Female Writers and SF - Why should I care?

In recent months, the ambient noise of discontent provoked by the under-representation of women in SF magazines and award listings has risen from a low murmur so a sound not unlike someone clearing their throat in a room full of geese.  These kinds of discussions have sprung up all over the place and generally involve female SF fans venting their anger while male SF fans look at the stats and tut.  Indeed, you'll note that while I've spoken out about racial and sexual inclusiveness in the past, I've never really ventured forth into the world of SF's sexual politics.

Well... I've decided to put an end to this and my tutting.

Why should I, as a white middle class male, care about the representation of women within the hobby?

I should care because SF is a literature primarily of ideas and the ideas that people have are largely determined by where they stand and where they come from.  Simply put, the fewer backgrounds we have reflected in the SF we read, the more we are limiting our access to fresh ideas.  As it is, the experiences of white middle class straight men are pretty much covered from an SF point of view.  If you want to read SF that will inform either directly or indirectly about what it's like to be a middle class white guy at the beginning of the 21st Century then SF has your back.

However, if you want to read a story informed by the experience of what it's like to be a woman living in the 21st Century then you're a lot less well served.  In fact, if you want to know what it's like to be a black transgendered female living in the 21st Century through the medium of SF you can pretty much fuck right off.

So far, so bland.  Pretty much everyone born later than the mid 70's will agree with everything that I've written above.  The problem is that at the moment, it's doing a fat lot of good because while pretty much all male SF fans are capable of seeing the problem, I don't think that many of them are willing to do anything about it.  This is because, at the end of the day, most SF fans are selfish.  If women wrote books that interested them then they'd buy them... until then, it's not their problem.  In fact, any fan that did actively seek out female SF (something not necessarily all that easy given the tendency for female writers to hide behind initials) would most likely run into feminist SF and if your average fan doesn't read feminist literature as a whole, why should they want to engage with feminist writings in the milieu of SF?

I admit that, up until recently, I've been a "part of the problem".  I read quite a bit of feminist thought at uni and I now tend to consider it "done".  I've read that stuff, I know the arguments, move on.  As a result, I've hardly reviewed any female writers on this blog or on other sites.  I have contributed to the problem of the invisibility of female writers by virtue of not caring enough to make a special effort and then simply not covering anyone as a part of my general reading.  In fact, in the last 6 months, I've given up on three different works by female writers (two Justina Robsons and a Mary Gentle).  Works that I was reading in order to review.

Well, now I have realised the error of my ways and I've decided to remedy them by actively seeking out female writers to review and write about.  I don't do this because I am necessarily desperate to engage with female thought.  I do it because I like the idea of an SF scene that covers as many different viewpoints and sets of experiences as possible.  I think that paying attention to the sex, sexuality and race of the people we SF bloggers write about is a good way of investing in the diversity of the genre and I think that diversity is something worth pursuing in a literary genre that can seem very colloquial at times.

The irony, of course, is that there are more women than men on this planet so wanting to engage with them because one values diversity is utterly perverse.  In a way, it reminds me of when MTV started up and they refused to put up videos featuring black artists on the grounds that they were "niche".  So a better way to think of it is not that we're making an effort to keep SF diverse, in truth we're making an effort to stop SF from becoming completely uniform.

Comments

[Conrad]

There are many interesting women sf authors so I do not understand that much what the fuss is. I leave fantasy aside where women rule today by and large (as someone pointed out Laurel Hamilton is the top seller genre author of today beating R. Jordan who still outsells the rest by 3 to 1 - if you leave aside children's books of course where we all know who is queen...)

Lois Bujold has all the awards you care for sf mostly, though some for fantasy, as many as Heinlein I think

Then Mary Gentle, Justina Robson (her earlier work is better than the new series), Mary Rosenbaum, Kristine Smith, Chris Moriarty, Sarah Zettel (2 good sf books), Kate Eliott (again the sf not the fantasy), Maureen Hugh, even the queen of feminist sf Sheri Tepper has several very good books, Eleanor Arnason, Julie Czerneda (some books), Catherine Asaro (some books - though again she is very, very popular), Kage Baker, Elizabeth Bear and I can go on...

I think that all these posts show the ignorance about sf of the posters.

[b harper]

C.J. Cherryh

[Ian Sales]

There's also Gwyneth Jones (who also writes as Ann Halam). Oh, and you might want to try the Marq'ssan Cycle by L Timmel Duchamp - see http://aqueductpress.com/current-pubs.html#alanya

[Jonathan McCalmont]

One of the things that is quite interesting about all of this is that if you look into the matter of female SF writers (as I did yesterday) then you discover that the bulk of female SFF writers are fantasy writers. Even the women that DO write SF also write fantasy and are frequently better known for their fantasy.

