I love sci-fi and grew up devouring as much as I could.
But honestly, reading the older sci-fi is painful when it comes to gender portrayals. When Heinlein represents some of the better portrayals, you know you have issues. Even the more liberal representations feel ham-fisted and vapid. It's enough that I've grown very leery of anything before the 90s, which is a shame because there's a lot of important stuff before then...but reading it pokes the wounds of too many sexist/racist older relatives (plus "is this what I'll seem like by the standards of a few decades in the future?") to let me enjoy the stories.
Reading as a woman, I agree with you about the cringe however you may not be also picking up the same stereotypes and unreasonable expectations demanded of the male characters. They are often required to be some kind of impossibly strong, rational, perfect male-figure which is equally impossible as the feminine roles they write about. If the story has other qualities, I can put these issues aside however often I just feel that the entire tale falls apart since I can't believe in the characters and their decisions.
I was going to recommend Octavia E. Butler, but I see she is already on the list. The whole Xenogenesis trilogy is good, not just Dawn (first in the series). Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents likewise.
And Connie Willis' To say nothing of the dog is hilarious! It will brighten anyone's day.
I'll just have to starting working through that list, now.
Yes! Feminism not only means women are allowed to be strong and smart; it also means men are allowed to show their emotions and talk about their feelings.
Yeah, no. If feminism were at all interested in improving the mental health of men, it wouldn't be called feminism. Feminism is only interested in men insofar as the whole gender is considered the source of womens' issues.
Third-wave feminism is about including and respecting everybody who has been made unequal by systems of power and privilege, and that very much includes men.
Where did you learn about the definition of feminism? Feminism is called feminism because it advocates women's rights in order to bring about equality of the sexes in all aspects of public and private life.
The term was coined in the late nineteenth century; before women's suffrage and the gradual abolishment of a whole host of other laws and customs that suppressed (and in some cases still suppress) women — hence the name of the movement.
The point is, yes, in the past there were many injustices against women. No one denies this. These injustices must be corrected.
But the solution is not to tilt the balance so that all injustice now goes against men, when any accused is automatically assumed guilty, and losing their jobs, scholarships, everything, before a ruling is made.
The solution is to try to avoid any and all injustice, and we are failing at that.
Hell, we can't even criticize feminism if we are not women and self-proclaimed feminists.
> in order to bring about equality of the sexes in all aspects of public and private life.
And none of that has anything to do with helping men. It's all about women. Which is fine, women need advocates for all the shit they have to put up with. But pretending that feminism has any interest at all in helping men is utter bullshit and such an atrocious lie and this isn't the place to push that lie. I've never once ever in my life been helped by a feminist. I've been demonized, insulted, discriminated against, but never helped. Because that's not their goal.
> Yes, that's the definition as it certainly "feels" like to many men. And because it's perceived this way, it's mission is hamstrung from the word go.
The problem here is men basing their view of feminism on their own emotional intuition, or at the very least, approaching feminism through the lens of third party anti-feminist activism and web culture rather than engage with feminism or feminist theory firsthand.
Obviously if everything you know about feminism comes from people who hate it, and caricature radical feminists on Twitter and Tumblr, you're not going to trust any criticism the movement has about you. But that's like expecting to get a realistic view of black culture from /pol/.
Thanks for the recommendations, I'll give them a go (Asimov I've been all over, but only a handful of Lem and Le Guin).
Excellent points - I grew up with a single mom and often semi-joke that sci-fi/fantasy provided all of my adult role models. There's a disturbing connection between my failed personal expectations of myself and the stereotypes you called out.
Le Guin is one of the all time greats. If you like fantasy, the wizard of earthsea is a classic. For sci-fi, my introduction to her was the left hand of darkness, which I devoured.
1960's sci-fi is pretty much all I read for leisure. And of course, it contains a lot of views that society as a whole no longer subscribes to. This is not limited to portrayals of women but perhaps it's something we've learned to be indignant about more than other things.
But it does not matter to me at all. See, I'm not reading old sci-fi to get accurate predictions of the future, nor do I mistake the descriptions of gender roles or other social or societal aspects as recommended norms. No, I first and foremost read these stories because I want to be entertained and what I get is suspenseful plots with clever twists and turns in a futuristic setting. Some story lines are ridiculous, sure, but you know what - I can still enjoy most of it. Gender portrayals are really marginal to that experience.
If anything, I find it additionally appealing to learn about the zeitgeist of the mid-20th century, when these works were written. Comparing the underlying assumptions that some authors apparently must have made is quite informative about how much has changed since then.
And let's not forget: anything more recent that is more in sync with your sensitivities today bears the potential of being found grossly inappropriate for one reason or the other by our children's or grandchildren's generation.
