Amph The role of women in sci-fi and fantasy

With all the discussion this topic has been getting, I figure it deserves it's own thread

I don't read much sci-fi, but in fantasy women are somethimes downplayed as characters. I think that this isn't always the author's intention, but it comes out that way because a lot of fantasy is written in a time much like the European Middle Ages, when women had no rights.

Just be sure to keep your comments and discussions in here to a polite tone. Don't start anything.

 

Yeah many female characters don't get a fiar shake in this genre. I think it's going to slowly change as more women get involved in the creative process. Let's look at red sonja, it's a comic from dynamyte, while i've only read a little of it, so i don't clame to be an expert, it is writen and drawn by 2 guys. She also walks around mostly nude. That being said, i think some female charcters do ok. Look at MJ and Aunt may in jms's run on Amazing spiderman.

 

Sharon Shinn does a good job with female characters. Some of them are in situations or scoeities where they are socially inferior, but they are still powerful (Archangel and Summers at Castle Auburn are good examples).

 

Terry Brooks has written strong female characters in his Word and the Void books, and his Shannara books.

Another author I like who has done this as well is Greg Keys in his Kingdom's of Thorn and Bone books. The main character is a female chosen one if you will.

 

I happen to think Catelyn Stark from ASoIaF is one of the best female characters out there. I'm always amazed at how well GRRM wrote her.

 

True, but Martin is still thralls women to men.

I hear Scott Bakker has done this too, so for the interim his trilogy is off limits.

Reputable Aussie co-authors Sean Williams and Shane Dix always have heaps of fem characters.

Elizabeth Haydon adoration for her precious Rhapsody utterly revolted me. Honour required I finish that trilogy to et the complete holo, nothing more. How this got past a publisher . . . I'm stunned. And yet people say how a Grim Reapering the business is.

Pfft.

Ian Irvine's and View from the Mirror quartet, and Steven Erikson's Malazan series doesn't disgrace women to men. Quite the contrary. Erikson's women are as tough as any military man, and he's raped just one woman in five books, in the fifth book, and that was unseen offpage. Relevant to her plot, not gratuitous.

 

Although I do not agree with your view of RH female characters, I do agree in general. It is slightly unnerving to see women mostly kept at home, in distress, crying over the dead hero etc etc. or, in the other extreme, be some wild battle amazone (honestly, seeing some of the graphs accompanying the stories, can you imagine going to battle in nothing but a leather bikini? ), almost unnatural, denying all human feelings.

 

What do you mean by RH women, Marte? Robin Hobb?

Sidious, I have to disagree. (Haven't read Feast for Crows yet!)

Catelyn---or Catty-lyn, as American Martin pronoucnes her---was well characterisaed in the first book. I'll give you that. But what dismayed me was her complete downturn in the following two books. She went from being strong willed and proactive to a whimpering worrier. She literally kept weeping her fears, extraordinarily repetitive to read time and time again for two books.

That's the problem with Martin. What he does good he does really good---but he writes an Impstar load of annoyances too. You have to give and take, with him. Overall, I look to the positives.

 

It is true that women do seem to have more Medieval roles in High Fantasy. It's probably because most High Fantasy takes after Medieval times, when women had very little rights and all.

I once started writing a King Arthur story where Merlin was actually a girl. I got mixed views on that at this writing website I used to frequent. Some said 'awesome!', some said 'you're such a feminist, but cool' and some warned me away from trying.

I think I'd like to eventually get back to that someday and actually write it. I'm not an extreme feminist, but one thing about Germany that really annoys me at times is the fact that while they claim that women are equal, there's still an out-dated mentality most places.

Then again, when I find myself writing SW fan fic, or fantasy fiction, I always end up putting my female characters in the same situation- being considered pretty worthless and not having much say in anything. I wonder why I do that...

It would be nice to have a new 'genre'? of fantasy where women have the freedom that we supposedly do today and are treated decently. But that kind of goes against the High Fantasy standard, in a way, since it is based on Medieval values. And going too over the top is not a good thing either- I once tried to read a book set in the future where women ruled the world and men were considered slaves. An interesting read at first, but it got to the point where I just had to put it down and shake my head over the extremeness of the message. I don't want one race to be higher than the other, I'd just like some equality...

 

True, but Martin is still thralls women to men

Dani and Arya are both strong female characters. I don't really like Catelyn because she's mean to Jon over something hat wasn't his fault.

Terry Goodkind does a god job with strong female characters. Ann, the Sister who succeeds her, and Richard's wife (can't remember names, I haven't read them in a while) are all very strong characters, as are the Mord-Sith.

 

Ironically, I do tend to think that part of the problem is looking for things and finding them only because you want them to be there. In the case of Star Wars there's very few women heroes except for Leia but then there's no deliberate attempt to lower their numbers either. Given women are 50% of the population its entirely possible you could see a crew of them totally on a ship or write about it without being crazy I think in Star Wars.

