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Monday, 16 May 2022

What fiction has unlimited possibilities of stories, characters, worlds, universes ?

Speculative Fiction  - Is it really just an abstract man’s world?


Speculative Fiction - recap from last blog post

Speculative Fiction is a gift to literature, film and TV.  Not only does it give us an abundance of subgenres, it also opens up unlimited possibilities of stories, characters, worlds, universes and planets.  As the human race, we are perceptive to the fantastic, the absurd, the magnificent, the unbelievable, the magical and the terrific ways life may or may not turn out.  We relish in different lands, worlds, creatures and thrive on the imagination of an author who shows us images crafted through words that we never thought possible. Speculative fiction brings all this alive and is without doubt one of the most popular genres.  

In our last blog we looked at the multitude of subgenres as well as some famous authors and their successful works.  The list included (thank you QU Speculations, 2016):

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins


The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson 

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial by Steven Spielberg 

Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien

Cinderella by Grimm Brothers

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Of course, this list is not exclusive and there are many more authors, both male and female, that could be added to the list.  

man in gray hoodie

Is speculative fiction, (especially science fiction) a

Male-dominated genre?

However, there has been some communication around the perception that speculative fiction is mainly male dominated, and this notion is not just seen here in the UK.  Rasha Jameel (2021) asked a similar question and realised that they couldn’t think of even half the amount of female to male Bangla speculative fiction writers:

“Subsequent research didn't yield much more about the presence of women writers in Bangla science fiction. The love letter was thus scrapped, in favour of a deeper look into the gender biases at play in this vast field of fiction.





"Deloitte Global predicts that boys and men in almost every country will
continue to spend less time reading books, and read them less frequently, than girls and women. "

Results Among 2286 (64.7%) and 2335 (66.1%) manuscripts for which first and last author gender were identified, respectively, 49.3% of prepandemic submissions were from male first authors, increasing to 55.4% in the first year of the pandemic (difference of 6.1%, 95% CI 1.3% to 10.7%), before dropping to 46.6% from April 2021 onwards. Quarterly counts identified a large increase in submissions from male authors during the first year after the onset of the pandemic, and a smaller increase from female authors. The proportion of male last authors did not change significantly during the pandemic.

Conclusions These findings suggest that there has been an increase in male productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic within the field of occupational and environmental health research that is present to a lesser extent among women. Source https://oem.bmj.com/content/early/2022/02/16/oemed-2021-107915



In 2017, Tor Books, the primary imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, revealed their publishing figures for various genres for the month of January that year. The ratio of female author submissions to male author submissions in the science fiction genre was ridiculously skewed, clocking in at 0.22:0.78. There is a pronounced sense of gender discrimination in these numbers that is hard to miss. Are women being discouraged from writing science fiction in the first place? Publishing houses often deny that being the cause, saying instead that manuscripts are approved on the basis of merit, which raises yet another question on the "capabilities" of a woman writing science fiction. One can't help but wonder whether it is the pre-conceived notion of male writers being more bankable at play here. This inequality is a continued discrimination that has been at play from long before the 2017 article.”

The success of Margaret Atwood and Suzanne Collins and their stories would suggest that women are, of course, just as capable as men in writing award-winning speculative fiction of any kind.  Here at Happy London Press, in fact, we firmly believe that women are just as gifted as their male counterparts when it comes to writing any kind of speculative fiction.  So are there other issues at play here, that would suggest that the patriarchy is undermining female authors’ speculative fiction works by and large?


Lets take a look at this man’s world... in science fiction and is it true?

Jameel (2021) has looked into this: “The science fiction genre has largely been dominated by men, despite Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)—which depicted scientific creation with underlying themes of religion, eliminating mysticism—enduring as one of the most popular sci-fi pop culture icons. The novel's publishing history is also mired in debate. It did not bear the name of its author when it was first released, leading people to conclude that it was likely to have been written by Percy Bysshe Shelley rather than his wife Mary. Further investigation into the matter revealed that Percy's role was limited to that of the editor, while Mary brought the monstrous Frankenstein to life with her words and creativity. To what extent Percy's editing added to or took away from the text warrants its own separate discussion.”


There is plenty of evidence that women and their stories have graced the literary world and should have, without doubt, gained more recognition than they actually received.  Jameel (2021) points out that “Cavendish's The Blazing World (1666) was well and truly ahead of its time, fusing futuristic elements with the 17th century way of life. The novel centres on the exploits of an unnamed woman from our world who is accidentally transported to another dimension, The Blazing World. Cavendish wrote about an utopian society which reflected the flawed community she grew up in, but exhibited far more progressive ideologies through the characterisation of complex female characters such as the Empress of the Blazing World. A ceiling had been shattered in the realm of speculative fiction with the publication of this novel, at a time when such an action was deemed inconceivable.


Duchess Cavendish had written a story about women unbound by patriarchal constraints, women portrayed to be more than just subservient and innocent, but also warriors, leaders, and villains.”  Forerunners of subsequent works and creators of revolutionary stories - women are clearly more than capable of wearing the crown of speculative fiction.  However, something clearly went wrong:“"Mad Madge" Cavendish's work isn't recognised as equal to that of Johannes Kepler's, whose Somnium (1634) features one of the earliest documentations of lunar astronomy in literature, complete with elaborate scientific descriptions. Cavendish's imagination of an utopian world—of a future we now call present—set up the stage to inspire incidents of scientific revolution in fiction. On the other hand, in my opinion, Kepler's work never really sought to address underlying issues about man's evolution. And while Kepler was treated as a well-read scholar, a mathematician, and an astronomer, eventually being hailed by many as the 'Father of Science Fiction', Cavendish's work was criticised as having "dull verses" and for portraying a world where "women live like bats or owls, labour like beasts, and die like worms".” (Jameel, 2021).

