Echoes of the past

This week I've been in discussion with people on the Dublin Worldcon community Facebook group about forgotten science fiction writers of the last.  Most of the members were quoting old white dudes - Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, etc, so I  had to pitch in about forgotten women SF writers.

One of my favourites  was Anne McCaffrey.  I picked up an old book of hers (1992), one her 'Brainship' series, in the Oxfam Bookshop last weekend.  Thinking about these books now, the stories of people with disabilities enhanced to become the brains of starships and space stations were early positive depictions of people with disabilities.

One of my recommendations on the Worldcon site was CJ Cherryh's The Pride of Chanur.  The Chanur stories centre around an older, wily tradeship captain called Pyanfar Chanur.  She's a Hani, essentially a walking, talking, lion species, so these books combine my love of starships with my love of big cats.

Pyanfar was a major influence on my own tradeship captain, Ria Bihar. Ria is human, but she shares Pyanfar's independence of spirit, and she also makes her own trades.  Another influence on Ria is Elizabeth Moon's Kykara Vatta.  Ky is a disgraced military cadet who ends up piloting tradeships for the family firm, Vatta Transport.  These books aren't quite so old.  Trading in Danger, the first in the series, was published in the UK in 2003.  Then there's Katherine Kerr's Polar City Blues, published in 1991, which has another sentient AI as a character.

Looking at these recommendations, it strikes me how long I've been reading SF.  I started seriously reading in 1980, and it's now 2019, so I've been reading books about starships and AIs for nearly 40 years.  That ought to make me a wise old woman in the genre, but I don't feel that way.  There are too many female writers from the 50s to 70s period whom I've never read. 

Part of that is because of the systematic erasure of women from the genre, but part of it is because the Internet wasn't around when I was young and I didn't know these books existed.  But there are women older than me who are determined to rediscover these erased women, and to make sure their work is remembered alongside the canon of works by old white dudes.