Mostly Manly SF by Mostly Manly Men

I found this list – tagged as the “SF Masterworks Meme”, with the usual “how many have YOU read” formatting, and a quick google established it’s properly the Gollancz SF Masterworks list – the novels they have published to date in their iconic yellow covers, called Masterworks.

I have seen these in libraries and bookshops, but never as one set. SF Masterworks is (from the SFsite) “a series of classics that deserve to be in print and kept there, rather than languishing as OP titles. They are published monthly by Millennium, which is an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group“.

The names on the list already chosen as SF Masterworks are: Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Greg Bear (twice), Gregory Benford, Alfred Bester (twice), James Blish (twice), John Brunner, Arthur C. Clarke (five times), Hal Clement, Samuel R. Delany (twice), Philip K. Dick (eleven times), Joe Haldeman, M. John Harrison, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Daniel Keyes, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Ursula K. Le Guin (twice), Richard Matheson (twice), Michael Moorcock (twice), Walter M. Miller, Jr., Ward Moore, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl (three times), Christopher Priest, Keith Roberts, Geoff Ryman, Lucius Shepard, Robert Silverberg (three times), John Sladek, Cordwainer Smith, Olaf Stapledon (twice), George R. Stewart, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Theodore Sturgeon, Sheri S. Tepper, Walter Tevis, Jack Vance, Kurt Vonnegut (twice), H. G. Wells (four times), Kate Wilhelm, Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny. 43 writers, of whom 3 are women: just under 7%.

Planned for release in the rest of 2010: three more books by Brian Aldiss, Samuel R. Delany, and H.G. Wells: three books by writers not yet chosen, M.J.Engh, Jack Finney, and Joanna Russ. That will bring this to 46 writers, of whom 5 are women, a sudden jump to 11%. (And yes, orthogonal to the point I was going to make: the news that I can get a brand new copy of Dhalgren, when the first copy I had I bought used nearly 20 years ago and it’s almost falling in pieces, is making me squee.)

The book titles written by women are: Arslan, The Dispossessed, The Female Man, Grass, The Lathe of Heaven, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.

The book titles written by men are A Case of Conscience, A Fall of Moondust, A Maze of Death, A Scanner Darkly, Babel-17, Behold the Man, Blood Music, The Body Snatchers, The Book of Skulls, Bring the Jubilee, Cat’s Cradle, The Centauri Device, The Child Garden, Childhood’s End, Cities in Flight, The City and the Stars, The Complete Roderick, The Dancers at the End of Time, Dark Benediction, The Demolished Man, Dhalgren, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Downward to the Earth, Dr. Bloodmoney, The Drowned World, Dune, Dying Inside, Ringworld, Earth Abides, Emphyrio, Eon, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, The First Men in the Moon, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Flowers for Algernon, Food of the Gods, The Forever War, The Fountains of Paradise, Gateway, Helliconia, I Am Legend, Inverted World, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Jem, Last and First Men, Life During Wartime, Lord of Light, The Man in the High Castle, Man Plus, Martian Time-Slip, Mission of Gravity, Mockingbird, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, More Than Human, Non-Stop, Nova, Now Wait for Last Year, Pavane, The Penultimate Truth, The Rediscovery of Man, Rendezvous with Rama, Roadside Picnic, The Shrinking Man, The Simulacra, The Sirens of Titan, The Space Merchants, Stand on Zanzibar, Star Maker, The Stars My Destination, Tau Zero, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Time Machine, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, Time Out of Joint, Timescape, Ubi, and VALIS.

The usual meme is: bold those you read, bold/italicize those you own, italicize those you own and haven’t read yet.

Here’s my version of it:

Copy and paste the list of book titles above. Without checking back through the list of authors to give you more clues than one read-through could already give you: Bold the ones whose authors you know without thinking about, without having to check. Italicize the ones whose authors you can figure out easily by checking the list.

Add the names of up to five writers whom you think may have been excluded from this list because they’re … well… women. (Bear in mind the defining attribute of all of these novels was supposed to be that they’re out of print.)

Bechel Tests and Babies

As I was surfing the Internet, seeking out feminist mindporn to entertain me, I came across these two posts:

Kate Elliot, asking Epic Fantasy and the Bechdel Test, in which she asks:

How much epic fantasy passes the Bechdel Test? All, most, some, little?

