Women in SF and Fantasy
Probably everyone here is aware of the discussion going on all over about a recent discussion of the "best" works of SF, and how few women were mentioned.
la_marquise_de began a list of women writers whose works she felt should be represented on that list, and encouraged others to do so.
Here is my problem with such lists: my eyes begin to glaze, especially after I hit a few and think, "Why is that on there? I thought it was a forgettable stinker." Obviously, it wasn't a forgettable stinker to somebody else, but a lovely and important work that has an honored place on her shelf.
And the list gets longer.
Does anyone read such lists for reading? Maybe another type of mind from mine--lists daunt me if I can't find a connection between the items.
However, today she asks for why--which is something I can get behind. I am going to track this post, because now, I hope, people will talk about why they love those books, including the ones I filed away in my stinker bin years ago, and haven't thought about since. Maybe I'll revisit the book, or maybe I'll discover a new vector. Either way, it's a win win, and it also propagates discussion of female-written books, which moves against the endless tide of the same three or four guys' books being discussed.
For older works, from authors no longer living, my mind goes back to ones that were seminal in shaping my tastes and my evolving worldview. A couple of these would be Elizabeth Marie Pope, whose sprightly mystery involving ghosts, The Sherwood Ring I first read as a grade-schooler as part of my secret mandate to read everything with the name Sherwood in it. (I was, um, trying to find secret contacts hidden in books from my adopted girl gang from another world. Well, I was under ten.) Anyway, that book helped shape my taste for history, which had already been discovered when I first read Mara, Daughter of the Nile, by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, and for romance-flavored comedy-of-manners.
But Pope's really great work, Perilous Gard I think was seminal in shaping the urban fantasy of the past thirty years, with her unsentimental look at elves, and her sympathetic understanding of the Elizabethan paradigm, made clear to a young reader unfamiliar with history.
Unfortunately, Pope, a Milton scholar and a professor at Mills College, had been weakened by the polio outbreak of the early fifties, and only wrote those two books.
Another was Marion Zimmer Bradley. I loved her books as a college student and twenty-something. It's difficult to go back and read them now, as she wrote fast, and her prose could be rocky at times, but here's the thing that struck me when thinking about her body of work. Her early stories were rip-snorters plotwise, containing a lot of the unexamined prejudices and attitudes of the time. But she was already questioning those attitudes, and as time went on, she began exploring those attitudes and extrapolating changes through her Darkover books. Finally, when she wrote Mists of Avalon from a feminist and pagan POV, (which had a stunning effect when it came out) she was swimming in paradigm clashes.
I remember seeing her working through this, from my distance as a dweeby twenty-something occasionally visiting Greyhaven at the time she was writing this. I sat there in daunted and respectful silence as I listened to writing talk over dinner, when Marion would visit, as she did pretty much every day.
Though she'd sold the book to Lester Del Rey, who was hailed (rightly) as innovative in the fantasy field, she used to go over and talk about the book to Donald Wollheim, a rival editor, but who was also an innovative editor in the field, and who had developed a long relationship with Marion. He willingly served as a sounding board, suspecting (rightly) that this would be Marion's breakout book.
Diana L. Paxson and Deborah Ross have since carried on with the Avalon-era historical fantasies and with Darkover respectively--their prose skills are much more polished than Marion's, but also, they have (I think) successfully bridged the raw paradigm clash sensibilities that Marion was struggling to express through her galloping plots, and the sensibilities of the present day.
la_marquise_de began a list of women writers whose works she felt should be represented on that list, and encouraged others to do so.
Here is my problem with such lists: my eyes begin to glaze, especially after I hit a few and think, "Why is that on there? I thought it was a forgettable stinker." Obviously, it wasn't a forgettable stinker to somebody else, but a lovely and important work that has an honored place on her shelf.
And the list gets longer.
Does anyone read such lists for reading? Maybe another type of mind from mine--lists daunt me if I can't find a connection between the items.
However, today she asks for why--which is something I can get behind. I am going to track this post, because now, I hope, people will talk about why they love those books, including the ones I filed away in my stinker bin years ago, and haven't thought about since. Maybe I'll revisit the book, or maybe I'll discover a new vector. Either way, it's a win win, and it also propagates discussion of female-written books, which moves against the endless tide of the same three or four guys' books being discussed.
For older works, from authors no longer living, my mind goes back to ones that were seminal in shaping my tastes and my evolving worldview. A couple of these would be Elizabeth Marie Pope, whose sprightly mystery involving ghosts, The Sherwood Ring I first read as a grade-schooler as part of my secret mandate to read everything with the name Sherwood in it. (I was, um, trying to find secret contacts hidden in books from my adopted girl gang from another world. Well, I was under ten.) Anyway, that book helped shape my taste for history, which had already been discovered when I first read Mara, Daughter of the Nile, by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, and for romance-flavored comedy-of-manners.
But Pope's really great work, Perilous Gard I think was seminal in shaping the urban fantasy of the past thirty years, with her unsentimental look at elves, and her sympathetic understanding of the Elizabethan paradigm, made clear to a young reader unfamiliar with history.
Unfortunately, Pope, a Milton scholar and a professor at Mills College, had been weakened by the polio outbreak of the early fifties, and only wrote those two books.
Another was Marion Zimmer Bradley. I loved her books as a college student and twenty-something. It's difficult to go back and read them now, as she wrote fast, and her prose could be rocky at times, but here's the thing that struck me when thinking about her body of work. Her early stories were rip-snorters plotwise, containing a lot of the unexamined prejudices and attitudes of the time. But she was already questioning those attitudes, and as time went on, she began exploring those attitudes and extrapolating changes through her Darkover books. Finally, when she wrote Mists of Avalon from a feminist and pagan POV, (which had a stunning effect when it came out) she was swimming in paradigm clashes.
I remember seeing her working through this, from my distance as a dweeby twenty-something occasionally visiting Greyhaven at the time she was writing this. I sat there in daunted and respectful silence as I listened to writing talk over dinner, when Marion would visit, as she did pretty much every day.
Though she'd sold the book to Lester Del Rey, who was hailed (rightly) as innovative in the fantasy field, she used to go over and talk about the book to Donald Wollheim, a rival editor, but who was also an innovative editor in the field, and who had developed a long relationship with Marion. He willingly served as a sounding board, suspecting (rightly) that this would be Marion's breakout book.
Diana L. Paxson and Deborah Ross have since carried on with the Avalon-era historical fantasies and with Darkover respectively--their prose skills are much more polished than Marion's, but also, they have (I think) successfully bridged the raw paradigm clash sensibilities that Marion was struggling to express through her galloping plots, and the sensibilities of the present day.