THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF SF STORIES BY WOMEN Edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane for/m

[james_davis_nicoll]

Table of Contents (and Cover): THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF SF STORIES BY WOMEN Edited by Alex Dally MacFarlane

            Total     Female    Male  Mu  f/t
TOC          33         33       0        1.0
Cover art                        1        0.0  
Total        34         33       1        .97

Comments

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

"It's the book of stories by women, not cover art by women," he mansplained.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

That does rather seem like a missed opportunity, though.

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the fact that if the pictured woman's deliberately bared camera-facing back with a slightly glowing brand(? tattoo?) is supposed to be some kind of satirical commentary on the cliched "back to the camera and showing off a tramp stamp" pose that was so popular on paranormal romance book covers up until quite recently, I don't think it really works. For one thing, the basic composition of the picture as a whole is too complicated and involves too many cryptically mysterious elements. Unless the cover artist got to read all or most of the stories from the collection and managed to incorporate elements from a bunch of different ones into a single image, which will only really make sense once the person looking at the book has read those stories too.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

At the risk of being called names and accused of being a bad feminist again, the entire idea of a female-only compendium as an answer to complaints of a lack of gender diversity in prior compendiums is beyond offensive to me. Knowing the artist was male doesn't improve my opinion of this any; in fact, it makes it sound even more like an attempt to retain the status quo except for the bare minimum of female names necessary to achieve the desired public appearance.