When I was a college student and a very casual reader, at best, of fantasy, one of my favorite chunky anthologies were The Mammoth Book of X series. Such as: The Mammoth Book of Fantasy, The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories, The Mammoth Book of King Arthur, The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy, etc. Even The Mammoth Book of Future Cops, back when I thought SF was “fantasy, but in the future.”
So when I heard about the upcoming The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Science Fiction (Running Press) I was filled with a mix of nostalgia and anticipation, because now I know more about SF (although a lot of times I still class it as “fantasy, but in the future, and sometimes with science that my college physics professor would probably shoot the author in the head over”).
And then the table of contents for TMBOMSF were made available at SFSignal.
Summary: not a woman or a person of color to be found in the entire book.
Now. Okay. I’m Asian. Not obvious from the name. Also, I’m female, probably obvious from the name. Just to clear things up, in case someone minds.
But that table of contents is stupid and made of FAIL. I’m sorry, but if you’re going to advertise yourself as The Mammoth Book of Anything these days, people might expect you to, um, actually be representative of the field. You know. With all the women and PoC that populate it, with skill and style in equal power to the traditional white male representatives.
I mean, hell, if you’re going to advertise yourself as The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Science Fiction and not include, i.e., Samuel R. Delany, who is the definition of mindblowing science fiction, there is something wrong with you.
In this day and age, there is no excuse. There actually wasn’t much of an excuse a few decades ago either, but times change. And so does the composition of the field. And so should the Mammoth Books.
Angry Black Woman has a wonderful blog post out about this fiasco’s current state of affairs, taking apart one of the anthology defenders’1 convoluted arguments with surgical and humorous precision (along with one of the best uses of WP-Footnotes I have seen in a long time). You should read it.
While she gets legitimately angry, I, on the other hand, get depressed2. It’s hard for me to see something I love go down in flames in this way. It’s hard to see something I love say, “Your gender is not worthy to be included in this survey of the field. Your race is not worthy, either, just to twist the knife.”
Why can’t they do what people like John Joseph Adams do? I reviewed Federations (Prime Books) earlier on Tor.com with much praise, and have caught up on Adams’ other anthologies as well, which are also excellent. Obviously a wonderful anthology including women and PoC can be done. Which is, duh, Captain Obvious territory, but sometimes these incidents make me question my general worth so much that I need to pull out concrete examples.
Unfortunately, my experience with SF/F multiple-author anthologies can currently be thought of as Mammoth Books and John Joseph Adams’ books.
So help a sad SF/F newbie out, Tor.com readers. Give me recommendations for anthologies that are not as full of fail as this recent Mammoth Books one. Surely there must be more than JJA, as excellent as he is. Surely in this day and age.
Argh.
1 I'd mention the name, but I'm upset enough right now that I don’t want to. I used to like his stuff a bit, and this is just making me sad.
2 Depressed Asian Woman doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Arachne Jericho writes about science fiction, fantasy and other topics determined by 1d20, at Spontaneous ∂erivation. She also thinks waaay too much about Sherlock Holmes. She reviews at Tor.com on a semi-biweekly basis, and needs a frakking drink.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 05:29pm EDT
Maybe I'm unique here, but when I buy an anthology, I'm looking for a set of stories that are enjoyable. I don't care about the gender, race, nationality of the authors, what I care about is whether or not I like the stories. It's interesting that you mention Delaney - I've read and enjoyed several of this works, and tried to read Dhalgren a time or three, and until maybe last year I would have had no idea he was, as you put it, a POC. And why the heck should it matter? It doesn't. I don't fail to finish Dhalgren because it's author isn't white, I fail to finish it because, for me, the book runs out of steam about 40% of the way through.
Just as a thought experiment, what if the results had been exactly opposite? If, purely by chance, it had ended up with no white guys? Would you reflexively feel that this was a problem that needed to be fixed?
Wednesday August 05, 2009 05:40pm EDT
I'm with Artanian. Who cares? Quite frankly, I don't. Unless I happen to have a picture of an author right in front of me, I don't assign race or gender to their writing (or sexual orientation for that matter) and, also as frankly, I don't care to. Yes women, PoC, and just about every other demographic you care to name can write outstanding S/F, Fantasy, Mainstream, insert-genre-here. I have a tendency to read the story first and if I like it, then I go looking for that author and I don't do that on the basis of their demographic membership, only on the strength of their work.
One of the wonderful things about literature is that barring gender obvious names, there is no true way of knowing if an author is white, black, asian, male, female, insert-demographic-here, based on their written work.
Is there a bias towards white males in S/F? Probably, but there has been a historical bias towards white males so this isn't surprising. Is the editor guilty of bias? Who knows. I would love to hear his side of the story though.
