| By placing Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos series in the context of the female science fiction tradition, this dissertation explains why one of the foremost practitioners of the realistic novel has begun writing space fiction. This historical survey of science fiction reveals that the figure of the female alien is a version of Demeter or the Snow Queen, and that the female alien is a constant in the genre from Mary Shelley to Doris Lessing. Chapter I focuses on Mary Shelley, the mother of modern science fiction, and discusses the subintentionally feminist aspects of her two science fiction novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man. Chapter II delineates an important subset of science fiction written by men: the female dystopia, an all-female or female-ruled dystopian world. The female dystopia shaped the mainstream science fiction tradition; this influence is discussed in Chapter III. Chapter IV shows that the nineteenth-century female utopia, an idyllic female community or woman-ruled world, uses the same tropes as the female dystopia, but reverses the female dystopia's misogynistic plot. The female utopia was reborn in the twentieth century, as Chapter V shows. Twentieth-century feminist science fiction, the focus of Chapter VI, similarly embraces feminist ideas, but emphasizes the benefits of feminism to both male and female characters. Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos properly belongs in this last category; the final chapter details Lessing's gradual conversion to science fiction and suggests that Canopus in Argos is the apex of the female science fiction tradition. |
