Galactic Suburbia

In this groundbreaking cultural history, Lisa Yaszek recovers a lost tradition of womenrs"s science fiction that flourished after 1945. This new kind of science fiction was set in a place called galactic suburbia, a literary frontier that was home to nearly 300 women writers. These authors explored how womenrs"s lives, loves, and work were being transformed by new sciences and technologies, thus establishing womenrs"s place in the American future imaginary. Yaszek shows how the authors of galactic suburbia rewrote midcentury culturers"s assumptions about womenrs"s domestic, political, and scientific lives. Her case studies of luminaries such as Judith Merril, Carol Emshwiller, and Anne McCaffrey and lesser-known authors such as Alice Eleanor Jones, Mildred Clingerman, and Doris Pitkin Buck demonstrate how galactic suburbia is the worldrs"s first literary tradition to explore the changing relations of gender, science, and society. Galactic Suburbia challenges conventional literary histories that posit men as the progenitors of modern science fiction and women as followers who turned to the genre only after the advent of the womenrs"s liberation movement. As Yaszek demonstrates, stories written by women about women in galactic suburbia anticipated the development of both feminist science fiction and domestic science fiction written by men.

Lisa Yaszek is associate professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture; Director of the



Science, Technology, and Culture degree program; and Curator of the Bud Foote Science Fiction Collection at the Georgia Institute of Technology.