“These are the voyages of our ‘starship’ enterprise. Its ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no-one has gone before!”
Creating A Future History
Art by CoPilot AI
Decades later, the church building is still there, but the adjoining church hall, where Austrek held its first public meetings – forty-nine years ago today – has long since been demolished and replaced with shop fronts. The infrastructure may change, but its echo endures. In this busy street in a northern suburb of Melbourne, traces remain of past times, when a sanctuary for those seeking shelter in the past also offered shelter for those seeking consolation in the future. Of the six main public spaces where Austrek has met over the last five decades, four of them have been church halls, demonstrating the intersection between community spaces and collective belonging.
The World That Was
You may be old enough to remember a world before the digital age, when connection meant conversation, not clicks. This was a world without the Internet, mobile phones or streaming services. No instant communication or digital information. If you wanted social media, you went out and met others in real life. Instead of googling, you read a book, or headed to the library to consult encyclopaedias.
For news, you relied on the evening TV news bulletin or picked up a newspaper, knowing that the headlines were already at least a day old. I recall the Apollo 13 Moon mission, when the front page of a Melbourne newspaper was overprinted with a daily 3am “Stop Press” notice in red ink – an otherwise unthinkable notion for something as inviolate and sacrosanct as a newspaper. These were our closest to instant communication and worldly wisdom: many Star Trek fans collected scrap books full of news clippings like they were collecting holy relics.
These were the times before streaming and YouTube, before DVDs and videocassettes – even before modern marketing made copyright issues ubiquitous and inviolate. Fans of TV programs took recordings of their favourite programs on audio cassettes, for their own personal use, and replayed them endlessly until they were word perfect on the script. They photographed their favourite shows off the TV screen. Decades before mobile phones and their inbuilt cameras, photography was more of an effort and an art. Commercial photos and souvenirs were largely unavailable.
Fandom Begins with Persistence
Photos required patience: you bought a roll of film, used a camera, then handed the film over to the local pharmacy, waiting a week for your memories to be developed and printed.
In my tweens during the early 1970s, my rapt attendance at a local movie theatre to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey while university-aged couples necked, led to my attending the theatre one weekend with my pocket camera and some rolls of film so I could take photos of the spaceships. After snap-snap-snapping during the movie, I took my rolls of film to my local pharmacy and impatiently waited the obligatory week for my photos to return. I was disappointed to find that – due to the darkness within the theatre – none of my photos had come out. The pharmacist felt sorry for me and gave me a free roll of film.
“Two rolls of film, one bruised ego, and a carry bag of flash cubes — proof that fandom begins with persistence.”
Undeterred, I returned the following weekend with my camera, more rolls of film, and a carry bag full of flash cubes — determined to photograph the wondrous spaceships. This time, my attempts at photography – flashes and all – caused consternation, likely misunderstandings, and mayhem in the theatre. After surviving being nearly strangled by local university-aged boys in the audience (their girlfriends told them to “leave the boy alone”), I finished my photos and once again (rather smugly this time) presented my films to the pharmacy, waiting another agonising week — only to find that these photos had also not come out. I explained what had happened to the pharmacist, and this time he sternly told me off.
Sadly, I gave up any further attempts to photograph these filmic images — only to joyously find later that the Space Age Bookshop in Melbourne was selling slides of these exact same fictional spaceships. My amateur and failed attempts to deepen my connection with my interest in things science fictional were finally starting to be anticipated and met by rudimentary professional marketing enterprises.
Phones of that era were firmly fixed on walls or situated on shelves. Wireless phones only existed in SF programs. Most homes had a single handset connected by wires, and long-distance calls meant booking ahead through an operator. If you were out and about, you found a TARDIS-shaped phone booth on a street corner and dialled home.
Phone booths were great places to shelter from the harsh weather as you made private calls to friends that you dared not make at home (on the family phone in the living room). They were also great places for Clark Kent to change into his Superman underwear – and those phone directories! In the days before modern privacy laws, these phone books comprised hundreds of pages containing the names, addresses and phone numbers of many thousands of people; I knew fans who had fun skimming through the directory pages to find the names of their favourite fictional characters – not to ring them, of course, but just because it was fun to see fictitious names in print in the “real” world.
