Women and Hard SF (WisCon 32 panel)

Women and Hard SF Panel

Margaret McBride: Teaches SF at university level. Victoria: teaches in Oklahoma, sometimes SF. Love reading SF Sue Lange. A couple of books out. We, Robots. Not academic. Interested in issue of what hard SF is. Janice Bogstad: I buy books and throw them away for a living, review for 11 publications, 5 of them sf/fantasy teach. Others, collection building, etc. Reference books. When men write it it's defined as hard, when women, it's not. I enjoyed the transition we made from biological sf being hard, to soft. (sarcastic)

Margaret: How are we defining the term? Why has it been so problematic? What to do with it?

JB: Part of the reason the concept, the term is problematic is it's used as a norm for "real science fiction" and however we define it, it has changed as more women enter the field. Fantastic, speculative, there's other terms they call it when they don't want to call it sf. Femspec. In early days of 50s and 60s sf, male authors would write about social issues and the social issues around tech but when women do it's soft sf. Then we come to 70s and 80s when writing about biology was considered soft, because (the rhetoric is that) women are their biology in some way, women can therefore more easily be biochemical scientists... I expect the next thing to fall is going to be mathematics. Real, normative, actual, the only kind we should really care about, that counts, used in book reivews, not included in canon. This changing definition has a gender bias to it.

Margaret: Just like what has been called "art". At various times pottery, woven stuff, wasn't art, because it was women and people of color who were doing that. And very similar things done with gender and hard sf. As you've suggested, when men were doing very similar things with social issues, that was still "hard".

JB Population control, alterations in the nature of human mind. But suddenly when Joan Sloanczewski does it, it's suddenly not hard.

Sue: No one knows what those words mean any more. Googling it shows the confusion. I've been paying attention to it for years because I'm interested in what am I writing. Hard SF is sf that deals with hard sciences which are hard because they're difficult. Or, Hardsf is chemistry and physics. And psychology is not. Why? Because it's a new science. Psych is definitely a science! But because it's difficult to do it in black and white it's not hard sf. On a Xtian hard sf page, I found the best definition, sf that will stop the action to explain the science.

JB I just call that bad writing!

Sue: I don't think you really stop the action! But the science is interesting enough to the reader to really go into the details. Then it's up to the author to decide what the science is! You have to explain what the theories are, it might sound dry but a good writer can make that good. I want the details and that's hard sf as far as I'm concerned.

Victoria: Arthur C Clarke is the ironic example, I was calculating out the numbers, I knew the big reveal based on the numbers in the story! and later I saw definition of hard sf relevant to explaining the sicence, but then in another book he refers to the star's eternity circuits, and I thought Wait a minute that's not science, Does he get a pass?

Liz H: I think you're right they do it once and get a free pass and get on the lists.

JB: Yes i've watched the definition change over time and yes there is gender bias.

Sue: If you explain it to the point where it's plausible and doesn't break any rules

JB: But the point is when people review it, they leave out Joan Slonczewski etc

Margaret: So there are 2 points, one how it's reviewed and one does it have As you know bob in it... (but done well.)

Sue: Calling the critics on their definitions!

Aud: Science shows on tv - voiceovers are male because they think male voices are more authoritative.

Aud: definition of science. science as a way of thinking.

Sue: I think sci and tech are conflated in sf, and just because you have superiour fancy mechanism does not make it science.

Margaret: things that are considered sf and hard sF and that are totally wrong in the science.

Margaret: Political element to say we will find solutions to problems. Winding up in other place, elements that make it suddenly not "hard" any more

Guy on other side of room: miliatary, Men's section, shoot em up,

Liz (interrupting) hard being conflated with military?

Sue: Hard sf, cyberpunk, science is major part of the story. Had no science ! Just had technology! The marketers just say let's call it hard sf, because then Men will buy it.

