MIND MELD: What’s The Importance of ‘The Russ Pledge’ For Science Fiction Today?
[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Let us know!]
Recently, a poll in The Guardian created to the readers nominate their favorite SF writers revealed an appalling result: 500 men in the list – but only 18 women made it. This result sparked a chain of reactions in the blogosphere, from Nicola Griffith to Cheryl Morgan to Ian Sales and many other critics and writers, including this Mind Meld moderator. However, one of the most interesting results of this discussion was a proposition made by Nicola Griffith of what she called The Russ Pledge. Please read the links above before reading below.
We asked this week’s panelists…
Here’s what they said…
I am more interested in hearing why male writers think the Russ Pledge is important for science fiction, and then watching them act it out, than I am in writing yet one more exhausted rant stating the obvious.
I think discussing women writers in SF is always valuable, though it seems to me at least some of this discussion focuses on the false dichotomy between fantasy and science fiction. If we take a recent genre masterpiece – Mary Gentle’s incredible Ash: A Secret History – it’s the sort of novel that can be easily both – is it SF? Is it fantasy? Does it matter?
And obviously in genre some of our most successful writers are women. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books, for instance, are everywhere – and are simply addictive!
I seem to have less of an interest in discussing the classics (that whole SF Mistressworks meme) simply because, to me, the classics are such an ingrained part of my reading of SF I sort of expect everyone else to have already read them! One simply can’t imagine SF/F without C.L. Moore or Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.), or to discuss fantasy without mentioning Patricia McKillip’s The Riddle Master of Hed trilogy…while I realise a lot of people haven’t read, say, Zenna Henderson (one of the great and only Pastorals of SF) – but at the same time, a lot of old SF gets left behind as new readers get into genre from a different angle – through media SF or newer works.
You know, Tiptree’s “The Women Men Don’t See”? That’s one of the all-time great SF stories – and it was the inspiration for my first professional sale, “Alienation and Love in the Hebrew Alphabet”. Or C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry, she was the direct influence for me to start writing my Gorel of Goliris stories, starting with “Black Gods Kiss”, a reference to Moore’s “Black God’s Kiss”, obviously… (these are published by PS Publishing in the UK, incidentally).
So to me these are very relevant, very living writers, works. I’m not going to make up lists of them, like they belong in some encyclopedia! They’re still shaping fiction and ideas today, they’re still a fabric of my writer identity.
As an editor, particularly as an editor of international SF/F stories (via the World SF Blog and the Apex Book of World SF series of anthologies, of which the second one is coming out soon), I think we’re at a pretty exciting time! It was interesting, in that I saw a Twitter conversation recently, when someone said her impression was that a lot of the young, up-and-coming genre writers were women, and someone else replied that his perception was that this was not the case.
Well, I’m with the former, not the latter. If I look at the writers I’m excited about today, the ones working in short fiction or getting into novels, the ones in my two (to date) Apex Book of World SF anthologies, they’re people like Lauren Beukes, who picked up the Clarke Award recently for her novel Zoo City; it’s Aliette de Bodard, who won the BSFA Award for short story, was up for a Nebula and is still up for a Hugo; it’s Kaaron Warren, who just has this very weird mind… all three happen to be with Angry Robot (also my publishers for the Bookman books), but that just shows we may have similar editorial tastes! AR are also bringing out debut novelist Anne Lyle soon, which is very exciting.
The second Apex Book of World SF volume opens with a writer I’m very excited about (can you tell there’s a recurrent theme here??) – Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, with “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life”, from Interzone. I think she’s a wonderful writer and I know she’s working on a novel, and I can’t wait to see it!
And we have, for instance, Joyce Chng from Singapore, who recently released a novel, A Wolf at the Door (as by J. Damask) – werewolves in Singapore! Who could resist that?
And we have Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who is working on a couple of very exciting novels, writes wonderful stuff. Shweta Narayan, who was up for a Nebula recently. Ekaterina Sedia, who is just such a great writer – you have to read A Secret History of Moscow! And I just love her short stories. We were lucky to get a story from Nnedi Okorafor, who is incredible. Or Gail Har’even, a highly regarded Israeli author who does both mainstream and SF (the story we reprint is from the New Yorker). We have original stories from Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro from Cuba, and Csilla Kleinheincz from Hungary.
