Science Fiction: Women Do It Better
In a cafe in New Orleans a couple years ago, I overheard a couple in conversation. The girl was explaining the book she planned to write. For about thirty minutes I listened to this extraordinary idea for a narrative, a Jekyll and Hyde-inspired story dealing with female body insecurities that I’m not going to further explain because I really hope she’s still working on it, if not near publication.
“So that’s almost like science fiction,” her boyfriend said. “Not really,” she replied
No, it’s not just “like” it, her idea is science fiction. But for some reason the classification is avoided when the work is written by a woman. It’s speculative fiction, fantasy, or quirky McSweeny’s-style stories, but if a woman wrote it, it’s certainly not sci-fi.
Just look at the brilliant book Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall. I haven’t read anything better in years. The science fiction community has all but ignored it, giving only passing mention of its James Tiptree Jr award win.
This may seem like a superficial concern. Why should it matter whether something is part of a genre or not? But “science fiction” is known as the literature of ideas, intellectual rigor, and philosophic arguments. Science fiction indicates an imaginative literature: analytic, scientific — a creative work of scholarship rather than banal solipsism.
Even if a female author is labeled science fiction, another distinction is made: that she isn’t “hard science fiction.” The “hard science fiction” bar is raised when women want to write or film science fiction. Women tend to write a lot about biology, and more women study biology than other sciences. As Peggy at Biology and Science Fiction points out, “there aren’t that many gadgets that have come out of the biological sciences, at least as compared to the physical sciences” — and gadgety is representative of “hard science fiction.”
There was a panel about this at the WISCON, the women in science fiction con:
JB: Part of the reason the concept, the term is problematic is it’s used as a norm for “real science fiction” and however we define it, it has changed as more women enter the field. Fantastic, speculative, there’s other terms they call it when they don’t want to call it sf. Femspec. In early days of 50s and 60s sf, male authors would write about social issues and the social issues around tech but when women do it’s soft sf. Then we come to 70s and 80s when writing about biology was considered soft, because (the rhetoric is that) women are their biology in some way, women can therefore more easily be biochemical scientists… I expect the next thing to fall is going to be mathematics. Real, normative, actual, the only kind we should really care about, that counts, used in book reivews, not included in canon. This changing definition has a gender bias to it.
Margaret: Just like what has been called “art”. At various times pottery, woven stuff, wasn’t art, because it was women and people of color who were doing that. And very similar things done with gender and hard sf. As you’ve suggested, when men were doing very similar things with social issues, that was still “hard”.
There’s pressure on a woman to write “hard science fiction,” even if she doesn’t really want to — just to prove that she can.
People gave Sleater Kinney a lot of guff because they didn’t have a bass player; but no one ever said that meant they weren’t a rock band! Classification is always arbitrary. Had Joanna Russ befriended Donald Bartheleme in the 70s, instead of editors of Amazing, her work would be called metafiction, (or whatever.)
Going back to the idea that every subject can be science fiction, those of the gender that breed and bleed, have plenty of interesting science fiction concepts to bring to the table.
And they are definitely consuming science fiction. At least as many young girls have read the Handmaid’s Tale as young boys have read Ender’s Game — perhaps an equal number of boys and girls have read Ender’s Game. Females tend to read more fiction, after all.
Another two reasons I just don’t buy the idea that men are inherently more interested in science fiction than women: Small Wonder and Out of this World, about a girl-robot and time-shifter whose dad is an alien, respectively. Those two shows (and Punky Brewster about an orphan who was obsessed with astronauts) were my favorites and yours if happened to be a girl growing up in the 80s.
What makes these two television shows unique from other widely enjoyed tv sci-fi like Lost in Space or even BSG today, is both of the lead characters were girls. It might be the first time science fiction was made just for a mass young female audience. Silly as it seems now, the shows were no better or worse than any other 80s sitcoms.
Children watching these programs were engaged with philosophy of science fiction: what would it be like to stop time just by touching your fingertips together? (I’m sure I’m not the only one who practiced this in my bedroom when no one was looking.) Or if your friend is made of metal and wires, do you treat her just like everyone else?