JB: Someone who pierced the veil for me early on. the political or ideological . We are who about to... by Joanna Russ. it's a critique of the supposedly hard sf story, people who get abandoned on a planet and they're going to have as many babies as they can and if people really tried to do that with one womean who is 15 and the other is aging and elderly, take a good hard look at it. That is a penultimate science story, becuase it says, it wouldn't work.

Sue: We screwed up the first time! Political/tech - you could tell the society, totally militaristic, she was saying it wasn't going to work!

Margaret: Hard sf not character driven, chars less important. This gets said over and over. Again this is very problematic for me. A book by Amy Thomson, Color of Distance, I know she did a lot of research, very science based on environmental issues, as far as I'm concerned it belongs on this list but I haven't found her name on any other list of hard sf. It's a problematic term but that doesn't mean we can just make it go away. For those of us who ar teachers we have to deal with those issues.

Betty: We never get hard fantasy. You look at it and go This economics are nuts! These dwarves are all mining gold but no one's growing Wheat! Others have really well researched worlds but we don't look at it using that lens!

Margaret: L.E. Modesitt, made deliberatie effort to include economics in his fantasy.

Aud: flip on its head, origins, hard fantasy, fables, removed from social economic underpinnings.

Margaret: Believable world, made works,. we can argue science is well done.

JB; what term is useful. what we have to do more of is deconstruct therm itself so when people see this is hard or not hard that they don't have this knee jerk reaction is i'm going to like it or not. One of my favorite authors is Iain Banks, far future utopias dystopias, two diff sides of the coin, to think about our own embedding in technological existences as it disadvantages and advantages, where people have everything right, and they lgo looking for problems. But by no stretch of the imagination will he be called soft sf. But they are tremendously character driven. Alistair Reynolds, LE Modesitt. Where it matters it seems is where people aren't sure how good the author is. It's definitely a marketing ploy, I want another one just like the other one.

Sue: Which isn't what we want as teachers

Margaret: But as authors we are keenly aware of it.

JB There are markers by which your novel will be sold, this is a novel just like that other one, but as a woman it is going to be harder to get called whatever the normative thing is.

Margaret: Rigorous. "Rigorous use of science" Examples of men who have been called hard but totally aren't.

JB: Robert Heinlein.

• • laughter**

Sue: FTL travel, they don't give us any reason or any way to go that fast plausibly then it's fantasy.

Aud: "mundane " sf .

Margaret: Geoff Ryman and number of others, in response to what Sue said about markets, we've been using science that's so bad, we're not going to do FTL travel, let's make it more real and believable, it's going to be set on earth, it's going to deal with issues that aren't , that are more related to us today.

Aud: Not using science or knowledge of science that can't be extrapolated. Like FTL. There is a lot of fuss about that as it's too restricting.

Sue: I emailed him and asked him mundane vs. hard, define science, big name authors really dont like it, some do and some don't.

Aud: Women authors who have allied them with this movement?

Sue: I didn't buy that issue of Interzone, did you?

Aud: Ahhaah no!

JB: Am trying to wrap my head around how Ryman could say that with Air... hahahaah

JB: Post colonial theory. he had not even heard of it. He was surprised I could understand his book so well with this stuff.

(Spivak? I am thinking so.)

Margaret: The whole stomach pregnancy thing.

JB: I asked him point blank. I don't get it. Anyone?

Liz H: *something about the disconnect being the genius of it to jolt the reader into culture shock but instead, narrative/genre shock*

JB: The birth at the end. What will the new children be like.

Liz H: Damaged.

Margaret: Anything else?

Aud: Darwin's Radio!

Annalee: Greg Bear, number one our list of criminals, he sits on a committee that advises the DOD on future scenarios, he's very proud of it! He thinks he's the hardest of the hard, but his science is terrible! and he's dealing with biology! Which a ton of women have dealt with.

Aud: Marketing term for fast driven plot, (...)

Annalee: Michael Crichton kind of guy, resurrecting Stalin. I mean, come on.

Aud: I would like to like hard sf, but, it's like the cold skeleton, bare bones, boy playing with his toys, in Singularity Charlie Stross (something), there's no movement, human touch, it's the skeleton of ideas without people moving through it.

