Steph Swainston: “The internet is poison to authors”; quits writing

Fantasy author Steph Swainston stops being a fulltime writer to pursue her dream of being a chemistry teacher:

But – cautionary tale alert! – the writer’s life isn’t what it could be. For starters, packing in the day job can be a mistake. Swainston says: “Writers have to have something as well as writing, something which feeds back into their work and makes it meaningful.” She references the 19th-century Scottish writer and reformer Samuel Smiles. “He said that if you are going to be an artist, you should have a job as well, so that you’re not relying on your art to pay your bills. If we don’t have external influences …” she pauses, “well, look at Stephen King. All his characters seem to be writers.”

Then there’s the lack of human interaction: “I suffer terribly from isolation while writing. I really need a job where I can be around people and learn to speak again. It’s much, much healthier to be around people. Human beings are social animals.”

[…]

“I don’t have a problem with fandom,” she says. “But I don’t think fans realise the pressure they put on authors. The very vocal ones can change an author’s next book, even an author’s career, by what they say on the internet. And writers are expected to engage and respond.” She pauses. “The internet is poison to authors.”

Swainston is also unhappy with the “book a year” ethos of modern publishing: “Publishers seem to want to compete with faster forms of media, but the fast turnover leads to poorer books, and publishers shoot themselves in the foot. And it’s as if authors have to be celebrities these days. It’s expected that authors do loads of self-publicity – Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forum discussions – but it’s an author’s job to write a book, not do the marketing. Just like celebrities don’t make good authors, authors don’t really make good celebrities.”

You can’t blame her for her decision, but it does point out a worry that in these much more commercially minded times, where writers do have to depend on their own gifts for self promotion, some writers will lose out because they aren’t good at playing this game. It certainly doesn’t help fantasy/science fiction to lose yet another prominent female writer this way…

Taking the Russ Pledge

cover of How to Suppress Womens Writing

“She didn’t write it. But if it’s clear she did the deed… She wrote it, bit she shouldn’t have. (It’s political, sexual, masculine, feminist.) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women!) She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. (“Jane Eyre. Poor dear. That’s all she ever…”) She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art. (It’s a thriller, a romance, a children’s book. It’s sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning. Branwell Brontë. Her own “masculine side”.) Sje wrote it, but she’s an anomaly. (Woolf. With Leonard’s help…) She wrote it BUT…”

That’s the cover of How to Suppress Women’s Writing, Joanna Russ’ classic examination of all the ways women’s writing has been written out of literary history. The cover sort of gives the game away in how that was and is done. It’s so easy to outright deny or minimise female contributions to literature, consciously or unconsciously because despite a century of feminism, we’re still living in a male orientated world. Whether we like it or not, people like me — white, western, male, straight — are the default and if we don’t watch ourselves we find it easy to ignore all those not like us, while immediately finding it strange if we’re not present in our fictions, either as author or character.

In science fiction, despite its self asserted reputation of openmindedness, things are no better. If have been following this blog for a while, you know this, as we hashed this all out last year as well. That’s why I started a project to read at least one science fiction or fantasy book written by a woman per month, just to counter my own subconscious tendency to stick to male authors. The personal is the political after all and if I don’t take the trouble to look after my own reading, I can’t really fault others for ignoring female writers. It may seem odd to police your pleasure reading that way, but I’ve found that if I don’t, I get stuck in the same rut with the same male authors over and over again. I don’t just do it because it’s good for science fiction if more people pay as much attention to female as to male writers, but because it’s good for me.

Just because a few of us felt this way last year, doesn’t mean the war is being won of course. At the moment science fiction has gotten a bit more media attention again, if only through the by all accounts brilliant exhibition at the British Library, but sadly it has revealed that it’s still the male writers who get most of the attention. As Nicola Griffith found out, when The Guardian asked its readers to name its favourite sf books/writers, only 18 out of 500 writers were female. It reminded her of what Joanna Russ had analysed so well thirty years ago and it inspired her to a call for action:

Clearly, women’s sf is being suppressed in the UK. Oh, not intentionally. But that’s how bias works: it’s unconscious. And of course sometimes it’s beyond a reader’s power to change: you can’t buy a book that’s not on the shelf. You can’t shelve something the publisher hasn’t printed. You can’t publish something an agent doesn’t send you. You can’t represent something a writer doesn’t submit. Etc.

But, whether this bias is active or passive, it’s time to attack it on several fronts:

  • reexamine and rewrite Best Of lists to take into account women who have been relegated to also-rans (this will involve public discussion and reevaluation)
  • rexamine and republish Classics to include those women who, through the process Russ delineates, have slipped down the rankings (ditto)
  • revive the old-style Women’s Press list of sf, historic and contemporary, by women writers
  • acknowledge, in media pieces, likely inherent bias
  • writers, stop self-censoring
  • agents, stop narrowing the funnel
  • editors, consider balancing your list
  • booksellers, pay attention to your readers and categories
  • readers, give books and writers a chance
  • etc.

