The Stereotype of the Spinster Scientist

By Lynne Lumsden Green

Astounding Science Fiction, January 1955

–

She blinded me with science, And hit me with technology.

Excerpt from ‘She Blinded Me With Science’ by Thomas Dolby

–

The concept of a ‘Spinster Scientist’ is an artefact of Western Society during the twentieth century. Women, historically, had to fight for the right to be allowed to study and matriculate at universities, as they were effectively barred from tertiary education in the Western world until the late 19^th century. Once women scientists existed in academia, popular culture, and mainstream society, they were of perceived as being different from their male colleagues; women were considered somehow less intelligent, and less ambitious, than their brother scientists: persistent Victorian-era beliefs within the medical profession that over-educating women would make them infertile. Even Charles Darwin argued that British women were intellectually inferior to British men. These gender biases contributed to the creation of the Spinster Scientist stereotype. However, the interactions between science practice, science fiction, and feminist movements have influenced the effect of this stereotype, creating a feedback loop where the stereotype also influenced those three arenas.

Birth of a Stereotype

The Spinster Scientist evolved over the course of the twentieth century, with the following stereotypical traits: a woman scientist, unmarried because she is dedicated to her career, or because she is socially awkward or frumpy. She generally wears glasses and isn’t interested in the latest style of clothes; she dresses for safety or comfort, not to conform to fashion. Her attitude to men is straightforward, brooking no nonsense, and though she might appear meek, she will stick to her convictions. The trope is exemplified in Susan Calvin, the robopsychologist created by Isaac Asimov, who narrates the stories collected in the anthology, I, Robot. Her character was written to be confident, brilliant, with a lifelong commitment to her work. Yet, from Asimov’s description of her in I, Robot: “She was a frosty girl, plain and colourless, who protected herself against a world she disliked by a mask-like expression and a hypertrophy of intellect.” In other words, she is a textbook example of the stereotype. In the one story where she shows a romantic interest in one of her colleagues, she is derided for wearing make-up and trying to conform to the current beauty standards. Damned when she tried to conform to gender norms, and damned when she wasn’t trying, this is a fictional example of a double standard applied to women in the professional work arena.

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Gender, Democracy, and SF/F Literary Awards

Published in Foundation 149 (winter 2024) edited by Paul March-Russell. Republished with permission.

By Jo Lindsay Walton and Polina Levontin

This article explores cultural and design dimensions of non-governmental voting systems, focusing on science fiction and fantasy (SFF) literary awards voted for by fans, with a focus on the British Science Fiction Awards. The design of such voting systems needs to juggle a range of goals, one of which is fairness with regard to gender — acknowledging that ‘fairness’ is not straightforward to define, particularly given such awards are embedded within broader gender inequalities. Our analysis suggests that men have been more likely than women to vote for works by men, and also more likely to vote in ways that amplify the influence of men’s votes under an Alternative Vote System. We suggest that SFF awards are cultural spaces which lend themselves to experimentation with new democratic forms, and briefly offer potential sources of inspiration. Just as SFF has aspired to be a space to think about the future of technology, gender, the environment, and many other issues, SFF award spaces could be spaces for thinking about the future of democracy. We also offer recommendations to SFF awards designers and communities to address gender bias (emphasising reflective practices over technical solutions), and to continue to explore how aesthetic and cultural values and identities are constructed and negotiated within SFF award spaces, and beyond.

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Undugu

By Eugen Bacon

Undugu—it’s a Swahili term for kindredship. It’s not far off from “ujamaa,” a premise of sharing and togetherness that was President Julius Kambarage Nyerere’s socialist experiment when the United Republic of Tanzania first gained colonial independence. Ideally, ujamaa should have worked—it’s a beautiful and generous concept. In practice, it wasn’t quite the success it was meant to be. So there are also inherent risks with “undugu”—because kindredship means inviting others into your personal space. It’s a trust relationship founded on goodwill. And this is what it means to collaborate: to trust, to respect, to have goodwill in the understanding that all participants are beneficiaries of the outputs, that we all put in effort for the best outcome(s).

