Liberty and quiet power

Last week I was reading an SF book about a kick-ass female pilot out to save the universe.  At the same time I was reading blog posts about the quiet power of introverts in effective management, and at first the two ideas seemed to conflict.  Don't we need the kick-ass extrovert types to save the world?  Not necessarily.  Sometimes the tenacity of quiet power can achieve more.

To achieve the overthrow of a regime one needs intelligence, and to build a base of support for your alternative ideology.  If the regime is of the brutal type that tends to squash alternative modes of thought, this needs to be done very quietly and carefully.  And if you're planning on going behind enemy lines it helps if you don't draw attention to yourself.  The quiet power of the self-reliant introvert comes in very handy there,

I started thinking about instances of quiet power in the SF stories I love.  In Anne McCaffrey's All the Weyrs of Pern, the quiet  power is AIVAS, a rediscovered AI that teaches the descendants of the original colonists all the science they've forgotten since their ancestors landed on the planet 2,500 years ago.  With a combination of that knowledge, the use of the colonists' bioengineered dragons, and some handy left-over antimatter drives, they change their orbit of a planet.

I think also of the quiet power of CJ Cherryh's Pyanfar Chanur.  She's a tradeship captain who gets caught up in an interstellar, multi-species diplomatic incident.  It's her trading smarts and ability to quietly hide that help her to save her ship and defy a vicious race of aliens that threatens the destruction of her home world.

Even among military SF stories there are examples of quiet power.  In Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series Grace Vatta is an older woman who wields great power.  She's the Rector of Defence for her planet, and gets to order its Spaceforce around.

A mind-wiped teenager in Teri Terry's Slated series of books keeps her reawakening memories of her past secret while she quietly uncovers the truth of a totalitarian government and its evil schemes.  She watches, waits, gathers information, and when the time is right she destroys the evil system.

While kick-ass heroes create sound and fury and blow things up, the chances are that it's quiet power that figured out who the real enemy and real threats were.

The quiet power of the word

There are some SF authors I follow on Twitter who are perpetually angry about anything and everything.  Several times I've been enticed by a good headline to check out a blog post, to see what that person has to say about a subject that interests me.  This week there were several that I started reading, but didn't get past the second paragraph before I stopped reading.  Why?  Because the page was littered with 'f' and other swear words.

No, I'm not a prude.  I'm quite capable of telling someone who really annoys me to 'f' off in appropriate circumstances.  But that's usually an immediate response to an in-my-face interaction.  But writing a blog post is different.  It should be a reasoned argument for whatever view you're putting forward.  And to me, strong and controlled narratives have more persuasive power.  A text littered with angry rants and swear words dilutes the writer's message massively,

I have a similar problem with the thorny issue of representation of female characters in SF stories.  In the so-called "golden age" (aka as "dark age" for women), white male writers included female characters only as sexy bimbos, to be carried away by the aliens, screaming.  It meant the art department could produce a pornographic cover for the magazine with the woman's breasts exposed.  Real women with intelligence were pretty much absent,

Now at least real women are SFF protagonists, but I think some authors have pushed the boundaries too far the other way.  We have a clutch of books with "kick-ass heroines" (easily the term I most detest) , employed as assassins, mercenaries, and selling their wombs for money.  These books are a huge turn off for me.  I don't think you need to be in the reader's face, or angry, to make a powerful point.  I think the quiet power of gentle but persistent persuasion can often work better.  

Where a reader has been thoroughly entertained by a tale they're more likely to go back and re-read the story.  On a second or third reading the chances are that they'll notice the nuances of the book's theme, and the arguments the writer is making, far more than in the first, headlong, rush to discover the story.  When we know how the story ends but we don't want to let it go, we go back and re-immerse ourselves in the world of the story and its characters.

And, just as several viewings of a painting, or several listens to a piece of music, turn up new insights, so does several readings of a text.  I'm all in favour of the quiet power way of getting my point across.

I'd rather have my character Ren Hunter quietly despairing about why big cats are being exterminated than writing an angry rant about deforestation, habitat destruction, hunting and poaching.

Plenty of other people are using their energy to tackle those issues head-on, leaving space for me to address the things I care about sideways.  And, just as a casually overheard song can lodge itself in your mind, so can a casually absorbed idea from a favourite story have a lasting impact.  In the end, it might be the insidious insistence of the ideas planted by quiet power that really change the world.

Women of quiet power

I've been thinking some more about the Women in Science Fiction  panel I attended in London last week.  

The overall feeling of the panel was that women were getting a rough deal in the SF genre.  They felt that the problems for women writers in SF were systemic.  Women were not getting published enough, they were not being reviewed enough, there were not enough women reviewers. The VIDA count and the Strange Horizons survey were quoted to back this up. One panelist felt that nothing had changed in five years.

But hang on there a moment.  I left the genre a decade ago because these issues weren't even being aired properly.  I cancelled my subscriptions to SF organisations because they appeared to have no women in them, and certainly didn't feature any women writers.  The world I was seeing then didn't include me as a participant.  But I can't say the same today.

The biggest thing that has changed is that people are aware of the gender imbalance.  Things are not the same. Two of the five nominees for the Hugo Best Novel this year are women writers, and women are shortlisted in nearly every other category of the award.  

A bigger concern to me is not the blanket issue of representation, but what women writers are being recognized for.  I don't want to read books about female assassins.  I also have a dislike of  kick-ass mercenaries.  Neither of these stereotypes bears any relation to the life i live.  I'm undomesticated and fiercely independent too, so I don't want to read stories where women are trapped in families either.

So what do I want to see?  First, as an introvert, I'd love to see more strong introvert characters, women of quiet power.  Introverts are the inventors, the people who stick at challenging tasks the longest.  I want to see stories where these people are forced to stand up for their beliefs and values against extrovert kick-ass types.  Stories where the answer isn't to raze the whole planet to the ground with the biggest superweapon we can build.  Stories where we talk to aliens and negotiate tricky diplomatic solutions instead of opening fire on them,

I want to see quiet heroines saving the galaxy.  Not cowed, owned women, but tough, independent characters who stick to the findings of their research and warn people of the truth about corrupted organisations and governments.  Women who are tough enough to withstand threats of blackmail and violence to uphold the truth,

Quiet power and courage, that's the sort of SF I'd like to see.  Save the planet, save the universe - without annihilating a huge swathe of something or someone else.