One of the greatest science fiction magazines is now available online (2017)
theverge.com
theverge.com
But honestly, reading the older sci-fi is painful when it comes to gender portrayals. When Heinlein represents some of the better portrayals, you know you have issues. Even the more liberal representations feel ham-fisted and vapid. It's enough that I've grown very leery of anything before the 90s, which is a shame because there's a lot of important stuff before then...but reading it pokes the wounds of too many sexist/racist older relatives (plus "is this what I'll seem like by the standards of a few decades in the future?") to let me enjoy the stories.
Stanislav Lem, along with Asimov discussed here, has excellent women roles. Obviously as does Ursula Le Guin. Some other recommendations here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/50-sci-fi...
And Connie Willis' To say nothing of the dog is hilarious! It will brighten anyone's day.
I'll just have to starting working through that list, now.
It is probably the best science fiction book I have read in many years.
The term was coined in the late nineteenth century; before women's suffrage and the gradual abolishment of a whole host of other laws and customs that suppressed (and in some cases still suppress) women — hence the name of the movement.
In practice, feminist District Attorneys are attacked by other feminists for defending due process, see here:
https://app.getpocket.com/read/2699410657 https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190807-feminist-law...
The point is, yes, in the past there were many injustices against women. No one denies this. These injustices must be corrected.
But the solution is not to tilt the balance so that all injustice now goes against men, when any accused is automatically assumed guilty, and losing their jobs, scholarships, everything, before a ruling is made.
The solution is to try to avoid any and all injustice, and we are failing at that.
Hell, we can't even criticize feminism if we are not women and self-proclaimed feminists.
And none of that has anything to do with helping men. It's all about women. Which is fine, women need advocates for all the shit they have to put up with. But pretending that feminism has any interest at all in helping men is utter bullshit and such an atrocious lie and this isn't the place to push that lie. I've never once ever in my life been helped by a feminist. I've been demonized, insulted, discriminated against, but never helped. Because that's not their goal.
The problem here is men basing their view of feminism on their own emotional intuition, or at the very least, approaching feminism through the lens of third party anti-feminist activism and web culture rather than engage with feminism or feminist theory firsthand.
Obviously if everything you know about feminism comes from people who hate it, and caricature radical feminists on Twitter and Tumblr, you're not going to trust any criticism the movement has about you. But that's like expecting to get a realistic view of black culture from /pol/.
Fair enough, but no man or woman is an island we all must be cognizant of others' perceptions.
Excellent points - I grew up with a single mom and often semi-joke that sci-fi/fantasy provided all of my adult role models. There's a disturbing connection between my failed personal expectations of myself and the stereotypes you called out.
1960's sci-fi is pretty much all I read for leisure. And of course, it contains a lot of views that society as a whole no longer subscribes to. This is not limited to portrayals of women but perhaps it's something we've learned to be indignant about more than other things.
But it does not matter to me at all. See, I'm not reading old sci-fi to get accurate predictions of the future, nor do I mistake the descriptions of gender roles or other social or societal aspects as recommended norms. No, I first and foremost read these stories because I want to be entertained and what I get is suspenseful plots with clever twists and turns in a futuristic setting. Some story lines are ridiculous, sure, but you know what - I can still enjoy most of it. Gender portrayals are really marginal to that experience.
If anything, I find it additionally appealing to learn about the zeitgeist of the mid-20th century, when these works were written. Comparing the underlying assumptions that some authors apparently must have made is quite informative about how much has changed since then.
And let's not forget: anything more recent that is more in sync with your sensitivities today bears the potential of being found grossly inappropriate for one reason or the other by our children's or grandchildren's generation.
I know you're speaking about sci-fi here, but what makes it different than the vast majority of literature that exists? The majority of anything written before our current times will likely not be politically correct as far as todays standards go, in regards to stereotypes and such. That seems like an awful lot of literature to exclude based on the portrayal of fictional characters created in a society fairly different to our own.
I find the attitude worrisome. Funnily enough, it reminds me of Farenheit 451 and the oppressive censorship towards anything that made people feel uncomfortable.
