You are right about Eva Stratt and the author's... hangups around women. I had a hard time reading Iain Banks for similar reasons. And Gene Wolffe was SO BAD I ended up pitching the book against the wall and not finishing it. My guy friends who read Wolffe were like "WTF is up with his characters". He had a woman who accepted an arm transplant from someone, and this meant she had feelings for that someone's spouse??? And Wolffe was grappling with "what does a man owe a woman in this situation?" b/c he grew up when women couldn't have credit cards/bank accounts. I love a lot of things about sci fi but so many of the authors seem to think that a person == A Gender Presentation They Grew Up With. I think one of the reasons these guys need to write about strange foreign planets is because they've never visited anywhere outside of their own city && social class. What it means for me to be a woman is different in the small town I grew up in vs. the university I went to vs. the blue collar job I worked vs. the white collar job I work now. So many of these authors have never lived that. All this to say - do you have book recs? I am always taking book recs.
Male author who desperately wants to not be sexist: what female character should I make to show that I Respect Women… oh I know! Cold angsty badass mommy dom. I’m so good at this writing thing.
I’ve never read Iain Banks or Gene Wolffe but these don’t really surprise me. There definitely is a type of man who thinks that Woman is a Type Of Person with specific traits (similar to the type of white person who thinks that an Asian or Black or Latino or Native is a Type Of Person with specific traits) and this comes through in their writing. Disappointing to hear about Banks though, everyone sings his praises for his genderfluid future. (And I suppose to stick up for gender equality, there are absolutely women writing SFF who seem to believe that everyone deep down is basically a white suburban Californian at heart, and nonbinary SFF authors who are deeply incurious about literally anything outside their own self-centered experience. Becky Chambers and Alexandra Rowland I’m looking at you.)
Book recs that are not like that: Ted Chiang Ted Chiang Ted Chianggggg aside from iterating in fascinating ways constantly on the ideas of free will and contextual constraint, my mom read “Story Of Your Life” and kept reflexively calling the author “she” because she assumed an author who wrote about motherhood with such realism and empathy and insight must have been a woman and kept being shocked to be reminded that he was a man. He only writes bangers. He also only writes short stories tho :’)
Also my current in-progress reads are Common Bonds 2 an anthology of aromantic-spectrum sff short stories, which so far range from okay-to-good, kind if on the nose sometimes, needed a slightly stronger editorial hand sometimes imo, but I’m loving to see the variety of stories in it; Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim, the first novel of a short story author I’ve liked for years and the novel is a fascinating and aching portrayal of doppelgängers and immigration and bicultural experiences; and Planet Sickness by Kat Giles, which is the published version of Space Archives that is about disability, control of the narrative, and an archivist trying to figure out What Happened to a mission lost in space years ago. Said archivist is groundbreaking in the SFF archives world for actually doing real archival work (she still does go to space about it also). All of them are really compelling and interesting and intentional about diversity in experience in different ways!