So, you know, do we want to talk about women writers? Well, obviously I do! They’re such a vital and vibrant part of the field that I see – and this is just talking international stuff, you know. If you open it up a bit…you have Nina Allan making some waves in the UK with her short stories, you have Catherynne Valente, who hardly needs me to shout about, she’s everywhere, you have Cat Rambo, Amal El-Mohtar, Genevieve Valentine, Kij Johnson, Sarah Monette, Yoon Ha Lee, Rachel Swirsky, N.K. Jemisin, Karen Lord – do you want me to go on? The problem would be getting me to shut up! There’s a new collection Apex have just put out, Let’s Play White by Chesya Burke, that you should really check out. And let’s not forget Ellen Datlow, one of the truly great editors in the field, who I, personally, just owe so much to.
But, is there an issue with the invisibility of women in SF? Of course there is. There are a lot of deep-rooted problems in the world of SF, from a sort of ingrained, unconscious racism that goes all the way back to Campbell, to an unthinking, unblinking sexism and xenophobia and homophobia and, weirdly, a deep-seated conservatism of the WASP variety, a sort of fear of the future that exhibits itself in the stories that win awards, in the way magazines receive (or don’t) submissions, in bizarre rambling editorials from once-great writers in the field…
But I have very little interest in what was, in yesterday’s tomorrows. The future is here, and it can be female, it can be black, it can be transgender, it can be Jewish or Muslim (Campbellian orthodoxy and American xenophobia notwithstanding), it can be queer – it can be _fun_ again, and it can be serious again, and it _is_ glorious, and exciting, and I learn every day from those writers above, the living and the dead, may their smoke rise up forever.
I’d say that the Russ Pledge, and any movement towards bringing attention to women’s writing in SF (& by doing so combating creeping invisibility and suppression), is as important today as it’s ever been. Though the presence of women in the speculative field is undeniable throughout our history, when it comes to critical consideration like reviews, awards, et cetera, all of those talented women tend to disappear. When discussing the pulps/the “golden age,” for example, how many people will talk about the women who were writing? How many people even know there were women writing?
While I’m not going to say it hasn’t gotten better in recent years–it has–that’s because we’ve tried to make it so, by drawing attention to the fact that women writing SF are being erased in the critical arena. Sexism is rarely intentional–it’s cultural, and it’s hard to kick until you see it and acknowledge it. (Once seen, it can’t be unseen, either–Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing is quite the eye-opener in this regard, because it’s so very clear and concise.) Only further effort will continue the steps we’re making as a community toward recognizing as many women as we do men for the brilliant books they’re writing. Books like Helen Merrick’s The Secret Feminist Cabal, while focused specifically on feminist SF, also collect the history of women writing in the genre since its beginnings–damned important work, in my opinion.
On the less positive hand, the recent discussions in places like The Guardian about invisibility of women writers in SF go to show that there are still hurdles to clear when it comes to women writing in the speculative field getting the same kind of recognition that men do. It’s a life’s work, it is, but with things like the Russ Pledge we can all try to work toward a better future for the field.
Personal anecdote time: last December, I reviewed Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing for Tor.com. I’d encountered it in a search for more feminist science-fiction criticism, and it blew me away, so I wrote about it. The response to the review was one of the coolest, weirdest things I’ve experience so far in writing criticism–it spread. For days and weeks after that review went live, people were reposting, retweeting, emailing me, everything you can think of, talking about how they’d found the book through that review, or how it had reminded them of it, or how it put the book on their reading list. It was kind of awesome, seeing how the internet facilitated the spread of discussion about books like Russ’s.
But, the thing about all of that renewed interest and people asking where they could find How to Suppress Women’s Writing is that it ended up just underscoring the problems Joanna herself talked about in the book–guess what: it’s difficult to find in bookstores, because it’s no longer fully in print from the press and is only available as a print-on-demand title. The most important, cogent, incisive work I’ve ever read on the suppression of women’s writing is treading invisibility in its own way, unless we–as readers, as writers, as critics, as fans–keep it alive and remember it and recommend it to our friends. It’s a big responsibility, but one I think we can handle as a community.
(And maybe we could get to work on reprinting some other out-of-print texts, too, as folks like the wonderful Cheryl Morgan have suggested.)
What’s interesting about the Russ Pledge is not that it exists–it’s a tribute to a great luminary in the field who died recently, who would have been pleased with it, I think–but that it’s essentially gone viral. There’s been a rising awareness in recent years that science fiction, the literature of all that’s possible, has been remarkably limited in its human dimension. In short–mostly written by white American males, about issues that concern white American males, and evaluated and awarded and anthologized by still more white American males. This is reflected in lists of “greats” in the field. Women and minorities are seriously underrepresented.
