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,

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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