Monster of the Day #2025

Updated on November 7, 2019 By Ken Begg 23 Comments

Thank, o great Captain Marvel, for finally delivering unto us a female sci-fi character with agency and power and general kick-assed-ness.

Pin It



Related Posts

  • Beckoning Chasm

    Keeping the garden looking nice is never fun, even in space.

  • Gamera977

    Well according to the Puppy-Kickers there were no SF/Fantasy writers before 1980…

    Except: Leigh Brackett as above,
    C.L. Moore
    Andre Norton
    Kate Wilhelm
    Tanith Lee
    Anne McCaffrey

    Yeah some are initials and androgynous names but still gee friggin’ whiz if you’re going to lie make up better ones.

  • Gamera977

    And the same week Capt Marvel came out I watched ‘Magnificent Warriors’, aka ‘Dynamite Fighters’, or ‘ Zhong Hua Zhan Shi’ as the original title. A painfully young Michelle Yeoh plays a aviatrix/adventuress in a 1987 ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ rip-off supplying guns to the Chinese to fight the Japanese invasion during the Second World War. By the end I think Yeoh had kung-fued the snot out of half the Japanese Army. And this was years AFTER Sarah Conner and Ellen Ripley- but there weren’t ANY female action heroines BEFORE Capt. Marvel…..

  • bgbear_punchingforthechildren

    So I married an axe murderer.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    Doris Piserchia, Ursula LeGuin, and someone named…Shelley? Mary, I think? She’s pretty obscure, though.

  • Gamera977

    Those are just the ones off the top of my head. Thanks for adding to the list!

    I think I’ve said I’ve been reading though a bunch of ‘Weird Tales’ on the internet. I’m in the 1928’s now and about 20-30% of the writers by name are women.

  • kgb_san_diego

    I love this straw man y’all construct so nicely. I have never heard anyone claim Captain Marvel was the first woman hero, or that no women wrote SciFi Fantasy before 1980, or anything like that. Who exactly are these “puppy kickers” you are talking about?

  • Ken_Begg

    Everybody mentions Ripley, which is certainly valid, but hell as a wee tot I was watching Emma Peel…

  • Eric Hinkle

    I seem to recall that very pretentious lady Ursula Le Guin saying, when she was close to the end of her life, that only now were we getting ‘authentic’ female authors. All the ones including and before her didn’t count.

    My sole thought on that was ‘what an ass this woman is’.

    And I’d rather take Norton, Brackett, and/or Moore over almost any female or male author writing today.

  • Eric Hinkle

    I really do love the covers they did for the old Planet Stories magazine. Heck, the covers for these magazines in general just feel so much more dramatic ad impressive than most modern SF cover art

  • Gamera977

    SF/Fantasy writer Larry Correia put together a group called the ‘Sad Puppies’. Those who opposed them ended up being dubbed the ‘Puppy Kickers’. And at that point I’m going to apologize to you and anyone else offended and shut up.

  • kgb_san_diego

    Wasn’t offended. Had literally never heard that term before. Thanks for the info! :-)

  • The only real effect the “Puppies” had was ruining the Hugo Awards around 2015….

  • That sh*t from LeGuin (all the Puppy Kickers too) really hacked me off. I am so tired of women unpersoning any women who were successful before them so they can be “pioneers”. See also Hillary and her recent assertions that she left the late great Margaret Thatcher out of her book about gutsy women, because she didn’t work specifically to help advance other women during her career. So I take that to mean feminism really is just about promoting women at the expense of men and that everything they claim about it just being about equality is bullshirt?

    As many times as I’ve been told that my opinions don’t count because I’m “not a real woman” (usually because I’ve been independently successful in two male-dominated professions without facing significant issues with either harassment or discrimination, but sometimes because I like being a wife and mom and raising my children. ALWAYS because I won’t kowtow unquestioningly to the soi-disant feminist narrative) I no longer accept any of their statements about female accomplishments on face level, since what they really mean is “no woman I personally approve of and who unquestioningly accepts (this week’s) narrative” has done this cool thing.

    It’s like the whole “Notorious RBG” thing, they want to erase Sandra Day O’Connor from history because she was (relatively) conservative, even though she came up through the system at an even more difficult time (and place) for women in law and did it all while also successfully raising a family (that, I suspect, is the part they *really* hate).

    Um, no, I’m *not* a feminist, how’d you guess? I am, however, an egalitarian and as such am tired of this constant promoting of “approved” groups over whoever we have declared guilty of pre-emptive badthink this week. That never ends well.

    *rant ends*

    Sorry, I’m late to the party, btw, I was literally lost at sea. OK, not lost so much as stuck, but whatever.

  • The Hugos had done a marvelous job of destroying themselves at least a decade before that, the puppies just forced it out into the open.

  • Ken_Begg

    You’re still going to have to go a way’s to beat Kirk and Patty’s story.

  • Ken_Begg

    Yeah, people calling out someone’s BS aren’t the ones who ruin things.

  • Oh, this was nowhere near that, literally one extra day of free food and entertainment and a little bit of choppy water, but someone still managed to call WBAL from the ship and tell them how horribly we were all “suffering” .

  • From the Brits, on the fantasy side you get E. Nesbit and Susan Cooper. The vile and heinous child abuser Marion Zimmer Bradley was female and popular too, as much as we’d like to disown her from the human species.

    I’d also posit that quite a bit of the lesser pulp SF stuff, the kind that served as page filler each month, then sank quietly into the abyss, never to be seen again (like 90% of everything ever written), was likely written by women either psuedonymously or under one of the may standard “house names” of the period, but never became well-enough known for the author’s identity (and therefor sex) to be cared about by the public. Rather the way many of the True Confession and Romance stories that were also a big part of the pulps, were written by men under female pen names. It was simply the practice of the day at a time when the main goal was to churn out enough pages per month to fill a magazine, then sell it with a couple of big names on the cover and a few “familiar” ones that were really the product of a different author every time they appeared. To produce pulp magazines month after month after required a lot of authors whose main qualification were the ability to turn out coherent copy, quickly, by rough editorial order.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    A.E. Van Vogt wrote a lot of “True Confessions” type stories early in his career. So, yeah, I don’t think the pulps were as sexist as some would like to make them seem.

  • Gamera977

    Heinlein wrote a hilarious piece on how he wrote ‘True Confessions’ stories way back when to pay the rent. Wish I could remember the name of it.

  • He also wrote the wonderful Puddin’ stories for one of the Girls Own type magazines, back in the day. Basically because the female editor of his juveniles (with whom he always had a fraught relationship) said he couldn’t possibly write convincingly for girls. “Cliff and the Calories” is a personal favorite of mine. He stated that Maureen later became the model for Podkayne, but I refuse to accept that as headcanon because I thoroughly loathe Poddy.

  • Gamera977

    Those are the ones I was thinking about!