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I'm starting to feel crazy about this whole women in SF thing.
See, last year when Liz de Jager--an uninvolved bystander to SF--pointed out to me that there had been only one female Clarke Award winner in the previous ten years, I found myself scrambling for an explanation. How to explain why is SF so male-dominated? Because I just took that for granted as a feature of the environment. LIz's immediate instinct was to blame the award, but when we took a look we found that not ony had the Clarke had a pretty good track record in its earlier years, but that there weren't many SF books by female writers being published and therefore up for consideration. And this exposed a dip in the number of women publishing SF. Well, not so much a dip as a near-extinction at novel length with major houses. Jaine Fenn is under contract. Lauren Beukes is certain to be offered a deal for her next book. That's...er...about it.
So a big conversation ensued on Torque Control. And I started thinking about the issue seriously for the first time. I began to think maybe I shouldn't give up on SF (as I had been intending to do) because perhaps people really did care about the narrowing of the genre in Britain.
Now this thing is all over the place. Hot topic. On Nicola Griffith's blog and later on SF Signal a simple request to read and discuss more women writers turned into what NK Jemisin so hilariously described as: "OMG YOUS WIMMINS ARE OPPRESHING ME QUOTAS GULAGS MEN REDUCED TO NEKKID CASTRATED SLAVES WOMEN PLAYING FOOTBALL CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER THE END OF THE WORLD!!!1!"
Ian Whates recently published the TOC of the new Solaris Rising anthology. I'm in it, and the other women are Jaine Fenn, Pat Cadigan, and Laurie Tom. The ratio of women:men is weak and this has brought down a shitstorm on Solaris in general and Ian in particular.
Ian is an extremely hard-working editor, writer, and publisher and has put his money where his mouth is when it comes to supporting women writers. He funded and published an all-female SFF anthology several years ago. The title, Myth-Understandings, seems to have come through his efforts to unify a diverse collection of stories; it's divided into two parts, of which the second is more SFnal. My recollection is that at the time there was some flak on the internet about men not being allowed to submit.
At first when a storm developed around the new anthology, I didn't know the history of female representation in the Solaris books (it sucks). Looking at it I think Ian might have been better prepared for the angry response to the TOC. It seems like it took him by surprise. But not everybody reads the internet all day. Every time I'm in touch with Ian he's buried in work. And that's the point about Ian. He doesn't go on the internet and talk about things. He rolls up his sleeves and gets in there. I know he is aware of the discussion on women in SF and I know he's keen to change it. I consider him an ally. But I don't think he's fluent in the art of internet debate. In fact, it's painful to watch what's happening for that reason alone. The attacks that have come down against him as the representatiave of Solaris are really ugly.
I'm hard-pressed to imagine another UK anthologist who could have done better than Ian Whates with this book. Ian is proactive when it comes to women writers. He goes out of his way. (That's one reason I made certain I got my story in, even though it was a real stretch for me with my current schedule.) Now, in the current climate it may be judged (particularly by USian standards) that he is not proactive enough. OK. This then begs the question, how proactive is enough? To what lengths should anthology editors be going?
And very soon we are talking about quotas. I'm uneasy about this. I am in favour of discussion, examination, and the routing out of the ASTONISHING BULLSHIT that still goes on with respect to women and science fiction. I am in favour of supporting and encouraging more women to write SF and also of promoting SF to women readers. I'm not in favour of establishing quotas, although if male writers want to question anthologists and publishers about what they are doing in terms of representation, if prominent male authors want to put a spotlight on this issue, I think that would be great. Editors who have that pair of eyes in the room watching them (you know those experiments I'm talking about, right? with the eyes? it's really weird) may be more conscientious and willing to go the extra mile.
But is it OK to tar and feather editors for their failures to recruit enough women for anthologies? It may seem like an acceptable tactic when you don't know the editor in question. When you do, and when you know that person has good intentions and is making the best of a difficult publishing climate, then it's horrible to see these attacks. I feel complicit.