This was the world a generation ago: awed by the space age and watching men walking on the Moon, but still stuck in an era before space age technology had trickled down to the everyday. It would take another twenty years before the Internet or mobile phones started making public appearances, another decade after that before home computers brought the Internet into our homes, and another two decades again before AI became commonplace.
Television in those days was a box in your living room, connected to small rabbit-ears antennae that sat on top of your TV set, or connected via wires to an antenna on your roof. Reception was limited to a handful of local TV stations that were accessible via your antenna; and if you wanted to watch a TV program, you were totally reliant upon the whims of the programmers at those local TV stations. In the days before streaming or DVDs or videotapes, when your favourite TV show was taken off the air, you had no guarantee that you would ever see it again. (And if you wanted to see a movie, go to a movie theatre).
And then, as if someone flipped a switch, the future began to arrive… not all at once, but in colour.
Future Echoes
On 1 March 1975, Australia officially turned on colour television – although colour test transmissions had commenced some months beforehand, hinting at a rainbow of multicoloured diversity in our formerly monotone black-and-white TV services. In those early days of colour TV, the colour palette was turned up high, so everything appeared almost fluorescent. This was especially breathtaking, for example, when seeing that cricket matches were played on the MCG grass field that was blindingly green.
“The [television] sets cost more than $1,000, the equivalent of approximately $8,800 in today’s money. The many who could not afford to upgrade their sets continued to watch in black and white.”
As a result of colour TV, local stations pulled many old programs out of their archives and repeated them – now in living colour. Star Trek was one of these programs, airing in a G-rated (suitable for children) timeslot for about three months on Saturday afternoons.. maybe fifteen episodes. For nerdy SF-starved teens, it was wondrous.
I remember sitting around the dining table for our family’s traditional Saturday evening dinner, and at my pleading they allowed me to have the television turned on so I could watch while we ate. Upon hearing the opening narration: “Space: The Final Frontier…” my father laughed and commented that space was the infinite frontier. Having been suitably chastened for the gall to watch television during family tea-time, I was allowed to watch the rest of the episode without critical commentary, although I was compelled to ignore my mother and sisters rolling their eyes in patronising amusement. Within my 14 year-old brain, I felt the thrill of space-age adventure mixed with deference to a nostalgic program that dated from the Apollo space era. I was hooked. Over subsequent weeks, in between the TV episodes on Saturday afternoons, I turned to reading Star Trek books, especially when the series was withdrawn from that timeslot, and later appeared in erratic late night “graveyard shift” timeslots.
This was an era when Australian Star Trek viewers were totally dependent upon the whims of Channel 9 programmers – who took the show on and off, often late at night. I even recall late night viewing of one episode, “Amok Time”, containing a scene in which Kirk and Spock face off against each other, ready to fight to the death. Snip! A Channel 9 film editor suddenly cuts out the subsequent five minutes of action – and Kirk went from standing courageously to lying apparently dead in front of Spock. As I sat there stupefied and puzzled, the reason for this edit suddenly became clear: the scene was ended quickly, in order to make way for another five minutes of advertising Saba and Franco Cozzo furniture.
Fans became frantic for more Star Trek, a hunger which Channel 9 seemed reluctant to satiate, despite our phone calls, letters and petitions (I recall being told by one Channel Nine Programming Manager that they had enough problems in their workplace without having to worry about giving fans what they wanted). Into this vacuum stepped a local film theatre manager.
A portion of a Ritz theatre flyer, with the bottom half of the page advertising the first Star Trek Marathon on 27 November 1976
Bob Johnston was a local film enthusiast who had collected many films and ran a small theatre – the Ritz – in a hired theatrette in Errol Street, North Melbourne (his Sydney operations were likewise run out of ANZAC House). Out of curiosity, he threw a couple Star Trek episodes into a theatre night, and the audience response was so positive that he decided to run a Star Trek Marathon featuring Star Trek episodes running “from dusk ’til dawn”, and for the first time ever, he had to open the theatrette balcony in order to accommodate the audience. Naturally, this meant that the Marathons became a regular feature in both his Melbourne and Sydney theatres.