That’s changing, and the Russ Pledge is an important part of it. Writers and readers and listmakers are stopping to think, and making new (and exciting and extensive) lists, and coming to the realization that not only have quite a few women been writing sf over the years, they’ve been writing it pretty damn well.
But inertia is a powerful force, and so is cultural conditioning. As long as we’re trained to minimize the importance of women’s work, we’ll continue to favor men’s work and downplay or disregard that of women.
I see the Russ Pledge not as (s)training myself to find a comparable woman writer for every male writer I list (at the risk of creating false equivalencies or marriages of convenience), but as asking myself, when I consider the landscape of the field, whether I’ve really seen the whole of it. Have even I, with my feminist leanings, committed a case of “The Women Men Don’t See”?
I want to open my eyes and really see. And if I do that, maybe others will, too. Then we’ll find ourselves in a much wider, more diverse, and more truly wonderful field than we already thought we had.
Talking about science fiction by women is important because women are half the world. SF as a genre will be stronger if women’s contribution is spread, talked about, and supported–as opposed to suppressed, ignored, or belittled. Diversity is strength. It’s that simple.
“We should take the pledge to make a considerable and consistent effort to mention women’s work which, consciously or unconsciously, has been suppressed.”
Why should we single out women’s writing? Surely they want to succeed on their own merits, as writers first not as women?
Well… how’s that been working out? Not too good, in fact. Treating women’s sf writing equally hasn’t been a resounding success. Since they were created, the Hugo Award for Best Novel has gone to 15 women out of 55, the BSFA Award to two women out of 42 – and these are the two largest popular-choice sf awards in the US and UK. But, I hear you ask, isn’t treating women sf writers differently, giving them preferential treatment, a form of discrimination? Er, no. It’s not discrimination to give women preferential treatment in your reading habits, but it *is* discrimination to refuse to read books because they were written by women. It’s not a level playing-field, and pretending it is does nothing to change that unfairness.
Most people’s views of sf were formed by the books they read when they entered the genre as young teenagers, the books that gave them their first hit of sense of wonder. They were typically indiscriminate readers then – I know I was – which is probably why Asimov’s blandly-written Foundation appears in so many lists of classic or great science fiction, and why (male) sf fans will happily excuse the appalling sexism in EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman series. And in the days those books were written, and for many decades following, the genre was indeed dominated by male writers – so women sf writers such as CJ Cherryh, CL Moore, MJ Engh and SN Lewitt chose to disguise their gender by using their initials. There was a perception that sf was for boys, and readers chose not to question that assumption – perhaps because they liked being part of a special club their sister could not, or would not, join. Which is rubbish, as there’s nothing inherently masculine about science fiction, just as there’s nothing inherently masculine about science, engineering or technology.
It’s still happening now, although the situation is worse in the UK than it is in the US – only two women sf writers are currently under contract with major publishers in the UK: Jaine Fenn and Tricia Sullivan. Yet the editorial staff at those publishers are mostly female. Publishers, however, only publish books that sell – the days of the midlist have long since gone – which suggests readers are simply not buying books by women writers. Even now, some, such as MM Bruckner, hide their gender behind their initials. If the playing field truly were level, or had levelled in the decades since a woman first won the Hugo (Ursula K Le Guin in 1970 for The Left Hand of Darkness), this shouldn’t be happening. Even CJ Cherryh, whose books I remember filling the shelves of WH Smith during the 1980s, is no longer published by a UK imprint. Perhaps it’s because books by women writers are not reviewed as often as those by men – Niall Harrison investigated this back in March and published his findings at Strange Horizons. The results indicated there is a problem: in the US 41.7% of books received by Locus were by women; in the UK, it was 37% (for the four months taken as samples). And yet, across all those review venues considered by Niall, only 29.6% of books reviewed were by women. You can see the full results here: http://www.strangehorizons.com/blog/2011/03/the_sf_count.shtml
Perhaps there’s a perception that all sf novels written by women are feminist. Though why this should be seen as a bad thing is beyond me. Is gender equality so frightening a prospect that men don’t even want to read books which discuss or comment on it? Except that can’t be the case, because men can write sf novels which are arguably feminist and no one complains – just look at the works of Robert Heinlein: he’s praised for his strong women characters, though they don’t actually appear all that feminist to me. On a recent Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4, Gwyneth Jones admitted she wished she had written her earlier sf novels under a male pseudonym, because “books by a significant male writer expressing feminist views would reach a much, much wider public”. And, “if you’re a feminist, it’s much better to be a man, with the science fiction public”.
