Infected SFF: Where Romance Cooties Reach the Stars

Ray Bradbury famously relates a story about how much he loved Buck Rogers as a kid. LOVED Buck Rogers. Collected all the comics. Kept them in meticulous order while his friends jeered and laughed. They told him those stories were junk. Worthless. Finally, buckling under the weight of peer pressure, he tore up his comics and threw them all out. And for three long weeks, he was miserable. Life wasn't worth living. Then one day it occurred to him. Those people making fun of what he loved weren't his friends. Buck Rogers was. He went back to collecting comics, reading what made him happy, and found a new group of friends who didn't belittle his passions.

This is the long way of saying that if you don't like romance in your stories, then the stories I write with romance in them aren't written for you. They're written for the people who love that thing. Frankly, the question of whether romance belongs in any story, ever, is spurious. It comes across as trying to silence the voices of people who have visions of the future/alternate realities that aren't straight white dude centric. There ARE more things in heaven and earth, ya know. To quote a dead white dude.

If SFF is, at its core, an exploration of what it means to be human in the larger context of time and space, there is no way to carve emotional motivations out of characters. Humans are singularly messy creatures from a touchy/feely standpoint. If we weren't so messy, murder rates probably wouldn't be what they are, nor would birthrates. Doesn't mean that every story has to feature some frilly, blossoming lurv. Not everyone is motivated by sex or romance. For that reason, I'll argue there are no hard and fast rules about what belongs and what doesn't. SFF, to me, is about what you can get away with based on the notion that no one gets to invalidate someone else's experience, OTP,  or feelings. If a story moves you, it wins, no matter what form it takes.

The only thing any of us gets to do, then, is vote with our pocketbooks. I don't read Oprah books, for example. Does that mean I think those books aren't worth having been written? Not at all - I merely understand my own limitations. I can depress myself, thanks. I don't need a book to do it for me. That said, in no way does my personal preference invalidate the fact that tons of people adore those books. More power to 'em - readers and writers alike. I just won't be spending my limited book $$$ on stories that'll make me want to slit my wrists. Sounds like a joke, but it isn't. Managing a depressive personality and state means building some walls. Mine say "no reading this type of book" and "no graphic animal cruelty pics on the FB feed." If you have a rule that says "no kissy", I respect that and advise you to skip my stories.

So careful with the value judgments out there in the great wide world. Read what you love. Don't let anyone else convince you to shred your collection. But by the same token, don't be that kid trying to bully someone else into trashing the thing she loves. There are 7 billion + people on earth. Surely there are enough tastes to allow for all kinds of stories about all kinds of people, monsters, aliens and robots.

Do Dudes Rule SF/F?

Every summer, I do a "project" for my parents. Consider it redemption for my sins. This year's project involved redesigning and reorganizing my mother's library. My mother is an avid fantasy reader. For every Terry Brooks book there are four Marion Zimmer Bradleys. David Eddings is matched against Mercedes Lackey. Stephen Lawhead sits across from Diana Paxson. J.K. Rowling shares a shelf with Christopher Paolini.

So, to answer the question: Do dudes rule the fantasy genre? 

Not in mom's house. Not in mine either. 

Neither gender rules the genre.

Now, Sci-Fi is a wholly separate issue. Mom and I are not avid readers of the genre as a whole. I prefer creatures and magic over machines and science. I'd say it's a personal thing, but I'm not wholly certain that it is. The male bias in the publishing field is reflecting society's bias (men still dominate the sciences), which (I may be beaten for this) is reflecting the differences in the way women and men perceive and analyze the real world. Gender differences are not justifiable excuses for exclusion in publishing or acceptable explanations for what James's friend is enduring at the hands of her publisher's marketing team.