And always, always name the behaviour around you: we can’t change behaviour until it’s named.

From there on, Nicola called for The Russ pledge:

The single most important thing we (readers, writers, journalists, critics, publishers, editors, etc.) can do is talk about women writers whenever we talk about men. And if we honestly can’t think of women ‘good enough’ to match those men, then we should wonder aloud (or in print) why that is so. If it’s appropriate (it might not be, always) we should point to the historical bias that consistently reduces the stature of women’s literature; we should point to Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which is still the best book I’ve ever read on the subject. We should take the pledge to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed. Call it the Russ Pledge. I like to think she would have approved.

This in turn inspired Ian Sales, who had been part of the debate last year as well, to start the SF Mistress Works blog, dedicated fto establishing a line of potential “Mistress Works”, classical sf novels written by women, ala the actually existing Gollancz SF Masteworks line. He’s calling for reviews of those works he has already put up as potential Mistress Works, either existing or new ones; I might just take him up on that.

As long as it’s not as natural or easy to think of female sf writers as it is to think of male ones, the Russ Pledge and initiatives like Ian Sales’ are necessary. As Maura McHugh says in in the title of her excellent summing up of the current “controversy”, be part of the solution. Take the Russ Pledge today!

The Gollancz fifty

This year it will be fifty years since Gollancz started publishing science fiction and fantasy. To celebrate the publisher set up a website listing its fifty best science fiction and fantasy novels (or at least the ones it still has the rights to) and is asking us, their readers to chose our favourites out of these. Twentyfive science fiction and twentyfive fantasy novels are listed and you get to choose one of each. The top five choices will be published in a special “collectable retro-look edition”. A nice idea to celebrate a very important British science fiction and fantasy publisher. I can’t be the only fan who quickly learned to associate yellow covers in the library’s bookcases with proper science fiction….

Given that these lists had to be created out of the books Gollancz still had the rights to, they’re somewhat biased towards contemporary authors, but unfortunatly also heavily biased towards male authors: of the twentyfive science fiction novels, only two are by women. The fantasy list is slightly more balanced, but still only has five novels written by women. Both lists are also very white and anglosaxon. Of course you can argue that given the constraints of having to work from their own backlist meant that these lists would always be imbalanced, but than that only moves the argument to why Gollancz hasn’t had a more diverse publishing list in these fifty years…

Apart from that, these lists are a good excuse to play the usual “bold if you’ve read it, italicise if you own it” game. First the science fiction list, which seems to be the stronger of the two and from which I’ve certainly read the most. On the downside, there are no real surprises in this list either: a mix of obvious classics always present in these lists and contemporary bestselling authors. Many of these books have had special editions recently as well, e.g. in the Science Fiction Masterworks series. Which probably explains why I read so many of them…

  • A Case of Conscience by James Blish
  • Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan
  • Brasyl by Ian McDonald
  • The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
  • Dune by Frank Herbert
  • Fairyland by Paul McAuley
  • The Female Man by Joanna Russ
  • The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
  • Flood by Stephen Baxter
  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  • Gateway by Frederik Pohl
  • Hyperion by Dan Simmons
  • Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
  • More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
  • Pavane by Keith Roberts
  • Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
  • Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds
  • Ringworld by Larry Niven
  • Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
  • Tau Zero by Poul Anderson
  • The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
  • The Separation by Christopher Priest
  • The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
  • Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts

The fantasy list seems to be more heavily biased towards contemporary books, with some odd choices: the complete Book of the New Sun but Stephen R. Donaldson is represented by the first book of the third trilogy in the Thomas Covenant series? Why Eric of all Discworld novels?

  • Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper
  • Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
  • Book of the New Sun (Vol 1&2) (Vol 3&4) by Gene Wolfe
  • The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg
  • Conan Volume One by Robert E. Howard
  • Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
  • Elric by Michael Moorcock
  • Eric by Terry Pratchett
  • Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin
  • The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
  • The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
  • Graceling by Kristin Cashore
  • Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill
  • I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
  • The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
  • Little, Big by John Crowley
  • Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees
  • Memoirs of a Master Forger by William Heaney
  • Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock
  • The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
  • The Runes of the Earth by Stephen Donaldson
  • Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
  • Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance
  • Viriconium by M. John Harrison
  • Wolfsangel by M. D. Lachlan

I’m not sure which books of either list I’d choose as my favourite, but I’d think in the end I’d go for Stand on Zanzibar and Mythago Wood, both books by British writers who died too soon and who deserve a bit more attention.