I know you're speaking about sci-fi here, but what makes it different than the vast majority of literature that exists? The majority of anything written before our current times will likely not be politically correct as far as todays standards go, in regards to stereotypes and such. That seems like an awful lot of literature to exclude based on the portrayal of fictional characters created in a society fairly different to our own.
I find the attitude worrisome. Funnily enough, it reminds me of Farenheit 451 and the oppressive censorship towards anything that made people feel uncomfortable.
As a kid, in the 90's, in grade 4 or 5 or something we had to read Huckleberry Finn, it's full of fairly extreme example of some fairly negative stereotypes. Before we read the story, our teacher explained to us about historical context, how the language used in the book was inappropriate and hateful to use. Then we read the book. There were no problems, nobody got upset, nobody started using racist words after, no parents complained and the sky didn't fall.
Sometimes literature should make you uncomfortable, it should remind you of the way things used to be, how we've progressed and why the way it was didn't work. If this is ignored or forgotten, we risk going back to this as a society.
Who knows, maybe the social attitudes/standards will revert to those before the 90s, and then in a few decades we'll seem funny exactly because of our "outrage" at earlier times.
EDIT: such a reversal would not be unheard of -- if you read some communist texts from the 60s, they often talk mockingly of the capitalism of earlier decades, and congratulate themselves for having superseded those times. From our vantage point these 60s texts indeed seem outdated, but not because we have progressed even further along the path they had in mind :)
I'm not convinced by a reversal, but there may be a replacement.
IMO contemporary gender politics are just as rigid and aggressively normative as those of the 50s - just in different ways.
If you consider the possibility that rigid politics are a problem, and the form they take is secondary, there may still be room for progress.
Meanwhile these magazines are 50-60 years old, and best read as a historical record. They haven't been taken seriously as futurology for literally decades - if ever.
Getting angry about the content is a little like getting angry about the whaling in Moby Dick.
Perhaps not, but your example is not a good one; it doesn't show reversion it shows, if anything, a perspective that was never dominant continuing to not be dominant. (Actually, I suspect communist—particularly from the segments of Western communism that were already at odds with the Leninist/Stalinists—critiques of capitalism from the 1960s resonate more with the popular view today than they did when written, even if 1960s communist prescriptions for resolving the issues raised in those critiques might not, which, come to think of it, I wouldn't count on all that much.)
Interesting, some of use find the current generation has plenty of stories that seem dedicated to showing men as total losers and women as three million percent better. Yes it is painful, ham-fisted, sexist and vapid.
I am a subscriber to Clarkesworld Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and spend significant time pouring over novels that are coming up for the Hugos and Nebulas every year.
Where are you finding these stories? I'm certainly not reading them!
I was handed a collection of shorts a while ago [1] [2]. Only two of the stories had a male protagonist: one is an ineffectual programmer trapped inside a smart house (which has a female AI personality; in the end a female colleague rescues him) [3], and the other is an insane space probe. It's not quite the pogrom jcriddle4 was describing, but it was an interesting swing of the pendulum.
The stories were mostly pretty average. I thought 'Escape from Caring Seasons' by Sarah Pinsker was great; sadly, it doesn't seem to be online. 'Byzantine Empathy' by Ken Liu enraged me greatly, because it was about the transformative power of blockchain, and like everything about the transformative power of blockchain, contains a massive implicit "???" right before the "profit".
I'm kind of confused; this is a collection of 12 stories that does not appear to claim that they reflect all of science fiction or even a broad subset of science fiction. It could be entirely possible that it just happened that that specific anthology fell that way (it is an n=12 only, after all). How does it compare with The Best Science Fiction Of The Year and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy?
The hugos and nebulas are now highly politically motivated awards, and their winners often not really deserving stories more stories that told the right tales that someone wanted to hear ideologically.
They've devalued themselves and old winners of those awards should feel angry knowing that when people see "hugo winner" seals on books it makes that book more likely to be a political sledgehammer is pretend sci fi form, than a story worth reading.
And I say this as someone who buys 4-5 new fiction novels a month, which I think is relatively high for today's entertainment consumption trends.
I can't speak to your personal motivations/preferences, but the viewpoint you're espousing was pushed hard by the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies, who were (a) very highly politically motivated themselves, and (b) based on the evidence of the works they advocated for during their campaigns, manifestly failed to demonstrate that better works were being systematically discounted for award consideration.
I don't doubt that there are worthy books that never made the ballot for various reasons, and I don't doubt that there are books that don't make the ballot due to fan politics and personalities. But it was hard not to notice that it was very, very hard to get any Puppy to point to more than one of a handful of titles as "proof" of the Hugos being taken over by the Evil Liberal SJWs: the short story "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachael Swirsky; Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It was hard, in the final analysis, not to draw the parallels between the Puppies and the GamerGate crowd: one got the impression that they didn't really care how bad the case they were making was, because it was a proxy for a larger conservative culture war.
