A trip down memory lane: genre and gender

Cover of "Beggars in Spain (Beggars Trilo...
Cover of Beggars in Spain (Beggars Trilogy)

This isn’t the blog post I thought I was writing. Its not even the blog post I originally wrote when I penned these “trip down memory lane” posts last month. I wanted to write about gender in SF/F, a broiling hot topic lately.

But the closer I got to this post going live, the more I realized I didn’t understand the topic. Perhaps I am just another symptom of a broken world. Maybe I’m just showing my age and naivete.

So instead, let’s talk about some of my favorite authors, and this set happens to be all women. Some are “women of color,” as they say, but that’s really beside the point. Any list I make like this has to start with Octavia Butler. If you haven’t read Octavia’s books, you have truly missed out on some amazing storytelling. Take a gander at Lilith and her post-apocalyptic, “aliens picked me up to trade for my cancer genes world”, and tell me there isn’t some mind bending fiction there. I’ve already mentioned recently my love as a child for H. M. Hoover and Susan Cooper. In High School, it was Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain and Beggars and Choosers, along with Julian May’s entire product (the Pliocene books, the Mileu books, etc.) that filled my head with many colored lands. And what SF/F reader didn’t at least dabble, if not consume whole, the books of Anne McCaffrey? Robin McKinley’s Blue Sword and Hero books were standout fantasy books, along with Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Star books. In 8th grade, I found a copy of  C.J. Cherryh’s Serpent’s Reach, my first forray into her Company series, and never stopped. C.S. Friedman shook my universe on multiple occasions.

The sad thing? This is just the tip of the iceberg, the highlight reel. And the only thing that really matters is the story being told. Even before the advent of social media, an author was like a built-in hashtag for a type of book. If you read three books by an author, chances are good book four is going to be to your liking too. Before the Age of Google, you went to your library or bookseller and said “I want a book like so-and-so.” The name on the cover didn’t matter. The gender – of either the author or the protagonist – didn’t matter. You were just looking for that next fix for your reading habit.

I know I’ve strayed in this post, and now you can see why the original topic was so hard for me to grasp. Books are vessels, and some writers are better than others about filling those. Bah. I realize there’s an entire topic I’m missing here, one that has to do with gender actually in fiction. I’m still wrapping my mind around the fact that there are people that care what gender created the fiction in the first place.

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