Always Coming Home discussion

1) Aware? I always do notice, but if the SF is good it will be engaging no matter what. Some of my favorite SF writers are women, though: Bujold, Butler, Le Guin, and they seem to get the gender thing right. The guys are less reliable. I love the old Orson Scott Card stuff, but the women in there, though they might be smart and strong people, are almost always playing some lesser role. Petra couldn't hack Battle School and cracked under the strain. etc. It does annoy me.

The worst of all were guys in the 70s and 80s like Niven, who made almost all his women sex-kittenish and ready to jump in bed with our hero any time. I was so disappointed in that, because we should have known better by then, though I still loved his stuff for the cool ideas.

Earlier stuff like Heinlein, wow. He was a creepy old guy, wasn't he? But his stories were so much fun to read that I just identified with the male protagonists (or the women who were just men with hot female bods), and ignored the ridiculous sexual stuff. His better books are the (generally) earlier pre-adolescent male wish fulfillment fantasies, and the later dirty old man wish fulfillment fantasies are less good, to me. I guess the one good thing that came from all that stuff was the idea that we really do need to re-examine all our society's sexual customs and decide which to keep and which are anachronisms. The freedom from pre-existing conditions in our thoughts was a great thing. The actual solutions these guys came up with are usually male centered and unworkable for females, though. The idea that the babies are all off being raised by some computer with an occasional look-in by the moms who are otherwise engaged in being hot sexy chicks for the guys' pleasure is obviously ridiculous. But Heinlein at least is always good, even when he's bad. So I read all of them.

Asimov didn't do women well at all either, but again the ideas are the main thing here, and he did those wonderfully well. So because of his quality in general, and because of the time he wrote in, he gets a pass (from me, at least) for getting gender wrong.

It was a terrible disappointment to me that people in the future weren't envisioned to have much more radically complete gender equality than we do now. What a failure of imagination! How disappointing that they see us women that way! It always did bother me.

I like hard SF best, and always have. People like UKL are just as hard, though, to me, because their worlds are so very, very real. What I hate is stuff like Anne McCaffery that is actually fantasy and just has a few words sprinkled in to try to make it count as science fiction. Their worlds are so fake. To me it destroys my ability to suspend disbelief entirely.

I have a suspicion that some male writers avoid female characters because they feel unable to portray them well. James Blish is my favourite example, yet sometimes he was able to do it well. Unfortunately most of those characters were rather unpleasant. (One of them was based on his first wife...) The story, How Beautiful with Banners, goes some way towards restoring the balance; not only is the protagonist female, but she is the only character and she's very believable. Also she is a leading researcher and the SF idea is excellent. I can (and do) read Blish's books endlessly, however because there are few writers who can match him for the shear number of ideas he can pack into a 50,000 word novel - more than you get in most 100,000 or even 500,000 word SF books these days.

I find that my tolerance of gender related issues depends on the writer more than the period of writing e.g. Last of the Mohicans drove me nuts with its completely wet, helpless women but Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver drove me nuts with its female protagonist who hadn't had a contemporary thought in the entire book. (Actually, all the characters seemed entirely 20th Century, 300 years ahead of their time.)

I read more "hard" SF but UKL's Hainish books entirely fit in that category to me because, after-all, isn't there star-spanning human civilization, advanced technology, war?

1) Totally aware. Gender's one of my favorite topics to explore through SF.

2) Absolutely. Though actually, most of the examples I can think of immediately are from the Fantasy side of the line. . . I read a lot of the Golden Age SF when I was too young to be aware of this sort of stuff so it got a pass, and since I've become aware of it I've been sticking with authors who are engaging with the topic in a thoughtful way. So all that I can come up with right now is Yarn, which fell into one of those really offensive tropes about transgendered people. (This one, except that the character is actually transgendered, not just a cross-dresser. Also, that's a spoiler. And another also: Be careful not to fall into the black hole that is TV Tropes while you're there. . .)

3) Ummmm. . . thorny question. . . must phrase carefully. . . yes, I do. But not out of some intrinsic difference between men and women. I think many men write in a stereotypically "masculine" way and many women write in a stereotypically "feminine" way because that's how our society's socialized men and women. And if I were to codify the difference. . . I'd say that Clarke and Asimov were "masculine" writers in that they didn't care a bit about their characters' inner/emotional lives, and many women, because our society has socialized us to pay more attention to those things, write with an eye firmly on that emotional/inner life, and that seems "feminine." Again, this is a generalization. . . there are tons of authors that break this stereotype, particularly in the last few decades when SF has grown out of being solely a Big Idea and action/adventure sort of genre. . .

4) I'd much prefer fiction FROM the Golden Age to fiction that simply emulates it. . . mostly because I do factor in when an author was writing and how progressive for his/her time he/she was when I'm judging a book, so someone like Heinlein I can deal with and just take the good parts away from the novel, while if I were reading someone who wanted to write a Heinlein novel today, I'd probably throw the book across the room if it didn't do something to reflect how far our society's come in the intervening 50 years. (I pretty much did this with The Sky People.)