Why should this be the case? What is it that’s so scary about a feminist sf novel written by a woman? Is it that it challenges firmly-held beliefs? But isn’t that what science fiction is all about, showing new ways of thinking about the world? It’s not as though implementing the Russ Pledge is a difficult thing to do. That conditioning from your early years reading sf is easy to break. All it takes is a conscious effort to remove the rose-tinted spectacles and take a proper look at the sf books that have been, and are being, published. All it takes is a conscious effort to buy, or borrow from a library, a science fiction novel or collection written by a female sf writer.
But that’s not enough, you need to do more. Review those books by women sf writers on your blog. If you’ve just read a great book by a woman sf writer, then tell everyone about it. Nominate those writers for awards, and vote for them when they’re shortlisted. That’s why I put together the sf mistressworks meme, that’s why I started up the SF Mistressworks blog (at http://sfmistressworks.wordpress.com/). But it’s not something I should be doing on my own, it’s something we should *all* be doing, both men and women. Which is why you should spread the meme, and why the SF Mistressworks blog is open to reviews of relevant books – ie, sf, published before 2000, woman writer (500 words or more, please).
Things need to change, and they won’t change by themselves. It’s time for people to do something. Take the pledge.
When I first saw folks talking about the Guardian 500 list, I started drafting what is now a post I will never put up on my blog. I didn’t agree with what people were saying about the list. This isn’t an issue about invisibility, I wanted to say, so much as a problem of wording/question choice/etc. And in a lot of ways, I think that’s true in a very general sense. When you ask people for their favorite science fiction novel, you’re already working within an extremely limited perspective, one which depends on the responding audience (age, upbringing, first science fiction experiences, etc.). If the majority of your responding audience began reading science fiction with Golden Age texts, it’s very likely that their favorite novel is a Golden Age text, and that their exposure to books will be disproportionately oriented towards male fiction by default. That doesn’t necessarily mean that said audience never reads books by women, just that their favorite book happens to be by a man (likely because their favorite book is also the book that got them into SF in the first place).
But when I started formulating all of that, it dawned on me that I was talking about something I didn’t know anything about. The Guardian 500 list was chosen almost exclusively by British readers, a segment of the world’s population that I cannot profess to know enough about to give anything approaching an informed opinion. And when I started to dig into the reality of the situation, it became clear that some British SF readers have a history of snooty behavior towards anything approaching a “feminist” discussion about gender in SF (plus: very few female writers are published in the U.K.). I don’t know if the list would change drastically if the same question were posed to U.S. readers. I’m leaning towards “probably not,” but I think that will have a little more to do with the question and limits of perspective than a continued history of silence and/or outright anti-woman opinions/behavior. That’s not to say that there isn’t a long history of anti-woman opinions/behavior in the U.S. (reading about Congress for a week will prove this). But when part of your reading community is saying things like, “well, women don’t write as well as men,” you have a huge problem that needs addressing regardless of where you live.
Which brings me to the Russ Pledge. I confess that I have never read Russ’ book on women’s writing, but Nicola Griffith is right on the money when she says we (in the SF community) need to talk about women writers. However, I think we need to be careful not to highlight women writers because they are women writers, which, to me, essentializes their gender and adds fuel for the “they’re not as good as men” camp (I believe Nicola wants to avoid this too, since her post says we should talk about women alongside men). We need to talk about female writers as great authors who just so happen to have inherited the right set of genes to make them women. Because equality has to arise from removing the conditions of exceptionalism and essentialization from *all* genders. The most important aspect of the Russ Pledge is that it aims to change the dynamic, but it can’t do that if it makes people think of women as a special case. And this is a hard thing to do, because there are people who will see the inclusion of a woman on a “best of” list or in a blog post about favorite female authors as being some kind of evil liberal feminist plot to make mediocre writing seem more important (their language, not mine). We might not be able to change their minds, but we can change what gets discussed in the community by, well, discussing works that damn well should be discussed.
And when you change what the community talks about, you change the publishing landscape. SF publishers are businesses. They follow the money. Sadly, the money in SF is more often than not centered on books by people who were “fortunate enough” to be born as men. This is a hangup from an older time when men were “in charge,” and it persists because the readership has always been exposed to writers of the male persuasion, despite a rich history of excellent writers of the female persuasion. And if the SF community isn’t reviewing, tweeting, and blogging about books that happen to be written by women, we’re left with a self-perpetuating cycle of silence about such writers. The Russ Pledge is, at its most basic, a challenge to this structure. It’s up to us to do something about the future of publishing by, well, talking about women authors. And, maybe, looking at what our friends are saying and trying someone new.
