the lost feminist sci-fi zines of the 1970s

xeroxed visions of matriarchal futures, cyborg sex, and revenge fantasies buried in university archives

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Ursula K. Le Guin

In a world before the internet, the pathways for sharing radical ideas were as precarious as they were precious. In the turbulent, politically electric landscape of the 1970s, marginalised voices carved out spaces for themselves using the most accessible tool available: the Xerox printer.

Amid the counterculture zine explosion, across punk, queer rights, and political activism, a quieter but no less revolutionary form took root: feminist science fiction zines. These were not slick, commercial magazines; they were xeroxed dreams, stapled manifestos, and hand-drawn blueprints for alternative futures. Produced in basements, kitchens, and college dorm rooms, they were slipped into envelopes, traded at conventions, and passed hand-to-hand like forbidden knowledge. Today, many of these powerful, ephemeral creations lie quietly in university archives, waiting to be rediscovered.

Science Fiction Meets Second-Wave Feminism

The 1970s marked a watershed moment for feminist science fiction. As second-wave feminism surged, challenging patriarchal structures across politics, culture, and everyday life, women turned their critical gaze toward the genres they loved. Science fiction, long dominated by male authors and male-centric visions, offered a rich and often frustrating playground for reimagination.

Where mainstream publishing faltered, women seized the means of production for themselves. With the rise of relatively affordable photocopying technology, creating a publication was no longer the sole domain of corporations and gatekeepers. Anyone with a typewriter, a marker, and a small amount of money for copy costs could do it.

Zines offered a DIY ethos perfectly suited to feminist sci-fi fans: community-driven, deeply political, and radically imaginative. They were places to dream aloud, to critique existing works, to invent new mythologies, and to forge a network of resistance and solidarity.

While few complete collections of feminist sci-fi zines from the '70s have been systematically catalogued, glimpses into their contents reveal bold, unruly territories of thought:

Matriarchal Futures and Feminist Utopias

Echoing the utopian novels of the time, like Joanna Russ’s The Female Man or Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, these zines often envisioned societies where women ruled or where gender had been entirely reimagined.

Some imagined separatist colonies, peaceful, fertile worlds where patriarchy had long been overthrown. Others were more sceptical, exploring the complicated dynamics of power even in matriarchal or genderless societies. Not all was idealised: in these worlds, power itself was often treated as a double-edged sword.

Zines like Janus (later renamed Aurora) provide a direct window into these ambitions. Published in Seattle from 1975 to 1980, Janus offered reviews, fiction, and essays explicitly aiming to integrate feminist consciousness into science fiction.

Cyborg Sex and the Rewriting of Bodies

Long before Donna Haraway published her seminal A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), feminist sci-fi zines of the '70s were probing the boundaries of body, gender, and technology.

Though the explicit term "cyborg sex" hadn't yet entered common usage, you can feel its presence in the speculative fiction and artwork that blurred the lines between human, machine, and environment. These stories challenged essentialist ideas of womanhood: What happens when bodies are merged with metal, when reproduction is decoupled from biology, when desire itself is reprogrammed?

The freedom to imagine post-human, post-gender realities was intoxicating—and it pointed the way toward later cyberfeminist movements that would flourish with the rise of digital technology.

Revenge Fantasies and Radical Justice

For many women in the 1970s, anger was not only a legitimate emotion; it was a survival tool. Feminist zines became spaces to articulate rage at patriarchal oppression and imagine revenge fantasies where women seized back their autonomy, power, and safety.

These weren’t just escapist tales; they were acts of psychological and political reclamation. They flipped the script on classic "damsel in distress" tropes and often inverted violence back onto patriarchal systems. In a world where sexual violence and systemic inequality were daily realities, writing stories of resistance, rebellion, and survival was itself an act of radical defiance.

In a feminist sci-fi zine, a battered woman might return as a battle-hardened cyborg; a group of mothers might overthrow a corporate oligarchy with guerrilla tactics; a matriarchal collective might sentence an imperialist warlord to an existence as a disembodied consciousness trapped inside a failing AI.

Beyond Fiction: Fandom as Critical Community

These zines weren’t just about original stories. They fostered critical discourse too; sharp, often blistering analyses of existing science fiction from a feminist perspective.

Publications like The Witch and the Chameleon (first published in 1974) offered essays that critiqued the slow pace of change among male science fiction authors, dissected sexist tropes, and highlighted the work of women and queer writers previously marginalised by the genre.

Fans exchanged recommendations, organised meet-ups, reviewed books and films through a feminist lens, and offered solidarity to one another. These zines were support networks as much as they were publications, keeping the spark alive in readers who might otherwise have felt isolated in their passion.

Lost, But Not Gone

Because zines were often produced on cheap paper, with tiny circulation numbers, few survive today in pristine form. Yet some treasures have been preserved, tucked away in university archives and special collections:

• The University of Liverpool has an extensive science fiction archive (which I have been lucky to undertake work experience in!).

• Barnard College Library holds a wealth of feminist zines, including sci-fi titles.

• The University of Iowa Special Collections boasts one of the most extensive zine collections in the country.

• The Sallie Bingham Centre for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University offers a trove of rare feminist periodicals and self-published works.

Within these ageing boxes of brittle pages and smudged ink, researchers have unearthed hand-drawn illustrations of cyborg women wielding swords against patriarchal tyrants, typewritten manifestos declaring the end of compulsory heterosexuality, and personal essays grappling with the loneliness of being a feminist sci-fi fan in a hostile culture.

These “lost” zines are more than historical curiosities. They are blueprints of radical imagination, records of struggle, resilience, and creative fury. They remind us that the future is not just something we inherit; it’s something we invent.

Why It Matters Now

In an era when corporate media often flattens or sanitises feminist narratives, the rawness of these early zines feels even more vital. They show us what unfettered feminist imagination looked like before it was co-opted or commodified.

And they invite us to ask:

• What futures are we imagining today?

• What radical possibilities are we still brave enough to dream into existence?

The matriarchal societies, the cybernetic lovers, the fierce and unapologetic avengers of the 1970s zines haven't disappeared.

They're still here, whispering to us from fading Xerox pages, challenging us to continue building futures that defy the limits imposed on us.

Maybe it's time we started listening again.