My teenager friends and I were already running an amateur student science club, the Melbourne Amateur Science Club (MASC), and we excitedly attended this first Star Trek Marathon. We even took some photocopied flyers advertising Austrek (a subsection of MASC), and these were snapped up by Marathon audience members and caused us to be overwhelmed with immediate sign-ups for new memberships (an annual membership initially costing $1, although postage costs for our newsletter forced us to quickly increase that to $2.50). We quickly concluded that we did not have the resources to run both our school children’s science club and the fledgling Austrek (which in one night had received more enthusiastic memberships than MASC had received in its years of operation), so we closed down MASC and dedicated our limited teenage time and efforts to Austrek. That first Star Trek Marathon on 27 November 1976 was retrospectively assigned as being the date of our club’s public launch. We even met a lovely young lady, a school teacher named Diane, who encouraged us to run our new club.
Science fiction fans have traditionally been voracious readers, and local fans were no exception. Concurrent to the aforementioned media activities, we had previously sought Star Trek-related material via a scarce number of books. British author James Blish had novelised the Star Trek episodes, and US author Alan Dean Foster had done the same for the Star Trek animated series. Beyond that, such books were rare. We started watching Star Trek on TV, fell in love with its magic, and scoured bookshops for more.
There were two books that particularly made a difference in the early club. Star Trek Lives! introduced us to the concept of fan clubs and fandom. We learned that there were others like us: keen and enthusiastic for Star Trek and space age excitement; running fan clubs and conventions; writing fan fiction and publishing fanzines. This book had probably helped inspire us to start Austrek as a sub-section of our humble little schoolkids science club, MASC, and begin to consider expanding that subsection into something more (the Star Trek Marathons helped that option take off like a rocket).
The second book to impact our lives was I Am Not Spock, an autobiographical account by actor Leonard Nimoy. He complained that any time anyone wrote a letter and addressed the envelope to “Mr Spock, Hollywood, California”, the Post Office delivered it to him. Encouraged by this, we did something that I would now recommend that nobody ever do: we wrote to him using that very method. Dozens of us signed a letter asking if we could officially start a Star Trek fan club, and we posted it with teenaged-sized bravery, wondering if we would ever get a reply. To our surprise, we did – but not from the man himself.
It turns out that there was an organisation called the Star Trek Welcommittee (STW) – a Star Trek volunteer-based information exchange network, based in the USA. In the days before the digital communications, they wrote a snail mail reply to us, recommending that we contact a mysterious “D. Marchant” who lived in Melbourne (but in far-away Mordialloc, a southern suburb – too far for us to visit in the days before we were old enough to own or drive our own cars). With some fear and trembling, I dialled my home phone’s rotary dial and called this mysterious “D. Marchant”. To my astonishment, my new friend – Diane from the Star Trek Marathons – answered the phone. It turned out that she was the world STW representative for every country outside the USA.
Diane mentored, encouraged and assisted us with everything from contacting local fans, to posting out our first real newsletter (she donated the stamps for us to afford the postage costs). It was full-steam ahead.
A portion of page 1 of the first Captain’s Log
The following months were a mix of frantic and exciting, especially balancing schoolwork and homework against building Austrek infrastructure. We published our first Austrek newsletter, titled Trekkie Talk, and then changed the name after Diane gently explained how the word “trekkie” was seen as a negative by many Star Trek fans at that time; leading to the newsletter being relaunched as The Captain’s Log.
Our first public meeting took place in the abovementioned church hall in Fairfield on 27 February 1977. The pastor was annoyed when I asked for a receipt for the hall hire cost: the princely sum of five dollars. He hand-wrote a receipt, making sure to exaggerate the receipt number as #1 (the 1 being preceded by a ridiculous number of zeroes) as his gentle protest.
