Gold SF: why feminists are reinventing the future – again 

by Paul March-Russell

Feminist SF? Oh yeah, wasn’t that a 70s thing? Le Guin, Russ, McIntyre, a few others. Maybe even the odd small press. 

Course it didn’t amount to much. Cyberpunk came along and men went back to doing what they always did – penetrating space, just this time virtually – and anxiously inhabiting a womby tomby Matrix. There’d be the occasional kick-ass girl with prosthetic eyes. And, of course, meat puppets – i.e., prostitutes.

But then something strange happened. From the mid-2010s, a bunch of new feminist SF writers came along. Authors like Naomi Alderman, Christina Dalcher, Sophie Macintosh, Sandra Newman. Critics were flummoxed. Around the same time The Handmaid’s Tale was adapted to TV, so obviously these writers had to have been inspired by Margaret Atwood’s 1985 classic. Alderman was even mentored by Atwood. No need to go looking for all that 70s stuff. You know, all that consciousness raising and women’s collectives and lesbian utopias. You know, all those actual, radical alternatives to women’s subjugation under the biopolitics of heteronormative, patriarchal capitalism.

Myself and Una McCormack were mad, angry; in short, pissed-off. 

Una and I had met while judging the Clarke Award in 2017, the year that Colson Whitehead won with The Underground Railroad, thirty years after Atwood, and with a worthy female successor as his protagonist. The shortlist itself was split 50-50, three men, three women, including Becky Chambers, Emma Newman and Tricia Sullivan. Of the men, one (Yoon Ha-Lee) was trans. Whether it was down to us or not, I think that shortlist was a pivotal moment, reflecting a fundamental shift in SF publishing. Of the seven winners since then, four have been women, including the first Zambian (Namwali Serpell) and the first trans winner since Rachel Pollack (Harry Josephine Giles). 

But still, in the world beyond genre, SF is viewed as a largely male pursuit.

Example: I went to a recent panel about the ethics of astrobiology and the possibilities of first contact. The first names to get mentioned? Asimov, Clarke, Lem, Bradbury. All men, all dead. Where were the women? Well, a few eventually got mentioned. Sue Burke, Mary Doria Russell. Wow! they were even alive!

With this kind of discrepancy, knowing there was a rising groundswell of women’s SF writing which demanded recognition, something needed to be done.

Luckily, Una’s not someone to hang around.

Back in 2019, she was giving a talk on feminist enclaves at Goldsmiths College in London, where she met Prof Sarah Kember, the director of Goldsmiths Press. Una suggested they should create a feminist SF imprint along the lines of the Women’s Press SF list. Sarah responded enthusiastically, and later that autumn we all met in Sarah’s office, me as the token man. 

Una and I are, if not children, then certainly adolescents of the Women’s Press. For ten years, from 1982 to 1992, the Women’s Press – first in their distinctive grey spines, and then in their black and white stripes – made available writers previously inaccessible to UK readers. Octavia Butler, Suzette Haden Elgin, Sally Miller Gearhart, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Jody Scott, Joan Slonczewski – you know, all that 70s stuff. The Women’s Press republished classics like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and Naomi Mitchison’s Memoirs of a Spacewoman; reprinted novels by Suzy McKee Charnas in one volume; and commissioned new works by writers like Elizabeth Baines, Carol Emshwiller, Gwyneth Jones, Anna Livia, Suniti Namjoshi, Josephine Saxton and Lisa Tuttle. Una discovered the latter’s A Spaceship Built of Stone as an undergraduate; I brandished copies of Russ’s The Female Man and Scott’s Passing for Human during a student presentation on Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve. 

Nearly thirty years on, couldn’t we do something similar?

But not the same. Because feminism had moved on from the moment of the Women’s Press as the Second Wave tilted into the Third. Because, despite our love of the list, there were assumptions we were no longer comfortable with. Of the authors published, only Butler and Namjoshi were non-white. Some of the texts had TERFy aspects; even Russ admitted that the representation of transsexuality in The Female Man was potentially problematic. In line with the tenets of Fourth Wave feminism, our imprint had to be intersectional. (Which also means, as long as they accord with our pro-feminist principles, we’d welcome proposals from male authors.)

And the political situation had also changed, hardened, worsened. We were midway through the Trump presidency (and – dear God! – hasn’t Butler been proven right in Parable of the Sower, set in 2024?). The UK had split from the EU and Johnson was on the verge of his election victory. Across the globe, ultra-right premierships were spreading like a virus. And only a few months later, a real virus would be leaping national borders, killing some 15 million people in its wake. The spread of COVID-19 was a sign that climate change had already passed a milestone; that the global eco-catastrophe was unfolding around us. 

What a time to be alive!

Or rather, what a time to launch a feminist imprint!