Undugu—this is what I aim to achieve in my collaborations. And they’re many.

The most powerful and, hopefully, the longest lasting of them is the Sauútiverse. Back in November 2021, Wole Talabi, one of the founding members of the Sauútiverse, reached out to African writers for expressions of interest in becoming part of a collective, to create a shared world using the Syllble platform. A bout of brainstorming sessions followed, in which we determined our vision as holding the key tenets of collaboration, support, creativity and Afrocentric-based storytelling. The Sauúti Collective, as we named the founding members, comprised ten African writers and creators from Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and the diaspora—Haiti. Together, we created a new world, the Sauútiverse: an Africa-inspired secondary world with humanoid and non-humanoid creatures in a five-planet, binary star system with a shared history, and the presence of sound magic.

The name Sauúti is inspired by the Swahili word “sauti” which means voice or sound.

The five main planets, each named after the words for ‘song’ in various African languages, are:

Zezépfeni—from the Amharic word “zefeni”
Wiimb-ó—from the Swahili word “wimbo”
Órino-Rin—from the Yoruba word “orin”
Ekwukwe—from the Igbo word “ukwe” meaning “song” or “anthem”
Mahwé (before its destruction)— from the Kirundi word “mawe” meaning “mother”
There is also an inhabited moon, Pinaa, from the Setswana word “pina,” meaning “song.”

*Illustrated by Akintoba Kalejaye and Stephen Embleton*

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Costume as Community History

By Ibtisam Ahmed

Science fiction narratives all engage in an element of world-building, even if the descriptions are minimal. By their very nature, the settings are fictitious and, more often than not, have elements that are fantastically different to reality. They are imaginary potentials, the possibilities of what-could-be. As such, every single aspect of these stories is crucial to creating a fuller picture. One element that can be overlooked in the analysis of the genre is costume (especially in texts that are only in the written form), but it is still a vital part of the wider world-building. In this essay, I consider the impact of costume in creating and holding community history in two science fictional texts – the short story ‘The Last Dawn of Targadrides,’ and the X-Men comic book arcs focusing on the Hellfire Gala.

Both examples are fictional counterparts to real-world analogues, but heightened to focus on marginalised community identity. As a scholar and performer whose artistic work engages with my own multiple marginalised identities (queer, Bangladeshi, migrant), these narratives provide instances of meaningful empowerment and even liberation. As such, just as these fictions build on real-world histories, my own work is influenced by and builds on these fictions. This is something I will reflect on at the end of this essay, but it is important to start by exploring each of the examples individually.

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Torque Control 300

The bitterness and the spark

I am sixteen, in a secondary school ‘Introduction to Philosophy’ class, and I am learning of Solipsism for the first time. For the uninitiated and/or the non-skeptics, the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy defines it as follows, at least in its most radical iteration:

[Solipsism posits that] one’s own immediate experience has a fundamental, self-certifying reality and that comparable knowledge of ‘physical’ or ‘public’ items is unobtainable. (Honderich, ed., 1995, p.218).

I am terrified, as any introvert often overwhelmed by the intensity of their inner life would be terrified. The ‘physical’ and the ‘public’ instantly became concepts of doubt, and objects of fallibility. Such concepts are of course cliché in the world of SF: a genre that has, for decades, explored the paradoxes of the self, and the strange new worlds that could exist at the limits of our perception. Drugs, religion, virtual reality, dimensional travel, mind-transference: these are just some avenues via which the self may be expanded—and sometimes even obliterated—in service of access to a greater, or somehow ‘truer,’ experience.

…Of course: you know I don’t romanticize my beloved genre that easily.

SF narratives don’t always elicit the oohs and aahs of cosmic collectivity, as often as we might wish them to. For every astral reunion through realities separated as breath between lips, there are genocidal boys’ stories of colonial derring-do that exterminate entire alien societies; for every mind-altering encounter with an astral god, or any other form of divinity, there is invoked the (laughable) threat of enforced homosexuality, used as a foil to ‘prove’ the degeneracy of human civilization across time. I could go on. For its touted expansiveness and offerings of pleasurable escape, science fiction, as I always tell my students, is perhaps the most nakedly political of all literary genres.