But what do I know? I’m just a crazy immoral liberal pinko commie socialist wacko…
Related posts:
- MIND MELD: Today’s SF Authors Define Science Fiction (Part 1)
- MIND MELD: Today’s SF Authors Define Science Fiction (Part 2)
- MIND MELD: How Important is Plausible Science In Science Fiction?
- MIND MELD: Science Fiction Series
- MIND MELD: The Future of Written Science Fiction
Filed under: Mind Meld
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I wasn’t advocating 50/50. I personally decided to go 50/50 because 1) the previous was about 95/5 in favor of men and 2) it’s easy to remember the gender of the author I last read and pick the opposite gender on the next book.
I probably have 30 or so must read books on my radar and I’d say it’s about 2/3′s male. Not to mentions huge lists of “good” books, e.g. Hugo and Nebula award winners and nominees, etc. that I’m slowly working my way through.
I read the Russ Pledge as “read whatever you want from the set of things that you ‘like’ but make an attempt to broaden what the set of things that you ‘like’ includes”. It’s a pledge not a blood oath.
I’m quite happy to take the Russ Pledge, and was curious as to how well I’d done in the last few years. Fortunately I have the data to hand, as since 2007 I’ve been logging the books I’ve completed (all books, including novels, collections, anthologies, book-length novellas and non-fiction, also beta-reads of unpublished novels – three of which were SF novels by two British-based female writers, none of which has been published as yet, though the writer of two of them is agented) in that year. In an effort to reduce the ever-looming TBR pile I set myself the target of reading fifty books a year. Obviously much of these lists is not SF or fantasy.
At first thought I think I’ve done okay. The author I have read more books by than any other alive or dead is a woman, namely Joyce Carol Oates. But anyway, I’ve now opened my spreadsheets and I’ll see how I did do.
2007 – 38 books, 16 by women (not so good, that year)
2008 – 51 books, 25 by women + one female/female/male collaboration
2009 – 49 books, 25 by women + two female/male collaborations + 1 female/female collaboration
2010 – 54 books, 34 by women
2011 so far – 22 books, 10 by women
As for discussing them, I have written book reviews in the past and some of the above were review copies. For various reasons I’m not actively seeking book review work at the moment, but one publisher has so far sent me four (unsolicited) review copies. Three are by men; the fourth is under an initialled byline. (A quick Google tells me that it’s the work of a man and a woman in collaboration.) What this says about that publisher and what they think I would like to review, I can only speculate. The name on the press release as the marketing contact, by the way, is female.
Apart from that, some more of my reading is, in effect, chosen for me. Last year and this, I’ve made a point of reading the BSFA Award novel shortlist, and that has made up a large proportion of my (adult) SF reading at novel length. In 2010 there was one novel by a woman on a shortlist of four. This year, there were two out of five. In both years, a man won. I’ve also been tracking the Carnegie Medal shortlists since 2009 – this is for children’s/YA novels in all genres, not only SF or fantasy. 2009 – two by women out of seven, one of those two being the eventual winner. 2010 – three women out of eight with a male winner. 2011 – three out of six, prize not yet awarded. This is no doubt proper to a different discussion as to what appears on award shortlists and what wins.
I no doubt need to read more SF, including SF by women writers. Actually I need to read more books, and wish I could read faster.
Only adding my voice to the chorus of people seconding Nora Jemisin’s comment.
How many women vs. men are published in the SF genre as a whole? I mean, is the list as disproportionate as it seems, or are we just tallying numbers without looking at proper percentages? To be honest most women I know aren’t interested in hard SF — I know I may get in trouble for saying that– but I struggle to find other women who like to read the fantasy/sf stuff I like. So I’d guess there are fewer overall female SF writers in the field.
I also wonder how many of the guy bloggers here read blogs written by women– as an example. I’ve been a little bit on the receiving end of some dismissive attitudes from a few male bloggers, though never from other women. I admit it, I sometimes feel left out of the club. Should I insist male bloggers give more thought to reading female written blogs? I know, silly example. But there’s something about this discussion that makes me wary. I always figured I failed or succeeded on my own merits.
And Daniel beat me to my original thought. I do believe that paranormal fiction is predominately written by women. Should there be a pledge to give more thought to reading paranormal fiction written by men?
