But Enough About Me!

Clarkesworld Magazine has published Part Two of its Epic Fantasy Roundtable. This is an impressively massive undertaking by Jeremy L.C. Jones, and I want to again give special attention to the fact that the roundtable includes one agent, one editor, and 26 writers of whom half are female and half male (2 that I know of are PoC).

In the July Part One to be found here, Jones asked all the writers why they wrote epic fantasy. My answer wasn't included in that part because, as it turned out, it was used in Part Two.

I want to highlight part of my answer here, and talk a little more about what I said and what it means for how I write, in light of an email conversation I have been having recently with writer Michelle Sagara West msagara.

I said:

I was an outdoor, athletic child: I preferred to play physically active imagination games outdoors. But, against that, the cultural norms of the day reminded me constantly that the things I loved to do were appropriate for boys, not for girls. People forget this. So in the beginning, as it were, fantasy novels were a way for me to escape the rigid constraints put on girls. More importantly, I could write my own stories and build my own worlds. If you've not grown up being told you shouldn't be who you are, I'm not sure you can quite understand why world-building and writing epic fantasy is so attractive and in its way a form of chain-breaking. But it was, and it is.


Long ago I made a kind of intrinsic promise to my 16 year old self that I would never betray her by leaving her out of the stories I was then beginning to write and that she loved. By which I hasten to add that I do not mean that I write stories with myself as a thinly disguised version of a main character. What I meant then and mean now is that I would never neglect or diminish or elide the female perspective in my books. That I would not bow to the idea, prevalent far more then than now, that there were proper and "natural" stories for girls and women to enjoy, but that male focused stories and perspectives were more naturally Worthy and Important. And that girls and women didn't belong there (except possibly as props or as rewards for the men).

I have to be honest. I think epic fantasy is still by and large written with a male gaze. With a few notable exceptions, unexpected amounts of it still don't do a particularly good job passing the Bechdel Test despite the historical evidence that women lived during the past.

I'm thrilled by the explosion of popularity of genres like urban fantasy, paranormal, Young Adult, and romantic fantasy (and the huge numbers of readers who crossover from the unfairly maligned romance genre to read widely throughout other genres), because they are all great genres for the female perspective--and the male as well.

But epic fantasy is the genre of my heart.

I write epic fantasy the way I do because I remember being that 16 year old girl who almost never saw people like her in the stories she wanted to read and thereby experience.

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.

Science fiction is often defined as a “literature of ideas,” and many famous SF stories can be identified by the idea, or nifty concept, or “what if” speculation that lies at their heart. Is my sf novel JARAN just a rousing adventure story with a romantic element, or is there some kind of science fictional speculation involved?

Glad you asked. (Because I’ve discovered that people usually don’t ask. Too often they seem to just assume there isn’t because nothing in the book (if they’ve even read the book) fits the received and accepted definition of a sfnal “idea.”)

What if, in a low-tech, chieftain-level pastoral society in which labor remains divided along fairly traditional (by our standards) gender line, women had real authority?

Not lip service authority. Not a lot of talk about women being the repository of honor in the home, or the teachers of the next generation, or the keeper of the house in a way that specifically limits them to the house, or the biologically equipped nurturing machines whose scriptural mandate is to be mother and helpmeet, but real authority: “The right and power to command, enforce laws, exact obedience, determine, or judge.” (The American Heritage Dictionary, 1976)

As authority, that is, held over all members of society and not just over children and social inferiors. And not just some women, those who by birth or accident or exceptionalism have managed to wrest authority for themselves out of a patriarchal society by being “as good as a man,” but all women.

What would such a society look like? How might it function to grant equal dignity to women and men and yet at the same time fit realistically into a broader world and with an understanding of human nature and the needs of survival in a low-tech world with a high mortality rate?

Over the course of envisioning and revising the book, I had to ask myself a lot of questions. Am I reinforcing notions of biological determinism by splitting labor along traditional gender lines as the average USA reader knows and expects them to be observed even today but particularly in our view of the past? Yet if I can only write women as “free and powerful” by freeing them from their “traditional” roles, am I not then implicitly agreeing with unchallenged cultural assumptions that devalue women’s labor and women’s experience? How can I mediate between these two extremes?

