Now, this many years later, I have the courage and honor to write about women and men who have honor, and who believe in Faulkner’s values. I am a Southern California science fiction writer. I owe to those who came before me: Jim Blaylock and Tim Powers, and before them, Philip K. Dick.
I have been slapped, groped, insulted, and intimidated in my pursuit of being a female science fiction writer.
I have some news for those who’d seek to put me or my work down. I am Female Science Fiction Writer. I will write about that which I wish and choose to write about.
Am I, as a permanent slush pile denizen who reviews for a major publication stated, a “decent sentence-to-sentence writer?” Oh, I suppose so. But what I am, truly, is someone who understands Faulkner’s charge. I refuse to write as though I “stood among and watched the end of man,” a term that Faulkner used in its full sense—to refer to all people.
We are not writing among the end of men. We are writing among the beginning of women. Of people. Of our, human, race.
Inspired by a lifelong love of nature, endless curiosity, and a belief in wonderful things, Amy Sterling Casil is a 2002 Nebula Award nominee and recipient of other awards and recognition for her short science fiction and fantasy, which has appeared in publications ranging from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction to Zoetrope. She is the author of twenty-six nonfiction books, more than a hundred short stories, primarily science fiction and fantasy, two fiction and poetry collections, and two novels. She lives in Aliso Viejo, California with her daughter Meredith and a Jack Russell Terrier named Gambit. Amy is a business consultant and teaches writing and composition at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, after receiving her MFA from Chapman University in 1999.
Toward a Better Future
Nancy Jane Moore
No one has ever pinched my butt at a con. I don’t recall anyone ever telling me I didn’t have the “balls” to write science fiction.
And convention panels addressing gender issues have evolved into thoughtful and rational discussions—at least when I’m moderating them. I’ve even seen some change in the panels on women soldiers in SF. When I first started doing them (I get asked to do these often, since I’m a martial artist and write some military SF), the discussion quickly degenerated into whether women could fight. But these days it’s more common to have a conversation about how the military has changed with respect to women and to speculate on what that will mean in the future.
So I don’t have any entertaining or obnoxious stories about the time so-and-so did such-and-such to me. But other women do. And I’ve heard those stories enough to know that misogyny has not disappeared in the science fiction world.
It makes me wonder if it would be easier to sell my fiction if my name was Nathan rather than Nancy, or if I didn’t write so many stories with female protagonists. A positive review of my PS Publishing collection, Conscientious Inconsistencies, questioned whether the word “feminist” should have been used in the description of the book, since even non-feminists would like it. I know the reviewer meant it as a compliment, but it was still frustrating.
Here’s the thing about oppression: It’s rarely the result of one person’s actions and often it’s not even intentional. As philosopher Carol Hay puts it, “Most oppressive harms tend not to be the result of the intentional actions of an individual person, but are more often the unintentional result of an interrelated system of social norms and institutions.” [Hay, Carol, Kantianism, Liberalism, and Feminism, Palgrave McMillan, 2013, p. 8.]
Editors who say that women submit fewer stories than men and that they buy stories from men and women in about the proportion of their submissions are probably telling the truth. But while they have no intention to harm women writers, the fact remains that every time I pick up an issue of the magazine, I see more stories by men.
I also see more stories by men in most anthologies, including the various “year’s best” ones. And I see more reviews of books by men, something documented every year. This is, of course, also true in literary and mainstream fiction—especially the reviews.
Do women submit in smaller numbers because they notice these discrepancies? Of course they do. Even women who have spent their lives battering down the doors that say “No Girls Allowed” get tired of fighting all the time.
How do we fix this? By doing things like this Lightspeed special issue. And by recognizing—and embracing—the fact that women are going to tell stories that differ from the ones of the so-called Golden Age.
Science fiction is supposed to be a genre of ideas, and ideas grow and change. It’s time for the SF community to stop defining science fiction by the ideas of U.S. and U.K. white male writers. The future will be the better for it.
