[DOWNLOAD] "Letters (Letter to the Editor)" by Extrapolation " eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Letters (Letter to the Editor)
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 208 KB
Description
* Gary K. Wolfe Responds to L. Timmel Duchamp. While I appreciate Javier A. Martinez's invitation to respond to L. Timmel Duchamp's "The Cliche from Outer Space: Reflections on Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated" (Extrapolation 44, 1), which rather pointedly makes use of one paragraph from a book review I wrote six years ago in Locus, I'm not at all sure that I can add much light to Duchamp's heat beyond what is already there: any reader of Extrapolation is easily as capable as I am of examining that paragraph to see if it actually says what Duchamp says it does. She introduced the out-of-context quotation, for example, by invoking what she regards as the fearful argument that "feminism in sf is not only unnecessary but also counterproductive" and that "feminist sf's time has passed," then claims that my paragraph "unequivocally embraces the feminism-has-been-completed argument." She then quotes the paragraph, which makes no statements remotely like those above, but merely asks rhetorically if the term "f eminist science fiction" is as useful as it once was, since, like "hard SF," it seems to invite readers to focus on one dimension of what may be a complex, multidimensional work. At no point do I say that feminism has "been completed," and in fact I say quite the opposite, that "many writers are still writing it." Duchamp even admits this in her next paragraph, although for some reason she finds it "curious" that I should make such a fuss about the term, apparently since she wants my real intention to be far more nefarious. But there's nothing curious about it at all: it was the entire point of the paragraph. So she tries other angles of attack. Since I mention that from the 1960s on, feminism was "revitalizing the field, broadening its perspectives and themes, and heightening its awareness of issues such as language and gender"--a statement that hardly supports her view of my view--she argues that "he presumably excludes feminist sf texts of the 1990s from doing those things, also." This has to be willful misreading, since the entire remainder of my review (unquoted by Duchamp) shows that the book in question, Candas Jane Dorsey's Black Wine, does exactly those sorts of things, specifically praising its treatment of sex and gender roles and its language and identifying Dorsey as "a significant new feminist voice" (while acknowledging her earlier contributions to feminist SF as well). Next, in a classical rhetorical fallacy of false analogies, she attempts to link my comments about the term "feminist SF' to statements made to her by younger women writers 'That feminist preoccupations can only inhibit and limit wri ters' imaginations" and to a statement by Margaret Atwood that the term SF itself has become an "awkard box," despite the fact that SF itself can be "brilliant." Again, neither of these are viewpoints that are addressed, even indirectly, in my review, although I'm not certain why Duchamp should be so intolerant of them: the first simply seems to be an expressed concern by younger writers that they not be told what to write, and the latter is a simple redaction of the "SF-as-ghetto" argument which I have heard echoed at one time or another by nearly every SF writer I know.