Yes, we all need to be called out on our shit from time to time. Me, too. So here I am, calling myself out. I want to see change but I don't want to work in a climate where individual people are at risk of being brought to ground, cornered and shamed for issues that arise out of a much more nebulous problem in society--and in this case, in the peculiarities of the SFF scene in Britain. I don't think editors in Britain are chauvanist pigs. I've worked with several book editors in this country and have never had a whiff of old-school sexism from any of them. Do we live in a sexist culture? Yes, absolutely. Fucking yes.
Because of this and for other reasons it seems to be impossible to precisely identify the problem in SF in this country. I've said again and again in personal conversation that I believe it is systemic. I don't think it's merely a case of mistakenly attacking the branches instead of the root of the problem (as I've seen the attacks on Ian described) because it's not a rooted sort of problem. I suspect the whole ecological cycle is messed up and I doubt there is any one action or plane of action that will ameliorate it. As I said to Juliet McKenna at the AGM: the whole is dumber than the sum of its parts. And I think it would be good to address this on all levels but perhaps only in small ways in some situations because sometimes that is all you can do for the moment. The main thing is to keep it going and move it forward. The scene didn't get like this in a day and it's not going to be fixed in sweeping strokes.
Also we need to recognise that we are in a teacup here. We are a small community and we're in this together. Nicola Griffith mentioned the idea of a fighty family in one of her posts. This strikes me as key. It's one thing to squabble and challenge one another. But it's also important to fight fair and to give one another room to maneuver, to change our minds, to have another look, to take a positive step.
I'm trying not to sound sanctimonious when I say this. Hope I got there.
See, last year when Liz de Jager--an uninvolved bystander to SF--pointed out to me that there had been only one female Clarke Award winner in the previous ten years, I found myself scrambling for an explanation. How to explain why is SF so male-dominated? Because I just took that for granted as a feature of the environment. LIz's immediate instinct was to blame the award, but when we took a look we found that not ony had the Clarke had a pretty good track record in its earlier years, but that there weren't many SF books by female writers being published and therefore up for consideration. And this exposed a dip in the number of women publishing SF. Well, not so much a dip as a near-extinction at novel length with major houses. Jaine Fenn is under contract. Lauren Beukes is certain to be offered a deal for her next book. That's...er...about it.
So a big conversation ensued on Torque Control. And I started thinking about the issue seriously for the first time. I began to think maybe I shouldn't give up on SF (as I had been intending to do) because perhaps people really did care about the narrowing of the genre in Britain.
Now this thing is all over the place. Hot topic. On Nicola Griffith's blog and later on SF Signal a simple request to read and discuss more women writers turned into what NK Jemisin so hilariously described as: "OMG YOUS WIMMINS ARE OPPRESHING ME QUOTAS GULAGS MEN REDUCED TO NEKKID CASTRATED SLAVES WOMEN PLAYING FOOTBALL CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER THE END OF THE WORLD!!!1!"
Ian Whates recently published the TOC of the new Solaris Rising anthology. I'm in it, and the other women are Jaine Fenn, Pat Cadigan, and Laurie Tom. The ratio of women:men is weak and this has brought down a shitstorm on Solaris in general and Ian in particular.
Ian is an extremely hard-working editor, writer, and publisher and has put his money where his mouth is when it comes to supporting women writers. He funded and published an all-female SFF anthology several years ago. The title, Myth-Understandings, seems to have come through his efforts to unify a diverse collection of stories; it's divided into two parts, of which the second is more SFnal. My recollection is that at the time there was some flak on the internet about men not being allowed to submit.
At first when a storm developed around the new anthology, I didn't know the history of female representation in the Solaris books (it sucks). Looking at it I think Ian might have been better prepared for the angry response to the TOC. It seems like it took him by surprise. But not everybody reads the internet all day. Every time I'm in touch with Ian he's buried in work. And that's the point about Ian. He doesn't go on the internet and talk about things. He rolls up his sleeves and gets in there. I know he is aware of the discussion on women in SF and I know he's keen to change it. I consider him an ally. But I don't think he's fluent in the art of internet debate. In fact, it's painful to watch what's happening for that reason alone. The attacks that have come down against him as the representatiave of Solaris are really ugly.
I'm hard-pressed to imagine another UK anthologist who could have done better than Ian Whates with this book. Ian is proactive when it comes to women writers. He goes out of his way. (That's one reason I made certain I got my story in, even though it was a real stretch for me with my current schedule.) Now, in the current climate it may be judged (particularly by USian standards) that he is not proactive enough. OK. This then begs the question, how proactive is enough? To what lengths should anthology editors be going?
