As a teenager in Boulder, Colorado, I used to wander among the stacks of the public library seeking out books that would take me away from my mundane suburban existence. All on my own I somehow discovered the short stories of James Tiptree, Jr., a renowned science fiction writer who, it turned out, was actually a woman named Dr. Alice Sheldon.

I remember reading Tiptree’s stories and finding them mysteriously compelling, but I had no idea why. My tastes at the time tended toward fantasy novels featuring mythical creatures battling the forces of evil, so Tiptree’s deft touch with the English language did not exactly fit in with my bedside reading.

But in retrospect, it makes sense: Tiptree wrote about gender, and about transforming it Even when I was fourteen, I found that to be something that I instinctively wanted to know about, and when I discovered that James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym for a woman, I felt as if I belonged to a secret club. It was as if I had been somehow vindicated: I knew there had been something female in those stories that spoke to me, for I rarely connected with books written by men.

In 1991 the James Tiptree, Jr. Award was created by WisCon, the world’s only feminist science fiction convention, to honor science fiction or fantasy that expands and explores gender. Feminist science fiction continues to be a vehicle for women writers to examine gender roles and experiment with the ways they could be changed. For lesbian and bisexual women, feminist science fiction offers a place for us to experience worlds where women are central, and where being a lesbian is often the norm instead of the exception.

Although women have written about imagined utopias since the nineteenth century, feminist science fiction did not come into its own until the late 1960s. Partially inspired by the feminist and gay rights movements of the 1960s, authors such as Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, and Suzy McKee Charnas created worlds in which women ruled, gave birth to children without the help of men, or switched genders throughout their lives.

Many of these feminist utopias looked very similar. They were ecologically stable, communal, egalitarian, non-capitalist, non-sexist, non-racist, non-hierarchical—in other words, a 1960s-era commune populated only by women. As academic Sonya Andermahr noted in her 1993 essay “The Worlds of Lesbian/Feminist Science Fiction,” these utopias often excluded men not because the authors necessarily hated men, but because of a desire to envision a world in which power was not located in one (male) sex.

These lesbian feminist utopias were also characterized by deep maternal and sisterly love among women, which follows the 1970s feminist definition of sexuality as having no distinction between love and sex. Unfortunately for lesbian and bisexual women, that also meant that there wasn’t any sexual desire—or at least not in the commonly accepted sense of the term. Feminist science fiction might have been full of women on horses pounding drums in the forests, but (paradoxically) none of that pounding or riding led to sex in the woods.

More recent feminist science fiction novels, such as Nicola Griffith’s "Ammonite," have moved beyond 1970s feminism’s romance of the earth mother. In other words, sex and violence and pain and pleasure all return in full force, which can be a relief after reading some of the colder, more political feminist science fiction. It was certainly important to imagine alternate worlds in which gender was redefined and power was not patriarchal, but I am thankful we have moved into a third generation of feminism where lesbian desire can be expressed without cloaking it in maternal love.

If you're interested in reading some feminist science fiction, here's four to start with:

"The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K. Le Guin (originally published in 1969)
In this novel, which is Le Guin’s first attempt to deal with gender, the emissary Genly Ai is sent to the world of Winter to bring the planet back into communication with Ai’s galaxy. On Winter, gender does not exist; instead, the planet’s people are androgynous until they enter a stage called kemmer, during which they take on male or female sexual characteristics in response to their companion. This book won both the 1970 Hugo Award and the 1969 Nebula Award for best novel, and it has also been awarded a Retrospective James Tiptree, Jr. Award.

"The Female Man" by Joanna Russ (originally published in 1975)
In this groundbreaking novel, four women from four alternate realities are brought together. Janet is a woman from the future utopic world of Whileaway, where all the men died in a plague and the women now procreate together, Jael is from a future dystopic world in which men and women are engaged in a battle against each other, Jeannine is a stereotypically feminine woman from a world in which World War II never happened and the world is still engulfed in depression, and Joanna is a feminist from the 1960s who becomes a lesbian. According to Andermahr, “'The Female Man' refuses essentialism and metaphysical concepts of nature, seeking to represent history as a process of change initiated by political action. Utopia is not a static future, but a coming-into-being through radical action.”

"The Holdfast Chronicles" by Suzy McKee Charnas, encompassing "Walk to the End of the World (1974)," "Motherlines" (1976), "The Furies" (1994), and "The Conqueror's Child" (1999)
This four-volume epic was written over the course of twenty years, and reflects the changes in feminism that occurred during those years. "Walk to the End of the World" presents a dystopia in which women have been enslaved as “fems;” one woman, Alldera, travels through a world that is falling apart as a slave to two men. She escapes at the end of the novel, and her story continues in "Motherlines" where she lives among a colony of free women who have found a way to reproduce without men, and among a group of Freed Fems. In "The Furies," the Freed Fems return to free the other women who are still enslaved, and finally, "The Conquerer’s Child" focuses on Alldera’s daughter, who was conceived out of rape. In 1996, "Motherlines" and "Walk to the End of the World" jointly won the James Tiptree, Jr. Retrospective Award.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith (1993)
Anthropologist Marghe Taishan arrives on the planet Jeep to test a vaccine against a plague that killed all men on the planet, and she subsequently becomes involved with several of the all-women societies on the proto-industrial world. Once again the women are able to reproduce without men and sometimes they drum around a fire, but this world is also full of passion and violence--the women are not universal mothers. "Ammonite" won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Lambda Award.

"Warm Worlds & Otherwise" /"Ammonite"/ "Conqueror's Child" / "Left Hand of Darkness"