Twenty first century heroines

I love writing speculative fiction because it allows me to visualise worlds and cultures very different from my own broken society. The clue's in the name : speculative fiction.  SF should speculate about the future, or an alternative past, dream of something better than today.

Which is why it irritates me to hell when women throw away the wonderful gifts and freedom that working in the genre offers to reproduce the present-day's sexy and romantic cultural brainwashing. I don't find the domestic sphere in the least bit interesting, and I spend as little time there as I can.  I don't want to read about continuations of today's controlling nuclear family structure in SF.  I don't want to read stories which assume all women are maternal.  I want to read stories that show women accepting their diversity, being proud of their choices to live independently, and unburdened by the sort of emotional rubbish most women take on today.

I've recently sent off a story to a competition told from the viewpoint of a female security commander responsible for protecting a bank of artificial wombs.  I've extrapolated today's falling human fertility to the point where IVF reproduction and growth in artificial wombs has become the norm.  But the beauty of writing speculative fiction is that I can imagine what wider changes this would have on women.

I decided they would be far-reaching.  Children produced in artificial wombs would be more closely monitored for abnormalities. Eventually the society would require foetuses to be scanned, and defective ones terminated well before birth.  But this change would also trigger major cultural shifts too.   I think most women would see recreational sex as useless.  Perhaps the cultural emphasis will shift, and the "sex is good" mantra will die out.

Which brings me back to my story,.  Such a change would inevitably cause a backlash, and here it's neo-mysogynistic men who campaign for a "right" to sex.  They attack the wombs my heroine has to defend.  She has had her ovaries removed and her vagina filled in.  She is one if the first women who can't be physically raped, or get pregnant by mistake.

This is the kind of twenty first century heroine I want to write, and read, about. One who is independent and makes her own decisions, a woman who doesn't alter her appearance or behaviour, or what she does, to please others.  She is a true twenty-first century heroine.