Over at the SFWA blog, Nisi Shawl writes on the subject of writing about characters from races and cultures other than your own.  It’s a great article and has some excellent ideas for improving one’s own knowledge and insight.

The number of aspiring authors who shy away from writing about characters of other races because they believe themselves unable to do so well is strange, since there is probably no genre that spends more time with people or beings unlike the author than science fiction.  Jack McDevitt is not an archaeologist.  Elizabeth Moon is not autistic.  Iain M. Banks is not a machine intelligence.  David Drake is not a psychologically reconditioned rapist.  Neal Asher is not an alien space-faring biomechanical sphereoid with a penchant for strange, cryptic pronouncements.  Dan Simmons is not a Jewish college professor who has spent the last twenty years grappling with his religious beliefs while watching helplessly as his beloved daughter ages backwards into infancy.

Writing about characters of another race or culture is not an insurmountable challenge compared to this.  There is, of course, an added degree of risk if it is done badly, in terms of causing real-world offense or anger, that doesn’t apply to portraying the inhuman; Peter Watts need not fear being upbraided by space-going philosophical zombies who thought the aliens in Blindsight were offensive stereotypes.

Anyway, I definitely recommend checking out Shawl’s article.  Discussion of racial and cultural diversity in science fiction topic tends to be vague and platitudinous,  so it’s great to see more writing about the nuts and bolts of actually doing something about it.

I’ve been kept busy lately by some work-related stuff, along with the seven or eight distinct illnessess that have all apparently taken up residence in my digestive system simultaenously and started battling for supremacy, but I’m back in action.  Look for new reviews both here and at BSCreview very soon.

Here’s some very good news, via SF Crowsnest: Solaris Books has found a buyer.  It was announced a few months ago that their parent company, the Black Library, was going to start focusing solely on its primary purpose as the fiction-publishing arm of Games Workshop.   Solaris’ new owner is British game developer Rebellion Developments.  Rebellion has experience with publishing, through creating their own SF/Fantasy/Horror imprint Abaddon Books and by acquiring seminal weekly comics anthology 2000 AD and RPG/tabletop game company Mongoose Publishing.  2000 AD is the source of Judge Dredd, among other things, and Mongoose is the publisher of the current edition of the legendary Traveller and the new RPG based on David Drake’s Hammers Slammers stories, so presumably the new guys in charge know their way around the SF field.

(Though their greatest accolade may be this line from the Rebellion Developments Wikipedia page:  “Their first known title was Alien Vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar, which was considered one of the few good games for that console.”  Seldom has a single sentence been so coldly factual and hilariously brutal at the same.  Poor Jaguar.  I guess the world just wasn’t ready for your 64 bits of processing power and godawful controllers.)

I’ve really come to like Solaris over the past year or so, and it’s through Solaris that I’ve discovered a number of authors, such as Andy Remic, Eric Brown, and Jeffrey Thomas.  I’m very happy to see it will continue.

Found the test via Andrew Wheeler.  I’m actually not a big Moorcock reader, but this still seems right somehow.  I’m not sure I’d call myself “high-brow,” but the rest of it- violent, traditional, cynical, ruggedly manly facial hair- all fit.  If you try out the test yourself, let me know what you get in the comments.

Your result for Which fantasy writer are you?…

Michael Moorcock (b. 1939)

19 High-Brow, 21 Violent, -17 Experimental and 21 Cynical!

Take Which fantasy writer are you? at HelloQuizzy

Not long ago, at least by this blog’s glacial standards, SF Signal and its weekly mind meld feature featured the question of whether or not science fiction has held back the real-life exploration of space, as recently claimed by astronaut Buzz Aldrin. The idea is that science fiction and unrealistic portrayals of space travel make the real thing seem boring and disappointing by comparison, diminishing the public’s interest in real space travel.

I find this implausible for a few reasons. The biggest is that I don’t think science fiction has enough influence on the public consciousness to be a serious factor in the way Aldrin suggests. Everyone has heard of Star Trek and Star Wars, but I don’t think the average person compares what they hear about real space travel to science fiction, even subconsciously. The people who are sufficiently immersed in science fiction to seriously make that sort of comparison seem if anything to be more likely than average to be in favor of space travel, in my experience, so if science fiction has any effect it seems more likely to be the opposite of what Aldrin suggests.