But when we read or watch ‘escapist’ stories, what, exactly, is it that we wish to escape from? It seems to me that to seek escape from something implies at least implicit awareness of one’s guilt. For what reason should we feel guilty? For what, and for whom, should we feel?

Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker opens with arguably one of the loveliest lines in science fiction: “One night when I had tasted bitterness I went out onto the hill” (Stapledon, 1987, p.1). This ‘bitter’ sensation has spoiled the “decade and a half”-long relationship with the narrator’s wife, and even the births of their two children, in spite (or perhaps because of?) the ghost of divinity, something transcendent in their pairing, in contrast with the banal coziness of their existence together: “There, under that roof, our own two lives, recalcitrant sometimes to one another, were all the while thankfully one, one larger, more conscious life, than either alone” (Stapledon, p.2). Star Maker’s narrator has done everything right: made a home, borne children, become something larger than himself, his relationship, the quartet of ‘I’s’ that form the core of his world. And yet: recalcitrance, unease, even “horror,” lingers.

After traveling through the cosmos and encountering a bewildering array of nonhuman lives, the narrator meets the titular Star Maker—the grand dreamer of the whole universe—and finds, among the love, that there is cruelty, and sympathy, and passion, all “contemplated” by some vast and inscrutable mind. The being is beyond ethics, somehow, having witnessed myriad forms of sentience (including bird-like telepaths that wheel in huge flocks across a planet’s skies), and offers, I suggest, an answer to the question I asked earlier: for what, and for whom, should we feel?

Everything, and everyone.

But the narrator is dissatisfied. Afraid, even. It is perhaps too much to bear witness to, and certainly too much to ask of a human organism.

Talking of fear: I am thirty-seven, and too sad to be concerned by ‘dead internet theory’ that suggests that, in the en-shittified 21^st-century internet, the majority of content is produced and consumed by bots ‘speaking’ to one another. The promise of a vast ‘web’ of human consciousness—akin to the multitudes of sentient lives held in Stapledon’s narrative—doesn’t even provide human dross anymore, only dross; language is ingested, hacked up, repeated and linked and relinked to nothingness, speaking of nothing, only making-the-motions-of.

I am thirty-seven, and too amused to be terrified at the Tesla-unveiled robotic companions that may or may not be voiced remotely by an operator responding to vocal inputs, becoming nothing more than humanoid cyberpunk telephones.

I want to be overwhelmed by the conviction of other minds, and their assurance that everything will be alright in the end—and even if it won’t be, I want another human being to tell me that.

This is, of course, a classic philosophical problem—and each of the authors in this landmark issue explore, in their own ways, how knowledge of and connection with others is obtainable. Can reading give us irrefutable access to other minds, and even generate empathy? Is the idea of generating empathy for (especially marginalized) others in fact a “grotesque dynamic,” after Namwali Serpell (The New York Review, 2019)? Do capitalist-alternative video games hold insights into how we can exist without exploiting one another? How does a necktie consolidate community history? What can the horror genre offer to allay (or amplify) our anxieties, and what monstrosities can it bring to light in a Freudian excision of the fears of the id?

This is issue 300 of Vector, on the theme of Community! It should be a celebration! And make no mistake—it is a celebration of that. Community. The people who make, and made, literary life-worlds. It is also a lament at the relentless change that follows us across the years: change that sees friendships cement and fall apart, that sees creative idols shape entire generations and then fall in disgrace, that sees spaces—both physical and ideological—inched open by cracks and then blown open, wide, seemingly overnight, and precious groups forming and falling apart as their members age and pass. It is younger generations struggling to keep alive the physical meeting spaces of conferences and conventions when expenses are so high, and wages are so low. It is a yearning for persistent physicality, because despite the hours we spend straining our eyes ‘connecting’ with others on screens we realize, profoundly, that the screen is not enough.

So: out with it! Let’s have the pages. We are three hundred issues of scholarly inquiry, of impassioned creation and reviews and conversations. (We have the screens, of course, too, as our lively blog attests to). I hope we will be three hundred more issues.