She defines the Bechdel Test for those who do not already know it, but despite that people in the comments-thread that follows (on livejournal, where I have been banned, deleted, and purged… more of that later) still come up with the same old arguments, which are, in no particular order:

1. OMG WHY SO JUDGY? Or: Even if the story doesn’t have at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man, it’s still a good story!

Yes, it may well be. Lord of the Rings fails the Bechdel Test, totally utterly and completely – most of the named women in it never get to talk to each other – but it’s still a good story. It’s just a story that, in Kate Elliot’s fine phrase, “ellides women”. That’s what the Bechdel Test measures.

2. BUT SOME STORIES JUST DON’T HAVE WOMEN IN THEM. As Kate Elliot notes in the comments-thread, while the fighters of your epic fantasy may be mostly or entirely men, unless the war of which the epic fantasy is the story is being fought by an all-male group against an all-male group in deserted hills, there are going to be women around. Medieval times might have seen soldiering and ruling as a role for men, but that didn’t make armies or courts all-male environments: and the presence of women in the world of the narrative means you get to ask the Bechdel question: why are there no women who get to talk to each other about something other than a man?

3. OH I DON’T SEE THAT AS A PROBLEM, PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING PASSES THAT TEST NOW. Followed by the cite of a well-known writer with the assurance that she has LOTS of strong female characters. Lois McMaster Bujold, for example. Mercedes Lackey. Even Anne McCaffrey or C. J. Cherryh. Well, yes. But mostly their narratives don’t pass. Cherryh and Bujold both have lots of strong female characters. But mostly, they don’t talk to each other, except about men. They fail the Bechdel Test in that key respect: as female characters, they tend to have plot-driven conversations only when they are talking to male characters. (Rimrunners, for example, passes the Bechdel Test more strongly than most Cherryh novels, by two brief conversations that Bet has with her bunkmate, apologising for breaking the hygiene regs on her first night, and with the ship’s doctor, claiming she walked into a door: Cyteen, unless we count the long online “conversations” than Younger Ari has with Older Ari, I don’t think passes at all.)

4. WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Well, we’re feminists, so it does. *is judgy*

The other post was Mary Catelli’s, babies in world-building, about how SF writers “neglect to figure out Where Babies Come From and Why It Matters.” It bears almost no relation to the previous post, except in that “having babies” is always (unless you posit Unusually Advanced Technology) something that women – and only women -can do. (Even breastfeeding is feasible for a man given the right hormonal balance, but for growing a fetus from fertilised egg to baby, you need a working uterus….) I cannot help feeling that the dismissal of women from the central narrative correlates with the dismissal of “women’s work” from the central narrative.

Avert your eyes, girls, I get to look YOU over

PZ Myers posted I have been objectified! which is where I found out about a post I want to write about and won’t link to directly: a post on a blog called Common Sense Atheist entitled “Fifteen Sexy Scientists”, dated 16th July. All the scientists (apart from Myers himself, who’s number 15) are women: all are white. There’s also a header pic of a revealingly-dressed woman bending to look into a microscope – except she is not looking into the microscope, but at the photographer, whose camera angle is peering down at her breasts.

The man who put the post together defends his picks with “Why no men? Because I unavoidably find women more sexy, of course! ….. I’m not pandering to my male readership. I’m pandering to me. ….. Are you saying it would be nice if I were ‘freethinking’ and not attracted to women with a waist-to-hip ratio of .7, with clear skin and big eyes? ….. I’m just not aware of non-white sexy women. My favorite women in the world are actually darker-skinned Latinas, as it happens. If you can point me to some sexy non-white scientists, I will most gladly add them to the list. ….. You’re tired of women being portrayed as beautiful? I’m not. This is a post about sexy women. So it portrays women as sexy. …… Also, as it happens, latinas are my favorite. I just couldn’t find many latina scientists on a quick search.” (That last comment was directed at someone who pointed out this post was not just sexist, but racist.)

What the Common Sense Atheist did was search the web for photographs of women who identified as scientists (at least one of whom is still a student) and defended this with “I took pictures that are already online and put them together in a list. Just to be clear: is that the objection? That I took public pictures and put them altogether with the word ’sexy’ at the top?”

(I’m quoting him exactly because he claims “I’m tempted to make a list of the hundreds of ways people here and on other blogs have explicitly misrepresented my stated views, often even erecting strawmen which said the opposite of what I explicitly claim. Quite exhausting.”)

