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spitzig's review
5.0
I LOVED this book. It's been a while since I read it.
The chapter on Tiptree was enlightening. An author who wrote works that compared to Hemmingway in masculinity(according to a review by Silverburg). But, was a female author hiding as a male author. Impossible, these days with the interconnected nature of things, but quite possible in her day.
My favorite was the letter to the editor written by a young Isaac Asimov. The letter read like an intelligent version of "girls are icky" about females on SF(I don't remember whether as reader, author, or character).
It also gave me a good idea of the development of SF fandom(I've read very little on the subject). In a general way-not just from the point of view of feminism. For example, it started as a mailing list. The letters got collected into (what would now be called) fanzines. These fanzines eventually became the SF magazines that for a long time were the backbone of SF.
The chapter on Tiptree was enlightening. An author who wrote works that compared to Hemmingway in masculinity(according to a review by Silverburg). But, was a female author hiding as a male author. Impossible, these days with the interconnected nature of things, but quite possible in her day.
My favorite was the letter to the editor written by a young Isaac Asimov. The letter read like an intelligent version of "girls are icky" about females on SF(I don't remember whether as reader, author, or character).
It also gave me a good idea of the development of SF fandom(I've read very little on the subject). In a general way-not just from the point of view of feminism. For example, it started as a mailing list. The letters got collected into (what would now be called) fanzines. These fanzines eventually became the SF magazines that for a long time were the backbone of SF.
vg2's review against another edition
2.0
Whilst there was a lot of interesting content in this book, the structure and style made it a real struggle to get through. This is partially due to mis-representation - had I realised that this was a published thesis, in (what I imagine to be) its original format, my expectations would have been very different. Instead, the continuous referencing of every source destroyed the flow, chapters opened and concluded in that very particular, box-ticking university style (which I am not criticising - it is merely the formulaic approach that academia demands from students) and I wondered why it had not been adapted/edited for a wider audience.
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