Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 93

by Robert Reed

  “No one can make you feel inferior without you agreeing with them first,” said Mae. It was something Old Mrs. Tung had once told Mae when she herself was poor, hungry, and famished for magic.

  “Take off the dress,” Mae said. “I’ll have to take it back for finishing.”

  Sezen stepped out of it, right there, naked on the dirt floor. Hatijah did not chastise her, but offered Mae tea. Because she had refused the corn, Mae had to accept the tea. At least that would be boiled.

  Hatijah scuttled off to the black kettle and her daughter leaned back in full insolence, her supposedly virgin pubes plucked as bare as the baby’s bottom.

  Mae fussed with the dress, folding it, so she would have somewhere else to look. The daughter just stared. Mae could take no more. “Do you want people to see you? Go put something on!”

  “I don’t have anything else,” said Sezen.

  Her other sisters had gone shopping in the town for graduation gifts. They would have taken all the family’s good dresses.

  “You mean you have nothing else you will deign to put on.” Mae glanced at Hatijah: she really should not be having to do this woman’s work for her. “You have other clothes, old clothes. Put them on.”

  The girl stared at her in even greater insolence.

  Mae lost her temper. “I do not work for pigs. You have paid nothing so far for this dress. If you stand there like that I will leave, now, and the dress will not be yours. Wear what you like to the graduation. Come to it naked like a whore for all I care.”

  Sezen turned and slowly walked toward the side room.

  Hatijah the mother still squatted over the kettle, boiling more water to dilute the stew of leaves. She lived on tea and burnt corn that was more usually fed to cattle. Her cow’s eyes were averted. Untended, the family cow was still bellowing.

  Mae sat and blew out air from stress. This week! She looked at Hatijah’s dress. It was a patchwork assembly of her husband’s old shirts, beautifully stitched. Hatijah could sew. Mae could not. Hatijah would know that; it was one of the things that made the woman nervous. With all these changes, Mae was going to have to find something else to do beside sketch photographs of dresses. She had a sudden thought.

  “Would you be interested in working for me?” Mae asked. Hatijah looked fearful and pleased and said she would have to ask her husband.

  Everything is going to have to change, thought Mae, as if to convince herself.

  That night Mae worked nearly to dawn on the other three dresses. Her racketing sewing machine sat silent in the corner. It was fine for rough work, but not for finishing, not for graduation dresses.

  The bare electric light glared down at her like a headache, as Mae’s husband Joe snored. Above them in the loft, his brother and father snored too, as they had done for twenty years.

  Mae looked into Joe’s open mouth like a mystery. When he was sixteen Joe had been handsome, in the context of the village, wild, and clever. They’d been married a year when she first went to Yeshibozkay with him, where he worked between harvests building a house. She saw the clever city man, an acupuncturist who had money. She saw her husband bullied, made to look foolish, asked questions for which he had no answer. The acupuncturist made Joe do the work again. In Yeshibozkay, her handsome husband was a dolt.

  Here they were, both of them now middle-aged. Their son Vikram was a major in the Army. They had sent him to Balshang. He mailed them parcels of orange skins for potpourri; he sent cards and matches in picture boxes. He had met some city girl. Vik would not be back. Their daughter Lily lived on the other side of Yeshibozkay, in a bungalow with a toilet. Life pulled everything away.

  At this hour of the morning, she could hear their little river, rushing down the steep slope to the valley. Then a door slammed in the North End. Mae knew who it would be: their Muerain, Mr. Shenyalar. He would be walking across the village to the mosque. A dog started to bark at him; Mrs. Doh’s, by the bridge.

  Mae knew that Kwan would be cradled in her husband’s arms and that Kwan was beautiful because she was an Eloi tribeswoman. All the Eloi had fine features. Her husband Wing did not mind and no one now mentioned it. But Mae could see Kwan shiver now in her sleep. Kwan had dreams, visions, she had tribal blood and it made her shift at night as if she had another, tribal life.

  Mae knew that Kwan’s clean and noble athlete son would be breathing like a moist baby in his bed, cradling his younger brother.

  Without seeing them, Mae could imagine the moon and clouds over their village. The moon would be reflected shimmering on the water of the irrigation canals which had once borne their paper boats of wishes. There would be old candles, deep in the mud.

  Then, the slow, sad voice of their Muerain began to sing. Even amplified, his voice was deep and soft, like pillows that allowed the unfaithful to sleep. In the byres, the lonely cows would be stirring. The beasts would walk themselves to the town square, for a lick of salt, and then wait to be herded to pastures. In the evening, they would walk themselves home. Mae heard the first clanking of a cowbell.

  At that moment something came into the room, something she did not want to see, something dark and whole like a black dog with froth around its mouth that sat in her corner and would not go away, nameless yet.

  Mae started sewing faster.

  The dresses were finished on time, all six, each a different color.

  Mae ran barefoot in her shift to deliver them. The mothers bowed sleepily in greeting. The daughters were hopping with anxiety like water on a skillet.

