Women writing Fantasy!

Following on from that list of science fiction by female authors I’ve read in the last ten years, here’s the same for fantasy:

  • The Interior Life — Katherine Blake
  • Tam Lin — Pamela Dean
  • The Paladin — C. J. Cherryh
  • God Stalk — P. C. Hodgell
  • Dark of the Moon — P. C. Hodgell
  • A Wizard of Earthsea — Ursula K. Le Guin
  • The Tombs of Atuan — Ursula K. Le Guin
  • The Farthest Shore — Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Shadow Magic — Patricia C. Wrede
  • Daughter of Witches — Patricia C. Wrede
  • The Harp of Imach Thyssel — Patricia C. Wrede
  • Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone — J. K. Rowling
  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets — J. K. Rowling
  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — J. K. Rowling
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire — J. K. Rowling
  • Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell — Susanna Clarke
  • Deep Secret — Diane Wynne Jones
  • A College of Magics — Caroline Stevermer
  • The Prize in the Game — Jo Walton
  • Gate of Ivrel — C. J. Cherryh
  • The Year of Our War — Steph Swainson
  • War for the Oaks — Emma Bull
  • Grunts — Mary Gentle

And per comparison, the complete list: 231 books read of which 24 were written by women. Not a great score either, if percentage wise slightly better than in science fiction. (Compare also with detectives: 34 out of 87 books read.) For me personally at least it’s untrue that women are more represented in fantasy than in science fiction; this may be true, but I’m still reading more male than female authors. there really isn’t something about a specific genre that makes male authors more appealing than female ones or vice versa.

My naive assumption is that in an ideal world, the gender balance between authors in any given subgenre will be roughly equal. The idea that innate gender differences are to blame for the relative lack of female space opera/hard sf authors or the same lack of male dark fantasy vampire shaggers, as suggested several times in the original Torque Control discussion is just wrong. That we can even have this discussion some thirty years after the second wave of feminism hit science fiction is awful, but somehow we’re still in a situation that female sf/fantasy writers are more easily ignored by publishers, reviewers and readers, including myself. I’m not interested in debating why this is (at least not here and now), but this is not a situation that’s healthy for sf/fantasy to ignore.

(More on women and science fiction at Torque control.)

Women writing science fiction!

What Martin said. But. Here’s my own record on reading female science fiction writers during the last ten years (2001-2010):

  • Serpent’s Reach — C. J. Cherryh
  • Pride of Chanur — C. J. Cherryh
  • To Say Nothing of the Dog — Connie Willis
  • The Sparrow — Mary Doria Russell
  • Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus — Mary Shelley
  • Shards of Honor — Lois McMaster Bujold
  • Tea from an Empty Cup — Pat Cadigan
  • Sideshow — Sheri S. Tepper
  • Picnic on Paradise — Joanna Russ
  • Dervish is Digital — Pat Cadigan
  • Sign of the Labrys — Margaret St. Clair
  • In the Garden of Iden — Kage Baker
  • Sky Coyote — Kage Baker
  • Diplomatic Immunity — Lois McMaster Bujold
  • Nine Layers of Sky — Liz Williams
  • Heavy Time — C. J. Cherryh
  • Hellburner — C. J. Cherryh
  • Mendoza in Hollywood — Kage Baker
  • Ammonite — Nicola Griffith
  • 1610: a Sundial in a Grave — Mary Gentle
  • Farthing — Jo Walton
  • The Secret of Sinharat — Leigh Brackett
  • People of the Talisman — Leigh Brackett
  • The Best of C. L. Moore — C. L. Moore
  • Cetaganda — Lois McMaster Bujold
  • Ha’Penny — Jo Walton

For comparison, the complete list of science fiction read in that time. that’s twentysix books by female authors out of a total of roughly 300 books, or less than ten percent. In other words, it would be a bit cheeky to join in the discussion about the real or percieved rarity of female science fiction writers and the lack of recognition they get considering how bad my own record is. There are reasons for this gender imbalance in my reading of course: most of my favourite writers just happen to be male, I at any rate tend to cluster my reading, with some writers (like Charlie Stross or Poul Anderson) getting a lot of repeat custom, which doesn’t help either. It’s not therefore that I deliberately avoid female science fiction writers, more that my unstructured reading for pleasure means my reading is biased unconsciously towards male authors.

If I want to do something about this, I have to consciously balance out that bias, by forcing myself to seek out women writers rather than just reading what I want. I don’t have to do that of course, but if I am worried about this gender imbalance in my favourite genre of fiction, I need to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

So… Any suggestions?

Alanis would think it ironic

The visceral anger and loathing some science fiction fans can display when confronted with anything that’s different from “how we did things thirty years ago”. In this case it’s one Taral Wayne, complaining in The Drink Tank #259 (PDF) about the wrong people winning the Best Fanwriter and Best Fanzine Hugos. With the first award, Taral was offended that Frederik Pohl had won the award, because he didn’t consider him to be a fan and blamed the voters and voting committee for not realising this:

My point is this: Pohl spelled it out, right there in his blog, that these were early drafts for a new edition of the old book. How much more plainly must he tell us that this is not fanwriting?