Another problem is that unrealistic or fanciful portrayals of other forms of technology don’t seem to have retarded their development or diminished public interest. The portrayal of computers and the Internet in movies is frequently ridiculous, but that doesn’t seem to have harmed the development of computers or the public’s interest in them; people don’t turn their noses up to real PCs because they don’t act like the ones in movies. The same could be said of weapons, surveillance technology, or forensic science, to name a few.

More generally, exaggerated or idealized depictions of a thing usually make people more interested in that thing, not less. I’d be shocked, for instance, if the movie Top Gun made viewers less interested in military aviation, or if movies about idealistic political crusaders and reformers made viewers less interested in real politics, or if Kill Bill made people less interested in katanas. In my experience, seeing an idealized fantasy version of something is what strengthens interest, both because it initially draws attention and because it makes people want to make the fantasy reality.

A personal example: I know plenty of long-time students at the martial arts school I go to who first became interested because of martial arts movies. Martial arts movies are seldom very realistic; even the relatively down-to-earth ones are often a lot smoother and prettier than the real thing. The movies also usually fail to convey what being on the receiving end of a punch to the gut or a triangle choke feels like, and leave out things like watching someone vomit because they got kicked in the groin on the day they forgot to wear their cup. Nevertheless, there is no doubt in my mind that martial arts movies have increased public interest in the martial arts and the number of practitioners. To give another personal example, I cover local government for a small newspaper. I see the nuts-and-bolts of real politics on a regular basis, and I can assure you that seeing it up close is a lot less likely to inspire enthusiasm about politics than watching The West Wing.

If anything, I think more realistic science fiction is less likely to inspire interest in real space travel than more fanciful SF. I love hard science fiction, but I think that most people- and especially impressionable kids- are more likely to say, “Wow, space is really cool!” from watching Star Trek then from watching a realistic portrayal of space flight, with all its limitations. This is by no means a criticism of hard SF; it’s not science fiction’s job as a genre to push any particular viewpoint.

If SF does hurt public appreciation for science, it would be not by presenting unrealistic science and technology that leads to disappointment with the real thing, but through the heavy reliance of media SF on “science gone wrong/tampering in God’s domain” type stories. This sort of plot and theme is far more common in movies and television then in science fiction books, I think due to a combination of who produces written SF vs. media SF and the constraints imposed by the different forms. However, this trope never involves space flight, as far as I’m aware. (I suppose the movie Event Horizon could be considered an exception, but I doubt anyone watched that movie and thought, “We should abandon all research into spacecraft propulsion to make sure nobody accidentally opens a gateway into Hell.”) It’s almost always applied to biological science and technology, or to robots and computers.

There are several factors leading to lack of public enthusiasm for space travel, I think, but science fiction is not among them. I have my own ideas on that front, but this post is long enough already.

Alastair Reynolds has an interesting post on some science fiction fans’ aversion to the term “sci-fi.” I myself do not use the term much, but I’ve never shared the intense dislike of the term some people have. It’s in the URL of my blog, after all.

I do find the aversion understandable, however. “Sci-fi” is often used in a derogatory, belittling, or patronizing context- those “check out these weirdos” articles that pop up in newspapers when there’s a sci-fi convention in town, for instance. Thus, I don’t think the analogy Reynolds draws to audiophiles who get upset when people say “hi-fi” instead of “high-fidelity” really works- no one uses the term “hi-fi” while laughing or sneering at high-fidelity stereos or their owners.

There may be a regional difference shaping our differing perceptions. Reynolds is from the United Kingdom, while I’m from the Midwestern United States, and I don’t know how “sci-fi” is used in the British media.

All in all, I think it’s a useful term- catchier-sounding and more concise than “science fiction,” more readily understandable and identifiable to the uninitiated than “SF,” less likely to set my teeth on edge than “speculative fiction.” I’d hate to abandon a good word just because some people use it in an obnoxious way.

I wonder if part of the hostility to the term comes from the desire of many fans for greater mainstream respectability and recognition of science fiction as “real literature.” It’s a desire I sympathize with, but not one I consider attainable. There seems to be a common belief that written science fiction (and fantasy) could triumphantly burst out of its “ghetto” if only it were presented better- book covers that don’t look so embarrassingly science fictiony, fewer aesthetically displeasing male nerds at cons, whatever. Thus, the word “sci-fi,” with its popular connotation of schlocky movies about bug-eyed men, may strike some people as the source (or part of the source) of science fiction’s image problem, which suggests that the problem could be solved or ameliorated if we got people to say “science fiction” or “speculative fiction” instead.

