Of course, we do talk about women who ran with Shaka Zulu. When I Google “women who fought for Shaka Zulu” I learn all about his “harem of 1200 women.” And his mother, of course. And this line was very popular: “Women, cattle, and slaves.” One breath.
It’s easy to think women never fought, never led, when we are never seen.
• • •
What does it matter, if we tell the same old stories? If we share the same old lies? If women fight, and women lead, and women hold up half the sky, what do stories matter to the truth? We won’t change the truth by writing people out of it.
Will we?
Stories tell us who we are. What we’re capable of. When we go out looking for stories, we are, I think, in many ways going in search of ourselves, trying to find understanding of our lives, and the people around us. Stories and language tell us what’s important.
If women are “bitches” and “cunts” and “whores” and the people we’re killing are “gooks” and “japs” and “ragheads,” then they aren’t really people, are they? It makes them easier to erase. Easier to kill. To disregard. To un-see.
But the moment we re-imagine the world as a buzzing hive of individuals with a variety of genders and complicated sexes and unique, passionate narratives that have yet to be told—it makes them harder to ignore. They are no longer “women and cattle and slaves,” but active players in their own stories.
And ours.
Because when we choose to write stories, it’s not just an individual story we’re telling. It’s theirs. And yours. And ours. We all exist together. It all happens here. It’s muddy and complex and often tragic and terrifying. But ignoring half of it, and pretending there’s only one way a woman lives or has ever lived—in relation to the men that surround her—is not a single act of erasure, but a political erasure.
Populating a world with men, with male heroes, male people, and their “women, cattle, and slaves” is a political act. You are making a conscious choice to erase half the world.
As storytellers, there are more interesting choices we can make.
I can tell you all day that llamas have scales. I can draw you pictures. I can rewrite history. But I am a single storyteller, and my lies don’t become narrative unless you agree with me. Unless you write just like me. Unless you, too, buy my lazy narrative and perpetuate it.
You must be complicit in this erasure for it to happen. You, me, all of us.
Don’t let it happen.
Don’t be lazy.
The llamas will thank you.
Real human people will, too.
• • •
This post first appeared at A Dribble of Ink (http://aidanmoher.com/blog/), and is reprinted with the permission of the author.
Kameron Hurley is a Very Serious Writer who currently hacks out a living as a marketing and advertising scribe in Ohio. She spent much of her roaring twenties traveling, pretending to learn how to box, and trying not to die spectacularly. Along the way, she justified her nomadic lifestyle by picking up degrees in history from the University of Alaska and the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Today, she lives a comparatively boring life sustained by Coke Zero, Chipotle, low-carb cooking, and lots of words. She continues to work hard at not dying.
Writing Stories, Wrinkling Time
Kat Howard
The very first work of science fiction I ever read was written by a woman, and featured a female lead. And the female characters in the book weren’t limited to just the lead. There was an entire compelling and interesting cast of them. Not because this was some Amazonian dystopia where something happened to all the men but the one poor guy whose sad duty was to repopulate humanity, but just because! More than that, the book was given to me by a woman, by my mom’s best friend. It was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and it wasn’t until I started writing in the field that I realized just how unusual this experience, so full of women, was when it came to SF.
I find myself in a field now that all too often seems convulsed by the idea that if women are doing it, it can’t be SF. God knows, we shouldn’t be writing it, because then we contaminate the lovely pristine science with feelings and relationships, and with women doing things they couldn’t possibly be doing. That treats as exceptions the contributions of Mary Shelley and James Tiptree, Jr. and Joanna Russ and Connie Willis and Mary Doria Russell and Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin and Ada Lovelace and Anita Borg and Grace Hopper to their respective fields.
I don’t want to destroy science fiction, not really. I want to remind it that—at its best—it is the literature of extraordinary possibility. Of looking to the future, to the stars, to the place past the limits of current knowledge, and saying “there.” There is what we can imagine. There is what we can be. There is what is possible. Of not just dreaming bigger, but dreaming better.
I want, quite desperately, to go back in time to the world of that seven-year-old girl who read A Wrinkle in Time and felt like she had found a book and a world she belonged in.
Kat Howard is the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of over twenty pieces of short fiction. Her work has been performed on NPR as part of “Selected Shorts,” and has appeared in Lightspeed, Subterranean, and Apex, among other venues. Her novella, “The End of the Sentence,” written with Maria Dahvana Headley, will be out in August from Subterranean Press. You can find her on twitter as @KatWithSword and she blogs at strangeink.blogspot.com.
Where Are My SF Books?
DeAnna Knippling
A lot of the things I know now about women and SF, I didn’t learn until my daughter was old enough to start reading chapter books. The two don’t really seem to connect, do they? Chapter books (or early reader books) are for kids age six to eight-ish, and they’re deadly dull. I’m sorry. I’m sure there are people out there who love Magic Tree House and that ilk with a passion, but we had trouble getting through them, reading them together. I turned to other books. What was I reading when I was that age? I couldn’t remember, really, but I dipped back as far as I could into my memories, for things like The Hobbit and Narnia and Heinlein and Piers Anthony and whatnot.
