More thoughts on Julie Crisp's blog post

For those who didn't see my earlier post, Julie Crisp is the Commissioning Editor of Tor UK.  I can't get her blog post about women authors in SF out of my head.  I keep thinking of other things related to it, so here goes at putting those thoughts down.

First off, she talks about the number of female commissioning editors working in SF.  As a newbie author, I was always told that my work would never get read by the commissioning editor when it got plucked off the slush pile.  I've read horror stories about how interns would be detailed to work through them and accept or reject.  The thought of some spotty eighteen year old passing judgement on my masterpiece didn't exactly fill me with joy.  It would be lovely to know that my work would be passed to an intelligent commissioning editor who has the experience to know whether the book will work commercially or not.

My experience of nearly having a young adult book taken by a major UK publisher a few years ago bore out that suspicion.  I was clearly dealing with a very young woman, and as the three months' email correspondence wore on and I was no nearer to discovering what she wanted me to do with the  book I began to despair.  I think it was after that negative experience that I started thinking about the idea of self-publishing.

To go back to Julie's post, I was really interested in her figures for the number of women submitting young adult stories.  I too turned to writing young adult SF because I began to feel that that was where the future lay for female SF writers.  In fact, Auroradawn, The novel the major publisher called in, is YA science fiction.  I've read so much exciting YA SF recently that I too began to feel that this was where the future lay for female SF authors.  Books like Scott Westerfield's Uglies/Pretties/Specials and Leviathan, Veronica Roth's Divergent, Sam Hawkmoor's The Repossession/The Hunting, and Sarah Crossan's Breathe. (I've just realised that's two male and two female authors each.  I'm not sure what that proves though).  

Part of the problem lies in the perception adult women have of SF.  If I had a pound for every time a woman has said to me "I don't read science fiction" when they clearly have no idea what the genre encompasses I'd be a millionaire by now.  These are mainly older women in their 50s onwards.  I've just had a sudden thought about this.  I wonder if they saw some of the so-called 'golden age' pulp mags and were put off SF for life by them.  I can't blame them.  

There's no denying that SF as it appears on bookshop shelves has a real image problem if it wants to attract female readers.  Personally, I have no interest in macho "my gun's bigger than yours" space opera.  I do like Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's War series, but those aren't purely military.  They're galaxy-spanning stories of government corruption, diplomacy, piracy, and merchants trying to get on with their ordinary lives against the threat of interstellar piracy.

I also have no interest in sexy vampire PIs.  This seems to be the latest sexual fantasy peddled for the delight of male readers, and it's another reason why I've steered clear of adult SF for the last decade.  SF seems to haven lost the 'speculative' part of its name.  Rather than being visionary explorations of the future, they've simply been repackaging current sexual obsessions.

 I think a part of the problem lies with the bookshops.  The way some of them choose the books they want to stock is a huge issue in itself.  Even if a woman SF author is successful in getting published by a mainstream publisher she could well find that the major bookshops don't want to stock her books because they don't conform to the macho genre image the bookshop is presenting.

These factors are part of what's driven so many of us to self publish.  That way we can tell the story we want to tell, and our characters can be who we want them to be. I personally would resist any attempts to make my characters 'sexy', whatever that means.  They're people with high self-esteem and professional careers and 'sexy' just isn't the way they are.  They're too busy getting on with their lives to worry about rubbish like that.  

Julie's right when she says it's a complex issue.  I'd like to finish this post by replying to one of her comments.  She says that genre readers are "the most diverse, experimental, and well-read book buyers  I've ever encountered, and that gender isn't a factor in deciding why they'll pick a book up."  If that's so, then please let's see a lot more books with real women as the heroines on our bookshelves, bookshops.