CONCLUSION

  CHALLENGING THE NARRATIVE, OR, WOMEN TAKE BACK SCIENCE FICTION

  KATHLEEN ANN GOONAN

  [Science fiction and fantasy] are dedicated to the exploration of the future and myth and history. Dreams, if you want to frame it that way. Yet the enforced [single white male] dominance of these genres means that the dreams of whole groups of people have been obliterated from the Zeitgeist.

  —N. K. Jemisin, Guest of honor speech at Wiscon 38

  SF is a big tent. Clowns and preachers, warriors and pacifists, space-farers, life forms, philosophies, genders, scantily clothed gedankenexperiments, utopias and dystopias, politicos, thieves, adventurers, and mad American housewives crowd in. Thrilling, fantastic, incredibly serious fights continuously ensue as to what, exactly, this time-traveling circus is to be called, who will be allowed to be part of the show, who will be tossed beneath the elephant’s parade once hired, who gets to keep the money box, and even who the audience (SF’s real source of power) might be as marks mill outside eyeing, with delight or repugnance, lurid posters of the Astoundingly Buxom Chain-Mail-Bikini-Clad Woman and considering whether they want to pay to enter this flimsy construction alive with the outline of raised fists as it emits the eerie, alluring wail of the Unknown, the Different, the Amazing, and the Astounding brain-changing word potions of an infinite array of weird, dangerous, and thought-provoking wild worlds.

  Or let’s say that SF is a generation ship on which the pilots are always men—usually white men—because only they have the mental capacity to imagine, to plan, to lead, to build. Well, sometimes women hijack the ship and fly it to new, strange, unmanly galaxies where SF is uncomfortable—where, some say, SF can’t even exist, so of course the men don’t remember those weird time shifts even when they experience them firsthand.

  But we now know the truth: many of those inside the tent, the starship—oh, heck, the genre—are women. And surprisingly enough to some (even to some women), from the very beginning women wrote, illustrated, poeticized, and edited SF. They weren’t just in the tent or the generation ship—they helped build it, and then they used their scientific and literary brilliance to steer it to new galaxies.

  Yet, as often happens to the work of women, their accomplishments became invisible over the decades. Some even claimed, as Dogs said of Humans in Clifford Simak’s City and as Joanna Russ pointed out in How to Suppress Women’s Writing, that Humans—especially women—couldn’t possibly have done such things because they were clearly incapable of building wonders—or, if they did, these wonders were certainly not of the caliber of wonders built by men and that, in fact, they were inevitably ineffective, ill-conceived, poorly executed wonders.

  Now, at the same time as the truth of how women shaped SF, how they gained and wielded their power, has emerged and come into sharp focus as the result of painstaking research, women are, once again, claiming their place in SF. They declare, through their fiction, their blogs, their speeches, and their scholarship, that the edges of the ship are nowhere and everywhere, and that women of all colors, nationalities, and visions are qualified to design, build, and pilot the ship.

  For some men—those who have learned to believe that only men have ever shaped and written SF, and that only men read it, and that men must join the battle to save it—this argument over Who Can Write SF is not pretty. But the struggle for equality has never been pretty. This battle has always been deeply necessary, as innate and inevitable as our envisioning, inventing, and eager using of technology.

  This essay will discuss the history of women’s naming and unnaming and how they are now—as always, for women in SF seem always to be disappearing and resurfacing—naming themselves again as thinkers, as artists, as writers, and as the rabble-rousers they were born to be. It will relate this issue to the larger culture from which SF emerges. It will show that some things are changing rapidly and that others are changing much too slowly. It will speculate as to why. It will conclude with a loud explosion. (Just kidding. Or maybe not.)

  WOMEN AND SF: WRITERS, EDITORS, AND READERS

  Girls and women are the ultimate outsiders, so it makes sense that they would understand the role of the alien and try to subvert—to change—the societal construct that tells them “girls can’t” and “women aren’t as (intelligent, strong, capable)” as men. After more than a century of activism, girls still get the message that they cannot be. They cannot be scientists, writers, engineers, architects, computer programmers, game designers, mathematicians, artists, CEOS, presidents—that is, they cannot be powerful. This narrative is shouted at girls by images, behaviors, admonitions, and models in the world and in stories, our most powerful form of communication, from birth. Often, the narrative is backed up by harassment, sometimes so subtle that even the perpetrators can successfully claim that it wasn’t there, that the harassers were misunderstood, or that the alleged harassment has to do with innate biological differences between the sexes. If that doesn’t work, harassment sometimes becomes overt, and ugly.

  Women who publish science fiction are, therefore, doubly strong, admirably conditioned for the time when rumbling turns to out-and-out battle. These women have beaten the invidious “you can’t” and almost always shape new narratives that women and men who read and dream would want their daughters and sons to read, books and stories that steer the ship of thought and action in new social directions, books that examine gender, history, power, culture, and technology and use them in new ways to speak from new viewpoints.

  Because women have had to become so strong, this time they will not be silenced, erased, or forgotten.