I would also love to hear a reasoned answer to Artanian's question as well. If no white males were included in the anthology would anyone be as upset? Could white males then justifiably cry foul?
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 06:07pm EDT · amended on Wednesday August 05, 2009 08:32pm EDT
Anyone can easily enjoy work presented to them without knowing its origin but the problem is not having the benefit of exposure to a greater range of view points to begin with.
"I would also love to hear a reasoned answer to Artanian's question as well. If no white males were included in the anthology would anyone be as upset? Could white males then justifiably cry foul?"
Of course they would, as they should. Assuming it claimed to be representative of the field, which this book does.
Wednesday August 05, 2009 06:15pm EDT
and to this: If no white males were included in the anthology would anyone be as upset? Could white males then justifiably cry foul? : if the collection was meant to showcase the "best" writing across the genre, then yes, most probably, because white men are still a big proportion of those writing SF now, and an anthology that managed to not include any was either collated in a different universe, or it's not being honest about criteria. (this goes only for collections not otherwise specified; certainly nobody should object if it's an on-purpose collection of SF written by women or people of color.) people might very well be LESS upset, however, than they are here, because in fact white men have in general been more highly visible and have had better access to publishing outlets in the history of english-language SF, so there are no other shortage of collections in which to find their writing. the same has not been true for writers representing other demographics.
arachnejericho: thanks for this post. i don't know a lot about anthologies myself, but if you want an opposite-day style corrective, try Dark Matter and So Long Been Dreaming.
*i appreciate the ABW post but one needs to note that she is writing there for a specific audience, and is not in particular trying to convince the reluctant reader. it's not called angry black woman for nothing. i recommend the SFSignal thread for more patient explanations.
Wednesday August 05, 2009 06:19pm EDT
Wednesday August 05, 2009 06:26pm EDT
I don't know most of the stories, so I can't say for sure whether this is true — for me, "mind-blowing" implies New Wave, or New Weird, or Things Of That Ilk, in which case I can, off the top of my head, come up with several female authors and black authors it would be unthinkable to exclude. But if the editor intends "mind-blowing" to mean "hard SF stories about really really huge engineering structures that are so huge they'll blow your mind", I have a harder time coming up with appropriate stories by women and PoC. (There may be a bunch out there, but none leap to mind immediately; it's not a subgenre I read much of.)
If you're looking for a great anthology that's also jam-packed full of diversity, the Vandermeers' first Best American Fantasy was the most mind-blowing (heh) SF anthology I've read in a long time.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 06:27pm EDT
You wrote "If, purely by chance, it had ended up with no white guys? Would you reflexively feel that this was a problem that needed to be fixed?"
Yes. As I see it, that would be a problem, too. An anthology claiming to be "21 finest stories of awesome science fiction" without any white male writers would be absurd. Just as it is absurd to make one with nothing but white male writers.
The phrase "purely by chance" I don't know about, though. Was it, in this case, purely by chance? Perhaps Mike Ashley will discuss this at some point. As #2 said, I would like to hear his side of it.
I have nothing negative to say about the authors included in the anthology, nor would I ever claim that race or gender alone are grounds for inclusion in something like this. But it baffles me to think that anyone can seriously say they've got the "finest stories of awesome science fiction" and just happen not to have any women at all, or any writers of non-European ancestry.
Seriously, how is that possible?
Wednesday August 05, 2009 06:36pm EDT
So, would you say the majority of the SF out there that people know about is written by white men? It may well be that a bunch of white guys is a very good statistical representation of current published SF authors. It may not be representative of the "field", as you put it, but it is representative of what is out there, published. It makes sense for the publishers to print known authors, not cherry pick anybody for reasons other than how well known they are. They want to sell books, not advance some social goal.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 06:38pm EDT
Beyond that, the real issue here is not just fairness as an abstract concept. These anthologies carry real weight with new readers of SF. Just by being included in one, a writer's name is more likely to be remembered, his/her books are more likely to be bought, and his/her career is likely to advance - possibly at the expense of those not included. In short, there is money and fame at stake, both of which been historically been denied to female/PoC authors. So they're right to be hopping mad at being denied once again.
Wednesday August 05, 2009 06:48pm EDT
If the selection had made purely by chance then this wouldn't be a problem, but, as has been pointed out, the selection was intended to representative...so representative as to be called Mammoth.
Secondly....yes you shouldn't be commenting as a white guy because as a similarly white guy I'm aware that I can't comprehend what it would be like be left out of something because of my race/gender/etc. And, to be honest I'm am so sick of the "well if situations were reversed argument". They're NOT. The question you should be asking is what if there were thousands of events over hundreds of years that didn't include white males. THEN you could complain.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 07:01pm EDT
Honestly, I don't think anyone would complain if the anthology had no white guys in it - unless they had a bone to pick with the PoC/feminist bloggers. Maybe Harlan Ellison would complain, but that's about it.
