Friday 31 January 2014

Whizzy new technology versus story

A lot of people who don't read SF think it's full of whizzy new technology they can't understand.  SF writers are themselves partly to blame for this perception.  If the tech in a story isn't understandable to   a certain degree then the story fails.

Arthur C. Clarke's Rendevous With Rama comes to mind here.  Humans enter vast alien starship, explore for a while, meet some machines they don't dialogue with, and leave.   The characters never find out who built the craft, or get to meet them.  Or even find out anything useful about them.  I remember thinking 'is that all?' when I'd finished reading it.  The whizzy tech came at the expense of story.

Sometimes SF writers lose track of the fact that they're telling the reader a story.  I'll often read extracts from SF short stories in magazines but I'm rarely tempted to buy the whole thing.  Call me old-fashioned if you like, but I do get confused after the second jump-cut in half a page introducing a third character who isn't any better drawn than the half-sketches of the first two.  And there seems to be quite a fashion for obscure stories with bizarre ideas that aren't properly worked-out right now.

Just because we're SF writers that doesn't absolve us from the responsibility of telling a damn good story.  And if we've got a message to speak, telling a damn good story helps us to get that across without the danger of author preaching.

By all means use whizzy tech in your stories, but for the sake of  your readers, provide a good enough    explanation of it to allow them to grasp its significance in the story.  If you can't do that then you haven't visualised it well enough and need to go back to the drawing board and do some more design.

Thursday 30 January 2014

Entry-level SF

Yesterday I was reading a discussion about entry-level SF.  It was a long discussion, with many different viewpoints, all of them recommending their best books to hook people into reading SF.

SF has an image problem.  It always has had, but for me as a woman SF writer wanting to write about the world from a feminist perspective it's even more of a problem.

So what would I recommend as entry-level SF for women readers?  Sadly, nothing that I've seen recently on my local bookshop's shelves. That's a problem in itself, as the bookseller clearly believes SF is for men and doesn't stock most of the new books by women authors.  The few that do make it onto the shelves are military SF.  Not a great introduction to the genre for women.

No, if you want entry-level SF go look in the young adult section. It isn't marketed as SF, but one look at the covers and blurbs of many of the books will tell you that they most definitely are.  And just as importantly, many of these books tackle soft SF issues wrapped around the hard SF core of the story. Most of the exciting new SF I've read for the last decade has been YA.

Take Scoff Westerfield's Uglies/Pretties/Specials trilogy, exploring the consequences of extreme re-making of our bodies.  Everybody ends up Pretty, but there's a price to pay, a price that keeps people controlled and docile.  If you want a warning about what cosmetic surgery could become, read them.

Then there's Sam Hawksmoor's The Repossession and The Hunting.  Teleportation experiments on vulnerable kids, anyone?  Or how about Sarah Crossan's Breathe, taking the old joke about taxing the air we breathe and showing what happens when we do.

Memory wipe?  Try Teri Terry's Slated and Fractured.  An exploration of not belonging and its consequences?  Try Veronica Roth's Divergent.

Mobile cities?  Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines series, with their terrifying cyborg Stalkers.

All these books deal with hard SF issues, but they also explore the soft SF cultural and individual consequences for people of the worlds they've drawn. And just as importantly, they all tella damn good story, something a lot of adult SF has got too up itself to do.  But that's another rant for another day.

Wednesday 29 January 2014

FEM-SF rules, okay?

It seems that women can't destroy science fiction with stories about rape and mysogyny on colony planets.  What is the point of having a women's issue of an SF magazine if it doesn't deal with issues that are central to women's' existence?

I can't figure out whether the refusal to deal with this issue is because of funding constraints, or because there's some romantic notion out there that the future will be rape-free.

It's disappointing that  editors won't recognize that the problems women face today will still be around in the future.  No amount of whizzy new tech is going to make women safe in the universe if the culture doesn't give a clear signal that rape is not okay.

That's what FEM-SF is all about, dealing with women's issues in the context of the wider universe. I'm fed up with stories that preserve traditional family structures, even in universes where humans are grown in artificial wombs.  Why?  In our present culture, family is the biggest reason why so many women don't achieve their full potential.  Weighed down by kids and a controlling partner, any attempt to do great things doesn't stand a chance,

I want FEM-SF to challenge the stultifying norms that program women to breed and to accept being financially supported by someone else.  There's a whole big universe out there to explore, why do we limit ourselves in this way?  Where are the challenges to the so-called maternal instinct?  I don't have an ounce of it, and never have.  Self-sufficient, financially independent, well educated women have the choice to refuse that life of limitation, and I want to see more of them do so.

I want to see more challenges to the idea that recreational sex is good.  In my view, it's the basis of the majority of evil on our planet.  Discrimination, prostitution, sexual harassment, sexually transmitted diseases are all things we've brought on ourselves through our cultural programming that 'sex is good'.  

Back in the 1970s and 80s these issues were getting aired.  The Golden Age of SF gave women a voice through the words of the talented women authors who were writing about these issues then.

Would The Left Hand of Darkness get published today?  With the state of present SF publishing I doubt it.  It's looking like we simply don't care any more about the real issues that face women,

FEM-SF AUTHOR'S RANT

Welcome to my blog, where I’ll be periodically ranting about the state of FEM-SF – or more likely the lack of it.

I got into reading the SF genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and for me this is the Golden Age of SF.  I was hooked by fabulous books like C.J. Cherryh’s Chanur Saga, Mary Gentle’s Golden Witchbreed, Joan Vinge’s The Snow Queen, Katherine Kerr’s Polar City Blues.   Real SF with real heroines.

So what happened?  Many of those authors have switched their allegiance to writing fantasy instead of true SF, and some of the others have switched to writing mainstream books.  Certainly when I go down to my local bookshop I see very little that I like on the SF shelves, and almost nothing by those authors that is contemporary SF.

It seems to me that SF publishers, both magazine and book, are still seduced by shiny technology at the expense of cultural exploration of how that technology impacts on the lives of humans.  And even more depressingly, the number of heroines in powerful roles seems to have shrunk.  What that means is the FEM-SF viewpoint is virtually non-existent.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the genre in the last decade or so.  I was brought up on Anne McCaffrey: brainships, telepathy, starship designers, colonists, all with strong female characters.  More recently I’ve got into Eizabeth Moon’s military SF.  But for several years now I haven’t seen anything that makes my heart sing written by female authors.

I want to see SF that challenges traditional family structures, that doesn’t reinforce the stereotype that all women want to breed, and that shows that some women don’t do sex either.  In other words, I want SF to reflect the variety of women’s experience in the real world today.
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