Too much category counting

Every day I see a tweet that leads to a blog post about how unequal the representation of women and other groups is in the SF genre.  It's important that we're talking about such things,c and that organisations such as VIDA and Strange Chemistry are keeling gender counts of published stories.

One of the reasons I turned my back in SF a decade ago was because I felt under-represented there.  I stil feel like a lone voice in the wilderness sometimes, because the stories I want to write are still not published in the genre, but at least the equality debate has gone mainstream now.

But this brings new problems.  Reading blog posts about the absence of various kinds of characters in SF, I start to get nervous.  Because I'm not writing a narrative to some equality formula,  with quotas of certain characters, I'm writing the story I want to tell.

And this is where I have problems with the equality debate.  Because it doesn't seem to recognize that this white English woman also has the right to have her voice heard.  I see major book prizes going to people with what look like exotic backgrounds to an English person.  And I see a lot of new book reviews that praise novels for their exotic settings and cultures.

But I'm a white English woman, and I write about the world from the background of my own culture.  Sure, I alter it to have powerful female characters about, often in charge of important things, but they're rooted in the world I know.  And sometimes I feel that English publishers discount that world in the search for something exotic.

Sometimes I think we can do too much equality number counting, and that it can interfere with the story we want to tell.  It's certainly something I've had to be aware of recently, and something that, if I'm not careful, will endanger my individual voice.  And no outside influence should ever dictate a writer's voice.