It might be a bit apples and oranges to compare the current comic-book-blockbuster landscape to the last century of science fiction magazines. Nonetheless, as I worked my way through New Eves, an anthology of lady-penned science fiction from decades past, this is the comparison that came to mind.
I was supposed to be so excited to see Iron Man 3 — and not just because I owned Iron Man on DVD before I moved in April for the millionth time and left it on a sidewalk in Montreal along with assorted old math textbooks and winter gear.
I had read in a post by Laura Hudson on Wired’s Underwire blog that Iron Man 3 displays — and they are on display, aren’t they — supporting female characters that appear to have some cognitive function beyond interactions with Tony Stark. Headline: “How Iron Man 3 flipped the script.” The script-flip: Stark-girlfriend Pepper Potts and biologist slash former-Stark-love-interest Maya Hansen pass the Bechdel test, when they spend one scene discussing the impending doom of the world.
New Eves, in contrast, opens with a story published in 1918, titled “Friend Island,” a world where people live at sea, lives backdropped with misandry-lite as women have “ousted man from his heroic pedestal.”
In the next story, we meet a woman who kills her husband with a paralyzing potion of his own creation. Then, an alien species ruled by a queen, where men are “sweet,” “gentle,” “fun-loving,” and, according to the narrator, a princess, “unable to grasp the profundities of our science.”
We’re taken through plot reversals that are more simultaneously wholesale and subtle: the letters h-e-r-o simply appended with i-n-e.
Take that, Mr. Stark.
Named for the beginnings that the authors and their characters represent, New Eves found its way to me in a used bookstore in Moab, Utah. The cover suggests adventure on other worlds, featuring a curling dragon and a lady in a space suit. (I refuse to tell you to cringe or not at the overall design, which does include some Papyrus-like font; that’s your choice to make for yourself.) The pages inside make good on the cover’s promise — we go to the ocean, to Mars, to war, to strange caves, to sand dunes prickling with radioactivity.
As is the case with good sci-fi, many of these worlds uncannily mirror our own: a moment of bravery takes place on a spaceship, and is executed by a female astronaut decades before men would even go to space, let alone consider sending women. Here’s a woman toying with Wolfram Alpha to solve a math problem – except it’s 1940, computers haven’t even been invented yet, and instead of timing out on an impossible problem,the so-called “visi-math” has the potential to swallow the neighborhood, not just fuck up her homework. Here’s a woman in English lit class who is going to grow up to be an agent in an interstellar militia. Everyday bickering taking place on Mars, and there’s just a dog that’s pyramid-shaped and charmingly parrots snippets of conversation.(“Thatspyramidshapedandcharmingly!”). Or, there you are, in your apartment, casually contemplating moving to another planet with your boyfriend on an intra-solar-system arts grant when he unexpectedly shows up and you say, “Jon! What in the galaxy are you doing here?”
There’s a world that’s maybe just a few decades ahead of ours, where parents have selected relentlessly for male children, where the few women left on Earth hide in houses: “Men always ran everything. Some say they didn’t, but they had all the real power. Sometimes they’d dole a little of it out to the girls, that’s all. Now they don’t have to anymore.”
With writing samplings from key authors from the ’20s to the ’90s — ‘virtually every key author’ — each introduced by a couple paragraphs from the editors, New Eves takes readers through one final strange place — the world of pulp magazine publishing, and the ebb and flow of feminist presence within it over the years.
Sci-fi pulps kicked off with Amazing Stories in 1926, published by Hugo Gernsbeck. Many female authors were published in Amazing Stories, and, after it folded just a few years later, Gernsbeck’s Wonder Stories. It wasn’t long until Wonder Stories was sold into someone else’s hands, had the qualifier “Thrilling” pre-fixed onto the title, and launched a “transmutation of science fiction into a genre of men’s and boy’s adventure pulps.” Women were pushed to fringe pulps where pay was minimal and occurred “on lawsuit.”
There were the pseudonyms that sometimes swallowed careers whole. Gertrude Bennett, who wrote “Friend Island” (pre-Amazing Stories), and a handful of other stories, under the name Francis Stevens (the traditionally male spelling of a somewhat male name), before turning her attention to being a secretary at the University of Pennsylvania. There was the very popular — still-popular — Alice Mary Norton, who wrote as Andre Norton (or sometimes Andrew North, or Allen Weston), and mostly wrote about male protagonists, which could have had something to do with the whole popularity thing. There were woman who became fan favorites by writing the same kinds of stories that men usually wrote, that were so germane to what pulps liked to publish— namely, stories with strong male protagonists.