This is futile, even if it were somehow possible to get everyone to use some other word or words. Even if people stopped saying “sci-fi,” the euphemism treadmill is relentless.  Whatever term replaced ‘sci-fi” in the public mind would quickly gain all the negative connotations of its predecessor- and those negative connotations are not going to go away.

Lou Anders has an interesting post (found via SF Signal) on people’s enjoyment of books being affected by the religious or political views expressed in the book.  I can’t think of a book that I otherwise would have liked that I disliked because of its political, ideological, or religious content, though maybe that has more to do with my reading choices than any innate tolerance; I really couldn’t say.

There are two ways I can think of for a book or author’s ideological stance to diminish a reader’s enjoyment, and I think people almost always talk about only the first, which is when a person finds the author’s viewpoint morally or intellectually objectionable in itself.  This is the kind Anders is talking about, I think, and is the kind usually discussed when the issue comes up.  Orson Scott Card is probably the most prominent example of an author some people won’t read for this reason.

There is another way in which I can see a book’s stance or viewpoint marring someone’s enjoyment of the book, however, particularly in regards to politics.  Every adult who is not oblivious to the society around him has an ideology, consciously embraced and held or otherwise.  Political ideologies do, of course, have a purely moral component, beliefs about how things should be.  However, in large part, an ideology is a set of beliefs about how the world works, a sort of physics of society. Can government central planners do a better job of creating prosperity than the market economy?  Can despotic foreign countries be turned into successful democracies through invasion?  Will increased welfare spending have undesirable cultural effects on the recipients?  Is human nature as we know it fixed, or would it change significantly under different socioeconomic conditions?  These are questions full of moral significance, but they are not themselves moral questions.

If a character in a story is forced to watch as his beloved family is slaughtered and never feels any distress about it, most readers would think, “Hold on, people don’t work that way.”  If you’re reading a science fiction story where normal people routinely survive 500-foot drops in Earth’s gravity without being harmed, the implausibility of it will make it harder to believe in the world of the story, and thus harder to enjoy it.  My father, an attorney, can’t watch TV legal dramas for more than five minutes without yelling at the television.

Politics can be similar.  When someone’s ideology clashes with yours, he doesn’t just disagree about moral values, he disagrees about how the world works, and how people work.  Thus, when reading a work of fiction, a violation of one’s ideological expectations can be jarring in the same way that poorly done characterization, bad science, or technical mistakes can be.  If you believe that unregulated markets inevitably result in monopolies and plutocracy, a story with a world based on libertarian assumptions about society and economics will be that much harder to buy into.  If you think that the state is by nature an exploitative institution, a setting where the government works the way good-government liberals say it does (or can) is not going to be believable.  You won’t believe in a setting based on a free-love paradise if you believe promiscuity causes unhappiness and social breakdown.  And so on.

There are ways around this.  (Perhaps everyone in the free-love paradise has been genetically engineered so that they don’t feel jealousy or form strong pair-bond ties.)  And you can still enjoy a story even if you think it’s based on bad assumptions about society and human nature, if it’s other virtues are enough to compensate.  Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable for enjoyment of a story to be affected by these factors, any more than it’s unreasonable for it to be affected by the realism of characterization or science.

This goes deeper than bad physics, for me and I think for most people.  It’s relatively easy for me to imagine that the laws of physics are other than what they really are, so that FTL travel or whatever is possible.  But ideology is in large part about the causal laws of human beings, and it’s much harder to bracket what I know about human beings than it is to temporarily put aside what I know about physical science.  I can read about and contemplate special relativity, or not, as I choose; I can’t stop living in a human society and thinking and feeling with a human mind.  Almost everyone has strongly held beliefs about how people work that are fundamental to their worldview; most people don’t have such beliefs about science, even if they like the subject and are knowledgeable about it.

Of course, people who care about the subject mostly agree about the laws of physics, except on the cutting edges, and there’s fairly broad agreement about at least the basics of how most people behave, at least on the individual level.  Ideology is far more contentious.  Most people would be intolerant of a story, if allegedly set in the real universe we know, where people enjoy being tortured or rivers flow uphill, but such intolerance never shows itself because everyone agrees on those points, and so there are no stories like that to be intolerant of.  There’s plenty of opportunity to be intolerant where ideology is concerned, on the other hand, because no comparable consensus exists.  Whatever you believe about politics and society, the world has plenty of people who believe things that will strike you as the equivalent of “rivers flow uphill,” and who would say the same thing about your beliefs.

