The Skiffy and Fanty Show 3: Pie, Bad Books, Angry People, and the Science Fiction God

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1. Favorite women SF writers: Tricia Sullivan, Nancy Kress, Octavia Butler and all in my top 10 favorite writers of any gender. As far as the ToC counting goes. On one hand I think it’s important that any number of imbalances get mentioned continuously so that anyone not thinking about this at all, will. On the other hand it will come as no surprise that I don’t think being mean to an editor that’s already engaged with the issue makes any sense.

   And as for the “harmful novels,” I consider this type of post to be GREAT for generating discussion, but any such list is going to be rather personal in nature. The top of my “most harmful novel” list would be contain a handful of my favorite books, that nonetheless discouraged me as a writer, because they were writing what I wanted to write, but doing it better by far. My first attempt at novel involved (back in 1995) was trunked after reading Blood Music by Greg Bear. Shortly after trying to resurrect it a few years later, Diamond age torpedoed it again. Looking back, the idea that I was attempting to write about nanotechnology BEFORE having read those books is pretty awesome. Those 2 books nevertheless set me back a decade in my writing.

   1. I absolutely agree on the first. I do think it’s a good idea to bring it up, but I completely disagree with the rhetoric. I think we can get a lot more done now by addressing the issue to publishers and editors and making them know that we want more ladies in SF/F. The community is big enough. We can affect some change if we get rid of the divisive modes.

      I didn’t much care for Blood Music. It read too much like a giant nerd fantasy in the first half for me, which is nice, but doesn’t make for compelling reading. I much prefer Eon by Bear; his cyberpunk and biopunk are so-so for me.

      Thanks for the comment!

2. Don’t worry about about being mobbed by people irate about what you said. ‘They’ have decided to trash you on their blogs, but are not linking to you so people won’t be infected with your anti-feminism. It took me a while to find your cast from the hints they left in posts

   http://strangedave.livejournal.com/297481.html

   http://girliejones.livejournal.com/1596520.html

   One thing I think you were wrong about was the idea that the people who commented were criticising authors for being part of the anthology or expecting them to be part of policing the content of any anthology they take part in. Apart from starting the err…conversation(?) on Michael Swanwick’s blog I couldn’t see any negativity towards the authors who contributed.

   1. I think they’re going in the wrong direction when they want editors to think about gender. I don’t think editors should think either way, whether against or for the inclusion of women. You don’t actually get anything out of forcing people to do what you want them to by publicly harassing them. What you get are some people going “yeah yeah, I get it, I’ll do what you want,” which is more offensive, in my book, than someone simply responding to market interest.

      I don’t think I was wrong about the criticism of the authors. There was a comment in there that spoke directly on the issue of authors not saying anything.

   2. It should also be noted that I (Shaun) am not an anti-feminist, nor am I unfamiliar with women’s suffrage or feminist theory, and so on. I highly doubt my co-host is any of those things either, though he may know a little less about feminism than I do, but those are all things I’d have to ask him.

      1. I must have missed the author comment, and to tell the truth I don’t think you are anti-feminist either, but you are disagreeing with them so that is how they will see it(they are ‘soooo’ sick of having to go over feminism 101 with people again and again!)

         1. Yet they want people to change. There’s a silly sort of irony there.

            Reading the stuff being said about us has actually been somewhat humorous, because what we actually said has largely been taken and skewed into something we didn’t actually say. It’s almost like what happened to Sutter when he came and explained his editing process. Very surreal experience.

      2. Reading the stuff being said about us has actually been somewhat humorous, because what we actually said has largely been taken and skewed into something we didn’t actually say. It’s almost like what happened to Sutter when he came and explained his editing process. Very surreal experience.

         Shaun, you do realise this is exactly what you and Adam did to girliejones and the other women you talked about, right?

         1. Actually, no, because we weren’t actually talking about Girlie Jones in the podcast. We mentioned her post, but our discussion was on the comments in Swanwick’s blog. As far as I can see, Girlie Jones only provided one comment on that thread.

            1. And for the record: those we did discuss did, in fact, ignore Sutter when he explicitly stated that he did approach women. He did. What he didn’t do is go outside of his list to find people he didn’t already know. As far as I can tell, nobody provided him a reading list for that, or a starting point. They mentioned the big names, which he approached, but they didn’t suggest new folks that he might go to.

               That’s the point. When Sutter explained his editorial process, those who had already formulated an opinion about him ignored him, and that’s the problem we had.

3. We’re stuck in a recursive argument with no stop command. Yes, we criticized a few bloggers for being aggressive when the case of misogyny was shown to not be deliberate and now we’re being criticized for criticizing the critics. Of course we’re going to rebuttal the criticism, which will cause the critics to rebuttal our rebuttal. Hmm. Oh well, I dropped out of software engineering anyway.

   1. I think the problem is that you’re failing to fully understand their objections in the first place. I listened to your podcast for the first time with this episode, and I read all of the comments on Swanwick’s and other blogs at the time, and you both deeply misrepresented these women’s comments on those blogs. They expressed dissatisfaction with a serious problem (and I think it *is* a serious problem), and you guys seemed intent on characterising it as shouting, or being mean-spirited, or engaging in some kind of anti-editor online lynching, and that simply didn’t happen.

      I thought the editor (I’ve shamefully forgotten his name, Sutter?) was very gracious when he apologised and I think that apology was accepted very maturely as well. The only people who seemed to overreact and rant about things was you guys.

      I originally wasn’t going to post a reply here, not because I (or I suspect anyone) were trying to insidiously bitch about you behind your backs, but because no one wants a bitchy flame war bouncing from blog to podcast and back again, and the way you guys were talking on your podcast made it seem very likely to me that you were being quite over-the-top and unreasonable about things.

      1. If you listened to the podcast, then you would have known that we actually did talk about the legitimacy of the issue. Shaun particularly defended the argument (gender/color arguments).

         But more about all this to come in the next episode.

      2. Well I will definitely listen to the next episode and find out more, then!

4. Just realized that Memory Dog was in the Hartwell/Cramer Best SF of last year. My mistake.