Judith Tarr comments over at the SF Signal post about the importance of the Russ Pledge:
I am actually new to SF Signal because when I gafiated, I gafiated like holy whoa. Blew completely out of the genre and went mainstream.
It’s not any better there. And my real heart is in the genre.But when I came back…well, it’s over on my guest blog. The world I found myself writing in narrowed down something fierce at the turn of the millennium. There just weren’t any choices, apart from a specfic few. And I was so disconcerted, and taken aback, and beaten down as it went on, that I got to the point where if I was going to post somewhere, I’d start, then delete it. “Why bother? Nobody cares what I have to say.”
(You’ll have to scroll down quite a lot; SF Signal doesn’t do comment links.) She expanded on the same sentiments in later guest post, detailing her own personal history with “girl cooties”:
2001:
“You want to sell some more fantasy? Great! But can you do female protagonists? And put more romance in? Romance sells.” – OK, no problem, but I’d really like to do a male protagonist for this one if I–
“No, you can’t do that. You’re a girl. You need to write about girl heroes. Also, don’t get exotic. Really. Can you write something set in England?”
2003: “Yes, I know this is a secondary series in an established fantasy world. Yes, I know it’s a great story. And it has plenty of romance. But you have to tell it from a female POV. You can’t sell male POV.”
2005: “Female POV. Romance. Fantasy. You’re good at it. Don’t write anything different. And no, no male protagonist. Please.”
2009: “We love this strikingly unusual cross-genre book! It’s brilliant! We just hate to let it pass. But Marketing feels it’s too ‘girl-friendly’ for science fiction.”
2010: “This is full-on, grand-scale, old-fashioned space opera. Twenty years ago we’d have killed to get our hands on it. Unfortunately, we just can’t sell a book like this any more, unless you’ve been publishing books like this for, well, the past twenty years.” – Actually I would have, I wanted to, I tried. But.
2011: Time to think really seriously about that androgynous pseudonym. No, not because I’m giving up. Because I’m the mood to experiment, and I like to test hypotheses in the real world. A woman writing science fiction set in the medieval period is, by universal fiat, writing fantasy. Likewise if the science fiction is set in a preindustrial technological period, though it’s actually a prequel to a cycle of space operas that predated Stargate by a fair few years. One of those got sneaked into print a few years back as, you guessed it, a fantasy. With a pointed historical sting in the tail. (Points if you can guess, accurately, which one that is.)(It’s not under a pseudonym.) Now it might be the tech level that’s doing it, but all things considered…
Now of course one woman’s experiences don’t make a trend, but at the very least it makes for a useful — as Coffeandink put it — “contradiction of cultural narratives of straightforward political progress over time”. From Judith Tarr experiences it seems science fiction and fantasy publishers have become less welcoming to anything that doesn’t fit into a neat little subgenre, exacerbated by a gender essentialism that assumes that men write/read hard sf and women paranormal romances and never the twain shall meet. The insistent rumour that only two female sf authors still have contracts in the UK doesn’t help here either.
In general, from the discussions currently going on in especially British science fiction/fantasy circles, it does seem as if the options for female writers in particular have only narrowed over the past thirty years, with less women being published, less being read/reviewed and those who do make it forced towards what publishers think are typically female subgenres: urban fantasy, paranormal romance and so on. What I’m wondering about is how this trend correlates with that other trend of increased commercialisation and globalisation of publishing in the past thirty years. Because I think it does.
Back in the seventies there was room made for more diversity, for feminism in science fiction because writers, editors, reviewers and publishers were able to act outside of narrow profit/loss considerations. Not that publishing ever was a charity, but it makes a difference if you’re working for an independent family business or if your publisher is part of a multinational media conglomerate which sees novels largely as fodder for its television or movie investments. The bean counters have taken over and they’re wary of taking chances. What they want is predictable, repeatable successes, formula fiction and anything that doesn’t fit a succesful subgenre is not even considered.
And of course this sort of thinking reinforces the systemic biases already present in science fiction, with the result that it has become correspondently harder for women — and writers of colour — to be published…