How to Change an Industry

[zhai]

It seems that the feminism issue rears its head on the speculative fiction blogosphere about once every six months, maybe more frequently if you follow specific blogs in question. I'd been meaning, with certain trepidation, to throw my hat in, and now seems an opportune time as I have found myself unwittingly participating in one editor's salvo in

Comments

[zhai]

Oh, I am very familiar with S&S, and I was very pleased to see Norilana pick them up. I used to collect the S&S volumes, and I still have the earliest ones (including S&S2, the first appearance of Tarma & Kethry, Mercedes Lackey's semi-famous woman's-empowerment characters) -- Marion Zimmer Bradley sent me my first ever rejection letter, and I followed her writing advice like gospel in my early years.

MZBFM is probably, now that you mention it, the closest thing there's been to the kind of magazine I'm talking about, and it seems entirely possible and plausible that its absence in the market is what drives a lot of the readership discontent. Authors like Lackey and Bradley and McCaffrey established a thorough readerbase of motivated, strong, passionate female readers who now largely lack those three lynchpins of that kind of fiction. Lackey still writes, but has moved into romance in a big way, McCaffrey is no longer writing (I think, anyway) and Bradley is gone. This is pure conjecture, of course, and the market has also shifted and new authors have sprung up... but none, I think, possibly with the exception of Kate Elliot, who fill that niche. It's an interesting dynamic to inspect.

[elenuial]

I think a large part of that is that the chunk of your generation of readers who turned into this generation's writers are now writing for the next generation, and what they're putting out (and what is overwhelmingly popular) is that hair's-breadth difference from paranormal romance: urban fantasy.

So the people who would fulfill that niche are instead fulfilling a larger, more lucrative niche for the time being.

I would bet that may be related to why Misty's shifted to romance of late (in a correlation, rather than a cause-and-effect relationship).

My first real writing mentor in SF was Elizabeth Massie (even though she only gave me the time of one day). When I get my first novel out, I'll likely dedicate it to her, because what she gave me was the determination to actually make it writing.