The last rule in Nancy Jane Moore’s story “Thirty-One Rules for Fulfilling Your Destiny” is “Break all rules, including these.” It’s advice she has taken to heart. Her books, all available as ebooks at Book View Café, include the novellas “Changeling” (first published by Aqueduct Press) and “Ardent Forest,” and the collections Conscientious Inconsistencies (first published by PS Publishing) and Flashes of Illumination. Moore’s short fiction has appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines ranging from Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet to The National Law Journal. She holds a fourth degree black belt in Aikido and divides her time between Austin, Texas, and Oakland, California.
We Are the Army of Women Destroying SF
Sandra Wickham
I grew up watching the Star Wars trilogy on repeat. Yes, I know it’s not science fiction, but back then all I knew was it had spaceships, robots, and laser swords, and I was hooked. I wanted to be a Jedi, or at the very least, a super hero. I’m pretty sure a great deal of who I am today has on some level been a quest for that.
I also grew up naïve of gender discrimination. My brothers and I all had chores to do on the farm. The easier ones went to me, but it was because I was the youngest and littlest, not because I was a girl. I was never told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl, and was definitely never held back from anything I wanted to do. For my first job, I wanted to pump gas at a busy intersection, mostly because it was on the route to the beach and I’d get to see tons of people my age. It never occurred to me that they hadn’t ever had a female work there, but it didn’t stop me from convincing them to hire me, which opened doors for other women to work there. I became the first female president of the British Columbia Amateur Bodybuilding Association, not to prove a point, but because someone needed to step up to the position. I never thought of those as gender issues or something I shouldn’t have taken on.
Cue me naïvely entering the science fiction publishing world with the same ideas. I want to write the same stories I loved growing up, the ones that filled my heart and soul with wonder and fueled my imagination. To hear it said that women are destroying science fiction rattles me to the core. I’m new to the publishing industry and haven’t had the experiences other women have had at conventions or online. Yet. When I hear about it, it makes me want to pick up my light saber and start slicing off body parts. While that might be fun, I realize it wouldn’t solve the problem.
I’m also aware that being a strong, intelligent, and independent-minded female is not popular with everyone. To those people, I say, “I don’t care.” It makes me angry and drives me to want to stand up for all women in the industry, whether it’s by continuing to destroy science fiction by writing it, or by physically standing up for someone who needs it. This Jedi recently earned a black belt. You need me; I’ll be there.
I will continue to write science fiction and fantasy because I love it and because I want to entertain people, whatever the gender. The talented women who write science fiction are not going anywhere, no matter what the haters say. We are the army of women destroying science fiction and we are strong. May the force be with us.
Sandra Wickham lives in Vancouver, Canada, with her husband and two cats. Her friends call her a needle-crafting aficiona
do, health guru, and ninja-in-training. Sandra’s short stories have appeared in Evolve, Vampires of the New Undead; Evolve, Vampires of the Future Undead; Chronicles of the Order; Crossed Genres; LocoThology: Tales of Fantasy & Science Fiction; and The Urban Green Man. She blogs about writing with the Inkpunks, is the Fitness Nerd columnist for the Functional Nerds, and slush reads for Lightspeed Magazine.
Read SF and You’ve Got a Posse
Gail Marsella
As a consumer, reading science fiction resembles an auction—the tables hold an impossibly enticing variety of unique things, the sellers make multiple bid calls for your attention, and you’re never the oddest person there. You can be tongue-tied, brainy, hit upside the head with an ugly stick, or as socially awkward as a chimp at a bris, but read SF and you’ve got a posse: people (some admittedly fictional) who would actively admire you for having a chemistry set and scuba gear to go with your sewing machine and fine china. Too much guy stuff? Well, yes. No argument about misogyny in the field, and the disturbingly wide POV range can be daunting, but—maybe because of a supportive father—I found it exciting, a sanctuary where I could use big words, think big thoughts, and not endure very many swelled heads. The two best work groups in my corporate career had a routine SF book swap, and even academia, where I teach now, is starting to come around.