So, yes, my enjoyment of stories can be, and has been, affected by the ideological stance or assumptions in a book, and I don’t think there’s anything unreasonable about that.  (Though I do my best to bracket that aspect when writing a review, since “Are the book’s setting and events in accord with John Markley’s social and political views?” is probably not a question SF fans are dying to know the answer to.)  Now, I don’t give this consideration a huge amount of weight.  There are far too many different authors with different views for me to limit myself to people who agree with me, and my reading would be greatly diminished if I decided that, say, Iain M. Banks was too doctrinally impure to read.

What about you?  Has this issue affected the way you read or experience fiction?  If so, how?

Jake Seliger has an interesting post about remarks made about fantasy by Patrick Kurp, in which Kurp says:

Fantasy feels like a cheat, an evasion, a con game for stunted children. I read to know the world, in particular the human world, even to celebrate it, not to slum in another. Ours feels sufficiently mysterious and wonder-filled, so ghosts, witches, aliens and magic spells come off as kitschy, redundant gimmicks.

I strongly recommend Seliger’s post. He gives an interesting defense of fantasy that is worth reading.

I’m interested not so much in Kurp specifically as in what his remark suggests, because I think it shows an important part of the reason why fantasy and science fiction is so looked down upon, a question that’s been on my mind lately. Calling something childish or the like is, of course, a common attack leveled against fiction that does not take place in the real world as we know it (or its past), as well as a common criticism of people who read such fiction. Why?

I think it largely boils down to this. Children often have vivid imaginations, and so imagination is strongly associated with children in our culture. Children tend to have all sorts of traits that are not appropriate for adults. People often have a need to prove themselves grown up, to others and perhaps to themselves. Thus, use of imagination beyond imagining fairly mundane real-world events is disreputable. As a result, it’s often not enough to simply say, “SF doesn’t interest me,” or even to say that SF is all aesthetically bad; some psychological or moral fault must be ascribed to SF and/or its readers.

It’s worth noting that the small number of speculative works that have gained respectability are usually social/political commentaries, satires, or allegories, e.g. 1984 and Brave New World. (Or the new Battlestar Galactica, for that matter.) Imagination is more excusable when the imaginative elements of a work are only a stand-in for something about the present-day world, merely sugar to help the medicine go down. Some SF fans themselves seem to implicitly accept this, arguing that SF should be respected because of its potential for metaphor or allegory.

Things are likely aggravated by the fact that most modern fantasy, like science fiction, is heavily based on system-building and logical extrapolation: if X were the case (X being “magic is real” or “time-travel is possible” or whatever), what would happen? Logic and systematizing, as I’ve said before, are disfavored personality traits; having a strong interest in them is considered to be mostly the preserve of nerds, weirdoes, and losers. Fantasy is (obviously) not connected to science in the way science fiction is, but it often shares science fiction’s rational approach to a great extent.

That might explain why magical realism is usually considered legit literature: it has imaginative elements, which is iffy, but it doesn’t compound the sin by thinking about the imaginative elements rationally. Weird stuff just happens, and people and the world in general don’t respond realistically. (I’m not saying this as a criticism; different forms of literature engage different aspects of the human mind to different degrees, and that’s perfectly legitimate.)

Similarly, while mystery is often highly rational in orientation, it does not usually imagine things that could not happen today (or in the real past, for historicals.) Mystery is Genre rather than Real Literature, but it is still far more respectable than science fiction or fantasy.

Respectability for fantasy or science fiction is most likely a hopeless cause, at least in the current cultural climate. It has the stigma of childishness and Nerd Cooties at the same time. A genre might be able to get away with one; you won’t get away with both.

Over at SF Crowsnest, there’s a new social network for SF fans called Hivemind.  It’s just starting, but I like how it looks so far.  I’ve got a profile here.

