Masculine science-fiction may end in destruction, but that doesn’t mean the genre as a whole is in a spaceship headed for a disastrous end. Feminist approaches see writers employ strategies that avoid falling into the patriarchal trap of narratives of control and domination.

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In 1980 Octavia Butler asked, where is the diversity in science-fiction? The science-fiction author observed an absence of diversity in science-fiction, disparaging a genre that can imagine far-flung speculative worlds and inconceivable technologies but not imagine ‘ordinary everyday humans who happen not to be white.’ (2) When writing about science-fiction, it is important to be aware that the genre continues to be dominated by the white man. Sara Ahmed’s Politics of Citation is central when thinking about how to free ourselves from his grasp. The Politics of Citation is a response to syllabi that disproportionately centres the white - and western- male. Citation, as a way of ‘reproducing the world around certain bodies’, needs to be re-claimed as feminist, queer and away from western sameness. (3)

Western and patriarchal science-fiction often perpetuates a constant story of a male hero on a spaceship ‘thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilise it.’(4) The spaceship is his trusty tool, bringing him to new planets, full of so-called aliens to destroy. This narrative is re-imagined by science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, who offers several strategies to re-imagine the genre. For Le Guin patriarchal science-fiction would do well to throw away the tools and swap them for a carrier. Le Guin’s carrier is a way to keep man(kind) in his place - in the grand scheme of things. The point of a spear, a tool, is finite. It can’t gather, it can only punch holes or kill. The carrier is vast compared, and more forgiving as it creates space for unexpected and seemingly unconnected stories to weave together.

‘So when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things [...] and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts [...] full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail and people who don’t understand.’ (5)

Le Guin’s open approach to science-fiction is at odds with extrapolative practices often grounded in logic. Extrapolation is on the same path to destruction as the tool, as it projects us forward into a future dominated by man. Offering the thought-experiment as an alternative to this future-orientated practice, Le Guin turns to a different science-fiction. The thought-experiment is a technique used by quantum physicists to describe reality. Quantum physics is not about predicting but views time as discontinuous and non-linear. By avoiding the arrow of time, a point hurtling forwards, the thought-experiment offers a different approach to progressive western and male stories. Anna Bunting Branch highlights that time and different understandings of reality are central to feminist science-fiction. (6) The thought-experiment accommodates these different understandings.

Accommodating is important to feminist science-fiction. So important, in fact, that feminist science-fiction is not necessarily always about ending a story, but coming back to it and making it move differently. Le Guin re-appraised her own novel The Left Hand of Darkness in her essay Is Gender Necessary? In this essay Le Guin looks again at her novel, ‘to see what it tried to do and what it might have done.’ (7) Is Gender Necessary? Was followed by a later redux, another re-appraising. In her essay Autocritique and Accountability, artist Tuesday Smillie writes of Le Guin’s self-critique,

‘Le Guin offers a model where fucking up and being called out by our peers does not mark the end of a project, but provides the opportunity for a crucial turning point in the imagining of what that project could accomplish. To build another world, we must first be brave enough to imagine how that world could be, knowing we will make profound mistakes in the process.’ (8)

This act of self-critique and re-imagining refuses the masculine desire for a totalised and destructive ending.

And so we come around again to Haraway’s non-ending. Feminist science-fiction strategies provide a way out of the male - and western - canon. Refusing to be part of a masculine tale of domination and control, we pick up a carrier bag, and we begin to gather:

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