As a creator, writing science fiction is probably no more difficult than any other kind of writing, which means next to impossible if you’ve only ever written essays, proposals, or software manuals. Steep. Learning. Curve. It’s harder than humor. It’s harder than convincing the dean to fund a purely practical study of how to make money. Despite several decades of reading and writing experience, and a favorite definition of “story” that fits particularly well with SF (it’s survival information), I’m struggling to get started. Thank God for Nancy Kress, Ben Bova, Kate Wilhelm, and all the others who give back to the field by writing how-to books and teaching. At some point I’ll be ready for Clarion, and despite my age (sixty), I’m going to wow them. Be ready.
Gail Marsella lives in Allentown, PA, with her husband, dog, SF book collection, and assorted hobbies. Retired from corporate America after launching three kids, she now teaches chemistry at Muhlenberg College. Gail is also a first reader for Lightspeed Magazine.
Stomp All Over That
O. J. Cade
Apparently, women are destroying science fiction. The historically minded will recall that we used to destroy science. We’re branching out, it seems.
It started in the test tubes, the bright labs, the white coats, with Ada Lovelace in clockwork heels and Rosalind Franklin in spiral stilettos, and both of them following behind, because their footwear was all so flimsy they couldn’t possibly hold up by themselves, without help. With Lise Meitner in windup shoes, a dolly working on automatic in a lab that didn’t want her. With Marie Curie in shoes that glowed like ruby slippers dipped in uranium, turned away from the Academy of Sciences because men don’t wear pretty slippers and they’d taint the very threshold, they would, leave little traces of woman with a half-life too desperately long to ever be scrubbed away.
Still a place was made, if grudging. We clawed our way up and into science in our pretty, silly, sensible shoes, and stuck there, because people couldn’t very well bitch about women in science when Rebecca Lancefield was helping them see off Streptococcus in sequined, sequenced sandals and when Gertrude Elion was doing the same with leukaemia, with her toenails peeping red-painted out of open-toed marrowbone shoes. When Henrietta Lacks became science, her feet shod in Petri dishes, and legion. And the bigots read outside in the waiting room, their feet in concrete blocks and granddad slippers, and suddenly there’s this whole new world of women with feet that could be stepped on, that could be bound up and turned away.
There’s Mary Shelley with electricity zipping through her iron-toed, hobnail boots. And Margaret Atwood with her decoupage slippers, handmade with pages from Genesis, and Octavia Butler in boots embossed with teeth and feathers … And beneath all the shoes, upon all the soles, is stamped exception—making, for the prints that can’t be scuffed out, and taking, for the ones that can.
And this new army of shoes, of bright, pretty prints, are tracking in mud. They’re bringing in blood and dead birds and flesh-eating bacteria and sex, all come to topple, to bring down, and the poor deluded things don’t seem to realise that they’ve missed the Golden Age, all right, and it was back when their owners were barefoot. And would they mind going back, please, to the sad, superficial corners of the wardrobes from whence they came, because gold is best when not part of a spectrum and their presence just might drown it out. Those heels are noisy, understand? And science is a single experience, and limited, and you should sit back and let other people talk about it, because those tongues in those shoes can have nothing valuable to say. (Do you hear that, Marie? Do you hear it, Ada and Mary and Margaret?)
I hear it. And stomp all over that, I say. Science belongs to us all, and so does science fiction.
O.J. Cade is a PhD candidate in science communication. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cosmos, and Aurealis, amongst others. She has a novella, “Trading Rosemary,” due out in February from Masque Books.
For the Trailblazers
Kristi Charish
I clone things.
When I first started my career in research that was the way I introduced myself.
I clone things. For someone who started university in the late ’90s that was such a loaded sentence—it carried the weight of recent scientific cloning advances (They cloned a sheep—a SHEEP! Named Dolly!), that I was involved with the leading edge of scientific advances, and that I was a female scientist—one of many from my generation.