Again, I'm not necessarily ascribing any of this to you, but generally speaking the last few years of Hugo and Nebula Award winners/nominees have been both critically acclaimed and popular, with very few if any titles being stories that nobody particularly liked but just had the perception of "being important" in the way, say, it seems at least one Best Picture nominee always is ("Green Book," anyone?).
Could you indicate won works that aren't really deserving stories? The works I've read recently have been entertaining reads that explore humanity in interesting ways, that have been produced with excellent craftmanship.
Awards don't exist in a vacuum. The stories that make it to nomination and win are competing but no longer on the story but the adjacent political bent.
there were more interesting stories that did not win because they did not espouse the right politics or identity.
I have no interest in singling out stories that won I'm interested in why they won.
I'm glad you enjoyed what you read but to me the modern Hugo is the brand that intentionally devalues itself for the purpose of political manipulation in sledgehammer levels of subtlety.
I am less likely to buy a modern day Hugo winner than another book, because they've demonstrated that the values they use to decide who wins are too politically motivated and don't match my interest.
Eh. When I look at the Hugo lists, I'm looking for truly excellent work to read. It still checks that box for me more than other awards I'm aware of, so I don't feel it's devalued. The winners still seem very deserving. You could argue (and I think you may be) that many runners-up are also deserving. Of the stories that deserve to win, they choose one they more endorse the message of. That seems fine to me.
I've only really sought out the short story winners, but they remain really really excellent, and who cares about the subtlety. A sledgehammer can tell a great story, and at the end of the day, it's the greatness I care about, not how it's achieved. Last year's winner, Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ for example, wasn't exactly subtle, but it was really really excellent and enjoyable. Likewise the year before's winner: Seasons of Glass and Iron.
Between writing and editing this comment I read this year's winner and decided you are absolutely wrong.
I'd love to hear about this difference between the new Hugo-awarded novels and the authentic Hugo awards of old. Would there be any good examples of this?
I know you mentioned you didn't want to single out anything particular, but I feel like I could use a reference point or two to help understand the "why"s you mentioned.
The Hugos have always been like that. Not necessarily about politics, but about what it is that the kind of people who vote for the Hugos find comforting. There have been occasional diamonds, but for the most part, the Hugos have been anointing embarrassingly poor books for decades.
I'd recommend looking into a phenomenon known as 'racefail 09'. It was a large fandom-wide discussion on dated depictions of non-majority demographics (focused mostly on race, thus the name). Several of today's big authors were part of racefail '09 when it happened and its effect is still visible on modern scifi.
From a cursory look, if you're white and write a PoC character, you're racist. And if you're white and don't write a PoC character you're also racist. Cool.
I'm a big fan of Heinlein. His racial and gender politics were strikingly progressive for his time. It's no insult to say that we've moved past his time and can do better now than he did, in part thanks to the efforts of people like him.
SF had lots of great progressive ideas, but SF didn't always disrupt contemporary gender roles when it could've. I'm imagining girls who were interested in the stories, ideas, science, etc., and picking up on the discouraging gender role reinforcement.
> "is this what I'll seem like by the standards of a few decades in the future?"
One cultural improvement we hopefully have to look forward to: The more recent "Moana" (one of my favorite films) finally fixes the gender roles programming of the Disney princess stories, as far as I could tell, but it implicitly accepts classism. The child is wandering through her community, noting the people doing their various working class labor, accepting that's their predetermined roles in life, and agonizing that her birthright role of chief will prevent her from exploring.[1] Maybe someday we'll all tell her to go do her share of the coconut harvesting, and that she should demand to replace the monarchy with elected representatives. Then everyone will have some time to explore, if they want.
You might be interested to read Jeanette Ng’s acceptance speech for the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the Hugo Award Ceremony just two days ago.
The text alone doesn’t do it justice, her animated energy and excitement was a thing to behold live!
And H.L. Gold at Galaxy, along with Boucher & McComas at Fantasy & Science Fiction, were among the first editors to provide an alternative to the Campbell-dominated model of sf.
> reading the older sci-fi is painful when it comes to gender portrayals
A lot of old (and much new) SF is pretty terrible when in comes to any character portrait. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan, but it’s despite the depiction of characters.
Cardboard cutout characters are naturally going to be stereotypical, or wish fulfilment. And even when the characters have real depth, like in Dune, or The Left Hand of Darkness, they’re literally inhuman.