Women love science fiction! We do! Probably more than you dudes! Nearly every art school girl has Ursula Le Guin’s books on her shelf. Women actually write most of the fanfic. Even at the basest, lowest low culture it is in there: a number of romantic comedies, (many starring Mel Gibson for some reason,) use science fiction furniture. And I learned, during a period of unemployment, that nearly every soap opera has a supernatural gimmick — clones, witches, even aliens. Instead of mocking it, we should embrace it, as the feminine counterpart to the shlocky science fiction made by the likes of The Rock and Sylvester Stallone in the 90s.
Some work by women that should be welcomed into the Science Fiction cannon: the writers Anna Kavan, Angela Carter, Shelley Jackson, Katharine Burdekin. In film: Lynne Littman, Kay Linaker, Caroline Thompson, and so many others. The music of Anne Clark. Art by Sara Sze and Patricia Piccinini. These are all just off the top of my head. I should probably make another post on this.
And let me praise Daughters of the North yet again. It’s magnificent. The Handmaid’s Tale comparisons were inevitable, but Atwood’s dystopia, while bleak and repressive, isn’t nearly as horrific as Hall’s vision. Hers is a world of hunger, suffering, torture, shit. It’s even better than Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Sarah Hall is a genius.
Images of sculptures by Sarah Sze
Previously:
- Science Fiction is for the Renaissance Men
- Dario Argento and the Paradoxical Feminism of Horror Films
Related links:
- Bat Segundo interviews Sarah Hall
- When Harry Met Sexism, Bidisha, The Guardian
- Science Fiction Fandom Has No Sex, This Recording
- What Chicks Don’t Like About Science Fiction, io9
- Gender and Fan Studies, CCC
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6 Responses to “Science Fiction: Women Do It Better”
Posted by: Molly Lambert - 06/16/2008
yes yes yes, all of this is so right on
James Tiptree herself was subjected to the double standards. They worked in her favor because people took her writing much more seriously assuming she was a man. When her sex was revealed in 1977,
“Several prominent science fiction writers suffered some embarrassment. Robert Silverberg had written an introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, arguing on the basis of selections from stories in the collection, that Tiptree could not possibly be a woman. And in an introduction to Tiptree’s story in his Again, Dangerous Visions anthology, Harlan Ellison opined that “[Kate] Wilhelm is the woman to beat this year, but Tiptree is the man.”
Posted by: Guy Hermann - 06/17/2008
I am just reading a series of books my 13-year-old daughter loved–Uglies/Pretties/Specials by Scott Westerfeld. This is science fiction, but not technology fiction–the science is biology and psychology and appeals to a 13-year old girl because it is all about how appearance isn’t everything in a world where appearance is everything, but is also not what it appears. And this from a guy who started out writing “hard core” space opera. Lets have more like this!
Posted by: Joanne McNeil - 06/18/2008
Thanks for the recommendation! I’ll definitely check that series out
Posted by: Peggy - 06/20/2008
Sounds like I’m going to have to find a copy of Daughters of the North - and Scott Westerfield is already on my “to read” list. The idea that girls (and women) don’t like science fiction is really self-perpetuating. It’s sometimes hard to admit to enjoying things that are considered outside the norm, so it becomes more socially acceptable for girls to disdain sci-fi than to admit to liking it. It doesn’t help that there is still a lot of marketing (especially for movies and TV shows) that is clearly aimed at young men. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem like horror is considered as “unfeminine” as sci-fi, even when it’s filled with gore. I’m not sure why that is.
Posted by: Joanne McNeil - 06/20/2008
That is a very good point. Maybe because horror movies are thought of — rather amusingly — as teenage date movies? It is an interesting comparison, especially as the list of women writing and filming horror is very, very small
Posted by: Emma - 07/11/2008
Interesting. There used to be a great science fiction comic for girls in the 70s or early 80s called Misty - maybe only in the UK, I’m not sure. It was drawn in the style of a teen romance comic but full of stories about inventor’s daughters who were actually robots etc. I think it was pretty popular - perhaps because it never openly labelled itself as sci-fi in terms of its aesthetic. The covers emphasized a sort of witchy Gothic horror instead.
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