Tag: SJW

When the pinkshirts in science fiction talk about wanting to destroy Campbellian SF, they’re not being ironic or kidding. They seriously believe that Pink SF is better and genuinely want to eradicate old school Blue SF/F because it is too outdated, offensive, and problematic.

I read the 100 “best” fantasy and sci-fi novels – and they were shockingly offensive. Why are so many of NPR’s list of best science fiction books so misogynistic, and why can’t we move past our nostalgia for them?

When
it comes to the best of anything, what do you expect? If it’s science
fiction and fantasy novels you want epic adventures and getting out of
impossible situations. But what you often get is barely disguised sexism
and inability to imagine any world where women are involved in the
derring-do.

At
the end of 2013, after a year of reading very little, I decided to
embark on a challenge: read all the books I hadn’t yet read on
NPR’s list of 100 best sci-fi and fantasy novels.
Nostalgia permeates the list. Of the books I read, there were more
books published before 1960 than after 2000. The vast majority were
published in the 1970s and 1980s. There were also many sci-fi
masterworks or what were groundbreaking novels. However, groundbreaking
30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago can now seem horribly out of date and
shockingly offensive….

Recent controversy

I’ve been acutely aware of the ferocious debate in the science fiction and fantasy community about representation (the recent controversy over the Hugo awards is a case in point), so I should have been somewhat prepared for this relentlessly depressing string of disappointing novels. But with the dogged determination of reading through the list, it really grinds you down. How can people actually defend the status quo when it’s so obviously awful? Putting these books on a pedestal, given how problematic the portrayal of women and other minorities, is surely part of the problem?

Frankly, from my vantage in 2015, it was just plain weird to read books where there were hardly any women, no people of colour, no LGBT people. It seemed wholly unbelievable. I know what you could say: it’s science fiction and fantasy, believability isn’t one of the main criteria for such books. But it is relatively absurd that in the future people could discover faster-than-light travel, build massive empires and create artificial intelligences but somehow not crack gender equality or the space-faring glass ceiling.

The consequence of the lack of women and the obvious sexism is that the books became very much like one another. My book reviews contained more profanity and I became a much more harsh critic of the genres I most enjoyed reading. They were all the same story of white guys, going on an adventure….

I can understand how many of the books on the list may have once been
groundbreaking but that doesn’t mean that they are now the best examples
of the genre. They have been supplanted, hundreds of times over, by
other authors that took similar themes but made them better and more
inclusive.

They genuinely believe throwing in a few men-with-tits and white men with colored skin – which is as far as their attempts at diversity generally go – somehow magically improves a book. Of course, the general public disagrees, as the continued decline in SF sales demonstrates.

Tangent Online addresses the problematic issue of gender issues in author identification with an ingenious solution:

While we applaud Lightspeed’s recent groundbreaking, progressive Women Destroy SF and Queers Destroy SF special issues, we feel they didn’t go far enough. To effect change one must not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. Women and Queers are not the only groups destroying science fiction, for those who champion such a worthwhile social cause as androgyny are at fault too. These forward-thinking social futurists should be given their just due as androgyny is perhaps the most important social issue facing science fiction practitioners today, and which, for the most part, the SF community has chosen to ignore with its retrograde thinking in regards to the problem of gender inequality and gender bias in its fiction.

With greater frequency (which we welcome, but is still a small percentage of the fiction published in the magazines and in book form today), science fiction stories with nameless protagonists or ancillary characters are at the forefront of the androgynous revolution. But only in the field’s fiction do we see how it might work, as fictive experiments, so much enlightened theory on paper—food for thought and nothing more. If the lofty goal of the Androgyny Revolution is to reveal unconscious bias and prejudice in fiction by rendering invisible the gender of its characters then the same ideology should just as readily reveal bias and prejudice in other areas of the real world, but not if gender assignation is permitted to continue.

Therefore, Tangent Online will show how the philosophy, the core defining predicates of androgyny can be applied to non-fiction as well as fiction and how in other ways it should be applied to areas of our real world lives. Thus, the table of contents for the August issue of Lightspeed below will contain only story titles—no author names; for revealing an author’s name would give immediate rise to the same conscious or unconscious bias we find in so much of our fiction. As well, the name of the reviewer is not mentioned for the same reason. Following the lead of the special Women and Queers Destroy SF issues of Lightspeed, you will find an essay following the review. Its author is also nameless, as it should be. It is the content of the words which truly matter and not who penned them. Content over author or editor is the only way to go in the Androgyny Revolution.

Lightspeed and its companion magazine Nightmare have seen the light and no longer showcase author names on their covers. Only the magazine title and subtitle, issue number and issue date are shown for each. The exception being that the editor’s name is prominently displayed on every cover. We can forgive this seeming contradiction to the basic canons of the androgynous movement because it is a given that the editor’s name on the cover of any magazine is perforce a more lucrative marketing strategy than displaying author names—those who provide the content for which the potential buyer is shelling out their beer money. It works, and so we give it a pass because we all already know the editor is really one of “us” (yes, this previous knowledge leads to bias but since the editor thinks like we do it’s no big deal; insider exceptions are one of our most sacred, binding rules).

There is no end to progess in the SJW quest to bring about a more perfect world. So brave. Thank you for this.