I don’t have an answer to these questions, although I can say that over time I’ve learned how fluid division of labor by gender is from society to society. For instance, in the jaran I made men the ones who embroider, but of course embroidery is not a universal female occupation; most USAians just tend to think it is.

In any case, in JARAN and the other volumes in the sequence I explore what respect and authority mean and how they might interact through and between genders and, by doing so, shape how the culture of the jaran tribes developed in the past and continues to develop when a disruptive new force begins to alter the social fabric of the tribes.

Yet I didn’t want to create a “matriarchy” in which women rule and men submit--an inverted patriarchy. I wanted to explore the idea of a culture in which all adult roles are truly respected. So I started with an assumption: For women to maintain authority, institutions within the culture have to support that authority.

I made the tribes matrilineal, and in addition borrowed from many Native American traditions in which the right to hold certain offices and to inherit property follow down the female line.

I also made the jaran matrilocal: Under most circumstances, a new husband goes to live with his wife’s tribe. The locus of power within any given tribe centers on extended families of sisters. A woman’s relationship to her brother is considered to be the most stable female-male relationship, based on a shared mother and upbringing, and within extended families, cousins related through sisters or a sister and brother are considered like siblings (however, this is not true for cousins related through brothers).

In addition, women have possession of the tents and wagons, and they manage and distribute food and labor available to the tribe. As with the Iroquois and Cherokee, jaran etsanas (headwomen) have the power to install or depose male tribal war leaders.

These familial, economic, and political relationships give women a network of support as well as a respect and autonomy that reinforces their authority.

Another aspect I played with was the cultural norms of sexual behavior. The hoary old cliché of male sexual aggression contrasted with female sexual passivity is still with us in a multitude of forms. I chose to make jaran women the sexual initiators: They choose lovers at will when unmarried, and are free to continue to (discreetly) take lovers once they are married. To drain off a bit of the “power” implicit in sexual choice, I gave men the choice in marriage. Although in practice almost all men (at the instigation of or with the assistance of their mothers and sisters) would negotiate with the other family first, it would be possible for a man to marry a woman whom he wanted but who did not want him. This contrasting pattern assured that neither sex had complete power over the other. Even in a strongly patriarchal society that is highly restrictive toward women, women will seek avenues of balance and redress when they can, including underhanded ones. History is full of such examples. I wanted to place mine right out on the table.

I catapult my protagonist into this culture without preparing her for it. Since she comes from a future Earth where the dregs of our patriarchal past still hold some sway over her way of thinking, she often has the opportunity to misinterpret what freedom and authority mean among the jaran. And when I look back at the book now, almost two decades later, I can see ways in which my own thinking has changed, things I might have written differently but which reflect the era and attitudes in which I grew up.

Ultimately, looking back, I wish that discussing my speculative ideas behind the jaran society weren’t still timely. To quote sff writer N. K. Jemisin in her recent and really excellent post on “The Limitations of Womanhood in Fantasy,” “Here’s the problem with this wholesale rejection of both societally-imposed and self-chosen “typical” women’s behaviors — in the end, it amounts to a rejection of nearly all things feminine. And that’s definitely not good for women.”

That’s the idea I was trying to explore, back then. We’re still struggling with it now.





*** This post was adapted out of the introduction I wrote to the 2002 edition of JARAN, published by DAW Books.

In a previous post I asked people to name the first science fiction or fantasy novel they read, if they remember.

I just went through and did a very casual analysis of the results.

I suspect more people would have said fairy and/or folk tales, as many did (as I did), but I did specifically request genre, that is, a story that we would consider to fall into fairly clear genre parameters. The kind of stuff, you know, that some journalism outlets write snarky articles about, wondering why the heck it is those strange people (us) read that geeky unreal childish stuff. But I'm digressing.


As expected, The Hobbit was mentioned many times.

I was surprised by how many people started with C.S. Lewis' Narnia books, but I shouldn't be. I suspect that's only because I didn't find those books until I was in college; they simply weren't on my radar. My parents did not read sff, and for some reason my high school English teacher who did read sff and who greatly encouraged me in my writing and reading habits (some of you know him: Chip Sullivan, former president of IAFA) never steered me to them.

Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

A couple of mentions of the Oz books (which were big early reads for me, possibly before the Silverberg novel I tend to identify as my first clearly sff title).

And a few mentions for Lloyd Alexander, Alan Garner, Ursula K. Le Guin, Richard Adams' Watership Down, as well as miscellaneous other fantasy.

SF mentions are less frequent but include multiple mentions of Robert Heinlein and the aforementioned Silverberg, as well as the Star Wars books.

However, I expect a prize ought to go to twinsuns who writes:

Basically, you were my first favorite modern-day sff writer.

Aww! That's sweet, but also terrifying.


Let me tell you my Robert Silverberg story.
[Be aware this is merely my take on the story. I can't vouch for Silverberg's recollection of the same events.]

Two fucking decades ago (damn), I was introduced to Robert Silverberg at a convention when I was a newly published writer. Robert Silverberg has of course been an immensely prolific and notable writer and seemingly around forever (from my perspective).

I said, perkily (and cluelessly), "So glad to meet you! You wrote the first science fiction novel I ever read, REVOLT ON ALPHA C! I was in fourth grade!"

He got A LOOK on his face of perhaps that disjunction we hit once we pass a certain age when we are periodically forced to recall the inevitable crawl of advancing years as they slowly obliterate us. But he graciously smiled and replied, "thank you. I was ten when I wrote it." {That was a joke. Or maybe not . . . he did start writing early.}

I never got to know Mr. Silverberg beyond occasionally saying hello to him at conventions. In fact, the second time I met him, I said, "You probably don't remember me, but -- " At which point he cut me off and said, "oh, I remember you."

Time passes in the way it does in films where water flows under the bridge, usually accompanied by a musical piece.

Dear reader, you will find me at AussieCon, in September 2010 (just last year!), in scenic Melbourne.

Who do I encounter there but Robert Silverberg! (at the after-Hugos party, to which I was not invited but I got in anyway -- that's another story).

And I said to him, "I know you remember me, and I have a story to tell you."

He gave me A LOOK like oh god what is it going to be this time?

I smiled and said, "I just had a new novel come out with a new (to me) publisher and editor. And my new editor, Devi Pillai, sent out the Advance Reading Copies accompanied by a letter which began, 'I first read Kate Elliott's Jaran when I was 13.'"

Trust me, you would have paid money to see his expression.

Because, you know, it's kind of like being a grandparent.

I'm really liking Tumblr because it's easier to post links and photos. It's limiting, too, something like a cross between Twitter and live journal, if I had to make a crude comparison, which I do, but it's just so much easier to post photos there (for me; this may not be true for those of you who find posting photos on lj easy) that I can post a photo a day JUST BECAUSE I FEEL LIKE IT and the hardest part is deciding which one.

I'm on Tumblr here.

Today I posted a quote from Iain Banks taken from a short interview up on Orbit Books blog with Simon Morden.

The quote I quoted:

I just think it’s basically snobbery which makes us separate entertainment and art and denigrate one while worshipping the other. I also don’t mean to imply that all art/entertainment is of the same worth; it isn’t. All I want to argue is that what we are faced with when we confront the vast array of creative cultural output that we currently call art and entertainment is not as crudely binary in nature as those two words suggest but rather a spectrum, and an untidy one at that, with junk and gems distributed throughout.

I think all that any of us can do is produce the best stuff we’re capable of producing – preferably without either feeling ashamed of it or (even worse in a way) working on projects our hearts aren’t really in but which pursue anyway because we feel they’ll garner a better class of praise just through their supposedly more serious or refined nature. And, I repeat, keep banging away at this very subject; don’t take it lying down, don’t accept this is just the way things have to be. We have to challenge the authorised version of our imposed cultural hierarchy.

I really enjoyed this post by Justina Robson* on Babel Clash.

Personally I’m fed up to the back teeth of everyone gnawing away on these sets and their rules (shall we have another round of What is Science Fiction anyone, or do you have lives to be getting on with?) because what this boils down to is solipsism in the end; each of us states what we like and don’t like…except for this exception here…

She's writing a response as part of an ongoing conversation with Mark Chadbourn, who himself posted on the topic Time For SF and F to Split? in which he wonders if "if it’s time for fantasy and SF to dissolve the marriage of convenience."

