Unfortunately one aspect of the novel that has dated badly is its stereotypical view of gender roles. Science fiction professor Lisa Yaszek was initially intrigued by the book's female lead Wyoming Knot, and was disappointed that the character plays such a minor role in the story. "I do not want to be a woman in that revolution, sitting around serving the coffee," Yaszek says. "It really makes you understand what women were up in arms about in the 1960s." Listen to the complete interview with Anthony Ha, Robby Soave, and Lisa Yaszek in Episode 516 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is one of the most popular sci-fi books of all time, and together with William Gibson's Neuromancer it stands as a foundational text of the cyberpunk movement. Science fiction author Anthony Ha was blown away by Snow Crash when he first read it back in the late '90s. "This was a period when there were some clunky representations of virtual reality in movies and TV," Ha says in Episode 487 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "So it wasn't that Snow Crash was the first time I encountered that kind of iconography, but it was the first time it actually seemed cool." Snow Crash tells the story of Hiro Protagonist, a katana-wielding hacker who jumps back and forth between dystopian Los Angeles and a virtual world called the Metaverse.

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness is about a planet where the genetically-engineered inhabitants randomly become male or female for a few days each month. Science fiction professor Lisa Yaszek says that the book is one of the genre's most important explorations of gender. "This stuff was all in the air, so I think that Le Guin is definitely thinking about it at the right time," Yaszek says in Episode 464 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "No one had really put it together into a sustained novel--well, I think some people had, but they hadn't been published yet. She was definitely the first to the punch. So this is the first person to pick up some things that were beginning to happen in some of the edgier, more avant-garde science fiction."

Ursula K. Le Guin's 1974 novel The Dispossessed depicts a society with no laws or government, an experiment in "nonviolent anarchism." Science fiction author Matthew Kressel was impressed by the book's thoughtful exploration of politics and economics. "After reading The Dispossessed, I was just blown away," Kressel says in Episode 460 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "It was just such an intellectual book. It's so philosophical, and it was so different from a lot of the science fiction I had read before that. It made me want to read more of Le Guin's work."

In the recent movie Coma, everyone who falls into a coma finds themselves inhabiting the same surreal landscape. Science fiction author Anthony Ha enjoyed the film's premise, and is surprised there aren't more science fiction movies about dreaming. "There isn't quite as much as I would have expected," Ha says in Episode 441 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "There's so much dream fantasy fiction--and certainly there are a number of science fiction examples too--but it seems a lot less common." The best-known science fiction dream movies, such as Inception and The Cell, are at least a decade old, and the best-known novels on the subject were published in the 1960s and '70s.

Hollywood movies usually depict the suburbs as a place of conformity and dark secrets. Horror author Grady Hendrix says this is particularly true of 1980s films like Poltergeist and A Nightmare on Elm Street, which critique the idea of the suburbs as being clean and new. "I think Poltergeist and Nightmare on Elm Street are both movies that say, 'No, history doesn't begin where you say it begins. There are crimes in the past that have been buried,'" Hendrix says in Episode 428 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Science fiction professor Lisa Yaszek says that suburban life has always been a particular source of anxiety for women. "I know from my own research that in the 1950s, women who were writing science fiction, absolutely one of their favorite topics was the horror of suburban life for women," she says.

Conventional wisdom holds that science fiction was written almost exclusively by men until the advent of feminism in the 1960s and '70s. But when Lisa Yaszek, who teaches science fiction studies at Georgia Tech, went digging through old magazines, she discovered a very different story. "I was so surprised to see how many women there were in science fiction before women really came into the genre in the 1970s with feminist science fiction," Yaszek says in Episode 346 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "I kept uncovering these anthologies with all of these women who were clearly well-known and celebrated in their day, and who I had never heard of." In fact, women writers were relatively common throughout the pulp era, and the proportion of women readers was even higher.