science fiction

Her facts are all wrong, but does she get the spirit of the thing!

Numpties, science fiction
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While Sarah Newton gets everything, but everything wrong about hard science fiction to rage against a problem with it that does not exist, she inadvertedly gets the spirit of it spot on in her introduction:

ow, a hundred or so years ago, it was widely regarded that all the known laws of physics had been discovered, and that theoretical physics was a “completed” science, with nothing more to do other than cross a few t’s and dot a few i’s. It was also believed that if you travelled more than 15 miles per hour in an automobile you’d probably suffocate…

Can you see what’s wrong with that? That’s right, “a hundred or so years ago” gets you to 1911, after the Wright Brothers, when the automobile was well on its way to become more than just a rich man’s toy and when steam locomotives had been travelling at speeds greater than fifteen miles an hour with no reports of suffocation for donkeys ages. Worse, 1911 was smack dab in the middle of the Einsteinian revolution, six years after Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis in which he introduced the special theory of relativity, his observations about the photoelectric effect that helped get quantum mechanics started, not to mention that whole E=MC squared thingie.

In this small paragraph Sarah gets her facts wrong, doesn’t think through when “a hundred years ago” was and ignores actual history and science for comforting myths about Progress — sounds remarkable like most hard science fiction to me.

(It doesn’t get much better in the rest of the post. Thanks James.)

They came from the seventies

posts interesting only to me, science fiction
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From James Nicoll: which of these female sf/f authors who debuted in the 1970ties do you know? Italicize the authors you’ve heard of before reading this list of authors, bold the ones you’ve read at least one work by, underline the ones of whose work you own at least one example of.

  • Lynn Abbey
  • Eleanor Arnason
  • Octavia Butler
  • Moyra Caldecott
  • Jaygee Carr
  • Joy Chant
  • Suzy McKee Charnas
  • C. J. Cherryh
  • Jo Clayton
  • Candas Jane Dorsey
  • Diane Duane
  • Phyllis Eisenstein
  • Cynthia Felice
  • Sheila Finch
  • Sally Gearhart
  • Mary Gentle
  • Dian Girard
  • Eileen Gunn
  • Monica Hughes
  • Diana Wynne Jones
  • Gwyneth Jones
  • Leigh Kennedy
  • Lee Killough
  • Nancy Kress
  • Katherine Kurtz
  • Tanith Lee
  • Megan Lindholm (AKA Robin Hobb)
  • Elizabeth A. Lynn
  • Phillipa Maddern
  • Ardath Mayhar
  • Vonda McIntyre
  • Patricia A. McKillip
  • Janet Morris
  • Pat Murphy
  • Sam Nicholson (AKA Shirley Nikolaisen)
  • Rachel Pollack
  • Marta Randall
  • Anne Rice
  • Jessica Amanda Salmonson
  • Pamela Sargent
  • Sydney J. Van Scyoc
  • Susan Shwartz
  • Nancy Springer
  • Lisa Tuttle
  • Joan Vinge
  • Élisabeth Vonarburg
  • Cherry Wilder
  • Connie Willis

Lots of names I recognise but either never read or only read a few stories off in various anthologies.

Reviews up at SF Mistressworks

books and books review, posts interesting only to me, science fiction
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Dept. of self promotion: the last few weeks I’ve gotten some old and new reviews published at Ian Sales’ SF Mistressworks site, dedicated to showcasing good books by female sf writers. Thought it might be good to point y’all at them.

The Female Man — Joanna Russ: “The Female Man is a tough book, but not a hard book to read. Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer and everything in here sparkles”

Ammonite — Nicola Griffith: “Nicola Griffith’s goal was to create a world populated solely with women without falling back on clichés about what such a world would look like. No “seven-feet-tall vegetarian amazons who would never dream of killing anyone, no “aliens who are really women or women who are really aliens”, but “the entire spectrum of human behavior”. ”

The Sword of Rhiannon — Leigh Brackett: “What sets The Sword of Rhiannon a touch above other pulp adventure stories is both Brackett’s writing and that elegiac sense of loss that comes across through it.”

Sign of the Labrys — Margaret St. Clair: “The infusion of what at first seemed a fairly standard science fiction story with a dose of Wicca worked pretty well. If necessary, you can ignore all the Wicca mumbo-jumbo and just think of it as psionics.”