Women’s oppression in history and writing


There is a long history of women’s oppression and treating them as second class citizens in society.  This easily translated into the academic and creative fields, which were traditionally reserved for men.  What is more, it was only just over a mere 100 years ago that women were allowed to enrol in higher education.  In October 1920, Oxford allowed its first female students to matriculate.  This supports the thoughts of Jameel, that historically, women in most societies had been actively discouraged to take part and pursue anything related to academia.  That, of course, involved writing.  Jameel (2021) therefore concludes that “it only makes sense that the sustained sexism would prevent their accomplishments in the field from being recognised. SF became a male dominated genre solely because there was a significant lack of female writers to compete with.”

It wasn’t until the 1960s that things changed.  The Faculty of History at Oxford University (2020) notes that “speculative fiction can first be traced to New Wave radical feminist authors of the 1960s and 1970s and was a spinoff of American feminism’s second wave. It was contemporaneous to the widely discussed shift from “hard” science fiction toward science fiction indebted to “soft” sciences of sociology, anthropology, linguistics, economics, and political philosophy—a narrative swerve that feminist authors theorized as indicating a rebellion against the constrains of patriarchal, androcentric structures of meaning. Feminists were perhaps the first to point out that conventional concepts of possibility and rationality used to define science fiction, fantasy, and other non-mimetic genres were limited and value laden. Moving beyond the purely formalist definitions, these authors and critics highlighted the sociopolitical contexts of these genres’ creation, academic legitimization, and subversive cultural impact. To project speculative fiction as a new space for articulating feminist theory and praxis was, of course, a political move. It linked the cognitive estrangement effect of speculative fiction to priming the audience for questioning the dominant status quo and its androcentric biases. It also invested works of speculative fiction with the power, even responsibility, to voice alternative views that can move the world in the direction of gender equality.”

The Faculty of History at Oxford University(2020) also highlights that, before that, many female speculative fiction writers had changed their style of writing in order to fit in: “When in “Earthsea Revisioned” (1992) Ursula K. Le Guin reflected on having written her early fantasy and science fiction works “as an artificial man”—that is, by gendering her writing male—she spoke to the concerns that animated many other female authors who turned to speculative fiction in the 1960s and 1970s: Lois Gould, Rhonda Lerman, Judith Merril, James Tiptree Jr., Angela Carter, Kate Wilhelm, Carol Emshwiller, Suzy McKee Charnas, Octavia Butler, Tanith Lee, Doris Lessing, Sally Miller Gearhart, Barbara Ehrenreich, and others. These authors used the textual power of speculative fiction to challenge the predominantly male literary establishment and patriarchal social reality—including the dominant androcentric traditions of science fiction.”

It was, however, not only the style of writing that was heavily influenced by men.  It was also the content of speculative fiction stories that did women a disservice.  As Jameel (2021) suggests, “There is nothing wrong with having an extensive number of male writers contribute to a particular literary genre. But the forced exclusion of women due to gender discrimination is both detrimental and unwarranted. The works of most male writers often, if not always, feature content curated for men, about men. Stories about women written by men are filtered to cater to the male gaze. As a result, we end up with hypersexualised female characters who are only there to further the male protagonist's journey, much like Lenina Crowne in Brave New World (Chatto & Windus, 1932), or Sadie Dunhill in Stephen King's 11.22.63 (Scribner, 2011) who is a soft-spoken dame doomed to live out a tragic life of abuse she can't escape. In most SF novels penned by men, nothing spells out "entertainment" like a woman who is treated as a harlot or a punching bag.”


What is more, “Amidst this horribly regressive characterisation of fictional women in science fiction, award-winning writer Orson Scott Card took the patriarchal ideology even further by incorporating his neo-conservative views into his works. Card's novels Empire (Tor Books, 2006) and Songmaster (Dial Press, 1980) depicted a fair share of graphic violence coupled with right-wing sentiments and homophobia, which were deemed to be necessary, provocative additions to the genre by the author who once described homosexuality to the Mormom Times as a "tragic genetic mixup" (Jameel, 2021).  


Concluding thoughts

Whilst it is clear that speculative fiction has come a long way since its gender-oppressive ways in the early 20th century, the success of the greats of Margaret Atwood, Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer or Ursula K. Le Guin, is not to be taken as a sign that all is well-balanced regarding gender in the world of this overarching genre.  Whilst there is nothing wrong with having a genre that has more male than female authors, it has to be clear why that is.  If the reasons for this are patriarchy and disregard of a certain group in society, then this begs the question as to how many brilliant untold or undervalued stories need to be pushed into the light and past those that gained prominence simply because their author was male.  As the above blog has shown, there is an abundance of female writers in the speculative fiction genre that have written and continue to write groundbreaking stories. 

In our third and last blog post of that series we will look at the influences of speculative fiction. We can’t wait for you to join us then.  

 

References:

Faculty of History.2020. A Short History of Women’s Education at the University of Oxford. Available at: A Short History of Women’s Education at the University of Oxford | Faculty of History (Accessed 26th April)

Jameel, R. 2021. Is Science Fiction really a not a woman’s genre?. Available at: Is science fiction really not a woman’s genre? | The Daily Star (Accessed 24th April 2022)


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