Pigeonholes
Write what you know... Write what you love ... These phrases guided what I did for years. The only trouble was that I didn't get the results published.
Publishers shove our work into pigeonholes. And for the last decade that's been a real problem for me. I want to be the next Anne McCaffrey, a damn good storyteller telling a straightforward story. But it seemed that the SF genre was stuffed full of macho space opera and there was no place for my feminist characters who didn't lead armies.
Now at last the white male supremacy of the SF genre is being challenged. Lightspeed Magazine is producing a Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue that has created quite a stir in SF circles. There have been many blog posts and discussions in the last year about making the genre more inclusive. People are starting to question and challenge the genre's blinkers.
I find it ironic and maddening that a genre that is supposed to show us the future continues to present us with visions of patriarchally controlled societies where women are still largely invisible. Please! We did that in the dark ages of the Golden Age. It's time we moved on.
Part of my struggle to get published as an SF writer is down to those pigeonholes. But there are signs things are changing. Cross-genre are the current buzzwords. They suit me just fine. All my books have crime in them, so I've been able to reinvent myself as a future crime writer, a category suggested by an SF publisher recently.
Now we are seeing a whole crop of new women authors coming into the genre. And they're writing under their real names. Shock, horror! Women's names are on the covers of SF books again. About time. A new rash of feminist authors can hook the next generation of women into the genre the way I was pulled in in the late 1970s. Let's change the pigeonholes to include us.
Publishers shove our work into pigeonholes. And for the last decade that's been a real problem for me. I want to be the next Anne McCaffrey, a damn good storyteller telling a straightforward story. But it seemed that the SF genre was stuffed full of macho space opera and there was no place for my feminist characters who didn't lead armies.
Now at last the white male supremacy of the SF genre is being challenged. Lightspeed Magazine is producing a Women Destroy Science Fiction special issue that has created quite a stir in SF circles. There have been many blog posts and discussions in the last year about making the genre more inclusive. People are starting to question and challenge the genre's blinkers.
I find it ironic and maddening that a genre that is supposed to show us the future continues to present us with visions of patriarchally controlled societies where women are still largely invisible. Please! We did that in the dark ages of the Golden Age. It's time we moved on.
Part of my struggle to get published as an SF writer is down to those pigeonholes. But there are signs things are changing. Cross-genre are the current buzzwords. They suit me just fine. All my books have crime in them, so I've been able to reinvent myself as a future crime writer, a category suggested by an SF publisher recently.
Now we are seeing a whole crop of new women authors coming into the genre. And they're writing under their real names. Shock, horror! Women's names are on the covers of SF books again. About time. A new rash of feminist authors can hook the next generation of women into the genre the way I was pulled in in the late 1970s. Let's change the pigeonholes to include us.
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