Most writers would agree that if you want to write mysteries, you’ve got to read mysteries; if you want to write westerns, you’ve got to read westerns; if you want to write romances, you’ve got to read romances. But for some reason, the you’ve-got-to-read-it rule often seems to go out the window—or out the airlock—for science fiction. I’d hate to think this is because some people feel once they’ve seen Alien or Star Wars, they’re good to go.
The other problem with genre published outside our walls is often the writers and/or publishers don’t want it included in the genre. I was a judge for the Clarke Award the year The Road by Cormac McCarthy was published. The publisher refused to submit the book to the judges—they didn’t want the genre taint. They did not want it considered for a science fiction award because it wasn’t science fiction, they said. And how many times have we read that this or that book or movie or TV series isn’t science fiction because “it’s about something that could really happen”?
And sometimes, it’s just the critics or the publishers who feel that way—the writers themselves are more open. Kazuo Ishiguro came to the Clarke Award event the year he was nominated, even though he had no idea whether he was going to win or not. I was in a group of people talking to him and he actually asked how we felt about an “outsider” showing up. We all told him we were really glad he was there, that his book was wonderful, and wished him good luck. He didn’t win, but I guess he had a good time. When the British Library put on the big science fiction exhibition a few years ago, he showed up for that, too. He came to the inaugural evening and I saw him running from one exhibit to the next with his son. He told me he was thrilled, he loved seeing so many wonderful things: Some he was familiar with, some he’d only heard about, and some that were completely new to him. This was the event where Margaret Atwood, formerly a genre denier herself despite having won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award ever, delivered a short speech via videotape about how wonderful the field is.
Ellen is right—we’ve got to be friendlier. Every time mainstream writers publish genre books, we should dispatch teams of fun commandos to welcome them into the fold and charm their socks off.
In the very early days of my career, before I even really had a career, I used to entertain serious fantasies of migrating from genre to Literaturia, a la Richard McKenna. Then I discovered that I didn’t want to write the holy scripture of Literaturia, I wanted to write genre.
And then I noticed something: While Literaturia is universally revered as producing the finest works of art, people look to popular culture—i.e., genre—for answers to most of their ethical and moral questions. Everything they ever needed to know, they have learned in kindergarten … and then from Star Trek. It was not Literaturia that spearheaded the change from screaming ingénue needing rescue by a brave, handsome male; it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, the Twi-hards came with sparkly immortal vampires and pale young women wanting to be killed, but Buffy’s Scooby gang laughed at them.
It was actually Robert Bloch who told me the Secret of Life—or at least the Secret of My Life—one night at a Florida literary conference in 1980. He said, “Very few people can tell you who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1976. But ask who won the Hugo Award for Best Novel that same year and thousands of people will shout, ‘Joe Haldeman, The Forever War!’”
In Literaturia, they give each other awards and then forget. They get their names in the paper and then forget. Our books are handed down from one generation to the next, from one enthusiast to another. We don’t forget as easily.
Mary: What this conversation makes me aware of is that while it might seem that the same battles are being fought over and over, each victory shapes the field. My generation of writers entered with the expectation of being treated as equals in science fiction and fantasy, because that is the precedent that women had fought for. When we discover that it is still not the case, being told that it’s better than it used to be isn’t quite enough.
We write science fiction and imagine the future we want to live in. We want that future now.
Seeing how the field has changed gives me perspective on the future that I’m living in and, hopefully, will help women writing today continue to destroy science fiction for subsequent generations of writers.
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Pat Cadigan is a multi-award-winning author of science fiction. Her first collection, Patterns, was honoured with the Locus Award in 1990, and she has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1992 and 1995 for her novels Synners and Fools. Her novelette, “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi,” won the Hugo in 2013.
Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for almost thirty years. She was fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and SCIFICTION and has edited more than fifty anthologies, including the horror half of the long-running The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She currently acquires short stories for Tor.com, and is the editor for Nightmare’s Women Destroy Horror! special issue (due out October 2014).
Nancy Kress’s fiction has won four Nebulas (for “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” “Beggars in Spain,” “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” and “Fountain of Age”), two Hugos (for “Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), a Sturgeon (for “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Probability Space). Her work has been translated into Swedish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Croatian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, and Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. She also teaches regularly at summer conferences and has written three book about writing.
Ursula K. Le Guin has published twenty-one novels, eleven volumes of short stories, four collections of essays, twelve books for children, six volumes of poetry and four of translation, and has received many honors and awards including the Hugo, Nebula, National Book Award, and PEN-Malamud. Her most recent publications are Finding My Elegy (New and Selected Poems, 1960-2010) and The Unreal and the Real (Selected Short Stories), 2012.
