Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49

by Seanan McGuire

Science fiction also has an advantage that sometimes appears to be a disadvantage—people generally don’t take it seriously. In the eyes of the world, science fiction is goofy, fun, entertaining, silly stuff, really. As such, it flies beneath the radar, seeping into people’s minds below the level of conscious thought.

  The stories we read and the stories we tell shape who we are. Stories—whether jokes or TV shows or tales in a pulp magazine—shape our assumptions, our expectations, our understanding of the world. They get under our skin and show us how to behave, what to expect, who we can be.

  Ultimately, I believe that science fiction can change the world. Because the first step in changing the world is imagining a new one. That’s the part that science fiction writers are good at. We can imagine new futures, create new stories to live by.

  Back in 1991, Karen Fowler and I founded the Tiptree Award in an effort to reward those writers who were pushing against expectations in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of society. The Tiptree Award, which is given out each year to a work of speculative fiction that explores or expands gender roles, was designed to help all of us learn to see and expect something different from what we have seen before.

  Way back then, in an ancient time when we often communicated with words printed on paper, I wrote: “Science fiction is the literature of imagination and change. Yet all too often, our futuristic views of human roles are limited by our present world. To change the way that our society thinks about women and men, we need to show people in different roles [… ] The Tiptree Award will reward those who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society. The aim of award organizers is not to look for work that falls into some narrow definition of political correctness, but rather to seek out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. Having one’s boundaries expanded is not always a comfortable process.”

  When I announced the award in 1991, I said we would fund it through bake sales. (That was Karen Fowler’s idea; she has a wicked mind.) Ultimately, our goal was world domination through chocolate chip cookies.

  That’s still our goal. I confess: I’m surprised that we are fighting the same battles today that began back in 1991, but I still have great faith in the power of chocolate chip cookies and science fiction.

  The first step in changing the world is changing ourselves. And there is no better way to do it than creating new stories to live by.

  References

  For more on work by Mikaela Wapman and Deborah Belle related to the reluctant surgeon story, see

  http://www.bu.edu/today/2014/bu-research-riddle-reveals-the-depth-of-gender-bias/

  For more on the 2012 Yale University study in which science faculty ranked applicants with male names as more competent than identical applicants with female names, see http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/421746.article

  For more on implicit association, see http://www.boston.com/news/science/blogs/science-in-mind/2013/02/05/everyone-biased-harvard-professor-work-reveals-barely-know-our-own-minds/7x5K4gvrvaT5d3vpDaXC1K/blog.html

  To take online tests that let you assess your own implicit associations, see https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/aboutus.html

  For more on the Tiptree Award, visit Tiptree.org

  To read the speech in which Pat Murphy announced the award, see http://www.wiscon.info/downloads/patmurphy.pdf

  Pat Murphy has won numerous awards for her thoughtful, literary science fiction and fantasy writing, including two Nebula Awards, the Philip K. Dick Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Seiun Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. She has published seven novels and many short stories for adults, including Rachel in Love, The Falling Woman, The City Not Long After, Nadya, and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell, a novel that Publisher’s Weekly called the “cerebral equivalent of a roller-coaster ride.” Her children’s novel, The Wild Girls, won a Christopher Award in 2008. In 1991, with writer Karen Fowler, Pat co-founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender roles. This award is funded by grassroots efforts that include auctions and bake sales, harnessing the power of chocolate chip cookies in an ongoing effort to change the world. Pat enjoys looking for and making trouble. Her favorite color is ultraviolet. Her favorite book is whichever one she is working on right now.

  Women Remember: A Roundtable Interview

  Mary Robinette Kowal

  In the ten years that I’ve been actively participating in the science fiction community, I’ve seen the field change. A great deal of that change can be attributed to social media providing a voice for people who otherwise went ignored. The awards ballots are showing greater percentages of women and larger ethnic diversity. At the same time, there are places where it feels like the field had taken a step back from the work I remembered reading as a teenager. It feels very much like a case of “the more things change … ”

  So, I decided to ask some women who had been there. Please welcome Ursula K. Le Guin, Pat Cadigan, Ellen Datlow, and Nancy Kress.

