Will women be erased from SFF's memory, yet again?

[james_davis_nicoll]

I want to take a step away from politics to talk about the "only men write SFF, look at the shelves at any bookstore!" thing for a moment...

— Sandstone (@quartzen) July 11, 2017

Comments

[kjn]

Yes, unless things change.

The erasure is a continuous and on-going process. Even if more women have managed to break through to awareness within sff fandom (amorphous as it is) lately than earlier, the process still works against them.

[dewline]

Aaaaaaaaghhh!!!

Willful Idiots are still trying to roll back the clock.

[graydon]

Wrong model.

Very focused people with high status want to maintain the existing power structures because any change in those structures mean they lose. (If you're at the top of the heap, all change is loss.) They've got more money (and thus time; they can hire lives and lives worth of time...) and thus personal decisions aren't sufficient in scale to be efficacious without structural change.

(If you want personal decisions to be economically meaningful, you need a political system that imposes income and asset caps, quite low ones relative to the (lower of) mean or median incomes.)

[undomielregina]

Ugh, it's so baffling and frustrating to me that it's reverted to this. I came of age as a reader/fan in a very particular moment in the 90s, and while the paradigm then wasn't really any less sexist than what we have now, it did at least involve a lot more women. Because when I started really reading fantasy, specifically, it was the "girl" genre, where SFF was the male one. I can still name a large number of female fantasy writers, many of them securely midlist, because that's what fantasy looked like. And I feel like that switched back with Game of Thrones getting huge and the grimdark boom in general, and it really bums me out.

It's not like that status quo was without its problems, because I remember a very strong split in genre valuation between fantasy, where the idea was that it was the "soft" genre for women, and the "objectivity" and "seriousness" of SF because it was based in facts and not impossible magic. But at least there were women writing visibly, everywhere, on all the bookstore shelves... except, I suppose, the ones that would carry SF but not F because only SF met their standards for seriousness, which I did see in some indies from time to time. (Also, quite selfishly, the modern status quo irritates me because I love the type of fantasy that was ascendant back then, even when it was objectively pretty terrible rather than the cream of the crop, and I resent that it's harder to find now.)

[thewayne]

I bought a supporting membership to Worldcon this year. Four of the six Hugo Best Novel nominees are women, and three of them are awesome. One of them I flat-out did not like and stopped reading, but that's my taste. My #1 pick is a woman, a guy got #2, the other guy came in at #5 because his first book previously got a Hugo. Best novella: is split with three guys, three women. A guy didn't come in until #3 for my vote.

Novelette? Ignoring Stix, it has five women in the category and I'm voting for the five women.

While I don't care who writes what I read, such a statement that only men write SFF is clearly rubbish. Bujold has been a favorite of mine for ages, as has Macavoy, Cherryh, Macaffrey. And let's talk Cixin Liu, Yoon Ha Lee, Becky Chambers, Ada Palmer?! So much that I've read of the Hugo nominees just blew me away! I was so happy that so much of it was not written by men!

Another one that's new to me is Seanan McGuire: I'm about to download her October Daye omnibus. I know she's been around for a while, but she's new to me. Malka Older is another that's a "just wow!" for me, and she's up for a Campbell.

Definitely buying another Supporting for next year, and MUST start reading earlier! Dunno if I'm going to be able to get through the Campbell material by the end of the week!