The meeting was attended by Diane and her mother Jessie, by many of the teenage club members, and a mix of new members who had joined since the first Marathon. One teenage boy dressed as Darth Vader, managing to go to the milk bar next to the church and trying to buy a Star Wars icy pole, getting flustered, and tripping over the Twisties stand. But our youth and enthusiasm were infectious: our club sped ahead into new activities over the coming months, not being held back by wisdom or caution. We had never tried anything before, and we had no idea what was possible or impossible, so we generally went ahead and did it anyway. Any time we had an idea, we anticipated the later Star Trek mantra of Make It So, and we did. Our human adventure was just beginning.
Early Austrek logo
Austrek has organised many activities: including club meetings, car rallies, birthday parties, weddings, Christmas events, weekend events at private homes, New Year’s Day events, trivial pursuit nights, camps, fan fiction, fanzines, newsletters, collating parties, conventions, fan films, art displays, costume competitions,’courts martial’ and ‘ambassadors’ banquets’ and other cosplay events, formal debates, letter campaigns to help NASA or medical causes, charities, banquets, movie nights, sold out theatre bookings for virtually every Star Trek movie premiere, museum displays, filk songs, radio programs, Moomba floats, media interviews, medical and personal interventions, picnics to Hanging Rock, merchandise including T-shirts and cups and stickers and playing cards and lanyards, contributions to books and magazines, assisting the start of many other SF media clubs, assisting fan authors and fan artists to become professionals, providing a welcoming sanctuary for many people facing issues of diversity, isolation and difference, introducing women to science fiction and science fiction to women… the sky was our limit. Whether creative activities borne of need in the early days to find more Star Trek inspiration amidst the cultural desert; or more recent consumerist activities to accommodate the wide range of franchise material now available, the club has learnt and adapted to suit changing commercial and copyright and cultural interests.
As for me, I will never forget the many people who have told me (over the last five decades) how Austrek literally saved their lives by providing supportive social networks.
We may not have changed the world overnight, but we have changed it one life at a time. After half a century, our journey – our legacy – continues.
And the rest is history.
“Starfleet was founded to seek out new life. Well, there it sits.”
– Picard, Measure of A Man, Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Published to commemorate the birthday of Joanna Russ.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
— Neil Armstrong, 1969
“He was a man, and I was a woman. That’s what they told us.”
— Janelle Monáe, Dirty Computer, 2018
Genre Was Never Neutral
Speculative fiction was built on a foundation of masculine myth. From the 19th century onward, writers like Verne, Wells, and Burroughs imagined futures of conquest, invention, and control. Their heroes were white, male, cisgender, heterosexual, and rational – and women were either absent or ornamental.
Early science fiction: Explorers and inventors dominated their worlds. The alien was orientalised and othered. Women were sidelined.
Golden Age SF (1930s–50s): Pulp magazines glorified masculine genius. Women were assistants, lovers, or threats.
High fantasy (Tolkien, Lewis): Noble bloodlines, patriarchy, and exotic locations.
Space opera (Star Wars, Foundation): Empire in space. Male heroes and women as damsels in distress.
For me as a younger science fiction fan, one of my template heroes was Captain Kirk, who happened to be white, male, heterosexual and imperialist. The same with Commander Straker, Luke Skywalker, Doctor Who, R. Daneel Olivaw, and even Galen from Planet of the Apes. These generically universal straight white male heroes (or their analog) served to lead and guide science fiction by example. But from Tarzan to Tony Stark, from Sherlock to Spock, the so-called “universal” hero was never really universal. He was a product of Western patriarchy, designed to dominate and conquer.
Helena Tried to Give Them Souls
She Was the Genre’s First Media Emotional Ark
Helena Glory, the President’s daughter, arrives at Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.), a factory that mass-produces synthetic labourers. She comes as an emissary of the League of Humanity, pleading for the robots to be treated with dignity. She begs the scientists to give them souls, to make them more human. They laugh. They dismiss her. They marry her.
Years later, Helena burns the formula for creating robots (not out of malice, but grief). She’s horrified by their callousness, by the sterility of a world without care. When the robots revolt, she is killed: erased like the empathy she embodied.
