Women Writing Science Fiction: Worlds of Possibility

Dear Colleagues,

At the awards ceremony for her historic third consecutive Hugo win for Best Novel in 2018, N.K. Jemisin noted that she “look[s] to science fiction and fantasy as the aspirational drive of the zeitgeist. We creators are the engineers of possibility”. Her words reflect the transformative role women writers have played throughout science fiction (SF)’s history as trailblazers, visionaries, and provocateurs. This Special Issue seeks to trace the evolution of women’s contributions to SF from the genre’s earliest days through to its various movements and transformations. We are particularly interested in examining how women writers have consistently challenged and expanded SF’s boundaries, from nineteenth-century pioneers through the modernist innovations of the early- and mid-twentieth century, the feminist SF movement of the 1970s, and into contemporary global expressions of the genre. This Special Issue will highlight both Western and non-Western perspectives, acknowledging SF’s increasingly transnational character and the vital role women writers from diverse cultural backgrounds have played in reimagining what SF can be and do. We especially welcome scholarship that considers how women’s SF has engaged with shifting social, technological, and environmental landscapes across different cultural and historical contexts.

We welcome submissions addressing, among others:

1. The feminist project in contemporary SF: its challenges, failures, and possibilities;
2. Reimagining traditional SF tropes and narratives to contest the genre’s historically phallogocentric purview;
3. Creating space for diverse identities and experiences in SF;
4. Intersectional perspectives on race, class, gender, and sexuality;
5. Non-Western perspectives and global transformations of SF conventions;
6. Environmental crisis, climate change, and ecological futures;
7. Posthumanism, the body, and human–machine relationships;
8. Reproduction, care work, and social relationships;
9. Digital cultures, technology studies, and virtual environments;
10. Emerging subgenres, including Cli-Fi, solarpunk, and post-colonial SF;
11. SF’s generic intersections, particularly with Gothic, horror, and fantasy traditions;
12. The theoretical and critical contributions of women SF scholars to the field.

Prof. Dr. Ericka A Hoagland
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• ecofeminism/Cli-Fi
• Afro/Africanfuturism
• postcolonial science fiction
• social justice
• posthumanism
• the body
• digital cultures
• technology studies
• intersectionality
• global science fiction
• feminist futures
• virtual environments
• reproductive futures
• care ethics
• emerging subgenres