science fiction

If you want to read more women, try quotas

Published on February 18, 2014Leave a comment

E. Catherine Tobler noticed that her friend Christopher DeFilippis’s top five books from 2013 didn’t contain any woman writers and asked him about it. It turned out he hadn’t read any female writers in two years:

I asked him on Twitter what his favorite books by female authors were for the year, and to his surprise, he realized he hadn’t read any female authors in 2013. Nor, it turns out, had he read any female authors in 2012. (Octavia Butler made his best-of list in 2011.)

“In my defense,” Chris tweeted when a couple followers made author suggestions, “it’s more coincidence than ailment that needs a remedy.”

Then, I asked him if I could blog about this, because…

Two years.

It’s a remarkable oversight, to exclude a whole gender from your reading without even noticing and that for two years in a row. However, I can’t help but feel sympathy for Christopher, as it happened to me to. In 2010 I discovered that only ten percent of the fantasy and science fiction I’d read in the past decade had been written by women. Now I knew I read more blokes than women, but it was a real shock to discover how lobsided the ratios were. I wasn’t the only one; in my little corner of the science fiction internet quite a few people came to the same sort of conclusion and attempted to do something about it.

it’s more coincidence than ailment that needs a remedy.

Again, I can sympathise. I never set out to exclude women from my reading, or to read only male writers; it just happened that way. Because I was just following my reading instincts, read whatever seemed interesting or from authors I already knew and trusted, my reading was channeled into a mostly blokeish channel. Clearly something had to change if I wanted to be more inclusive in my reading. If I thought this was important enough, I couldn’t keep up with the same habits. If Christopher feels the same way, if he thinks this important too, there is one thing that he can do to fix his reading.

He should set himself quotas.

Because quotas work.

Good intentions and a vague will to change aren’t enough, you need something you can measure, preferably in public so you can hold yourself accountable for your choices. You don’t necessarily need to keep these quotas up forever of course, just as long as it takes to change your outdated reading habits. Otherwise it’s just too easy to slip back into them, or to let fear of the unknown chase you back to safer grounds.

Of course, some people might think it unfair on the hypothetical male authors who miss out on your reading attention, but considering there are well over a 1,000 books of genre interest published each year, you should feel guilty already no matter who you chose to read…

The other fear you might have is that of missing out on reading the people everbody else is reading, but this is also something that’s deeply gender unbalanced. Male authors get a disproportionate share of fandom and media attention, so a grassroots attempt to change this is long overdue anyway. It’s this what’s at the heart of the Russ Pledge Nicola Griffith came up with a few years ago, to not just read more women, but also pay more attention to women, the necesssity of which is proven by the simple fact that even a well connected, well read person like Christopher DeFillippis can go two years without reading women and not even realise it.

Finally, as Anil Dash found out in a different context when he made the decision last year to only retweet women, the rewards of being more gender inclusive can be immediate:

For me, for my experience, it’s better. I feel happier about the time I spend on Twitter, and it’s made me try to be more thoughtful, and more disciplined with other things I do in my time online.

Personally, I found something similar when I made the decision to prioritise female authors over male. I discovered authors I’d never would’ve noticed otherwise, as well as authors writing the kind of books I didn’t get from the ones I was already reading. My sf reading has become richer and more rewarding.

So, give it a go. You never know, you might like it.

And if you don’t know where to start or whom to read? That’s what Sf Mistressworks is for.

Terminal World — Alastair Reynolds

Published on February 17, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Terminal World

Terminal World
Alastair Reynolds
487 pages
published in 2010

I find Alastair Reynolds hard to review. I like his work well enough to keep reading his novels, but I find it hard to say anything useful about them. As a writer, he has his feet planted firmly in the hard science fiction camp, where “hard” means no FTL ships or time travel and only the right sort of technobabble and jargon. He is however, unlike far too many American hard sf writers, not blind to literary virtues and not half bad at creating plausible, lived in futures either. All in all, most of his novels are solid, core science fiction, where if you like that sort of thing you’ll like them, but perhaps with not much to talk about other than the plot or the setting. They’re evolutionary, rather than revolutionary novels.

Terminal World is a case in point. This is a standalone adventure story set in the far future, where the world as we know it has changed considerably. It’s slowly dying, with what remains of humanity clustered on and around a gigantic artificial spire called Spearpoint, which from top to bottom is divided into zones of ever decreasing technology: Circuit City, Neon Heights, Steamtown, etc. Transfering from one zone to another is not easy: people who do it suffer from zone sickness, while higher technology stops working in a lower tech zone. Away from Spearpoint the world is largely wilderness, with the various zones becoming much larger as they spread out from the spire. What we have here in fact, is the planetary equivalent of Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thoughts he divided the galaxy in, in A Fire Upon the Deep and sequels. It’s a great setting, with a never quite revealed secret at the heart of it observant readers might puzzle out for themselves.

