What kind of diverse universe do you want?

If we're expanding human civilisation to other star systems, what kind of universe do we want to create as writers?  There's a lot of discussion right now about including diverse characters and cultures in our writing.  This is a good thing, but sometimes people are suggesting that today's ethnic groupings and cultures be transplanted wholesale to the future, and I don't think that's realistic.

Cultures and religious beliefs change with the ages, and with the environments they find themselves in. Archeologists and historians know that cultures are more fluid than the labels we give them.  Usually there's no violent disconnect between one period and the next.  More likely, one religion or cultural strand segues into the next.

I think some of the current discussion on diversity smacks of formulas and quotas.  We're so busy counting the people of colour, the LGBT characters, in our books that we lose sight of the fact that our function as a novelist is to tell a story.

I tend to see cultures of the future as rather more mixed-up.  We'll have dark-skinned and light-skinned people working alongside each other doing the same job and not noticing their skin differences.  We'll have women and men equally appointed to top jobs.  Faith probably won't disappear, because I think it's a basic need of the human, but the forms it takes will morph and change.

This is the sort of universe I write about.  I'm a white English woman, so I'm going to be massively influenced by western culture's beliefs and values when I write.  No surprise there, it's what I know.  But in my books people of both genders and all ethnic backgrounds get along fine together generally.  I don't make a big deal about ethnic or religious differences.

When we start travelling between the stars that distance, and the challenges of the new worlds we settle on, will change our culture and faiths.  They'll acquire an intergalactic overlay.  When we're twenty light years from our home world some of our beliefs and religious practices won't make sense any more. And preserving ethnic and cultural heritage won't be as relevant.  We'll be busy creating new cultures. 

And then I think we'll get people working alongside each other, just getting on with their jobs.  That's the kind of diversity I like to use in my books, a diversity where the characters don't even notice the issue.

Gendered writer, gendered writing?

I'm musing again on this idea of gender in SF.  All the noise right now is about counting the number of women authors in SFF, and looking at how many are getting reviewed.  But I think there's another issue we should be addressing alongside the gender of the author, and that's the gendering of the story.

I think this matters just as much.  I can't take to ladette mercenaries who kill and have sex with everyone in sight.  I've ranted about them before, but it's a particular pet peeve of mine, along with the assassin as heroine.  I can't identify with either.  They have no connection with the life I lead - or want to lead.

I like to think my writing can be a source of inspiration for women, that they can look at my work and think "Oh, women can be artists with an interstellar reputation, or the best starship coder, or head up a whole planet's security operation".  I've got all of these in my novels, and in some cases I do think they carry out their roles in a different way because they are female.

In my re-write of Auroradawn that I'm now half-way through I'm adding a lot of story for Baak.  He's  training for a security qualification, and the head of the academy where he's doing his training is a woman.  He's just had to admit his less than perfect past to her.  She was sympathetic to him in a way many of the male managers I've worked for over the years wouldn't be, but she was also realistic.  She knows that she will have to argue his case with the Trustees for qualification.

That's the sort of gendered writing I like to see.  Not women doing things because that's what women do, but because they have more empathy with a character and tackle problems a different way.  Most of these women are in powerful positions and have a great deal of influence.  It's not that they can't handle power, it's more that they're fully aware of the consequences of using it.  Using power is less of an ego thing for them, and more a case of 'what's best for this situation'.  

I think its a mistake for us to want to erase all traces of gender from our books.  Women do think differently from men, our brains are physically wired in different ways.  We need to celebrate the differences and make them our source of strength rather than apologising for them and downplaying them.  The universe needs our empathy and ability to see the bigger picture.

The power of the older character

I'm starting to think about my panel at Loncon 3.  I'm talking about Exuberance and Experience, stereotypes and expectations of older and younger characters.

