Authors, Genders, and Authors' Genders

The Guardian has an interesting article looking at a new wave of male authors who hide their gender. As one author, Sean Thomas, who writes under the gender-neutral name SK Tremayne, explains, he did this with the encouragement of his editor and agent "because it arguably helps, these days, for fiction writers to be female, or at least not male."

I believe people respond to incentives. Social scientists should pay attention when professionals are changing their behavior in response to a perceived change in incentives; as professionals, they are probably on to something. But is this evidence that the Puppy's are right about a conspiracy (explicit or implicit) against male authors? Not necessarily. My impression (not backed up by hard data; someone please correct me if I am wrong) is that the reading population is increasingly female in composition and that readers of all genders are disproportionately attracted to fiction written by members of their own gender. But it is evidence that the market for fiction as a whole is less biased against women than is commonly represented. Of course, to the extent that affirmative action movements like K. Tempest Bradford's Challenge to "stop reading white, straight, cis male authors for one year" take off, this only adds to the incentive to hide or misrepresent one's gender.

More concerning is the report that the authors felt that their attempts to write female characters would be considered more believable if they were not perceived to be men. Fiction should be judged on its merits, not by the identity of the author. But again this is no evidence of a conspiracy against men: women authors have had to obscure their gender for centuries in order to achieve acceptance by male readers (and as the referenced article points out, this continues today; see JK Rowling). Rather, it reflects the disturbing trend in society to favor form over substance, and to abandon meritocracy in favor of an allegiance to one's tribe.

The Childishness of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Every now and then I meet someone who dismisses my interest in science fiction and fantasy as childish. This has never bothered me particularly and the closed-mindedness that the comment implies has meant that I have never felt the urge to combat the view (I don't seek out closed minded people for friendship). Hence, I have never bothered to attempt a rebuttal.

Recently, I came across an attempt at a rebuttal by C.S. Lewis which I record here as ammunition in case I decide to enter combat.

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But then into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development: When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

and

They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we had in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change. I now enjoy Tolstoy and Jane Austen and Trollope as well as fairy tales and I call that growth: if I had had to lose the fairy tales in order to acquire the novelists, I would not say that I had grown but only that I had changed.

Lewis also has some words for people who worry that science fiction and fantasy can lead readers to lose touch with reality. Specifically, he wrote that the fairy tale

is accused of giving children a false impression of the world they live in. But I think no literature that children could read gives them less of a false impression. I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories. The fantasies did not deceive me: the school stories did. All stories in which children have adventures and successes which are possible, in the sense that they do not break the laws of nature, but almost infinitely improbable, are in more danger than the fairy tales of raising false expectations…

This distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes—things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an askesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease.

Introduction

For fans of science fiction and fantasy, 2015 is likely to go down in history as the year of the Hugo Awards Controversy. An ocean of ink (a pile of pixels?) has been spilled over this Controversy already, and I intend to spill more in the future, but for now I'll simply note that the Controversy involves two loose groups of fans and authors with conflicting visions as to what constitutes "good science fiction and fantasy writing" getting into a heated debate about nominating and voting on the Hugo Awards. The Controversy has many things in common with the so-called culture war that is supposed to be raging in the United States, and indeed the two sides in the Controversy might be more or less accurately identified with "the left" (often referred to disparagingly as "social justice warriors" or SJWs) and "the right" (who have operated under the titles "sad puppies" and "rabid puppies").

As an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, I could not help but be drawn into this Controversy as a spectator. And whereas many other fans have expressed profound disappointment and upset at what has happened, I have found it to be wonderful! Looking past the ranting and raving, I found a whole new world of fiction---that is to say, short fiction---that I had previously been ignoring. I've ended up reading more, and more widely, than I had for a very long time. If anything good comes out of the Controversy, it will be that many new people have been attracted to the genre, while other more casual fans like myself have been prompted to engage with the field to a greater degree than they had before.

As someone who self-identifies as a member of the left (albeit, the center left, and a somewhat contrarian member at that) and who embraces the SJW term (as I can get a little feisty, I like to say that I put the "warrior" into "social justice warrior"), I expected to align entirely with the SJW crowd. Much to my surprise I found that I could see a lot of merit in the views of the two puppy groups. I was also especially disappointed at the behavior of some of my supposed allies from the SJW crowd. The whiny ranting and raving, double-standards, and intellectual inconsistency of some of these people has earned my disgust. This was especially evident in the reviews of the puppy-nominated work which began to appear and which in some cases, I thought, took the form of hatchet jobs rather than open minded evaluations of the quality of the work.

All of which leads to this blog. I am inspired primarily to write reviews of work, not limited to work nominated for the Hugo Awards (voting for which is about to close as I write in any case), that I think are a little bit more even handed than what I am seeing online at the moment. They will be personal opinions, and sometimes will be strongly worded. But I will try to evaluate all work on the merits as I see it, and not on perceived affiliations and alliances or notions of political correctness. I intend to write reviews of work that interests me, as well as of work that has come up in the context of the debates about the worth of different contributions to the field of SFF as a whole. I am not sure it will influence anyone, and will be content simply to document my own reading and evolving views on the subject. But in the event that it contributes to the current debate---and that I move from being a spectator to a participant---I will not be at all displeased.

Of course, along the way, I expect that I will post more than just reviews, but also my thoughts on the field as a whole, as well as my attempts to document the history of the field as I learn it. Corrections, clarifications, comments and criticism are all welcomed!