Strong female characters Part 1: Saving the world from strong female characters so you don't have to

[mcjulie]

So, this year. There was this thing nominated for a Hugo. You might have heard of it - “Transhuman and Subhuman,” a collection of essays nominally on the subject of science fiction by John C. Wright. It was in the Hugo packet. One of the essays is the novel-length anti-feminist ramble:

“Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters”

Comments

[trepkos]

Wonderful! Are you going to publish this anywhere he might read it?

[mcjulie]

Well, he MIGHT read my blog or Livejournal... but if he did, he'd just accuse me of libel.

[randy_byers]

So far so good.

[mcjulie]

Well, the strong female characters haven't destroyed science fiction yet, although I have it on good authority that actual women destroy science fiction.

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/special-issues/women-destroy-sf/table-of-contents/

[randy_byers]

Been there, done that, went to the Potlatch.

[uly]

I like toothsome as an adjective -- but then I'm probably a bad person.

Is he really suggesting that a hero should have no perceivable flaws, and be hyper-competent in all things?

[mcjulie]

I'm probably a bad person.

That's true, but I think it mostly came across as gross and creepy in context. His pompous old-fashioned persona makes lubricious words like "toothsome" come across not as an adult man appreciating the beauty of an adult woman, but as an aging college professor licking his lips over a freshman English student.

Is he really suggesting that a hero should have no perceivable flaws, and be hyper-competent in all things?

That's certainly how it seemed. At every point, he talked about characters only in termed of their supposed virtues.

[slaymesoftly]

He crams words into his prose until the sentences cannot absorb any more and random clauses start to precipitate out.

You need to have a second career as a reviewer. Just saying... This made me giggle while I was totally imagining his writing style. Well done. A shame he will probably never see it. :)

[mcjulie]

I'm glad it amused you! It amused me when I thought of it as a way to describe how overstuffed his prose is. But I'm probably way too slow at this to get very far as a reviewer.