FOOTNOTES:
1 Cecilia Tan: The Velderet
2 Evangeline Walton: The Mabinogion series
3 Vonda N. McIntyre: The Starfarers series
4 Marge Piercy: Woman on the Edge of Time
PERSONAL ESSAYS
edited by Wendy N. Wagner
This special double issue of Lightspeed was funded by an extraordinary Kickstarter campaign featuring personal essays written by women working in our genre. When we put out the call for these essays, we asked for “smashing, crashing women’s voices, telling what it really means to be a woman reading and writing science fiction.”
Here are twenty-eight different voices raised in destructive harmony.
We Are the Fifty Percent
Rachel Swirsky
Sometimes I catch myself feeling like I only read writing by women. “Ugh,” I think. “That is so skewed.” Then I crunch the numbers.
They are almost always fifty percent.
Sociological research suggests that when women and men speak equally in a conversation, both men and women perceive the women as dominating the conversation. That phenomenon has had a significant influence on my experience as a woman writing and consuming SF.
In 2007, when I started editing a podcast magazine that broadcast previously published fantasy stories, many readers responded with vitriol, angered by the number of female authors and main characters. Of course, at the beginning of the run, we were running a backlog; most of the stories that were going on the air had been selected by the previous male editor. But I was a woman, and a known feminist, and therefore under suspicion for being prejudiced toward women and against men. It spooked me, so I ran the numbers. Over and over again, compulsively, for as long as I edited the podcast, I ran the numbers every few months. Fifty percent women writers. Fifty percent women main characters. It never varied more than five percent in either direction. And still, the entire time, some readers were furious with what they saw as a magazine entirely dominated by women. Partially because of that, I eventually left the position.
At the same time, as I entered my editorial position and was criticized for running work “dominated” by fifty percent women, the podcast’s male-edited science fiction counterpart hadn’t run a story authored by a woman in weeks. No one said a thing.
This kind of thing gets in your brain. Insidious viral memes bury themselves into illogical thought patterns, deceiving one into thinking they are rational. Even though I know from prior number crunching that fifty percent of what I read is by women, I still find myself periodically doubting. So I count again.
Women aren’t supposed to talk as much as men. We aren’t supposed to take up as much space as men do. So when we talk, we must be SHOUTING. When we take up space, we must be EVERYWHERE.
When we’re writing science fiction, we’re DESTROYING it.
Now, of course, that’s just the bad stuff. I am deeply grateful toward and indebted to amazing and supportive readers, editors, publishers and critics of all genders, who have been incredibly generous to me and my work.
But still, sometimes I look at the table of contents in an anthology and I see women restrained, demurely, to that unthreatening third, or even less. Present, but not too present. Talking, but not too much.
If our presence will always be perceived as a taint, then let science fiction be tainted. If our speaking voices will always be perceived as shouts, then let us shout.
We’re here. We’re fifty percent of you.
And we deserve some room to bellow.
Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA in short fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop and has published more than sixty stories in venues including Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and the New Haven Review. Although her editing run of PodCastle is over, the magazine still persists in the talented hands of its editorial team Dave Thompson and Anna Schwind, with the assistance of Ann Leckie.
Science Fiction: You’re Doin’ It Wrong
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
I am one of the women wreaking wholesale havoc on SF. Worse, I am a repeat offender.
Analog’s longtime editor, Stan Schmidt, has told me he’s lost subscriptions over my work. I knew this before I attended my first Worldcon in 1992 and was still gob-smacked when a couple of fellows cornered me at a party and explained, at length, why I had never written a word of real, hard science fiction in my life and, therefore, did not belong in the pages of Analog. This was after only half-a-dozen stories. I’m at two dozen and counting.
I’ve frequently sat next to Stan Schmidt on “Women in SF” panels at which he publicly expressed chagrin that we were still talking about gender and genre. Ironically, at Renovation in 2011, a man in the audience opined that it was a dead issue. He then proceeded to discuss how women had changed SF.
Apparently, there is something about the way we women write the genre that “softens” it. In our hands, it focuses more on characters and their feelings than on science. Men write hardware; women write software.
My first story in Analog was “Hand-me-down Town,” which explored a solution to homelessness. Yes, I wrote about feelings—the feelings of the homeless about being homeless, the feelings of the people trying to help them, and the feelings of the people trying to banish them through zoning ordinances.
Stan got fan mail for that piece from a nurse and a social worker who applauded my humanizing of the subject. He also drew criticism: “Not science fiction!” detractors cried. To which he replied, “Sociology is, too, a science,” and asked me to write more.
I did. “A Little Bit of an Eclipse” was hard SF about a lunar eclipse … sort of. Well, okay, it was a humorous tale of a scheister alien who steals the moon, which, I quickly realized, made me doubly a purveyor of mayhem. Not only was I a female writing science fiction, I was a female writing funny science fiction.
