Thank you for this. As a woman, the original post infuriated me. I’m a sci-fi author who designs clothing and cities with technology. Bringing a unique aesthetic to the future has driven the majority of my career. Why is another woman saying that sci-fi and designing the future should be turned into some Jane Austen revivalism? Vomit inducing stereotypical cringe. Elle is usually better than this.
Thanks. John Carter had a thread on Notes where he listed some of the women writing solid sci-fi (https://substack.com/@barsoom/note/c-49498078); it seems like the more salient difference here is personality type. Some personality types broadly correlate with one gender more than another, but those same personality types also correlate, probably even more strongly, with certain genres or subcultures. So a given genre or subculture may skew more male or more female, but if you drill down, it skews even more strongly towards a certain personality type. Then somebody comes along and says, "Hey, we need to change this genre and its subculture to attract a different gender dynamic," but in practice, what that means is, "This genre and its subculture don't match *my* personality, so we need to force top-down changes onto it until it's more to my liking." And they destroy the genre and its culture in the process.
Was literally just reading his thread on this. They are trying to feminize society to make it safe and comfortable, defanging it in the process while creating the most banal monotony. Pat Cadigan is also an excellent sci-fi author who did not focus on gender as her main subject. She focused on ideas and concepts, which is what made her such a brilliant world builder. Elle started her post out saying she didn’t like sci-fi because it was too masculine, which tells us all we need to know.
Yes, who on Earth says “I don’t like sci-fi because it is too masculine.” If you don’t like something just don’t like it and move on, don’t tell other people what to like or not to like unless you can prove it’s hurting someone like if someone likes kicking puppies or something less obviously harmful. If you think women liking cyberpunk or the Terminator or whatever is breaking down your gender roles or something you probably also want to live in the 8th century without any technology anyway so like what’s your complaint.
Science-fiction future will be like a divorce on a grand scale. Women can keep the planet, just like the wives get the houses. The men will just go out and take over the rest of the universe. Not a bad deal. We will even leave them some robots that aren’t afraid to kill insects in the kitchen or unblock the toilet.
The Hugo Awards are a fine example of what happens when the Fantasy & Science Fiction future is mandated to be Female-centric. The SWFA is another. Both are now mandating it. See what books the Hugo Awards champion, then force Ms Griffin to read them. That's what Woke and "The Future is Female" has brought to SF/F. Argue for bringing back high-quality writing over political screeds, and maybe you can shave a few years off your 40 year sentence in the wilderness.
For me, any book after about 1998 displaying the Hugo Award on its cover is akin to seeing a biohazard placard. "Stay AWAY! Stay far, far away! Stay a galaxy far away!"
In addition, taking advice from someone who states plainly she doesn't like a thing? Nah. You don't like my gaming table? Find your own. You especially don't get to tell me how things work here.
What you said about things dated after 1998 raising a red flag applies more broadly! For books/movies/etc, anything after 2012 is assumed to be shite until proven otherwise in my book!
"We're sorry, you said hateful things toward Ibram X Kendi and you are hereby unallowed to leave your pod for a period of 365 days, to reflext upon your white supremacy and lack of empathy and affirmation, after which you will wash Mr Kendi's feet or be exiled to White Antarctic Station.
Spinrad was the Bad Boy of SF. After all, he wrote "The Iron Dream," and the considerably more disturbing "The Men in the Jungle." (Warning: the latter can stain the brain. Avoid unless you are someone who enjoys sick horror films.)
The very existence and writing careers of CL Moore, Margaret St. Clair, Andre Norton, and Leigh Brackett negate her entire argument. Due entirely because the former never entered with an eye to do Kennedy style changes from the Top down.
The type of person who even thinks she can force top-down changes onto an art form (and have it still be art) is someone who lacks the spirit of an artist, someone who doesn't understand the difference between art and propaganda. Case in point: Kathleen Kennedy.
So hysterical! But seriously could that be our future……… Really think the gender divide as well as all other forms of separation is only a smoke screen the adversary of ALL Humanity is using to alienate us from our Creator. That is the underlying theme and trajectory this world is on
Glad you enjoyed it! I think the pendulum is swinging back the other way with the rising generation -- as long as the psychopaths currently in power don't destroy everything beyond the point of no return!
The Body of Christ is indestructible I believe. Christ conquered death - it no longer has power. The adversary is a cuckold, horned and impotent Mankind has been reconciled to God it remains for each of us as individuals with free will to repent of our pride and follow Christ.
This is the third time I have had to subscribe to you. Substack seems to randomly unsubscribe me from people without notifying me. It has happened with numerous others.
Thanks for staying with me! Not sure why that happens. I have had to resubscribe to some substacks I know I used to follow. Maybe they have cast a black hat algorithmic spell on accounts that delve into forbidden subjects?