It's got me thinking about how many older characters I have in my books, and how I portray them.  The first thing I have to decide is what I mean by 'older'.   To someone in their teens it probably means some ancient person of fifty.  To me of rather more mature years, I think of older as seventy plus.  So it's a fluid definition that I can interpret in my individual way.

Taking a good, hard look at my books, I realise I have lots of "older" characters if you define older as forties and fifties, but very few if you define it as sixty plus.  One of the reasons for this is that most of my books have elements of adventure to them, and often my characters have to run about somewhere or avoid being shot.  There are limits to the degree of physical fitness of very old characters that tends to rule them out of many of the roles my characters play.

Having said that, in Snowbird and Darius I do have a very powerful older character.  Hyam D Scwanberger is the owner of the biggest shipline on Darius Orbital Station, and he has his fingers in dozens of pies.  I see him as a spider in the centre of his lair, pulling in data from everywhere.  In Jade my main characters are in their thirties and forties, but Kaath my main character does have an older aunt Bara.  She's a key source of support for Kaath when she discovers the truth about her origins.

Looking back at my books I see I don't have that many older characters in them.  Was that because I was in my twenties and thirties when I wrote them?  Possibly.  But I'm not anymore, I'm now of an age to know how powerful an older person can be, a person who knows their own mind and can spot falsehood, flattery, and bribery from a hundred paces away.

There's no reason why powerful older characters can't have a place in books.  Elizabeth Moon has several fabulous examples in hers.  I must try harder in future.

Who do you think you are?

I've been doing a lot more rewriting of Auroradawn this week, and part of the work has been finding out more of the family history of the Starriders.  In the original version I had Arrien and Baak as the children of one if Vedrana's seven Great Families.  I didn't know how they'd got there, or what their power base was.

Now I'm rewriting the book as an adult one, and I need to delve more into their background.  The original settlers of Vedrana were the Kerkeen, of whom there are now only traces of their ruins around.  I haven't yet worked out how they came to leave the planet, or whether they went extinct.  That doesn't matter for book one, but I'm writing a trilogy with these characters and I think the answers to some of these questions might come out in parts two and three of the characters' quest.

I have a sneakIng suspicion that the Starriders had some kind of alliance with the Kerveen when they first landed on Vedrana generations ago.  And if I get that right, I could have Arrien unearthing some shocking family secret that threatens the survival of her Great Family.

What started out as a simple quest adventure is turning into a much deeper work, one that explores Arrien and Baak's ancestry in much more depth.  And the secrets I unearth will give me a chance to show who they really are under pressure.  That always makes for good characters.

So today it's back to working out what Arrien's great-grandfather did with his time on the planet, and who his friends and allies were.  Maybe he brought a big secret with him from Earth, something he was running away from.  Hmm, that idea looks promising.  And instead of the Great Famlies being respected, the revelation of this secret could destroy respect for the Starriders.  I like that.  Now all I have to do is go away and work out the details.

Too much category counting

Every day I see a tweet that leads to a blog post about how unequal the representation of women and other groups is in the SF genre.  It's important that we're talking about such things,c and that organisations such as VIDA and Strange Chemistry are keeling gender counts of published stories.

One of the reasons I turned my back in SF a decade ago was because I felt under-represented there.  I stil feel like a lone voice in the wilderness sometimes, because the stories I want to write are still not published in the genre, but at least the equality debate has gone mainstream now.

But this brings new problems.  Reading blog posts about the absence of various kinds of characters in SF, I start to get nervous.  Because I'm not writing a narrative to some equality formula,  with quotas of certain characters, I'm writing the story I want to tell.

And this is where I have problems with the equality debate.  Because it doesn't seem to recognize that this white English woman also has the right to have her voice heard.  I see major book prizes going to people with what look like exotic backgrounds to an English person.  And I see a lot of new book reviews that praise novels for their exotic settings and cultures.

But I'm a white English woman, and I write about the world from the background of my own culture.  Sure, I alter it to have powerful female characters about, often in charge of important things, but they're rooted in the world I know.  And sometimes I feel that English publishers discount that world in the search for something exotic.