  It all went well. Under banners the children stood together, including Kwan’s son Luk, Sezen, all ten children of the village, all smiles, all for a moment looking like an official poster of the future, brave, red-cheeked with perfect teeth.

  Teacher Shen read out each of their achievements. Sezen had none, except in animal husbandry, but she still collected her certificate to applause. And then Mae’s friend Shen did something special.

  He began to talk about a friend to all of the village, who had spent more time on this ceremony than anyone else, whose only aim was to bring a breath of beauty into this tiny village, the seamstress who worked only to adorn other people . . . .

  He was talking about her.

  . . . one was devoted to the daughters and mothers of rich and poor alike and who spread kindness and good will.

  The whole village was applauding her, under the white clouds, the blue sky. All were smiling at her. Someone, Kwan perhaps, gave her a push from behind and she stumbled forward.

  And her friend Shen was holding out a certificate for her.

  “In our day, Lady Chung,” he said, “there were no schools for the likes of us, not after early childhood. So. This is a graduation certificate for you. From all your friends. It is in Fashion Studies.”

  There was applause. Mae tried to speak and found only fluttering sounds came out, and she saw the faces, ranged all in smiles, friends and enemies, cousins and no kin alike.

  “This is unexpected,” she finally said, and they all chuckled. She looked at the high-school certificate, surprised by the power it had, surprised that she still cared about her lack of education. She couldn’t read it. “I do not do fashion as a student, you know.”

  They knew well enough that she did it for money and how precariously she balanced things.

  Something stirred, like the wind in the clouds.

  “After tomorrow, you may not need a fashion expert. After tomorrow, everything changes. They will give us TV in our heads, all the knowledge we want. We can talk to the President. We can pretend to order cars from Tokyo. We’ll all be experts.” She looked at her certificate, hand-lettered, so small.

  Mae found she was angry, and her voice seemed to come from her belly, an octave lower.

  “I’m sure that it is a good thing. I am sure the people who do this think they do a good thing. They worry about us, like we were children.” Her eyes were like two hearts, pumping furiously. “We don’t have time for TV or computers.
We face sun, rain, wind, sickness, and each other. It is good that they want to help us.” She wanted to shake her certificate, she wished it was one of them, who had upended everything. “But how dare they? How dare they call us have-nots?”

  First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2001.

  About the Author

  Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, but it was not until 1984, with the appearance of his brilliant novella “The Unconquered Country” that he first attracted any serious attention. “The Unconquered Country,” one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy won both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award; and his later novel Air also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life, the critically-acclaimed mainstream novels Was, Coming of Enkidu, The King’s Last Song, Lust, and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” which in its original form ran online, and which, in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. His most recent books are the anthology When It Changed, the novel The Film-Makers of Mars, and the collection Paradise Tales: and Other Stories.

  The Issue of Gender in Genre Fiction:

  A Detailed Analysis

  Susan E. Connolly

  In 2013, Lightspeed Magazine announced a special, “Women Destroy Science Fiction” issue, written and edited solely by women. The issue was intended to challenge the misapprehension that women don’t write “real” science fiction. On reading this, my first thought was “cool.” My second thought was, “I wonder how women authors are currently represented in science fiction short markets.”

  Gender representation in genre fiction is an issue that’s been getting more and more attention, but nobody had yet assembled a comprehensive review of the data. Now that I have collected this data, I can see why. So many emails . . . So much Excel.

  I quickly realized that the raw numbers of women-authored fiction published was only part of the story. In the first place, finished magazines are the end result of a process. This process starts with submissions, and so any analysis needs to also look there. Secondly, there are various other factors that could be investigated, such as whether gender or age of editors has an impact on what gets published.

  When conducting a study, it’s important to choose your sample carefully. SFWA qualifying markets get the most attention in terms of award nominations, gaining of “professional” status, and by-and-large have the largest readerships. So, I chose the SFWA qualifying markets that publish science fiction and accept unsolicited submissions as a sample group.

  Originally, I emailed the editors of these markets with four questions. By the end of my investigations, I had asked them a total of fourteen (with multiple sub-questions). The amount of work done by these editors, slush-readers and other staff was absolutely immense, and none of this would have been possible without their willingness to take time away from their actual work to help me with this study.

  This article should not be read as some kind of hit piece, pointing out “bad” markets and “good” markets. What I’m trying to do is make available some facts, as far as I can discern them. What is the situation regarding gender representation in science fiction? Whether or not this is something we should care about, and what strategies should be employed to deal with it, if any, are a separate issue. The one thing I’m certain of is that the more data and analysis we have, the easier it is to discuss these issues in a productive way.

  In this specific article, I’m looking at Publications, by which I mean published prose fiction stories, including those accepted from slush, reprints of previously published stories, and stories solicited by editors. Basically, what was seen by readers in an issue of the magazine or on the market’s website. Most markets gave their data for the year 2013, however, in some cases (such as the F&SF special issue) the data is from 2014.