There’s Helen Clarkson: “We have been unable to discover a single fact about Helen Clarkson,” says the editor’s note that precedes her story, perhaps her only story, about a women who may be the only survivor on earth following a nuclear apocalypse.
There was the resurgence of female authors in the ’60s and ’70s and the role of their stories as a “tools against the patriarchy.” In the ’70s there was a switch in the authorship and readership of sci-fi that the editors’ introduction explains thusly:
“[S]cience fiction’s audience would remain largely male until the 1970s, when the shopping mall emerged as the major point of distribution for American books – causing a seismic upheaval that resulted in almost complete reversal of the fields readership, with women who visit malls more frequently than men, becoming its dominant market, and hence, inevitably, the dominant writers of science fiction.”
Though several writers from this later period are still recognizable parts of the field (Octavia Butler, Karen Joy Fowler, to name a few) most — because of popularity that was lost with time, or never there to start with — are either out of print today, or only “fitfully available” in bookstores.
The book itself, with its strange cover and old pages, recovery of stories from the depths of space and time; otherworldly down to the place that I found it — in a bookstore tucked away in a dusty tourist town – is itself an artifact from another world. The editor’s introduction feels like a note delivered from the future, declaring finally that deliberate themes of gender in science fiction became a “receding wave:” “The New Eves live in a world reborn whose Genesis has made gender simply not an issue.”
What a great, strange place! I wonder if they have free abortions there.
But New Eves was published in 1994. I was 4 (Ed. note – hahahaha oh my God). A whole world of misogyny had yet to skim the consciousness of a whole generation.
At a party one evening in August, I get in to the same dumb argument about the male-to-female ratio in the hard sciences. (In undergrad physics, it was 80:20 boys:girls.) (How do these arguments start — do I start them? Do I have a sign on my forehead? I think its the first one, but sometimes I don’t even know.) I get the same “No, but you’re one of the awesome girls,” my cue to excuse myself and do a shot or literally anything else.
Even if the field had more ladies than it once did, sci-fi prizes still largely go to men, and in-clicks of writers remain a problem. We’ve been promised a modern world that’s designed to bend and upend, challenge and be changed, but it still largely….doesn’t. Sure, Dr. Who could be anyone — female, black, trans, disabled — but he’s chosen to be a white man every single time. In fantasy video games, you can transcend your body…to become a damsel in distress. In the real world, anyone can be a physics professor, but the deeply overwhelming majority “just so happen” to be white men.
The superhero world is, like other forms of sci-fi, uncannily our own — but the tweaks and bends and mirrors are arranged in such a way to reflect and amplify power: brains, courage, passion, and male strength. The landscape of superhero movies is its own little dystopian world. And in Tony Stark’s world, women might save the day in the final moments — they have been the recipients of a little power. But the series is still called Iron Man, the women are still conventionally fuckable, and — as Hudson concludes in her Underwire post — largely optional. And still, the whole thing barrels into first place as one of the more feminist superhero movies of the summer.
(Noted-forward-thinker Joss Whedon’s Avengers arguably took that first-place spot in summer 2012. As Megan Kearns observed on Fem2.0, in ensemble movies like X-Men, the female characters tend to “orbit” the men — though this is not the case with Avengers, female characters never speak to each other, securing a Bechdel-test grade of “F.” In an interview, Scarlet Johansson calls Whedon “gender-blind.”)
Meanwhile, in July, DC Entertainment Chief Diane Nelson told The Hollywood Reporter that a movie featuring Wonder Woman would be tricky because “she doesn’t have the single, clear, compelling story that everyone knows and recognizes.” (A few years ago, Whedon was slated to make a Wonder Woman movie for a minute, which did not work out due to creative differences with the production company.)
Back at Wired’s Underwire blog, Noah Berlatsky argues that Wonder Woman is “tricky” because she is an “avowedly, even militantly, feminist icon,” pointing out her status as a 1940s queer Amazonian warrior. Unlike her male counterparts, she has not been reincarnated on the screen in her own film.
As Hudson points out in her post on Iron Man, “we still have yet to see a single (successful) superhero movie centered around a female character.” The word “successful” links to an article title “Catwoman coughs up hairball.” We’re pretty much on the brink of Huxley-style feelies, but the only superhero flick featuring a lady garners reviews that liken it to a sick domestic animal.
Somehow, in superhero world, its still always a guy that saves the day.
