“I read the 100 “best” fantasy and sci-fi novels — and they were shockingly offensive”
“At the end of 2013, after a year of reading very little, I decided to embark on a challenge: read all the books I hadn’t yet read on NPR’s list of 100 best sci-fi and fantasy novels. Nostalgia permeates the list. Of the books I read, there were more books published before 1960 than after 2000. The vast majority were published in the 1970s and 1980s. There were also many sci-fi masterworks or what were groundbreaking novels. However, groundbreaking 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago can now seem horribly out of date and shockingly offensive…
What I hated, and dreaded the most as I continued to read through the list, was the continued and pervasive sexism — even in seemingly progressive books for their time. I devoured science fiction and fantasy when I was younger — the idea that I was also devouring patriarchal and sexist ideas made me deeply uncomfortable. The fact that these were all supposed to be the best of the genre, was even more shocking…
In this book and others, it felt like the book would have been less sexist if there weren’t any women at all. At least that way, they wouldn’t be belittled or be treated contemptuously… the women characters were all mothers, nurses or love interests. They were passive characters with little agency or character development, like the women in A Canticle for Leibowitz and Magician. They were scenery, adding a tiny bit of texture to mainly male dominated world.”
So, I found this link on facebook and it was really interesting to see how some people were reacting — they were not necessarily hostile, but they were not there for this article and they seemed to be threatened by the fact of there being a critique.
These commenters seemed to read into the article and assume that the author and the poster were making the value statement that, because the books are problematic, “you must immediately stop having good feelings about these books — that makes you evil”. And so there was a set of people who were rebutting the article and over-explaining about the “importance of putting these books in context”, and that totally trampled over this healing conversation people were having where they were discussing their negative experiences with books that defined their subculture.
Also, seconding the recommendation re: Ancillary Justice. It is really, really amazing to read a book in female-normative. And it won, like, all the awards.
(credit to KK)
