A blog called The Rejectionist is having a Feminist SF Week. They already have interview up with Liz Hand and Nnedi Okorafor, but my favorite piece to date is the introduction which contains stirring stuff like this:
Speculative fiction offers us human beings something different: not “common sense” but a sense we have in common that the world is larger and more filled with possibility than we might be able to imagine, a sense that enlarging the opportunities of other people’s lives does not have to mean making our own lives smaller. In fact, quite the opposite. If we’re writing the stories, there’s room on that spaceship for all of us.
Well, unless it is Tom Godwin’s spaceship, of course, but on balance I think speculative fiction does do rather well in this respect.
There’s a story that riffs off of Godwin’s, where the pilot is a woman and the stowaway is a child. The woman solves the problem so that both survive. And no, there’s no cat pulled out of the bag at the last minute, the constraints are just as rigorous as in The Cold Equations. Can’t remember the title or author though. 🙁