I want to like you - but I don't

It's time for nominating works for the Hugo awards, and as an attending member of next year's Worldcon in Dublin I get the right to nominate this year.

I've been trying to read more SF written by women authors in the last few years, but I have to say it has sometimes been problematical.  Much of the women's SF I've read recently has been really heavy on exploring gender identity and sex, in some cases to the detriment of the story.

It's good that publishing is looking for diverse authors, and that publishers are publishing stories featuring diverse characters, but what I want is diversity of storylines too. I don't want motherhood set in space, or to read about women in traditional caring roles.  I want to see them transcend the limiting shackles of the patriarchy and go exploring the universe.

Lucy V Hay, in her book Writing Diverse Characters for Fiction TV and Film, makes the very important  point that a story does not need to be about diversity issues.  It could instead be a story about something else which has diverse characters as its cast.  That's the kind of story I like, and which I'm finding so hard to find written by women authors.

This is the way I write.  In Renaissance I have a centenarian aromantic asexual female ship captain.  I also have a male/male interracial relationship.  But I only use those labels for the purpose of pitching the story.  The story isn't about diversity or sexuality issues.  It's about the challenges of recycling junk in space.  And all those characters are shown simply getting on with their jobs.

And this is where I have a problem with some women SF authors' books.  Because what they're doing is setting today's gender and diversity issues unchanged into stories set in the future.  But think back to the changes of the last couple of hundred years in England alone.  Back then, women couldn't vote, and couldn't even own their own property at times.  No we can do both of these things.  We have a woman Prime Minister at present.  And we've gone from convicting 'homosexuals' for having illegal sex, to the law allowing gay couples to legally marry.

The same scale of change will continue to happen in the future.  But where a writer is fixated on today's issues and extrapolates them unchanged into their SF work, I can't identify with that.  So there are quite a few works by women authors that I won't be nominating for Hugos this year.