Mu Ming often emphasises and treats the emotional and creative power of storytelling as an inherently human trait. Under this lens, through retelling these stories on their own terms, the author of this piece, Cocoon, uses Mu Ming’s turn of phrase to point out how women’s writers, through their insistence in taking on the voice of machines (much like the tape’s voice), shift the gendered discussion within these tales more firmly towards conversations that more genuinely belong to ‘her’, away from what was previously perceived as a gender ‘neutral’ (but often male-dominated) status quo. —Ed. ↩︎
2. Editor’s Note: Le Guin was also the English translator of the Dao De Jing.—Ed. ↩︎

Translation Editor: JX