We celebrate community. We celebrate the joy we can bring to each other even as we hold, in our other hand/s, the damage we can do to one another: the bitterness and the spark. I’ll leave you with Stapledon, again, this time with words from his moving novel Death Into Life (Stapledon, 1946, p.48):

“As centers of awareness we remain eternally distinct; but in participation in our ‘we,’ each ‘I’ awakens to be an ampler, richer ‘I,’ whose treasure is not ‘myself,’ but ‘we.’”

Warmth and light,

Phoenix

References

Honderich, T. (1995) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, USA.

Serpell, N. (2020) The banality of empathy. http://www.nybooks.com/online/2019/03/02/the-banality-of-empathy/.

Stapledon, O. (1987) Star Maker. J P Tarcher.

Stapledon, O. (1946) Death Into Life.

AUGURS and S@%T

Placing Steven Erikson’s Manuromancy in the Larger Tradition of Hieromantic Divination: A Socratic Dialogue

By Mame Bougouma Diene with Steven Erikson in Conversation

The following real and fictional analysis of (by the grace of God) fictional Manuromancy (the art of divination in feces) is based on Steven Erikson’s novella Upon a Dark of Evil Overlords published by PS Publishing in 2021, the seventh novella in the Bauchelain & Korbal Broach series, spinning off from The Malazan Book of the Fallen.

It is divided into four parts:

I – Introduction.

II – A factual overview of the origins and practices of hieromancy/haruspices.

III – An overview of differing approaches to prophecy and divination in epic fantasy.

IV – A fictional contextualization of manuromancy in relation to hieromancy/haruspices.

I – Introduction

When Han Solo saved Luke Skywalker by slicing a Tauntaun open and emptying its guts, attempting to survive a night in the subglacial plains of Hoth, he missed a prime opportunity to read the future. If only he’d been more versed in the finer points of hieromancy, perhaps he would have saved Luke’s hand in the process.

Indeed, while many a finer class of societies frown upon the art of divination, perhaps because enough money and you do not so much need to foretell the future as to wish it into existence and/or weather it as the case may be, humanity as a whole, has, over the course of millennia devised ever more jaw-dropping techniques to predict and hopelessly attempt to thwart the wyrd sisters’ nigh karmic hand.

Even the most stubborn of disbelievers will, in a moment of despair, seek solace in the pages of their daily horoscope, in the chicken scratch of a fortune cookie, or while in the thrall of athletic frenzy, in the mental clairvoyance of goats, parrots, octopus, cats, pigs, ants, at least one kangaroo, meerkats, and/or penguins. Either that or unwashed underwear, which while objectively distasteful at least verges on hieromancy or to the point of this here paean, the under appreciated art of manuromancy and its objective equal distastefulness.

Bear with me.

[Steven Erikson: and with me, too. The strangeness of the world before the internet was that nobody really knew just how strange that world was. Imagine entering an outhouse, hungover and smelling of mosquito coils, peering down into the hole (as one does, if only to position oneself properly) and meeting a pair of beady eyes glinting back up at you from the earthy gloom below?

To this day I choose to believe that the woodchuck (or whatever it was) had an alternate route to and from the deep pit, and barring the unthinkable, had acquired a taste for slightly (or egregiously) used toilet paper. Or maybe it was just exploring.

Is it apocryphal the lurid tale of some guy caught lurking at the bottom of an outhouse? Imagine what your friends and family would think of that? ‘It was only the once, honey, I swear it!’ One presumes the perverse pleasures of the witnessing thereof lean more towards the divine than the divining, but who knows, right?

I like to think the woodchuck, which subsequently disappeared, then didn’t, then did, eventually set off to finer pastures. And if it had a mate, well, lipstick on the collar would surely have elicited a milder reaction upon its fateful return home. Either way, a night in the woodshed for the woodchuck.]

[Mame Bougouma Diene: This reminds me of a scene from The Young Pope, Steve, where Pius XIII surmises that buried under the ice of Greenland, that never quite thaws, there, you may find God.

