Beyond the Wasteland: A Feminist in Cyberspace

Abstract

My title is intended to call attention to the dialogue with cyberpunk in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, and with science fiction more generally, for the novel has received little or no attention within the North American science fiction community, even after it won the Arthur C. Clarke award as the best science fiction novel of 1992 in Great Britain. At the same time, He, She and It develops themes and issues from Piercy’s 1976 Woman on the Edge of Time, and more generally, with feminist utopian concerns as they have evolved over the intervening fifteen years. Such dialogues are an integral part of our ongoing reflections about a better society, and an indication of how literary genres grow and develop through borrowing and interchanges.