Summary
In 1915 women could neither vote, divorce nor work after marriage, yet in that same year the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman envisaged a revolutionary world populated entirely by women who were intelligent, resourceful and brave. Her great science fiction novel Herland tells the story of three men who crash land on an island where the men have died out; women reproduce by parthenogenesis.
Until Gilman's book was published, most visions of utopia, though turning the world on its head, struggled to envisage a place where gender had changed. Fantastical machines could be imagined alongside marvellous advances in medicine and technology, but the idea of woman functioning fully in the new utopias was too much for many to imagine.
In this programme the award winning science fiction writer Geoff Ryman uses Herland as a starting point to ask why it's been so had to imagine a world where gender dissolves. In the course of the programme he will write his own short story, avoiding the pitfalls that have skewered many before him. The story No Point Talking is included in the podcast.
Presenter: Geoff Ryman Producer: Nicola Swords Contributors: Stephanie Saulter, author of the Evolution Trilogy; Laurie Penny, writer and journalist; Dr Sari Edelstein, The President of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society; Sarah Le Fanu, former Senior Editor at The Women's Press; Dr Caitríona Ní Dhúill, author of Sex and Imagined Spaces; Sarah Hall, author of The Carhullan Army and The Wolf Border Original music composed by Scanner.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, welcome to Seriously, with Me Testament. |
| 0:07.0 | Now as a teenager, I grew up loving the dystopian novel 1984, and even though George Orwell said that he was writing |
| 0:15.2 | about 1948, many of the novel's predictions about language, surveillance, |
| 0:20.8 | technology, even politics have seemingly come to pass. Now imagine a very different |
| 0:26.5 | and perhaps more ambitious task of writing a utopian novel which redefines gender relations. Now that would be pretty special. It just novel, her groundbreaking novel Herland, a utopian story of three men who crash on an |
| 0:44.4 | island where women rule. In this program we join award-winning science fiction |
| 0:48.9 | author Jeff Riemann as he takes us on a journey where Herland is his starting point. |
| 0:53.6 | He'll look at the challenges and pitfalls of creating a utopia where relationships between |
| 0:57.9 | men and women have changed and asks, how far have things come since Gilman wrote Herland? |
| 1:03.0 | And as part of this documentary, |
| 1:05.0 | Jeff has written a special sci-fi story in which he imagines a future world |
| 1:10.0 | where California has been split in two, |
| 1:12.0 | each half with very different political outlooks. |
| 1:15.5 | You can hear that at the end of the program, |
| 1:17.1 | but for now, let's get started |
| 1:18.9 | and catch up with Jeff Riemann as we adventure to Herland is a story about a society of women, but its hero is a man. |
| 1:37.0 | Van Dyck Jennings' crashlands in the forests of Herland, along with two of his friends, and he tells us the story of what they find there. |
| 1:50.0 | Everything was beauty, order, perfect cleanness, and the pleasantest sense of home over at all. |
| 1:57.0 | As we neared the center of the town, the houses stood thicker, ran together as it were, grew into |
| 2:02.3 | rambling palaces grouped among parks and open squares, |
| 2:05.8 | something as college buildings stand in their quiet greens. |
| 2:10.1 | And then, turning a corner, we came into a broad paved space and saw before us a band of women, |
... |
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