I was praising Catherine L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, and other female writers before Joanna Russ wrote and sold her first word; as an editor I’ve bought about as many stories from women as from men; of my 44 collaborators, 21 were women; and I resent anyone suggesting that I have praised or worked with or bought from anyone on the basis of gender, or that I -should- praise anyone on that basis.
– Mike Resnick
Mike, nobody needs to say it to you, and if anybody is, I’ll kick them for you. (Better. I’ll have one of my horses do it. Any particular planet you want them kicked to?) You were the one editor who never cared what I was “known” for. You’d just say, “I got an idea. You. Write about it.” I got to write all over the map and halfway to the sixth galaxy from the left, and have a a damned good time doing it.
I wish there were a lot more like you.
sgt, there are statistics; some have been quoted in the thread. What makes me wonder though is how much of those are skewed by the inability of writers to even get through the gate. It’s like the Jane Austen fanfic trend. A male writer had to do it before anyone even realized it could be a trend. Female writers had been trying for years and being told, “That’s just fanfic. Nobody wants it.”
As for men in paranormal, as with men in romance, I know a fair few writing under female names. But you know what? Both of those genres are regarded as fluff. Light entertainment. Not Serious. It’s still the same continuum. Do I think male writers should have parity? Do they want it? And if so, does parity actually mean they take over and the women writers land in their usual slot, three steps behind and dismissed as “not nearly as good”?
If the answer is no, and can be proved over time, GOOD. At this point, based on previous patterns? Um. Well.
Re: I do not know who dissed Mike but I agree with his statement.
Re: Nick Mamatas and his criticism of me saying, “You should not have participated in a poll with such haphazard sampling.” Mike before my rant, congradulations for winning The 2011 Hugo for Best Editor Long Form for Haikasoru-Viz Media. Well not announced yet but you will. Mike the Guardian asked for your favourite SF novel. They asked for NOVEL. They did not as for SF favourite WRITER. So you and your friends are making a fundamental error in critical thinking. It is called a Categorical Error. My favorite SF Novel is Neverness by David Zindell. But David Zindell is not my favourite WRITER. Maybe Hiroshi Yamamoto is. Maybe Chohei Kambayashi is. If the Guardian had asked for my favourite Fantasy NOVEL I would have given Lud-In-The-Mist by Hope Mirrless. But she is not my favorite Fantasy WRITER. Maybe Le Guinn is. Maybe Marha Wells is. And regarding “haphazard”, can you tell exactly what is haphazard about me selecting one NOVEL when I can not see the other NOVELS selected. And why are you being such a damn kill-joy. I like to answer polls. But if my selections are going to be conflated to allow some non-critical thinkers to make conclusions based on insufficient data or incorrect data maybe I will not engage in future polls. Although you did not complain when I selected The Stories of Ibis by Yamamoto as my favorite novel of the year. Nor did you complain when I entered a poll selecting Good Luck, Yukikaze as the novel I was most looking forward to reading in 2011. Nor did you complain when I selected Rocket Girls as one of the most enjoyable and scientifically accurate novels of 2010. Nor did you but that’s enough. And Nick you are near UC, USF, and Stanford. Show a statistics professor the original Guardian Request, the results, and the comments and if his remarks do not change your stand I would be surprised. The Guardian results can not be made to support the Russ pledge. The Russ Pledge can stand on its own feet. Finally I have bought eight of your SF NOVELS fron Haikasoru. You give no bios on your Authors. You give no genders. If some of your great authors are females aren’t you being remiss in not sharing that with us? And no I have not gone to wikipedia to look up that information. I buy a book by reading the first three pages, looking at the cover, judging how well made physically the book is, and lastly look for the editors name. When I do that I usually end up buying a Haikasoru book and I do it never knowing the gender of the author and I do not think that would influence me in any way at all.
I went to dinner tonight with friends, of whom two men and two women read some science fiction but aren’t into the community. I told them about what was happening currently with gender discussions and this monster thread in particular. A lot of the points they raised were points made here by others. None of us were at either end of the political spectrum on this. One couple brought up the idea that hardly any women were writing science fiction back in the day and I found myself trying to explain the basic thoughts behind Russ’ book as I understand them since I’ve only heard about it from others and haven’t read it myself. At that, the other guy said her point was proven by the fact that he read about Amy Thomson’s The Color of Distance on i09 and couldn’t find a copy to read. This lead to my biggest surprise of the evening: I’ve been reading science fiction since the early eighties and had no idea who Amy Thomson was! And she won the flippin’ Campbell! Amy, if you’re out there, I’m sorry.