I’m pretty certain that this epMotion ad depicting a number of attractive men dancing round a scientist to sell her the automated pipette system has already been linked to from this blog (Warning: clicking on this link will start video/sound playing on an endless loop: lyrics here if you need to be reminded) because I remember discussing/reading discussion about the unusualness of an ad for something-geeky using sexy men to sell it to a woman.

Or, really, the unusualness of having sexy men being objectified for a woman’s gaze at all. The 15th photo on Common Sense Atheist’s list, P Z Myers: Myers is (from a lesbian eye view) a reasonably attractive man, if you’re into that kind of gender: I could certainly (from a slash fan’s view) pair him off with Samuel Gerard in a cross-universe adventure in which scientist and US Marshal save Chicago from anti-evolution terrorism and have hot sex, angst, and sizzling dialogue, except I don’t do RPS. But the photo of him riding a dinosaur is plainly not intended to be read as a sexy photograph – though nor are some of the other photographs in the list, of young scientists working out at the gym or on the playing field. They’re made “sexy”, “objectified”, because this “common sense atheist” presumes to put them up as if they were his pinups, his to look at and admire, in a way he does not intend to be admired himself.
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On access policies, conventions, and sausages

“There are two things you don’t want to let anyone see how you make, laws and sausages,” Leo McGarry says at some point in the West Wing.

Well, I don’t know how to make sausages.

Access policies generally begin by accident. A group of people organise an event. Someone who came (or wanted to come) had an unexpected amount of difficulty attending. The group take note and decide “oh, we’ll do that differently next time”. Eventually they decide to write it down. The result after some years is often confusing, badly arranged, and ineffective as a guideline for future actions.

Here’s what I discovered when taking one such set of time-accreted access policies and creating a standard set:

0. The Alpha and the Omega: The access policy is meant to make people feel welcome. Having an access policy is itself an access issue. Everything in the access policy should be written accordingly.
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The Homophobia Keeper

So, I was thinking about homophobia and heterosexism and the creative process.

I was told last year (by someone who had no idea who I was, to be fair) that I had no idea how the writer’s mind works: I couldn’t, she thought, or I wouldn’t be asking questions like “Why are you writing about this?” because I ought to know that writers don’t choose their subject matter, their subject matter chooses them. And I thought, well, there speaks a writer who has never been challenged.

I’ve had discussions that started from the question “Why are you writing about this?” for twenty-plus years. I am a lesbian writing about gay men. Everyone assumes this is a choice that can be challenged, apart from other lesbian slash writers, and meeting the challenges has led me to a better understanding of how a writer’s mind works – mine, if no one elses.

A post I made a few years ago about Robin Hobb’s Six Duchies/Liveships trilogy of trilogies, The Fool, the Fitz, and Fanfic brought up a question for me in the discussion thread that followed; Why is the culture of the Six Duchies homophobic? An important plot point turns on Fitz’s being homophobic – and homophobic in an accepted, settled way, as if being homophobic is just regarded as natural and right. While Fitz was somewhat isolated from the mainstream in the Six Duchies, his homophobia is not presented as part of his being out of step: it’s never questioned at all, except by its target, and the target is not from the Six Duchies at all.

There’s a new trilogy coming out, The Rain Wild Chronicles: I just finished reading the first volume, The Dragon Keeper, this weekend. (Minor spoilers under the cut) Continue reading »

Telling stories is how I think

George R. R. Martin wrote a post about the latest greatest Fanfic Stormlet:

And if I can feel that strongly about characters created by other people, can you possibly imagine how strongly I feel about my own characters?

That’s why I liken them to my children. I can care about Newt and Gwen Stacy and Frodo and Captain Ahab and the Great Gatsby and on and on… but I care about the Turtle and Abner Marsh and Tyrion Lannister and Jon Snow and Haviland Tuf and Daenerys and my own guys a thousand times more. They are my sons and daughters.

There are lots and lots and lots of people like me, I think. And it’s that which accounts for the emotional vehemence of these debates on fan fiction, on both sides.

The fan fictioneers fall in love with a character or characters, and want to make things come out right for them… or come out the way they want things to come out.

He’s right, and he’s wrong.

It is about love, but it’s not just love that turns me on to writing fanfic.
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Hollywood sisterhood, or lack thereof

On a recent promotional tour for Avatar, Sigourney Weaver put forth the following explanation of why the film did not win Best Picture at the Academy Awards:

“Jim didn’t have breasts, and I think that was the reason. He should have taken home that Oscar.”

