Is the future female? Fixing sci-fi"s women problem

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Recently, I was asked if I could write a short story for a science fiction collection about “women inventing the future”. Could I write it in four weeks? I considered it. I have three day jobs, a two-year-old and was then knee deep in promotion for my debut novel. Out of those four weeks, I figured I’d have three days to write the thing – if granny could step up. “No problem,” I said breezily, and hung up. Then I panicked.

What on earth did “women inventing the future” mean? Was I supposed to write some sort of feminist space opera, full of menstruating aliens? A utopian version of the singularity, with robots who liked to talk about their feelings? A vision of a social media platform so woke and teeming with empathy that Zuckerberg would jack in Facebook and invest?

Then there was the issue of my credentials. Who am I to invent the future? I am not a technologist. I can’t code. Yes, my novel has been described as “neuroscience fiction”, but it is far from the “hard” end of the genre. I certainly didn’t consider it sci-fi when I wrote it. Neither did my publisher’s marketing team, who sold it as commercial women’s fiction, a “Bridget Jones meets The Matrix” mashup that offered none of the detailed tech porn I felt would be needed to lay out a vision of humanity’s future. And let’s not even get on to the issue of my sex: most days, I feel like a genderless toddler slave and word machine. Was I really woman enough to rep the sisterhood? Or did I feel like a fraud precisely because I’m a woman? (We’re good at that.)

In my experience, kids are far more gender– (and sometimes, species–) blind than we give them credit for

Any conversation about gender stumbles around in generalisations and cliches. But the fact remains: only 16% of the people studying computer science in the UK are women. And this imbalance, which has an undeniable impact on the design of the devices, platforms and systems driving our future, has an equally poisonous literary twin.

Science fiction is famously male-dominated, both in its writers and its readers. It’s also famously rubbish at offering nuanced female characters; any doubters would do well to read Liz Lutgendorff’s blistering take-down of the misogyny permeating NPR’s 100 best sci-fi and fantasy books list. That landscape is changing: more women (and, notably, women of colour) are winning prestigious awards such as the Arthur C Clarke and its US counterpart the Hugos, and there are projects such as the recent all-female edition of iconic comic 2000AD. But, there’s still a long way to go.

What’s more, some believe that the lack of female role models in sci-fi has already done real-world damage. “Right now,” wrote Laurie Penny in an essay for the Guardian last June, “the real world seems to be out of ideas about how to organise its future – and that’s exactly why women’s fantasy futures feel more necessary than ever”. This, I learned, was why the anthology I was writing my story for was commissioned: doteveryone, the thinktank behind it, hoped that “different stories about the future, written by and featuring women, might make it easier for more women and girls to succeed as inventors, innovators and entrepreneurs.”

Well, boom. Instinctively, this idea made me want to march around London’s Silicon Roundabout, giving startled brogrammers books by Becky Chambers and Nnedi Okorafor. The problem was, I wasn’t entirely sure I bought it.

Sci-fi was a big influence on me growing up. I bonded with few of the canonical classics, but in the new wave of novels being published between the 1980s and 2000s, I discovered plenty to adore. Yes, I loved Jill Paton Walsh and Ursula K Le Guin and Octavia Butler, but I also loved William Gibson, and the blokey pulp Space Above and Beyond novels. I also encountered several complex heroines in books by men – the eponymous star of Peter Dickinson’s young adult novel Eva is a longstanding favourite – as well a fair few male heroes and even non-humans that I admired. In my experience, kids are far more gender– (and sometimes, species–) blind than we give them credit for.

‘Yes, I loved Jill Paton Walsh and Ursula K Le Guin and Octavia Butler, but I also loved William Gibson’ Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

Moreover, my love of sci-fi spectacularly failed to nudge me into a tech career. Despite spending two years near-exclusively reading X-Files fanfiction, I remained immune to “the Scully effect” – a phenomenon discovered by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which found that women who regularly watched X-Files on TV were 50% more likely to go on to work in STEM industries. When the time came for university, I passed over engineering for English literature, to my eternal feminist shame.

But as I began writing my story, I collided with some deep biases about sci-fi I had never realised that I had internalised. The first concerned my protagonist. The heroine of my novel is of average intelligence, clumsy, and without any discernible special talent (other than putting her foot in it). But for a genre-specific, feminist-flag-waving anthology, I automatically assumed I needed the opposite. One of those strong, naturally gifted sci-fi heroines. You know the type: young, scowling, super-fit cyberpunks with a penchant for tight black leather and purple hair. Ever since I encountered Cayce Pollard in Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, I’d loved those feisty, damaged bad girls. But as I tried my hardest to write one, I wondered if that’s exactly what they were. They weren’t women – they were girls, emotionally stunted, evergreen teenagers. That realisation prompted a more worrying one: in my youth, had I – extremely uncool, unrebellious and unsexy – simply assumed I wasn’t sassy and shouty enough to translate a literary passion for tech into a job? Is that why I wasn’t now raking in the billions in a Shoreditch co-working space?

So my heroine became 47, plain, pragmatic and gay.

In terms of the setting, I realised how readily I had bought into the trope of great inventors adhering to a life of solitude, relentless work, physical aggression and borderline mental illness (a fine tradition running from Mary Shelley to Neal Stephenson and beyond). Again, I reassessed the impact this seductive literary message had had on me: did my younger self assume, because my life goals included being happy and healthy, that I simply wasn’t cut out for scientific greatness?

Then there was the science. I wanted to base my plot on the neurobiology of sleep, but self-doubt soon reared its head. I’d enjoyed the odd dose of the hard stuff now and then, but I’d never felt compelled to write it. But didn’t I need pen a technically impeccable rebuttal to critics of modern science fiction, those who claim the genre is being diluted by disrespectful dilettantes “trying to pass off romance in space and left-wing diversity lectures as science fiction”?

In the end, I gave up trying to be the right kind of female science fiction writer and simply wrote what came out – a riff on grief, love and family that wore its near-future science lightly. But that isn’t to say that my story, A Darker Wave, was any more female or meaningful than others in the anthology, the ones that had sexier heroines (Kassandra Khaw’s There are Wolves in These Woods) or more glamorous settings (Madeline Ashby’s The Cure For Jetlag) or more overt astrophysics (Liz Williams’ In the God Fields). It was just different. They all were. Their shared femaleness was less notable than their exhilarating and unexpected range of perspectives, fears, hopes and ideas.

I had succumbed to the same fallacy that seduces the tech world: the belief that diversity means seeking out more of the same, from different people. It is this idea that dictates every woman must learn to code, that expects people from diverse backgrounds to apply to organisations that show no sign of changing their monolithic cultures, that underestimates the value of insights that do not come from a dataset.

The best science fiction has always been that which most powerfully disrupts our expectations. If adding more, and more varied, depictions of female life helps uncover new ideas in sci-fi, from hard to soft to the genre-skimming hybrids, that makes for better books. And the better the sci-fi, the more likely it is to dislodge old thinking, spark new ideas, reach new readers and, perhaps, change the future. Whether the giant alien warrior-queens mention their periods or not.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/29/is-the-future-female-fixing-sci-fis-women-problem