Putting the speculation into FEM-SF

There was a lot wrong with the so-called 'golden age' SF, the biggest issue being the invisibility of real women, but there were some good things about it too.  One of the best was its ability to dream, to look outwards to the stars and speculate about future tech and societies.  And it's this speculative element that is sadly missing from so much of today's so-called SF.

It's good that the whole issue of women's representation in the genre has come centre-stage, but for me that's raised new issues.  One of the biggest is that so many female authors are transferring the  navel-gazing of contemporary women's fiction into SF.  

I don't read so-called women's fiction because I'm not interested in romance, sex, or owning designer shoes.  I don't want to endorse traditional family structures, I want to champion archetypes of successful independent women.  Filling SF books with angst about current gender concerns is a criminal waste of the opportunities the genre provides.  

I want to see characters who choose their gender, get over it, and get on with their lives.  And I don't want their lives to revolve around the patriarcally-conceived family control system.  I want to see societies where women are valued for choosing life-long celibacy, societies which entrust them with leadership positions because they can't be corrupted by sex.

I want to see societies where no women breeds, where kids are all produced by IVF in artificial wombs,  only enough to maintain the society.  We'd solve the overbreeding problem that way. But how would the millions of women who today take their whole identity from breeding construct meaning in their lives then?   Let's speculate on women who take full responsibility for their lives.  Perhaps the dominant social grouping would be clan-based, moving away from the stifling nuclear family's constraints. How would those clans be organised?  Males together?  Females together?  Or on the basis of profession, or religion?  How would being a member of a clan change women's lives if they had equality there?

But, of course, that would require publishers being willing to take a risk on offending some people with that speculation.  And I see little evidence of that so far.  I sigh long and loud when I read another so-called SF short story about a brother and sister growing up together in a traditional family.  I could read so-called women's fiction if I wanted that.  I don't.   I want change, female equality, female power and respect for professional women.  Let's see FEM-SF embracing that.

The 'not good enough' demon

Reading reviews of Kameron Hurley's The Mirror Empire and Anne Leckie's Ancillary Sword, it struck me how far away from my own work these two books are.  I tussle constantly with whether I can make my name as an SF writer. I came into the genre in what seems like a much simpler age.  I read a lot of Anne McCaffrey, and Elizabeth Moon's feminist military SF.  These are writers who write a straightforward story, with a clear narrative style.  They may have multi-viewpoints, but it's always clear who's speaking and thinking.

The same can't be said about some of the more recent published SF.  Confusing, viewpoints jumping  everywhere, switching first person viewpoints without making the change clear, all seem to be in vogue.  I wonder if publishers are looking for clever structure and complexity - a "challenging read" - over simple storytelling.  

Ambiguity, and concepts so high they're stuck in the stratosphere, don't do it for me.  Despite my two Master's degrees, I'm still a five year old kid at heart. I want you to tell me a story, dammit.  Which leaves me wondering if my straightforward style is a disadvantage in the current market.  I'm having an attack of the 'not good enough' demons.

Every review I've read recently has focused on gender representations in the text.  Yes, there's an issue with female invisibility in the genre, but sometimes this smacks of point-scoring.  "My book has characters with three genders".  It almost seems mandatory to consider gender issues in texts.

But I don't want to focus on that.  Yes, most of my protagonists are "strong" female characters with lives and careers of their own.  They pay their own way.  Men and women are pretty evenly scattered throughout my stories, and often the women are in charge of the men.  But they don't spend their time thinking about that.  It's just how things are.

But I get the feeling that reviewers are "keeping score".  This politicisation of story almost makes me afraid to put pen to paper, for fear of judgement.  I'm not interested in exploring gender issues, it's  wildlife and the natural world that fascinates me.  Am I wasting my time writing about deforestation, overpopulation, and species extinction if all anyone's interested in are gender counts and the Bechdel Test?

I want to tell a simple story focusing on the politics and issues that interest me.  And if that's judged not good enough, then so be it.  That's who I am, and what I care about.

The confusing multi-viewpoint 'I'

I'm working my way through a well-respected SF author's novel right now.  I'm about seventy pages into it, and still not sure how many characters I'm dealing with,  I know I have 'flu and I'm not at my brightest, but even so, this far into the book I should have a clear idea of the number of viewpoints.

There seems to be a vogue for multi-viewpoint first person SF books at present.  One of last year's multi-award winning books was first person viewpoint.  I got all the way through it, and still wasn't clear how many viewpoints it was dealing with.  I suppose I should go back and re-read it, but I don't feel inclined to.

The job of a storyteller is to tell us a story.  If I as the listener don't know who the story is about I'm going to get confused.  If those authors (or maybe it's their publishers) would stop being so clever, and  put the character's name at the top of the chapter when they changed viewpoint I wouldn't get confused.  It's a simple thing to fix, but it doesn't get done, and leaves the reader feeling confused and dissatisfied.

