While I like to see articles lauding Leckie

[james_davis_nicoll]

It seems to me the author of this one hews too closely to the standard forms used when writing about successful women.

For example, the photo of John Scalzi used in this article on Ann Leckie didn't have "John Scalzi, husband and writer" under it, it had "Sci-fi blogger and author John Scalzi is a big fan of Leckie", whereas Leckie's photo got (in part) with "St. Louis mother and first-time novelist.

Passages like

The first Nebula was given to Frank Herbert's Dune in 1966. Over the next thirteen years, only two awards for Best Novel went to a woman — both to Ursula K. Le Guin. That trend began to change in the late 1980s as more and more women began publishing. Since 2000 the gender split for Nebula winners, which is also awarded for novellas and short stories, has been about 50-50. But that hardly means we've arrived at a post-sexism literary world.

suggest the author means well, despite falling short.

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

In general, in fact, you can play 'How to Suppress Women's Writing' bingo with articles about Leckie -- this isn't unusual. I remember it too with Audrey Niffenegger when "The Time Traveller's Wife" came out. People just couldn't cope with 'it's a jolly good book and people like it a whole lot' -- they had to deconstruct it in ways that belittled it.

Does this happen with male first-time novelists? (Hint: no.)

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest it certainly happens in one regard: when a genre writer writes a book that might be of sufficient quality to approach "real fiction"¹, similar tropes get hauled out to belittle the work. And in a [per|re]verse way as well, when a "real author" stoops to doing "genre work" there's all sorts of limboing going on to (a) belittle the piece as slumming, not "really serious", obviously a "bit of a vacation" etc, and/or (b) use it as a cudgel to demonstrate how the rest of the authors who inhabit this neighbourhood couldn't ever possibly be so awesome and thus deserve never to rise out of the ghetto².

But, I also think that, in these cases, it's a matter of class/artist-type/genre and not necessarily a matter of gender (and oddly, I might even suggest that it's easier for women or minorities to get away with this kind of thing anyway, because "everyone knows they're not really capable of serious work anyway, so we can understand that they'd play around like this." which, I realize, makes your point admirably, as well.)

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¹ -- this is a phrase describing perception, not reality - that is "the defenders of quality" for some reason decide that a work has presumptions to "quality" and thus line up for the smack down because, geez, no genre work shall pass, etc, etc.

² -- viz McCarthy's The Road and anything remotely genre written by Margaret Atwood; viz nearly anything written by Michael Chabon.