My hero, Ray Bradbury, wrote that SF is our way of making reality behave by pretending to look the other way—our attempt to solve current problems by shifting them in time and space. Humanity’s current problems, you may have noticed, are not mostly hardware-related. They are software bugs. They are about us humans and the way we react to our shared world—a world we are building day by day. A bit more than half of us are female. Which means that, by any logic, if our half of the human race is to help make reality behave, we must do it in a way that speaks to the things we believe to be essential to the process of worldbuilding.
To be frank, if science fiction were only about the hardware, I wouldn’t write it. I find the software—the doers of science, both men and women—ever so much more interesting.
• • •
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff is the New York Times Bestselling author of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: Shadow Games. She became addicted to science fiction when her dad let her stay up late to watch The Day the Earth Stood Still. Mom was horrified. Dad was unrepentant. Maya slept with a night-light in her room until she was fifteen. She started her writing career sketching science fiction comic books in the last row of her third grade classroom. She was never apprehended. Since then, her short fiction has been published in Analog, Amazing Stories, Century, Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, Paradox, and Jim Baen’s Universe. Her debut novel, The Meri (Baen), was a Locus Magazine 1992 Best First Novel nominee (now available as a trade paperback from Sense of Wonder Press). Since, she has published ten more speculative fiction novels, including collaborations with Marc Scott Zicree and Michael Reaves.
Maya lives in San Jose, where she writes, performs, and records original and parody (filk) music with her husband and awesome musician and music producer, Chef Jeff Vader, All-Powerful God of Biscuits. The couple has produced five music albums: Retro Rocket Science, Aliens Ate My Homework, and Grated Hits (parody), and the original music CDs Manhattan Sleeps and Mobius Street. To top it off, they’ve also produced three musical children: Alex, Kristine, and Amanda.
Join Us in the Future
Marissa Lingen
One of the tenets I’ve been taught
of writing science fiction is that the future doesn’t arrive everywhere evenly. (I think that’s William Gibson, more or less.) I didn’t realize how much it would apply to me personally.
When I left physics to write full time, I was leaving a male-dominated field for one that looked to me like a shining golden paradise of women. Two of the most decorated SF writers anywhere, ever, are Connie Willis and Lois McMaster Bujold. The author my father gave me when I was twelve, to get me started on modern SF, was Nancy Kress. Everywhere I turned, there were outstanding female editors and agents, experienced writers like the ones I’d already read and beginners like me, whose ideas were just barely starting to see the light of day—it was an entire world of women. A beautiful, amazing world of women.
And then it became clear that this world was not the world some other people were living in.
I could tell stories about getting harassed at my first con—and my third con—and so on. I could talk about how male fans looked straight at me when I was on panels, when they raised their hands to ask why women don’t write SF and whether it was because women don’t like science. (After repeating “dude, I am right here, don’t talk about me like I don’t exist” a couple of times, I lost my temper and challenged that man to a contest of differential equations.)
But what I really think about, when I think about being a woman who writes SF, is that I was right about what world I was joining. It is a beautiful, amazing world of women. Women started “destroying” SF before I was born, and I am so glad and so proud to share the work with them. And I look at the people who are living in this cramped, airless world where SF is somehow not chock full of wonderful women, and I think, “Join us in the future. It’s already here, it just hasn’t gotten to you yet. And it’s awesome.”
Marissa Lingen is a short fiction writer living in the Minneapolis area. She has sold over one hundred stories to publications such as Year’s Best, Tor.com, Analog, and Lightspeed. You can find her online at www.marissalingen.com.
Are We There Yet?
Sheila Finch
In the early 1980s, an editor of a literary journal that had previously published my work rejected a story because he “didn’t buy science fiction.” Since I hadn’t realized that was what I’d written, I thought I’d better do a lot of reading to catch up with the field. The rejected story found a home, then another story, and a third, and I was a member of SFWA.
I started to go to conventions and be on panels—where I quickly found myself the only woman on any panel that was about “hard” SF. Not that there was a lack of women in the field up to that time—think C. L. Moore, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ—but the prevailing wisdom was that only men could handle the hard stuff. Then I published my first novel, based on the Everett interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (I did a lot of research), and I began to badger con committees to put me on appropriate panels.
I got more than I bargained for on several occasions. I remember being seated between two famously arrogant authors. Predictably, an argument broke out, and they stood up to shout at each other over my head. (I doubt they would have done that to another man.) All-male panels tended to ignore any women, and the moderator usually let them go because—you know—what could a woman contribute? I quickly learned to volunteer as moderator where I had the upper hand. Riding herd on these very vocal authors was often scary, but I grew up in a rough part of London and my father taught me to hold my own.