As a kid, in the 90's, in grade 4 or 5 or something we had to read Huckleberry Finn, it's full of fairly extreme example of some fairly negative stereotypes. Before we read the story, our teacher explained to us about historical context, how the language used in the book was inappropriate and hateful to use. Then we read the book. There were no problems, nobody got upset, nobody started using racist words after, no parents complained and the sky didn't fall.
Sometimes literature should make you uncomfortable, it should remind you of the way things used to be, how we've progressed and why the way it was didn't work. If this is ignored or forgotten, we risk going back to this as a society.
EDIT: such a reversal would not be unheard of -- if you read some communist texts from the 60s, they often talk mockingly of the capitalism of earlier decades, and congratulate themselves for having superseded those times. From our vantage point these 60s texts indeed seem outdated, but not because we have progressed even further along the path they had in mind :)
IMO contemporary gender politics are just as rigid and aggressively normative as those of the 50s - just in different ways.
If you consider the possibility that rigid politics are a problem, and the form they take is secondary, there may still be room for progress.
Meanwhile these magazines are 50-60 years old, and best read as a historical record. They haven't been taken seriously as futurology for literally decades - if ever.
Getting angry about the content is a little like getting angry about the whaling in Moby Dick.
Perhaps not, but your example is not a good one; it doesn't show reversion it shows, if anything, a perspective that was never dominant continuing to not be dominant. (Actually, I suspect communist—particularly from the segments of Western communism that were already at odds with the Leninist/Stalinists—critiques of capitalism from the 1960s resonate more with the popular view today than they did when written, even if 1960s communist prescriptions for resolving the issues raised in those critiques might not, which, come to think of it, I wouldn't count on all that much.)
Where are you finding these stories? I'm certainly not reading them!
The stories were mostly pretty average. I thought 'Escape from Caring Seasons' by Sarah Pinsker was great; sadly, it doesn't seem to be online. 'Byzantine Empathy' by Ken Liu enraged me greatly, because it was about the transformative power of blockchain, and like everything about the transformative power of blockchain, contains a massive implicit "???" right before the "profit".
[1] http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?659620
[2] https://factordaily.com/twelve-tomorrows-mit-technology-revi...
[3] http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/okay-glory/
[4] https://breakermag.com/kchain-science-fiction-premiere-byzan...
They've devalued themselves and old winners of those awards should feel angry knowing that when people see "hugo winner" seals on books it makes that book more likely to be a political sledgehammer is pretend sci fi form, than a story worth reading.
And I say this as someone who buys 4-5 new fiction novels a month, which I think is relatively high for today's entertainment consumption trends.
I don't doubt that there are worthy books that never made the ballot for various reasons, and I don't doubt that there are books that don't make the ballot due to fan politics and personalities. But it was hard not to notice that it was very, very hard to get any Puppy to point to more than one of a handful of titles as "proof" of the Hugos being taken over by the Evil Liberal SJWs: the short story "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachael Swirsky; Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. It was hard, in the final analysis, not to draw the parallels between the Puppies and the GamerGate crowd: one got the impression that they didn't really care how bad the case they were making was, because it was a proxy for a larger conservative culture war.
Again, I'm not necessarily ascribing any of this to you, but generally speaking the last few years of Hugo and Nebula Award winners/nominees have been both critically acclaimed and popular, with very few if any titles being stories that nobody particularly liked but just had the perception of "being important" in the way, say, it seems at least one Best Picture nominee always is ("Green Book," anyone?).
there were more interesting stories that did not win because they did not espouse the right politics or identity.
I have no interest in singling out stories that won I'm interested in why they won.
I'm glad you enjoyed what you read but to me the modern Hugo is the brand that intentionally devalues itself for the purpose of political manipulation in sledgehammer levels of subtlety.
I am less likely to buy a modern day Hugo winner than another book, because they've demonstrated that the values they use to decide who wins are too politically motivated and don't match my interest.