If I were to organize Mom's library by genre then by author, Sci-Fi books might occupy one shelf. Maybe two. The Sci-Fi books in my mother's library are there because they were written by authors who predominately write fantasy. Of the female fantasy authors who dabbled in Sci-Fi, most of them co-wrote that Sci-Fi novel with a man. I wonder if those books were co-authored because the writers truly wanted to work together or if the publisher inflicted one author upon the other for "credibility."

Dudes rule Sci-Fi, but their domination is threatened by the sub-genre of Steampunk. Women -- readers and writers -- seem to be eagerly embracing that sub-genre. Plenty of men write fictional history about dirigibles and clockwork-machines, but women are decidedly gaining ground.

The guaranteed way to change publishing's Sci-Fi gender bias is for consumers to change what they purchase. If readers buy more Sci-Fi books written by women, then the almighty dollar ensures publishers contract more Sci-Fi books written by women.

There are wonderful women writing excellent Sci-Fi, our own Marcella Burnard among them. Her Enemy books are definitely on my keeper shelf. What about you, dear reader, what Sci-Fi novels written by women would you recommend?

Tainting Sci Fi and Fantasy with Girl Cooties

I've just dragged myself home from the RWA National Convention, where I participated in the gigantic literacy signing benefit for the first time.

Yes, it was fabulous.

And, yes, I'm exhausted.

But RWA - Romance Writers of America - is my home territory. This was my fifth year going and I've been heavily involved in my special interest and local chapters. Plus, it's pretty much all girls. There's a few guys here and there, but functionally it's 2,000 women involved in some branch of romance writing and publishing.

It's really the only thing I do that's like this. Maybe it's akin to the old sorority days, but this is better because it's so profession and career-focused. They are my tribe.

In November, I plan to go to World Fantasy Con, which will not be like this. In fact, my smart friend advised me not to go. "They're not your audience," she told me. And then she told me several stories about female authors being harassed at the more hard core science fiction and fantasy conventions. I thought about this and decided that they won't be my audience if they never meet me.

I'm a little nervous though.

It reminds me of the old Dennis the Menace joke - the clubhouse with the "No Girls Allowed" sign. My feelings date back to my own childhood. That awful phase we all went through, when the boys decided that all girls had cooties (an indefinable, icky, yet dreadfully contagious thing) and that we were something to be disdained.

(Much later in life I discovered that "cooties" actually referred to head lice, but we never knew this as children. Nobody could ever tell me what a cootie was.)

I know there's lots of psychology behind this. The boys were distancing themselves from their mothers and moving into the world of men. They needed to create distance to cement their developing masculinity. But I also recall my teachers telling us about studies showing that, while girls could see themselves as boys, boys could not see themselves as girls.

The message was quite clear that being a girl just wasn't as good.

But hey - we all grew up, right? The boys rediscovered the girls and all the lovely thrill and magic of blending ourselves. And it turned out that some of the boys wanted to be girls enough to have operations to get there. Nothing was so black and white.

Still, there remains a contingent of boys who seem to be guarding the ever more rickety clubhouse. They don't want girls writing SFF and getting all that sticky, kissy shit in it. Except for maybe the Ginas, who don't act like real girls anyway. It's more okay if a girl author writes kick-ass stuff. But if we're the Margarets, starry eyed over love and romance? We are emphatically sent home, with ridicule chasing us down the street.

It's significant, I think, that I'm using an analogy that dates back to 1952. The world has changed a great deal since then. Change, however, happens in fits and starts, with little backwater stagnant pools that get left behind. Eventually those pools dry up. Or get washed into the fast-moving water of the greater flow.

Last night, a Carina Press book won RWA's RITA award. This is RWA's version of the Oscars and this marks the first time a digital press has won the award. (Another epress, Avon Impulse, also had an award winner.)

The world turns and times change.

I first read that line in Anne McCaffrey's book Dragonflight, one of the seminal SFF books, series and authors out. The line is a recurring theme and it became part of my frame of reference.

We aren't kids on the playground anymore. No one has cooties.

And the clubhouse is big enough for everyone.