One of Gnaedinger’s covers (Pulpfest)
From the beginning, women haunted the margins of speculative fiction: sometimes as authors, more often as symbols. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) gave the genre its first speculative scaffold, yet even there, women are silenced, sacrificed, or erased to propel male ambition. In colonial fantasies by Verne and Burroughs, women are romantic prizes or civilizing burdens; emblems of the empire’s moral veneer. As the genre moved into pulp fiction, women were both creators and constraints: Mary Gnaedinger edited Famous Fantastic Mysteries, while writers like Clare Winger Harris and Leslie F. Stone published under ambiguous names to slip past editorial gatekeeping. Yet on the page, female characters were often mute, decorative, or doomed: narrative decoration for masculine conquest. Even in R.U.R. (1920), where the word “robot” was born, Helena Glory’s efforts end in obliteration. These early texts excluded and obliterated women.
Maria: The Robot Was a Woman
In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), the first cinematic robot wasn’t a neutral machine, it was a woman. The Maschinenmensch, built in the image of Maria, wasn’t designed to liberate. She was built to deceive, seduce, and incite chaos.
She was created by Rotwang, not as a marvel of science, but as a monument to his lost love, Hel. In that act, the genre revealed its blueprint: women being subservient to the whims and fantasies of men. The robot wasn’t just futuristic, it was patriarchal fantasy presented in chrome.
And yet, she endures. Her silhouette haunts pop culture, from C-3PO to Beyoncé. She reminds us that speculative fiction didn’t begin with liberation — it began with discrimination.
Masculinist Literature
Science fiction, in particular, has long been a stage for masculine melodrama. From lost-world adventures to interstellar warfare, the genre has often glorified the warrior archetype. As Ezekiel Crago puts it, SF’s morality is saturated with “military masculinity”, a form of manhood that justifies violence through the illusion of protection. The “helpful hero” becomes a vessel for power.
To understand how women are written in speculative fiction, we have to start with how masculinity is constructed. The genre doesn’t just exclude women, it defines them in contrast to male protagonists. They’re presented as emotional devices, moral challenges, or damsels in distress. Feminist SF has pushed back for decades, but the genre remains stubbornly resistant.
Let’s talk about the classics: Aragorn, Paul Atreides, Luke Skywalker, Hari Seldon, and their ilk. They were role models for young white boys, and reflected what NASA would later classify as being “the right stuff” for astronauts: male, white, heterosexual, and culturally all-American.
Aragorn: Inherits kingship through bloodline and prophecy. Éowyn’s grief is sidelined.
Paul Atreides: Becomes a messiah. Women vanish in his vision.
Luke Skywalker: Cosmic destiny, paternal revelation, heroic aspirations.
Hari Seldon: Intellectual superiority. Women reduced to background decoration.
These narratives entertained and instructed. The hero wasn’t just a character. He was a role model for male emotional distance and a testimony to testosterone. Hasta La Vista, Baby!
The Treatment of Female Characters
In speculative fiction, women are rarely protagonists. More often, they’re decoration, used to provide background context for the male hero, or to soften his testosterone. They’re props.
Altaira and the Gaslight
I recall chatting to a younger SF fan about an old movie (Forbidden Planet), which I had always considered positively, but I was about to learn something. This younger guy viewed this movie as being awful, which surprised me because it is often invoked as a classic. When I asked him why, his reply was startling but made me think:
“That scene when the captain scolds Altaira for wearing a short skirt in front of a spaceship full of men who haven’t seen a woman for a year. Talk about gaslighting and rape culture!”
Maybe the Creature from the Id was wider than just a movie concept.
Narrative Roles Assigned to Women
The Love Interest: A prize or temptation. Think Leia, Arwen, Chani.
The Healer or Mother: Emotional tokenism. Often unnamed or undeveloped as a character, often sacrificed. Think Edith Keeler, Beverley Crusher, Deanna Troi, and Miramanee (Star Trek)
The Symbolic Martyr: Forgotten, or sanctified. Think Maria in Metropolis and Furiosa in Mad Max.
The Exceptional Woman: Allowed agency only by rejecting femininity or becoming “one of the boys.” Think Buffy Summers, Dana Scully, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Susan Calvin.