Here in North America, we white males are so unused to being the targets of racism (incidental or malicious), that we probably would not even notice. And anyway, we could accurately assure ourselves that the same thing would not happen next time. PoC lack that security, and I think that contributes to the anger at this anthology.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 07:03pm EDT
I'd love a review, if you've had a chance to read it.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 07:07pm EDT
The privilege in this case, let's keep it basic, is being represented in this Mammoth Book. Because it sucks to read books with 21 authors in them claiming to span the breadth of the genre and not be represented.
And I love the internet for putting folks together to the point where they can be like, "No, its not just me who wants this."
Wednesday August 05, 2009 07:15pm EDT
i have no idea of the actual numbers but yeah, i bet a majority of published SF (especially speaking cumulatively) is by white men. sure. so what? i get that anthologists mostly want to sell books, but a) it's not like there aren't well-known female and of color SF authors out there (i may think you're a lazy anthologist for going to le guin, tiptree, and delany again, as good as they are, but that's at least pretending to look like you care), and b) what's wrong with including great stories by a couple of lesser known authors, especially when you've already got some big names?
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 07:24pm EDT
Wednesday August 05, 2009 08:08pm EDT
Wednesday August 05, 2009 08:38pm EDT
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 08:44pm EDT
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 09:03pm EDT
Thanks for the recommendations and the discussion. Keep it up!
firkin,
Good point in #4 about the ABW link. The explanations and discussion going on at SFSignal are, indeed, more patient.
jere7my,
Hah, that is indeed a marketing fail. The title definitely does not communicate "huge engineering structures" at all to me.
I'm thinking about what my college self would have thought about SF had she picked up that book believing it to be "generic" SF (I mean, SF is always supposed to be mind-blowing, isn't it? I knew that even when I thought that it was all called Sci-Fi).
Probably she would have thought, "Huh, so the best SF is all about engineering in space. Just what I expected. Not for me. Thank goodness this Mammoth Book helped me understand SF better before I really got involved."
... which leads to another weirdness apart from the women/PoC angle. I mean, there's a lot of different types of SF out there; I know that now. Definitely didn't know it then.
p-l,
In #9 the point about getting names into anthologies is a very important one.
The audience for the Mammoth Books is huge and casual. Getting names out is one of the most important things these books can do; when you pick up a Mammoth Book, you're supposed to get a good tasting at the smorgasboard of whatever the title is about.
And those names get remembered when someone decides they want some more of that.
The popularity/success of the Mammoth Books in general is probably best shown in the long, long listing at Fantastic Fiction.
These are the books that show up in the general reading clubs, which is how I found The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy (and life was never really the same afterwards).
thedidey,
As slickhop points out, even if you're white you can and very arguably should speak up.
And by the way, thank you for stating very clearly the problem with the "if situations were reversed" hypothetical. :) What I think of those sorts of hypotheticals is really, really... impolite.
brainwane,
Gah, I shouldn't have forgotten Thoughtcrime Experiments.
So far I don't review anything I've made ebooks of, since it would involve reviewing my own involvement in the formatting process in the Kindle Bit. Which is a shame, because I don't go through that much trouble unless I really like a work. And I did like your anthology.
Maybe I should overturn that rule. (And review-smacking myself for mistakes I made during formatting would be comedy.)
Shadowgoob,
Maybe all the women and PoC writers invited did turn down the invitations. To a massive selling platform with serious outreach. That is supposed to be a representative volume.
I think this is a highly unlikely scenario, unless people think Ashley is the Kiss of Death, which is also not likely.
The "SF = space engineering" angle seems more likely.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 09:52pm EDT
What I posted there:
"That's a very narrow view of "mind-blowing", which is after all, what the title promises. I've really enjoyed Mike Ashley's "The History of the Science Fiction Magazine" series, but in this case I think he's exhibiting tunnel-vision."
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 10:03pm EDT
*jawdrop*
Someone needs to remind Mr. Ashley what one should do when in a hole, before he goes and rents a steam shovel.
And yet, considering that the Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy (which I am very, very glad I picked up used now as opposed to at retail) was about half science fiction tales, I wonder if I should be surprised at any of this.
I don't know how other people view this anthology series, but in my eyes its credibility has been shot.
Wednesday August 05, 2009 11:25pm EDT
Other "Mammoth" books have decent spreads of authors, in my opinion. One book in a series, which already is leaning toward a white male submission base, hardly reflects on the rest of a series. Each of which is generally edited by somebody different.(@Calli) For example, I believe Stephen Jones does the horror anthos.