Margaret: This raises a very significant thing for me. The people who doesn't read SF at all, especially women, because they think that's what it is. Even more importantly, is it making the feeling of science less interesting or important to women, because they think that's what it is?? That's why it's important and that's why these tropes and definitions matter.

Sue: This hard sf that's supposedly the holy grail, maybe isn't something we should be reaching for, it's not as good. Doesn't great literature always involve the human aspect? If that is truely what hard sf is, it won't attain greatness. But we could argue about that, because Ascent of Wonder has great, wonderful, literarily beautiful stuff. So I don't think that is true, but the marketers use the term, without us making our statement that's what's going to happen, it's going to become pulp fiction again after having risen so far above pulp fiction.

Aud: how?

Sue: Panels... talking... writing... well... people consuming it, say, Thomson is a hard Sf writer. We're the readers, we're the consumers, we're the ones writing the blogs! The blogosphere is a very powerful tool.

JB: Story teller, whales, giant consciousness, in publishers weekly, you give something a start. They highlight it. I thought it was one of the best books i've read in years. but there's a whole group of fundamentalist right, had a problem with it. I think if a man had written about similar things and they are considered great. I mean, Solaris for example!

Margaret: How many of you have subsccrip to Analog. No one. FSF. 1 or 2. Asimov's? No. What if we subscribe to those magazines and write the editors?

((I read Strange Horizons and subscribe to Lady Churchill))

Sue: If we do that I think it might make a difference. At least it would get your opinion out there.

Liz: Maureen McHugh story! Kingdom of the Blind. Programming/techie details lovingly described and were right, well, almost all right, and that made me really really happy.

Annalee: In our blogs, etc. the hard science aspect is biology, or sociology. The thing that got me into sf as a kid was an anthology of anthropological sf, back when anthropology was still considered a science. As readers we have to explain w hat we think. At Tor they will read it and pay attention.

Margaret: I have to be a little bit cynical. editor at tor, book cover panel, memo, I dont care what you people think, the half nude broad is what sells it

Annalee: Well if that half nude broad is doing biology, i'm down with it.

Erin Kelly: it's this whole messed up thinking! we have to trick them! we have to write bioloigcal sf under male names and then we'll suddeny all reveal ourselves!

JB: Any real physicist will tell you that physics is not a straightforward thing any more

Erin: It's just a construct that we've imposed that anything women do is not as good!

Guy: My friend Jim Frankel has said many times, if the author is female they automatically give her an advance that is 20% or 50% less than if the author is a man. It doesn't matter how good the author is, even if the author is a Hugo winning author with a background they'll just cut it off.

Margaret: I have added names to that list since I came today! add maureen mchugh, Rosemary Kirstein! it's seen as fantasy but the whole underpinning of how we see science.

JB: Frank Herbert is NOT hard SF.

Margaret: If Dune goes on the list then Amy Thomson goes on the list!

• general laughter*

Margaret: It's hard SF beause it is so concerned with the environment of a desert world!!! That is a direct quote from something I just read!

Aud: Are you aware of science teachers using "hard sf" to get students excited, there's a blog out there

Aud: Julie Czerneda's part of that group.

aud guy: The UW engineering dept runs a program every year

Liz: this workshop by NASA, http://www.launchpadworkshop.org/index.html for sf writers, astronomy and science,

Aud: I'm an enginerer and I love Larry Niven, he lacks narrative and charactrisitc.s he'll geek out endlessly, I prefer les narrative, less character, more geeky stuff, more mechanism, plot devices, more sicence explanations.

Annalee: Do you like it with any science, biology or just others?

Aud: Octavia Butler, with biology! So good with the science!

Erin Kelly: Octavia butler. Orson scott card, Ender's Game is more hard, you're free to jump on that....

Guy in Aud: Philip K Dick is a terrible scientist! But psychologically he is brilliant on how people can become paranoid in response to technology and alienation.

(Panel ends in discussion of list of hard SF, additions to it)