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.)

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.

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.

Being the one who looks is the position of power. Bitchy Jones (whose blog is absolutely amazing and absolutely NSFW) wrote in Who’s a pretty boy then:

But, look, right, let’s workshop. And by workshop I mean I’ll keep hitting these keys until feel less-sectionablely-hysterical and then we can all get on with our lives. What the f*k is an out of shape submissive man all about? How does that even make sense? If you really truly are all and only about my pleasure, how come you’re not all working out round the clock and living on egg whites just to see me smile?

How come you’re not all (or an above national average proportion of you) totally buff and groomed and lust scented like gay men?

How come submissive men aren’t all about well cut jeans and tight t shirts over their lickable torsos and expensively cut knicker-dampening suits and butchy boots and dirty looks. Yeah, not all women like the same thing, but there are vague ideas, there are archetypes women find hot and until you can buy a Hot Sissy Maid 2010 calendar in my supermarket I’m betting the look most submissive men are going for isn’t one of them.

I mean, why? Why are you doing something that no women want or like? Isn’t that, like, the opposite of your entire thing?

I love Bitchy Jones. I’m probably going to be quoting her quite a lot in this post. Because there is no other way that she would ever get to confront this Common Sense Atheist, who asks in a following post (entitled) “Am I Sexist (round 2)” (yes, he ended up having to do a series):

So all that leads me to suspect the last post in this series is going to have the title “Yup, I Was Being Sexist.” But I don’t really know yet, because I’m still trying to figure out what the arguments are. Obviously, there are lots of bad or obscure arguments on offer against my original position. Researchers in moral psychology have shown that moral judgment usually happens like this: We have an emotional reaction to something, and then we invent post-hoc reasons to defend our unthinking emotional reaction. And of course that’s no different here.

This is the classic: How can I be sexist? I didn’t mean to be! But in reaction to this, let me post Bitchy Jones in response to an equally deadening reaction from the organiser of an online “Bondage Award” contest which was in principle open to all, and yet in which the only photos on display were of women being tied up:

Well, before I jump up and down and froth too much (like I ever..) let’s see what the awards people have to say: they point out patiently, that right-minded, sane complaints are all very well, but really, they – the awards – are not actually sexist because they never meant to be sexist.

Yes, it’s unfortunate that in the page inviting nominations women are pictured tied up, being drawn tied up and, um, surfing the net wearing a ball gag. (WHAT? People do that? Or is it just a way of making a woman who is looking at porn still a looked at bondage-sexay thing – because, god, women can’t just look at porn without also putting on some kind of sexy pantomime for anyone looking on (who? who surfs porn for an audience)). Really, though, really, I have never seen anything so stubbornly insist that women have to be the sexual display object even when they are consuming porn. And what is she even looking at. Sites featuring sneering mandoms? Do they exist? I’m guessing no. Meanwhile the guys (who are – irrelevant aside – hot) get to be riggers (ahem), photographers, artists, retailers, owners of fetish companies, consumers of pay-for porn (yeah women only surf free sites – wearing ball gags – so no one ever make any porn for them. There’s no money in it.) In other words, the men get to be sexual agents.

But, yeah, just unfortunate. Because, the most fabulous and rigorous argument against sexist arsehattery (or other retrograde arsehattery) is wheeled out here: it is just this way because it is, okay! It just turned out this way. In fact, all representation of anything ever that seems to endorse only the majority viewpoint and tastes is just a fucking coincidence, okay, and stop whining or, you know, pointing it out.

Apparently, the guy who runs the awards just took a bunch of his favourite pictures off of his hardest drive and sent them to an artist who drew the pics. And that is just what happened, okay, so shut up. No one is trying to be sexist. Calm down, dear.

