What’s With Sci-Fi’s Fixation on Single-Gendered Planets?
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Because few things have had as strong an influence in our culture as gender, it's central to both our biology and culture; it's an extremely big avenue for narrative exploration messing with that. In other words, I'm surprised there isn't more of a fixation with "single-gender" sci fi considering how important gender is.
I'd pitch two more examples:
In Dune by Frank Herbert the whole Tleilaxu population is male and nobody knows what happened to their women (this is explained later in the book). It seems odd to me that this was not mentioned in the article as I assume that Dune is more known that any of the books the author mentioned. Tleilaxu in the book have a sort of religious hatred for women.
In the The Risen Empire by Scott Westerfeld the initial antagonist is a race human women who have "since disposed of the useless gender" and merged with machines. This is stated as a matter of fact and is not a theme explored by the book.
One of the scarier books I've read. For most science fiction, there's a clear reason why the events can't really happen, or at the very least, that some sort of massive breakthrough would be required (FTL, fusion, etc.) for the story to happen, or it's just so absurd or disconnected from my real day-to-day experience that it's not a real concern. I've got no such defense for this story, so even though I've read stories about things that are arguably more horrifying in the sense that there are more deaths or the deaths are more horrible or such, this book penetrated my psychological defenses like few others ever have. There's very little stopping it from happening now, and ever less every year. Usually the modern focus of the discussion is race-specific plagues, but (genetic) gender would probably not be that hard to nail either. Even if such a plague wasn't quite 100% accurate, it wouldn't matter much.
(Tiptree's "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" was already mentioned in the linked-to article.)
To add to the list of single-gender planets: "The Crime and the Glory of Commander Suzdal", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crime_and_the_Glory_of_Com... :
> The original settlers nearly became extinct, succumbing to a plague that (in Smith's words) rendered "femininity carcinogenic." They were only able to save their women by chemically (and later genetically) making them male. However, the resulting society is deeply unbalanced by the lack of females and ordinary family structure. The Arachosians, not truly male or female and calling themselves "klopts", realize on an instinctive level what they are missing and as a result, hate normal human beings with unbridled fervor and regard them as abominations to be destroyed (even though they have not seen one in many generations).
However, that story was not set on the planet.
There's also a Lensman book by E.E. Smith with a female-dominate society, as well as the Raumpatrouille episode "Battle for the Sun". Both had scenes on that planet, but were not primarily set there.
This probably makes more sense given how often sci-fi is about social commentary, and gender equality is more accepted these days, while gender identity is a bigger issue. In the case of Steven Universe the creator Rebecca Sugar recently gave an interview to NPR (https://the1a.org/audio/#/shows/2018-07-09/the-mind-behind-a...) where she revealed she identifies as non-binary and having gems be genderless but female-coded in the show is a good expression for that.
The only example of this trope I can think of is the Anime series "Vandread" where somehow humanity ended up being split into a male planet and a female planet, so long removed they no longer recognise each other as the same species. It's basically just an excuse for the male protagonist to come across a ship of women, etc...
The original article has Sci-Fi.
One of the intentions is to distinguish it from futuristic fiction which is more about the rip-roaring adventure than the science. For example, Star Wars would be labelled sci-fi, 2001 would be labelled SF.
If you're thinking it sounds like there's an element of snobbishness in there, you are definitely right. It's much the same as with those authors who prefer to say that they write speculative fiction rather than science fiction (SF as an abbreviation also has the advantage that it works for both of those).
> It must have something to do with the perceived audience for SF being young men (presumably unacquainted with women or why would they have time to read SF?). Olden time authors also tended to have firm notions as to what kind of story might be genre-appropriate: if SF is about scientists inventing things, or can-do he-men having adventures, well, that’s not what women do.
10% of the comments to the article use "SF" or "SFF" (for Science Fiction & Fantasy)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction attests that "SF" use dates from at least the 1970s, eg. "The earliest organized fandom online was the SF Lovers community, originally a mailing list in the late 1970s with a text archive file that was updated regularly."\
Thus, "SF" is neither a new use nor an unusual use.