Everything comes around

I've been continuing my trawl through my new copy of the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook this week. And I've had a pleasant surprise, for once.  The number of agents who now say they represent SF authors seems to have grown a great deal.  

I can remember back a decade ago, when I could find only five or six agents to submit to who had any affinity for SF.  'No SF' was a common part of the listing of an otherwise promising agent.  The five or six who did profess an affinity for SF got sent every novel I had - and rejected them all.  I hit a brick wall, with nowhere else to go, and that's when I took a step back from the genre for a few years.

It pained me.  I fell in love with SF in my twenties, and started writing it soon after.  My first attempts were derivative, and definitely not publishable.  But by the time I'd finished novel number twelve I'd learned my craft, found my voice, and knew what I wanted to say.  The trouble was that nobody was interested in what I had to say.

I call that my fallow period, the time when I went on writing, because that's who I am and what I do, but I didn't submit anything for years.  It was a dark time when I found it hard to believe that I'd ever get the chance to be published.

But the wheel has turned again, and SF is back in fashion, but, more excitingly, it's moved on.  Social media has given women SF writers a strong voice.  VIDA has started measuring the under-representation of women in reviews and as reviewers.  That has spurred some editors to come out of the woodwork to say that they value women's voices, but don't get enough submissions from us.

Last year we had the Women in Science Fiction panel in London, which again highlighted the challenges women SF writers face.  I now feel that it's not me, that I'm not alone in this struggle. I have  sisters who are challenging the status quo and calling out the inequality. I have the feeling that we're on  the verge of a step change in the genre, despite, or maybe because of, this year's hiccup in the Hugo nominations.  For the first time for a decade I now have hope that there might be a place for me in the genre, an agent who will be willing to take me on, a publisher willing to print my words.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

The invisible woman

Yesterday I went to the Women In Science Fiction panel organised by Jo Fletcher Books and Blackwell's in London.  The panel was  chaired by Edward James of the Science Fiction Foundation.  The panelists were Karen Lord, Stephanie Salter, Naomi Foyle, Janet Edwards, and Jaine Fenn.  

What emerged from the discussion was a systemic failure to recognise the talents of women writing science fiction.  Publishers aren't publishing enough women's SF books, booksellers aren't stocking enough of them, and even when women do get published, reviewers aren't reviewing their books as often.

The panelists wanted recognition for their work, not for being female. I can see the merits of this approach, but I suspect that this desire to blend in is one of the very things that makes women SF writers invisible. 

My recent experience with SF short stories has shown me that magazines aren't interested in stories about the fallout from rape.  One of mine was submitted for a women's SF special issue, and still got no interest.  I think it's a mistake for us to want to blend into the background, to say that our gender makes no difference to what we write and how we write it. Because to me it damned well does.

In my opinion we need more feminist, campaigning, SF.  I don't want my fiction to be interchangeable with a man's, I want it to be something that reflects a woman's world view and experience.  And sadly, even though the major awards have nominated women's books this year, those books are not about women's experience - at lease, as I know it,

Books that show women having sex with anyone they choose without any commitment don't accord with my experience of being a woman.   Women are writing books about things I don't care about, ladette behaviour and copious killing being two of them.  I cannot identify with sex-crazed mercenary women who kill casually. They violate all my core values.

So if we're wondering why women in SF aren't getting the recognition they deserve we might think about standing out more, not blending into the background.  Write about rape, about the  consequences of being saddled with an unwanted child, about prejudice and discrimination.  And put covers on those books that attract women. No pink please, but the faces of the female protagonists, in a world of colour instead of the black space default setting.

Women SF writers need to brand themselves as different, to stand out.  When we stop apologising for being women writing in a men's genre and claim that genre as our own then we might get noticed.