mariness

But I find myself impelled to chat about the table of contents for The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF. As many others have pointed out, this supposedly mindblowing book does not have one story in it by a woman, or a person of color. Or Isaac Asimov. (tchernabyelo has an excellent post suggesting that the Table of Contents even does a disservice to white male writers.)

I was going to stay silent on this, really, I was. I suck at these sorts of conversations. And then I remembered three more conversations/blog posts I've been in/read about just this week that chatted about the perception that men read/write science fiction and women read/write fantasy. Never mind that a couple of the major bestselling fantasy writers out there have been men (Tolkien, Robert Jordan, George RR Martin, Ted Williams.) (Or, amusingly enough, that it was two guys who told me to read Twilight. I'm still working on forgiving them for this.) Never mind that some of the major bestselling and ground breaking science fiction writers have been women (Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, Nancy Kress, far more) Never mind that the boundary between the two fields is extremely questionable to begin with and many works of speculative fiction contain elements of both, and many writers write in both fields.

No, what's upsetting me is the robots.

When I was a kid, I had no taste in books whatsoever. None. For crying out loud, I read Enid Blyton and Bobbsey Twin books. Yes, it was that bad. My horrified parents and grandfather tried to help by sneaking in decent books, some of which I did like/love. Two things, though, could automatically make any book ABSOLUTELY GREAT:

Robots.
Dinosaurs.

(Alas, no one ever wrote the ultimate book for me: a book where all the dinosaurs were secretly robots and trampled all over schools and found pirate treasure and kidnapped criminals. I did tell you I had no taste as a kid, right? Moving on.)

I loved robot books. Good, bad, indifferent – it really didn't matter; if it had a robot in it, I read it. I also watched Star Trek and played Star Wars with all of my friends, all of whom wanted to be Han Solo because, let's face it, Han had an ACTUAL spaceship and in the last two movies redeemed himself by also having robots.

Fantasy, at the time, was a decidedly secondary love. Yes, I loved Oz and Narnia and the Nesbitt books. But I wanted robots. And come to think of it, Oz actually had a robot (Tik-tok, the mechanical man who needs to be wound up). No wonder I loved Oz. Talking animals AND ROBOTS. But I digress.

In case it hasn't been clear, I'm a girl.

And each and every time someone says something like this:

" That probably has something to do with my concept of "mind-blowing". Women are every bit as capable of writing mindblowing sf as men are, but with women the stories concentrate far more on people, life, society and not the hard-scientific concepts I was looking for."

I want to respond with, "BUT, ROBOTS!"

I mean, I could dispute this by chatting about Connie Willis and Ursula LeGuin and Nancy Kress, or about how the phrase mindblowing sf does not necessarily have to exclude a focus on people, life and society, or how much of the very best science fiction focuses on how hard scientific concepts change people, life and society (and robots!). I could note that this just again perpetuates the ingrained and frustrating fallacy that not only sees science fiction and fantasy as two opposing genres (even though they're continually shelved together in bookstores and libraries), so ingrained that even someone like this particular anthologist/editor, who has focused on and published female writers before, finds himself repeating it.

Instead, I'll just say it again:

I love robots. Really, really, love robots.

Even the ones that don't look like dinosaurs.