There's talk of women preferring the "softer" sciences such as biology and sociology to physics and astronomy et al. but even then, there really aren't that many women making their way in the world as SF writers.

I actually think that the situation is getting worse in this respect. If you look at lists of female SF writers you find that most of them are either dead, retired or simply no longer writing.

[Conrad]

Regarding fantasy, it just outsells sf by a lot (4 to 1 was the last number I heard), so it's no wonder that most new writers men and women go there. It's ironic for me who used to read mostly sf, that these days I read a lot of fantasy, just because amid the chaff there is a lot of action there. I do not remember a sf debut in the past 3-4 years to excite me as some fantasy debuts did, or as debuts like Neal Asher, Richard Morgan and others did.

[Sarah]

And then there are fantastic SF authors from back in the day that went beyond mere initials. Alice Sheldon was James Tiptree Jr. her entire career. Fantastic writing and I'd recomend the anthology named after her. Some interesting speculative SF going on in there.

I didn't realize the power of perspectives until I read some of her work and said to myself, "Wow! It's finally here!" Or Octavia Butler. Etc etc etc. Work that pushes you places with familiar hands.

[Mac]

Joan Slonczewski writes pretty hard SF ("hard" in that the actual science is the major plot point, not just the backdrop). Might fall under the feminist umbrella, and thus I don't know your level of interest, but she manages to make microbiological particles into well-rounded major characters -- I approve.

[S.M. Stirling]

First, how are women "under-represented" in SF/F?

There are certainly more of them around than there used to be, both as readers and as writers, and the trend has been steady throughout the past four decades.

It's noticeable even since I got into the field in the 1980's, and things were changing even then.

Second, in the immortal words of the late, great Poul Anderson, SF writers are "competing for the readers' beer money".

That is, the primary reason people read fiction is for pleasure.(*)

If it doesn't give them pleasure, they won't read it, and it's silly to expect them to do so.

It's fiction, not a dose of cultural/ideological cod-liver oil administered by some stern nanny 'for your own good'.

Nobody is under any obligation to buy your work.

It's up to the authors to please the audience enough that the audience will fork over. If you don't, it's entirely your fault, not that of the audience. We're entertainers, lineal descendants of the guy telling stories on the corner with a bowl for donations at his feet.

There are legitimate grounds for complaint about how the selection/editorial process is managed these days, but consumer sovereignty isn't one of them. In fact, it's the main restraining influence on the things that _are_ wrong with the system.

Third, the theory that only Group X can write the experience of Group X is ludicrous, and its logical end product is books written by, about and for oneself. Narcissism, in other words.

It's particularly ludicrous in SF, where the characters often aren't even _human_, or come from radically different cultural contexts.

Early in my career, I was routinely assumed (by people of both sexes) to be female because I write under my initials and often use female protagonists. 'tain't so.

One of the main points of writing is to get into the heads of characters who _aren't_ like yourself; that's true of reading, too, of course.

And let's put the 'misunderstood genius starving in a garret' to rest once and for all, shall we? 'twas a myth popularized by the Romantics to flatter their own arrogant conceit, and to conceal (often from themselves) that they were in transition from being recipients of aristocratic patronage to being marketplace hucksters.

Before them, authors (and composers, and so forth) were popularly classed with cabinetmakers and confectioners, rather than as quasi-deities uncoverning gnomic truths for the unworthy masses. I think that was a far healthier and more accurate attitude.

(*) except for critics, academics and university students who get assigned books as coursework, of course. Poor bastards.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

I actually agree with most of what you say.

I don't think that only women can write women anymore than I think that only men can write men. So I don't think that there's an argument from authenticity for the inclusion of more women writers.

However, I do think that there's something to be said for stories written from different perspectives. By this I don't mean stories that are about "feminist themes" because to my ears the idea that women can't write or aren't interested in science and ideas and prefer to write about relationships is just about as sexist as saying that a woman's place is in the home.

I think that diversity of perspective is something worth pursuing in one's reading and given the domination of the genre by straight white middle class guys, going out of one's way to find different perspectives (whatever those perspectives might be) is something worth doing for its own sake.

As for whether or not women are under-represented, I suspect that's largely a question of whast one feels the correct levels of representation are. Evidently there are less female novelists than there should be given how many female short story writers there are and there are less female short story writers than there should be given how many female genre fans there are.

I want, for my own purely selfish reasons, as diverse a choice of books to choose from as possible and what prompted me to write this piece was that while I want diversity and enjoy diversity, I don't always reflect that in the coverage I give to books on this site.

[Farah Mendlesohn]

Mac asks how women are under represented: I don't have the links to the various people who did the maths, but the magazines are publishing about 30% by women.

Does this matter?

Well, their readership is declining, and the latest reader survey (Baxter & Mendlesohn, will be published in 2008) found that 50% of the 900 respondents were female (and the survey was only interested in sf, not fantasy).