I always have trouble sussing out in odd situatiosn like these where there's actually racism/sexism in effect, or if it's just reading too far into a coincidence. It worries me that it may be intentional, but on the other hand I don't think a submission that isn't as good as the other subs should get published because of the gender/race of the author, and I'm a woman. I don't want to be prized over a male author just because I have two X chromosomes. I want it to be my work that matters.
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 11:30pm EDT
I'm so glad you enjoyed the anthology! I hope you hear about lots of enjoyable sf/f anthologies that feature balanced tables of contents, and share the lists with us.
Wednesday August 05, 2009 11:37pm EDT
I'd love to be able to make an insightful and educated comment, but my college education (econ, gov, social theory) consisted in reading the works of a bunch of dead (or well on their way) white guys for four years.
As I see it, regardless of who is right or wrong, these types of situations are always tricky. In this case, you are essentially asking a white man to admit that he is racist and sexist. Sure, the guy is biased, as are most white men, but when you paint him into a corner you leave him no option but to stick to an affirmative 'this is the way I see it' defense, because that is much easier than saying 'I am a bigot'. I sincerely doubt he deliberately set out to exclude women and minorities from the anthology, but if you feel passionately otherwise, I can think of a couple legal funds that will try and help you remedy the title, because making angry blog posts on a corporate website only serves to inflame the situation and polarize debate even further.
@arachne: "What I think of those sorts of hypotheticals is really, really... impolite." (I think you were referring to reserve discrimination?).
That situation parallels the Supreme Court's decision with respect to the New Haven firefighters, don't you think? You even propose that these anthologies are about author promotion.
Wednesday August 05, 2009 11:44pm EDT
make that reverse and opposed to reserve...
VIEW ALL BY · Wednesday August 05, 2009 11:50pm EDT · amended on Wednesday August 05, 2009 11:53pm EDT
The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy is edited by Ashley as well. (Though I admit I didn't look before I made that first post. And should have. I should have let myself stop reeling before replying first.) Thanks for mentioning there are other editors, though. I was premature in writing off the entire series.
(And of the 33 entries in New Comic Fantasy, 5 are by women. It may mean nothing. It may not. It does make me curious about how the other anthologies he edited turned out, as well as others in the Mammoth series.)
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 12:10am EDT
There's the Latin American SF anthology, Cosmos Latinos, that's excellent and has a nice mixture of genders and ethnic groups.
Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's New Weird anthology is another that comes to mind.
I believe anything edited by Ellen Datlow would be prime counterexamples, such as her recent The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Ekaterina Sedia edited Paper Cities, which is a World Fantasy Award finalist.
Lou Anders in his Fast Forward 2 anthology has a good gender mix.
Nalo Hopkinson's So Long Been Dreaming and Sheree Thomas's Dark Matter are two excellent anthologies of stories written by PoCs.
Best of all, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 12:35am EDT
Regarding the antho itself, the most charitable explanation seems to be that the hard-SF genre it's trying to represent is one that really is dominated by white males. In which case the title might be poorly chosen, but there's no bias involved other than self-selection. And the worst I can say about that is that it's not an anthology I'm likely to read. Other, less positive spins also exist, but for the sake of my blood pressure I'm not going to think about those too much.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 12:37am EDT
Brit is right about the multiple editors in the Mammoth Books series. I think Asimov actually did one, way back when.
And Brit, I know how you feel re: "I don't want to be prized over a male author just because I have two X chromosomes." I work in a very competitive male-dominated field, and have never wanted to be hired for a developer team just because I'm a woman. My feelings on all that are complicated and have no neat summary or conclusion.
Larry,
Thank you for the many recommendations! :)
bloggeratf,
We all have biases in our heads. For instance, I have a long-standing self-hatred of my own race and gender, to the point where I don't think very much about the face I see in the mirror every day. A somewhat radical case, but biases can be weird like that.
These biases can be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. Fact is, they exist in everybody's head, from white men to women to PoC.
I suggest this post at John Scalzi's Whatever, written by Mary Ann Mohanraj, where she gets people up to speed on the topic of racism, starting with "We’re all racist", and proceeding from there.
And as for the "angry blog posts on a corporate website" tsk-tsk... I'm going to have to let my bosses at Tor.com speak for me in this. Because (a) I don't get automatic carte blanche, (b) I asked for this post to get bumped up in the queue, because I felt it was important, and it was, and (c) I've been encouraged to write my thoughts when issues like this come up---in fact, way before this particular issue bubbled up out of the heap.
Trust me, I don't want to go around dipping my hand in battery acid, because posts like this rip me up inside every time. This is NOT cathartic in any way, and it always, always costs me a lot of self-hatred during and after.
But I felt it was important to say, even with all that in mind.
