The golden age of SF - a woman's view

This week I read another article praising the so-called Golden Age of SF.  What's meant by this is a time when white males were writing hard SF, often including no women characters.  An age when the stories were tech-fests, with no regard for the impact of the tech on the civilisations using it.  And they often had no female characters - except the odd screaming female to be carried away by an alien.

My definition of the'Golden Age' of SF is very different.  My Golden Age is the late 1970's and early 1980's.  Newly married to a scientists who read SF, I was encouraged by him to start reading and writing in the genre.  At the time I was living in Hampshire, on the south coast of England, and commuting to work in London every day.  That meant a train journey of one and a half hours each way every day.  A perfect time to fill with a good book.

And boy, did I fill it.  I worked ten minutes' walk away from Lambeth Library, and I took six SF books a week out to read.  The library had a brilliant SF collection, and it was on its shelves that I discovered some of the books and female authors I still love today.  Books like Katherine Kerr's Polar Ciry Blues, set on a world orbiting a red giant where the population comes out at night. Books like CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur.  I still love the Hani tradeship captain Pyanfar Chanur.  Tough, wily, powerful, independent, experienced, skilled in interstellar politics, she's an inspiring role model for all women.

Books like Joan D Vinge's The Snow Queen, with its themes of exploitation of a low-tech civilisation by a high-tech one, the wholesale slaughter of wildlife, and cloning.  Books like Mary Gentle's Golden  Witchbreed, with a human female ambassador struggling to survive on Orthe and make sense of a culture where friends might have you assassinated for the good of their people.

And, of course, Anne McCaffrey.  Decision on Doona and Treaty Planet are still two of my favourite books, despite them having few female characters with agency.  What I love about them is the picture Anne paints of humans and the cat-like Hrrubans making first contact and learning to get along together.  The chief catalyst for this is a human boy and Hrruban cub who grow up together. Their inseparable  bond reaches beyond all the false legal barriers the adults of both species try to put up in the way of their friendship.

These books are my Golden Age of SF, one based on people, not tech,

The ten books meme

Facebook and Twitter are full of posts by people listing the ten books that have been most important to them.  I thought I'd join in for today's post and list the ten most Important books for me.

1.   All The Weyrs of Pern - Anne McCaffrey

In this book the Pern colonists discover their ancestors' AI 2500 years later.  I love the self-referential nature of the book, and the way McCaffrey has blended fantasy and SF elements in the story.  Guided by the AI's knowledge, the citizens of Pern do something impossible.  They move the Red Star into a new orbit.

2.  The Ship Who Searched - Anne McCaffrey

This is one of here 'brainship' books, this time with an archeology theme.  The relationship between Tia and Alex was one of the major influences for my own book Eyemind, where I have a similar relationship between Keri and Bi, but set against an art background.

3.  The Pride of Chanur - CJ Cherryh.

I love the portrayal of the Hani Pyanfur Chanur.  This alien is alive and real.  And the details of taking a ship through interstellar space are stunning.  It reads as if she's really been there.  And if you want a masterclass in handling dangerous interstellar politics, read this book.

4. Vatta's War - Elizabeth Moon

Ky Vatta is a disgraced Spaceforce cadet who ends up leading her own Space Defence Force and saving human space against ruthless pirates.  I'm not normally a fan of military SF, but this series is much more than that.  It is multi-viewpoint, and most of the viewpoints are civilians.  The books show us how ordinary people's lives can be threatened by one ruthless individual.

5.  Polar Ciry Blues - Katherine Kerr

This book shows us life on Hagar, a planet close to a red giant sun.  It's a murder mystery with interstellar ramifications, as an alien has been murdered.  It's a fabulous depiction of life on a planet where it's dangerous to be out in the daytime, and where interstellar politics are again finely drawn.

6.  Dragonsinger - Anne McCaffrey

A girl dreams of being a Harper.  But she's female, and girls can't be Harpers.  At least, according to her brutal father.  This is a feminist tale of Menolly running away from home and seeking her dream.  And eventually finding that her incredible talents are appreciated by others.

7.  Treaty Planet - Anne McCaffrey

This is the third of the Doona books, the first being Decision at Doona.  I love its portrayal of Hayuumans (humans) and Hrrubans (a walking big cat like species), and the way they live together in harmony on Doona.  Despite the meddling of their respective governments, the colony is a success.  There are some great descriptions of friendships across species.  These people don't just co-exist, they're workmates and best friends.

8. Slated - Teri Terry

This is a YA novel about a brutal repressive society where teenagers get brain-wiped to "correct" their behaviour.  Kyla somehow recovers her memories from before her Slating, and brings down the brutal totalitarian government.  A message that there is always hope in the darkness, if we look for it.

9.  Uglies/Pretties/Specials -  Scott Westerfeld 

Okay, I cheated.  This is three books, but you need to read all three to get the whole message.  It's a story about the dangers of pursuing extreme beauty treatments, and what their real cost might be.

10.  Freedom's Landing/Choice/Challenge - Anne McCaffrey 

Okay, so I cheated again with three books.  This is the story of how transported humans build a new life for themselves on Botany with only cups, knives, and blankets.  Human ingenuity triumphs, and this is also a tale about how they learn to accept a member of their oppressing species.

The story of the land

Moving on from thinking about alien skies, I'm exploring the idea of using the rest of the landscape as part of our story today. 

Landscape can be far much more than just a passive setting into which the characters are dropped.  It can be the major driver of the story.  EJ Swift's Osiris shows us a world where global warming has melted the Antarttic ice and forced the remnant human population into cities built in the waters.  The city defines who people are in that world.  They are either privileged Citizens, or lowlife westerners. The haves and have-nots are physically divided by their city.  This is not a place where it is easy to be upwardly mobile.

In Frank Herbert's Dune the author created the desert environs of Arrakis.  The sand, and the Fremen  who live in it, powerfully shape the story.  Then there's Katherine Kerr's Polar City books.  There the planet is far too near to its sun for people to be out in the day.  Life takes place at night in Polar City.  In Sarah Crossan's Breathe the landscape is the story.  People cluster in the city, the only place where there's enough oxygen to breathe.  It's a cautionary tale about what happens when we cut down all the trees.

In Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines books cities take mobile form, trundling about the landscape.  And they've become predatory, eating up smaller cities.  And Anne McCaffrey's Petaybee is a world of cold, snow, and ice, its colonists drawn from Earth tribes who lived in such environments here,

In all these stories the landscape is a character in its own right, a powerful one that shapes and dictates what the human characters in the stories do.  Landscape can be so much more than pretty views.

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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