I had a chance to do some radio interviews—supposed to be good publicity for me, but mostly filler for DJs who were on the air hour after hour with only platters to spin. One day, the DJ started the interview by asking what a nice lady like me was doing in a field like science fiction. He wasn’t kidding. So I wasn’t kidding either when I replied in a very sweet, ladylike tone that I was interested in children, and family, and relationships—and I wanted to explore what was going to happen to them in a future dominated by aggressive male ideas.
About this time, an editor rejected a story, telling me he just couldn’t believe in its science underpinning. I had—as usual—done copious research, and everything I’d speculated about was either on the horizon or perhaps already being done in secret experiments somewhere. I don’t usually write “dear jerk” letters to editors who reject my work, but I couldn’t get past the conviction he would never have doubted the science if a man had written the story. I drew up a two-page list citing my sources and sent it to him, just so he’d know for the future that women can do research and write science, too.
Then one day, a scientist from JPL cornered me at a convention. He wanted to talk about my use of the Everett interpretation in my first novel. He took me seriously. (I was so primed for another battle, I nearly missed that.)
Are we there yet?
Sheila Finch is the author of eight science fiction novels and numerous short stories that have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Asimov’s, Fantasy Book, and many anthologies. A collection of the “lingster” stories recently appeared as The Guild of Xenolinguists. A nonfiction work, Myth, Metaphor, and Science Fiction, will be published this year from Aqueduct Press. Her work has won several awards, including a Nebula for Best Novella, the San Diego Book Award for Juvenile Fiction, and the Compton-Crook Award for Best First Novel. Sheila taught creative writing at El Camino College for thirty years and at workshops around California. She lives in Long Beach, with two long-haired cats whose fur keeps getting into the keyboard because they like to monitor what she’s writing. Her website can be found at: http://sff.net/people/sheila-finch/
Not a Spaceship, Robot, or Zombie in Sight
Anne Charnock
As a writer of science fiction, I had a slow and, initially, rocky start. I spent the best part of a decade writing my first novel, A Calculated Life. It seemed that every other year I was too busy to look at the manuscript—busy with my art practice, raising two sons, getting involved with community carbon-reduction projects.
When I did eventually complete the novel, I was unaware that, in the UK, women SF writers were struggling to secure publishing contracts. I’d like to think this partly explains why I failed to find a literary agent, although it didn’t help that my book was short by SFF standards.
I cast around for any SF publishers that might accept author submissions, but my novel seemed a bad fit with their existing lists. After all, I’d written a near-future dystopia with a female protagonist who works in an office in central Manchester, a northern English city with an industrial heritage! Not a spaceship, robot, or zombie in sight. And no element of fantasy or the paranormal. I felt out of step.
So, I invested months of effort towards self-publishing my novel as a Kindle ebook and paperback. What a steep learning curve! Out of the blue, five months after I published the paperback, I was approached by David Pomerico, acquisitions editor at 47North. He offered me a contract, which I readily accepted. It feels odd that as an English woman SF writer I have a publisher in Seattle, nearly 5,000 miles from UK shores, and an editor based in New York.
A Calculated Life, I learned this month, is one of seven nominated works for the Philip K. Dick Award 2013 and one of five shortlisted works for The Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award for debut novel.
Anne Charnock’s writing career began in journalism. Her articles appeared in the Guardian, New Scientist, International Herald Tribune, and Geographical. She was educated at the University of East Anglia, where she studied environmental sciences, and at the Manchester School of Art. She travelled widely as a foreign correspondent and spent a year trekking through Egypt, Sudan, and Kenya. In her fine art practice, Anne tried to answer the questions: What is it to be human? What is it to be a machine? Ultimately she decided to write fiction as another route to finding answers. Her website is http://www.annecharnock.com, and you can find her on Twitter @annecharnock.
Writing Among the Beginning of Women
Amy Sterling Casil
Science is one of the primary ways in which people seek to understand the wo
rld and themselves.
The only people who read my short fiction when I started out, other than my writing friends Ron Collins, Brian Plante, and Lisa Silverthorne, was my aunt Donna Hodgson, who was a nurse, and who was among the best human beings who ever lived.
I received eighty-two rejections before I made my first professional science fiction sale, “Jonny Punkinhead,” which appeared in the July 1996 “New Writers” issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Prior to my selling “Jonny Punkinhead” to Kris Rusch at F&SF, Donna rubbed this story for good luck and pronounced it excellent.
Though trained in the medical field and of an analytical mind, my aunt Donna read primarily literature, including such authors as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. When she read my writing, including “Jonny Punkinhead,” she said, “This is good and beautifully written—it’s not science fiction.”
I heard from my “friends” that my work was not science fiction. Far too “literary.” This was because it dealt not only with speculation, but with concerns of the human heart and mind.
Concerns much like those that were mentioned by William Faulkner in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.”
I find it pitiful that a great number of those who sought to take control of science fiction thought it was unimportant to write about, in addition to pride, the other human values of compassion, pity, sacrifice—and my primary topic—honor.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 50