The Aardwyrm's Nest

science-fiction

  • Begum Rokeya and “Sultana’s Dream”

    Today’s warnings: Gender essentialism, and for once that’s it! I should have found a way out of the whiteness of this series much earlier for a lot of good reasons, but not having to warn for every prejudice an upper middle class white lady from the first half of the 20th century might have is…

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  • Dorothy Gertrude Quick and “Strange Orchids”

    Today’s warnings: Weird old timey racism (no slurs, just stupidity), wild classism, transphobia weirdly enough. I’ve decided to just tag all these at the beginning because, as I’ll touch on a bit more later, yeah, none of these so far have been without some shitty elements. The thirties: Tada! Sometimes I’m reading spec-fic of the…

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  • Judith Merril and “That Only a Mother”

    Warning: Today’s story uses the r-slur in what was at the time an approximately medical context, but not really, we all know what it means. As an aside, since I started this extremely sporadic series of reflections on early sci-fi by women, the direction chosen in part because I do try to stay in my…

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  • Dorothy Louise Les Tina and “When You Think That… Smile!”

    Warning: This story seethes with racism! It’s frankly fairly weird racism by modern standards, a burst of minstrel pseudo-dialect from a person described as “Sam, the milk-chocolate elevator boy” apropos of nothing, plus a heavy dose of orientalism at the end, but damn is it hot garbage. The first story in this series, for all…

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  • Clare Winger Harris and “The Evolutionary Monstrosity”

    I’ve found myself missing longform blogging from the weird old days of the internet. I hate my own recorded voice and don’t really bother to look like anything other than a tired gremlin on the regular, so despite the hours I spend cheerfully consuming weird informative junk on Youtube (I am too old to have…

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