The Bechdel test and me

I've been reading a lot of stuff recently about the gender imbalance within the speculative fiction genre, and one of the things I keep coming across is the Bechdel test.  The test is named after Alison Bechdel, an American cartoonist who set out the idea in her 1985 comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For.  It's been taken up by the SFF community as a handy measure of how well we're doing - or not - in gender parity.

A work of fiction passes the Bechdel test if it contains more than one woman, and those women talk to each other about something other than a man.  It sounds like a great idea to me, but how many of my own works pass the test?

Snowbird - yes.  Top starship coder Jian Kabana talks to talented engineer Mai, about starships.

Darius - same characters talk again, this time trying to save an orbital shipyard from sabotage.

The Fall of Freyr - yes.  I have a whole female investigative team talking among themselves about their professional mission to survey the planet's culture.

Jade - yes.  Kaath, my xenobilogist, talks to Sarry about the strange fauna she's discovered.

Eyemind - yes.  Artist Keri Starseer talks to Ennis, Governor of Altius, about her mission and her Mind partner Bi.

Auroradawn - yes.  Arrien talks to other Great Family Captains about her riddle quest.

Starfire - yes.  My Trader captain Ria Bihar talks to a female stationmaster about piracy.

Panthera : Death Spiral, Panthera : Death Song, Panthera : Death. Plain - yes .  Ren Hunter talks with the head off the Conservation Authority and with female security chiefs about her work.

So I'm doing pretty well in passing the Bechdel test.  I've always had strong female heroines in key positions in my stories, but now I stop and think about it more.  I actively think about switching some roles to women, to create a more even gender balance.  But here's the thing.  None of these books has yet been taken by a mainstream publisher.  Could the presence of strong female protagonists be one reason why?  I'd hate to think so, but I'm not so sure.

My fictional role models

One of the reasons readers get into SF Is because it allows us to dream of futures we'll never have.  It allows us to travel the universe, make the next big breakthrough scientific discovery, and discover the pleasures of exotic worlds.  But for me one of the biggest reasons why I go back to my favourite books is because they provide strong fictional role models I can identify with.  These women inspire me on my down days.

If I need to be reminded how tough women can be when thrown into unexpected and dangerous situations I need look no further than C. J. Cherryh's Pyanfar Chanur.  A wily old tradeship captain, she  gets more challenges than she bargained for when she decides not to hand over a stowaway on her ship to the murderous Kif.  In the world of the Hani it is the women who pilot starships while the men stay at home and fight each other.  I've always loved that role reversal.

Then there's Kylara Vatta, who single-handedly forms the Space Defence Force and bests a fleet of pirates three times the size of her own.  And in Anne McCaffrey's world of Pern, harper Menolly shows what you can achieve when you're determined not to let men's prejudices stop you from having your dream career.  And in most of my favoure books, the characters pass the Bechdel test too,

These favourite books have greatly influenced my own writing and the way I dream on the page.  I like to think that what I write can change the world, through the influence of my story on each individual reader.  

And if part of my influence is to show women that they can be as successful as Admiral Vida Serrano or Pyanfar Chanur I'll have provided some great inspiration and role models for women,

I see it as changing the world by stealth, one fictional role model at a time.

What kind of sensawunda do you want?

I was reading the latest copy of the BSFA's  Focus magazine this week.  The major articles focus on world-building this issue, and something Gaie Sebold said stuck with me.  She talked about being attacked by the "shiny".  What she meant was that the technology ran away with her storytelling, hijacking it and sometimes backing her writing into corners where she didn't want it to go.

I'm not attacked by the "shiny" in that way.  Although I, or my characters, would use a cool new piece of tech, I'm not likely to build a story around that gadget.  I'm far more likely to build a story around misuse of the tech, which is what I've done with the Panthera books.

That doesn't mean I don't have any interest in cutting-edge science.  To write the Panthera books I had to delve into DNA and epigenetics.  And delving into that world, finding out how creatures are created, is magical.  There are around twenty-three thousand genes in every human, and every one of those genes is in every cell in our bodies.  We have fifty trillion or so cells in our bodies, and each one of them is packed with DNA.  How can so much data be packed into such a tiny space?  To me that evokes a sense of wonder.