Imagine wanting new experiences as a sf reader!

Published on February 12, 2014Leave a comment

So Alex Dally MacFarlane started a series on gender diversity in science fiction which some obnoxious little wankstain “author” called Larry Correia took exception to, whose nonsense was aptly but slightly more charitably than I would’ve done dissected by everbody’s science fiction pinup, Jim C. Hines. The gist of Correia’s ranting was that nobody was interested in all that gender nonsense and it was all political correctness and message writing and people want story, not strange queer or agender people in their fiction, anyway, you know the type.

Basically what he seems to say is that only white straight men read science fiction and they don’t want to read about anybody else but themselves, because the familiar is truely what you read sf for. Well, Ria off off Bibliotropic is here to set him straight (heh) on the first part:

I love opening a book and sinking into the story and discovering that a character is like me. Whether that means they’re asexual or agendered or just have a weakness for knitting with cashmere yarn, it’s a little bright light that goes on, a link between me and the person whose story I am following, and it makes me want to read about them even more. It’s a very selfish impulse to want to read about people in whom I can see myself reflected.

But that doesn’t make it a bad thing. It makes the character real, because I am real. It makes them a person, because I am a person. It means they have no point, because I have no point, but why should that mean that I and everything about me should disappear for the comfort of people who already have far more options to see themselves reflected in the pages of the novels they read? My existence doesn’t depend on someone learning a lesson from me. I am not an after-school special.

And I’ll set him straight on the second. You know, these days I not only reading science fiction that doesn’t feature the kind of protagonist I can see in the mirror, but actively seek it out. I bought Ascension because its cover featured a black woman; heck, this is my FemShep. Why? Not out of some poofaced desire to know what it would be like to be a black woman in the future, that would be slightly offensive, but because it’s fun, it’s interesting to read the adventures of somebody who isn’t you.

And that’s something people like Correia just can’t understand, that people can be genuinely interested in post-binary gender, even if they’re not personally involved in it. Which is just sad for a science fiction writer.

Ancillary Justice — Ann Leckie

Published on February 9, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Ancillary Justice

Ancillary Justice
Ann Leckie
385 pages
published in 2013

It’s funny how you don’t notice how ingrained gender is until you get your nose rubbed in it. In Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie makes it clear by the third page that when her protagonist Breq uses “she” and “her” she uses it as a neutral pronoun, yet unless I paid close attention or Leckie explicitly outed a character as male, I kept thinking of every character she meets as female. That’s I think a response more readers will have, as we’re just not used to thinking of the female form as universal; traditonally it has always been “he” or “him”, or something like singular “they” for those of us aware that the male isn’t actually universal. It may seem like a too clever writing trick, a clumpsy attempt at showing the reader the gender assumptions build into the very language we use, but I don’t think this is actually what Leckie had in mind. What it does instead is establishing the fundamental strangeness of Breq herself even before we learn she’s the last remaining component of a thousands years old warship’s AI.

That consistent use of “she” and “her” foregrounds the difference of the Radchaai culture Breq comes from. It’s a bit of unexplained strangeness that tells a lot about their society, culture and history, most importantly that the Radchaai are inherently matriarchal in the same way most if not all actually existing human societies are patriarchal. But there’s more going on with Breq’s gender blindness, as other Radchaai seem to have far less trouble differiating between men and women, even if they use the same pronouns for both. Meanwhile Breq not only has pronoun troubles, she also has trouble remembering which secondary sexual characteristics are male and which are female. It’s this that singles her out as not quite human.

Plague Ship — Andre Norton

Published on February 6, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Plague Ship

Plague Ship
Andre Norton
192 pages
published in 1956

Hold on to your tail fins, space fans. This retro rocket boosted tale is sure to knock you out of your orbit. Oy, did this very fifties future slang get old fast in Plague Ship. This is another of Norton’s books at Project Gutenberg and mildly irritating as its language occasionally was, it was also the perfect kind of light adventure science fiction to be read in small snatches on my phone, while getting coffee at work.

Plague Ship is the second in Norton’s Solar Queen series, about the adventures of the crew of the ship the series is named after, free traders trying to eke out a living making the kind of trading deals the big companies can’t. The Solar Queen is literally a huge rocket ship, complete with humongous fifties tail fins to land on. Amongst its crew is Dane Thorson, Cargo-master-apprentice and our hero, prone to saying things like “rest easy on your fins” and “right up the rockets” and all other sorts of horrid expressions you have to read around.