The actual Best Picture winner was Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker — one of the most testosterone-drenched winners in recent memory. One may honestly believe that Avatar was a better film (personally, I don’t), but given The Hurt Locker‘s subject matter, and the fact that Bigelow made no attempt to campaign on the basis of her gender, this seems like a pretty unfounded and demeaning claim for Weaver to make. The fact that it comes from her — one of the few women to achieve Action Hero status, blazing a trail for other women to follow — makes it all the more disheartening.

(Sorry for the newest installment of Outrage, Laura.)

breaking news: Virginia Woolf’s Moon-Lander

We interrupt this blog recess to bring you breaking news: Virginia Woolf has been spotted in a Moon-Lander.

Virginia Woolf piloting her moon lander.

My nearly 2yo daughter came to show me. More frequently, Woolf, Sappho, Frida Kahlo, Emma Goldman, etc., are found piloting construction trucks, but today a special trip to the moon was order.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled menu of outrage.

Who invented fanfic?

There are various arguments along the similar lines to “who invented science-fiction”? But most people agree: fanfic in the sense we use in the 21st century, was first published between forty and fifty years ago*, and has always been an area of writing which has been primarily by women.

There are advantages to this and disadvantages: I noted in a panel at Anticipation that writing fanfic frees you up to write anything – and people do.

Orson Scott Card seemed to think (when writing his Foundation fanfic story about Seldon after the original Foundation left, and when writing his fanfic novel of The Abyss) that he was inventing something new, in taking the work of an established writer and writing his own story from it, or in watching a film and then writing a story based on what he saw and heard and understood – as any fanwriter does.

And of course there were the bright lads at Fanlib who really did seem to think they’d invented fanfic for their own profit.

John Scalzi is now claiming to have invented fanfic, on the basis that he’s writing what he calls a “reboot” of Little Fuzzy, which has never been done before. (Of course it has, by Ursula K. LeGuin in The Word for World is Forest, and by Ardath Mayhar in Golden Dreams, but – all together now! – She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art. )

Fanfic frees you up. I can think offhand of two or three fanfic writers who I thought were pretty damn good: who when they could write with no concern for anything but the laws of grammar, the rules of punctuation, and the conventions of text formatting, wrote fantastic adventurous exciting stories… and then went pro. And flattened out. Suddenly the editor and the market and the contract got between them and their mad spirit of wordy adventure. Or something did.

That writers who are pro see us having fun in our whirlpool of words and want to join in, is understandable. And they can.

But please: no trying to kick everyone out of the pool and then claim it’s your own personal “discovery”.

*See
Filed under Writers & Artists, fandom, fanworks, feminism, slash, women writers | | Comments (8)

Alien to Avatar: How James Cameron Learned to Fail

In 1979, the movie Alien became the first known film to pass the Bechdel Test. Thirty years on, where are we at? James Cameron’s big sci-fi movie for 2009 has three women playing major roles – Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy Chacon), and of course Doctor Grace Augustine herself (Sigourney Weaver)… and yet fails to pass the Bechdel Test. I don’t think any of the three women ever get to speak to each other.

[Before any more Constant Readers point it out to me: Yes, I managed to muddle Cameron, who directed Aliens, with Ridley Scott, who directed Alien. Oops. *facepalm*]

I went to see Avatar with a friend just before Christmas, and we both enjoyed it – for the background special effects rather than the plot, of course.

Walking away from it afterwards, I thought how Cameron could have made a film that passed the Bechdel Test (and would had at least a superficially more-original plot) simply by taking the same “risk” he took thirty years earlier – and casting a woman to play Jake Sully instead of a man.

Yes, all the bloody race issues are still there, and yes, taking a classically boring heterosexual white soldier falls for “native woman” does not actually become that much more original plot when the white soldier is a woman – but … even if Brokeback Mountain wasn’t that great of a gay story, wasn’t it still astonishing to see two men in love in a blockbuster movie? Wouldn’t it be astonishing to see two women in love in a PG-13 you-can’t-see-the-nipples sci-fi action movie where the central plot is not all about how titilating it is for the guys to have two women making out on a big screen?

Or am I just being too hopeful? The Playboy interview about why the Navi have to have breasts even though they’re not mammalian does not sound like James Cameron has spent any time in the last thirty years learning anything except that women don’t buy cinema tickets and female characters exist to promote male leads, and of course: you can spend millions creating a realistic alien world, but by god the female aliens must be otherness without being offputting – to heterosexual men.

