Introduction to Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculure

Booth, Austin, and Mary Flanagan. "Introduction" to Reload: Rethinking Women + Cyberculture, Booth and Flanagan, editors. MIT Press, 2002: 1-24.

In 1998 the editors of this collection wanted to find an anthology of women's cyberpunk fiction for use in a cybertheory course and could not find one, despite the increasing number of women writing what can loosely be called cyberfiction — writing that explores the relationship between people and virtual technologies. We wished to show that our technoculture, imagine so creatively by writers such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and Neal Stephenson (and reimagined by popular Hollywood cinema), is actively being reshaped by women's voices. As teachers, we wanted to make available to students the feminist voices challenging the two existing visions of cyberspace: that of the almost exclusively male cyberpunk writers and technoculture aficionados (the Wired/Mondo generation) and that of cyberfeminist theorists.

This book fills two problematic gaps — that absence of a volume that introduces women's cyberfiction and the absence of a volume that considers gender and technology issues from fictional and theoretical viewpoints with and against each other. (p. 1).

This Introduction includes useful Notes and a substantial Works Cited.

RDE, finishing, 3Jul23, 25Jul23