Girl cooties in science fiction

Feminism, Life under Capitalism, science fiction
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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…

Russ Pledge: Jo Walton

science fiction
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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.

Jo Walton joined rec.arts.sf.written at around the same time as I did, back in 1994. This was before the web had really started going and Usenet was the hot new social medium, though we didn’t call it that then. Text based, it played to Jo’s strengths and she quickly became one of the top posters on rasfw — not a small achievement in that pressure cooker full of highly articulate, intelligent people, not to mention huge egos. The same insights and knowledge she now brings to her posts at the Tor blog now, she already showed back then. Her presence was one of the things that made rec.arts.sf.written the best place to talk about science fiction online ever. Jo wasn’t just another sf fan; like so many of us she was also attempting to break into writing. Having written a couple of short stories, it was a connection made through rec.arts.sf.written, with Tor editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden, that got her first novel published in 2000. Since then she has written eight more.

Her best novel so far is her latest and also her most personal: Amongst Others, published in February, is both a fantasy story and the coming age story of a science fiction fan where you don’t need much imagination to see much of Jo herself in her protagonist. To quote from my review:

But that isn’t what her life revolves around. For the most part this is the diary of a fifteen year old girl interested in science fiction and fantasy, a fan of Ursula LeGuin, Robert A. Heinlein, Roger Zelazny and James Tiptree Jr., but not Philip K. Dick or Stephen Donaldson. Her diary entries are about what’s going on with school, reading books and buying books, getting involved with her father’s side of the family and worries about the family she left behind in Wales, Grampaw and Auntie Teg and finding other people who like science fiction, including her father. These parts are where the Jo-ness shines through, but also the most universal parts of the story. There’s one heartbreaking little scene when she and her father are staying in a hotel somewhere and he gets drunk in the bar below and comes into their room and tries to climb into her bed and kiss her and she’s trying to reason it out through what she learned from Heinlein that incest is not a sin if no children are concieved but she has no contraceptives and it doesn’t feel right but it’s nice to be wanted and…

Before that, there was the Small Change series of alternate history novels, featuring the familiar concept of a Britain that has made peace with Nazi Germany, but which Jo had managed to give a new twist. Again quoting from my own review of the first book, Farthing:

Farthing grabbed me by the throat from the first page and didn’t let go; one of the very few books to have ever done that. As with any other alternate WWII story, part of that is due to what you know is going on in the background that the characters themselves do not know yet or only suspect. Every such Hitler wins story depends on the tension between what the reader knows happened historically and what the characters in the story know or do not know: sometimes this is done explicit, as in Fatherland, where the whole point of the book is to get the protagonist up to speed on what we as readers already know. In Farthing’s case though things are kept implicit. What Walton does is let the essential horror of the setting speak for itself, keeping the swastikas and Gestapo goons offstage. What she does in fact is showing that England did not need these props to become a fascist state.

England after all was a deeply racist country before the war, where anti-semitism was deeply ingrained, as anybody who has read classic cozies knows — even an enlightened writer like Dorothy L. Sayers could talk about a “typical Jew” with all the stereotypes that entails. What Walton does in Farthing is take the casual racism and snobbery of a Josephine Tey and makes it all slightly more explicit and horrid, but still recognisable English. No Kristallnacht, but it is quite casually established Jews cannot buy land.

I’ve not read all of her books, but every book I’ve read of hers was no less than excellent. What’s more, she’s not content to keep repeating her earlier successes. Her first three novels were Arthurian sagas set in a fantasy Britain: this was follewed by her attempt at an Anthony Trollope novel, but with dragons. Then there were the three Small Change alternate history novels, a return to fantasy with Lifelode and finally Among Others. Despite their differences these novels do have something in common, in that each in their own way treats with the Matter of Britain, what it means to be British to the core, in the very old fashioned last Roman in England way that Jo Walton has.

Do yourself a favour and read:

  • The King’s Peace (2000)
  • The King’s Name (2001)
  • The Prize in the Game (2002)
  • Tooth and Claw (2003)
  • Farthing (2006)
  • Ha’penny (2007)
  • Half a Crown (2008)
  • Lifelode (2009)
  • Among Others (2011)