Look, why does slash make (some) men feel so uncomfortable? It takes the butchy/heroic guys they’re supposed to get to identify with, and sets them up as sex objects. Women write stories about these guys getting sexually used: describing them in luscious, flattering, sexual terminology: women are objectifying men. Men find that disturbing. At a convention I’ve been going to for some years, the first year I went they had one slash panel, held Sunday night, that was packed out: the next year they had half a dozen, attended by slash fans only: the year after, they had so many I had to miss some, and not a few were attended by non-slash fans, some of whom caused trouble by insisting we had to justify ourselves: and last year, one slash panel was convened by a man who opened the panel by declaring that he didn’t much care for m/m slash, what he wanted to know was where to find the slash stories with women in them. (And bizarrely, an audience full of slash fans, most of whom would have rather talked about m/m slash, helpfully tried to direct him to the saffic slash sites.)

P Z Myers writes in response to Common Sense Atheist:

I’m also bothered by the premise. I think it’s an excellent idea to promote the idea that scientists can be sexy, and women who are comfortable with that should be able to proudly present themselves as sexual beings. But the important concept is that women should have the choice, and their decisions should be respected. Men do not get the privilege of having the roving eye, of being able to pick individual women out of the crowd to tell them that here, they get to be object of sexual interest, especially not if they’re going to then publicly display them as clever eye candy.

There are so many things wrong with the Common Sense Atheist post, his dismissal of women trying to explain what’s wrong with it not least of them – but one of the worst is just that he’s taken pics that people put up on the Internet and decided that these real people, these scientists and students, are just to be dismissed as pinup girls. These are real people, with real careers, who may not even be aware that their pic is appearing on this blog post as this charmer’s “sexy scientist”.

I have written stories in which fictional characters get used and abused and objectified. I don’t write RPS because my imagination cannot get going on the real people – even though the vast majority of RPS is about the public persona of famous people (actors, singers, politicians), rather than the people themselves, and I’ve read and enjoyed RPS that was so clearly satire or out-there fantasy that I suspect the people named wouldn’t care if they did read it. (Blair getting screwed by Bush: is this RPS or political satire?)

The power to look is a privilege that men do not relinquish gladly, whether they express it by forcing women to cover or to uncover, by taking over BDSM culture or by objectifying scientists or by showing up at slash panels and demanding that the women present talk about anything other than the sexual use of fictional men. The power to look and the power to ensure women don’t look back.

Bitchy Jones gets the last word:

19 out of every twenty dominant women aren’t happy or comfortable with femdom as an identity or a place to live. That’s a lot.

That’s 95%.

95% of dominant women aren’t comfortable in femdom. Are being shut out of there own sexual culture.

Maybe there’s more to this than individual acts between individuals?

And I can’t pretend it’s all okay. Something is very wrong here. I’m sorry if your kink got in my way but, really, what would you do it you were me?

And that’s why I have this sledgehammer.

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.

1. Use the discussions that went before, and the notes that were taken, and the resulting “policy” as a mine for data about what worked or didn’t work in the past. Use that mine for unrefined ore which you will not take out and show about in public. Yes, the discussions and results made sense at the time: yes, we were all people of goodwill and we meant well: but nonetheless, this is Leo McGarry’s rule brought to life: don’t.

2. Consider as a framework all the possible kinds of things that might prevent someone from coming to your event or make them feel unwelcome when they’re there. Discriminatory or offensive language; mobility issues; childcare issues; visual impairments; hearing impairments; dietary issues; travel costs; accommodation costs.

3. There are the things that can be done for free (or at trivial costs) and that will tend to improve the event for everyone regardless; there are the things that are worth doing providing people tell you when they book they’re going to use them: there are the things that are unaffordable. And there are the things you didn’t think of yet: and there are the things it is your legal obligation to do.

4. The things that are free/low cost should get done regardless – and, in a public access policy, say that’s what you do. (Print essential information in 14-point sans serif: mark off front-row seating for disabled-access: declare a “respect yourself and others at all times” policy on language: don’t serve alcohol at the event itself: tell the venue to provide vegetarian/vegan food options and to clearly label buffet dishes accordingly. These are things the organisation I work for has found we can do without cost to ourselves.)

