zlacker

>>apolli+(OP)
She looks down her nose at "science fiction" and claims that her work is "speculative fiction" instead. It is a pretentious, pedantic distinction and, as a lifelong scifi fan, it makes me deeply ambivalent to anything she produces. Even if it is good science fiction.

>>klunge+314
To be fair to Atwood, there was a lot of junk sci fi over the years that she would want to distance her work from.

>>techst+X94
Exactly - look at what kind of work dominated scifi in 1961, the year of her first published work.

The 1961 Hugo Award was given to Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys, a work about the discovery of an alien artifact on the moon. The only women in this book are vapid arm candy for the bold, intrepid male explorers.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Moon

>> Claire Pack, Barker's girlfriend, who flirts with both Hawks and Connington but knows she prefers the manliness of Barker. She has some sort of sado-masochistic bond with Barker; even when he hits her face in public, she says without irony, "Isn't he grand? Isn't he a man?"

This kind of treatment is pretty much par for the course in popular science fiction of the time. Bold, violent men riding around in spaceships and shooting rayguns at hostile aliens to save giggling, helpless women.