Marion Zimmer Bradley omnibus: Winds of Darkover, Star of Danger, The Bloody Sun

[rachelmanija]

This is all
coffeeandink's faultThese are a set of old (1965-1970) sf novels about Darkover, a vividly evoked lost colony where, due to interbreeding with native psychic aliens, a caste of red-headed telepaths evolved, used their psychic powers to commit massively destructive acts, then renounced all weapons that kill at a distance and most of their psychic

Comments

[rachelmanija]

The fact that it was so impossible for even someone like Ursula K. Le Guin to extrapolate really gives you a sense of what the prevailing climate was then toward gender equality, doesn't it?

[apintrix]

Hm

[rachelmanija]

Yeah, definitely there was early feminist sf; and yet LeGuin herself has written essays where she does say explicitly that she was unable, at the time, to imagine certain things in The Left Hand of Darkness and A Wizard of Earthsea, and she now sees that as a failure of imagination on her part. I know I've read more than one essay by her where she that Tehanu was written specifically because in earlier times, she could not imagine a world where women went to mage school, and where women's magic wasn't weak and wicked.

I don't think this takes away from what LeGuin did accomplish, but I think it was genuinely hard for people to even conceive of a more equal society, or that a woman could write the ineffably male works of James Tiptree Jr.