And very soon we are talking about quotas. I'm uneasy about this. I am in favour of discussion, examination, and the routing out of the ASTONISHING BULLSHIT that still goes on with respect to women and science fiction. I am in favour of supporting and encouraging more women to write SF and also of promoting SF to women readers. I'm not in favour of establishing quotas, although if male writers want to question anthologists and publishers about what they are doing in terms of representation, if prominent male authors want to put a spotlight on this issue, I think that would be great. Editors who have that pair of eyes in the room watching them (you know those experiments I'm talking about, right? with the eyes? it's really weird) may be more conscientious and willing to go the extra mile.
But is it OK to tar and feather editors for their failures to recruit enough women for anthologies? It may seem like an acceptable tactic when you don't know the editor in question. When you do, and when you know that person has good intentions and is making the best of a difficult publishing climate, then it's horrible to see these attacks. I feel complicit.
Yes, we all need to be called out on our shit from time to time. Me, too. So here I am, calling myself out. I want to see change but I don't want to work in a climate where individual people are at risk of being brought to ground, cornered and shamed for issues that arise out of a much more nebulous problem in society--and in this case, in the peculiarities of the SFF scene in Britain. I don't think editors in Britain are chauvanist pigs. I've worked with several book editors in this country and have never had a whiff of old-school sexism from any of them. Do we live in a sexist culture? Yes, absolutely. Fucking yes.
Because of this and for other reasons it seems to be impossible to precisely identify the problem in SF in this country. I've said again and again in personal conversation that I believe it is systemic. I don't think it's merely a case of mistakenly attacking the branches instead of the root of the problem (as I've seen the attacks on Ian described) because it's not a rooted sort of problem. I suspect the whole ecological cycle is messed up and I doubt there is any one action or plane of action that will ameliorate it. As I said to Juliet McKenna at the AGM: the whole is dumber than the sum of its parts. And I think it would be good to address this on all levels but perhaps only in small ways in some situations because sometimes that is all you can do for the moment. The main thing is to keep it going and move it forward. The scene didn't get like this in a day and it's not going to be fixed in sweeping strokes.
Also we need to recognise that we are in a teacup here. We are a small community and we're in this together. Nicola Griffith mentioned the idea of a fighty family in one of her posts. This strikes me as key. It's one thing to squabble and challenge one another. But it's also important to fight fair and to give one another room to maneuver, to change our minds, to have another look, to take a positive step.
I'm trying not to sound sanctimonious when I say this. Hope I got there.
I don't know whether I should say this or not, but I have been somewhat dismayed by a couple of conversations in which people seem to think that because I was on the Clarke's jury (i.e. the sole woman among several men), this is somehow the reason why your own excellent novel and Lauren's book were on the shortlist, and why Lauren won. I don't think it is appropriate to say too much about the selection process, but I can say that it was remarkably amicable and united. The idea that I've spent the last year battling against the opinions of Teh Evil Wimmin-Denying Blokes just isn't on. It was the same when I was on the InterZone editorial board.
I don't know whether my experience has been atypical or what. I don't actually think that it has. Most of my commissioning editors for novels were female, with the exception of the delightful Peter Lavery and the Nightshade team. With the exception of the latter in the later stages, I had universally good experiences with my editors (and with Marty Halpern who edited the Chen novels and was also great to work with. NS, as we know, Bob, had problems which had nothing to do, IMO, with the gender issue).
A large percentage of the book editors in SF in this country are female. Their hands are tied by the accounts depts of publishers: I don't think that it's because they want to fail to commission other women - on the contrary. It's a numbers game, of which many male authors are also falling foul (in SF - not, e.g., in urban fantasy where women do seem to be on strong ground). I think it is an issue with SF selling at all, no matter who writes it.
At magazine level, I have had a lot of support from a whole range of people - particularly Gardner Dozois, Sheila Williams, David Pringle, Shawna McC (who is my agent but who does not always take what I write for RoF) and others. Anthology invites almost always come from men - I think I've had one invite from a female editor in recent years.
