Debbie in the Times

Deborah Miller kindly drops me a line to let me know that the Sunday Times this week carried an interview with her. The interview does make the point that a female author + fantasy does not necessarily = soft touch, as anyone who had read Debbie’s work can vouch for, the darkness lurking in the shadows between pages (notably in her first novel, Talisker, published under the name Miller Lau). However, Debbie did point out that the article is wrong in one important respect – the owl outside her home is not plastic!

Actually the article makes a more serious mistake when it says “There aren’t many female sci-fi writers”. Pleased though I am to see such an excellent author getting well-deserved coverage in the mainstream press (we do seem to be becoming more respectable these days, if somewhat slowly, two steps forward and one back fashion) I was rather annoyed at this incorrect statement, so readily asserted and so fundamentally wrong (why can’t journalists do some basic research before making such statements???).

This plays very much on the stereotypical view that SF&F is a male arena, written by men for a male audience, with only a handful of tomboyish girls allowed in to play. Similar aspersions are cast on conventions and I have encountered it when talking about the Edinburgh SF Book Group as the ignorant sneer “oh is that a club for misfit boys?” is trotted out, despite the fact the group consists roughly half and half male and female regulars. But this false assertion that there are few female SF authors is just incredibly irritating; especially given the hard time trailblazers such as Leigh Brackett endured as female SF writers in the 40s and 50s.

While SF&F may well have a pretty big male component in terms of writers and readers it also boasts an impressive array of diverse female voices and a loyal female readership, with many of those authors being major award-winners around the globe. What of Margo Lanagan? Marianne de Pierres? Justina Robson? Susanna Clarke? Juliet E McKenna? Kelley Armstrong? Jude Fisher? Liz Williams? Steph Swainston? Trudi Canavan? Gwyneth Jones? Tanya Huff? Tricia Sullivan? And these are just a few names selected from the small (but perfectly formed) selection of Book Picks on our site alone.

What about Anne McCaffrey? What about Ursula Le Guin? How many generations of readers have grown up reading tales of Earthsea? Lois McMaster Bujold? How many men and women have been challenged by Sherri S Tepper? What about the late Octavia Butler? Storm Constantine? What about Ellen Datlow who has nurtured more writers of either gender than most of us can count? What about Denise Mina now writing the Hellblazer comic, the flagship title from DC’s adult Vertigo imprint? What about mainstream, ‘literary’ authors who write occasional works of SF such as Margaret Atwood?

Alright, you get the point – this is a sloppy bit of journalism by an interviewer who didn’t take a few minutes to check the facts. All the more galling because George at Orbit Books has been keeping me updated on just how well Trudi Canavan’s latest hardback is doing in the mainstream Hardback Fiction Bestsellers in the Times list, so a Times journalist writing a book article really should know better! Really, a few moments checking on Google or even asking a couple of people is all it takes… Perhaps it would have been more correct to say there are more female authors in the area of fantasy than hard SF for instance, but to dismiss the ranks of female writers and fans so simply is to do them a great disservice, especially given the fact that many of them produce not only a cracking read but work which is intelligent, emotional, daring and thought-provoking (really, what more can you ask from a writer?).

Still, it is good to see Debbie getting some mainstream coverage, so perhaps I shouldn’t rant too much. And since it is in the article I assume we are now free to tell the world (if it hadn't worked it out already) that Deborah Miller and Miller Lau were one and the same. But really, come on – some of the best writers in our genre are women. Perhaps we should send the journalist in question a copy of Sheri S Tepper’s Beauty?!?!