Just as the same for a crew of men.

 

Interesting topic.

One problem I do think exists in fantasy is that many people (authors included) don't often distinguish between a person's role in society and their actual character (as in the "demeanor" sense of the word). To clarfiy things, let me use an example of another (albeit rightfully) disempowered group: children. Everyone knows that children don't have many rights in society, in terms of ability to operate in the marketplace, or politics, or what have you. However, everyone also understands that a child might nonetheless be strong or weak-willed, be resentful of their low status, or might try to do things to exert what influence they do have and be resourceful. In other words, people can readily separate a child's status from their personality. Or, stated yet another way, in everyday life, we can tell the difference between a resourceful/competent person with no resources and a plainly incompetent one.

Yet, when we consider the Middle Ages, people often stop making this decision. They equate a women's low social status and powerlessness with helplessness as a character trait. At least, I think that's part of the dynamic in my opinion.

Charlemagne19, I think you bring up an important point that the overwheleming majority of this isn't malicious. However, I think the balance to that statement is that just because something is unintended doesn't mean it isn't there. I know Isaac Asimov, in his biographies, for instance, noted that he was really limited in terms of the characters he could write well to fairly-well educated rationalist white men--which was exactly what he was, and what his life experience had brought him into contact with. He also speaks of how "strong" female characters like Susan Calvin were more of a stretch for him. Now, to bring this full circle, I'd note that for a long time, the F&SF genre was dominated by white men. Thus, you didn't see a lot of women or minority characters. But as the field has opened up more (and society as well) you're seeing more of these types of characters, because authors have more background experience with them to write from.

A third part of the equation is the readership. Because this genre is perceived as being heavily male, there might be some thought that stereotypical images of women (either motherly or lascivious) might appeal to their sensisibilities more, and thus increase sales.

But yeah, I guess that's my initial take on this whole thing.

 

Robin Hobb (who is female in spite of her masculine pseudonym) writes very strong female characters, and that's particularly noticeable in the Liveship Traders trilogy. So does Elizabeth A. Lynn, who also incidentally has gays and lesbians in powerful positions in society, even including one dark-skinned lesbian city guard commander in a society where most people are fair-skinned. Tolkien admittedly tended to idealize his female characters, when they were visible at all, and I suspect many fantasy authors modeled their writing after him.

Don't get me wrong, I like Asimov's stories. However, I don't think Susan Calvin is anything but a man with boobs, she has repressed every trace of her femininity. I think Asimov's best female character is Dors Venabili, and if you've read the Foundation books, you'll know she's a robot.

Even Anne McCaffrey, who has been lauded as a female (if not feminist) pioneer in the field of science-fiction, essentially writes romance in a sf & f disguise, and this means that unfortunately many of her female characters lose all their interesting characteristics once they find someone to share their life with.

 

You mentioned skin colour there, Arwen. That's another key fallacy of an author's writing. It's a natural blindspot to specifically say someone's dark-skinned. I hate it. Doesn't ruin a book as seeing women raped does, but it's pretty irritating. That's fine, so long as you balance the Force and say when people are white or bronzed or tanned.

Steven Erikson has a lot of dark skinned characters, and you're told they're dark. And yet no one realy says someone is fair skinned . . . do they?

 

Perhaps not. However, given that I live in an almost exclusively white area and have no non-white friends or even aquaintances and only one or two co-workers; unless I'm told that a character is non-white, I'll see white when I imagine the people in my mind. Although pointers to eye and hair color are usually good pointers towards ethnicity as well, without specifically saying a person is white.

I really should read Octavia Butler, I wonder if she treated the ethnicity of her characters differently from most Caucasian sci-fi and fantasy authors.

 

I think you're right. The "mediaeval setting = helpless women" line wears a bit thin sometimes.

Embarrassingly I haven't read a lot of the authors being mentioned, but I'd like to bring up another one - Guy Gavriel Kay. As authors go, he tends to create very 'authentic' fantasy worlds based closely on the equivalent historical period, women's rights and all. However, in the books of his I've read he does a good job of creating female characters who manage to be effective despite the restrictions they live under. Jehane bet Ishak (The Lions of Al-Rassan) is a case in point - a professional woman in a society where women don't generally work, and a member of a religious minority.

Another of Kay's books, A Song for Arbonne, I would recommend to anyone interested in women in fantasy. A lot of the plot hinges on the differing perceptions of women by two slightly different cultures, and although the protagonist is a man, there are at least half a dozen strong women.

 

I think as a general rule, most science fiction/fantasy does have the problem of women being relegated to minor roles. There are some books and authors, though, that do a good job (IMO) of creating strong female characters. Terry Goodkind was mentioned earlier, with characters such as Kahlan and certain Sisters of the Light (Ann, Verna). I think Robert Jordan does a good job in his Wheel of Time, which has so many strong major characters both male and female that its difficult to list them all.