My daughter wasn’t interested in the things that I loved. Especially the SF.
She wanted adventure books (not that slow old Hobbit stuff), and she wanted books about girls. She did not see why she had to put up with boy main characters. Or boring stuff about girls, for that matter (Narnia? A snoozer). She had all kinds of other options than reading—so why waste her time on something that wasn’t at least as good as The Powerpuff Girls?
That’s when it started to snap into place.
SF was: a) All about Boys, b) Very Literary, or c) Not Otherwise Accessible to Kids. I’m not talking “not appropriate for kids,” in the sense of being frightened of finding dirty words or sex. We ended up finding and liking Tamora Pierce, thank you very much, and have been vastly entertained by many inappropriate things since then. But on the SF side—not so much. The Giver went over well eventually, and so did A Wrinkle in Time. But I had a horrible time finding other things. I could have looked harder; I could have found other SF she might have liked. But in the end, we ended up with a great deal more fantasy than anything else. And liked it.
At the same time, I was realizing that I was reading far, far less SF. On the one hand, I wasn’t reading it because I was digging into other genres, because I’m learning to write, and often when you’re learning, it’s easier to process hard lessons when you’re not picking apart the things you love best. But on the other hand, I was finding the same problems that my daughter did: a) All about Boys, b) Very Literary, or c) Not Otherwise Accessible to ME.
I buy a lot of books every year, and I plow through scads more via the library.
Where are my SF books?
I could dig down deep and find them (and I have in many cases). But what they should be doing is sitting right at the top of the lists—the award lists, the bestseller lists. Fantasy’s figured this out. So has … pretty much every o
ther genre. Except Westerns. And it’s easy to see how well those sell.
You know what’s selling like hotcakes right now for SF? Young adult SF … with some female protagonists, more action than literary, and all kinds of accessible, from realistic character flaws and a focus on science that’s engaging rather than alienating and asking hard questions having to do with society instead of taking an easy way out. Admittedly, I think the YA stuff skews too far for female leads—look, we’re trying to get all the readers to grow up loving the genre—but that’s another topic, for another day. Right now, I just want to know where my books are … and why they aren’t helping print SF in general hit the top of everyone’s lists.
DeAnna Knippling, at the behest of her daughter, secretly writes pulp adventure fiction for kids (she tries to stick to about half boys and half girls) under the name De Kenyon (her daughter comes up with the best ideas). She also writes adult fiction under her own name as well as doing design and editing work. She has recently appeared in Crossed Genres, Black Static, Big Pulp, and more. She reads submissions for Lightspeed and dreams one day of editing a middle-grade pulp magazine with stories that would curl the hair on a Peterbald cat. You can find her at www.WonderlandPress.com.
Reading the Library Alphabetically
Liz Argall
It started when I read the library alphabetically …
No, it started with Superman III and Richard Pryor’s dream of what computers could be.
It started with Doctor Who: Tom Baker, the twinkle-eyed uncle with jelly babies; Peter Davison, the mean older brother; Sylvester McCoy, the whimsical daydreamer who cared too much. Sylvester McCoy, my doctor. Ace, my companion, who was nobody’s victim, wore a bomber jacket with voluminous pockets and made her own explosives.
It started in school when I watched Star Trek and Red Dwarf so I could keep up and have something in common with the nerd girls (and even a few nerd boys) that I still love to this day.
But no, I didn’t think of those shows as Science Fiction, not then. Not my Science Fiction with capital letters, the fiction that set me on a path and shaped me as the writer I would become. That came from reading the library alphabetically.
Reading the library alphabetically was a solitary pursuit, huddled away in the stacks on a mildewed couch with mice scuttling in my peripheral vision. It was a private thing, and a lonely thing. I read introductions to anthologies that gave me windows into faraway America, where people spoke with confidence about trends and best of’s. They spoke with authority about battles in nomenclature that I only knew about as they argued to redefine the terms. The world those editors wrote about seemed almost as alien and impossible as Mars.
Asimov gave me a love of Mars. I read a lot of Asimov’s robot series, way up there in the A’s. He was so different to Star Trek, D&D, TMNT, Doctor Who and cyberpunk. I loved his academic rigor. I loved his introductions where he spent so much time explaining how our understanding of the planets had changed since he wrote the story. I loved his robots. I loved their yearning, the way they stretched the limits of their programming or fell into traps, but always strove. Sincere, good-hearted striving and failing isn’t something we see a lot of in non-“literary” fiction, but the robots were magnificent in their failures, often profound failures. The beauty and the tragedy of these characters created human-shaped entities in fiction I could relate to. Perhaps it says something that my comfort reading included Virginia Woolf, Jack London, Oscar Wilde, and short stories by Steinbeck.
And it may sound strange, given critiques he has received, but Asimov gave me my first memories of an adult female character I liked and admired! A strong woman who wasn’t sexualized (at least to my twelve year-old eyes—I have not re-read), who seemed whole and complete and complicated. Susan Calvin, who was interested in her own story, achieving what she thought was important, was wonderfully competent and was in a position of power and authority. I loved that she didn’t play nice and she was successful and that was a breath of fresh air. She wasn’t pretty and I especially liked that. People have told me how nastily Asimov wrote Susan Calvin, but I think every time I came across a “negative” description of her I must have rejoiced. You can be older and not-pretty and have people think about your body in negative ways and be angry and capable and in authority and that is marvelous. How often do we get active female characters like that?