5. The things that are worth doing if someone’s going to use them: ask people to specify their access needs when they book. Provide a field on the form for them to do so. Have someone whose job it is to check this and to get back to the person. (It is not worth trying to organise a wheat-free buffet for all for the sake of one coeliac, I say from personal experience, but it absolutely is worth making sure there are wheat-free cookies supplied with the tea and coffee so they have something to nibble on like everyone else, and that the venue has a clearly labelled wheat-free plate at each meal.)

6. Check local and national legislation and by-laws. If it’s your legal obligation to do it, you may as well make a virtue of necessity by declaring that you’re doing it as a matter of policy. It’s friendlier, it’s more open, and do you really want to come across as a group that’s only permitting certain people to be there because the law requires you let them be? (For example: it is unlawful, in the UK, to prevent a woman from breastfeeding her baby anywhere she has a legal right to be. It is unlawful, if someone needs a support person, to stop the support person from being with them.)

7. When it comes down to what costs money and what you can afford and what is possible given the venue, the size of the event, the time it would take to set something up: there are always going to be things that would be helpful that you just can’t afford to do. And that is the most awkward part of an access policy. But see zero, the alpha and the omega; if you’re not doing it because you can’t afford to, say upfront that’s why and you’re really sorry. If you’re not doing it because venue logistics don’t permit, well, say so and apologise. If you’re not doing it because you don’t wanna, see point zero and grow up.

8. Say on the policy that there will be clearly-identifiable volunteers at the event whose job it is to figure out solutions to access needs that didn’t come up in advance. And have those volunteers. Make sure they know who to ask at the venue (and the venue staff know them) if there’s something that can be done. Because nobody can think of everything. But you can always make sure someone is there to be helpful.

9. Remember rule zero.

Anyone want to link to/suggest fan access policies that in their view get it right?

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) As it turns out, Bingtown and the Rain Wild are also a homophobic culture. No explanation is offered for this, either: it’s simply presented as normal that a gay man will grow up completely unaware – and that he will be so vulnerable in his unawareness that he will be the target for a man more aware than he is.

There is a same-sex relationship in The Dragon Keeper. It’s the first adult same-sex relationship that I think Robin Hobb consciously wrote. It’s presented as that of a wealthy man dominating and abusing a less-wealthy man, a gay man marrying a straight woman without telling her he is gay, without explaining to her that he intends to move his lover and employee into the house with them. Both men lie to the woman to keep their secret. This hurts her appalllingly. As it would.

Where does the homophobia in Bingtown come from? Why is it that Hobb doesn’t appear able to conceive of a society that isn’t homophobic?

Why did Dickens invent Fagin? Not because Dickens was consciously anti-Semitic: but because Dickens had been reared in an anti-Semitic culture, that took for granted ugly stereotypes like Fagin. And Fagin is, while an anti-Semitic stereotype, also a real person – as developed a character as Dickens usually makes.

Hest is a real person: I can see why the homophobia of Bingtown, the denial and lies forced on him, have made him the way he is – as I can see how his treatment of Sedric and of Alise have warped them: and neither of them had been treated well by Bingtown’s culture before Hest came along. Alise because her scholarly fascination with dragons was treated as, at best, an eccentricity: Sedric because his sexual orientation had left him devastatingly ignorant.

But. Alise, in her story, seems to be changing – to become alive to the possibilities for a woman independent of her family. There are strong hints she’ll move on from her gay husband to be with a straight man who admires and respects her. There no hints whatsoever that Sedric will move on from his abusive relationship with his lover to be with another gay man who admires and respects him.

Maybe it’s just the circles I move in, but I like to think that, as a culture we are moving away from homophobia and heterosexism, into a culture where it is taken for granted that “some people gay, get over it”. We aren’t there yet, but every success gets us closer: in the week that the Prime Minister of Australia declared her belief that “marriage is between a man and a woman”, the Prime Minister of Iceland married her wife.

It becomes more and more uncomfortable to read novels in which the authorial background takes for granted that homophobia is normal, that assumes gay men will inevitably grow up ignorant and warped by hatred and invisibility: that leaves lesbians invisible. Especially this is discomforting in the universe I walked into, as a writer, even before I came out: because in SF, I did not need to be trapped by heterosexism.