I'm not in favour of quotas. I think Jemisin has a very salient point with OMG! Evil women are oppressing me! - for reasons of which I hope, by now, we are all conscious (guys, you've only had the last 12,000 years to make your point). Nor, however, am I in favour of being told what to think by a handful of other feminists who have more or less sweetly and condescendingly told me that when I have had my consciousness raised, and belong to a more advanced cultural mindset (i.e. American) then I'll understand that I'm in denial. They can fuck right off.
I don't think that your post is at all sanctimonious, BTW.
I have had a mix of male and female editors at book level. Tim Holman and Darren Nash were both incredibly supportive of my work. The Night Shade guys were also excellent with MAUL.
Now, as an editor, I get to read a lot of sf in which male writers treat their female characters very shabbily. I wish this stuff didn't tick the 'will sell well' box, but I think I know why such characterisation doesn't bat an eyelid.
I read stats this morning that in the 101 top-grossing G/U cert films (i.e what kids can watch)from 1990 to 2004, of over 4000 characters 75% were male, 83% of crowd characters were male, 83% of narrators were male, and 72% of speaking characters were male.
This is stuff that everyone picks up on subconsciously and sells the idea back to consumers that boys do and girls are done to - and this is just one thing.
By bringing in the wider culture you've put your finger on something here that I haven't been able to articulate except by frothing and grunting.
It's almost as if the diffuse sexism of the larger culture gets focused and magnified in SF in terms of its scope, subject, characterisations, subject matter.
And I think the sales-driven mechanism that Liz mentions in a parallel conversation on her journal, this may also play to sexist (and racist, and homophobic, and ablist etc) themes that have been shown to go hand in hand with success. The mechanism looks for what sells and grabs what it sees, so we have SF mags with rockets and women in skimpy spacesuits (LOL-well, maybe the praticality of that strains credibility or maybe not) on the cover. And all of this seeps into the culture of SF.
It's similar to the way sales-consciousness drives whitewashing. And it becomes a feedback loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Then the male characters will either be using sex as a weapon, or for the good guys there will be some idealised, dead love from the past, and other relations with female characters will be familial, hence the possibility of sex is removed, or sworn to unemotional relationships through some sort of chivalric pledge.
The thing is that for all the good work done by various editors including those mentioned in various comments and posts, the same issues arise. It was Gollancz earlier in the year, Solaris this week, if we say nothing it will be somebody else next week and so on. And maybe eventually the marketing people will think wait a minute, are we losing out here?
That's one approach. Another is to keep the profiles of women authors high so the first names editors think of are Liz and Tricia rather than Neal or Tony, and come award nomination time they're the names you remember.
On the classic lines Ian Sales SF Mistressworks blog is running reviews of SF by women pre-2000, reminding people that there is great SF by women out there.
So, I believe Solaris got it wrong and it wasn't the first time, so deserved to be called on it. I also agree that this isn't a root or branch issue, its in the air and soil too, and that needs a variety of tactics including dealing with specific issues like this one, but in no way limited to it.
It's what they say in retail - if you like it, order a dozen; if you don't like it, order a gross.
For my part, in this post I was actually referring in the main to posts that happened on other threads, where I didn't want to dive in from outside. That's why I thought I'd just make a personal statement here.
I'm ill-equipped to provide any sort of SF-specific response as I don't, unfortunately, read much of the genre. But I did want to throw my two cents in to say that I feel there are few, if any, situations like this that are ever truly improved by quotas. The point is to achieve a type of equality and quotas only devalue that entire concept. If I was an SF writer, I'd want to know--and would want others to know--without a shadow of a doubt, that my work was chosen to be alongside the work of other (in some cases, male) authors because of its quality. Not because I had the requisite reproductive equipment to keep the writing community off the editor's back.
So it's to be expected the pull-back to exclusion of women is visible in sf/f too. Trying to change things only in the field won't help, one thinks, when it is another consequence rather than the cause.
If that makes any sense to anyone. And yes, this is my opinion only, not the word from on High. There are also other reasons, that are embedded in the field itself, and aren't so much a factor in other areas of publishing.
Love, C.
Bit depressing, though...
Love, C.
So much word.
