Hello friends,
I’m writing you from the past. Much like plain old snail-mail, anything I schedule here is sent in the future, making the moment I am writing from only a past-in-the-making. Isn’t it wild how we do, actually, have the ability to time travel a little bit?
Today, I’m going to try to be brief-ish. I’ve been part of a weird program with Substack that I regret having joined, but I’ve met some nice thoughtful people there and so I’m going to finish it up, but let’s just say it’s really about marketing and less about writing, and I am somewhat allergic to the former. Except, of course, that it clings to me anyway, the way cat fur does to the clothes of those most allergic to them. So, now, my anxiety is heightened enough to believe that I should make this post short-ish and sweet-ish and maybe use headers or something so that there’s better flow or whatnot.
…which is to say, isn’t it wild how we humans do, actually, have mind control ability, at least via things like social pressures, cultural messaging, and deep-seated capitalist training?
I’m thinking about things like time travel and mind control because I’m reading a lot of old science fiction right now, from the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s (ostensibly for novel research). You’ll notice from a quick glance at the names visible in the photo above that they are largely men’s, except for Ursula K. Le Guin’s on the cover of Strange Fantasy, No. 10, Fall 1969 (which proclaims in red, next to the date, that it is STILL 50c). This might confirm your idea of what science fiction was like—full of men and their gatekeeping. That’s certainly the narrative that I used to believe in.
I say narrative because it appears that this was, very much, a narrative imposed on this time period from later on. According to Dr. Lisa Yaszek in this unbylined Wired article, in the pulp era, “[a]t least 15 percent of the science fiction community were women—producers—and reading polls suggest that 40 to 50 percent of the readers were women [… s]o there were always a lot of women in the genre.”
In Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction 1926–1965, Eric Leif Davin quotes SFF author Connie Willis writing in 1992:
The current version of women in science fiction before the 1960s (which I’ve heard several times lately), goes like this: There weren’t any. Only men wrote science fiction because the field was completely closed to women. Then, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, a group of feminist writers led by Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin stormed the barricades, and women began writing (and sometimes even editing) science fiction. Before that, nada.
If there were any women in the field before that (which there weren’t), […] they had to slink around using male pseudonyms and hoping they wouldn’t get caught. And if they did write under their own names (which they didn’t), it doesn’t count anyway because they only wrote sweet little domestic stories. Babies. They wrote mostly stories about babies1.
There’s only one problem with version of women in SF—it’s not true.
[…]
People are always asking me how I stormed the barricades, […] and my answer is always that I didn’t know there were any barricades. It never occurred to me that SF was a man’s field that had to be broken into. How could it be with all those women writers? How could it be when Judith Merril was the one editing all those Year’s Best SFs? I thought all I had to do was write good stories, and they’d let me in. And they did.
Fourteen years after Willis wrote this, Davin’s book came out, correcting the record again. Thirteen years after that, the WIRED article I linked above came out, summarizing the podcast episode where Dr. Yaszek tried correcting the record yet again. Who knows how many times people have tried to so in between. And here I was, in 2022, still thinking that there weren’t any women in science fiction before the 1960s and that, yes, they had indeed hidden their names if they were published.
What bosh!
It seems that the backlash against women writers in SF didn’t come until—as might be expected—second wave feminism pissed a whole bunch of dudes off. Too, some (but not all) early science fiction anthologies were edited by men who had decided that women couldn’t write and so excluded them deliberately. And so we now live with a distorted and still pervasive cultural memory.
Which is to say, isn’t it sort of fascinating—and terrifying, and alarming—that a relatively small percentage of men, angry at women daring to enter their rarified space (that was, itself, rather on the outskirts of the ~serious literary establishment~) succeeded in creating and upholding a cultural narrative that sci-fi is the domain of men (implied in which is often white, straight, cis as well), and that this idea is still being battled out today2?
Before I sign off for now (I said I’d keep this short and sweet, and this is about as short and sweet as I can make anything, apparently), I wanted to try out a new thing where I ask you, because I’m genuinely curious:
what are you reading?
I’d love you to share. Maybe you’ll find some good books in other people’s comments!
That’s that for today, friends. I’m currently on a weeklong self-created writing residency funded by a gift card I got last June for my birthday from my partner, mom, and aunts, and I’ve been taking walks and writing and reading and hanging out and it’s been great.
Yours, etc.,
Ilana
I laughed. Did you?
If you’re wondering how, read this Vox piece, “How conservatives took over sci-fi’s most prestigious award” by Emily VanDerWerff (one of my very favorite contemporary critics, by the by).
Thank you for this because I, too, believed there weren't women sci-fi writers pre-1960s. Yikes!
You asked what we're reading, so I'll shout out the ARC I got of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes by Nicky Beer. It's one of the best poetry books I've ever read and 99% of the poems are––in the words of an album of country covers I've been enjoying lately––"slappers, bangers, and certified twangers." All around thoroughly enjoyable.
Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen and The Bastard and the Bishop by Gerald Fleming. Enjoy your vacation!