Maybe women should design our sci-fi future

On whether we'd like technology better if women designed it.

I don’t like sci-fi. There, I’ve said it.

Their futures have always felt stark, with too many spaceships, dark dusty planets, and tortured plots spanning centuries and cryopods and generation ships. Whole lives are spent wearing uniform jumpsuits, eating microwave meals, and living between metal walls. They are masculine utopias, written by boys who love spaceships and science and physics.

I’ve never thought anything was wrong with that until I realized that all of the people building our current technologies are boys who love spaceships and science and physics. They think humanoid robots, computer chips in our brains, and space colonies make for an exciting future, and because they are the ones building it, they are making it that way. 

Much has been made of Elon Musk’s adoration of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series which is just such a masculine utopia. When Elon Musk took the stage at Tesla’s Cybertruck delivery launch, he said: “Finally the future will look like the future.” 

He’s right. But that future was designed by boys, and I couldn’t help but wonder: What might the future look like if it was designed by girls? Would women have designed the “car of the future” that way? Would we have made social media like that? Are moon colonies the future we would be going after? Are humanoid robots part of the world we would create?

I got a glimpse in the film The Pod Generation. There are all the sorts of things we might expect of a near future sci-fi: 3D printed breakfast, exowombs, a smart home that says, “your serotonin is low, would you like to schedule nature for today?” But it’s lush somehow, with rounded corners, a color palette inspired by Georgia O’Keefe, art hanging on the walls, piano music twinkling in the background, and plants literally everywhere. 

It’s a technological future envisioned by a woman and it was one of the few times I could see myself actually wanting to live in a sci-fi world. During a Q&A at the Sundance Film Festival, writer and director Sophie Barthes explained that she wanted a “feminine sci-fi future” we could “hold and touch and be part of.” She wanted to “seduce all of us into wanting this world.”

I was seduced. It was like she understood that we still want the world to be beautiful—with meaningful relationships and a deeper connection with nature. It’s not a perfect world, and much of the time we’re left to ponder whether it’s a utopia or a dystopia, but it's certainly a more liveable one—maybe even a better one than our current world. I’d at least prefer it to Asimov’s Foundation.

Curious, I looked up what women-led tech companies look like: Reshma Shetty co-founded Ginkgo Bioworks, a solarpunk bioengineering company that asks the question “what if you could grow anything?” Shara Ticku co-founded C16 Biosciences with the aim to reduce deforestation associated with palm oil extraction. Davida Herzl co-founded Aclima, a sensor network that maps pollutants and greenhouse gasses. Leslie Dewan is the CEO of RadiantNano where she is working on detecting and tracking radiation movement in the world. 

I’m cherry picking, but many of the women technologists that exist do seem focused on healthcare, environmental, peacekeeping, and communal initiatives more so than cars and spaceships. 

That’s true of feminine sci-fi too. 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland is a pastoral paradise where technological advancement serves to create a more sustainable and egalitarian world, with regenerative forests that grow their food and urban design that prioritizes aesthetic beauty. Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series similarly uses sci-fi to imagine, not generation ships, but “bash’houses,” where people self-organize into communities of likeminded people—like the humanists who live in Buenos Aires. Urban design is inspired by classical architecture and filled with art and green space. 

As I research the technological future in my own utopian novel, I find I’m much more interested in a pastoral world where the technology is so advanced it’s almost never actually seen. Where medicine grows on trees and information is transported through water. It’s not that I’m against technology, I very much think technology can make our lives better, but I don’t want a humanoid robot walking around my home, and I think we can come up with something prettier than the Cybertruck. 

Maybe if we had more feminine sci-fi dreaming up our futures, and more women tech founders building it, the future we create would be less focused on shiny metal things that are cool, and more focused on green, growing, communal things we can create. 

I think we need more of that. 

It’s not that we need less boy utopias, but we need a hell of a lot more girl ones. The feminine futures we may be able to imagine and build barely exist yet. And none have quite captured the zeitgeist like the space operas have. The result is that we might be building Minority Report just because it’s cool, without considering that maybe we’d rather have The Pod Generation because it is beautiful. 

Barthes said these technologies are already coming to us, because we are inventive, but that’s why she wanted to ask, “Is this the future we want? If we don’t ask these questions now, it’s going to be too late.”

Filling that vacuum with more beautiful visions for our technological future will be the great challenge of our time, and getting more women sci-fi writers to dream up the future and more women technologists to build it, I think, is one of the best things we can do to create a more beautiful world.

Thanks for reading!

Elle Griffin