seanan maguire

The following is an expansion of a piece I wrote for a Book Smugglers roundtable.

Recently — or perhaps not so recently — much has been made of women writing science fiction. Often it’s coupled with a complaint about “PC” behavior stifles creativity or how leftist writing “has no new ideas.”

Hmm. Speaking as an unabashed leftist and someone lacking a penis, which may bias me somewhat, in my experience the opposite is true. I find much more interesting stuff in those who are willing to question the status quo, rather than simply write fiction using the same old stories, but this time with lasers! or infinity drives! or whatever. As Patty Jansen put it recently in her blog post, “There are girl cooties on my spaceship — on women writing hard SF,” “There are many younger readers out there who do not want their SF with sauce of sexist golden age nostalgia.”

To talk about this, though, I need to mention a book I’ve been recently reading, David Zindell’s Neverness. It’s a terrific book with some amazing writing in it. Here, for example, is a passage from page 23, which I love for its ability to seed in information about societal structures while describing a crowd:

“We received our pilot’s rings late in the afternoon of the next day. At the center of Resa, surrounded by the stone dormitories, apartments, and other buildings of the college, the immense Hall of the Ancient Pilots overflowed with the men and women of our Order. From the great arched doorway to the dais where we journeymen knelt, the brightly colored robes of the academicians and high professionals rippled like a sea of rainbow silk. Because the masters of the various professions tended to cleave to their peers, the rainbow sea was patchy: near the far pillars at the north end of the Hall stood orange-robed cetics, and next to them, a group of akashics covered from neck to ankle in yellow silk. There were cliques of scryers berobed in dazzling white, and green-robed mechanics standing close to each other, no doubt arguing as to the ultimate (and paradoxical) composition and nature of the spacetime continuum, or some other arcanum. Just below the dais was the black wavefront of the pilots and master pilots. I saw Lionel, Tomoth and his brothers, Stephen Caraghar and others that I knew. At the very front stood my mother and Justine, looking at us — I thought — proudly.”

Great stuff, yeah? And at the same time, I find the book puts me, as a female reader, in an odd position. The women in the book so far are either relatives or love interest, and their defining characteristics seem somewhat odd: the male protagonist’s mother’s defining characteristic is that she’s chubby from eating too many chocolate candies, while much is made of his aunt’s sexual rapacity.

In a novel, often the main point of view is our lens for the book. If the book were a first-person shooter game, this is the character one maneuvers through the game. Women are used to having this male perspective imposed on them; we’ve been reading those narratives ever since we started reading.