Words to change the world

 Last week America was rocked by the overturning of the Roe v Wade decision.  In many states of that country now, abortion will be illegal.  The decision effectively means that women there effectively have  no control over their own bodies.  As some commentators have put it, a corpse has more rights than a woman in America right now.

This brings me to the power of words.  That's a strong statement, and many of the people reacting to this decision have been female writers.  I follow a lot of female SF writers on Twitter, writers who have been steadily working to change world ideas through their published works.

In the last decade I've seen a change in the way these authors describe their books on Twitter.  Before, they might have emphasised the story, now they're more likely to stress its ingredients.  The politics and causes they support have come out into the open.

There is no doubt that words can change the world.  Powerful stories have always had the ability  to make readers think, and sometimes to persuade them to change their minds on issues.  Many more published authors come from diverse backgrounds now, and have used their backgrounds in their writing.  They have considerably influenced the debate on diversity issues.

This has become a tricky decision point for some authors.  Sometimes they've had to decide whether to publically out themselves as a certain orientation in order to advocate strongly for their work.  All of which is to say that I'll be looking out for books which champion women's rights to abortion being published in the next few years.  And no doubt a fair number of short stories will advocate for that cause too.

For me, my way to change the world is two-fold.  First, to point out that not every woman wants kids, and second, that breeding too many of them is the driver behind destroying our planet.  These two issues are interlinked, although there are still many people who deny this.  I have several short stories which link these issues, and several novels refer to it too.

I'm a great fan of the wildworld story, one where characters, often childfree by choice women, land on an unspoiled world and then find out that someone wants to destroy its wild beauty.  This is my way of pointing out the danger human overbreeding poses, and of attempting to show other ways of living.

Part of that lies in challenging assumptions of heterosexuality, and the assumption that all women want children.  Neither of those things is true for many people now.  Our society has radically changed in the last few decades, and our stories and words should support those changes.

I'm looking forward to the Office for National Statistics publishing the detailed census results later this year.  For the first time the census asked for details of sexual orientation, and these will make a very interesting read.  I suspect we're going to find out that Britain is a lot more diverse than we think, and I suspect that data will be informing story issues for me in the future.