Mary Robinette Kowal is the author of Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor, 2010) and Glamour in Glass (Tor, 2012). In 2008 she received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2011, her short story “For Want of a Nail” won the Hugo Award for Short Story. Her work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. Her stories appear in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, and several Year’s Best anthologies. Mary, a professional puppeteer, also performs as a voice actor, recording fiction for authors such as Elizabeth Bear, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi. She lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Visit maryrobinettekowal.com
Feature Interview: Kelly Sue DeConnick
Jennifer Willis
Kelly Sue DeConnick writes comic books for Image, Dark Horse, and Marvel. Her credits include Avengers Assemble, Pretty Deadly, Ghost, Supergirl, Captain Marvel, and the forthcoming Bitch Planet. She is married to writer Matt Fraction. They have two children, two cats, one dog, and the occasional backyard coyote. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
An outspoken feminist who grew up reading comics, DeConnick emphasizes that there aren’t nearly enough women writing comics—or working in science fiction and fantasy in general—but notes that the gender conversation is at least happening now. DeConnick may not have envisioned Carol Danvers as a purely feminist hero, but Carol’s transition from Ms. Marvel to Captain Marvel has sent (positive) shockwaves through the comics community. In a larger media culture in which “our bodies are not our own,” she laments that the idealized “broke-back” pose is still too common for female characters—sometimes even in her own comics—and laughs over some readers’ outrage that Captain Marvel is wearing pants.
Lightspeed caught up with DeConnick at her dining room table to get her take on sexism and feminism in comics and in sci-fi/fantasy, and to talk about storytelling, success, and the price of humanity.
• • •
How did you become interested in comics?
My dad was in the Air Force. I grew up on military ba
ses. Comics are very much a part of military culture, or they were at least in the ’70s. In the U.S., the dominant genre is the superhero. These are people who are giving their lives to service. There’s a patriotic aspect to a lot of our books. On base growing up, they took up a whole wall at the bookstore, Stars and Stripes. All the GIs read them. They were forty-five cents apiece. I’d spend like half of my allowance getting new comics, and the other half buying used comics at the swap meet on weekends.
What challenges have you encountered as a woman writing comics?
The thing that gets under my skin the most is the perception that somehow I followed my husband into the business. I’m married to another comic book creator (Matt Fraction), and he’s extraordinarily gifted and wrote for Marvel Comics for a number of years before I did. So the assumption is that he got me my work. We actually met because of a mutual interest in comics. We met on the Warren Ellis posting board. I read comics long before Matt became a part of my life. Because I was a writer in New York and because of who I was friends with, Matt was my plus-one to the Editor-in-Chief’s birthday party years before either one of us worked at Marvel. We each got there on our own merits. That’s a thing that’s a little maddening.
There was a kerfuffle a year or so ago because of a convention that we had been invited to. An Irish news site that was covering the convention listed the guests. In my bio, the first line was “wife of Matt Fraction.” No one else’s marital status was mentioned anywhere, including Matt’s. I very politely pointed it out and asked that it be changed. Friends of mine, having my back and being very sweet and very funny people, all decided that their bios should indicate their marital status to Matt Fraction. So everyone changed their bios on Twitter and Tumblr to indicate that they were not, in fact, the wife of Matt Fraction, in case we all needed to state that. [That] kind of took the edge off a little bit. I know nobody intended anything malicious, but it’s those little cuts, you know?
You don’t want to be a bitch. You don’t want to make people uncomfortable. But the older I get, the more comfortable I am making other people uncomfortable! (Laughs) It wasn’t a hundred years ago that women were basically chattel. Because women before me have been willing to make people uncomfortable, I have the privileges I have today. So maybe if I’m willing to make people uncomfortable, my daughter has a little bit less of a fight ahead of her.
When you were a kid, your favorite comics included Wonder Woman, Vampirella, and the Archie Digests. What are your favorites today?
My pat answer for my favorite comic is Planetary by Warren Ellis, although it would be a close call with [Neil Gaiman’s] Sandman. Those were the books where I felt like I was really discovering a new mythology, which scratches the same itch that Wonder Woman did when I was a kid.
How have female characters in comics changed since you were a kid?
For a while, we regressed. There were a lot of really progressive comics when I was a kid. I didn’t happen to read Ms. Marvel as I was growing up, but I’ve gone back and read a lot of Ms. Marvel from the ’70s now. Ms. Marvel was an overtly feminist comic, unapologetically so. People think I’m heavy-handed, but they got away with stuff I could never do!
Brian Bendis has been at the top of the industry for a number of years. Brian writes his female characters like women, like people, you know? And always has.
The dudes that assert that there is a male audience, that women are there to be avenged or rescued or anything else you could do with a lamp, are always going to write like that and are always going to make those assumptions about the market.
I have noticed that the conversation seems to be happening more. But I’m wondering if I’m in an echo chamber because of the way that social media works, which is where we tend to have these conversations today. I follow and am followed by people who are prone to having these conversations.
What’s on your project wish list for the next few years?