These clichés teach readers or viewers to see women as secondary, symbolic, or expendable. As Brian Attebery puts it, science fiction doesn’t just reflect gender norms, it teaches them. It animates machines and aliens with power, while presenting women as relatively inert, decorative, or dead.
Case Studies in Erasure
Éowyn (The Lord of the Rings): Slays the Witch-King, then vanishes into domesticity.
Chani (Dune): Warrior and guide, reduced to womb and warning.
Leia Organa (Star Wars): Rebel leader, strategist, and survivor—yet always framed through restraint and lineage.
Susan Calvin (Asimov’s Robot series): Brilliant roboticist, emotionally flattened and mocked for her intellect.
Dr Elizabeth Dehner (Star Trek pilot): Brilliant scientist, emotionally flattened and mocked as a ‘walking freezer unit’.
These women are allowed power only when it serves the hero’s arc. Their stories are shaped by the emotional logic of a genre that mistrusts vulnerability and disciplines care out of its protagonists and its readers.
The Frigid Prototype
Dr. Susan Calvin, robopsychologist in Asimov’s I, Robot, is often described as cold, emotionless, and robotic. Shmoop notes that she’s referred to as a “frosty girl” with “cold enthusiasm,” her face and voice repeatedly described as cold—like the metal bodies of the robots she studies.
Calvin is more than just a scientist, she’s a genre prototype. She embodies the masculinist ideal of intellect stripped of emotion, a woman who “protected herself against a world she disliked by a masklike expression and a hypertrophy of intellect.” Her competence is unquestioned, but her humanity is flattened. She’s allowed power only by rejecting personality complexity.
Even Asimov admitted she was “much more like the popular conception of a robot than were any of my positronic creations.” Calvin’s legacy is profound: she’s the frigid woman scientist who must become machine to be taken seriously. And yet, she endures: brilliant, unyielding, and emotionally dead.
Damsels, Temptresses, and Designed for Rescue
Speculative fiction has long relied on women as visual and figures to be rescued, desired, or punished. These characters aren’t protagonists. They’re genre tropes, designed to elevate male heroism while suppressing female agency.
From Geisha to General
Princess Leia’s Story Arc Was Evolution
She began as a captured princess, framed through defiance but rescued by men.
She was silenced in a gold bikini, her body part of the conquest and subjugation.
She became a general: grieving, commanding, mentoring, surviving.
It took a lifetime for women’s liberation to arrive in a galaxy far, far away.
Designed for Rescue
Jane Porter (Tarzan): Repeatedly rescued, framed through romantic submission.
Aouda (Around the World in Eighty Days): Intelligent, gracious, but offered as romantic reward.
Maria (Metropolis): Saintly human and seductive robot, her humanity mechanised and weaponized.
Weena (The Time Machine): Passive and childlike.
Nova (Planet of the Apes): Mute, idealized, emotionally dependent.
Vina (Star Trek: “The Cage”): Reconstructed for beauty, her trauma made decorative.
Janice Rand (Star Trek: TOS): Professional, yet subordinated, her arc vanishes without closure.
Altaira Morbius (Forbidden Planet): Beautiful, naïve, emotionally reactive, transferred from father to suitor.
Dr. Ruth Adams (This Island Earth): A scientist, but emotionally subordinated, reduced to companion and witness.
Desire as Punishment
Marla McGivers (Star Trek: “Space Seed”): Betrays her crew for Khan’s love, her professionalism and autonomy forgotten.
Princess Aura (Flash Gordon): Sensual and rebellious, her quest for love made dangerous.
Barbarella:Her personality is contextualised through erotic spectacle.
Competence Undermined
Carol Marcus (Star Trek II): Brilliant scientist, but her arc is framed through romantic history and maternal sacrifice.
Maureen Robinson (original Lost In Space TV series): Qualified scientist who spends her time baking space cookies, washing the space laundry, and worrying about her children.
Tanya Adams (The Giant Claw): A mathematician, but her intellect is sidelined by romantic quests and repeated rescue.