Sometimes I think we can do too much equality number counting, and that it can interfere with the story we want to tell.  It's certainly something I've had to be aware of recently, and something that, if I'm not careful, will endanger my individual voice.  And no outside influence should ever dictate a writer's voice.

Science Fiction Writers of the United Kingdom

It's a lonely life being a science fiction writer in England.  A writer's life is generally solitary, but as an SF writer I feel even more isolated.

I have lots of writer friends, and I go to lots of writing conferences, workshops, and networking events. But the trouble is, very few of the writers I meet at these events are SF writers.

There are some gatherings where I know I'm not going to get any useful feedback on my work.  I know that I'm surrounded by romance writers who'd never stretch their fluffy little brains to get them around the concept of AI, or genetic design.  They have no understanding of what I write, and I have no understanding of their domestic tales either.

What I need is a Science Fiction Writers of the United Kingdom, an equivalent of the US organisation.  I need somewhere to get together with kindred spirits and discuss SF writing.  It would be lovely to have someone critique my work who understood what I was trying to do. And I don't write overy-complex tech-heavy books, or about strange worlds that are not understandable.  I'm a straightforward storyteller, and I have a straightforward view of the universe.  Yes, there's a little bit of rocket science in my books, but not a lot.  I'm not a scientist, and what I know comes from popular science research.

But even so I get women who say they don't understand what I mean when I read it to them.   The vast majority of women frustrate me because of their unwillingness to think outside the cosy domestic box. And many of them seem to have no wider awareness of the world, or the universe.

I need somewhere where I can meet with other women SF writers, talk about our work, and get real feedback on what I'm doing.  So, is anyone up for forming the Science Fiction Writers of the United Kingdom?

The British Science Fiction Association AGM

Tomorrow is the AGM of the BSFA.  I'm a newly-rejoined member, and I'm going to the meeting.  It's around a decade since I was last a member.  Back then I did try to find something of relevance to me as a women in the journals and news, but I couldn't.  The book reviews were of men's books, and women didn't seem to figure in the genre at all.  I felt like it didn't have any place for me, so I cancelled my membership.

So what's changed in the intervening period?  Lots of things.  In the last year the issue of women's under-representation in the genre has hit the headlines.  The spat between members of the Science Fiction Writers of America gave it public focus.  When well-respected female writers cancel their memberships of that august body then something's wring.

The VIDA statistics on women's representation in literature in general out this into perspective.   Women's under-representation in the genre is part of a wider problem of us not being published as often, not being reviewed as often.  Twitter was abuzz with items relating to the SFWA, and every day I came across new blog posts that told me a little more of the history of this situation.

As I pieced the evidence together, I realised I wasn't the problem.  The problem was with that old chestnut "women don't write SF".  Some women's stories and novels were nominated for the genre's top awards.  And some of those stories won them.

There are other changes afoot.  Having exhausted the handful of agents who would handle SF in the UK a decade ago, I came to a dead end in my submissions process.  I'd run out of agents to try, and there were no publishers willing to look at unsolicited manuscripts.  Today the position has radically altered.  The rise of self-publishing has forced changes on both editors and agents,  in a recent trawl on-line, I found dozens of agents I hadn't submitted to before who now represent SF novels.  Newer publishers like Angry Robot and Jo Fletcher Books have established themselves as very successful genre publishers.  And lately it seems that just about every publisher is launching a new speculative fiction imprint.

SF is in vogue again, and it's publishing women's work, so it's time for me to re-join the fray.  At the BSFA AGM tomorrow Jo Fletcher is a guest of honour, and I'll be listening very carefully to what she has to say.  It's time to get submitting again.  And maybe one day soon we'll remove the last impediment to women writing women's SF.  We might finally get rid of kick-ass heroines and allow the women in our books to be authentic people.