I’ve never understood how female authors who write intelligently are frequently labeled ‘unaccessable,’ slow, boring, &c. while male writers who do so are lauded for it. Just the other day I was reading a review of Ursula Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, a masterpiece of world-building, which criticized the first half of the book for dragging and reading far too slowly. I can’t help but feeling that, were Le Guin male, she’d be praised for capturing the glacial, majestic feel of the ice upon Gethen, and how the pacing of the first half of the book excellently matched the pacing and rhythms of the world she so excellently built and described in her text. It’s the same with [C.J.] Cherryh: She excels at writing stories about the alienation of one person effectively set down, set out, or set apart in a suddenly alien environment and struggling to adapt, at speed, on the fly, in a rapidly changing, hostile environment. Her characters are constantly forced to innovate, adapt, and think, on the fly, on their feet, and frequently while running, under fire. Her novels frequently include stream-of-consciousness passages, or delve into details of the actual science involved, but somehow expecting SF & F readers to be able to cope with that is asking too much of them? Really? A male writer wouldn’t be called inaccessable for this. He’d likely be lauded. As for the ‘Dense’ writing style of the Morgaine novels, they were a genderflipped send-up of John Norman’s Gor novels and their ilk, as evidenced by the cover art. The writing style derives from them as well. I like good SF and Fantasy, regardless of the gender of the author, but I really, really hate seeing some of the best writers in the genre (or genres, now that they’ve been somewhat split,) constantly be shaded for attributes which — were they male — would no doubt be celebrated as positive and delightful qualities in their writing. We, as readers, are better than this. Or at least we should be.
a comment on Tor article ‘Fighting Erasure: Women SF Writers Through the 1970s’ (James Davis Nicholl, Jan. 2018) by user Dubhain
