Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 95

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  This is only a single market, and two months of data. However, apart from the updated guidelines and the announcements of such on Twitter, the only other changing factor, according to the staff, was an increase in pay to the new SFWA qualifying rate. While it is possible that this increase led to a greater number of submissions, it would not explain why women were more motivated by that increase than men. There is always the possibility that a third, more unlikely factor has caused this increase, but it does give an indication that such explicit welcoming of women may increase their share of submissions.

  According to Nathaniel Lee of Escape Pod, their reasoning was simple. They discovered that they were receiving only a small proportion of submissions from women, and felt that the easiest-to-implement first step would simply be to encourage women to consider Escape Pod as a market. Whether this increase is a transient response or a sustained development is currently unclear, as is whether it will make an impact on the proportion of published stories by women. Even still, either result will give fruitful data for analysis and discussion.

  Study Limitations: Gender Identification

  One area in which this study was lacking was in data on non-binary individuals. In most cases, the gender categorization for each submission was based on first name, although some editors also engaged in Googling public bios of authors. As such, there are undoubtedly submissions from non-binary individuals which were miscategorized. Rose Lemberg raised this issue on Twitter, where it generated a fruitful discussion. Excitingly, a proposal was put forward suggesting that markets include an optional post-submission survey allowing for collection of demographic information based on the self-identity of authors. Crossed Genres expressed an interest in such a survey, and if there is follow through from markets, the full picture for both gender identity and other demographic areas would be much easier to analyze.

  With that said the fact that we are looking at data on ‘apparent’ gender, does not invalidate the study. Rather, it gives us another factor to consider when we assess the rigor and implications of the results. I am grateful to all those who took part in the Twitter discussion for elaborating on these implications and effects.

  Further Avenues for Study

  My aim in carrying out this study was to answer some of the underlying questions about representation of men and women in science fiction. Discussion of this topic often reaches an impasse when differing contributors disagree on the potential causes of a problem or whether there is in fact a problem at all. I hope that at least some of these issues can now be more easily discussed, with common reference points for the actual circumstances.

  However, to say that all the questions are answered is, of course, blatantly false. Firstly, there are the limitations of the data collection and analysis, which I hope have been made clear in all instalments of the study. Secondly, there is the fact that complete investigation of many of these questions would require different data, samples, and methodologies. Thirdly, there is the fact that there are important questions that I have not even attempted to answer.

  During my communications with editors, a number of questions were raised which this data could not answer, but which would be fruitful areas for further research and discussion. Are women less likely to resubmit to a market after receiving a rejection? Are women less likely to submit the same story to a different market after it has been rejected elsewhere? Are women less likely to self-categorize a story as science fiction when submitting to multi-genre markets? Are women less likely to submit a story to a market that only publishes science fiction, perhaps due to this self-categorization issue?

  I would very much welcome further research aimed at answering these questions. Post-submission surveys, along with the continued tracking of data which many publications have expressed an intention to carry out, will hopefully allow for follow-up and comparative studies. This data will hopefully better elucidate how various initiatives and strategies affect the submissions and publications gender ratios in the genre.

  Overall, this study has been time-consuming, occasionally frustrating, and always challenging, yet has, I believe, revealed important data for the community. We have no smoking gun for the differing levels of women’s submissions and publication rates across different markets. And yet, those differences do exist. This is an important realization. Again, I wish to thank all the editors and editorial staff who assisted, and the insightful comments from readers. The engagement and support of the community in investigating gender parity has been immense—we have not yet reached our destination, but our feet are firmly on the road.

  About the Author

  Susan E. Connolly’s short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, The Center For Digital Ethics and the fanzine Journey Planet. She is the author of Damsel, a middle-grade fantasy from Mercier Press and Granuaile, an upcoming historical comic book from Atomic Diner. Her degree in Veterinary Medicine given her strong opinions about the accurate portrayal of animal sidekicks in fiction. Susan lives in Ireland, near the mountains. Also near the sea. Also near the forest (Ireland is a small country).

  Human Nature:

  A Conversation with Peter Watts

  Julie Novakova

  Deep sea, deep space, and deep dark corners of the human mind—these are some of the domains in which Peter Watts truly excels. His Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight opens with the main character trapped in a shuttle, reminiscing, escaping . . . from what? As we dive into the story, we encounter one question after another, all of them fascinating and urging us forward.

  At the end, with his readers awe-struck and hungry, Watts leaves more questions than answers. Some of them might be addressed in his soon to be published novel Echopraxia, which is a sequel to Blindsight, but other, even more profound questions will without a doubt stem from the answers. Peter Watts is a master of thought experiments. That much was apparent even from his earliest short fiction in the nineties.

  Being a marine biologist by study, Watts set his first novel Starfish three kilometers below the sea surface to a rift in the Juan de Fuca subduction zone. But in this deep-sea environment, something is different, and it’s not only the strange outcast crew of Beebe Station. The success of Starfish was followed by publishing the two next books of the Rifters trilogy, Maelstrom and Behemoth.