Overall, awareness was raised all around the table.
@Judith
But if men are having to write under psedonyms, wouldn’t that argue that women are perceived at being better at paranormal fiction? I’ve talked to men who have submitted romance manuscripts to find that their work won’t be printed under their real name for the same reason. Disparities exist favoring both sexes depending on the genre.
I actually think N.K. Jemisin’s comment actually illustrates why these discussions aren’t very fruitful much of the time. If people are accused of sexism– or any other “ism” and they don’t feel they deserve the label, then they’re going to rebel and the result is the exact opposite of what you wanted in the first place.
@sgt
“If people are accused of sexism– or any other “ism” and they don’t feel they deserve the label, then they’re going to rebel and the result is the exact opposite of what you wanted in the first place.”
I know what you’re getting at here — but — if someone is sexist, and someone points out this fact to them, then their negative response isn’t really “rebelling”; they’re staying exactly the same. It’s not the *accuser’s* problem if they dig in their heels. They were doing that already.
It’s like saying one ought not to call a racist a racist because he/she might “rebel” and — um — keep being a racist. The accusation isn’t *causing* the damn racism. Nor is it the accuser’s responsibility to take into account the racist’s delicate feelings in the matter.
The reaction of the accused is their own responsibility.
Actually, this suggests to me a positive flip side of Jemisin’s comment. The resentful, intemperate, huffy, whacked-out responses that invariably appear in threads like this serve to demonstrate just how entrenched the problem still is. That’s useful.
There’ve got to be better ways of talking about these issues than those exemplified by this thread, most of which is mired in rhetoric and bloviation and name-calling. This is just utterly depressing. JeffV
Always love these kinds of discussions. So, so many ways in which to view and analyze this issue, which invariably leads you to different, but not disparate conclusions. I happen to write Urban Fantasy (at least that is what it’s shelved and marketed as, despite my insistence that it’s actually paranormal crime fiction, but that’s another arguement for another day). Or maybe not. Is it just me, or does it seem that there is a bias of some kind in all genre fiction. I use my initials to disguise gender, though it’s easy enough to see who I am if one bothers to look. UF is dominated by female writers. Because of it’s ties to paranormal romance, there is a perception that UF is written pretty much by and for women. There are a fair number of male UF writers, but I’m not so sure there’s really gender bias going here as much as there is marketing bias on the part of publishers. Romance sells better than any other genre fiction. It makes financial sense that they would do this, regardless of the slew of issues around a genre being written by and for women.
I don’t know a lot about sf, other than my favorite sf story was written by a woman. It does however strike me as a genre that has historically been written by and for males. It seems that this dichotomy plays itself out in genre fiction in general. It’s a hard mold to break. One way to fight against it of course is to do what you can to pass on word-of-mouth recommendations for works done by authors of who are in the minority of any genre. Kids need to grow up seeing authors of both genders in any given genre. Schools need to actively cultivate this. Publishers, I think, are in a difficult position, regardless of what they would prefer to do. Making a conscious effort to promote authors in the minority is all well and good unless you can’t meet your financial obligations. I suspect publishers could do more in this area without losing money. Librarians likely could. I can’t believe they’re all fighting for gender equality in genre fiction.
All of this is pretty difficult though, when most aren’t even aware there’s an issue. Folks have to know what they’re looking at in order to be proactive. Just telling people to read more women in sf because there’s bias, won’t do much. There needs to be more.
Maybe we need to go the real root of the problem and read Dorothy Sayers’ Are Women Human?
Hi Honey,
Thank you for your kind words as regards Haikasoru. (I think the smart money is on Lou Anders for the Hugo this year though.) We actually do give bios of our authors in the back pages of their books, and on our site. Two of our authors so far have been female, another female author’s book is literally on my desk right now.
It’s always good to check out stuff with someone knowledgable about statistics. Were I to show a professor the Guardian poll, he or she would likely agree with me that the sampling was haphazard. “Haphazard sampling” is a term of art in statistics—it means a group selected without any rules. So a bunch of people coming across the Guardian blog and saying, “Oh boy, I’m gonna write in my favorite book now!” to themselves is haphazard. Nobody all that concerned with statistical purity would participate in such a poll. It’s not like applying “basic statistics” to a poll with haphazard sampling would help now, eh?
