{"id":123,"date":"2008-01-01T02:23:46","date_gmt":"2008-01-01T09:23:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/specfic.philsites.net\/2008\/01\/01\/modern-sf-is-for-middle-aged-women\/"},"modified":"2008-01-01T02:25:02","modified_gmt":"2008-01-01T09:25:02","slug":"modern-sf-is-for-middle-aged-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philsites.net\/specfic\/2008\/01\/01\/modern-sf-is-for-middle-aged-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Modern SF is for “Middle-Aged Women?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

First off: HAPPY 2008 EVERYONE! Here’s to another good year of fine Pinoy spec fic!<\/p>\n

A while back, Kenneth Yu called our attention to an essay about magical realism<\/a>. I must admit though that my attention was more caught by a comment on that post by Jego<\/a>, who linked to another blog post by someone on the novel jury of the SFWA. The post is titled “A lament for science fiction,” and this passage stuck with me:<\/p>\n

Science fiction has changed a lot, unfortunately, not for the better. It used to be adventure literature for young men, now it’s romance literature for middle-aged women. That’s why young men now play science fiction-based computer games instead of reading science fiction novels and so-called science fiction publishers churn out book after book about sexy vampires, seductive were-seals and strong independent forty-something single women looking for love in space.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Permit me to ask: where may i find this “romance literature for middle-aged women”? I probably won’t have enough time to borrow the representative titles from my favorite library here, but I’m curious.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

During my stay here in New Zealand, I’ve come across at least two distinguished British scientists (one of whom is my Uncle Vern<\/a>) who admitted to having been huge science fiction buffs when they were younger – specifically, when they were in their early teens, through to their late twenties. If I keep going around telling people that I like science fiction, I’ll probably meet more.<\/p>\n

Uncle Vern still has a pretty impressive collection of titles bought during the 1940s and 50s. Having recently read Out of the Silent Planet<\/em> by C.S. Lewis and Ape and Essence<\/em> by Aldous Huxley, I can safely say the target audience of the books he liked then were clearly male.<\/p>\n

Please understand, I’m not offended – it’s a matter of fact that SF was written for boys during the golden decades of “the Old Guard.” I still remember reading “The Menace from Earth” by Robert Heinlein at my father’s recommendation, because he said it was “different” from other sci-fi stories. What made it different, I eventually saw, was that it was written from a female perspective. Moreover, the female in question was very… stereotypically female. It would probably be classified as “chick lit” in this day and age.<\/p>\n

I’m trying to see any sort of gender-related fix in the contemporary SF works by writers that I know and admire (David Brin, Michael Swanwick, Dan Simmons, CJ Cherryh among them) and I’m really not finding it. I can see how people can say Dan Simmons effectively works in the testosterone, but I don’t really see it anywhere else. I suspect I’m just largely clueless about the trends in modern SF. Some education is perhaps in order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First off: HAPPY 2008 EVERYONE! Here’s to another good year of fine Pinoy spec fic! A while back, Kenneth Yu called our attention to an essay about magical realism. I must admit though that my attention was more caught by a comment on that post by Jego, who linked to another blog post by someone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-container-style":"default","site-container-layout":"default","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-transparent-header":"default","disable-article-header":"default","disable-site-header":"default","disable-site-footer":"default","disable-content-area-spacing":"default","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philsites.net\/specfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philsites.net\/specfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philsites.net\/specfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philsites.net\/specfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philsites.net\/specfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/philsites.net\/specfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philsites.net\/specfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philsites.net\/specfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philsites.net\/specfic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}