Comments | tangendentalism: Women in SF

tangendentalism

Women in SF

Oct 09, 2010 15:18

There's been a by turns interesting and frustrating discussion at Torque Control about women in science fiction. After reading through the comments, I feel too exhausted by the waves of privilege and blindness coming from some (many?) of the commenters to comment over there. Despite which, the conversation seems to have died down now anyway. But I ( Read more... )

Comments 5

unfettrdphoenix October 9 2010, 23:48:44 UTC

Interesting observations & article. I hadn't really thought about it, but although I love SF my list of books read on GoodReads is not as big as my fantasy list. I follow several book communities online, and select from there which books I might be interested in reading. The number of SF books is quite low. I didn't realize it had farther reaching possible reasons for this.

I have noticed that many SF books seem to be older, and I haven't seen many new SF books of note. That's not to say they aren't out there, they just haven't popped up in the communities I follow.

Are women not as typically technically minded? I'm grasping here. The article is right, there are a LOT of urban fantasy books by women. But the research required for such a book is not as great as it would be for doing SF?

tangendentalism October 11 2010, 08:12:48 UTC

Are women not as typically technically minded? I'm grasping here. The article is right, there are a LOT of urban fantasy books by women. But the research required for such a book is not as great as it would be for doing SF?The research for any given book is as great or as small as the writer feels it needs to be. Iain Banks, on whom I am writing my thesis, writes enormous SF space operas but does pretty much zero research for every book ( ... )

unfettrdphoenix October 11 2010, 08:31:47 UTC

Wow, I had no idea about many of those things! It's sad, really.

tangendentalism October 11 2010, 10:01:32 UTC

Haha, your honesty and openness is so refreshing! I can't tell you how rare it is to get a response like this. Thank you. :)

And yes, it is sad. It's also maddening and frustrating and an outrage and utterly depressing. All in varying quantities depending on the given moment. However, it does mean that it is possible to find good, exciting sf written by a wide variety of people if you know where to look.

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