Look at how a fly dodges you swatting it.  How can it have a brain at such a tiny size?  And yet it does, one that controls flight dynamics, and drives reproduction and feeding behaviour.  Recent research into the brain has shown striking similarities between fly and human brains.  Just how can so much be crammed into the space of a pinhead?

This is the nano world that humans are only just starting to explore themselves.  But nature has been creating nano-structure architectures for centuries.  But how much SF explores the wonder of the natural world?  And yet it could be a rich vein for stories.  Time and again, when scientists set out to find the most efficient way to deal with a problem, it turns out that nature had it licked aeons ago.

We have learned to look at nature's structures for clues to how to tackle problems, but I still don't think we celebrate her enough.  That's what I've tried to do in the Panthera books, and no doubt will do in books yet unwritten in the future.  My sensawunda lies in the natural world.

What kind of diverse universe do you want?

If we're expanding human civilisation to other star systems, what kind of universe do we want to create as writers?  There's a lot of discussion right now about including diverse characters and cultures in our writing.  This is a good thing, but sometimes people are suggesting that today's ethnic groupings and cultures be transplanted wholesale to the future, and I don't think that's realistic.

Cultures and religious beliefs change with the ages, and with the environments they find themselves in. Archeologists and historians know that cultures are more fluid than the labels we give them.  Usually there's no violent disconnect between one period and the next.  More likely, one religion or cultural strand segues into the next.

I think some of the current discussion on diversity smacks of formulas and quotas.  We're so busy counting the people of colour, the LGBT characters, in our books that we lose sight of the fact that our function as a novelist is to tell a story.

I tend to see cultures of the future as rather more mixed-up.  We'll have dark-skinned and light-skinned people working alongside each other doing the same job and not noticing their skin differences.  We'll have women and men equally appointed to top jobs.  Faith probably won't disappear, because I think it's a basic need of the human, but the forms it takes will morph and change.

This is the sort of universe I write about.  I'm a white English woman, so I'm going to be massively influenced by western culture's beliefs and values when I write.  No surprise there, it's what I know.  But in my books people of both genders and all ethnic backgrounds get along fine together generally.  I don't make a big deal about ethnic or religious differences.

When we start travelling between the stars that distance, and the challenges of the new worlds we settle on, will change our culture and faiths.  They'll acquire an intergalactic overlay.  When we're twenty light years from our home world some of our beliefs and religious practices won't make sense any more. And preserving ethnic and cultural heritage won't be as relevant.  We'll be busy creating new cultures. 

And then I think we'll get people working alongside each other, just getting on with their jobs.  That's the kind of diversity I like to use in my books, a diversity where the characters don't even notice the issue.

Gendered writer, gendered writing?

I'm musing again on this idea of gender in SF.  All the noise right now is about counting the number of women authors in SFF, and looking at how many are getting reviewed.  But I think there's another issue we should be addressing alongside the gender of the author, and that's the gendering of the story.

I think this matters just as much.  I can't take to ladette mercenaries who kill and have sex with everyone in sight.  I've ranted about them before, but it's a particular pet peeve of mine, along with the assassin as heroine.  I can't identify with either.  They have no connection with the life I lead - or want to lead.

I like to think my writing can be a source of inspiration for women, that they can look at my work and think "Oh, women can be artists with an interstellar reputation, or the best starship coder, or head up a whole planet's security operation".  I've got all of these in my novels, and in some cases I do think they carry out their roles in a different way because they are female.

In my re-write of Auroradawn that I'm now half-way through I'm adding a lot of story for Baak.  He's  training for a security qualification, and the head of the academy where he's doing his training is a woman.  He's just had to admit his less than perfect past to her.  She was sympathetic to him in a way many of the male managers I've worked for over the years wouldn't be, but she was also realistic.  She knows that she will have to argue his case with the Trustees for qualification.

That's the sort of gendered writing I like to see.  Not women doing things because that's what women do, but because they have more empathy with a character and tackle problems a different way.  Most of these women are in powerful positions and have a great deal of influence.  It's not that they can't handle power, it's more that they're fully aware of the consequences of using it.  Using power is less of an ego thing for them, and more a case of 'what's best for this situation'.  

I think its a mistake for us to want to erase all traces of gender from our books.  Women do think differently from men, our brains are physically wired in different ways.  We need to celebrate the differences and make them our source of strength rather than apologising for them and downplaying them.  The universe needs our empathy and ability to see the bigger picture.