I suspect that it's more lazy editing - the writer wouldn't have chosen the photograph or, probably, the headline.
And there's a hint of a connection to the article's topic, since Walter mentions Mary Shelley, and this picture is taken from the recent theater production of Frankenstein.
Honestly? I would have thought a lot, but I could be wrong.
And in a way I do think that the picture illustrates the article's point. I'm trying to think of a sufficiently recognizable woman whose picture would be even tangentially related to the article's topic, and I'm drawing a blank.
You know there are people who try to claim she didn't write it? Because it's famous and women cannot have written famous books. Other people defend her authorship by claiming it's kind of a crap book and of course women can have written those.
Oh, come now! Frankenstein was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley! He was under a bit of a cloud in the UK at the time for being an Atheist so he published it under her name!
Do you suppose that Gabriel Rossetti wrote Goblin Market or are women allowed to be poets?
Nice. I hadn't thought of that. I wanted a nicely clear image I could use that seemed freely repostable and not ginormously huge, and the Google Books image seemed as close to that as I could get. If you have an alternative that doesn't doink her last name, I would be happy to be pointed at it.
Professor Jim Machor at Kansas State tried to teach us that when I was his student in the mid 1990s. In fact, he would pull crap like assigning the female students "women's books" for their final papers, and teaching books like The Lamplighter to surreptitiously prove that women all wrote junk that was popular but without merit.
I figured it wasn't an accident that Machor was "accidentally" spelled "Mac Hor" in our course listings the entire time I attended KSU.
I could criticise it for being over clever, but yeah, I think most skiffy fans are aware that Mary Shelley invented the genre and would get the Frankenstein connection at some point while reading the article, even if they're not aware that media heart-throb Cummerbund was performing the role currently.
bruce munro (from livejournal.com)2013-08-08 09:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Me three: I thought "some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario" at first look, because since when does Frankie Jr. have 1 giant scar randomly running slantways across his face like that? Did the good doctor have some sort of peculiar cavalry-saber related accident while putting him together? Don't know what's with the "bald" look, either...
It was, but annoyingly, the day I saw it both Cumberbatch and Naomie Harris who played Elizabeth were ill and I saw understudies. Miller played the creature, as in this picture.
Incidentally, I think Miller and Cumberbatch should swap roles between Sherlock and Elementary occasionally.
It was a fairly prominent UK theatre production, and the Guardian is a UK-based newspaper, so I think it's not completely off-base for them to assume readers would get the reference.
(Also, the actual story has a caption for the image, which explains what it's from.)
I only knew it because I was aware that Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller were in Danny Boyle's FRANKENSTEIN play a couple seasons ago, in which they traded off roles as the Monster and Frankenstein.
So... yeah. I recognized it from CONTEXT, not from anything inherent.
Yes, and I guess that might be sad for people who don't actually read the article, or at least the caption for the photo, and who also have no sense of irony.
ulie Crisp of Tor books – one of the UK's leading SF imprints – added to the discussion recently with a data-driven blogpost that seemed to shift the responsibility back to women writers. Of 502 manuscripts submitted to Tor, only 32% were from women, and those which were submitted were predominantly fantasy – either epic or urban – not science fiction.
Well, that's strange, I thought it was because women sci-fi authors didn't sell in the UK?
Although, if the publishers have been putting that about — as they were at EasterCon a year or so ago — then it's no wonder that they're not getting many manuscripts from women.
For this discussion, useful numbers that are not simply context-free statistics for the overarching categories of fantasy and science fiction (NB there is obviously slosh between the categories, but most works will trend toward one or the other) would include:
-M/F breakdown of slush pile manuscripts over, say, 25 or 30 years (to encompass pre-digital, traditional publishing)
-M/F breakdown of agented submissions, same time period
-M/F breakdown of acceptances, both of those categories
-M/F breakdown of high, low, median, and mean advances paid to authors
-M/F breakdown of in-house costs (to resolve the question of whether publishers support authors differently by sex), similarly with high, low, median, and mean amounts spent
-M/F breakdown of sales figures
Because this is really about money. About whether women are getting the same access to an income-producing opportunity as men, or whether bias is affecting the overall likelihood that a woman who writes science fiction will be published at Tor.