I myself consider science fiction and fantasy as subsets of the Literature of the Fantastic, or Speculative Fiction, that expansive set of stories that aren't firmly set in the "real world" as we think we understand it. Give me something that's one toe out of the real, and I'll happily call it SpecFic. You may, of course, call it what you wish because I'm feeling Just That Generous this evening.

Because I read both sf and f and enjoy them both to the point where I don't much distinguish between them, I simply don't see the utility in separating them out from each other. Why make my book shopping life less convenient?

Robson goes on to address an issue that also crops up with tedious regularity in the endless rehashing of the question of the so-called sf and f split:

If you don’t like something, then leave it alone. Of course, people who can’t leave it alone feel that the structure of the world itself is in some way at stake, hence all the moralising they throw out about Fantasy being pappy comfort food for poor little popsyminded fools who can’t face up to ‘reality’. Just count the number of assumptions in that.

Elsewhere I have briefly addressed the question of whether fantasy is By Nature conservative, consolatory, and reactionary fiction. By Nature? No, I don't think so. Is some fantasy written that way? Sure. So is some sf. So are other stories, in other venues and genres. Yet it's also possible to find in a work what you believe you will find, rather than what is there. And sometimes, in a related manner, work that is lauded as cutting edge or transgressive may not seem so to everyone who reads it. These facts tend to make me cautious about making sweeping generalizations about entire rafts of work, when oftentimes the differences between "iike" works may in fact be greater than the similarities except in the minds of the lumpers.

Oh, dear. Does this mean we have simply returned to the ancient and venerable Splitter Vs Lumper debate?

Or is this the point where the structure of the world itself is in some way at stake? (My favorite line!!!)

In any case, Robson's article is a fun and, I thought, incisive read, as part of an interesting and ongoing conversation this week between her and Chadbourn.

I write both science fiction and fantasy, although the bulk of my recent work is fantasy. And you know what? For me, it all writes from the same place.



* Haven't read her work. Obviously must seek it out.

** Author of the Age of Misrule trilogy, which I read and enjoyed some months ago and described as "Susan Cooper for adults."

In the wake of the USA presidential election, Deep Genre is thinking about politics, class, and science fiction and fantasy.

An introductory post is up now (see link above), and we hope to have more posts going up for the next many days.



Meanwhile, reader JA in Australia has given me permission to excerpt this from an email she sent me:

While in my local book store a youngish man was browsing the sci fi section and I talked him into getting the 1st two volumes of the Gate books and told him the 3rd was on its way, then I introduced him to the Crown series. He left the shop loaded up with your books and said to me as he left "God, I hope you're not in here next time I call or I will have to get a second job to pay for the books." Laughter echoed around the bookshop.

Do I have the best readers, or what? There is no way I could convince people to buy my books like that, although I can "sell" other authors' novels to strangers, no problem.

I know, I know - we fight about stupid things and argue over whose sub-genre brand is more harmful to the field or more full of mediocre hack writers - but hey, are you kidding me? People all over argue about stupid things.

Meanwhile, autopope announces The New Eclectics: Embrace and Extend!

while discussion rages in matociquala's lj over a recent Richard Morgan post

while tammy212 has two really worthwhile posts starting here and continuing here with important, honest, and strong, discussion about feminism and WoC following in each case

as along elsewhere skywardprodigal posts POC in SF Carnival #9: What I Heard About You and What that Meant for Me. I gakked it from ladyjax who has also just posted about some interesting new books she is reading or going to read.

and meanwhile Scalzi Hearts YA

cmpriest's novel Four and Twenty Blackbirds is available as a free download at the upcoming Tor.com

jaylake blogs about why you need scoping

and this is just mostly on lj and in the last 24 hours or so and merely what I am aware of (as opposed to the totality of what is out there) and had time to link to before I have to Get To Work on my various Howling Deadlines.

What I see is that people are excited and lively and thinking and talking. Which is far cooler than being incurious and apathetic and talking without thinking (although that happens with me, too, at times).

