Category: Education

Watch this entire presentation

The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne

Transcript:

I really like Marge Piercy. In one of our classes we sometimes teach her book He, She, and It” which is the story of a Jewish female scientist in the future working with AI right and dealing with the concept of when will they become human and when won’t they and this stuff is getting more and more realistic on a real world. There was a country can’t remember which it was a couple years ago that offered citizenship to an AI robot. So yeah it’s a little crazy. So we’re getting into this place where science fiction used to play and now we’re talking about it in a real world. So March Percy did that like 30 years ago and I just love a lady with a cat. Come on now. She looks like an author. Ladies that have cats they must write books, I don’t know, but Marge Piercy is very very interesting in she’s sort of world understanding and world building and the rest is like “oh my gosh what do now?” That right that’s pretty good — like that book.

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Watch this entire presentation

The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne

Transcript:

The other thing that’s cool about her — well she’s written many books — but Kindred is my favorite. A little chat about that from last week. She wanted to talk about race and she wanted to figure out a way to do that. So she chose the time-travel story and she took a modern-day African-American woman who without explanation — sort of like Narnia where they stumble into a wardrobe and bam they’re in a kingdom — we don’t need to know the machinations of how the time travel works. We don’t need to put dials in a car and drive the DeLorean down the street. We just walk into a room and oh my god now we’re in pre Civil War south and she’s a woman of African descent and she’s got to deal with now I’m in a place where they’re slaves and now she ends up being on the plantation where her ancestors were held in slavery and she comes up with you know drama. You want the big choice, the big question. She discovers that the way she could get back to her own future is she has to save the life of the plantation owner who owns her family on time for him to rape her great-great grandmother or she won’t exist yeah. There’s there’s a moral decision you gotta make in your lives right? But that’s a really fascinating and of course it allows her to have a discussion about what we don’t talk about in classrooms about the reality of slavery right? So this is a really fascinating book. It’s a one-off book. That’s good. She’s got a lot of you know series books so you can get involved in her writing and be busy for a while. That’s a great book to start with though. So I think Octavia Butler is of good attention for us.

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS