Who's missing?

[coalescent]

Poll

Actual answer here. Vote before you click.

EDIT: See also jlassen's two entries, and Andrew Wheeler here.

FURTHER EDIT: Commentary from rosefox here and cristalia here.

Comments

[rozk]

Have people learned NOTHING!!!

I am not asking for anti-sexist gender parity, nice as that would be. CYA anti-sexist gender parity would do just fine.

[coalescent]

What gets me is it looks to me as though there was some effort made to solicit stories from women writers -- I mean, Maureen McHugh and Eileen Gunn are not (alas) hugely prolific, so I'm guessing they were asked for stories. But it's a bit pointless doing that if you're then going to slap a boy's own cover on the thing.

[bluetyson]

Not hugely prolific, and not as good, either.

Eileen Gunn
Ellen Klages
Ysabeau Wilce
Maureen F. McHugh

Wouldn't be a lot of people looking twice at that list, in big letters, if you want to go the other extreme.

Jones, sure, maybe. I really like her books, does she have US appeal?

[mroctober]

I very much enjoy Klages work. With new stories from her and Ford, I had planned on buying this puppy.

[alexmc]

In trying to second guess you I note that the two "mistakes" I put in were women. I thought Maureen F. McHugh and Gwyneth Jones were more likely to help sell a collection than Lucius Shepard or Jeffrey Ford. (I've never even *heard* of Ford!)

But I am not going to assume there was definitely sexism involved. There could be many other reasons for chosing those names which might be perfectly innocent.

(stupid, ignorant, but innocent.)

[alexmc]

Hmmm, the writers themselves were roughly 50/50 split between male/female AFAIK.

[coalescent]

There are fifteen stories, seven of which are by women. (Nine men in total, because one of the stories has two writers.)

[coalescent]

I think the logic was probably "put the biggest names on the cover". Whether or not the names chosen are indeed the biggest names, or whether it might have been better to sacrifice one or two of them to avoid leaving half the audience feeling shut out, I leave as an exercise for the reader.

[grahamsleight]

Huh, 4 for 5, my mistake being that I put in Lanagan instead of Nix. The lesson I take from this being that the choice of names is even more strongly oriented towards the US market than I'd thought - though this should've been obvious to me.

[alexmc]

That was roughly why I put Nix in :-)

[coalescent]

Abigail is five for five!

[coalescent]

Also, we've gone from zero original unthemed sf anthology series to three (Fast Fwd, Eclipse, and the Solaris book of SF) in under 12 months ...

[alexmc]

too right!

;-)

[white_hart]

I've picked the five I've heard of...

[coalescent]

A useful datapoint in itself. :)

[white_hart]

Well, it either means they've been around for 20 years or that you or lslaw has discussed them at length and made them sound interesting...