Also, re: reverse discrimination: no, I wasn't referring to that. I was referring to thedidey's precise description, and you should go re-read that, because thedidey does a better job than I of outlining exactly what is wrong with that kind of "hypothetical".
----
For people morbidly curious about the self-hatred thing, that's a post on my personal blog. Like I said: this was not a cathartic blog post. I have far less endurance or resistance than many people who talk about this kind of stuff on a regular basis.
And in fact, I'm probably going to wait until tomorrow to comment or even think about this again. I burn out really quickly on this kind of topic, and in more ways than one.
(That all, plus it's not been a nice week in many other respects for me.)
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 02:11am EDT
The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction is actually YBSF edited by Gardner Dozois, but with different covers & numbering, e.g. Mammoth #11 is the same as YBSF#15.
Thursday August 06, 2009 07:53am EDT
Thursday August 06, 2009 08:32am EDT
Mind you, I fully acknowledge that there's a lot of idiotic gender discrimination going on, in both directions, if not of the same kind or magnitude. And there are plenty of authors of the female persuasion I like to read, inside and outside of the genre. However, if there are a lot of women SF writers who wallow in Big Dumb Objects, mega-engineering and/or cosmic space/time extents, it seems I've missed them, by and large. Any tips are welcome!
I beseech you, however, in the bowels of Christ or elsewhere, consider whether gender bias sensitivity may on occasion be misplaced.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 09:39am EDT
@ people who claim that the gender and race of an author is not important: Do you really think that a writer's background and life experiences have no bearing on their writing? Seriously, you live in a world where all fiction is produced by robots? Y'all need to branch out in your reading habits, and get your mind blown properly.
@ Arachne Jerico: I admire you for raising issues like this on a site where it's guaranteed that a good portion of your comments will be critical of you for daring to notice that sexism and racism exist.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 09:48am EDT
I think the whole thing is blown out of proportion. Starting with the idea that the name of the antology has any other reason than marketing.
The TOC shows stories from famous but not controversial authors, and frankly most of those stories say nothing to me. It is, by no means, an attempt to make a good compilation of the historically very best science-fiction under any criteria I can fathom.
That said, I would not lose my time crying Racisms and Sexism at the issue - I would employ my time in making an Anthology, or two or three, that satisfy that kind of criteria. I'm for example itching to get my hands on "The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent" (next paycheck it will be mine) and would love to find more like this covering more places, or Best Female SF Authors or.
And on a tangent - Didnt Thomas M. Disch write a very critical essay about an anthology edited by Le Guin, complainging about exactly the opposite issue? Seems this riff-raff is going longer than I remember.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 09:48am EDT
The faces behind Tor.com, our many contributors, and our visitors are a part of the SF community. When cases like this crop up that demonstrate how pervasive this kind of (surely unintentional, but very real) sexism and racism is within that community, it is important to speak up and make the problem visible to raise awareness and hopefully avoid the same kind of thing in the future. I thank Arachne Jericho for her post--it's a very personal issue for many.
@ generally
When you see an anthology like this, it's not so much about this one incident as it is about the way these incidents add up, speaking to a culture of privilege that hurts the entire community. This is a prime example of the ways in which that culture affects the stories that get published, the authors that get cultivated and highlighted and remembered, and the individuals--fans, writers, and professionals--who feel welcome (or not) within our community. When SF anthologies predominately select the stories of older white men from English-speaking countries as examples of the "finest" SF has to offer, it creates a self-perpetuating system in which "the best" stories are those by white men, written for the audience and tastes of white men. By reducing SF to a monoculture I as a reader suffer, the community as a whole suffers, as people become less and less likely to see stories that don't fit those very narrow criteria for "the best." And if we do see them, we may be at that point trained to feel those stories are somehow "inferior" or "worse" than our previously determined benchmark for excellence.
All of the writers in this anthology are excellent writers. I don't doubt their talent or ability for a moment, and I'm sure they've all written mind-blowing stories. But how many of us can easily think of a woman or PoC of equal caliber? There are many reasons why they may not have been included in this anthology, and I won't speculate. But the reality is that the many fine women and PoCs out there writing mind-blowing stories seem invisible when these opportunities come around.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 10:00am EDT
Since when did gender and race become more important than the stories themselves? This is not to say women /PoC don't write great SF, it just so happened that perhaps he had a greater quantity of material from white men to work with. I donno. I agree with the point that the anthology SEEMS to be meant to be inclusive, by which it should at MINIMUM have some female authors (I don't know about anyone else but I, for one, have no idea of the ethnicity of 99% of the authors I read. Its just not something I pay heed to). Mr. Ashley's posted response above suggests the anthology was meant to be a little more specifically themed than the cover implies, however.