I am of the belief that God resides not in the infinitely big, but in the infinitely small. That if you dig below the surface of the atom, into the smallest point in the universe, you will find a giant eye, staring back at you, holding the secrets of the universe.

Perhaps that woodchuck was but an avatar of the almighty, his ways, both spiritual and digestive, a mystery to the human mind.

In my days in the Southern Sahara, Northern Niger, in the sandstorm beaten town of Agadez, the millennial trading post known by the Tuareg as the Southern Cross, I had an encounter quite similar to yours.

Imagine my surprise, upon rising from my daily delivery (or sometimes thrice daily – if lucky – depending on the food I ingested and the cook’s cleanliness) and pulling the flush—only for a left over floater, to my utmost horror, to twist and turn, splashing the bowl with a will to live I could only admire, inducing a fit of prepubescent yelping that I am not ashamed to admit. “Holy shit what did I shit?” Were my exact words, I believe.

As it turns out it was a gecko, who, residing along the rim of the bowl, was dislodged from its home by the power of the rim jets. I could have flushed harder and sent it down the drain, but mercy guided my hand and, after much tribulation, it made its way back into the rim.

Needless to say, I never bothered to use that specific toilet again, for it was a house, a home and as I too like to imagine all these years later, much as your fated woodchuck, a humble abode of lizardly love.]

II – Entrails Divination in the Ancient World.

Hieromancy or Haruspicy (also known as Extispicy the latter focused specifically on intestinal divination), in our post-Western understanding of the world, resting upon divining the future in the entrails of, most often, animals, stems from the near east and Marduk’s priests. Predominantly, but not limited to, the liver. As many of our traditions, a Babylonian offshoot through way of Greece and filtered through the dominance of Roman cultural expansion.

The Latin terms haruspex and haruspicina are from an archaic word, hīra = “entrails, intestines” (cognate with hernia = “protruding viscera” and hira = “empty gut”; PIE *ǵʰer-) and from the root spec- = “to watch, observe”. The Greek ἡπατοσκοπία hēpatoskōpia is from hēpar = “liver” and skop- = “to examine”.¹

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Jean-Paul Garnier interviews Pedro Iniguez

Pedro Iniguez is a Mexican-American horror and science-fiction writer from Los Angeles, California. He is a Rhysling Award finalist and a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.

His work has appeared in Nightmare Magazine, Never Wake: An Anthology of Dream Horror, Shadows Over Main Street Volume 3, and Qualia Nous Vol. 2, among others.

Forthcoming, his horror fiction collection, FEVER DREAMS OF A PARASITE, is slated for a 2025 release from publisher Raw Dog Screaming Press. https://pedroiniguezauthor.com/

Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books bookstore and publishing house, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, BSFA, Ignyte, and British Fantasy Award Finalist), and editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief of Worlds of IF & Galaxy magazines. In 2024 he won the Laureate Award for Best Editor. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/

JPG – What made you want to take on the themes in Mexicans on the Moon through speculative poetry, and where did specpo take you that other mediums might not have allowed?

PI – I think there’s a power in the brevity and playfulness of poetry that really worked in my favor with this collection. Speculative poetry allows me to shift gears quickly from poem to poem. For example, in Mexicans on the Moon, you’ll find poems that are heartwarming, funny, sad, chilling, or thought-provoking. It allows the poems to take on their own life, be tonally different, while still feeling thematically coherent in the grand scheme of things.

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Science-Fiction, Quantum Physics and the Modernists

By Steven French

Introduction

In 1926, Erwin Schrödinger published the paper containing his eponymous equation, one of the most significant scientific achievements of the twentieth century. In the same year Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories, dedicated to what he insisted at the time on calling ‘scientifiction’. Given this, an obvious question to ask is whether the new theory of quantum mechanics had any impact on this emerging genre of literature, and if so, in what form?^[1] As far as I can tell, however, no one has seriously considered this before now.^[2] That’s not to say that there are no studies of the impact of quantum physics on science fiction at all – there are, but they tend to focus on later, post-war, developments. My interest lies with the earlier years, stretching from the late 1920s into the 1940s, when the theory spread beyond a small set of theoretical physicists and not only began to be applied to a range of phenomena – physical, chemical and biological – but was also presented to the general public through a number of popular scientific texts.

