That’s Right, the Women Are Smarter
Who Rules Science Fiction?
Trying to decide who rules science fiction?
That’s fundamentally the wrong way to look at it.
At heart, science fiction is about alternative visions and alternative voices. Its job is to blow open the gates and add some wonder to your day. Any attempt to form a corpus and rule over it acts against precisely what makes the genre widely loved.
Still, in the sorry case of the Sad Puppy, sf’s core definition became a fight with the Hugos (sf’s Oscars) as the marker for success.
To understand what happened (and just because it’s fun), we should start with a brief history.
First, despite attempts to portray sf as the purview of white men, it’s been a big tent to me as long as I’ve been reading. C L Moore’s Red Sonya was cleaving skulls and taking lovers along with Conan and Bran Mak Morn in the pulps I found in my Dad’s drugstore paperback rack when I was 11.
Even in the heyday of boys with toys science fiction Andre Norton held her own fully gendered. She was perhaps stigmatized as a writer for young adults but, frankly, so…