  However, Watts isn’t at home just in the deep sea—deep space, be it the edge of the solar system in Blindsight or vastly distant stars like in the Hugo-winning novelette “The Island,” is another environment he can depict so convincingly we can almost see the wonders of cosmos and the strange alien life forms before our own eyes. Watts’s aliens have been often praised for being truly alien and at the same time very believable. His insight into an alien’s mind in The Things, published here in 2010, led to another Hugo nomination. Peter Watts’s fiction is full of brilliant ideas, the kind that urges us to ask: What if?

  A friend of mine once commented about Watts: “He thinks of really interesting things.”

  It’s a simple statement but also a very accurate one. Let me introduce you the man who thinks interesting things.

  Your upcoming novel Echopraxia is a sequel to Blindsight, taking us inwards the Solar System to the Icarus Array this time. Have you already had an idea for this story when you were writing Blindsight?

  You know, I’m not entirely sure. It’s natural, in the course of writing a novel, to mull over what might happen after the last page—so in that vague sense I was certainly thinking of a follow-up. At the same time, I knew that Blindsight would be a hell of a hard act to follow, whether or not it was any good in terms of literary merit. The thematic question of consciousness vs. intelligence is pretty fundamental to the human condition; what the hell do you do for an encore?

  So while I was idly contemplating the idea of a sequel, the book I really expected to write after Blindsight was a near-future technothriller. It would have been a complete change of pace, and whether people loved it or hated it they’d be l
ess inclined to compare it to Blindsight because it would have been so obviously a different creature. A straight-up sequel would, I thought, have a much harder time getting out from the shadow of its predecessor.

  So what happened? I pitched about five different proposals to my agent, and he said the Blindsight sequel was head and shoulders above the others. And here we are.

  Judging from the snippets you posted on your blog, Echopraxia seems to me that it won’t have a hard time fulfilling high expectations.

  Yeah, well, it’s not as though I posted any of the crappy bits. Those snippets were probably high-graded.

  Besides the prospects of meeting Siri Keeton’s dad as one of the main characters and learning more about vampires and their role in the society, I was deeply intrigued by the Bicameral Order—a religious group whose predictions exceed those of science. Can you give us some hints about the methods they use, or their ideology and aims?

  Hints. Hmmm.

  The Dharmic faiths—you know, that school of thought that somehow, centuries ago, managed without benefit of MRI or TMS to figure out that all sensation, that the self itself, is an illusion—those Dharmic faiths were the mother of the modern Bicameral Order. (Neuroscience was the father; it was a winter-spring relationship.) But the Bicams aren’t really a religious order in the conventional sense, except insofar as their origins trace back to those ancient faiths. Oh, and also in the sense that they undergo religious experiences—the so-called “rapture”—in the course of their work.

  Then again, that whole transcendence/speaking-in-tongues thing happens when the part of the brain responsible for mapping body parts and boundaries fucks up. The mind loses its sense of where the body ends and the rest of the universe begins, so it literally ends up feeling connected to all of creation. The Bicams experience that because they’re members of a hive mind. Sharing sensory systems, linking minds one to another—such connections really do dissolve the boundaries between bodies. So for them, religious rapture is an unavoidable side effect of networked existence.

  Oh, and I guess they’re also a religious order in the sense that they’re faith-based—but faith has a very specific meaning here. There are certain sublevels of reality which are, even in principle, immune to empirical investigation. Anything below the Planck length gets very iffy; you can conjecture and model and hypothesize all you like, but as long as there’s no way to test those conjectures you’re not talking conventional science. (The various flavors of string and brane theory are regarded by many as philosophy, not science, for exactly that reason.) The Bicamerals have—at enormous personal cost, as it turns out—rewired themselves to explore reality past those limits, and the proof of their methodology is that they own half the patent office by the time Echopraxia opens. But it’s not a scientific methodology. It can’t be, by definition. We don’t really have a word for what they do; but faith comes closest.

  They’re also a religious order in the sense that they believe in God. But that’s not just faith: they have their reasons. Know your enemy and all that.

  I guess maybe they’re pretty religious after all.

  You often explore topics related in many ways to religion in your works. When you mentioned the near-future technothriller, were you talking about your other upcoming project, Intelligent Design? Can you give away a little of what can we be looking forward to in this novel?

  Well, yes, the title cuts two ways; I see the novel as both a straight-ahead Wattsian thought experiment (albeit hopefully more accessible than some of my previous efforts), and as a kind of metacommentary on the arguments of the IDiots who keep trying to sneak creationism into science classes. But in terms of what you can look forward to? You can look forward fifteen or twenty years to an ice-free Arctic, remote-controlled feral lobsters, genetically-engineered giant squid, submarine skirmishes between the US and Canada over wellheads on the Beaufort Shelf, and sentient money.