  How do you think science fiction has changed, either as a genre or as a culture, from when you started in the field?

  Ursula K. Le Guin: How has SF changed … Socially? Well, for women, it’s not quite as much like riding “Furthur” with Kesey’s Merry band as it used to be. I guess we caused some real destruction to the male notion that SF, like a good deal else, was theirs, all theirs, and only theirs. But I wonder if that notion is in fact destructible. It keeps popping up again, twice as large as life.

  Pat Cadigan: Migod, yes. Decades after the advent of U.K. Le Guin, we saw the debut of N.K. Jemisin, the N being Nora. There’s a photo on the Internet of a white-haired woman holding a protest sign; the sign says, “I cannot believe I still have to protest this shit.” Amen, sister.

  Ursula: This makes it sound as if I crept into SF under my initials only. Not so. I was Ursula K. from the get-go. The “debut of U.K. Le Guin” was a one-time appearance, for a specific reason. Virginia Kidd submitted my story “Nine Lives” to Playboy using my initials only and they accepted it. When Virginia gleefully told them U.K. was not Ulysses Karl, they didn’t back out, but they asked if they could keep the U.K., because their male readers were alarmed by female writers. The explanation was so touching, and the money was so good, that we magnanimously consented.

  Pat: I write fantasy and horror as well as SF, but when I write SF, I go to enormous effort to make it hard SF. It’s difficult because I’m not a scientist, but I can learn enough on my own to make things plausible. Male SF writers who are scientists have referred to me as a hard SF writer. It took me decades longer to reach that point than it did male SF writers who also aren’t scientists (are you still following this sentence?). I think it’s because everyone assumes that men who write hard SF must have more science education than females. And yet I know of at least one female SF writer who happens to be a theoretical physicist. How long will it take people to guess her name?

  As someone with a gender-ambiguous byline, I have had moments of amusement, disgust, and disbelief. In fact, Kim Newman (male) and I were discussing this a few weeks ago at a convention in Oslo. (I’ve also talked about this with Kim Stanley Robinson (also male), who told me when he was starting out that his publisher expressed some concern that people would mistakenly think actress Kim Stanley had remarried and was reinventing herself.)

  Kim Newman pointed out that he had not deliberately taken on gender ambiguity, that his name was his name. My name is also my name, but I could have written as Patricia Cadigan. I chose Pat Cadigan not to be gender-ambiguous, but because I liked the way it sounded when spoken aloud. In my opinion, it scans better. I didn’t go out of my way to hide the fact that I’m a woman. My first books even included a photo. But apparently a lot of readers don’t look at author photos because a number of readers thought I was a guy. Another female author told me that she loaned Synners to a
male friend. When he found out I was a woman, he opined I was someone “without an ounce of femininity.” Obviously this says more about him; more troubling to me is that this happened barely twenty years ago.

  And yet. My son is twenty-eight; he and his friends have a far more inclusive cultural perspective.

  Ellen Datlow: I entered the field officially in 1979 when I started working as Associate Fiction Editor at OMNI Magazine. Because I’ve mostly worked with short fiction, I’m more aware of the world of the short story than the novel. So that’s mostly what I’m referring to below.

  The field back then, while dominated by men, always had fabulous female writers working in it. By the late ’80s we were seeing many more women on award ballots— particularly in the short form. For a period of time Nancy Kress, Connie Willis, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Pat Cadigan, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Martha Soukup, and others seemed to dominate the Nebula ballot in the short form.

  Some of those writers still produce great short stories, but most of them moved on to novel writing, and only occasionally still have time to write short stories. Because this seems the natural progression of our field, short story editors are always looking for new blood.