Lois Lane (Superman): A brilliant journalist, yet frequently endangered and emotionally tethered to Superman’s arc.
These women aren’t just underwritten, they’re minimised. Their emotional power, sacrifice, and desire are used to fortify male heroism, not to explore their own arcs. They’re written to be seen, not to see.
Jessica Runs
I recall the opening episode of Logan’s Run: Jessica stands to one side, looking helpless while the men fight in fisticuffs. Just as the villain is about to defeat Logan, he is disarmed by a shot from Jessica, who has turned from damsel in distress to become a self-empowered runner!
I was sitting in a room with other teenagers, and we all cheered as Jessica discovered Women’s Lib. It wasn’t just a plot twist, it was a the birth of a new era. In that moment, speculative fiction cracked open, and we saw possibility sprint across the screen.
Point and Counterpoint: Wonder Woman
Diana isn’t rescued; she rescues the genre from itself. In a landscape dominated by male heroes, Wonder Woman emerges as a revelation.
Lasso: Compels honesty, not obedience.
Bracelets: Deflect violence, not invite it.
Mission: Peace over conquest.
She doesn’t conquer the other; she connects across difference. Where Paul Atreides erases Fremen women, Wonder Woman represents the silenced. Where Luke Skywalker inherits destiny through bloodline, she chooses empathy. She is not a masculinist hero reassigned as a woman. She is her own character.
Transitional Figures
Not all feminist characters arrive fully formed. Some characters inhabit the gap between old tropes and new ideas.
Ann Veronica (H.G. Wells): Defies patriarchy, seeks autonomy, yet returns to domesticity.
Jessica (Logan’s Run TV): Begins as companion, evolves co-architect of resistance.
Servalan (Blake’s 7): Glamorous and manipulative, yet politically dominant.
Elizabeth Dehner (Star Trek): Gains power, refuses domination, and then dies to stop Mitchell’s descent.
Nyota Uhura (Star Trek): Cultural bridge and communications officer. Like her character, her full name was not invented for decades.
Zira (Planet of the Apes): Empathetic and maternal scientist who dies in self-sacrifice.
Sarah Jane Smith (Doctor Who): Investigative journalist turned protagonist. She challenges the Doctor, leads her own spin-off.
These women signal that the genre is beginning to crack open.
Ripley Wasn’t Supposed to Survive
Ripley was originally written as a man. In early drafts of Alien (1979), the character was a standard-issue male officer. But director Ridley Scott, with a nudge from studio head Alan Ladd Jr., flipped the script: “Why can’t Ripley be a woman?”
Scott later explained the logic: a woman would be the last person audiences expected to survive. That subversion—casting Sigourney Weaver as the by-the-book officer who outlives them all—wasn’t just a twist. It was a genre detonation.
Ripley didn’t just survive. She returned, again and again, across sequels and decades, evolving from reluctant survivor to maternal protector to existential warrior. She became the spine of the franchise—and a new archetype for speculative fiction.
Feminist Interventions: Ripley and Sarah Connor
If Wonder Woman reframes heroism through care and individualism, Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor represent a darker evolution. They are the female equivalents of violent male heroes such as the Terminator, Judge Dredd, Batman, Wolverine, or Lobo. As such, they epitomise the idea that “might makes right” and their character development needs further nuance if they are to be seen as fully fleshed out, positive role models. While they represent the idea that women are just as physically capable as men towards forms of assertive behaviour, they also represent a transition phase between the “damsels in distress” of the past and more healthy representations in the future.
Towards Intersectionality and Speculative Care
Speculative fiction doesn’t just imagine futures. It helps to create them.
Russ Drew the Map
Joanna Russ exposed the architecture of genre in speculative fiction. In her essay “What Can a Heroine Do? or, Why Women Can’t Write”, Russ mapped the literary traps that constrain female protagonists: the ornamental roles, the emotional baggage, the narrative erasure. She showed how women are written to serve, not to act.
Russ argued that the problem isn’t just representation, it’s structure. The genre’s expectations discipline women into silence, sacrifice, or spectacle. “The heroine cannot act,” she wrote, “because the plot does not permit it.”