Rather than an atrociously sexist/racist crime, call this a case of poor title choice, mayhap.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 10:03am EDT
Mainly cause even if I love SF and talk about it and bond with people of similar tastes, I dont think there is any supraorganism I owe fealty to or something. I deal with "the genre" on a story by story basis.
I can surely accept that for a lot of people this is not a compilation of the best in "mind-blowing" SF (I agree - no P. K Dick?) - I dont agree with the publisher or the editor having failed "the community", "the genre", or anything.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 10:09am EDT
;)
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 11:10am EDT
Also note: the "tone" of my comments on the SFSignal thread before and then after Paul Di Filippo came along.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 11:28am EDT
Bloggeratf @24
As the person who runs Tor.com, and the person on whose desk the buck stops, so to speak (in public, at least; I do have a boss, of course), I want to publicly declare my support for AJ. She’s right: we encourage these kinds of posts, we prioritized this one in particular, and we give them their due space, because these conversations are important, for better or for worse. The only way we’ll get to a place where we don’t have to have them anymore is if we continue to call out this type of behaviour wherever it pops its ugly head, regardless of whether it was an intentional thing or not. And you bet your ass it polarizes the debate, and inflames the situation: that's actually the idea. You bring these issues into the harsh light of day so that they are always in people's minds. That way the next time an editor sits down to prepare an anthology, he or she has to think about them before, say, putting together a list of authors for an anthology with nothing but white dudes in it.
As for being a corporate site, well, while technically we *are* corporate-owned, we are deciedly *not* Tor Books’ or Macmillan’s corporate sites. Those are us.macmillan.com and tor-forge.com, respectively. As such I have absolutely no responsibility to toe a party line in the way that you imply: by keeping the content on here innocuous and inoffensive. This is a group blog, among other things, and our bloggers are encouraged to share their opinions about the things that they are passionate about. You or I may not agree with every viewpoint put forth on the site (I know I don’t, although in this particular case I do), but that diversity of opinion is what makes this site worth coming to on a daily basis. Otherwise it would be a pretty boring place, and nothing more that the very thing I’ve worked very hard to prevent it from becoming: a marketing shill site for Macmillan and Tor Books.
Breogan @34
No, it’s not, not by a long shot. Invoking something like RaceFail is simply your way of diminishing or offhandedly disregarding this conversation, by placing it squarely in the context of another, similar but not identical conversation about the same issues, which went south in a big way. In other words, you’re ascribing the fail from RaceFail to this conversation not on its merits, but by association, and dismissing the current conversation in a rather underhanded attempt at rhetorical thread-hijacking. Let’s stay the hell away from doing that, okay? These are conversations that need to happen, and they need to happen in a calm environment where people feel comfortable talking about issues they feel very passionate about. If you don’t want to be a part of the conversation, there’s a great wide internet out there. Go to icanhazcheezburger.com or something, if it really bothers you that much, you don’t have to be on our site if you don’t want to be.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 11:33am EDT
$50 I could pay, after $120-300 for just-published hardcovers, to try to get a couple voices that weren't white men noticed; but my natural allies, women and POCs, are also the people who are placed into poorer strata, so there aren't a lot there to support me.
And thus, it follows that the best sci-fi is written by white men!
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 11:46am EDT
Of course, it would take an awful lot of crying racism and sexism to equal the amount of time and effort that putting together an anthology would take.
And since one takes vastly less resources than the other, they aren't exactly mutually exclusive. There are plenty of factors could keep an anthology from being produced, but the odd blog post on the part of the hypothetical editor is not one of them.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 12:01pm EDT
I've just come across a reference to Mike Ashley's "The Mammoth e-Book of Mind-Blowing Mars SF", which is mostly if not exclusively composed of stories by women.
On the other other hand, the novella version of my "Empress of Mars" is in there, and I don't recall being asked if it could be included.
Thursday August 06, 2009 12:08pm EDT
Other people, including white male authors! have commented on both threads on the specific important, influential female authors of mind-blowing fiction who seem weird by their collective absence in a collection of "the finest." My favorites are Ursula Le Guin, Nancy Kress, Judith Merrill, Octavia Butler. Of course they wouldn't all fit in there, but none of them?
In conclusion: Come on.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 12:15pm EDT · amended on Thursday August 06, 2009 12:29pm EDT
"This" was not the conversation in this site. Yet, and I hope never.
"This" was the issue of the anthology and what few lines I managed to read on SFSignal before walking away, which stared intelligent and polite enough and degenerated into calls of priviledge, racism, boicot, namecalling, "I'll never buy your books", etc.