There’s been lots of discussion, started by Jonathon McCalmont and largely flowing out of Gabe Chouinard’s post here, about the idea of monetary compensation for SF review bloggers and sites from publishers. (See OF Blog of the Fallen, Antick Musings, A Dribble of Ink, Rob’s Blog o’Stuff, Walker of Worlds.) McCalmont originally said:

In order to build up a successful blog it takes time and energy. Not only do you have to keep on producing decent material, you also have to learn to write about certain topics in certain ways so as to pick up links from other people and increase your subscription rate by tapping into others’ subscription bases. As the article suggests, building that technorati rating can feel like working a second job. With some book bloggers showing the strain and quitting, I think the time may come in the future when publishers will have to do more than send out review copies.

Building on this, Chouinard said:

The truth is, the genre blogs are producing publicity for publishers. Each time we post an interview with an author or sponsor a book giveaway, we are doing a service for the publishers. The publishers are getting a free ride from us, to be honest, and to be even more honest I think we’ve given up too much to them, to the point where publishers now expect bloggers to do this work for them. And if we are doing that work for them, is it fair that the publishers ought to pay us for the work?

I’d certainly be thrilled to make money doing this, and I’m happy for any blogger who manages to do so, but I find some of the underlying ideas here hard to relate to. I work as a newspaper reporter. Do I find the work stimulating? Yes. I’m very fortunate in my job.  But if I was not being paid, would I attend government meetings in order to write about how the Board of Trustees spent two hours arguing about whether or not a waste disposal contract should include the optional wheeled recycling toters? No. Spending a lot of time researching and writing on topics of very little interest to me has made me very appreciative of the opportunity to write for an audience on things I like and enjoy, and I don’t share the idea that SF blogging on one’s own time is “work” calling for compensation.

I recognize that blogging well requires a lot of effort, but many hobbies are that way. I study the martial arts and love it, but it involves a great deal of exertion, some dull repetition, and not a little pain. I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with bloggers making money – I myself have made a veritable king’s ransom from the guy who bought a copy of The Prefect through my Amazon link- but I can’t see anything being owed.

The problems of bloggers remaining independent while getting money from publishers have been pointed out by several others already (perhaps most forcefully by Andrew Wheeler at Antick Musings), but there’s another issue which, in light of other things he’s said, ought to concern Chouinard. He has expressed the belief that online SF reviewing is being damaged and diluted by large numbers of shoddy reviewers. It seems to me that making blogging more financially lucrative would only aggravate such a situation, as non-reviewers currently on the margin are induced to take up writing. That’s not necessarily bad- some of these more mercenary potential bloggers would likely turn out to be worthwhile contributors- but it would certainly bring in a lot crap as well, especially since many of these reviewers would likely be of the lazy get-my-ticket-punched sort Chouinard deplores.

Another possible problem with the idea of publishers paying to support bloggers, either as individuals or in some sort of collective: I’m not sure how much SF bloggers actually benefit publishers as a whole, because I don’t know how much we actually increase total sales, if we do at all. A good review can make someone run out and buy something he hadn’t intended to, but a bad one can do the reverse. I’m sure the existence of online reviewers affects which books sell somewhat, which is good for readers but zero-sum for the publishing industry as a whole. Publishers sending books to bloggers may be sort of like nations having armies- they’d be better off if everyone abolished their military, but if one of them has one the others follow suit to keep up. If that’s the case, publishers might be reluctant to create an additional expense for themselves if they suspect that the ensuing arms race will nullify any advantage they initially gain and create a new source of promotional costs that may never go away.

Anyone else have some thoughts on this?

This post is a follow-up to my first post about the issue of the gender disparity in science fiction, which you may want to read first for context.

One important thing to keep in mind, if you’re going to argue that some or all of the disparity in science fiction is due to discrimination by publishers and editors, is that you’ll need a lot more than a headcount of published authors or award nominees. First and most obviously, you’ll need to know the number of male and female submissions in different genres and subgenres. Even if the stories submitted by males and females are indistinguishable, one would still expect whichever sex submitted more to dominate both publications and awards, since more submissions would mean more chances for lightning to strike. And, for reasons I’ve already given, it would be rather surprising if most attempts at being published in science fiction were not made by men.

You’d also need to know what those submissions are like, not only in terms of quality but in terms of style, subject, and content. Stories of equal quality are still heterogeneous. A well-written science fiction story with a Heinleinesque writing style revolving around string theory is not the same good as an equally well-written hard science fiction story with a Heinleinesque writing style revolving around neuroscience, or with a Vancian writing style, and so on. If there is some sex disparity in what men and women tend to write about, or in the style they tend to write in, or the genres they prefer, that could also make men more likely to get published or win awards. It might be lamentable that the subjects or styles that draw more women are of less interest to publishers or award committees or readers, but it’s not discrimination, conscious or otherwise, against women qua women. (Unless, of course, these topics or styles are being rejected simply because they are associated with women, rather than because of taste or expected profitability.) It still might be something worth addressing; that’s a different issue.