I could dream about what Avatar would have been if Cameron had been brave enough to cast a woman as Jake Sully. But really, if he had, wouldn’t everything else he learned in thirty years have come to the fore, so that Jake and Grace would spend their movie-time together talking about what Jake feels for the Navi man that Cameron would have wanted to hook her up with?

FailFandom to Hugo Awards: Pity? I don’t think so

Women writers have tended not to be shortlisted for the Hugo Awards. Hugo Award short-lists (the top five works or authors nominated) have tended to be men-only or male-dominated. This tendency has been excused or this bias denied by assertions that there are not enough women writing SF: not enough women being published in SF: not enough good writers of SF are women: that women who write SF are shyer, less numerous, or less able, than men. Not, in other words, that the fans who nominate for the Hugo awards (the minority subgroup of the members of the previous Worldcon and the current Worldcon) could be biased.

But there are plenty of women writing and editing and drawing and working in SF today, and indeed in the past ten years this has been so. They just weren’t getting nominated. I wrote about this James effect (women writers tend to be devalued or ignored) which I believe to be one of the direct causes of this in a post at this blog in December last year: I was feeling tired and depressed and the post is fairly cynical.

I was identified at last year’s worldcon in Montreal as a member of “Fail Fandom” – that is, one of the fans who’d been part of Racefail 2009. (The fan who so tagged me had a habit of picking on the white fans who’d peripherally been part of Racefail and apparently simply not seeing the fans of colour who were more directly involved.)

With the helpful assistance of Kevin Standlee and Tim Illingworth and Cheryl Morgan, I put forward a late amendment to the Hugo Awards:

If in the written fiction categories, no selected nominee has a female author or co-author, the highest nominee with a female author or co-author shall also be listed, provided that the nominee would appear on the list required by Section 3.11.14 [which is the section that defines the "top fifteen" list, published within 90 days of a Worldcon's closing ceremony].

The details are in the post linked to, but presuming that the six categories affected by this amendment would be Best Novel, Best Novella, Best Novelette, Best Short Story, Best Related Book, and Best Fan Writer, I looked up the short-lists for the Hugo Awards as far back as 2000, and found that for the past decade, there wasn’t a single year in which the amendment would have lain unused: every year since 2000, there has been at least one short-list in each of these categories which was men-only, and most years, more than one. Another measurement I looked at: how often have the numbers of women and men been approximately equal in those categories? Eight times in total (out of a possible 60), and never in Best Short Story.

What changed this year?

Not one of those six categories is a men-only short list. (In fact, the only men-only short list in the Hugo Awards this year is that of Best Professional Artist.) Also, the numbers of women and men are approximately equal in three out of the six categories: Best Novelette (three women, three men) and for the first time in over a decade the Best Short Story category (two women, three men) and, in a complicated kind of way, the Best Related Book category (six entries, three with women authors, two major works of feminist science-fiction).
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International Women’s Day Science-Fiction Sonnet Challenge

Write a sonnet on women and girls reading and writing science-fiction.

Girls are reading science-fiction? What a
girl’s gotta do: transpose transform translate
re-do re-see re-late create update
hero thinker science nerd great white way
We are reading science-fiction – okay
girl, who are you? Are you hero’s soul mate
evil witch whore gopher silent oblate?
can you read science-fiction and re-play
each world in your mind as a maker of
worlds, each world of your mind makes a maker
of you, writing worlds out of words out of
science and her, robots and swords, shaker
of thoughts, whileaway nerds, and dreamer of
how you can change science-fiction, writer.

Be reminded that the deadline for Hugo nominations is Sunday 14th March 2010, 07:59 GMT (that is, midnight Saturday 13th March PST).

We left no footprints

I went to see an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery this week: The Heart of the Great Alone, a collection of the photographs and artifacts from Scott and Shackleton’s explorations in Antarctica, that were presented to King George V and Queen Alexandra about a century ago, and which Elizabeth’s curators have dug out of the teeming collection to share with us plebs. (Granted, though Royal Prerogative=Bad, having these photos and books that once belonged to your grandfather is an extremely cool use of the Royal Prerogative.)

I wanted to go because I had heard great things about Herbert George Ponting’s photography of the ice, and I was not disappointed. (Frank Hurley’s photography was also excellent.) A friend who also visited that exhibition responded to it by making a music video to Holst’s Saturn: Scott’s Last Expedition, on Youtube.