I think part of the reason behind it is that fantasy especially is set in older ages, with less advanced technology, etc. The secondary role of women was often assumed back then, and it simply becomes part of that type of society, which fantasy fits directly into.

 

I agree that Robert Jordan's female characters are very independent and are perfectly fine without men to do the hard work, but the constant mooning over Rand and Lan gets extremely annoying.

And yeah, a lot of fantasy it set is an age where women have few to no rights, but there are plenty of examples of women rising above that. Valentyna in Fiona McIntosh's Quickening trilogy is another example.

 

Valentyna first intro scene showed a cocky and confident lady in Myrren's Gift, perhaps, Nat, but every page afterward she was cowering and worried.

 

I disagree. She did quite a bit of worrying, but she was a strong ruler and tried to do what was best for her people, even if it meant handing herself over to Celimus.

 

Women is sci-fi? The classic authors (Asimov, Clarke, etc) completely neglected and overlooked them. There are very few books of hard SF where the protagonist is a woman. Even female authors like Ursula K. Le Guin used men as central figures in her book, at least until a couple of decades ago.

It probably has something to do with the preponderancy of males in the scientist comunity, specially when it comes to engineering and hard sciences.

 

Even Clarke and Asimov came round in the last decades of their long careers.

The first science-fiction was written by geeks for geeks, but as the readership got more mainstream, so did the authors. Used to be only people with a true passion for science and speculations about the future wrote sf, and most of those were men. These days, many budding authors go into the genre because it's the only one where they still publish unknown authors in magazines. All the non-sf mags are gone, where people writing other kinds of fiction formerly had a chance to start publishing. These days a lot of sf authors have no background in science, well apart from reading the occasional Scientific American and watching Star Wars and Babylon 5 etc.

 

But do you need a science background? Does the physics of your universe need to conform to Earth's?

 

As much as I dislike those obstinate in the need to differentiate the two (and are also contemptuous of the latter), I think it simply comes down to this: If you're planning on writing science fiction, then YES, a science background of some sorts is almost a requisite, but if you're planning on writing sci-fi, then no.



On the topic of this thread, I'll ask the same loaded question which few, if any, from either gender can answer. What do women want? In not just science fiction and fantasy but any genre, authors can never seem to create a female character that is universally approved of by female readership. A female character praised as being strong and independent by one woman will be torn apart as a 'man with boobs' by another. A female character that's sensitive will be reprimanded as too weak. One that is a mixture is 'eratic'. You can't seem to win, particularly if you're a male author who might as well be writing about the social behavior of some unknown jungle tribe for all your understanding to begin with. The debate over various female characters in this short thread alone demonstrates such.

Of course, it's easy to demonstrate WHY women have played small roles in earlier works of science fiction and fantasy. As has already been said, it was a genre by men for men (and often narrowed down to 'by geeks for geeks'). While the demographics have changed and expanded, it's an interesting question as to whether newer works are written as they are because the audience is still largely male or if the audience is still that way because of the way they're written.

There's little excuse why you don't have stronger women in science fiction, aside from the aforementioned marketing and experience reasons. In fact, it is a failing of speculative writers of the past that they often tell of a world of the future where gender roles are better equated to those of the far past.

Relying on the whole "Well, that's how fantasy is because it's based on medieval Europe" reasoning is both simplistic and also demonstrates one of the reasons the fantasy genre is filled with trite and tired works (and perhaps also gives a nod to the first part of my reply, even though we're talking fantasy). Medieval Europe is the way it is for many reasons, both in terms of physical nature of human beings, religion/philosophy, history, and other social aspects. The average fantasy writer has little understanding of that and simply creates a world like medieval Europe, but with some name changes and maybe magic.

A fantasy world need not have developed like ours. There are examples of matriarchal societies in our history and even a few genetic relatives demonstrate this today (the Bonobo chimps, for example... although the females often use sex to gain what they want, something that is often looked upon as a negative thing, particularly in female characters, despite being a tool nearly every woman knows she has at her disposal). Just because in our world most cultures developed where original physical size, aggressive nature, and fewer period of incapacitation (pregnancy, childbirth, and rearing are fairly one sided) led to establishment of mores, rules, and laws that ensured male dominance doesn't mean your world had to have that moment in time. Even among the Greek states there were varying degrees of levels between males and females and had a state with a more equal approach dominated and later on Europe not be as influenced by Judeo-Christian beliefs, we might've seen a vastly different social structure in the Middle Ages.

But even if one does simply copy European history for one's backdrop, one needs to consider that much like science fiction and fantasy, history books were often written by men for men. You rarely get to see the strong women; the mothers, wives, sisters, and lovers who most likely played important roles, if indirectly through influence. You often just get glimpses of such, particular

 

Speaking only for myself, I think women can be strong characters using manipulation as well as physical or emotional strength. And about half the time, some women in books being weak doesn't bother me. Women are all different, and should not be written the same. There are weak and strong women in real life, so sf&f women aren't far off.