Annie Bot

Annie Bot is literary science fiction within the subgenre of gender-focused dystopias. Science fiction typically refers to texts that depict an imagined future that may be characterized by technological advances, space or time travel, and major environmental or societal changes. Science fiction exists in both popular and literary forms, and literary science fiction is typically characterized by in-depth character studies, intellectual complexity, and engagement with big-picture thematic concerns related to social issues like gender, sexuality, race, class, and human-created phenomena like war and societal upheaval.

Science fiction that engages with issues related to gender has a well-established history. Many 20th- and 21st-century authors have explored the changing nature of gender roles during various time periods, the way that gender impacts relationships, beauty standards, the role that gender plays in sexuality, patriarchal (and matriarchal) societal organization, and many other related concepts. Science fiction has long been an important literary avenue to explore hypothetical questions related to gender in part because of its speculative nature: Sci-fi texts allow authors to create worlds that do not yet exist, and the theoretical nature of the writing allows for the exploration of alternative models for societies, alternative identities, and alternative ways of experiencing sexuality and gender.

This is not to say that all literary science fiction is attuned to issues of gender and sexuality in a complex and nuanced way. The genre has been criticized both for the extent to which it caters to a heteronormative male readership and for its reliance on stereotype and bias. Critics (as well as readers) have pointed to depictions of scantily clad, hyper-sexualized, and hyper-feminized women that reinforce normative, though largely unattainable, beauty standards. Robert Heinlein, notable for works like Stranger in a Strange Land and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, has been criticized for sexist depictions of female characters even as he has retained his position as one of the literary greats of the sci-fi canon.

Although the genre as a whole has been criticized for its gender politics, there are a multitude of texts that seriously engage with issues of gender and sexuality and resist sexist conventions, and Greer self-consciously places Annie Bot within this tradition. Margaret Atwood is a notable contemporary author whose work is meant to question normative gender roles and patriarchal societal organization. Her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is representative of her interest in issues of gender and sexuality. Its depiction of a darkly futuristic world in which a subset of the female population is exploited for their reproductive capabilities is a powerful critique of the inherent inequality between men and women in patriarchal societies. Although markedly different in tone from Annie Bot, the two texts share an interest in autonomy, gender-based oppression, and inequality.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) is another example of canonical, gender-focused science fiction. The characters who populate this novel possess the ability to switch their sex/gender identity from male to female each month, and through this narrative, Le Guin interrogates binary understandings of gender identity that separate masculinity from femininity and rigidly assign masculinity to men and femininity to women. More recently, author Naomi Alderman’s The Power imagines a world in which women develop the ability to generate electric shocks with their bodies, thereby tipping the balance of power in a hitherto patriarchal society. Greer is also interested in the way that power intersects with gender dynamics, and Annie is shown on multiple occasions to consider her own use (and abuse) of power in a relationship she initially thought was characterized by her disempowerment at the hands of her male partner.