Don't tell me those numbers are hard to get. Money is tracked. With computers, even. The slush numbers will be tricky, but someone must keep track of names and initials-only authors can be either split down the middle between the two groups, excluded altogether, or assigned otherwise. If slush numbers aren't available, perhaps this is something a publisher should be thinking about looking at. If women are not even bothering to send a publisher work, that publisher may have a problem they don't want to own up to.
Someone on the flist pointed out, incidentally, that the production illustrated decided that Frankenstein would be improved by the Creature graphically raping Elizabeth before killing her.
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bruce munro (from livejournal.com)2013-08-08 09:34 pm (UTC)(link)
It used to be jello that there was always room for...
I only discovered it after reading a couple of his books, the second of which had a female protag. Don't remember where I learned it, but it wasn't obvious to me just from the name.
The first unit, Adam, was not merely given masculine pronouns but was sufficiently operationally male that he wanted a wife, and Dr. Frankenstein thought this was biologically practical...although it eventually occurred to him that building a wife out of spare parts might not be a good idea.
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bruce munro (from livejournal.com)2013-08-09 03:55 am (UTC)(link)
Early 19th knowledge of genetics betrayed him - if he'd known about DNA, he would be aware that if Adam and (Eve?) did manage to mate, they'd produce perfectly normal human brats.
(I once imagined a setting for a surviving race of Frankensteins: their kids are killed and revived at adolescence as a "rite of passage" not all of them make it through...)
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2013-08-08 12:48 pm
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And there's a hint of a connection to the article's topic, since Walter mentions Mary Shelley, and this picture is taken from the recent theater production of Frankenstein.
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Intentional or not, it does fit the topic quite well.
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And in a way I do think that the picture illustrates the article's point. I'm trying to think of a sufficiently recognizable woman whose picture would be even tangentially related to the article's topic, and I'm drawing a blank.
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;)
Yes, I think a picture of Sigourney Weaver wielding a flame-thrower would have had sufficient recognition.
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(Anonymous) 2013-08-09 08:18 pm (UTC)(link)William Hyde
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Do you suppose that Gabriel Rossetti wrote Goblin Market or are women allowed to be poets?
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I figured it wasn't an accident that Machor was "accidentally" spelled "Mac Hor" in our course listings the entire time I attended KSU.
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Incidentally, I think Miller and Cumberbatch should swap roles between Sherlock and Elementary occasionally.
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(Also, the actual story has a caption for the image, which explains what it's from.)
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So... yeah. I recognized it from CONTEXT, not from anything inherent.
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Well, that's strange, I thought it was because women sci-fi authors didn't sell in the UK?
Although, if the publishers have been putting that about — as they were at EasterCon a year or so ago — then it's no wonder that they're not getting many manuscripts from women.
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-M/F breakdown of slush pile manuscripts over, say, 25 or 30 years (to encompass pre-digital, traditional publishing)
-M/F breakdown of agented submissions, same time period
-M/F breakdown of acceptances, both of those categories
-M/F breakdown of high, low, median, and mean advances paid to authors
-M/F breakdown of in-house costs (to resolve the question of whether publishers support authors differently by sex), similarly with high, low, median, and mean amounts spent
-M/F breakdown of sales figures
Because this is really about money. About whether women are getting the same access to an income-producing opportunity as men, or whether bias is affecting the overall likelihood that a woman who writes science fiction will be published at Tor.
Don't tell me those numbers are hard to get. Money is tracked. With computers, even. The slush numbers will be tricky, but someone must keep track of names and initials-only authors can be either split down the middle between the two groups, excluded altogether, or assigned otherwise. If slush numbers aren't available, perhaps this is something a publisher should be thinking about looking at. If women are not even bothering to send a publisher work, that publisher may have a problem they don't want to own up to.
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Ow, ow, ow!
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(I once imagined a setting for a surviving race of Frankensteins: their kids are killed and revived at adolescence as a "rite of passage" not all of them make it through...)
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