  Assuming the damn thing even gets off the ground. And if “looking forward” is the right term.

  Your novels tend to be elaborately structured in order to express innovatory ideas, especially Blindsight, where you modeled each of the central characters to reflect some part of consciousness. When you start writing a novel, do you have a highly detailed outline to which you try to stick or just a short synopsis, or do you use some different approach altogether?

  That first thing—Cory Doctorow once said I didn’t write outlines so much as “novels without dialog”—but it never works out. I usually get somewhere between halfway and three-quarters done before I realize that Plot Point C contradicts Plot Point G, or some new scientific discovery trashes some vital bit of narrative tech I’ve rested half the story on. At which point I pretty much have to throw away the outline and start flying by the seat of my pants, stitching up the seams in the crotch as they split.

  Speaking of scientific discoveries requiring changing the story, you’ve repeatedly mentioned that you don’t think that being a scientist is a good prerequisite for being a good science fiction writer. Since scientists are often trained by peer-reviewers’ responses to use unnecessarily difficult writing in their papers, it often tends to make the work seem more complicated.

  Yet, more scientists are trying to express their findings as simply as possible and even don’t fear using humor (For example, I recently saw a sub-title: The good, the bad, and the ungulate). Do you think it’s getting better or are these just exceptions?

  My sense is, things are getting better. The use of personal pronouns, which was verboten back when I was going through grad school, is pretty common in the technical literature these days. It’s not uncommon for research papers in journals to be chaperoned by relatively nontechnical summary articles aimed at the nonspecialist (though perhaps still not accessible to Josephine SixPack).

  Hell, Nature regularly publishes science fiction. I can cite studies demonstrating a strong correlation between bafflegab and publication—one shows that the more opaque the writing style, the more prestigious the journal in which the paper ultimately appears—but those are all over a decade old by now. I don’t know if their findings are still relevant.

  In fact, the pendulum may be swinging too far in the other direction, what with scientists bending over backwards to “reach out” and “communicate with the masses.” I hear this refrain with increasing frequency: it’s scientists who are at least partly to blame for the public’s skepticism over evolution and climate change and vaccination, because they don’t try hard enough to communicate their findings to the general public. (Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of many who toe this line.)

  I don’t buy that. It’s been pretty firmly established that Human Nature is so rife with Confirmation Biases and Backfire Effects that even if you present someone with ironclad, irrefutable, expert evidence that their cherished beliefs are wrong, they’ll just dig in their heels and clutch those beliefs even closer to their bosoms (bosa? bosii?), while at the same time vilifying the expert who contradicted them. It’s not that they don’t understand the arguments; it’s just that they’ll reject anything that’s inconsistent with their preferred worldview.

  So what we seem to be getting is an increased dumbing-down of complex scientific issues to pander to people who read at a grade-three level. Scientific American turned into Psychology Today sometime when I wasn’t looking. Psychology Today turned into the fucking National Enquirer. The internet slowly fills with TED talks rife with charismatic delivery and vacuous content. And people still don’t give a shit about climate change.

  That’s one of the most discussed problems in science—should scientists try harder to educate the public, or is it a wasted effort? I personally hope it isn’t though the evidence points elsewhere. Another problem—in fact, the one that drove you out of academic science in the mid-90s—is the politicization of science. Do you think the situation has in any way improved over time? After all, the policy of science publishing seems to be changing with more open-access publishing and demands for clear ackn
owledgment of any competing interests along with making used datasets accessible to everyone. Do you consider this a good trend?

  If that is in fact the trend, then yes. I approve. I’ll have to take your word on that score, though; I haven’t been keeping close track since I left academia myself, so whenever the issue pokes through onto my radar it’s generally in relation to some so-called “scandal” in which Republican ideologues demand endless transcripts and e-mails of political enemies in an attempt to stifle scientific research (the Virginia attorney general’s harassment of Michael Mann is a particularly clear-cut example).

  I don’t consider that a particularly good trend.

  Daniel Brüks, the protagonist of Echopraxia, is a scientist too; a field biologist, a living fossil in his time, if I may cite from the official synopsis. Do you think that field work will become redundant soon or will there be a use for it centuries from now?

  Here’s a couple of snippets from Echopraxia that address that:

  Physics, officially. Cosmology. High-energy stuff. But it was all supposed to be theoretical; as far as Brüks knew the Bicameral Order didn’t perform actual experiments. Of course, hardly anyone did, these days. It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed the experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing: to sit in the desert and contemplate whatever answers those machines served up. Although most still preferred to call it analysis.

  and

  “No, I mean, what were you even doing out in the field? There any species even left out there that haven’t been RAMrodded and digitized?”

  “The extinct ones,” Brüks said shortly. Then, relenting: “Sure, you can virtualize anything in the lab. Still doesn’t tell you what it’s doing out in the wide wet world with a million unpredictable variables working on it.”