Can women fly?: Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake and Sally Gearhart's The Wanderground

In this article Vonda McIntyre and Sally Gearhart have been chosen to represent two different trends in recent speculative fiction written by women: the books written by feminist writers to whom writing comes first, and those by feminists who write because they have a message they want to express. According to traditional literary and critical norms, the former group of writers write fiction, the latter propaganda. The question posed by the article is this: what is one to do if the conclusions reached through literary analysis are very different from the emotional quality of one's reading experience?