I think we can say why the voters nominated a professional writer for his blog. Many had likely never seen more than a small number of fanzines, perhaps only con publications such as the Worldcon’s own progress reports. I’ll make a further guess that most of the voters have little appreciation for what fanzines do, beyond discussing science fiction. They can have no sense of fanzine fandom as a community, or of fanzines as a means of expression rather than information. It is self-evident that this must more or less be the case, since there are only two or three hundred fans involved in the fanzine network at any given time… but several thousand Worldcon members with a vote.

What puzzles me is why the Hugo committee permitted Pohl’s name to appear on the ballot. If the rules are to mean anything, his name had no business being there. But odds are that the committee members were no better informed about fanzines than the majority of voters.

What annoys me about Taral’s reasoning is that a) he doesn’t engage the quality of Pohl’s work, just argues his blog has to be disqualified as fan writing because it might end up as source material for a new autobiography and b) that he accuses the Hugo voters and administration of being ignorant. That last slur is the first thing every loudmouth trots out when the Hugo votes don’t got the way they want it and honours the wrong people. It’s never “the voters disagreed with me on the quality of the candidates for Best Novel, it’s always “Harry Potter should not have won because it’s fantasy, but the voters are so ignorant that they don’t even know it’s a science fiction award”. Bonus points if, like the example here, they themselves gets basic facts about the Hugos wrong. At least Taral does acknowledge that professional writers can and have been honoured for their fan work, even if he’s boneheaded about Pohl not being a real fan for the purpose of the award.

You can certainly argue whether Frederik Pohl deserved the award, but to say that his blog should be disqualified because he may some day be paid for the material he publishes there is stupid. But apart from that Taral has no argument: if posts about the earliest days of not just organised fandom but science fiction as a genre, days Pohl was around for, isn’t fannish enough to qualify, than what is?

(As an aside, thousands may have the right to vote in the Hugos, but only 558 people did for Best Fan Writer, so Taral’s two-three hundred fanzine fans could’ve easily swung the vote to a more deserving candidate had they agree with him and/or had a con membership. Also, I wonder how accurate his guesstimate is here, or whether he’s defining fanzines too narrowly. My guess is the latter.)

Speaking of fanzines, that was his other beef with this years Hugo winners:

The fanzine Hugo has been corrupted, just as the fanwriter Hugo has been. Last year, a webpage called Electric Velocipede encouraged its viewers to vote, and succeeded in taking the award from conventional media for the first time. The debate over whether or not a webpage is a fanzine is far from over. There are arguments for both views. But this year the issue was quite clear. The winner, StarShipSofa, is a podcast. Under what conceivable circumstances can a dramatic presentation be compared to the written media? To bring up apples and oranges is a tired cliché. Let’s use a different analogy. Allowing a podcast to compete with fanzines for the Hugo makes as little sense as judging between a Gene Kelly musical comedy and a lecture by Mark Twain.

(See? I was right)

As I said on File 770, this is a luddite attitude for a science fiction fan to take, confuses form with content and is clearly elitist to boot. As long as StarShipSofa does what expect from a fanzine, it’s a fanzine, one being done through voice rather than print, just like an audio book is still a book. If you look at the contents of any given issue it’s clear that whatever Star Ship Sofa is doing does not differ greatly from a print ‘zine. The format should not matter, the content should. And Taral isn’t just dismissive of audio fanzines, but also talks about whether or not a webpage can be a fanzine.

It’s this sort of attitude that I call luddite, with excuses to the historical luddites, whose attitude to technological progress was not half as unreasonably negative as this. There’s something absurd in having science fiction fans of all people reject creative uses of new technology, new and perhaps better ways to keep the conversation going.

The High Crusade – Poul Anderson

Cover of The High Crusade


The High Crusade
Poul Anderson
167 pages
published in 1960

Poul Anderson has a not undeserved reputation as a deeply pessimistic, even depressing writer, largely based on his later novels which all seemed to share the assumption that human nature is unchangable, that evil will always be amongst us, progress impossible and the future will always end badly. It must have been something to do with his gloomy Danish genes. The High Crusade shows it was not always this way. Once upon a time even Poul Anderson could write a lighthearted science fantasy romp without some great clonking moral to mess it up.

Great fun it is too. It’s the year 1345 and a small town in Lincolnshire is visited by a spaceship belonging to the Wersgorix Empire, while the local baron Sir Roger de Tourneville was busy gathering men to join king Edward III in France. Thinking the landing a French trick, he and his men storm the space ship and overwhelm and kill almost all of the aliens, who have long since grown unused to hand to hand combat. Ordering the remaining alien to take them to France, Sir Roger loads the entire town into the ship, but the alien tricks them and sets course back to the planet it came from. Lots of adventures and misunderstandings follow and it ends with Sir Roger conquering the entire Wersgorix Empire…

Read more and see also the celebrations over at Tor.

QotD: sadly true of way too much science fiction

Over at James “sadly nto a Hugo Award winner yet” Nicoll’s place, while discussing a sf novel which will remain nameless, Fridgepunk remarks:

a lot of sci-fi makes a bit more sense if you assume it is all historical fiction written by people from a deep time future where the primary knowledge about what people were like back in the day is gleaned from the archives of FF.net and a stash of evopsych journals discovered amid the archeological remains of an objectivist’s “tomb”.

Ouch.