  They are very angry. Because of this, they are very loud.

  This loudness annoys some people, to the point that it provokes online sexual slurs, bullying, and even death threats. One would not think that this would be the case in a field whose works are widely supposed to be written by the most intelligent for the most intelligent; that men would not be so angered. One would think that everyone in science fiction and fantasy (SFF) would have been delighted when women won every Nebula Award for work published in 2013, because women had so long been in the minority when it came to winning awards.

  This was true of both the Nebula and the Hugo Awards, which are two of SF’s most prestigious prizes. The Hugos were established in 1953, but no woman received one until 1967, when Anne McCaffrey’s novella “Weyr Search” and Kate Wilhelm’s short story “Baby, You Were Great” garnered awards. In 1968, McCaffrey and Wilhelm became the first women to win Nebula Awards—McCaffrey for her novella “Dragonrider” and Wilhelm for her short story “The Planners.” In 1970, Ursula K. Le Guin was the first woman to take home both a Hugo and a Nebula Award in the novel category for The Left Hand of Darkness, a spectacular win that some might have seen as indicative of the field’s becoming increasingly inclusive of women. But in fact, the statistics remained dismal: “From 1968 to 2011 there were 46 awards to women in all the professional [SFF] fiction categories (just over 20%)” (http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/women_sf_writers#sthash.KlRiI11x.dpuf).

  Despite this, there wasn’t exactly an all-inclusive celebration when the all-woman winner’s list was published in May 2014 (http://www.sfwa.org/2014/05/2013-nebula-awards-winners/). A few men characterizing themselves as “Sad Puppies 1” and “Sad Puppies 2” made it clear that they saw these wins as a loss of their own power to writers who might be characterized as feminist, non-white, of non-European descent, gay, transgendered, or any combination thereof—writers who, according to one of the Puppies, wrote SFF that might be about “racial prejudice and exploitation … sexism and the oppression of women … gay and transgender issues, [or the] evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy” (Torgersen).

  On the level playing field of the internet some of these feminist, activist, award-winning writers accused of causing genre-wrecking change voiced their history, their concerns, and their anger so articulately that the Sad Puppies, in their various iterations, have several times attempted to toss the board game in the air by bloc voting (entirely legal according to Hugo nomination rules) in order to return SF to its more traditional fare of manly men doing manly things with other manly men.

  In 1991, in the speech in which she launched the Tiptree Award, Pat Murphy said, “A persistent rumbling that I have heard echoing through science fiction … says, in essence, that women don’t write science fiction. Put a little more rudely, this rumbling says: ‘Those damn women are ruining science fiction.’ They are doing it by writing stuff that isn’t ‘real’ science fiction; they are writing ‘soft’ science fiction and fantasy” (Murphy, “Illusion and Expectation”).

  This begs the question: what is SF? One can easily find fifty sturdy definitions online, some directly contradicting others and most, of course, formulated by men. How can SF be ruined or destroyed if there is little agreement on what it is? Why is it so fragile?

  The field of SF did, in fact, change significantly when the Science Fiction Writers of America changed its name to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1992 through a member vote (although it still uses the acronym SFWA). The long process leading up to the vote brought out the natural vitriol of SFWA members as they kicked the idea around in their usual way, with personal insults and resultant waves of side-taking outrage. At heart, the debate centered on the fact that some writers produced strange and estranging stories that, they claimed, were SF. Yet sometimes the stories seemed suspiciously like … fantasy! And if fantasy was admitted for Nebula consideration, hard SF would be forever crushed, because it is fragile and rare. The practical result, when the dust settled, was that more SFF written by women—much of it different from what men had been writing, much of it feminist, much of it, because it was “soft” SF (code for narratives that focus on anthropology, psychology, linguistics, relationships, or even out-and-out fantasy rather than on physics, chemistry, mathematics, etc.), not previously eligible to win a Nebula Award—were now included on ballots.

  And winning.

  This is what it looks like when women speak out and take action.

  The scholarly research discussed in this book clearly shows that women took to what was called “scientifiction” in the early twentieth century as eagerly as did men. They edited, illustrated, and published fiction, science fact articles, editorials, poetry, and fan materials with great enthusiasm, shaping the field during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

  American women of that period had reason to feel good about themselves. For the first time, they were full members of the society in which they lived. Women had fought to gain the right to vote. That fight united them. Women had agency, and with this agency they became increasingly dedicated to bringing about change through political means.

  The 1920s were prosperous and optimistic. The United States had played a pivotal role in winning the Great War, which, it was thought, would end all war. Automobiles, washing machines, radio, enlightened awareness of birth control options, increased access to higher education, and the introduction of an equal rights amendment to the Constitution in the U.S. Congress were indicative of the sociocultural changes taking place at that time. In the arts, modernism and jazz reflected the technocultural changes taking place in the wake of the popularization of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Freud’s theory of the unconscious. In general, the feeling that everything—from the world, matter, and time to what we knew about our own bodies and minds—was much different than anything we had previously believed or lived by blossomed, grew, and persists.