… I guess there’s a big science fiction influence carried in that line too.
My name is Kristi Charish and I’m a Canadian geneticist and cell and molecular biologist. Until recently, I worked with these awesome, genetically modified fruit flies that carry something called a fluorophore, a glow-in-the-dark gene. Those little glow-in-the-dark genes made it possible for me to study cell division, and I discovered elements about how skin-like cells multiply that have some pretty important implications for cancer.
Take that anti GMO’ers! GMO, glow-in-the-dark fruit flies help cure cancer. Booyah!
I’m also a Science Fiction and Fantasy writer—the equivalent of a rookie who just got drafted to play in the major leagues. To say I’m still pretty stoked about the whole thing would be a colossal understatement. So how did I go from research scientist to fiction writer? Well, like most writers, I’ve loved books and movies since I was a kid. But … I didn’t want to be rescued by Indiana Jones, I wanted to be Indiana Jones—a female version mind you, like Tomb Raider, but I knew I didn’t want to take a back seat to the adventure. I guess you could say I carried that sentiment with me when I began to write a few years ago.
And something really cool happened—as a female writer and a non-arts major, I met with an overwhelming amount of support from the men and women around me. Perseverance, a finished manuscript, and a dozen query letters later, I had a fantastic agent (Carolyn Forde, WCA) and a two-book publishing deal with Simon and Schuster Canada/Pocket Books US.
Now, this is an essay for the WDSF Kickstarter, and here I am, a woman in the fields of science and science fiction who has never dealt with the overt discrimination so many other women have and still face every day around the world—quite the opposite.
But my experience is the way it should be.
I think it’s important for women like myself to speak up about their positive experiences. An integral element of science fiction and fantasy for me is the element of hope, that under the surface of every blatant setback lies a hidden truth that things are in fact changing, still changing, and the setbacks are no more than a nefarious force of old lashing back in a futile attempt to recapture a rapidly decaying mold.
For all of the women and men in science and writi
ng who’ve blazed the trail for me, I’m one of your many successes; a young woman who has had only encouragement from the men and women in her life to pursue her careers, who has had strong professional female role models, and who has never had the hear the words “you can’t because you’re a woman.”
There’s still a way to go, but we’ve made a hell of a lot of positive ground, too.
Kristi Charish, BSc., MSc., PhD., is a scientist and science fiction/fantasy writer who resides in Vancouver, Canada. She received her BSc and MSc from Simon Fraser University in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, and her PhD in Zoology from the University of British Columbia. Kristi writes what she loves; adventure-heavy stories featuring strong, savvy female protagonists. The first installment in her debut urban fantasy series, Owl and the Japanese Circus, is scheduled for release early 2015 through Simon & Schuster Canada/Pocket Books.
Women are the Future of Science Fiction
Juliette Wade
I fell backward into science fiction after years of reading, writing, and submitting. One day, Stanley Schmidt bought a story from me and published it in Analog, and I became a science fiction author.
That story was the only one I’d written that I considered science fiction. It had humans and aliens and spaceships. But as I corresponded with Stanley Schmidt and was welcomed heartily at the Analog forum, I realized people didn’t care as much about those superficial trappings. They cared about the sciences behind my stories, linguistics and anthropology. Then, when I looked back at everything I’d written, I realized they were all science fiction stories. They were about science, written with strict attention to scientific principle. This wasn’t an accident; I was a science fiction writer.
My sciences were never the “hard” sciences. Social sciences are generally considered “soft” in academia, and yes, that means feminine. I found that ironic at best, coming out of linguistics, a discipline that uses scientific notation—and even chaos theory—to grapple with language phenomena. Anthropology has grown out of a deeply problematic history of colonialism, but is now finding itself in a world of cultural relativism and feminism. This was fascinating to me—not just to capture the perspectives of Others as an anthropologist, but to consider the discipline itself through an anthropological eye.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 51
