Ack! Took a while to answer. “The Female Man” is one of those books I read and loved in college and would like to read again to see if it holds up or seems dated. It was one of the main books in a female sci-fi writer wave from the 1970s. It’s basically an alternative worlds story about three or four women from different timelines and you kind of have to figure out what they have in common.
They recently reprinted “The Forever War” too – I re-bought that one although I haven’t read it yet mainly because I was talking to someone younger who didn’t automatically see it as being about the Viet Nam war, and of course when I read it, no one thought it was about anything else, so it would be interesting to read years later.
Marion Zimmer Bradley, before the King Arthur stuff, wrote series (to use the word loosely) of books about this planet, Darkover, where the elite have telepathic/telekinesis/telewhatever powers. As a series it’s sprawling, wildly uneven and has massive continuity problems because it started out as your standard barbarian, blithely sexist and that’s okay world being rediscovered, then at some point MZB realized she could do a lot more interesting things so the later books in terms of theme, depth, etc. bear little relation to the earlier ones. The later ones are really heavy handed though from what I remember in the way a lot of 1970s sci fi was – it wasn’t a message unless they hit you over the head with it.
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winterfish
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Date: 2011-08-16 03:23 pm (UTC)They recently reprinted “The Forever War” too – I re-bought that one although I haven’t read it yet mainly because I was talking to someone younger who didn’t automatically see it as being about the Viet Nam war, and of course when I read it, no one thought it was about anything else, so it would be interesting to read years later.
Marion Zimmer Bradley, before the King Arthur stuff, wrote series (to use the word loosely) of books about this planet, Darkover, where the elite have telepathic/telekinesis/telewhatever powers. As a series it’s sprawling, wildly uneven and has massive continuity problems because it started out as your standard barbarian, blithely sexist and that’s okay world being rediscovered, then at some point MZB realized she could do a lot more interesting things so the later books in terms of theme, depth, etc. bear little relation to the earlier ones. The later ones are really heavy handed though from what I remember in the way a lot of 1970s sci fi was – it wasn’t a message unless they hit you over the head with it.