I want to write a novel. I have four ideas. I’ve talked to a couple of different novelists, friends of mine, as to what to start with. You know the first one’s probably not going to be very good! So do I want to save my favorite idea, or what? Apparently, I’m overthinking this. Chelsea Cain actually came over and sat down in my office and listened to me prattle on for a little while, and then really encouraged me. There was one [idea] she really lit up on, so that’s probably going to be the one I start with. And then we’ll see!
I’ve had “write a novel” on my ten-year list for like seven years. So I’m really going to have to start at some point.
It’s not like I’ve never written prose, but I’ve never written lengthy prose. Like, when I was a kid, I was on swim team. And I would also fantasize about, “Man, I wish I was a runner.” Because when you swim, you push your hand down and you don’t move that far forward. You lose effort to the water. And I always felt cheated by that. I just wanted to run. Like, if you push off with this much effort when you run, you go that far forward! So it’s always this “grass is always greener” thing.
In writing comics, I always feel like there’s water that slips through my fingers. But I have to have this frickin’ page turn right here! And so I don’t get to expand this scene as much as it really needs to be because the beat doesn’t work with the page turn, and there’s this artifice that feels like the things that go through my fingers. So there’s this fantasy I have that with a novel, I can pace it however I want! There are no page turns. Right now, because it’s nothing I’m working on at the moment except for taking some notes, it feels like just this decadent freedom.
I’m fairly certain that as soon as I’m into it, I will be longing for the structure of comics! (Laughs)
You were inspired by the Mercury 13 when reimagining Carol Danvers as Captain Marvel. Which others have influenced and informed your work?
Chuck Yeager is another big one on Captain Marvel. Specifically from the Mercury 13, Jerry Truhill and Jerrie Cobb. Truhill is more of an influence on the character Helen, but there’s DNA of both of those women and Yeager in my concept of Carol. The WASPs of World War II. Not any particular pilot, but their drive and a lot of the indignities that they suffered.
We call the relaunch of Captain Marvel “Higher, Further, Faster, More.” That’s kind of what all of those pilots share, that need to push boundaries. Swagger.
When [the WASPs] died in service, because they were not officially military pilots, because they were officially civilians, the service would not pay to send their bodies home. So the girls would take up collections. They were also not supposed to be buried with the flag and military honors, but most of the families said, “Fuck that,” and did it anyway.
That pissed me off to the point of tears. They were mistreated by their own colleagues. Jackie Cochran, who was the head of the [WASP] program, was bug-fuck crazy. But at one point there were apparently some male fliers who were not comfortable with the fact that there were women flying their planes, even though the women that were doing those jobs freed them up for combat positions. There was speculation that some of the women’s planes were being sabotaged, or given low priority for servicing. There was a death after a crash in Texas, I believe, and Jackie Cochran went to investigate and found no foul play. But then, years later, she said she had in fact uncovered sabotage, but that they had decided to cover it up for fear that it would end the program.
Jackie Cochran was Jackie Cochran, so you don’t know if that’s true or not. But if it is, someone got away with murder.
Have we reached a post-feminist world where characters—of any gender—can be simply who they are without the expectation of labels like “feminist”?
In a real-life context, I understand there is a movement to rebrand feminism or change the name. Maybe I am old, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. I’m a proud feminist. I’m not ceding to the people who use “feminazi.” You know what I mean? Feminism is about fairness. My husband is a feminist. My son is a feminist. It’s about fairness.
> Am I writing Captain Marvel as a feminist tome? I’m not. But I do think that’s at the core of her character. My conception of her is really about “pilot.” But if you go back, it’s why she was created—Ms. Marvel was an overt reference to Ms. Magazine. Some of the later issues, it’s like Gloria Steinem fanfic.
It’s not my main focus, but it’s not something I particularly shy away from.
What’s with the duck face?
At conventions, people freak when they want to take pictures with you. It’s a fun way to give us both something to do and end up with a silly picture. You don’t have to worry about trying to look pretty, because you’re making a duck face! I love that I am developing a gallery of duck face photos with people who are all much better looking than that face would have them appear. It’s an awkward moment for two strangers, you know? We can just do it and it’s fun and everybody can just kind of relax and chill.
What advice have you given to other women who aspire to work in comics?
The biggest thing is to make comics. A lot of people have this notion that they should start making comics when someone hires them to make comics, and that they should instead work on pitching comics. And that’s not really right. I’m not going to hire a plumber to fix my sink who’s never fixed a sink before, you know? You need to fix some sinks.
You can either draw your own or use photos or you can find an artist online and work together—find somebody who’s just starting out as well. And understand that you’re no genius and they’re not going to be a genius either. You learn and grow together. One of my favorite comic book pairings in the industry is Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. Their early comics are kind of stiff. I think there was tracing happening early on? But they’ve been working together for years, and now they’re making some of the best comics you can read. Phonogram. Young Avengers. They’re fantastic. They worked together and developed their skills together.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 47