Having now read the OP, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that the hard sci-fi depiction of the future - gritty, spartan, difficult and dangerous - appeals more to young men than to young women.
But this isn't because hard sci-fi authors are mean or suffering from an overabundance of testosterone. It's because they know their math and physics, and understand that's how it will have to be if you want to travel in space.
We didn't start depicting spacecraft as luxury yachts and bland flying cubicle farms until the space fantasies of Star Wars and Star Trek captured the popular imagination. But these things are, as far as we know, physically impossible. The parts of space fantasy that are not impossible are simply unconscionably costly (like, if you think a superyacht is outrageous, wait until you see the pricetag for a spacecraft "upgraded" to the luxury level of a mere boomer cruise ship).
The Cold Equations, often denounced by the science fantasy crowd, is not a story about trivializing execution-by-way-of-calculus, it's a story about how much impact every single gram of payload has on fuel demands in interplanetary transit. The scenario gives emotional weight to this complication, which is often overlooked when space fantasy authors feel the need to load their spacecraft with casinos and hardwood executive desks.
The same goes for most other science fantasy. When you're poking at the extreme limits of physics, you have to deal with increasingly severe trade offs. You want to run your utopian society on solar power? Well, say goodbye to either most of your population or most of your lifestyle expectations, pick one.
Would you rather run it on fusion and avoid that whole conundrum? Bad news, you're going to need some people doing the very difficult, dirty, dangerous job of fueling and maintaining those reactors, assuming we figure out how to make them, which assumes making them is possible (spoiler: it won't be "clean" and no you can't run it on seawater in any case).
Or maybe you'd like to put the solar panels up in space and beam the power down (RIP birds)? Well now we're back to those difficult, dangerous, scary physically-possible spacecraft.
Want to write a story about how a friendly AI connected to a benevolent brain chip is going to schedule you a slot at the local park whenever you have the sads? Well someone more serious is going to write a dark, dystopian novel about one of the many ways that technology could be abused.
There's nothing wrong with writing fluffy science fantasy. Fantasy is fantasy. If you want your magic reskinned as tech gadgets, by all means. Just understand that this isn't "serious" science fiction; you're no longer writing about possible futures, at least not according to the physics we know today. You're writing about elves and unicorns, whatever you want to call them in your setting.
Considering that most starships in OG Star Wars weren't luxury yachts, but old boats, your argument kind of falls apart.
To say nothing of the fact that John W. Campbell's push for scifi as message fiction via hard scifi is the ideological seed that femoids like Griffin and Kennedy used to make disgusting genre changes justified by the message.
A seed which has also affected fantasy as well. Realism has been a proven negative for fiction and should just be thrown in the trash alongside subversive as marketing ideological writing terms. You can't claim to be realistic in Speculative fiction because one simply does not know what the future holds (That science is never settled is one point in favor of this. That Telekinetics Ala Warhammer Psykers were considered hardscifi material is yet another. And the constant pendulum swings on Giant Robots just push this point forward). One can't claim to make realistic fiction dealing with an Alternative world due to not knowing how that world's laws work (Be they magic, science, or quantum techno color luminescent bio spiritual mechanics).
If you mean Kathleen, Krazy KK wouldn't know scientific realism if it hit her upside the head. This is the problem with the whole The Science crowd, they don't know the first thing about science. All the KK Star Wars shit did was take star Wars' fun but entirely fantastical space magic and pile on absurdities like mile-long windows, space horses, and the total retardation of weaponizing hyperdrives which breaks the whole setting in a thousand ways.
Nobody considers 40k hard sci fi. I don't know where you got that idea. The closest thing to hard sci fi we had in pop sci fi in the past 50 years was the Expanse, in that the human technology more-or-less conformed to known physics, though it goes way beyond what we know we can do and into the realm of "known physics doesn't forbid this." But the alien tech is pure fantasy and bumps The Expanse out of the category of hard sci fi and into what some authors call "resilient sci fi," in which one proposes some limited modifications to physics and then thinks carefully about the consequences.
That is what hard sci fi is, conforming strictly to what we know right now is possible, not what we wish to be true. Which among other things means no faster than light travel, no reactionless drives, no effectively unlimited energy sources, no time travel, no stealth space ships, no "force fields," no "plasma blasters," no laser swords... Basically no anything Star Wars or Star Trek.
We don't know what the future holds, this is true. It is at least remotely possible that everything we think we know about physics is wrong, and new understanding might make all of those things and more possible. But hard sci fi deals only with what we know.
