{"id":4187,"date":"2025-09-09T16:39:41","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T16:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=4187"},"modified":"2025-11-17T13:00:19","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T13:00:19","slug":"the-future-of-men-beyond-patriarchy-my-new-book-on-sf-by-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2025\/09\/09\/the-future-of-men-beyond-patriarchy-my-new-book-on-sf-by-men\/","title":{"rendered":"THE FUTURE OF MEN BEYOND PATRIARCHY: MY NEW BOOK ON SF BY MEN"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Happy new academic year! May it brings plenty of positive energy for teachers and students, and the thorough defeat of patriarchal darkness in all fronts and nations (yes, I\u2019m thinking of those awful guys). I\u2019ll begin my sixteenth year as a blogger (how time passes!!), with a reminder that the all the yearly volumes can be found online<\/a>, including the Spanish-language volumes of the translated version that I started publishing in 2021. I have considered taking a break, but finally decided against it for fear that this would end for ever the habit of writing a weekly post, so here I am again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I\u2019m using this first post of the year to publicise the latest book I have published, Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men<\/em><\/a>, issued by Liverpool University Press within its noted collection Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies<\/a>. This is my third monograph in English and my sixth volume in that language, if I also include my three co-edited volumes, and I must say that, as regards the publishers, this has been my happiest experience. I wrote the book thinking specifically of the collection where it has appeared and from the first message my editor, Christabel Scaife, has been immensely helpful. The process of proofreading has been incredibly smooth, in comparison to the now habitual outsourcing of this process to companies that force authors to use appalling user-unfriendly platforms. I\u2019ve had the pleasure of using a wonderful illustration for the cover by the artist @monofuture, of a truly handsome science-fictional man that I\u2019m totally in love with. And, last but not least, Liverpool UP has allowed me to keep the rights for the Spanish language. Tired of being asked for money to publish my own translation into this language, the book is now available for free in true open access from UAB\u2019s repository as Sin planes de futuro: masculinidad y ciencia ficci\u00f3n seg\u00fan los hombres<\/em><\/a>. Enjoy both versions!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          My first publication about men appeared in 1998, before I even knew that Masculinities Studies (now called Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities) existed. It was an article called \u201c<\/a>Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mister Universe?: Hollywood Masculinity and the Search for the New Man<\/a>,\u201d in which I wondered why Schwarzenegger and other \u2018musculine\u2019 men (in Yvonne Tasker\u2019s famous denomination) did not embody a truly inspiring model, despite their popularity. Twenty-seven years later, I have reached the conclusion with my latest book that men simply have \u2018no plans for the future\u2019, hence my chosen subtitle. By this I mean that whereas most women (cis or trans), and gender fluid or non-binary persons, dream collectively of an egalitarian future, men do not dream about any specific gender utopia, except for the right-wing men who dream of a terrifying patriarchal future, as Margaret Atwood warned in The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/em> (1985) and the extreme right movements all over the planet reminds us every day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In recent years, thanks to a lessened teaching workload, for which I thank my university, I have published diverse books on men and masculinities, apart from journal articles and book chapters. These books are Masculinity and Patriarchal Villainy in the British Novel: From Hitler to Voldemort<\/em> <\/a>(Routledge, 2019), Representations of Masculinity in Literature and Film: Focus on Men<\/a><\/em> (CSP, 2020), American Masculinities in Contemporary Documentary Film: Up Close Behind the Mask<\/a><\/em> (Palgrave, 2023), Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture: In Search of Good Men<\/a><\/em> (Palgrave, co-edited with M. Isabel Santaul\u00e0ria, 2023) and the forthcoming Masculinities in Contemporary Science-Fiction Television<\/a><\/em> (Bloomsbury, co-edited with Michael Pitts, 2025), apart, of course, from Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men<\/em>. I have translated myself the monographs into Spanish to give my research visibility in more than one language; Detoxing<\/em> will also appear soon in translation. It\u2019s not as hard as it sounds, except for the index, which is the part of academic books I truly abhor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          As a woman, I have always enjoyed SF precisely because its vision of the future tends to be far more egalitarian than our present and has allowed me to believe that the feminist utopia will be fulfilled, sooner or later. There are, however, many other feminist scholars writing about women\u2019s or LGTBIQA+ SF and I decided a few years ago that in Science Fiction Studies we were losing track of what men are up to as SF authors, and of the characters their fiction. I could have chosen to consider men in women\u2019s SF fiction, but Michael Pitts had already done that in Alternative Masculinities in Feminist Speculative Fiction: A New Man<\/em> <\/a>(2021). Besides, I\u2019m particularly interested in self-representation, and so the research question my new book answers is \u2018how do men represent men and masculinities in current 21st<\/sup> century SF?\u2019 I chose to consider only the current century because I believe that the SF by contemporary, living authors is substantially different from earlier 20th century SF, which is usually quite sexist. I\u2019m not going to naively claim that current SF male authors are feminists, because that is not the case. Yet, I have found in their novels very many compelling female characters, treated with notable respect, and often placed in a much higher moral and personal ground than the less than ideal, often quite lost, vulnerable male characters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          My initial thesis was that male SF writers are not only aware of the impact of feminism on society and on SF in the Anglophone territories, but also of the negative influence that patriarchy has over men and the diverse masculinities. This thesis, I believe, has been proven along the fourteen chapters of the book, which cover seventeen authors of different nationalities and even different generations. The problem is that I have also been proven right (please excuse my smugness!) in the sub-thesis guiding me: namely, that despite their lucid awareness about the burdens that patriarchy imposes on the present, male SF writers have not invested their energies on imagining an alternative, egalitarian, truly free social order. They complain, or even rage, against the current patriarchal regime and fear that it can be prolonged into the future, hence the many villains roaming the pages of 21st-century SF by men, yet the lack of a common anti-patriarchal agenda, also missing in Western society at large, makes it very difficult for them to build the utopia that all human beings need now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Here\u2019s the table of contents, hoping that these very well-known authors are minimally familiar to you:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction: A Missing Agenda<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. How to Stop Future Patriarchy: Robert Charles Wilson\u2019s The Chronoliths<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Queer SF and the Pursuit of Happiness: Geoff Ryman\u2019s Lust<\/em> and Samuel R. Delany\u2019s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Body to Body: Ghostly Masculinity in Richard K. Morgan\u2019s Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. The Marrying Kind: John Scalzi\u2019s Old Man\u2019s War<\/em> Series<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. The Soldier, the Villain, and Hell: Iain M. Banks\u2019s Surface Detail<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. Of Nerds and Geeks: Ernest Cline\u2019s Ready Player One<\/em> and Ready Player Two<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. The Quixotic Space Captain: James S.A. Corey\u2019s Expanse<\/em> Series<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8. Facing Disaster: Colson Whitehead\u2019s Zone One<\/em> and Andy Weir\u2019s The Martian<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. The Hero\u2019s Archive and the Evil AIs: Daniel H. Wilson\u2019s Robopocalypse<\/em> and Robogenesis<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