Sorry for not being clear. And the fact that I'm trying to post here means that I have a interest in the issue - even if it is not the same reading of the issue as you, I hope it is clear I think is important to talk about this kind of issues
But now let me ask a general question - the idea is "airing" it, or just if one has the correct position to make, whoever determines that? Cause - as in the previous cases - what I'm fearing from this kind of "community outrage" is that for most of the involved and anybody looking at it trying to learn something about how to conduct your business/marketing/writing/etc on the internet, the lesson is clear - dont waste your time. The possibilities of getting labeled as an awful human being that should not recieve the attention of "the community" for what seems to be at the very worst sins of omission are too high.
This can only serve to alienate people away. Not to bring the "minority" (quotes here cause thats kind of US centric in some cases) writers the spotlight they deserve and the awareness they need - it just gets to the point that the best strategy you can follow is to get out and dont do anything related to the "community". Walk away, its not worth the aggravation.
BTW - I'm white but not American myself (Spanish via Venezuela here - not at home anywhere, too). I know many of this issues are incredibly polarizing in the States, which is still the "default scenario" for SF Fandom. Not that the issues dont exist anywhere else - mostly that SF is even more marginal. But again, my wish and recommendation is that anybody feeling that women/blacks/asians/whatever dont get the recognition in fandom that they deserve is to stop chasing what you percieve as failures in others, whoever right you are about it, and focus on creating and delivering the alternatives.
Cause instead of having this kind of fight and anger and negativity tainting the "community", we could be having an enourmously more enjoyable conversation about a kickass anthology that reflects that kind of plurality the most vocal people argue for, and that I'm sure most of us not-so-vocal desire to see.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 12:17pm EDT
I thought about this a lot yesterday. Basically, I came down to this: SFF is diverse and getting more so, and an anthology which claims to be representative but includes only a bunch of safe, old-school white guys writing about giant buildings in space is a piss-poor representation of the genre. So, like I said above, this is not an antho that I'm likely to read. Having said that, I don't think that every anthology builder has an imperative duty to ensure that they include women and POC in their contents. If the selection criteria aren't inherently biased ("pick hard SF stories from famous authors"), but they nonetheless result in a skewed sample, I don't think that we have the basis for so much outrage. The editor should think about implicit biases in his criteria, and people who care should vote with our dollars by buying something else, but I don't think that the anthology itself deserves to become the object of so much anger. Hopefully this makes sense.
Now where did I put my privilege? I know I left it around here somewhere...
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 01:10pm EDT
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 03:05pm EDT
Thursday August 06, 2009 03:11pm EDT
How nice it must be to live in a world where you can legitimately consider those scenarios to be exactly parallel. One where there isn't any systematic racism and sexism, where an occasion of an all-male grouping is just pure chance, where there couldn't possibly be any reasons other than happenstance for women and PoC to be underrepresented in an anthology, or in science, or in the US Senate. One where each of a dozen incidents of anthologies with no women in the table of contents, or women in the table of contents but who don't get their names on the cover, can be considered in a vacuum as something that "just happened", because of course the editors aren't evil people who hate women and PoC, so there couldn't possibly be anything to talk about. I'd like to visit someday.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 03:17pm EDT
Thursday August 06, 2009 04:11pm EDT
Upstairs, which is authors A-B, I find the following majority-female anthologies. I'm afraid I don't know the racial balance on them, and if I stop to look them up in full, my colleague with whom I have a grant deadline will be legitimately annoyed with me. Several of the names I recognize are definitely POC. Anyway:
Wizards, Inc., Edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Loren L. Coleman. Haven't read the whole thing yet, but includes several authors I trust.
The entire Sword and Sorceress series, Edited by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Kind of a mixed bag--some very good stories, some eh. This series has recently started up again, I presume with similar levels of gender balance.
Women at War, Edited by Lois McMaster Bujold. Possibly my favorite anthology ever. Maybe one or two stories of the lot are less than perfect.
Finally, I just checked the TOC for the Vandermeer's Fast Ships, Black Sails, and while there are only 7/18 stories by women, they're all really good. Even if you don't normally like pirates. This is notable for not having a remotely gender-based theme--the editors obviously just wanted to get some of the best people working in the field--and is probably representative of what actually happens when you roll the contributor dice without bias.
Thursday August 06, 2009 04:24pm EDT
Thursday August 06, 2009 05:28pm EDT
it doesn't sound to me like aleistra was "ascribing" any "practices" to anyone in particular, they are saying that in a society thoroughly saturated by racism and sexism, you don't get [situations which are overwhelmingly white male dominated] by chance or happenstance or accident, and you cannot consider them to be independent, unrelated incidents. they are related outcomes, because the odds are stacked.
re: depressing. are you familiar with the saying "if you aren't outraged, you aren't paying attention" ?