I don’t mean to judge Robin Hobb in particular for her cultural homophobia. I don’t think that would be fair, any more than it would be fair to judge Dickens in particular for his cultural anti-Semitism. But I’m still left with this discomfort: a writer I enjoyed that I seem to be leaving behind in a trap I can’t endure.

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.

It’s thinking about the story, where thinking involves telling a story. Martin gets that:

I would strongly suspect that out there somewhere there must be ALIENS fanfic where Newt does NOT die horribly too. It’s love of the characters that prompts people to write these things. Hell, if I was ever hired to write a new ALIENS film, the first thing I would do would be to say, “Hey, remember how at the end of ALIENS Newt asks if she will dream? Well, she will. All the films from that moment have just been her bad dreams. We’ll open my new movie with Newt and Ripley waking up…” Which would be a sort of retconning, I know, which I just denounced. So sue me. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. It would also be the most expensive fanfic in history, I guess.

(And it would be great! I’d go see that film in a heartbeat.)

But. There are plenty of non-storytellers who would never think of that. Newt died at the beginning of Aliens Cubed. That’s that and nothing can change it. They wouldn’t do what a storyteller does: think about what happened and think about what happened next and it’s a story that’s coming into being, a narrative force that’s building like a whirlwind, all the metaphors and cliches to describe the moment when you feel the living alien stir inside you and you know that either the story ends now or else the time comes when you feel it burst out of your chest… and if you are a writer, you write the story down. Or you put it away. Forever. The alien doesn’t burst out if you take care to end the story before it quickens. It’s an abortion, but that’s the writer’s choice: there’s nothing wrong with aborting a story if you know you can’t write it as it should be written. It’s no fun, but abortions never are. It’s just necessary, sometimes.

I understand what Martin means when he says

I don’t want those pictures in my head. Even if they’re nice pictures, if you love my characters and only do nice, sweet, happy things to them. You’re still messing around with my people. I won’t use any analogies here, I know how that upsets people… but there is a sense of violation.

Any writer would understand that, I think (well, okay, nothing says a writer has to have any empathy for other writers, but if you are a writer with empathy for how other writers feel as well as how you yourself feel, you know that you feel that way about your characters and that this is how other writers feel too…) With one or two exceptions in giftfests like Yuletide, I’ve never written fanfiction in another writer’s universe when the writer was alive and I knew s/he didn’t want that to happen, because I do appreciate how they feel about it. (That’s print universes. TV and film have way too many creators for me to worry if any one of them doesn’t like fanfic: no one of the creators involved can really have that kind of intimate connection with their characters.)

But the real problem, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell from the occasions when a writer bursts out in horrified verbal rage at the other writers messing around with their people (and fanfic writers are not immune from this: it’s not legal ownership that gives you that feeling of connection!) is not the fanfic itself – it’s the actualised proof that fans of your work are reading your stories and yet they’re thinking things about your characters that you didn’t want them to think.

Look. I’m a writer. I am arrogant enough to believe that I can make you think what I want you to think with the power of words. I’m sane enough to know that even as you read what I write you may be arguing with this not agreeing with it – just because my words are entering your mind as you read, doesn’t mean your thoughts are falling into line beside them. But if I didn’t believe that I can change your mind with words, why would I be writing this?

Fanfic is visible evidence that although you read and loved the story that the writer wanted you to get, you didn’t think about that story as the writer wanted you to think. Love isn’t all. It’s a great deal, but love is never enough. The need to tell the story is what gives birth to the story, nothing more, nothing less. And it’s only copyright and legal ownership that has made some of this storytelling separate from the rest of the written word and called it fanfiction.

“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.)

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.

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 ]]> http://blogs.feministsf.net/?feed=rss2&p=1358 8 http://blogs.feministsf.net/?p=1351 http://blogs.feministsf.net/?p=1351#comments Sun, 11 Apr 2010 11:05:25 +0000 Yonmei http://blogs.feministsf.net/?p=1351 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?