Reading New Eves in 1994, you wouldn’t expect that this — this, this now — would be our future, our 2013. The stories contained in New Eves are, as they have been for decades, enduringly both an escape and reflective of current truths. Not some artifact of the past.
This is the final story in New Eves, “Down Behind Cuba Lake,” by Nancy Kress: A woman drives to meet a married man who she’s been seeing on-and-off, to maybe break things off with him. She finds herself writing notes in her head to him — “Dear Nick,” “Dear Nick,” “Dear Nick,” – thinking up different ways to beg, explain, and plead. She quickly finds herself trapped — literally trapped, this is sci-fi after all. All roads lead to this one deep dark lake.
Just before she finds her way out, finds a path that does not lead to drowning and does not lead to him, she writes the first line of the letter one almost-last time: “Not Wordsworth, not Byron, not even Stephen King. They had it backwards. We shape it.”
[Image via Wikipedia]
Tags: feminism, iron man, new eves, science fiction, the bechdel test, wired
Ooh I wonder if there is an eBook version!
We’ve been promised a modern world that’s designed to bend and upend, challenge and be changed, but it still largely….doesn’t. Sure, Dr. Who could be anyone — female, black, trans, disabled — but he’s chosen to be a white man every single time. In fantasy video games, you can transcend your body…to become a damsel in distress. In the real world, anyone can be a physics professor, but the deeply overwhelming majority “just so happen” to be white men.
One example of many, but that right there is why I thought Ready Player One failed so spectacularly.
As a lady who reads sci-fi, plays games, and is one of them “women in science” (albeit one who is considering leaving the professor path, sigh sigh sigh), I tend to think a lot about this issue. About how so many things of “worth” – be they serious things like science or programming, or fun things like science fiction and fantasy – have become codified as somehow fundamentally male. Women were many of the first computer programmers (heck, Ada Lovelace wrote the first damn program)! We were there are the beginning of Star Trek fan culture! We form 80% of the market for fiction in America! It’s not like there’s anything intrinsically manly about these topics – heck, I can make up my own goddamn just-so “evolutionary” tale for why we’re “just better suited” for this stuff.
Please excuse me while I share this with my Girl Geek tech group…
This evolutionary tale is amazing. A+
Also, thinking about all the media related to sci-fi/fantasy or nerd culture that I consume, I still find that literature does the best at not erasing women or reducing them to purely dependent characters. Sure, some of the biggest authors are terrible at this (Fuck yooooooou Patrick Rothfuss and your awful writing!), but you still get folks like Iain M Banks who fill their works with women of agency and flaws. There’s much less of an argument that “Books starring women don’t sell,” just because there’s so many more of them, and (most) books don’t need to be produced for hundreds of millions of dollars by a team of hundreds of people. That said, I’d like to see more successful female sci-fi authors, as the so-called “serious” ones are inevitably male. Toast readers: any good recommendations for good, new female Sci-Fi authors? Particularly ones involving spaceships? Fantasy’s doing a little better in that regard, at least.
Games, because they are expensive, and because you directly need to “become” the main character (oh noes! you might have to identify with a woman!) are still the worst at this. Remember ladies: you don’t want to be Lara Croft, you just want to protect her! Best bet is still western-style RPGs like Skyrim and BioWare stuff, where you can choose to “author” your own main character. (I don’t care if FemShep is just gender-swapped ManShep, playing her still felt amazing.) And sometimes, they won’t even magically turn your armor into a bikini!
I just finished a Storynexus game (part interactive fiction, part browser-based game) by Yoon Ha Lee called Winterstrike. It’s about the inhabitants of a winter-locked starship graveyard, and I strongly recommend it for people who like elegantly creepy writing. Here’s an announcement of her game with an explanation of what Storynexus is.
Ooh, thanks for telling me about this!
Yoon Ha Lee also writes excellent short genre fiction.
Also! Young adult fiction has scores of talented women writing sci-fi and fantasy stories (*cough* Harry Potter *cough*), many with female protagonists (*cough* The Hunger Games *cough*), that have made mountains of money for their publishers (*cough* Twilight *cough* also Harry Potter again because seriously, MOUNTAINS OF MONEY, *cough*), but there are way fewer highly visible and successful women writing similar stories for adults. Maybe because young adult fiction isn’t “serious”? Are there any statistics on the gender breakdown for submitted manuscripts for YA vs. adult sci-fi/fantasy lit?
So I don’t have any data to back this up, but my wife and I have discussed this a number of times, along with some of our librarian friends. I don’t think this is because YA fiction isn’t serious. It seems (again, no data) that this is the fault of Harry Potter, but not in a bad way.
