It’s like this…
You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character - because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned - and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.
But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.
And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.
But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.
Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character - Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.
Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.
And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.
Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.
Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”
You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable.
You tell him - this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow.
But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo - enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.
And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.
It’s like the world clicking into place.
And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.
This is an excellent post to keep in mind when you see another recent post criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder. No. It used to be about men. And now it’s not.
I was reading through this whole thing and agreeing (I remember reading James White’s Sector General series, and the whole space hospital was so cool, but apparently women can’t handle as many of the downloadable-knowledge-tapes as men can because their brains are too small and emotional), because I remember this so much from trying to read lit-sci-fi growing up, but then I got to the addenda by the second person at the bottom and …
No to this part. And this is just from my own experience, but there’s a lot more going on than people disguising their sexism by only complaining about dystopian fiction now
Dystopian fiction is a subgenre, not the whole of science fiction, and it’s a subgenre specifically about the lack of hope and wonder. It’s perfectly fine to not enjoy that particular subgenre at the minute with no bearing whatsoever on your feelings of male vs female protagonists, not least because we’re in the middle of an RL dystopia, or at least it feels like that a lot of days, what with the global pandemic and the western surveillance state
There has been a general trend in a lot of genre fiction towards increasing darkness since … I feel like the 90s particularly? The rise of the punk genres in the 80s probably had something to do with it, but the 90s feels like where ‘grimdark’ hit big, and it’s been waxing and waning since. If you look at something like Star Trek, the quintessential ‘hopeful’ sci-fi, there’s been a darkening trend since DS9 that shows particularly strongly in recent shows. And, yes, there’s an argument for that, because those more recent shows have been examining and highlighting some of the unspoken biases (and colonialism) in the earlier ‘utopian’ entries, but it’s still a trend
There’s been a swing of anti-intellectualism in a lot of genre fiction recently as well, something fairly obvious in the likes of the MCU, and it shows particularly hard in science fiction, where science no longer represents hope for the future but rampant danger and egoism. Again, that’s arguably been a thing since the punk genres got started in the 80s, but there’s a strong feeling lately of ‘protagonists shouldn’t think their way out of things, they should punch their way out of things’. I don’t know how much of this is only my own experience, but there’s been a serious sense of increased militarism in genre fiction the last while, conflict solved through violence rather than negotiation or even the good old technobabble, and a general sense of cynicism and depression about humanity’s ability to solve problems any other way than violence
There is an argument that this has been necessary. Again, going back to the Star Trek argument, there’s the idea that the deconstructive nature of a lot of genre fiction these days is to point out a lot of the hidden racism, sexism and assorted other isms in old-school science fiction (as well as the colonial propaganda). This is a often a fair point (though a lot of the grimdark stuff now feels grimdark for the sake of grimdark, not in order to make much of a point)
But (one of) the problems is, there isn’t a counterpoint, or it doesn’t feel like there’s much of a counterpoint. What I mean is, for example, female protagonists are often associated with dystopian fiction now. The rise of more nuanced and varied protagonists coincided with the increased darkening of genre fiction. So there’s a degree of basis for the whole ‘more female protagonists means more fucking depression’ sort of feeling, because where are the happy female stories? Where’s my bonkers planetary romance with a lady as the lead? Where’s my female space opera that doesn’t devolve into ‘hard military decisions because my utopian government is secretly a dystopia in disguise or has its back against the wall’? Where are my main character lady scientists? I know it does exist, and hopefully it’s picking up steam, but a lot of the big banner properties at the minute are a bit on the depressing end
So there is a … There genuinely is a feeling of increased darkness in genre fiction at the minute, and there genuinely are RL reasons not to want an increasing sense of darkness in your escapist fiction. There is also a lot of reasons not to want to go back to the original forms of the old-school utopian science fiction with all their hidden or not-so-hidden biases, but I’d like to think that there’s another solution than just … get used to liking dystopias?
Dystopian fiction is not the be-all-end-all of science fiction. We can have hope and wonder and ladies, is my point here. That would, in fact, be rather nice.
I feel this. I have some later works from some of these writers and the sexism is there, even if it got muted in the later works. The SF I found when I was a teen was by Anne McCaffrey. And whatever else you could say about McCaffrey, the one thing she was not was sexist.