I've only really sought out the short story winners, but they remain really really excellent, and who cares about the subtlety. A sledgehammer can tell a great story, and at the end of the day, it's the greatness I care about, not how it's achieved. Last year's winner, Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ for example, wasn't exactly subtle, but it was really really excellent and enjoyable. Likewise the year before's winner: Seasons of Glass and Iron.
Between writing and editing this comment I read this year's winner and decided you are absolutely wrong.
Which book are you talking about?
I know you mentioned you didn't want to single out anything particular, but I feel like I could use a reference point or two to help understand the "why"s you mentioned.
Edit: it was low-tier shitposting. I'll let you judge what it means in the context of your question.
I'm a big fan of Heinlein. His racial and gender politics were strikingly progressive for his time. It's no insult to say that we've moved past his time and can do better now than he did, in part thanks to the efforts of people like him.
> "is this what I'll seem like by the standards of a few decades in the future?"
One cultural improvement we hopefully have to look forward to: The more recent "Moana" (one of my favorite films) finally fixes the gender roles programming of the Disney princess stories, as far as I could tell, but it implicitly accepts classism. The child is wandering through her community, noting the people doing their various working class labor, accepting that's their predetermined roles in life, and agonizing that her birthright role of chief will prevent her from exploring.[1] Maybe someday we'll all tell her to go do her share of the coconut harvesting, and that she should demand to replace the monarchy with elected representatives. Then everyone will have some time to explore, if they want.
The text alone doesn’t do it justice, her animated energy and excitement was a thing to behold live!
https://twitter.com/jeannette_ng/status/1163182894908616706?...
A lot of old (and much new) SF is pretty terrible when in comes to any character portrait. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan, but it’s despite the depiction of characters.
Cardboard cutout characters are naturally going to be stereotypical, or wish fulfilment. And even when the characters have real depth, like in Dune, or The Left Hand of Darkness, they’re literally inhuman.
I don't think this is specific to science fiction. Most fiction and nonfiction from more than a few decades ago is pretty bad according to modern racial and gender portrayals. Anything before 1940 will just completely assume some races are inferior. Anything before 1900 will just completely assume women are inferior. Go back further and you get things that don't even make you cringe nowadays because they seem too ridiculous, like people thinking that slavery is fine. Go back to the Old Testament and it has lots of different stories that encourage killing people for reasons that we would consider unacceptable nowadays.
Anyway, it does make it less of a "light, enjoyable read" when you are dealing with attitudes like that, but I think it is still worthwhile to read old things with attitudes that we now consider inappropriate, in order to understand the past. Many times there are good ideas mixed in with the bad ones.
Asimov did write female characters but they are rare. Two that stand out are Susan Calvin (in the Robot series) and Noÿs in The End of Eternity. Calvin is described as follows: "She was a frosty girl, plain and colorless, who protected herself against a world she disliked by a mask-like expression and a hypertrophy of intellect" [0].
The main exception is The Gods Themselves, which is notable for discussing sex, albeit in a tri-sexual alien race.
[Edit - to be clear, this is not intended as a negative judgement of Asimov against today's sensibilities. Slightly reworded accordingly]
To be fair, Asimov didn't really tend to write very character-focussed fiction much, his male characters were generally no more developed than the female characters; protagonists were mostly lenses through which to explore the tapestry of broader systems, while non-viewpoint characters were mostly low-detail elements of the scene, he was more interested in showing the forest than lavishing detail on individual trees.
You are right about Asimov's style, it hasn't aged great. But he was an intellectual at heart, so his writing fits his personality.
People who need their author/actor/etc to be exactly like themselves are probably racist.
Hmm. I find that the latter thought is what makes it easier to accept the former.
Also heinlein? Look at I will fear no evil...
From 2016, including the grandson of the founder: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11185490
https://www.asimovs.com http://clarkesworldmagazine.com https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/
I subscribe/read with kindle/iPad (if you want color illustrations must be a tablet or computer).
Not as interesting as it could be then.
I'm not really sure where you get the protecting clause from, or intent. It's just market forces.
Many were printed in the Galaxy (linked from the article).
Also find:
Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury).
Damnation Alley (Roger Zelazny) (later period, but very good).