Houston, Ginny has not left the city, she has not been to the Manned Spacecraft Center, she has not seen a rocket or anything related to the space program. Walden has brought lots of paperwork home, and she’s sneaked looks through some of it when he’s not about. But surreptitiously checking out Walden’s training materials—she loves the Apollo spacecraft, their lines, their detail, their immense complexity, all those dials and switches, she wants to know all there is to know, much as she would about a spaceship which appeals to her on the cover of a magazine—but it’s only diagrams and dry text and what she really wants is to climb inside a LM or sit inside a CSM, she’d like to stand beside a Saturn V and actually experience its immensity. But she’s reluctant to display too much interest, Walden has professed on more than one occasion that he much prefers his “new” wife, and although she feels like a robot replica of Virginia Grace Eckhardt more and more of the time, in a town of robot wives which were designed, of course, by and for men—and now she thinks about it, that’s not a bad idea for a story—she nonetheless maintains the façade, the pretence: because everything on the home front must be “copacetic” if her husband is to have a chance at the Moon.
Her “space cadette” days are behind her, or so Walden believes—but he remains, as ever, mostly oblivious.
#
…was not the only writer of the first half of the twentieth century explicitly writing about the female experience, and using science fiction to do so.
The place of Virginia Grace Parker, who was published under the gender neutral name V. G. Parker, in the canon of feminist science fiction has been under debate for more than two decades. She was not a prolific writer, producing only eleven stories in as many years. Her stories were interesting for their general atmosphere of isolation, initially filtered through the experiences of a wife or mother. In this, Parker’s fiction followed the form of “housewife heroine” stories, as defined by Betty Friedan in her landmark work, The Feminine Mystique. Classic examples in science fiction include Judith Merril’s “Only A Mother” and Alice Eleanor’s Jones’s “Created He Them”, both of which are very much products of the Cold War and which explicitly document a housewife’s response to a situation resulting from a nuclear war. Parker, curiously, never based stories on this trope, and it is tempting to speculate the fact she was married to a serving US Air Force officer gave her a different perception on nuclear weapons’ capabilities and likelihood of use.
Parker’s stories fall into three rough periods, each corresponding to changes in circumstances linked to her husband’s career. The early ones were written while Parker lived in Germany. They were often told from the point of view of an alien, and displayed a somewhat pessimistic view of humanity. But once Parker’s husband had been stationed back in the USA, the stories turned more optimistic and more domestic, culminating in “The Spaceships Men Don’t See”. This last story is especially interesting, and not simply because its title eerily presages James Tiptree, Jr.’s 1973 story, “The Women Men Don’t See”.
“The Spaceships Men Don’t See” was published in Galaxy in 1968. The story describes a secret military project to develop a spaceship which is invisible to the enemy. The main character of the story is the wife of an engineer who is working on the project. It is not going well, and as the engineer returns home each evening, his wife can tell that the day has once again been a failure. This distancing from the central novum of the story—the technology required to render the ship invisible is neither explained nor provided with pseudo-scientific scaffolding—is common to much “housewife heroine” science fiction.
The story was rejected by a number of magazines before Frederik Pohl took it
Her “space cadette” days are behind her, or so Walden believes—but he remains, as ever, mostly oblivious.
#
…was not the only writer of the first half of the twentieth century explicitly writing about the female experience, and using science fiction to do so.
The place of Virginia Grace Parker, who was published under the gender neutral name V. G. Parker, in the canon of feminist science fiction has been under debate for more than two decades. She was not a prolific writer, producing only eleven stories in as many years. Her stories were interesting for their general atmosphere of isolation, initially filtered through the experiences of a wife or mother. In this, Parker’s fiction followed the form of “housewife heroine” stories, as defined by Betty Friedan in her landmark work, The Feminine Mystique. Classic examples in science fiction include Judith Merril’s “Only A Mother” and Alice Eleanor’s Jones’s “Created He Them”, both of which are very much products of the Cold War and which explicitly document a housewife’s response to a situation resulting from a nuclear war. Parker, curiously, never based stories on this trope, and it is tempting to speculate the fact she was married to a serving US Air Force officer gave her a different perception on nuclear weapons’ capabilities and likelihood of use.
Parker’s stories fall into three rough periods, each corresponding to changes in circumstances linked to her husband’s career. The early ones were written while Parker lived in Germany. They were often told from the point of view of an alien, and displayed a somewhat pessimistic view of humanity. But once Parker’s husband had been stationed back in the USA, the stories turned more optimistic and more domestic, culminating in “The Spaceships Men Don’t See”. This last story is especially interesting, and not simply because its title eerily presages James Tiptree, Jr.’s 1973 story, “The Women Men Don’t See”.
“The Spaceships Men Don’t See” was published in Galaxy in 1968. The story describes a secret military project to develop a spaceship which is invisible to the enemy. The main character of the story is the wife of an engineer who is working on the project. It is not going well, and as the engineer returns home each evening, his wife can tell that the day has once again been a failure. This distancing from the central novum of the story—the technology required to render the ship invisible is neither explained nor provided with pseudo-scientific scaffolding—is common to much “housewife heroine” science fiction.
The story was rejected by a number of magazines before Frederik Pohl took it
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