“Maybe women should design our sci-fi future?” wonders Elle Griffin in her latest post. She’s not too keen on the futuristic visions the men have been peddling: people zipping around the galaxy in their sporty spaceships, accompanied by their talking robot assistants as they explore distant planets for signs of life. Such a future seems cold and bleak and scary. What if — now hear me out guys — what if all these toxic men would just move aside and let the sassy, future-is-female girl bosses take charge?
Well, I have good news for Ms. Griffin and for anyone else depressed at the prospect of a patriarchal future: the girl bosses have already won! The feminine sci-fi future is already here! Just look around! Just look at Disney and all the great things Kathleen Kennedy and all her “Force Is Female” girl bosses have been able to do with the Star Wars franchise! That’s the kind of magic you get when you mix sci-fi with girl power!
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If you want to know what the feminized future will look like, just imagine another century of progress along the same trajectory we’ve been careening down for the past decade! There will be a global HR Department which will oversee your reeducation whenever you say anything that hurts anyone’s feelings (unless the person you offend has a lower ranking than you in the victimhood status hierarchy).
“Safety first!” will be the categorical imperative. Want to build something? Have you taken every precaution, reasonable and unreasonable, to ensure that no child will ever stub her toe or get a boo boo using whatever you built? No? Sorry, no building permit for you!
Empathy will be the highest virtue. Want to enforce borders and boundaries? Think you should be able to have exclusionary things like standards? Sorry! We can’t have anyone feel excluded (unless they are at the bottom of the victimhood status hierarchy — i.e., a toxic cis-male hetero-normative white oppressor), so you will have to open up your borders and remove all your boundaries! We’ll replace all the police with social workers, so if anyone less privileged than you tries to take your stuff and you try to call the cops, they’ll send a social worker out to your home to talk to you about what hidden pathologies you have that cause you to want to oppress people by enforcing boundaries!
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Affirmation will be the glue that holds society together — of course, such affirmation will be doled out according to your victimhood hierarchy ranking, so if you’re a retarded black trans-female lesbian (like Ibram X Kendi), you will be affirmed, no matter what you say or do!
And imagine how much more we’ll be able to affirm everyone in the future! We’ll be able to perform bottom surgeries on babies in the womb! Heck! We won’t even need wombs anymore! The empowered females of the future will be too busy girl bossing to take time out for maternity leave! We’ll have factory-produced babies who will come with manufacturers’ warranties! Just return your kid if he ever turns out to be defective, and get a brand new one!
And we won’t be limited to gender reassignment surgeries! We’ll be able to do species reassignment surgeries! Your two-year-old just realized that he’s actually a pink female unicorn? Well, her wish will be the healthcare system’s command! She’ll even have a real horn that will grow out of the middle of her forehead!
So, I agree with Ms. Griffin: the future men envision in their dreary sci-fi novels is too depressing. If there’s one thing we haven’t gotten enough of these past few years, it’s girl power. Thank God (she/her/hers) that the future is female!
By Daniel D; Reprinted from A Ghost in the Machine Substack.
What are your thoughts on the feminization of sci-fi? Let us know with a comment!
If Ms Griffin could be bothered to take a look at the activities of WorldCon and SFWA over the last two decades, and read some of the female-produced drek they push, she might have a different insight. But maybe being a Girl Boss is too important for those considerations.
Since she says SF isn’t really her cup of tea anyway, maybe she just likes messing with other people’s stuff. Where have we seen that before?