I'd seen the posting of the TOC. I did think it was unfortunate that Ian chose to mention three white male authors in the subject of his announcement. But I do understand that Ian has gone out of this way to support the careers of female SF writers, and is one of the good guys. (I actually also think that Mike Ashley is one of the good guys - he got it wrong with the Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, but his catalogue for the British Library is a model of reflecting the diversity of the field throughout its history.)
The backlash against Myth-Understandings is inexcusable, if unsurprising. Men fail to recognise the difference between all-male and all-female anthologies - the latter are an attempt to redress an imbalance, the former, however unintentionally, reinforce that imbalance. (Also, all-female anthologies almost always advertise themselves as such; all-male ones never do.) And I think some male sf fans believe that we genuinely are a community that has got beyond gender biases and that we therefore don't need all-female anthologies. This is, I think, naive.
I am not in favour of quotas either, though I have been accused of being so - this is the other straw man that is thrown up. What I am in favour is people thinking about their actions, asking themselves, have they forgotten the women? are they unconsciously discriminating against this person or in favour of that on account of their gender? (And the same applies for POC, of course.) So I don't want people to include women and POC in their anthologies just to fulfil an external quota. But I do want them to remember about women and POC, and to include them because if they don't, then their anthology is not going to be truly representative of that section of the field they want it to be representative of.
Your last paragraph reflects my feelings also. I would personally add that to even find the female writers, UK editors need to look harder and make more effort to diversify because of the extreme imbalance here in the UK. And this applies especially to POC but also to women. I really feel that with the connectivity we have now it is possible to bring people in from around the world, and that this would be absolutely worth the effort in terms of enriching the field.
I know that Ian tried to get some female US writers on board, for example, and didn't succeed. I'm glad that he tried and I hope that UK editors will continue to try in this area. Book editors, also.
It's notable that arguably two of the biggest new talents in the UK scene--Beukes and de Bodard--are published by Angry Robot, a new and hungry house. If we're a community invested in the future then we've got to think in terms of the future.
Some time soon I'm going to chip in my two pennyworth; although much sense has been talked, I still need to get a few things off my chest.
BTW, there is now another female British SF writer in contract with a major publisher (Janet Edwards, debuting with Harper-Collins I believe).
I'll look forward to your thoughts on the subject--when you can break away from the work long enough to get them down, presumably :-)
My debut book is due out summer 2012 with Harper Voyager. It's SF, with a main character aged 18, and I hope it will appeal to both YA and adult readers.
Congratulations on your book! I'll look forward to finding out more about it as publication approaches.
Please don't be discouraged by all of this. Every new writer in this field has a clean shot, so don't let it get to you too much. And if you ever want to talk, just drop me a line :-)
I find the "quota" argument to be a red herring, or a way to derail a conversation -- I don't actually think anyone is asking for "quotas". In the USA, Affirmative Action played an important role in opening up the work force, and decades after the fact I think its important has been overshadowed by simplistic statements about quotas as a kind of scare tactic, as it were.
The question of unthought-through bias and just not seeing strikes me as more pertinent, and as you say, as people begin to act on these things (well, they've been acting for decades, but you know what I mean) there will not be a steady gradient but a jerky one.
Thanks :-)
All I was going to say was that I agree about Affirmative Action being important, but the very fact that it has been so widely misunderstood and criticised points to how quotas or corrective measures of any kind tend to go down.
Yet anthologies are held up to scrutiny on the internet and names are counted, and that plays into the idea of quotas--or it did in this particular case that sparked my post, anyway. So right away we're plunged into a quantitative game. Which is great, in my view, as a matter of information--like the numbers Cheryl Morgan put together a few days back. But to somehow 'enforce' numbers? That's what makes me nervous, and that's the way the wind seemed to be blowing way-back-last-week when I posted :-)
I've been reading the discussions on women in SF with interest. So far, I've had no discouragingly experiences myself. I'm aware that every author's journey must be different, and problems may be just around the corner, but so far I've been lucky. Perhaps debates like this have been smoothing the path for me. People have been very helpful, and I had the unbelievable problem that I couldn't agree to be published with both of two wonderful publishers.
Incidentally, I have no stories published in anthologies, but that's not the fault of Ian Whates or anyone else. it would have required psychic powers in an editor to know that I even existed a year ago.