Yes, the sff community has its flaws (and ongoing issues like racism and sexism that, in parallel with overall society have to be battled over and over again) but overall I think almost anything can at least be addressed at least somewhere, and really, for me, how cool is it that you can get such a huge range of discussion most of which I'm not even touching on by people who are passionate (and occasionally insightful!) about ideas, about technology and how it is changing, about the human condition and society, about writing?

Oh, yeah, I forgot to put up a writing/craft link in the above:

Here's papersky on Fast and Dirty Fantasy Names.

Go forth and multiply.

Embrace and Extend!

When I was in 7th grade, my wonderful language arts teacher, a young woman named Sandy Campbell, gave all her students a page of fill-in-the-blanks questions of the 'getting to know you' variety. For instance: "I don't like__" or "When I'm twenty I want to___".

The last question was "I wish__"

I was twelve years old, and I finished the question in this way: "I wish I was a boy."

The next day the teacher took me aside and expressed concern over my answer. She was genuinely bothered, on my behalf, that I did not want to be who I was. "Boys get to do all the things I want to do," I told her. "Why wouldn't I want to be a boy?"

Remember, this is in the early 70s, when health class still warned girls against riding horses too enthusiastically while virgins because they might break their hymen or taking really hot showers or baths when they were having their menstrual period because they might faint. We didn't have a league of our own, girls weren't hired for the well paying summer jobs moving irrigation pipe, the real jobs out in the real world were (seemingly) all (or mostly) held by white males (my father was heavily involved in bringing in, via Affirmative Action, the first female and African American administrators into the community college he worked at). I can assure you that the books I devoured had male heroes who did things while females--well, if females had been invented yet, they rarely *did* things. Beyond romance, that pursuit which we were to frame our lives around, the lives of girls and women didn't hold much appeal for me. And romance was a darned long way from anything I could hope to aspire to since, trust me, I was the girl in junior high my friends would hide behind when they wanted to discourage a boy from asking them to a dance.

But Mrs. Campbell forced me to look very hard at what I was wishing for. Did I actually wish I was a boy? (If I had, I'd no doubt have ended up on a very different journey.)

When all was said and done, I didn't specifically want to be a boy. I wanted what boys could take for granted, what they could aspire to, what they could accomplish and what they could do. I wanted the things girls were either told they could not do, or the things it was simply assumed--through absence of discussion--weren't appropriate for girls or that girls wouldn't want. I wanted adventures.

By expressing concern and making me think about what it really was I wished for, and the unfairness of what was being offered to me, I suppose my young teacher set me on the road to becoming a feminist.

Later, of course, as I saw more of the world, I began to realize that "boy" in this context really meant "white boy." It was easy for me to identify with female characters, being female myself, but over time I began identifying as well with male characters who weren't white because I felt I had something in common with them although I wasn't always quite sure what that was.

Which brings me to the post that triggered these reflections.

Over at Naamenblog, Naamen muses on Female Protagonists and Why I Connect with Them Across Gender Lines

This is also around the age that I started to become more aware, mostly subconsciously, that being African-American separated me from most of my friends in a really profound way. The large majority of my friends were white and a lot of that had to do with where I went to school (Private School, Beverly Hills, San Fernando Valley, Chino Hills), not to say there weren’t people of color or that I wasn’t friends with them but the majority of my friends were white. I felt isolated a lot throughout high school and didn’t really know why consciously except that I saw that some teachers treated differently, some people were colder to me, I was ignored sometimes compared to the way my white friends were treated.

I felt that I needed to be on guard a lot, that I was alone. Now this is often the the storyline of a lot of F/SF: the loner that is outcast for some reason and might be more than she seems. Yes, it’s true of male characters as well but I felt the deep kinship for the female characters because often in that storyline it was their gender that was hated: something they were born into, something they couldn’t change/alter and just had to deal with. The normal resolution of such a storyline is the protagonist finding their own way to accept themselves and yet still be accepted by society in some way. But at the end of the story the women were still women, it was nothing they could change and they often had to prove themselves over and over, sometimes to the same person. It was something I could relate to.

Go read the whole thing. It really hit a nerve for me.

Robert Thompson at Fantasy Book Critic has posted an interesting year's end post, this one with a number of writers talking about what they liked from 2007, what they're looking forward to in 2008, and what they'll be publishing in '08 as well.

You'll find it here