I get frustrated with SFF publishing because it seems there's a triumph of style over story.  I've read several SFF short stories recently that had fragmented sections and viewpoints jumping everywhere, and to me there seems no good reason for most of it.  In fact, often when I analyse the story it's a boring domestic tale with nothing unusual about it except the jumping-about viewpoints.

I wish this trend for fancy writing would die out.  I grew up with the writing of Anne McCaffrey, a straightforward storyteller.  I also like Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War books.  They're multi-viewpoint, with the characters spread out across the universe, but they don't get confusing.  Why not?  One, they're third person viewpoints, and second, every time the viewpoint and location changes, that information goes at the top of the new section or chapter.  I can easily follow this large cast of characters back and forth across the galaxy without getting lost, and I wish we'd see a return to that clarity.

I've gone to the other extreme in the book I'm re-writing now.  Jade is a fifteen year old novel, told in one viewpoint, that of xenoformer Kaath N'Kosi.  I've found the return to a simple structure with one viewpoint character refreshing.  It allows me to present the complex science and ideas without them getting lost in character changes.  Bring back simplicity in viewpoint.

The story comes first

This week I led a Writing Science Fiction workshop for my local literary fesrival.  My workshop attendees were a varied bunch, and interestingly, I had more women than men.  None of them were existing science fiction writers, but were intrigued by the genre and willing to give it a go.

All except one woman, who revealed herself to be a space scientist.  She seemed inrent on picking holes in some of my ideas about world-building, but when it came to the writing exercises she huddled behind her laptop.  I'm not sure if she actually wrote any fiction, as she was the only person in the group who refused to read out what she'd done.   She couldn't seem to grasp that we were writing fiction and not delivering peer-reviewed science papers.

Science Fiction is becoming an ever-broader genre.  The traditional hard SF story is now only one part of a much broader genre.  The "soft" social sciences are every bit as important to the genre,  and often we fudge the science to get the story to work.  Because we're writing fiction, not fact.

It worries me when a career scientist gets so locked up in the technicalities of their science that they can't step over the threshold and consider the impact of it on our civilisation, or on the other creatures we share our planet with.  Just as great storytelling needs a dose of dreaming, so does great science, an ability to see beyond the rigid borders of the discipline and imagine how that knowledge will change the future.

I'm currently re-editing my novel Jade.  It has a planimal and ocean in symbiosis, and I'm trying to work out a semi-plausible way in which it can collect and store data.  I've hijacked the ocean's thermohaline circulation to do that.  I've also got an "impossible" human/alien hybrid that I'm doing my best to justify.

I've tried to make the known science work.  And ithat's been wide-ranging, from photosynthesis to how viruses transmit themselves, to the composition of atmospheres and submarine diving procedures.  I've done a lot of research to make the planet seem plausible.  The idea is that the whole planet is alive, in a form of sentience that hasn't been seen before.  And, necessarily, when something hasn't been seen before, known science breaks down.

And that's where I differ from that space scientist.  I can switch off the science brain and tell the story,  Because, after all, I'm a storyteller, and ultimately the story comes first,

The critics don't scare me - much

One of the downsides of following links on Twitter is that I sometimes read reviews which I'm eternally grateful aren't aimed at me.  What is it about these people that they think they can get all pretentious about a writer's work and pronounce on it in unintelligible terms?  I've read reviews of books that I've  also read, and wondered if we've seen the same text.  

So many reviewers seem to use the text they're commenting on as a springboard for their own obsessions.  One I've become very aware of recently is the call for diversity in stories.  Many critics are pulling apart stories because they don't have people of colour in them, or they don't have gay or lesbian relationships in them.  They're keeping score of the diversity instead of evaluating the story.

Yes, they do have a valid point that the universe will be as diverse as little of' planet Earth is, but sometimes these critics use their politics to browbeat authors.  Because here's the thing: I'm a storyteller.  I'm not a political activist.  Yes, my books will contain comments on situations I don't like, but my interests are big cat conservation and ecology, not the diversity of humans.

I've also sometimes read reviews about an author's writing style which have left me scratching my head and wondering whether I've learnt anything about my craft in forty years.  The critic sometimes picks up some very obscure point about the text and flogs it to death.

Never respond to a critic, we're told. It's just one opinion.  Which is fine, until that one person is a reviewer for a major magazine or newspaper.  Them they have considerable power.  It's not a critic's words that would ever scare me, but their reach.  The number of minds potentially changed by a damaging review in a major newspaper could be great.  And the impact on the author's sales.

It matters because an awful lot of critics are what Julia Cameron calls Shadow Artists, blocked writers themselves.  And instead of claiming their own writing talents they spend their time taking apart the writing of those who do use their talent.  Instead of getting started on their own great novels, they take apart the novels of those who have got on with the work.  That's what scares me about critics.  Not their words, but the subtext behind their words.