My truth will set me free - kicking out Imposter Syndrome

I've had a love/hate relationship with SF for the last twenty years.  I was introduced to the genre by my ex-husband in the late seventies.  I didn't realise what a golden time that was for women in SF.  Lambeth Library introduced me to many women SF writers I'd never have known otherwise.  It was a period when I felt full of hope as a writer.  The genre held great promise for me.

What a contrast that time is with how I feel now.  The last fifteen years of so have felt like a desert for women in SF.  Some good women have been publishing stuff, and a fair few who were around in my golden age still continue to be published.  But one of the big changes for me is that I no longer work in London.  And on the provincial south coast of England, discovering SF books by women in my local bookshops became an impossible task.

It got so bad a few years ago that the only books shelved under the SF section that were written by women were fantasy titles.  The message was clear: men write SF, women write fantasy.  And for a long while I believed that.  I felt embarrassed to be seen haunting the SF shelves, searching in vain for SF written by women.  And for quite some time that drove my Imposter Syndrome.  I was a woman, what the hell did I think I was doing, writing SF?  I hadn't read every published book in the genre, I wasn't a scientist, what did I seriously think I could contribute to the genre?  As you can see, my Imposter Syndrome was in full flow.

And then I started to read the bios of some of the male authors who wrote big SF books.  And found that many weren't scientists.  And some weren't anything like as well educated as I am.  And realised that the so-called science in their books was pseudo-science, invented in no different A way than I  invent things.  Then Ancillary Justice won every award going, and the rules changed.  Suddenly women did write SF again, and they were turning the genre around to examine issues important to women.

My truth is that I'm part of the 51% of the human race that is female.  I'm not a minority,  I have the right to write my truth, and I now do so.  My Imposter Syndrome is banished, and I'm now back browsing the SF bookshelves in bookshops.  I'm still not seeing enough women there, but at least I'm now expecting to find them.