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 City & The City — China Miéville

The City & The City


The City & The City
China Miéville
312 pages
published in 2009

Right. China Miéville is one my favourite writers, one of the few (together with Terry Pratchett, Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod) I’ll always buy in hardcover. I love the way in which he fuses science fiction and horror and fantasy together into what he himself has called New Weird, essentially a new genre that emphasises the grotesque and baroque sides of its parent genres. What I also admire in Miéville is that he keeps his imagination firmly grounded in a keen appreciation of political and economical realities, no doubt helped by his background as a proper socialist. That combination made Miéville’s creation of New Crobuzon one of the more fully realised cities in science fiction/fantasy. With Miéville there’s always the feeling that his heroes do have to work for a living, that the daily struggle for existence is just as important, if not more as whatever existentialist crisis they’re on the fringes of.

It’s this sense of realism that links The City & The City with Miéville’s earlier novels. Set on Earth in two fictional Eastern European cities with no fantastical or science fictional elements and written as a police procedural: The City & The City cannot be more different from its predecessors. Yet at the core of the novel are the same political and economical themes Miéville always write about. At its best the police procedural is a very political novel, just because policing itself is intensely political — just think about the decisions being made about which crimes to prosecute and which not, which investigations to support and which to starve of resources. There’s therefore a long tradition of writers using the police procedural as a vehicle for social criticsm and Miéville fits in well with this tradition. Of course Miéville being Miéville he does more than that but we’ll get to that.

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Gil Scott-Heron



Could there be any other poem to honour Gil Scott-Heron for a science fiction fan/space age believer than this?

Foreigner – C. J. Cherryh

Cover of Foreigner


Foreigner
C. J. Cherryh
423 pages
published in 1994

Foreigner is the fifth book in my Year of Reading Women project. It is the first novel in one of C. J. Cherryh’s more popular series, yet until now I had never read any of them. She is such a prolific writer that it’s easy to miss a series or two. She also has such a wide range, writing anything from fantasy to space opera, that not everything she writes appeals to every one of her fans. The number of people I’ve known who hated her breakthrough novel Downbelow Station for example…

Yet, once you’ve read a few of her novels, you discover that there is one narrative trick all her stories have in common, no matter what the setting or the plot is. What she likes to do is to take her protagonists out of their comfort zone, get them at their most vulnerable and then put the pressure on. Every one of her novels I’ve read has the same structure. The protagonist is a young man (rarely a young woman) put in a position of responsibility but without power. Usually he’s an outsider in an alien culture, cut off from his own people, in the middle of some sort of political crisis he barely understands let alone can influence. She then let’s this crisis heats up, makes sure her hero gets little to eat and less sleep and is as far removed from the centre of the crisis as possible, yet still has a vital role to play in resolving it, even if he not necessarily knows it. To make sure the reader is as much in the dark as the hero, she usually makes sure they’re only looking at the story through his eyes.

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Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille — Steven Brust

Cover of Cowboy Fengs Space Bar and Grill


Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille
Steven Brust
223 pages
published in 1990

Sometimes when I’m depressed I go on a book reading binge — I managed to read every Wheel of Time book up to Lord of Chaos in a week when I was at a low point during my time at college. Pure escapism, fleeing into a story to temporarily ignore the world around me. A few weeks ago I fled back in that habit when my wife was having a very bad night, the day before she had to go back to hospital again. I was sleeping on the couch to try and give her an easier night’s sleep but then couldn’t sleep myself, so I grabbed the nearest book at hand. This turned out to be Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille.

Which perhaps wasn’t the best book to keep the night terrors at bay. Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille is a strange book, if only because it’s one of Steven Brust’s rare science fiction novels, but also because it’s a light adventure story about a Strange Bar, set amongst a series of nuclear holocausts. Amongst Brust fans it’s apparently a bit of a controversial book with some hating it, but for me it was the right book at the right time. It may be strange to think of a book that has a succession of nuclear wars at its heart as comforting, but that’s what it was.

It’s comforting because Brust makes it so. The nuclear death is in the background, while in the foreground we get the story of the bar that has the best matzo ball soup in the galaxy, as well as some of the best Irish musicians. Whether or not Billy, the protagonist narrating the story in first person, counts himself amongst them remains unrevealed. This is the picture you get in the first few sentences and the cozy atmosphere it evokes neutralises much of the existential dread the nukes evoke. It reminds me of the urban fantasy people like Emma Bull and other of the Scribblies — a group Brust of course belonged to too — were writing in the eighties.

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