Her work teaches us that rewriting the hero means rewriting the blueprint. Russ didn’t just ask what a heroine could do. She demanded that we build stories where she can.
Reading List
Attebery, Brian. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake
Busse, Kristina. Framing Fan Fiction
Butler, Octavia. Kindred, Parable of the Sower
Cherryh, C.J. Foreigner series
Crago, Ezekiel. “The Helpful Hero: Military Masculinity in Science Fiction”
Drapeau-Bisson, Marie-Lise. “Feminist Readings of Genre Disruption”
Fellman, Isaac. The Breath of the Sun
Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto
Lemberg, R.B. The Four Profound Weaves, The Unbalancing
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”
Studocu Editorial Team. “Feminist Analysis of Joanna Russ: A Study of Female Agency.” Studocu.
Tiptree Jr., James (Alice Sheldon). Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Vint, Sherryl. Bodies of Tomorrow
Yang, Neon. The Tensorate Series
Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Speculative Fiction and the Colonial Imagination
A four-part journey through how speculative fiction echoed empire, rewrites resistance, and reclaims futurity.
Part One: Race and the Colonial Imagination
Published: 2 January 2026 Read Part One
From Lucian to Le Guin, speculative fiction’s imperial DNA is exposed: how imagined futures rehearsed conquest, racial hierarchy, and colonial logic.
Part Two: The Hero Must Be Rewritten
Published: 22 February 2026 Read Part Two
Gender and the myth of the universal hero. This chapter rewrites masculinist genre scaffolding, tracing how speculative fiction disciplines emotion, care, and female agency.
Part Three: Sexuality & Queer Futures
Published: 1 April 2026 Read Part Three
A queer reading of Star Trek and speculative canon. This chapter critiques heteronormative erasure, celebrates queer fandom’s legacy, and imagines futures beyond genre discipline.
Part Four: We Occupy the Future
Published: 5 April 2026 Read Part Four
Published on the anniversaries of the 504 Sit-In and Medibank Blockade, this chapter confronts techno-fix fantasies and reimagines futures where disabled bodies are not corrected or cured, but centred, celebrated, and architecturally included.
“Everything needs to change and it has to start today.”
– Greta Thunberg, 2018.
I am writing as a concerned Australian citizen to oppose this project. I respectfully call upon you to reject the project for the following reasons:
It does not enjoy support from the local community. Democracy requires that people should have representation in administrative and community matters, and there are many local people who oppose the project for many of the following reasons, and because it will not greatly add to local employment, nor otherwise benefit their community and the world around them.
The expansion will reportedly destroy 55 irreplaceable Aboriginal cultural artefacts, and potentially impact dozens of others. Such damage to our national and cultural legacy – for such short-term gain – must surely border upon the unethical and criminal.
The proposed expansion is located alongside a nature reserve and environmental damage will be extensive. This includes groundwater and creeks where pollution or other effects could create wide and long-term damage. It is our responsibility to protect our environment, and this project adds to damage and endangerment while adding very little overall benefit.
The project would destroy extensive areas for flora and fauna. I understand that this includes habitat for koalas, Regent Honeyeaters, and up to 401 hectares of the nationally endangered Box Gum Woodland ecosystem. It is our legacy to protect these areas for the sake of the biosphere and for the future of the world.
The proposed expansion will contribute to climate damage that contradicts NSW climate goals and endangers the future of the world. I work with young Australians, many of whom are concerned with the inadequacy of actions by Australian authorities to address and redress climate damage concerns. It is incumbent upon your Commission to ensure that their concerns are acknowledged and that action is taken to create a better world for these generations who follow.
The proposed expansion ignores world trends to wind back coal and fossil fuels. It entrenches redundant economic and ethical policies that the world is leaving behind. Australia needs to move forward instead of repeating the mistakes of our past.
I ask you to consider the legacy this proposed expansion would leave for future generations, and I submit that this legacy would not be positive for Australia or the world.
I respectfully urge the Independent Planning Commission to recommend that the Moolarben OC3 Coal Mining Extension Project be refused. Thank you for considering my submission.
