Abstract
In the same year that Gollancz published the first edition of Swastika Night in the UK, across the Atlantic John W. Campbell took over the editorship of a little known pulp sf magazine called Astounding Stories, later to be renamed Astounding Science Fiction, thus ushering in what is now generally regarded as the ‘golden age’ of sf. His predecessor, HugoGernsback, although responsible for naming the genre, made few demands on his writers, other than to insist that they incorporate a scientific theme. Campbell’s contribution was to hone and refine the genre into what Kingsley Amis calls ‘something an intelligent adult could profitably read’,3 encouraging his writers to experiment with language and content and, ultimately, discarding the hacks in favour of a coterie of challenging and sophisticated writers.
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[G]irdles and related equipment are sold on an engineering and technological basis: ‘an all-way stretch and resilient control. Girdle and garters act in harmony to give you a slim hip and thigh line…. It lives and breathes with you.’ The body as a living machine is now correlative with cars as vibrant and attractive organisms.
Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride1
One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meaning structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.
Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’2
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© 2000 Debra Benita Shaw
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Shaw, D.B. (2000). ‘No Woman Born’: C. L. Moore’s Dancing Cyborg. In: Women, Science and Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287341_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287341_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-40999-0
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