Thursday August 06, 2009 06:00pm EDT
Women don't write science fiction the way I like it. They generally focus on personalities and relationships - I prefer my science fiction hard.
When the author of a science fiction story is female, I skip it.
Science fiction is white guys. That's how it is.
Not to say there aren't exceptions, of course, but they're damn few and far between.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 07:30pm EDT
You're so right! I've never seen a good hard SF story written by a woman. Especially those softies Elizabeth Moon, C.J. Cherryh, Lois McMaster Bujold, Nancy Kress, Joan Slonczewski, Leigh Brackett, James Tiptree, Jr., Sarah Zettel, Eleanor Arnason, Julie Czerneda, Catherine Asaro, Laura Mixon, Connie Willis...
And man, nothing ruins a great story like people and relationships. I can't believe we teach Shakespeare in school!
You might want to be sure to avoid stories with women in them, too. That's why I stick to Plato, Aristotle, some of the manlier Catullus repetoire.
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 08:53pm EDT
In Mike's defense, he just invited me to contribute to one of his anthologies.
Thursday August 06, 2009 08:58pm EDT
Yes, exceptions exist. For example, I like Cherryh very much.
Are you telling me what kind of science fiction I should prefer?
VIEW ALL BY · Thursday August 06, 2009 09:10pm EDT
Thursday August 06, 2009 09:42pm EDT
Not having the wherewithal to make my own anthology, I will support the ones I want to read with my wallet -- as, I'm sure, will you.
Friday August 07, 2009 12:13am EDT
Actually, it would be a damn boring field if we all wrote exactly from our life experiences without experimenting and making an attempt to explore other social issues and experiences. I write predominantly male characters. I'm a woman. This isn't me being sexist; but if you squinted, well, damn, I suppose I should just be writing about women because that's my life experience.
I've read a plethora of male authors who write female characters and female issues well. Ditto black authors who write from Asian perspectives, etc. Or even white people writing about PoC!
I think it's extremely important to consider the content of the story. If a PoC wrote a story about white guys in space, and a white guy wrote a story about PoC in space, which would be more important in representing PoC in SF literature? (Assuming they were both well handled, truthful, and respectful.)
VIEW ALL BY · Friday August 07, 2009 04:44am EDT
from their experiences. We all have different experiences that shape our lives, and they affect or writing *beyond* simply writing "the other perspective."
It would be silly to posit that the point of view brought along by PoC and women and other minorities is simply interchangable.
I suppose this is to say: it probably doesn't occur to many writers to consider the Caribbeans as a legitimate player in the race for space. Unless you happen to be of Caribbean descent, the probability of such is much lower.
And this happens for quite a few options, which do not naturally occur to people who've not had the experience. For instance, the incongruities of growing up Chinese in America.
Or the road that leads you to hate your own race, the history that boiled up because of the American---excuse me, in the West it's called the Vietnam--the treatment of Vietnamese refugee parents in middle America?
What about an alternative history about the making of a Japanese American President from the viewpoint of a Japanese reporter? No one wanted to write that save for the writer of Eagle: The Making of a Japanese-American President. Japanese-American.
Being from a different culture or social strata or whatever is valuable and not as effectively replaced by "just about anybody."
The idea that these perspectives have nothing new to offer that can't be home-grown, as it were, in the dominant culture is naive. A view I once had, and have grown past as I read more fiction from both dominant culture and those outside of it.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday August 07, 2009 09:54am EDT
It's an awfully big jump from "Writers' life experiences influence their art" to "writers should *only* write about things which directly reflect their life experiences." For one thing, the former is descriptive, while the later is prescriptive. I don't believe anybody in this comment thread has seriously claimed the latter, and if they did, I would disagree strongly.
The point I was trying to make in my comment @33 is only that people who like to virtuously "an author's background is irrelevant to my understanding of a story" are not coming off as clever as they think they are, and they might want to try branching out in their reading material. It could--dare I say it--blow their minds.
VIEW ALL BY · Friday August 07, 2009 12:22pm EDT
Friday August 07, 2009 01:16pm EDT
Is this an example of actual racism / gender bias or merely apparent racism / sexism?
VIEW ALL BY · Friday August 07, 2009 01:39pm EDT
This tells me that if the white, maleness of the authors in the anthology was not *intentional* (and to my nose it smells like it was), the editor -- as an individual who obviously consciously selects only white male author product to *read* -- was not qualified to edit an anthology.
Meaning. The effort was either engineered to deny opportunity to a huge segment of talented authors, or is the product of incompetence.
Needless to say, I'll be passing on this one.
Tuesday October 13, 2009 01:25pm EDT
Is It Something in the Water? Or, Me Tarzan, You Ape
Athena Andreadis
Starship Reckless
To Seek Out New Life