  In future installments, I’m going to look at Acceptances (stories accepted from slush for publication), Submissions, and Interactions between these categories.

  Publications Overall

  Overall, I looked at sixteen markets: AE, Analog, Asimov’s, Bull Spec, Buzzy Mag, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Escape Pod, Fantasy & Science Fiction, the Fantasy & Science Fiction Special Issue edited by C.C. Finlay, Flash Fiction Online, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Lightspeed, Nature Futures, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com.

  Five of these markets, AE, Analog, Asimov’s, Escape Pod and Nature Futures, publish only science fiction. The remaining eleven publish other genres along with science fiction.

  No market in this study asks for authors to identify their gender when submitting. As such, this is not actually a study of publication and submission gender. Rather, it is a study of the apparent gender of authors based on name and publicly available information.

  The gender breakdown for all published stories and for science fiction stories only can be seen in the table below. Three facts regarding SFWA-qualifying markets are clear from this data:

  More stories by men are published than stories by women. 56.2% : 42.4%

  This imbalance is more pronounced when looking at science fiction stories alone. 62.1% : 36.5%

  This imbalance is further pronounced when looking at the five markets that publish science fiction only. 71.9% : 28.1%

  Total Authors who are men Authors who are women Non-binary authors Unknown Authors

  All Stories 996 559.5 422.5 1 13

  56.2% 42.4% 0.1% 1.3%

  Science Fiction Stories Overall 649 403 237 0 9

  62.1% 36.5% 0 1.4%

  Science-fiction-only markets 285 205 80 0 0

  71.9% 28.1% 0 0

  Mixed-genre markets 364 198 157 0 9

  54.4% 43.1% 0 2.5%

  Gender and Markets

  Looking at these markets individually (see the graphs below), we can see obvious differences—for example Strange Horizons published more women than men, Escape Pod published more men than women. While it is clear from the aggregate figures above that overall more stories by men are published than stories by women, seven markets publish greater than 50% stories by women, and six markets publish greater than 50% science fiction stories by women. After running some statistical analysis, there is no evidence that markets overall are biased towards publishing men, whether we’re looking at all genres or science fiction stories specifically.

  So, we cannot say that SFWA markets in general are skewed towards publishing stories by men. This does not mean there is no skew at all, rather it means that we cannot make broad generalizations about the group as a whole in this matter.

  Indeed, we can see there are what seem to be large differences between individual markets, from F&SF’s ~80% of stories by men down to Bull Spec’s ~25% (see graph 3). Are these differences “significant?” Significant, in statistics, means that something is not just due to chance alone.

  For example, if all of our markets published between 55% and 57% stories by men, we’d feel that this level of difference between the markets wasn’t that important—we would feel comfortable making generalizations. If half of the SFWA qualifying markets published 95% stories by men, and half published only 7% stories by men, we’d be pretty sure that was an important difference! The difficulty is when the numbers aren’t quite so clear-cut, such as those we have here. Thankfully, we have statistical tests to help us figure this out. It turns out that the differences we see here are significant, both for all stories and science fiction stories specifically.

  Enough markets skew towards authors wh
o are women that we can’t say anything about a possible gender bias of all sixteen markets as a group. So, where do the large differences we saw in Publications Overall come from? Well, for all stories, the markets that skew towards authors who are men averaged 71% stories by men, for a total of 328 publications, while those that skewed towards stories by women averaged 60% stories by women, for a total of 288.5 publications.

  The markets that skew towards authors who are men averaged 69% science fiction stories by men, for a total of 336.5 science fiction publications, while those that skewed towards stories by women averaged 62% science fiction stories by women, for a total of 61.5 science fiction publications. From this, we can see that the markets that skew towards authors who are men publish more stories in total than those that skew towards authors who are women. Secondly, markets that skew towards authors who are men publish a higher proportion of stories by men than those that skew towards stories by women publish stories by women. (i.e., they have a greater degree of divergence from parity.) The overall result is more stories by men being published.

  Does Genre Matter?

  Among the sixteen markets there are two intuitive categories: those that publish science-fiction-only, and those that publish science fiction in addition to other genres. Does this have an effect on the gender ratios of published science fiction stories? Are science fiction-only markets more likely to skew towards authors who are men than the science fiction sections of mixed-genre markets? If you’ve looked at the graphs, you’ll see that it looks pretty likely. And indeed, according to the analysis, the answer is yes. Markets that publish science-fiction-only are correlated with a greater proportion of science fiction publications by men.

  What about those markets that publish science fiction along with other genres? Their gender ratios tend to look like they’re less skewed towards the side of stories by men, or in some cases, are skewed towards stories by women. However, when looking only at science fiction stories from these markets, these ratios change. By graphing science fiction stories as a percentage of total stories by men and women, we can see whether each gender is over-or under-represented in science fiction within each market, compared to their overall ratio. So, for these markets, a high proportion of stories by men overall, does not necessarily mean a correspondingly high proportion of science fiction stories by men.