Unfortunately, however, with one or two exceptions, it appears to have had little impact on the science fiction stories of that era, beyond the occasional name-dropping and the odd, usually distorted, reference. it might be thought that this was because quantum mechanics was too new a theory and had not yet filtered into the consciousness of the general public, even of those who might be taken to be attuned to the latest scientific advances. Yet, this situation appears to contrast sharply with another form of literature prevalent at the time, namely Modernism. There is now a burgeoning literature on how the likes of Virginia Woolf were receptive to the new quantum physics, drawing on it to give non-traditional shape to their works. That suggests that the early authors of ‘scientifiction’ were not quite as ‘on the ball’ scientifically speaking as certain avant-garde writers in the UK. As we’ll see, however, things are not quite so clear, although there remains enough of a disparity to demand some form of explanation.

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Vector 299/Modernisms: Guest editorial by Paul March-Russell

Over the course of the last thirty years, the standard model of literary modernism has eroded.

This model offered an origin story, beginning with the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Henry James and the poetry of W.B. Yeats; a consolidation in the figure of Ford Madox Ford and the ethos of Impressionism; a quickening in the face of war and the avant-garde, as represented by Imagism and Vorticism; a fluorescence in the post-war aftermath of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf; and then a slow decay during the 1930s and `40s, culminating in the endgames of Samuel Beckett. What this narrative described was the rise and fall of a literary doctrine – art for art’s sake – in which the fever dream of history could be cooled by the impersonal application of myth and symbol. The type of artist this narrative valued was austere, detached, ironic and analytical. For John Carey, in his jeremiad The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), such an image was but an excuse for elitism, social prejudice, and even fascism.

For an undergraduate like myself, though, it seemed a bit rich for the Merton College Professor of English Literature to be condemning other writers as elitists, especially when he pronounced that what the masses really wanted was the middlebrow novels of Anita Brookner. Growing up in working-class Gillingham, in a single-parent family that barely kept itself above the breadline, what I wanted was not Brookner’s insufferable Hotel du Lac but J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, outmanoeuvred on the 1984 Booker Prize shortlist by that year’s Chair, Professor Richard Cobb.When eight years later I was studying Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and realised that a whole passage had been parodied by Alfred Bester in The Stars My Destination (1955), this received history about modernism and mass culture began to smell decidedly fishy.

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Stuck in the Middle with You: Speculative Structure and Concentric Reading in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

By Matthew Burchanoski

Immediately praised upon its release, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) stands as one of the most significant books of the 21st century. Though it has its skeptics, the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Nebula Award for Best Novel and won in Literary Fiction at the British Book Awards. The novel’s support across the communities of historical, speculative, and literary fictions is itself quite interesting but, suffice to say, the novel was well received and remains so in myriad lists of Best Books of the Century.

One reason potentially behind its plaudits is how Cloud Atlas attempts to catalogue the challenges, tensions, and anxieties of its post-postmodern period. Many of the sociopolitical concerns shared by theorists regardless of their periodizing name of choice also drive Cloud Atlas’ structure and world. Less a realist representation of the contemporaneous moment than a warning about violent mistakes being repeated over and over, the novel assesses what entwines human’s past, present, and future morally as well as, in the broadest sense, politically. Put simply, Cloud Atlas is one of the most comprehensive attempts at understanding and representing the anxieties of the present moment.

The impressive chronological and physical scope of Cloud Atlas is both obvious from its audacious structure and poured over in critical assessments. More than any other element, its expansive world motivates and helps organize analysis of the novel. Spanning roughly 1200 years with sections set on four different continents, Cloud Atlas presents a truly global vision of connectivity through time and space. The recurrence of objects, themes, and markers, as well as the reappearance of distinct, previous texts in newer sections, binds the eleven sections together as not simply diegetically related, but in many ways as repetitions of similar stories, phenomena, and souls.

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