  But we don’t always remember this history or, especially, women’s various roles within it. Consider the case of Lise Meitner, the second woman to earn a PhD in physics from the University of Vienna, who was a full participant in the gifted circle that included Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, and others who delved into the curious secrets of matter. Her scientific brilliance, which she made evident in spite of barriers that women of that age were just beginning to surmount, earned her a physics lab at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. However, her discovery of nuclear fission was written out of history when Otto Hahn claimed a postwar Nobel Prize for that accomplishment. Like many of the women involved in early SF, her important contributions to history are not well known. How many have heard of Mary Sherman Morgan, who formulated Hydyne, the fuel of the Redstone Rocket, when Von Braun’s team failed (G. Morgan)? Rosalind Franklin, a Cambridge scientist with a PhD in chemistry who was pursuing the holy grail of modern genetics, lost the opportunity to win a Nobel Prize for her work when her images of X-ray diffraction confirming the helical structure of DNA were unethically shown (by another male scientist) to her rival, James Watson. As scholars increasingly recognize, “Had Watson, Crick, and Wilkins properly acknowledged Franklin’s contribution, Rosalind Franklin would have shared the enormous public recognition that Watson and Crick received for discovering the helical structure of the DNA molecule” (Rapaport). The list of cases like these is long.

  It is not news that many women engineers and inventors have been written out of history, but, in this context, it bears repeating—particularly because SF is informed by and has a strong relationship with science and technology. The writing out of women from the history of SF parallels this process, and the stark, well-documented landmarks that show the process are disturbing to anyone who cares about losing the contributions of half of the human race to prejudice.

  But in the 1920s, these erasures were in the future, and women’s optimism about and increasing involvement with the greater world were reflected in their SF. Far from being passive sex objects waiting for rescue, women in early female-authored SFF fiction and poetry drove cars and piloted rocket ships. They explored space, fought aliens and mad scientists, made peace with demons, toyed with gender identity, and ruled both planets and homes with scientific care. But women did more than just write stories about egalitarian futures. They helped shape those futures through the work they did in the SFF community writing editorials, reporting on groundbreaking scientific and technological phenomena, and producing cover art. They performed these activities in professional and amateur publications alike, some of which they even published themselves. In short, they did everything that men did in the field. Statistics presented in this anthology show that this involvement in SF never slowed—in fact, over the decades, it increased. Women were always a part of SF. Women have always written SF.

  Editors, then, now, and in the decades between, publish stories that they believe will help sell a magazine—stories that will elicit interest in readers and help the magazine gain new readers. They comb slush piles to find stories that are not only publishable, but also good.

  Editors also shape the field by buying stories from certain writers and rejecting stories by others. Hugo Gernsback, T. O’Conor Sloane, and David Lasser actively courted women to contribute stories to their magazines, including Leslie F. Stone, Claire Winger Harris, Lilith Lorraine, and L. Taylor Hansen. Farnsworth Wright and Dorothy McIlwraith of Weird Tales regularly featured women writers such as Dorothy Quick and C. L. Moore, as well as infamous cover artist Margaret Brundage. All of these women became regulars in early SFF magazines precisely because they wrote the kind of stories and produced the kind of artwork that editors sought. Some of these women left SFF when Groff Conklin and John W. Campbell began their editorial reigns in the late 1930s. But others—including Dorothy Les Tina and Leslie Perri, both of whom are featured in this anthology and whose work anticipates that of the midcentury luminaries Judith Merril, Carol Emshwiller, and Ann McCaffrey—took advantage of the new editorial landscape to make their voices heard. Despite evidence that Campbell did not publish stories by some of the pioneering women in SF, he was instrumental in launching the careers of new women writers and in nurturing the careers of others who were able to shape their stories to accord with his vision of what SF should be.

  And yet—

  A century after this bright beginning, in 2014, women publish only 28.1 percent of SF short fiction (Connolly). Women author a mere quarter of all SF novels (Heimbach). Most SF anthologies have abysmal ratios of women to men—hardly ever half or more, and too often, one, or none (C. Morgan).

  If there is discrimination—which publishers and editors usually deny—where does such discrimination come from?

  All arts emerge from the culture in which they are embedded. If SF is full of sexual stereotypes that repel female readers, it is because these stereotypes are also the face of our culture. Female scientists in media are usually amazing, exotic creatures, a striking, weird anomaly, because they are able to think in ways in which women are not supposed to be able to think. The online document “Are Boys and Girls Equally Prepared for Life?”, published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), uses academic testing statistics gathered in 2012 by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) to show that girls in Iceland, Jordan, Thailand, Qatar, Malaysia, and Shanghai-China scored better than boys on the same mathematics tests. Yet when Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University, argued that biological differences in men and women account for the small number of women in mathematics and engineering, he was defended by the intellectual celebrity Steven Pinker. When he left his post because of the controversy, he was tapped by President Obama to be chairman of the Federal Reserve (Summers withdrew his name because of a vigorous campaign against his appointment).