The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (Early Classics of Science Fiction)
In Australian academic Larbalestier's first book, a critical  study of American SF's formative years, 1926 to 1973, some  gobbets of original and entertaining insight glitter through the  viscous prose, but glimpsing them requires slogging through  thickets of abstractions bristling with parenthetical  documentation, feminist jargon and such unhappily strident  images as "white heterosexual male insecurity" in the face of  women "as walking sex organs." Inspired by a Joanna Russ article  on this theme, the author buttresses her thesis, that male SF  writers saw keeping women subservient as the only solution to  eternal male-female conflict, by examining many more texts than  Russ did, from out-of-print magazines and fanzines to  correspondence. Larbalestier also explores semiotics, American  studies and histories of sexuality, especially trying to connect  battle-of-the-sexes texts with later, overtly feminist SF texts.  She sees the James Tiptree Jr. (aka Alice Raccoona Sheldon)  Award, which celebrates feminism, as a continuing battleground  where sexual warfare is "reworked and transformed." Despite  amusing jacket art, some period illustrations and a formidable  scholarly apparatus, including a 26-page bibliography, this  dense study needs far more than its sporadic dashes of the  playfulness with which the Tiptree Award - occasionally given in  the form of a typewriter cast in milk chocolate - attempts to  leaven a sometimes sententious genre. (June) FYI: This title is part of Wesleyan's recently launched early  Classics of Science Fiction series.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.