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 Great FEM-SF access debate

Yesterday I was in Chichester, West Sussex, a city on the south coast of England, checking out the SFF offering at a leading bookstore there.  I felt depressed about the lack of female representation yet again.

There's a perception that women don't read SF.  Certainly I've had a lot of women say that to me.  I think this is part of a vicious circle.  Analysing the covers of SFF books, the majority colour is black.   They're designed to appeal to what publishers think their male audience wants.

It's got me wondering if there's a case for FEM-SF, a separate genre of SFF fiction written by women, with feminist heroines as main characters, marketed to appeal to women.  SFF has such a bad rep with some part of the book buying public that they won't even look at it.  Which feeds the vicious circle, and the belief that it's a minority genre for men.

Perhaps more women would be attracted to the genre if the books had bright colourful covers.  And an absence of big guns, or the fantasy equivalent, big swords.  I'm not attracted to the military look, and probably most women aren't either.

And then there's the matter of the blurbs on the back of the books.  Check out how many of them are about someone slaying whole civilizations.  Hmm.  Maybe to draw women into the genre we need less macho blurbs too.  Even Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series has as many civilian characters and storylines as it does military.  On second thoughts, it has more.  And that's the whole point of those books.  They're about defending civilian freedoms from pirates who want to remove them.  It's a distinctly different slant to the universe-wide slayer war.

But mainstream publishers won't change the look of their books until they're convinced that it won't lose them market share.  Maybe this is a case for indie publishers to test the water first.

So how about it, Amazon?  Add a FEM-SF category to your book listings.  Maybe we indie authors might consider categorising our work as FEM-SF, specifically targeting a female audience.  Just maybe, if we show women that we're writing about them, about issues that have relevance to them, issues that will impact on their personal futures, we might just get them into the genre in big numbers and change the future of SFF.

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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