Basically Harry Potter got a huge generation of kids to read, and they just keep on reading. YA is one of the biggest selling genres, specifically YA fantasy/romance, and JK Rowling inspired a lot of people to write, and a lot of them were women (for instance, Cassandra Clare wrote HP fanfic prior to writing her City of Bones stuff. I’m sure she had other influences, and I know there are many other writers like her, I’m just pulling this one up because anecdotes are what you rely on when you, again, don’t have data).
So what you’ve got is a generation of writers, many of them female, who grew up reading YA fantasy, writing YA fantasy, and now YA fantasy is one of the best selling genres, and just about anything with a wand or an Abra Cadabra is getting at least optioned by Hollywood.
Writers are not stupid, and while they write what they want, if they *also* take market forces into account, it makes sense to go into YA Fantasy. See also: James Patterson.
So I don’t think it really has to do with it being serious or not, but rather a confluence of what they grew up with, what they like writing, and that happening to be also what’s hot right now.
Is my guess. With no data.
The SF I read (I’m more of a fantasy girl) is generally story-set-in-SF-world rather than story-revolving-around-SF-element, so I’m not sure it counts as ‘serious’, but… I would recommend Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, Lee & Miller’s Liaden Series, Lyda Morehouse’s Archangel Protocol, Diana Peterfreund’s For Darkness Shows the Stars.
I haven’t read, but have heard good things about Karen Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds, Madeline Ashby’s vN, Malinda Lo’s Adaptation and Linda Nagata’s work.
Mary Robinette Kowal’s novels are fantasy, but some of her short fiction is SF. I really liked First Flight and The Lady Astronaut of Mars. http://www.maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/im-44-t…
This was wonderful! I have Many Opinions on this subject, but I’ll stay focused and just say that I love the historical comparison between sci-fi now and sci-fi in the 70s in this piece, because WHAT HAPPENED? Sci-fi was an explicitly progressive genre, speeding into The Future on the expansion of civil rights and the erosion of the glass ceiling, and now it’s…not.
The weird thing about growing up as a white kid in the 90s is that I learned about the social movements of the 70s as things that happened before I was born to solve problems that no longer existed, and even though this is so, so false and that became clear once I was old enough to ask questions, it seems like half of our generation (and half of our parents’ generation) hasn’t gotten the memo that, surprise, racism and sexism are still deeply pervasive and corrosive forces in modern society, even in 2013. It’s not surprising that when movies/books/television just ignore that and try to be “gender-blind” or “race-blind” they wind up telling stories about white dudes.
ANYWAY anyone who’s into sci-fi and hasn’t already heard of Alice Sheldon, who wrote sci-fi stories under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr., she’s amazing and a very sharp observer of gender dynamics and their effect on society.
I was just thinking tonight I’m going to burrow into my copy of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.
I think I have already mentioned this book on this site, but Julie Phillips’s biography of Tiptree/Sheldon is FANTASTIC. The Tiptree Prize committee also finds some good progressive sf with regard to gender, though they also include fantasy.
(To tie this in with hurdyburdy’s comment above about YA lit, Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go, which co-won the Tiptree in its year, is one of my favourite books about What It Means To Be A Man and the toxicity of the patriarchy for young men and adult men and everyone.)
Well, it’s comparing superhero movies from now to books in the ’70s. There are lots of women writing science fiction — award-winning science fiction, even! — now. (Of the 18 novels nominated for a Nebula in the last three years, 13 were written by women, at least two of whom were women of color.) But nobody is making any of the nominees into tentpole film franchises, and the stuff that gets adapted into big-budget films tends to have kicked around for decades.
(Down here in comments, I’ll rep the absolutely amazing C.L. Moore, whose short fiction, written on her own and under a variety of pen names with her husband, Henry Kuttner, is just ludicrously good. Her “Vintage Season” is maybe the best science fiction story of the ’40s and is widely anthologized, so head to your local library and read it.)
Named for the beginnings that the authors and their characters represent
It might also be named in reference to Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve? Which is a rollicking bit of dystopian SF, if you’re in the mood for a trip into seventies feminism.
I just finished reading a collection of short sci-fi stories about the apocalypse (this one: http://www.amazon.com/The-End-World-Stories-Apoca… and out of 20 stories, only ONE was written by a woman, Nancy Kress. I was disappointed/filled with rage.
Lorde hadn’t even been born 1994. That’s all I have to say about the Ed note.
Lorde hadn't even been born 1994. That's all I have to say about the Ed note.