  I’m not going to name check all the wonderful female writers who emerged since the ’90s—there are plenty, but it seems to me that in the past five to ten years, there has been a continuous injection of new blood into the field by writers such as Priya Sharma, Genevieve Valentine, E. Lily Yu, Veronica Schanoes, and many others.

  What I see is that some of the best writers mix up their story production—moving with ease from science fiction to fantasy and horror and back again. This provides them with many more outlets for their work and recognition in more than one field—always a plus.

  Nancy Kress: Since I started writing SF, the field has changed in at least three significant ways. My first story appeared in 1976, a time of great feminist ferment in—and beyond—science fiction. In the few years preceding my debut story, Joanna Russ had published “When It Changed” (1972), Alice Sheldon “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973), and Suzy McKee Charnas Walk to the End of the World (1974), among scores of other works reimagining the relations of men and women. I was swept into the field among a great tide of female writers following these pioneers. When I started writing SF, the vast majority of SF still featured male protagonists. That is no longer true, and now SF is more likely to feature women in power positions as a given, rather than centering on the struggle to arrive there.

  Second, in the 1970s, science fiction still outsold most fantasy, still won most awards, still garnered the most attention. Today, as I write this, nearly every work of fiction on the Nebula ballot is fantasy, not science fiction. The bestselling series, such as George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, are fantasy.

  Pat: That’s right. In fact, I when I started reading genre, the field was far less stratified than it is now. Judith Merrill’s Best SF of the Year anthologies included hard SF, light-hearted fantasy, and weird pieces by John Cheever, Tuli Kupferberg, and Bernard Malamud (“The Jewbird”). The Merrill anthologies were a brilliant showcase of all kinds of stories with a fantastic element. I wish the electronic rights issues were more easily settled so that they could come back as ebooks. If I were teaching a literature course or a writing workshop, I would make them required reading.

  While I understand the divisions in genre—if I’m in the mood for elves, it’s nice to know I don’t have to spend hours sifting through rocket ships and serial killers—I often wish we were less concerned with what’s SF and what’s fantasy. But that’s just me.

  Ellen: Yes to all the above by Nancy. Fantasy has come to dominate the market. Perhaps it’s true that, as we’ve come to live more in a science fictional world of computers, nano technology, ebooks, space exploration, etc., it’s more difficult to excite readers the way science fiction used to—because it all seems so … normal.

  Nancy: And then there’s the third thing—Young Adult novels were once mostly read by teenagers. They mostly had no sex, little violence, and happy endings. Today, YA is one of the strongest subgenres in the field, and series such as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games and Veronica Roth’s Divergent are read by adults and are turned into big-budget movies. Except that their protagonists are teens, the novels share the traits of adult fiction.

  Pat: If you ever want to see writers treated like rock stars, go to an American Library Association convention and watch for a YA genre writer to show up. The librarians don’t scream and faint, but it’s a near thing. I saw the reception for Robert Cormier, author of The Chocolate War. I don’t think anyone threw underwear at him, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Anyone who gets young people reading is golden.

  Personally, I think that adults have been reading YA fiction all along. I know I have. I have happily re-read old favourites from my own youth and then gone on to check out new people. Judy Blume was one of the writers who pioneered true-life issues for teens in her books, like having sex and parents getting divorced.

  I also derive a great deal of satisfaction from knowing that the richest woman in the UK is a YA genre writer—J.K. Rowling.

  Ellen: The young adult market did not exist when I was a kid. There were books for kids and books for adults. I could hardly wait to move out of the kids’ book section of the library into the adult section.

  As Nancy says, young adult fiction can and does do everything adult SF and fantasy does except with younger protagonists.

  Pat: I went to my first convention in 1975. I made my first professional sale in 1979. Things in this field have changed a lot.

  For one thing, there are a hell of a lot more women. For another, the field isn’t quite as unrelentingly white as it used to be—we have more People of Colour. Granted, non-white fans and writers are still very much a minority, but they are no longer a rarity.