I've been working my way through all the sci-fi and mystery radio shows on archive.org over the past few years and there have definitely been some cringe worthy material. Gender roles, racism, and excessive use of derogatory terms for just about any condition...wow was some of that stuff just horrible. Covering nearly 30+ years I can hear the world getting better the later you listen.
reading the older sci-fi is painful when it comes to gender portrayals
I don't think this is specific to science fiction. Most fiction and nonfiction from more than a few decades ago is pretty bad according to modern racial and gender portrayals. Anything before 1940 will just completely assume some races are inferior. Anything before 1900 will just completely assume women are inferior. Go back further and you get things that don't even make you cringe nowadays because they seem too ridiculous, like people thinking that slavery is fine. Go back to the Old Testament and it has lots of different stories that encourage killing people for reasons that we would consider unacceptable nowadays.
Anyway, it does make it less of a "light, enjoyable read" when you are dealing with attitudes like that, but I think it is still worthwhile to read old things with attitudes that we now consider inappropriate, in order to understand the past. Many times there are good ideas mixed in with the bad ones.
Read some of Isaac Asimov's work. I find his ability to avoid many of the pitfalls of the social issues refreshing. His writing style isn't the most exciting, but it's thought provoking and interesting. The Foundation series as a whole was great.
I would count Foundation as one of the formative works that shaped my younger self's SF reading, but from a modern perspective, the almost complete absence of female characters is significant. Much of Asimov's work uses dialog-based exposition, and is very definitely 'tell' not 'show' in its nature - so there is very little scope for nuanced examination of social issues.
Asimov did write female characters but they are rare. Two that stand out are Susan Calvin (in the Robot series) and Noÿs in The End of Eternity. Calvin is described as follows: "She was a frosty girl, plain and colorless, who protected herself against a world she disliked by a mask-like expression and a hypertrophy of intellect" [0].
The main exception is The Gods Themselves, which is notable for discussing sex, albeit in a tri-sexual alien race.
[Edit - to be clear, this is not intended as a negative judgement of Asimov against today's sensibilities. Slightly reworded accordingly]
> Asimov did write female characters but they are rare
To be fair, Asimov didn't really tend to write very character-focussed fiction much, his male characters were generally no more developed than the female characters; protagonists were mostly lenses through which to explore the tapestry of broader systems, while non-viewpoint characters were mostly low-detail elements of the scene, he was more interested in showing the forest than lavishing detail on individual trees.
I find that I can enjoy any book based on the quality of the story and writing, I don't require it to fit into my own perspectives. If I did, I wouldn't be able to enjoy almost anything, as no one has my particular perspective.
You are right about Asimov's style, it hasn't aged great. But he was an intellectual at heart, so his writing fits his personality.
every writer should be interpreted in their context. I dont understand requiring asimov, who had so many interesting ideas and stories, to conform to today's gender concepts or judging him on them.
People who need their author/actor/etc to be exactly like themselves are probably racist.
Yes, totally agree on your point. I still enjoy Asimov, but stand by my original comment that he is one of those authors whose writing doesn't tick some boxes that are now considered important.
> It's enough that I've grown very leery of anything before the 90s, which is a shame because there's a lot of important stuff before then...but reading it pokes the wounds of too many sexist/racist older relatives (plus "is this what I'll seem like by the standards of a few decades in the future?") to let me enjoy the stories.
Hmm. I find that the latter thought is what makes it easier to accept the former.
I find old sci-fi very naive in many ways, and they obviously got some things factually wrong, since we discovered a lot in the last decades. There's so much good sci-fi, I don't have time to read even all the good modern stuff. I don't think I will ever attempt to even read anything before the 90's.
An interesting character in the Galaxy fold was science columnist (1952 on) Willy Ley. He'd been a co-founder of the German amateur rocketry society in 1927. He and illustrater Chesley Bonestell created some visionary publications in that period .. like 'The Conquest of Space' (1949).
I missed out on this era of Sci-fi. Thanks for sharing! If anyone else has any other suggestions other than the ones linked in this thread, please share :)
Compelling Science Fiction is a modern take on "hard scifi" as a magazine, that also avoids grimdark. I also highly recommend The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It's been a long-time staple of speculative fiction.
Some people genuinely are exposed to enough darkness irl that they don’t find enjoyment anymore in stories featuring nuances of misery, gore, and trauma. That’s totally fine.
Nope, it's just explaining there's a demand for non-grimdark work that Compelling Science Fiction's audience can compose of. There's no protection involved. Magazines select works to sell altogether as a product. If CSF's brand is non-grimdark, hard scifi, and they are successful at selling the product that is non-grimdark, hard scifi, then there's an audience interested in buying their work.
I'm not really sure where you get the protecting clause from, or intent. It's just market forces.
But honestly, reading the older sci-fi is painful when it comes to gender portrayals. When Heinlein represents some of the better portrayals, you know you have issues. Even the more liberal representations feel ham-fisted and vapid. It's enough that I've grown very leery of anything before the 90s, which is a shame because there's a lot of important stuff before then...but reading it pokes the wounds of too many sexist/racist older relatives (plus "is this what I'll seem like by the standards of a few decades in the future?") to let me enjoy the stories.