5) Well. . . I clearly define "Hard SF" differently than a couple of you. . . for me, "Hard SF" is characterized by a certain technofetishism that I have zero interest in; what makes it "Hard SF" to me is that it devotes pages and pages (and pages and pages) to lovingly describing its future technologies. I never read that stuff. . . so I say I fall on the "Soft SF" side of the line, which is where I put Le Guin and Bujold and Butler and Asimov, for that matter, and sometimes Clarke, and. . . well, it'd be easier to simply list the authors I avoid because I know I have no interest in them. ;)

Oh, that's interesting that you have that idea of hard SF, because to me the hardness is in whether they take the trouble to know and not violate the laws of physics, at least without giving some sort of nod to the new principles and technology that allow it. Soft means soft-minded, to me, and not at all clear about how their universe even works. So we have very different ideas of the definitions of soft and hard. =)

Yes, I've heard those definitions. . . I'd just place an emphasis, thusly:

Hard SF: That which observes and adheres to scientific principal in the areas of physics, chemistry, engineering, and related areas. It is primarily concerned with technology. Everything can be measures and quantified. Everything works via equations.

;p

And with that definition of Soft SF Le Guin and Bujold would definitely fall into that category rather than Hard SF. . . being primarily concerned with sociology and biology, respectively. :D

1) Are you aware of how gender affects the science fiction you read? Not consciously more often than not unless the author is addressing that subject (like Joanna Russ or Marge Piercy often do). But I was reading authors like UKL, "James Tiptree" and C.J. Cherryh from an early age so I think I was exposed - however inadvertently - to stories that incorporated both sides of the human species.

2) Have you ever run into a gender/sex role presentation in an SF work that bothered or upset you? Did you finish the book? The most recent example of this is Clifford Simak's Enchanted Pilgrimage, where you can find this gem: "I didn't know it until then, but then I did. There is a buried slut in every woman. It takes the touch of the right man's hand to bring it out."

Another guilty party would be Heinlein (as others have pointed out). I remember reading Friday and (view spoiler)[feeling utterly let down at the ending when we learn that the heroine's ultimate fulfillment comes when she gets "barefoot and pregnant" and marries one of the men who had gang-raped her in the first chapter. (hide spoiler)] I believe "WTF?!" is the appropriate, modern expression.

3) Do you think that men and women authors write differently? Another question I don't usually consider. As long as the story's good and keeps me interested and the characters (male or female) aren't too cardboard/stereotyped, I can tolerate a lot.

A good author - by definition, I would think - should be able to handle reasonably believable characters of any gender.

4) Do conventions of gender presentation from previous generations (such as Golden Age SF or Pulp SF) bother you? Again, it depends. Like a lot of respondents here I give an author like Asimov a pass because he's no great shake at characterization of any sort but they're not awful or offensive - just terribly, terribly bland.

Then there's Heinlein (again) or John Norman (ugh).

5) Do you pick your SF reading mostly from "Hard SF", "Soft SF", or from both? Here's another interpretation of "hard" and "soft": To me, "Hard SF" remains firmly seated in the current theories of physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Or - at the very least - it speculates about a theory (like quantum entanglement) but rigorously remains within the scientific realm. Alastair Reynolds is "Hard SF."

"Soft SF" - again, for me - tends to be SF where the trappings of science or fantasy are window dressing for the story. There's no great effort to follow physical laws and speculation is given free rein. "Star Trek" and "Doctor Who" are "Soft SF."

Then there's "Grey SF" - Stories that are fairly rigorous in adhering to a coherent science but where the technology is definitely second place to the story. I would put UKL and Iain M. Banks into this category and I think most of my SF preferences and authors fall into this category.

I guess maybe hard and soft are not the right words for the distinction I'm thinking of, which is extremely important to me, and why I don't care for most fantasy. The world has to seem real in that it obeys some very definite laws that can't be violated. It makes sense and hangs together with internal consistency and all that. Some of what you guys are defining as soft or grey falls into this category for me, and I like it very much.

I like good characters and sociology and all that stuff too, though I'm also fond of cool ideas and neat technology like room temperature superconductors, generated gravity, and time stasis fields. The stuff that I think like less well, including most fantasy, is stuff that doesn't ever make me feel the world or universe we're in is real. So I love UKL's fantasy and Tolkien, but nothing else much that I've found in fantasy. In science fiction I tend to prefer the writers that are writing hard sf, but mainly because their stuff makes good sense and doesn't violate my suspension of disbelief. I don't have trouble with lots of cool tech stuff. I'm a geek girl and love cool tech stuff. But that's not all there is in the story for me, by any means.

Frank Herbert is another one I loved that I would call hard. Do you consider him hard or soft? I loved the first Dune book, and lots of his other stuff like Whipping Star, Dosadai, Soul Catcher, etc.

Actually, there's only one rule for me and that's for a book whether hard or soft, just to be good. ;)

Garth Nix's Old Kingdom books have that fantasy "reality" thing and some great female characters.

I just reread The Birthday of the World, a collection of short stories by UKL, and there were so many interesting gender ideas in it. First of all, I have to mention the few stories about the society that had a 12-1 female to male sex ratio that skewed all their gender politics. Women had all the power and men had all the privilege. But to be a man on that world was horrible. The only thing you were allowed to do was practice for and participate in athletic games that would set your price as a stud, and then perform as a stud for whatever woman paid the price. That was it. They weren't educated further or allowed any other profession. When, after the "open gate" law, they were allowed to leave their castles and come out into society, they were still denied most everything because those things weren't suitable for a man, weren't manly enough, or they made the women there uncomfortable, or whatever. It was almost a straight analog for our society that I grew up in (that's a little better now but still not), except the males are the ones who were limited and the females are the ones who were normal. And it was horrible. So messed up. Sick. Ugly. Unfair. Wrong.

Sometimes it takes seeing things from a larger perspective to even realize how messed up things are in your own little world.