10. The Capitalist on the Moon: Ian McDonald\u2019s Luna<\/em> Trilogy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

11. The Revenant General in the Woman\u2019s Body: Yoon Ha Lee\u2019s Machineries of Empire<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

12. The Cowardly Hero That Nobody Likes: Tade Thompson\u2019s Wormwood<\/em> Trilogy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

13. The Billionaire in the Digital Afterlife: Neal Stephenson\u2019s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

14. Men in Despair: Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s The Ministry for the Future<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          As you may imagine, it was extremely challenging to choose just a handful of authors among the many currently active in SF, and to choose within their production works that are both representative and relevant as regards the representation of men and masculinity. I did try to strike a balance, though. Of the seventeen authors included in the current volume, eleven are US citizens: Delany, Scalzi, Cline, Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham (the duo behind the penname James S.A. Corey), Whithead, Weir, Wilson, Lee, Stephenson, and Robinson. Four authors are British: Morgan and Thompson are English (Thompson, of Nigerian descent, was partly raised in Nigeria), Banks was Scottish, and McDonald is Northern Irish. The other two, Wilson and Ryman are Canadian (though Wilson was born in the USA and Ryman has lived most of his life in the UK). There are gaps, then, to begin with, since I lack room for authors of other nationalities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          As regards race, fourteen authors are white, two are black (Whitehead and Thompson), one is Korean American (Lee) and another Indigenous (Daniel H. Wilson is Cherokee). Two authors are gay (Ryman and Delany) and one is a trans man (Lee); the rest are heterosexual, as far as the available biographies indicate. Regarding their dates of birth, the eldest is Samuel R. Delany (the only one born in the 1940s), followed by the authors born in the 1950s (Robert Charles Wilson, Ryman, Banks, Stephenson, Robinson), the 1960s (Morgan, Scalzi, Franck, Abraham, Whitehead, McDonald, Thompson) and the 1970s (Cline, Weir, Daniel H. Wilson, Lee). There is a thirty-seven-year-gap between the eldest (Delany) and the youngest (Lee). The selection might appear to be too biased towards US white heterosexual male authors, but they are the ones dominating the field and this is part of the make-up of the contemporary SF by men that I describe here. There are fourteen chapters in the current volume simply because the word count is necessarily limited. Readers might miss other authors (Stephen Baxter, Greg Bear, William Gibson, Stephen King, Alasdair Reynolds, Dan Simmons, Charles Stross, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Peter Watts and a long etcetera), but it is my hope that if the volume is successful, my research might inspire other scholars to explore masculinity in men\u2019s SF beyond my selection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          As Richard K. Morgan writes in his kind review, I have carefully avoided \u201cany smug blanket criticism of maleness,\u201d working with \u201can enthusiastic curiosity about what the men are doing<\/em> and a principled but impassioned engagement with why<\/em>.\u201d I have been very critical at points, whenever my feminist commitment has overcome my \u201centhusiastic curiosity\u201d but I would be extremely happy if my book could enrich the conversation about men and masculinities in SF without the bitterness and acrimony that often plagues our approach to gender. As I\u2019ve been arguing for many years now, it\u2019s about time we distinguish patriarchy from masculinity, to help build a future in which men are finally free from the poisonous toxicity of patriarchy. And SF by men, no doubt, can play a major role in that collective endeavour. Or should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Now enjoy Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction by Men<\/em> and please read the many great novels analysed in it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy new academic year! May it brings plenty of positive energy for teachers and students, and the thorough defeat of patriarchal darkness in all fronts and nations (yes, I\u2019m thinking of those awful guys). I\u2019ll begin my sixteenth year as a blogger (how time passes!!), with a reminder that the all the yearly volumes can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1137,11,1093,14,17,966,799,22,23,24,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literature","category-cultural-studies","category-english-studies","category-feminism","category-gender-studies","category-genre","category-literary-criticism","category-literary-studies","category-masculinities-studies","category-masculinity","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4187"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4270,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4187\/revisions\/4270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}