  However, the one thing I heard most after the last Worldcon—San Antonio, 2013, for the record—were complaints that the Worldcon was full of “old people.” This was apparently based on the number of mobility scooters in evidence. There was a lot of talk about how the Worldcon attendees were predominantly old people—ergo, it wasn’t attracting young people/new readers. All the hip, vital, young people went to DragonCon or the San Diego Comic Con.

  Bitch, please.

  I’m running into this kind of ageism more and more and I don’t like it. People in general are living longer and they’re healthier for longer. All new readers are not necessarily teenagers. The golden age of science fiction isn’t twelve.

  I think it’s deceptive anyway. I saw a lot of people under forty in San Antonio, and plenty under thirty as well. They were in evidence, but as most of them didn’t use mobility scooters, it wasn’t as easy to count them.

  But I was also gratified to see a number of disabled Worldcon attendees. There’s more concern for accessibility than there used to be. And there is more awareness of other issues as well. We don’t always get it right but we’re doing better than we used to.

  I suppose the biggest change has been ebooks. I welcome them with open arms—er, e-reader software on my iPad, anyway, and not just because SF Gateway brought back my backlist! Tons of formerly hard-to-find SF and fantasy is coming back to entertain and amaze new readers. My old favourites are back, along with a lot of books I’ve wanted to read but never got a chance to. And I love the fact that I can now take three hundred books on an airplane in my carry-on luggage without violating the weight restrictions.

  Ellen: More diversity is indeed in evidence. Not enough yet, but getting there. Embracing multiple voices in any art is crucial to the vitality of that art. Which also leads to Pat’s remarks about ageism. Writing is not a competition between the young and the old.

  Ursula: Then let us speak of how we have changed as a genre. Long ago, my children, in the days of my youth, our tribe was small and poor, skulking in exile on the margins of the rich kingdom of Literaturia. When we attempted to approac
h, we were driven back with execrations and the throwing of fecal matter by the armed Critics with their battle cry of “Genre! Kill!” We found, however, that many readers so loved us that they came into exile to join us, calling their settlement Fandom, and even in Literaturia, many secretly welcomed us to their hearts and homes. Over the years, we have grown in numbers and strength, and there is much intercourse of various kinds, and exchange of mental goods. Nowadays, blue-blooded Literaturians, believing they understand our simple customs, often imitate them, badly. Some of our tribe have become somewhat respectable in the streets of Literaturia, and pass, at times, almost unscathed among the Critics. The heights of the cities, however, and the great prizes to be found there, are still closed to us. I urge you to continue on the way of your tribal Elders, my children: Ignore execrations, seduce Critics, infiltrate curricula, and keep on truckin’.

  Ellen: Yes, yes, yes. The walls have become more permeable between our genre and the “literary” genre in the past thirty years and I hope this is an ongoing development. There are failures of course. I’ve watched writers of excellent literary fiction fail horribly at writing sf/f. And I’ve seen anger aimed at those writers by us (myself included) for poaching on our territory. Because of ongoing negative experiences with mainstream critics, our community has become more than a little defensive and possibly too insular.

  I think it would be useful for us to be more generous than those who dismiss our work and embrace the best examples of sf/f published outside our walls.

  Pat: I think most of the time, the—animosity is not really the word I want but it will have to do at the moment—the animosity aimed at mainstream writers who write genre is not really territoriality. It’s not “How dare you come into our clubhouse!” It’s usually because they’ve reinvented the wheel and think they’re being innovative and original. And a lot of mainstream critics start swooning about how innovative and original they are, praising ideas that they have previously sneered at in genre books. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, for example—I’m not going to trash it, it was a fine book. It was even nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. When it was made it into A Major Motion Picture, critics talked about not wanting to reveal the Big Secret. But every genre reader had probably already guessed. It was a variation on a premise that Robert Silverberg accomplished decades earlier in 5,000 words.