Goldsmiths Press is a small academic press, committed to unconventional forms of publishing that blur the boundaries between creative and critical writing. But it also has significant reach: distribution in the US is through MIT Press. There are some limitations because of our size: we can’t publish doorstop novels – our average length is between 55,000 and 75,000 words (slightly longer for e-books) – and we can’t pay our authors the advances expected of commercial publishers. But we make up for those in other ways, such as our caring approach from proposal to typeset copy, and our specially designed, gold and grey covers. We’ll take every opportunity to publicise our authors’ work so promotion doesn’t fall solely upon their shoulders. I’d like to think there’s a familial atmosphere when publishing with Gold SF, something that also comes through the mix of writers, critics and academics who make up our editorial board. The current members are Abi Curtis, Elizabeth English, Joan Haran, Aishwarya Subramanian, Sheree Renée Thomas and Aliya Whiteley. Previous members include Anne Charnock, Robin Reid and Maureen Kincaid Speller. We’ll also get expert opinion from outside the board. 

To submit your work to Gold SF, first check out the series description and take a look at some of our other titles. Then, if you feel your work matches with the series aims, complete the proposal form and send it, along with a 10,000-word sample, to goldsmithspress@gold.ac.uk. Una and I perform a triage system whereby we read every proposal sent to us before forwarding the ones that interest us the most. We’ll send extensive feedback to the authors we decide to accept and work with them on revising and finalising the work for publication. We currently publish four books a year, two in the spring and two in the autumn.

Maybe it was the effects of lockdown but we were surprised – and delighted – when our first book in September 2022 turned out to be, not a novel, but Jessy Randall’s brilliant collection of poems, Mathematics for Ladies. Jessy’s reimagining of the hidden voices of women from the history of science struck a chord – we’ll be publishing the sequel in 2025 – and it announced that Gold SF was not your average, run-of-the-mill imprint. 

We were looking to achieve three outcomes in forming Gold SF. The first was to publish new writers and new voices not previously heard. Jessy’s collection partially fitted with that aim, and since then we’ve published debut novels by S.J. Groenewegen, M.J. Maloney and Alexandra Grunberg, while Sue Dawes’s The Mune is scheduled for March 2025. S.J. and M.J.’s novels offer highly individual ‘takes’ on the world of disinformation and the slide into totalitarianism – so pressing and prescient after the recent US election. Alexandra’s Merchant had defied all our expectations: a post-apocalyptic novel that explored the consequences of food scarcity whilst, at the same time, rewriting Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. All three are seriously political and seriously playful.

Our second aim was to promote the work of writers already publishing but who, for whatever reason, needed to get their work out to a larger audience. Hoa Pham’s superb novellas, Empathy and The Other Shore, were available in her home country of Australia but we were able to take them to the rest of the English-speaking world. You don’t believe me they’re that good? Then read Timmah Ball’s review in Meanjin. 

Abi Curtis and Pippa Goldschmidt already have an audience, and we were delighted they wanted to be published by us (Abi liked us so much she stayed!). But Abi’s novel, The Headland, takes serious risks with her tale of first contact and interspecies communication – you can sense Abi’s other life as a poet breaking through the prose. And Pippa’s Schrödinger’s Wife was that apparently most difficult thing to market, a short story collection, but short stories are meat and drink to small presses like Goldsmiths. Just to underline the point, we’ll be publishing Andrea Ashworth’s new collection, Maybe the Birds, in late 2025. 

Our final aim was to reclaim the work of predecessors without whom there would be no Gold SF – no history or tradition or lineage of resistance. You know, that 70s stuff. Vonda N. McIntyre was a pathfinder, a contemporary of Russ and Butler and a collaborator with Le Guin. In novels like The Exile Waiting and the multiple award-winning Dreamsnake, she had the audacity to present women as human beings, where their gender or sexuality was not their defining feature. Without McIntyre’s tie-in novels, large parts of what now pass as lore in the Star Trek franchise wouldn’t exist. Little Sisters offers a selection of her previously uncollected short stories, from some of her earliest in 1970 through to her last in the 2000s, including the title story. Feminist SF didn’t begin with Atwood – go and read McIntyre and find out why!

So, there you have it – a crazy idea borne from a crazy historical moment has led so far to nine books with more to follow. And the world outside just keeps on getting crazier. We need SF by and about women more than ever. We think Gold SF is the place to do that – unrepentantly in the spirit of the 1970s and proudly intersectionally feminist. So, send us your proposals and buy our books!

You can find out more on the Goldsmiths website

Bio: Paul March-Russell is the co-founder with Una McCormack and Sarah Kember of Gold SF. He also edits Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction and sits on the advisory boards of the Journal of the Short Story in English and Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. His latest book is J.G. Ballard’s Crash (Palgrave Macmillan).