This conversation started with a discussion of the treatment of women writers in the sf field, based on a set of statistical data*, and ended up discussing the treatment of men in a particular (and disrespected) subfield, based on anecdotal evidence with neither sales figures nor review information to back it up, with plentiful diversions into “You’re enforcing quotas!”, “I don’t consider gender when I read and I don’t know how many female writers I read, “I don’t consider gender when I read and my purely personal taste is formed in a vacuum entirely unaffected by any social forces around me and the exact same vacuum surrounds decisions about what gets published and how it gets marketed and what constitutes valuable aesthetic elements,” and “I personally publish lots of women, so I don’t have to consider the problem.”
I’m pointing these things out not because I consider any of the commenters bad people or people who consciously think that women or women’s work is inferior to men’s. I’m pointing them out because they are classic avoidance techniques which are entirely typical in conversations about gender disparities and sexism, including many science fiction has been having for over 50 years (to judge by the essays of Joanna Russ and Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, among other works), and that I personally have witnessed many times over the past 10 years online.
Or, as Nora Jemisin said more succinctly, not many women are showing up here because we’ve had these conversations before and we’re really tired of them. It’s about time more men picked up the slack.
* I would personally go with the Strange Horizon counts for sf/f or the VIDA counts for mainstream literary works over the Guardian blog, but the numbers in the Guardian comments are certainly off enough to make a point.
Nick I still think you will get the Hugo. Anyone who has read as many of your Haikasoru books as I have would have to vote for you And congradulations on winning the Stoker. But please do what I asked. You will not convince me otherwise. I just participated in another poll at SF Signal. It asked for the three NOVELS or SERIES that I would like to see produced by HBO. Now Nick there is nothing haphazard about that. But if you get 500 responses and someone bean counts and says the same thing they said on the Guardian pole, then it becomes haphazard and the bean counters are at fault not the individuals such as me who are doing what SignalPost asked us to do. Once again if you single out the WRITERS and ignore the NOVELS I insist you are making a Categorical Error. If you ever make it to the statistics professor let me know. I would do it myself but I am afraid you would say I selected the mathematician I knew that would give me the desired result. My significant other just walked by and said, “GIVE IT A REST.”
Honey—that is haphazard as anyone who wanders by SF Signal can respond to the poll. It’s not sufficiently randomized.
I just explained this entire situation to the two men who lived in my house and asked, “What on earth is wrong with these men who are getting all bent out of shape because they’re being asked to recommend and mention good women writers?”
The response I received from husband was, “Well, it’s probably because they’re sexist, and they’re getting Bent out of shape because they feel defensive.”
Son, “Yeah, they’re guilty.”
Morgan Dempsey and N. K. Jemisin, you rock my world! Let’s get together and swap books (under suitably discrete gender neutral pen names).
“I just explained this entire situation to the two men who lived in my house and asked, “What on earth is wrong with these men who are getting all bent out of shape because they’re being asked to recommend and mention good women writers?”
The response I received from husband was, “Well, it’s probably because they’re sexist, and they’re getting Bent out of shape because they feel defensive.”
Son, “Yeah, they’re guilty.”
See it’s this kind of bullshit along with “If you support the status quo, you are sexist. End of story.” [implication: if you disagree with me you support the status quo].
I support the original pledge, and I already read a widely balanced set of new books, and I agree with the aims of the pledge, but none of that justifies this kind of sloppy thinking.
People, you are not mind readers. You may know what people have said but you don’t know why they’ve said it. And if the reason why you think they’ve said it is something incredibly self-serving such as: “My logical and self-evident arguments have tweaked an evil within you, one you don’t even know you believe, and that’s why you disagree with me” then you need to ask yourself some questions:
1) How do I know they haven’t just got hold of the wrong end of the stick? Maybe they genuinely think this is a call for quotas or some similar thing
2) Maybe they are seeing implications that were not intended. [Such as "and therefore you are an evil sexist]
3) Maybe they are responding to other people’s comments in favour of the idea which have added incorrect implications [Such as "and therefore you are an evil sexist]
4) Maybe they are seeing implications that were not intended in other people’s comments. [Such as "and therefore you are an evil sexist]
5) Maybe they are arguing for one of the <i>infinite</i> numbers of reasons that are possible, which I cannot possibly expect to “know” as <b>I cannot read minds!</b>
Having considered all that it should be obvious that you can call people out for things they’ve actually said (though they can retract them or clarfiy what they meant to say later and you should acknowledge that) and not for mind reading claims about their inner nature which therefore damn them for even arguing the point.
Honestly, it’s as bad as seeing religious people say “Well, it’s probably because they’re [sexist] immoral, and they’re getting Bent out of shape because they feel defensive” – it’s a shit argument then and it’s a shit one now.