I don’t blame people who claim the existence of discrimination among publishers for failing to provide this sort of data- they’re not writing a sociology thesis- but without it we’re mostly groping in the dark. The obvious solution, I suppose, would be for some editors to try reading submissions blind and see what happens.

Now, it is not an either/or situation. Even if it is the case that men are more likely to write what publishers and award organizations like, such that they would be disproportionately represented even in the absence of discrimination, it is quite possible that people have taken a generally accurate generalization and over-applied it. That happens all the time, since humans are lazy and it takes time and energy to judge people one individual at a time.

However, I am highly suspicious of the claim that publishers are acting out of sexism, because it requires me to believe that editors and publishers are not only sexist, but value sexism enough to make serious sacrifices in profitability. A similar objection applies to the idea that publishers are discriminating unconsciously. If they were, there’d be an obvious entrepreneurial opportunity for anyone who knows or suspects this to be the case: find as many unjustly unpublished female writers as you can and exploit the fact that you can pay them less since no one else is bidding for them, while maintaining or even increasing the quality of your product. It wouldn’t last, since the price of female writers will be bid up once other people start trying to get in on the action, but for a while you’ll have above-normal profits. Nobody seems to be doing this, and for publisher bigotry to explain that it would be necessary for everyone to be blind to the possibility, decade after decade, which is highly implausible. When an observer on the sidelines thinks that something would be profitable and entrepreneurs who actually have an incentive to get it right don’t, bet on the entrepreneurs. Yes, they could be mistaken, but people are more likely to get things right if they suffer some actual harm from being wrong. (It’s worth noting that what is often held up as the paradigmatic case of proven sex discrimination, orchestra hiring prior to the days of blind auditions, happened in the nonprofit sector.)

In the short story magazines, there may be more of a case for discrimination as an explanation: there are far fewer professional SF magazines than there are book publishers, and the declining fortunes of those publications no doubt discourages new entries to the market. With fewer eyes scanning for opportunities, it’s less implausible that an existing opportunity has been missed. Still, using publisher discrimination to explain the disparity once again requires us to believe that this has somehow been missed for decades.

The claim that the awards are given in a sexist manner does not fall under this objection, since people who vote for awards gain nothing by being fair and lose nothing by being unfair, so I’m more open to the possibility that the awards are sexist. Again, however, a mere headcount of nominees and winners is useless without additional data.

With all that said, there’s a more plausible way for sexism to be an influence. If part of the disparity is the result of bias within the field, it seems much more likely to be the bias of the audience, rather than the publishers. A publisher that decides who to publish based on sex can lose large amounts of money, whereas a reader who is sexist (consciously or unconsciously) in his reading choices suffers merely a diminution in his recreational reading pleasure, and unless he is rejecting utterly brilliant female writers in order to read wretched male hacks his loss is likely to be modest. In short, publishers have a strong incentive to be fair, and readers generally don’t.

There is a bit of anecdotal support for this being an issue. I recall hearing several times (years ago, so I can’t provide a source) that the publisher of hard science fiction author Chris Moriarty tried to exploit her ambiguous first name- they never denied the fact that she was a woman, but they coyly tried not to mention it if they could get around it.

In the absence of strong incentives to avoid it, I would expect a certain amount of reader sexism in any field where one sex is much more common than the other, or where the field is widely thought to be by nature better-suited to a particular sex, and so I’d be rather surprised if there wasn’t bias in book-buying habits from some readers, cutting against different sexes in different genres. On the other had, for reasons explained in my prior post on the issue, in the case of science fiction I think the sex disparity in publishing reflects a real sex disparity in output, so even a perfectly unbiased reader of science fiction would be likely to have a relative dearth of female authors in their book collection. (For which reason I find the ostentatious self-flagellation occasionally performed by bloggers or reviewers proclaiming themselves “part of the problem” for reviewing mostly books by male authors to be fairly absurd.)

That’s all for now. I have some other related thoughts that may coalesce into a post at some point.