Working my way through Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke (Rama Revealed, I didn’t find Rendezvous with Rama for years), and many anthologies, it slowly dawned on me. I’d always known I wanted to be a writer, from the age of seven I’d known, but it crept up on me that I wanted to write Science Fiction. It terrified me. Even whispering the word in the depths of my own mind felt close to impossible. Gendered marketing and schoolyard politics had made it clear I was not welcome and trying to grapple with the vastness of the cosmos can be terrifying for any soul or gender. As my reading continued, I learned the acronyms SF, SFF, and the politics of the phrase “Speculative Fiction” over “Science Fiction.” (After serious thought, I decided I would join team speculate.) “I want to write SF”: I could whisper that in the quiet of my mind and not always slide off the edges.
I remember standing in the library, thinking about being a girl trying to write science fiction. (I wonder how different life would have been if Butler or Russ had graced our library shelves.) Thinking about being a girl trying to prove myself to a series of blank-faced male American faces (with maybe a few from the UK) made me feel very small. My dry, bookish world of science fiction seemed so different to the brightly colored fandom of my friends and I had been taught to be somewhat snobbish about pop culture—even as I smeared my nose against the glass looking in.
I remember standing in the middle of the library, suddenly caught short by a thought, tears welling in my eyes. Would I be forever lonely? Trying to break into boys’ club after boys’ club? I’d already learned that becoming good at handball just meant the boys stopped playing if I came near.
Then, working my way through the library, I got to Le Guin. I had loved A Wizard of Earthsea, LOVED it, but it never occurred to me that she would write beyond fantasy. Her science fiction blew my mind; her essays inspired me and gave me dreams to chase.
Part of me felt jealous. I wanted to be the first female Science Fiction Author (I’m sure I had read science fiction by women before that, but had categorized it differently, not hard enough, not marketed as such—the way dystopian futures written by women are still erased as kidsy or other ghettoizing notions that render women invisible in our field). A bigger part of me was relieved. Le Guin showed me that female writers could make it in the world. Just as Aurealis magazine appeared in my life and gave me stories in my geography and culture, stories where America wasn’t always the center and the homes were more like my home.
For me, Le Guin had broken the path and written science fiction that resonated on so many levels. Her ansible, her exploration of space travel and diverse culture—one of her stories even made me feel angry and that radicalized my reading in a wonderful way.
Later I would properly tackle my own internalized misogyny, but for the time being me and Ursula Le Guin were the only female science fiction writers and we were going to change the world.
Mary Shelley, look at us now!
Liz Argall has been destroying science fiction in places like Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Daily Science Fiction, Anywhere But Earth, and This Is How You Die: Stories of the Inscrutable, Infallible, Inescapable Machine of Death. She creates the webcomic Things Without Arms and Without Legs and writes love songs to inanimate objects. She generally doesn’t put her SFWA membership on her bio, she never mentioned her Australian Society of Authors membership back in the day, and once you start mentioning memberships and workshops (like Clarion or Launch Pad) the bio can get terribly long! SFWA membership just seemed relevant for this particular essay. Her previous incarnations include circus manager, refuge worker, artists’ model, research officer for the Order of Au
stralia Awards, and extensive work in the not-for-profit sector. Her roller derby name is Betsy Nails. She has a website http://lizargall.com.
Stepping Through a Portal
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
I did not read much science fiction growing up. I liked what I did stumble upon: Childhood’s End; Alas, Babylon; A Scanner Darkly, Fahrenheit 451; Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But although these stories fascinated me, there was little in them to relate to for a bisexual teenage girl. What I read instead were YA books written for teens like me, all lacking in any element of the fantastical or science fictional: Girl Walking Backwards; Dare, Truth, or Promise; Pages for You (the reading of which was a steamy secret I kept from my parents). We were taught Frankenstein in school, of course, and in one particularly resonant AP English class we were required to read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The boys in the class complained; it was too liberal, too feminist, not as classic as the other dystopian novels we were exploring—Brave New World and 1984. “Why did we have to read that?” they asked.
It wasn’t until college that I stumbled upon women writing science fiction, and it was like stepping through a portal to a whole new world. No one had ever told me about these books, about these writers—Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Alice Sheldon, Kelly Link—or, for that matter, about this niche of SFF, where lived the subtle, character-oriented stories I’d always longed to read—and write. I thought I had found a haven by and for women like me. Then I started to read the comments, the critiques, follow the controversies, and it became apparent that the utopia I thought I had discovered was not a utopia after all. Like in Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” there was a darker side to paradise, a sinister presence lurking in comments sections, in bulletins and blogs, in reviews. It was just like in my high school English class, only the people who labeled these women-written stories as too feminist had bigger soapboxes from which to shout. It was a devastating blow for a young woman, one that dragged me down to a less rosy view of the science fiction world.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 53
