women in genre fiction

2014: The Year When Science Fiction And Fantasy Woke Up To Diversity

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This post by Damien Walter originally appeared on The Guardian on 1/2/15.

A year of unprecedented success for women writers was matched by a flood of new voices from the self-publishing scene

Looking back at 2014, you can sum it up in one word: diversity. The world of science fiction and fantasy saw diversity not only in the voices that found success, definitively turning the page on 2013’s chainmail binkinigate, but also in the means of production. While the metaphysical themes so vital to SF continued their conquest of the mainstream, it was the year when independent digital publishing changed the genre for good.

One book dominated the awards in 2014: Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. This debut novel evokes a future world in which gender is unimportant, a transformation Leckie renders by exclusively referring to characters with the pronoun “she”. Its unconventional take on gender politics helped Ancillary Justice make a clean sweep of the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA awards, a rare and deserved achievement.

 

Read the full post on The Guardian.

 

One Weird Old Trick to Undermine the Patriarchy

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This post by Michelle Nijhuis originally appeared on The Last Word on Nothing on 12/18/13.

My five-year-old insists that Bilbo Baggins is a girl.

The first time she made this claim, I protested. Part of the fun of reading to your kids, after all, is in sharing the stories you loved as a child. And in the story I knew, Bilbo was a boy. A boy hobbit. (Whatever that entails.)

But my daughter was determined. She liked the story pretty well so far, but Bilbo was definitely a girl. So would I please start reading the book the right way?

I hesitated. I imagined Tolkien spinning in his grave. I imagined mean letters from his testy estate. I imagined the story getting as lost in gender distinctions as dwarves in the Mirkwood.

Then I thought: What the hell, it’s just a pronoun. My daughter wants Bilbo to be a girl, so a girl she will be.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Last Word on Nothing.