Being part of the conversation

I've been writing and reading SF for over forty years, and my relationship with the genre has a love/hate feel to it.  I got into the genre in the late 1970s, through my husband's introduction to the writers he loved.  Which were of course, all male.  Then I moved to a job where I  commuted to London, and things changed.

In the late 1970s I discovered many women SF writers, courtesy of the London Borough of Lambeth's brilliant library.  This was before the Internet, so it wasn't so easy to know what was out there if it didn't turn up in your local bookshop or library.  Lambeth introduced me to Anne McCaffrey, CJ Cherryh, Mary Gentle, Katherine Kerr, Sheri Tepper, and other women SF authors.  I devoured their books on my three-hour commute.  And these women's stories played a big part in my starting to write SF too.

Fast forward a decade, and things were very different.  Now away from the London buzz, my local libraries and bookshops stocked very few SF books written by women.  This was still before easily-accessible internet, and I felt like I'd been cut off from the genre.  I spent a decade feeling disenfranchised from it.  I kept writing what I loved, but felt I had no place in the genre.  I joined the British Science Fiction Association, but saw little reference to women's work, so didn't renew my subscription.  I felt shut out of the genre I loved, and didn't bother to submit much of my stuff.  Now I know that part of that feeling was fuelled by Imposter Syndrome.  It even made me feel awkward browsing the SF section in bookshops, expecting to be challenged and thrown out.

Fast forward to 2020, and things are different again.  Social media has connected me to dozens of women SF writers, many of whom have long publishing careers.  These are the women who continued writing and publishing throughout my period of despair.  I just didn't know they were there.

Women writers have become more visible in the genre because they've recently won a lot of the most important awards, the Hugos and Nebulas. This has led to publishers and agents looking for submissions from diverse and under-represented voices.  And many publishers still consider women to be under-represented in SF.

So now, having got the Imposter Syndrome better under control, I'm fully engaged in being part of the conversation in the SF genre.  And I'm just about to renew my subscription to the BSFA.