kateelliott (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kateelliott) wrote2011-07-21 10:38 pm
kateelliott) wrote2011-07-21 10:38 pm
A Question of Toes and Names
A ton of linkage, which some of you will have already seen. I append a final comment at the end.
A number of posts have popped up in the last few days that feel to me related, not in direct subject matter but in exploring elements of fiction and or our response to fiction and the larger experience of deciding who and what to read as well as how we write and decision we make while writing.
Kari Sperring writes an excellent post about stepping on Other people's toes: A rant. With a lot of good comments, besides.
And while I'm talking about this, let's have a look at another phrase I'm seeing a lot lately, 'Eurocentric fantasy'. This, as far as I can tell, means fantasies set in backgrounds drawn from a sort of default idea of mediaeval Europe (usually Western Europe at that). I understand what people mean by this, and what they are thinking about. The thing is, as a European myself, these fantasies don't feel 'Eurocentric' to me. They don't feel like Europe at all, they feel like a mix of 50s Hollywood historicals and Las Vegas, they are theme park fantasies.
Cora Buhlert riffs in part on Sperring's post in Sometimes it just hits a bit too close to home , talking a bit about World War II as an historical setting for fiction and film. She goes on to say:
What’s the way out of this dilemma? Just write what you know? Never use anybody else’s history or culture for fear of offending? That would make for much more boring literature and we don’t need that. The key is to do your research and take particular care with living cultures and with historical periods that are still within living memory. Nonetheless, we’ll all probably mess up somewhere.
Chris Moriarty moves into the women writing sf discussion with an interesting post called Birds, Dinosaurs, and the Secret Life of Labels.
So how can we be stuck, after all this time and all those brilliant flights of imagination, in a stupid fight about whether the genre is even broad enough to include women?
And, more to the point, how do we get out of it?
Finally, Linda Nagata posts a rumination of writing sf as a woman under a woman's name, What's in a Name? that she wrote some months ago (I read it then, in fact) but only posted now, with some trepidation.
I haven’t done a lot of interviews in my career, but the question I least like to answer goes something like this: Do you feel it’s hurt your career being a woman writing hard science fiction?
I’m sure I get this deer-in-the-headlights expression before breaking eye contact and muttering something self-contradictory. Because really, how does one answer a question like that?
To say, “Yes, I think it has hurt my career” sounds like whining and finger pointing without any evidence to back it up, and risks offending the men who are the core readers of the genre.
To say, “No, I’m sure that’s not it” would be untruthful and would imply that my books didn’t sell because they were bad. My hard SF books may not be for everyone, but I don’t believe they’re bad.
So in my own mind I mostly ignored the question. Some writers succeed, others don’t. That’s just the way it is.
But of course the only true answer is that I can’t know. I can’t go back and change my name to Greg or David or Alastair and re-publish the books and see how things go.
That's just it. We can't know. Questions of how readers may unconsciously approach a book in a way that may alter their perception of it without them necessarily realizing it are frightfully difficult to answer and possibly impossible to quantify in any meaningful way.
If I had to do it all over again knowing what I know now, I would probably write my seven volume epic fantasy series under a male or gender neutral name.
A number of posts have popped up in the last few days that feel to me related, not in direct subject matter but in exploring elements of fiction and or our response to fiction and the larger experience of deciding who and what to read as well as how we write and decision we make while writing.
Kari Sperring writes an excellent post about stepping on Other people's toes: A rant. With a lot of good comments, besides.
And while I'm talking about this, let's have a look at another phrase I'm seeing a lot lately, 'Eurocentric fantasy'. This, as far as I can tell, means fantasies set in backgrounds drawn from a sort of default idea of mediaeval Europe (usually Western Europe at that). I understand what people mean by this, and what they are thinking about. The thing is, as a European myself, these fantasies don't feel 'Eurocentric' to me. They don't feel like Europe at all, they feel like a mix of 50s Hollywood historicals and Las Vegas, they are theme park fantasies.
Cora Buhlert riffs in part on Sperring's post in Sometimes it just hits a bit too close to home , talking a bit about World War II as an historical setting for fiction and film. She goes on to say:
What’s the way out of this dilemma? Just write what you know? Never use anybody else’s history or culture for fear of offending? That would make for much more boring literature and we don’t need that. The key is to do your research and take particular care with living cultures and with historical periods that are still within living memory. Nonetheless, we’ll all probably mess up somewhere.
Chris Moriarty moves into the women writing sf discussion with an interesting post called Birds, Dinosaurs, and the Secret Life of Labels.
So how can we be stuck, after all this time and all those brilliant flights of imagination, in a stupid fight about whether the genre is even broad enough to include women?
And, more to the point, how do we get out of it?
Finally, Linda Nagata posts a rumination of writing sf as a woman under a woman's name, What's in a Name? that she wrote some months ago (I read it then, in fact) but only posted now, with some trepidation.
I haven’t done a lot of interviews in my career, but the question I least like to answer goes something like this: Do you feel it’s hurt your career being a woman writing hard science fiction?
I’m sure I get this deer-in-the-headlights expression before breaking eye contact and muttering something self-contradictory. Because really, how does one answer a question like that?
To say, “Yes, I think it has hurt my career” sounds like whining and finger pointing without any evidence to back it up, and risks offending the men who are the core readers of the genre.
To say, “No, I’m sure that’s not it” would be untruthful and would imply that my books didn’t sell because they were bad. My hard SF books may not be for everyone, but I don’t believe they’re bad.
So in my own mind I mostly ignored the question. Some writers succeed, others don’t. That’s just the way it is.
But of course the only true answer is that I can’t know. I can’t go back and change my name to Greg or David or Alastair and re-publish the books and see how things go.
That's just it. We can't know. Questions of how readers may unconsciously approach a book in a way that may alter their perception of it without them necessarily realizing it are frightfully difficult to answer and possibly impossible to quantify in any meaningful way.
If I had to do it all over again knowing what I know now, I would probably write my seven volume epic fantasy series under a male or gender neutral name.