No matter how hard you bend over backward to appease SJWs, they will NEVER be content. It’s not enough to have 90-pound butt-kicking science fiction princesses in the place of the traditional male hero, now they’ve got to be post-menopausal, overweight, butt-kicking science fiction crones who nevertheless remain inexplicably attractive to the handsome, wealthy heroes who desire them as much as they respect them:
As women get old, they gain a superpower: invisibility. And not only in real life. ‘Young adult’ fantasy and science-fiction hits such as Suzanne Collins’s novel series The Hunger Games and Stephenie Meyers’s Twilight series have been taken to task for doing away with mature women. In fantasy generally, older women mainly occupy supporting roles, such as fairy godmothers, wise crones and evil witches. The best are subversions — George R. R. Martin’s Queen of Thorns in A Song of Ice and Fire, for instance, or Terry Pratchett’s wonderful Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg in the Discworld series. All of them embrace old age with gusto.
I expected better from science-fiction novels, where alternative worlds and alien nations explore what it means to be human. In 1976, after all, Ursula K. Le Guin argued in her essay ‘The Space Crone’ that post-menopausal women are best suited to representing the human race to alien species, because they are the most likely to have experienced all the changes of the human condition. And Robert A. Heinlein offers a fantastic galactic grandmother in The Rolling Stones (1952): Hazel Stone, engineer, lunar colonist and expert blackjack player irritated by the everyday misogyny of the Solar System.
Over the past year, with support from such authors and readers all over the world, I’ve searched for competent, witty female elders in major roles in sci-fi novels. I found no shortage of fantastic female characters across the genre, from the gynocentric utopians of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 Herland to mathematician Elma York in Mary Robinette Kowal’s 2018 The Calculating Stars. But I have so far confirmed just 36 English-language novels in the genre that feature old women as major figures. The earliest is Gertrude Atherton’s 1923 Black Oxen; the latest, from 2018, are Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller and Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers.
It never stops. It never, ever, stops. This is why it is a mistake to even give them so much as a nanometer.