I Don't Really Talk to my Family Right Now (Part 1) (How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe)

There is some discussion going on right now about women's place in sci-fi. This happens every now and then (spoiler: women should have just as much presence/access as men. Second spoiler: They don't. Third spoiler: some people don't think that this is a problem) and one of the attitudes it draws out is that old classic biological (now with added, zeitgeisty, neurological) determinism. The argument, paraphrased, is that women are just different to men, and they like books about feelings and love and relationships whereas men like books about technology and science and war. And that's why women don't read sci-fi, and so why sci-fi shouldn't bother to try to cater to women, except those few who have broken their own programming enough to appreciate all the seriousness and introspection.

This is such horseshit I almost don't know where to begin, although I'm going to let the implicit assumptions that, say, romance novels and family sagas are less important than science fiction novels be dealt with by the people that read them; not because I agree with the assumption but because I don't read those genres so I can't really claim any expertise. Really though, 'speculative' fiction needs to get over itself, it's only one way of doing things and the sly one-upmanship it plays with other genres is not to its credit. (See als:o: sci-fi writers claiming that they write literature, not SF.)

One big problem is that the idea that men are the default and women the exception is so deep-seated that entire discussions can happen within it and no-one spots that any argument they make is automatically meaningless. It would be very tempting to start trying to list the women who write technical/military sci-fi, or the women who can list the specs of more Star Trek ships than I can, but because they are being viewed in a context of exception each one only ever proves the existence of herself. Crucially, it also doesn't challenge this central assumption. So lets look a bit more closely at this impossibly masculine genre full of the hard, introverted study of facts. And Star Wars.

We'll look at some male writers this time*, because if men are biologically pre-determined to think differently to women (spoiler: they aren't, in any way that is meaningful to this discussion), and if they don't even need to break their programming in order to get let into the serious business of the sci-fi club (co-founder: M Shelley) then why would they want to write about girly things like emotions and the way people relate to one another?

Because if it turns out that men, with no ostensible barriers to distribution (Playboy, anyone?) or questions about legitimacy in their way, are perfectly happy and capable of writing - in genre - at this more womanly end of the spectrum (albeit with more of a focus on boobs), then, while it doesn't actually disprove the men-as-default assumption (one could argue men can do anything, women only some things, if one was a cretin) it does at least highlight that the assumption is there and that it therefore needs to be taken into account when we are having this argument.

There are, it's true, important differences between genres - that's why they are classed as different genres - and sci-fi differs from, say family sagas in that it focuses on the relationships between people and their environment where their environment is exemplified as technology, whereas the latter focuses on the relationships between people and their environment where their environment is exemplified as the family unit. What I really loved about How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is that it sees clearly what this means.

How to Live Safely... is science fiction. It says so in the title, and repeatedly throughout the book. It has a spaceship and time travel and jokes about the Death Star. More importantly it is genuinely about the way in which people interact with technology and allow it to shape their lives - and in fact about a certain breed of introspection that allows people to concentrate their relationships with technology to the detriment of their relationships with people.

It isn't about science, or real scientists, or any of that hard SF stuff, it just uses those as props to tell a story about a family. It also uses the sci-fi milieu - something which a lot of its readers will likely be very well versed in - to tease out some of the complexities and experiences of life as an immigrant from an agricultural country into a post-industrial one, which is a situation most people in the west would not be immediately able to relate to. Maybe I found that more poignant as a second generation immigrant myself, but I think it's worth reading - if you already have the grounding in sci-fi, because it explains it very well.

And that's it for now - but I will continue with the second part of this post and another recommendation as soon as I get it together enough to write another nine hundred words on the subject.

*That's not to say that I won't be recommending and talking about sci-fi written by women in the future, just that for the sake of this point I'll be looking at some of that written by men.