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This is the transcript of a roundtable conversation that my undergraduate research team and I conducted at the 2021 annual CUNY City Tech Science Fiction Conference. The theme of the conference was "Access and Science Fiction"; our panel explored the process of researching the 1970s feminist science fiction archive and making it available to modem readers. After I provide a brief overview of our research project, my student research team discusses the techniques they used, the challenges they faced, and the rewards they reaped from reading the first generation of modem feminist science fiction stories and connecting them with their own experiences of science, technology', and gender in the twenty-first century. (NB: This transcript has been lightly edited for reading clarity.)
Lisa Yaszek:
Hello, everyone. I want to thank Jason Ellis and everyone at CUNY City Tech for hosting this conference, and of course, I want to thank all of you for attending. I hope this is a good palette refresh before you return to your everyday activities. I'm Lisa Yaszek, a Regents Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, and I'm probably best known for my writing on the history of women in science fiction. I do work on the recovery of women in science fiction who've been marginalized or erased from history and on the discovery of new voices across the world as well. That's what led to my current work as an editor for the Library of America. The Library of America is a nonprofit American institution dedicated to preserving and disseminating the best of American letters across eras and genres. In other words, it's a taste-making institution that shapes the kinds of access that we have to the American literary archive in general, and increasingly, to the science fiction archive as well.
The first book that I did for the Library of America was called The Future Is Female! That book celebrates the accomplishments of women who wrote science fiction between 1920s and the 1960s, before the rise of a distinctly feminist science fiction in the 1970s. Now we're working on the sequel, "The Future Is Female, vol. 2: The 1970s." I'm really excited about this book because this time we get to take a deep dive into just one...