But what struck me, wandering round the exhibition, listening to commentary on the photographs and on the landscape, was how much of the exploration of Sur (“that strange continent, last Thule of the South, which lies on our maps and globes like a white cloud, a void, fringed here and there with scraps of coastline, dubious capes, supposititious islands, headlands that may or may not be there: Antarctica”) is pure narrative.

Yes, the ice is there: yes, the magnetic south pole of the Earth is there: yes, there is the vast silence – the unliving land, across which polar explorers say you talk aloud to hear something living in all the dead world.

But what Amundsen and Scott and Shackleton went for was the story.
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Hugo Voting on the Cheap

This post was written by Cheryl Morgan as part of the ongoing series about men-only short lists at the Hugo Awards. It’s full of excellent positive ideas about how we can change the men-only lists – for this year and for always! – and I hope people will comment with other ideas about nominating more women for the Hugo Awards. (I’ll post a follow-up when the short-lists go public.)

If you want to argue about whether this is worth doing, or about the Joanna Russ Amendment from last year’s Worldcon, I suggest you do so on one of the other posts on this topic, rather than take up discussion space on this one.

Update: The deadline for Hugo nominations is Sunday 14th March 2010, 07:59 GMT.

Guest post by Cheryl Morgan

It is another year, and Hugo nominations are once again open. What’s the betting that come April when the nominee lists are announced most of the people listed will be men?

Yes, I thought so. And the only way that’s going to change is if more women get involved in the process. But it costs money to participate in the Hugo process, and that’s a definite barrier. One of the many ways in which women are disadvantaged is that they are poorly paid, even for the same work, so an economic barrier will act against us. Therefore it is important to know how to participate cheaply.

Let start with some good news. Firstly, you do not have to go to Australia. Worldcon might be in Melbourne this year, but you don’t need to fork out for an attending membership, plane fares and hotels in order to vote in the Hugos. A simple “Supporting Membership” will suffice, and that only costs $50 (and may be cheaper in other currencies, depending on current exchange rates). [£31 in UK]

But, if you had a membership in last year’s Worldcon in Montréal then you already have nominating rights for Melbourne. You don’t have to pay anything more to nominate this year.

In case you are confused by that, here’s a bit more detail.
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“Just call me James”

Yesterday, James Chartrand, the founder of MenWithPens, came out: Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants:

Using a male pseudonym when you’re a woman isn’t anything new. Writers have been doing it for centuries. George Eliot, George Sand, Isak Dinesen. Even the Brontë sisters, championed today, wrote as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell back in their time.

Why did they do it? To have their work accepted, because women weren’t supposed to be writers. Their work had a much better chance if their audience didn’t have to get over initial skepticism that a woman could write at all, much less do it well.

Since then, we’ve had feminism. We have the right to vote, to own property, to be members of Parliament and Congress, to get a job, and to be the main breadwinner of the family. And yet apparently we haven’t gotten past those 19th century stigmas.

The evidence was right there in front of me.

When James Chartrand wrote under her own name, she “struggled to get gigs — there was tough competition from more experienced hustlers. When I did manage to grab a job before someone else could, I worked hard and wrote well. I wanted to do my best. I earned $1.50 an article. I averaged $8 a week. I was treated like crap, too. Bossed around, degraded, condescended to, with jibes made about my having to work from home. I quickly learned not to mention I had kids. I quickly learned not to mention I worked from my kitchen table.” When she changed her name to James Chartrand, “Instantly, jobs became easier to get. There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all. Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.”

As Kate Harding on Salon notes (and many others round the blogosphere today) it’s not a shock so much as a sobering reminder of what happens when you write like a woman.

I’d been meaning to do a statistics-laden follow-up to my posts on the Joanna Russ Amendment (Late Business at the Hugo Awards), and been putting off writing it because I didn’t have time (seriously: I got back from Canada and fell into work, and the only reason I have time to post this now is because I am off work with a cold).

The statistics I wanted to gather had to do with the number of people who nominate writers and novels for Hugo Awards: to confirm the point that many people have made, that shortlists for the Hugos – the top six, the top fifteen – are voted into existance by a very small number of people.