Pavlovian scolding

I have a fair amount of sympathy for the idea that you shouldn’t give trolls undeserved attention, even famous trolls, but Cheryl Morgan hacked me off:

Yesterday I launched Salon Futura #6 on the world. Like any publisher, I watched keenly for online reaction to my new baby, and a few people were very kind about it. Thank you, folks. But honestly I didn’t expect much reaction. You see, I hadn’t set out to offend anyone.

What did get a lot of reaction from teh intrawebs yesterday? Well, some ignorant prat wrote a long blog post about nihilism in modern fantasy, which served mainly to demonstrate his lack of knowledge of fantasy’s history, his lack of breadth of reading in modern fantasy (I suspect he’s never read a book by a woman in his life) and probably his lack of understanding of nihilism (though I’ll leave that to people with philosophy degrees to deal with). As journalism it was, to put it bluntly, a foetid heap of steaming dingo’s kidneys. So of course my little corner of teh intrawebs went apeshit over it.

The one thing more tiresome than engaging trolls is complaining about other people engaging trolls, especially when you make it seem that you’re mostly offended that they don’t pay attention to you. Which I’m sure wasn’t Morgan’s intent, but it does come across that way. I’m sure she understands something like Salon Futura with its mixture of short stories and thoughful non-fiction takes time to digest and reflect on, while Leo Grin’s fart of outrage takes no more than five minutes to read and mock. It makes for a nice bit of light entertainment as it does the round of Twitter and sf&f blogs, with e.g. Joe Abercrombie responding to it with some deft skewering:

But why all the fury, Leo? Relax. Pour yourself a drink. Admire your unrivalled collection of Frank Frazetta prints for a while. Wrestle the old blood pressure down. When an old building is demolished to make way for a new, I can see the cause of upset. Hey, depending what’s lost and what’s gained, I might be upset myself. Let’s all take a look at the plans together and see if we can work something out. But books don’t work that way. If I choose to write my own take on fantasy, what gets destroyed? What loss are we bewailing here?

That’s very far from the “pornography of rage” Morgan talks about, more a sort of bemused merriment at the idea that somebody can be so threatened by any kind of fantasy that isn’t like he imagined the “two titanic literary talents” J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard wrote that he has to write such a dumb polemic. It can be interesting to dissect, though I won’t bother myself, to understand why somebody is so insecure that he has to imagine that any fantasy he dislikes is not just to his taste, but actively undermining western civilisation…. To scold those who are interested in doing this seems counterproductive.

Racefail: not just for science fiction anymore

Roxane Gay reads this years Best American Short Stories, finds almost every story in the anthology was about rich or nearly rich white people:

What I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about black people (written by Danielle Evans, coincidentally) and there was a story about a mechanic, to bring in that working class perspective and there was a story set in Africa, but most of the stories were uniformly about rich white people (often rich, white old men) doing rich white people things like going on safari or playing poker and learning a painful lesson or lamenting old age in Naples. Each of these stories was wonderful and I don’t regret reading them, but the demographic narrowness is troubling. It’s not right that anyone who isn’t white, straight, or a man, reading a book like this, which is fairly representative of the work being published by the “major” journals, is going to have a hard time finding experiences that might, in some way, mirror their own. It’s not right that the best writing in the country, each year, is writing about white people by white people with a few splashes of color or globalism (Africa! Japan! the hood!) for good effect. Things have certainly improved over the years but that’s not saying much.

At the same time, she also find her own succes being questioned for the usual reasons:

Anytime you achieve even a little bit of success there’s going to be someone who suggests you earned that success because you’re a person of color (or a woman, or both). Even though you might know you achieved your success because you’re awesome, because you worked hard for years, because you beat down doors until one fell down, you are stuck with the niggling doubt that they’re right. You worry that everyone thinks that way so you can never really enjoy your success, you always push yourself to do better, to do more, to be the best, to be so good they have to stop saying it’s just because you’re a person of color. It is exhausting.

All of which confirms the superiority of science fiction and fantasy fandom, as

Most of 2009, the science fiction/fantasy community was embroiled in a contentious debate about race that was so extensive and ongoing that it even got its own name and wiki: RaceFail, but hey, at least the SF/F community is talking about these issues which cannot be said for other writing communities.

Which is surely the most important point to take away from these two posts. More seriously, it’s strangely heartening to see that the problems sf and fantasy struggle with (the representation of non-white/male/straight voices and viewpoints, the problems with appopriation, systemic racism and underrepresentation of people of colour and so on) are not unique to it. It means that it’s not impossible for science fiction/fantasy to change for the better.