Adrienne Martini suggests that “The solution is to get more women involved with fandom so that they are invested in voting for the award” but this seems to me to be as misguided as her apparent belief that if Ursula K. LeGuin had won a Hugo for “The Royals of Hegn”, this would have been a “pity Hugo”, awarded to LeGuin because women writers “can only succeed if the rules are changed”. (“The Royals of Hegn” would have been added to the short-story Hugo shortlist under the Joanna Russ Amendment rules in 2001.)

I have been involved in fandom since I was 16 – for over a quarter of a century. I’ve been to four Worldcons (though at the first one I didn’t hold a voting membership). Two in Glasgow, easy to commit to buying a membership since I could get there and back each day if I had to: and of course Anticipation in Montreal, an expensive holiday but a fun one. Not one I could afford to take every year, even if I were willing to travel to the US any more. I am involved in fandom: but voting for the Hugos would be far too expensive to commit to every year, and rule changes to make voting for the Hugos less expensive can only happen if a majority of regular Worldcon attendees agree that they want to let people vote for the Hugos who won’t be coming to the Worldcon. (The WSFS rules can only be successfully amended by majority vote at two WSFS business meetings in succession, and proxy votes are not permitted: therefore, you cannot hope to make a change in WSFS rules unless you are able to attend – not just buy a membership, but physically attend – on a regular basis. I watched as elderly regulars argued against and voted down rule-changes requiring Worldcons to make it easier for parents to attend Worldcon with their families, or young people to buy cheaper memberships, and formed the pretty strong conviction that most regular attenders at Worldcons do not want anything about their Worldcon to change.)

In order to nominate in the Hugo awards, two conditions apply: one must be (or have been) a Worldcon member before February for that Hugo year; and one must be able to buy or borrow enough newly-published SFF fiction to be able to nominate. This year, the first condition applies to me: the second doesn’t, though I do plan to try to read enough to be able to fill in a nomination form (given the wasps-nest I stirred up, that seems only fair). Voting for the Hugos on a regular basis is something you can only do if you live in North America and are at least well-off enough to buy new science-fiction and take your annual holiday every year at Worldcon time – or if you are much more well-off and can afford to take an annual holiday in North America most years (in which case, you can probably also afford to buy plenty of new SF…) It’s not a game for the poor, and women tend to be much less well-off than men, and much less likely to think they can spend what money they have on their own pleasures.

I got a lot of flack from various sources for proposing the Joanna Russ Amendment. I will admit here that while it would certainly have been fun if it had passed, the best I hoped for it ever was to get through to the Saturday business meeting and have discussion time there – I was not altogether surprised, however, when it got shot down without discussion at the end of Friday’s business meeting. What I wanted was to get people talking about all-male shortlists, about why every year for the past ten years at least there has never been a Hugo that was free of all-male shortlists: SF writers who write under women’s names are systematically ignored and devalued. It’s the James effect: it doesn’t take much.

When I thought about it, I realised that I should never have expected many woman writers who might someday get onto a Hugo shortlist to speak up in support of the principle. (And indeed, Cheryl Morgan, who won a Best Fan Writer Hugo in 2009, was the only one who did – though her strong support and help was worth a thousand: thanks again.)

For professional writers, winning a Hugo is to a certain extent an advantageous award. (Well, primarily, it keeps your book in print for longer, according to what I’ve been told.) To go out of your way to offend the small group of fans who nominate writers for this Hugo and that, by pointing out their sexist bias is responsible for all-male shortlists and means better writers are ignored and devalued because of their gender, would be professionally disadvantageous… to say the least. Add the James effect on – that these fans are not inclined to pick women writers – and the best response to the Joanna Russ Amendment for a professional woman writer would be outrage and open anger – how dare I suggest that the voting pool is biased, that the reason so few women writers are nominated is because the fans who do the nominating are subject to the James effect?

Well, I am not a professional writer. I write fanfic, and – as I noted on another panel at the Worldcon – one of the chief advantages of being a fanfic writer is that you have absolutely no standards to live up to: you can take whatever literary risks you want, because everyone with any literary standards whatsoever has already judged your writing as worthless. And I am not a Worldcon regular: I have nothing to lose by proposing the Joanna Russ Amendment – or by suggesting that if there’s another set of all-male shortlists, someone else should bring that pesky apple to the next WSFS business meeting and throw it at that wasp’s nest.

Because we need to break the institutionalised concept that so long as men succeed, the rules don’t need to change. And that’s a nasty, backhanded message.

Nomimations for this year’s Hugo Awards should open in early 2010. Are we going to see another year of “Just Call Me James” shortlists?