"Realism" in the context of pure fantasy is mouthbreather shit. In good fantasy the author stays consistent with the established rules of the setting. Star Trek's fantastical warp drives have speed limits, and the dilithium crystals can only produce so much power, cap'n, as convenient to introduce plot complications, and physically exceeding the speed of light without warp means traveling backward in time. Whatever, everyone's happy as long as the established rules aren't violated to the point of insulting the audience. When someone umakshullys space fantasy by invoking real physics, send them out the airlock.
Thank you for this. As a woman, the original post infuriated me. I’m a sci-fi author who designs clothing and cities with technology. Bringing a unique aesthetic to the future has driven the majority of my career. Why is another woman saying that sci-fi and designing the future should be turned into some Jane Austen revivalism? Vomit inducing stereotypical cringe. Elle is usually better than this.
Thanks. John Carter had a thread on Notes where he listed some of the women writing solid sci-fi (https://substack.com/@barsoom/note/c-49498078); it seems like the more salient difference here is personality type. Some personality types broadly correlate with one gender more than another, but those same personality types also correlate, probably even more strongly, with certain genres or subcultures. So a given genre or subculture may skew more male or more female, but if you drill down, it skews even more strongly towards a certain personality type. Then somebody comes along and says, "Hey, we need to change this genre and its subculture to attract a different gender dynamic," but in practice, what that means is, "This genre and its subculture don't match *my* personality, so we need to force top-down changes onto it until it's more to my liking." And they destroy the genre and its culture in the process.
This is exactly what happened to Star Wars. Serendipitously, Lorenzo Warby had a great post yesterday on this very theme: https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/narcissistic-cultural-degradation.
Was literally just reading his thread on this. They are trying to feminize society to make it safe and comfortable, defanging it in the process while creating the most banal monotony. Pat Cadigan is also an excellent sci-fi author who did not focus on gender as her main subject. She focused on ideas and concepts, which is what made her such a brilliant world builder. Elle started her post out saying she didn’t like sci-fi because it was too masculine, which tells us all we need to know.
Yes, who on Earth says “I don’t like sci-fi because it is too masculine.” If you don’t like something just don’t like it and move on, don’t tell other people what to like or not to like unless you can prove it’s hurting someone like if someone likes kicking puppies or something less obviously harmful. If you think women liking cyberpunk or the Terminator or whatever is breaking down your gender roles or something you probably also want to live in the 8th century without any technology anyway so like what’s your complaint.
If you say "HR" as a word, what does it become????
"HER"
COINCIDENCE?!
You can't spell "whore" without the letters H R either. I think there definitely is a connection!
Maybe this was the real psyop all along 🤔
Science-fiction future will be like a divorce on a grand scale. Women can keep the planet, just like the wives get the houses. The men will just go out and take over the rest of the universe. Not a bad deal. We will even leave them some robots that aren’t afraid to kill insects in the kitchen or unblock the toilet.
🤣 Well, that doesn't sound so bad.
The Hugo Awards are a fine example of what happens when the Fantasy & Science Fiction future is mandated to be Female-centric. The SWFA is another. Both are now mandating it. See what books the Hugo Awards champion, then force Ms Griffin to read them. That's what Woke and "The Future is Female" has brought to SF/F. Argue for bringing back high-quality writing over political screeds, and maybe you can shave a few years off your 40 year sentence in the wilderness.
For me, any book after about 1998 displaying the Hugo Award on its cover is akin to seeing a biohazard placard. "Stay AWAY! Stay far, far away! Stay a galaxy far away!"
In addition, taking advice from someone who states plainly she doesn't like a thing? Nah. You don't like my gaming table? Find your own. You especially don't get to tell me how things work here.
What you said about things dated after 1998 raising a red flag applies more broadly! For books/movies/etc, anything after 2012 is assumed to be shite until proven otherwise in my book!
Friends don't let friends read anything written after 1980.
1997 most Entertainment crashed and burned.
Cultural Ground Zero.
Follow JD Cowan, Brian Niemeier, and David V. Stewart for more on that.
If only they had screenwriters like Nobumoto Keiko.
I'm not familiar with her. Any movies you'd recommend?
Cowboy Bebop.
Thanks!
"We're sorry, you said hateful things toward Ibram X Kendi and you are hereby unallowed to leave your pod for a period of 365 days, to reflext upon your white supremacy and lack of empathy and affirmation, after which you will wash Mr Kendi's feet or be exiled to White Antarctic Station.
🤣🤣🤣
Have you read Norman Spinrad's "A World Between?"
If not, do so yesterday!
I'll check that out!
Femocracy vs. Transcendal Science...
Wouldn't be published today. Not a freaking chance!
Spinrad was the Bad Boy of SF. After all, he wrote "The Iron Dream," and the considerably more disturbing "The Men in the Jungle." (Warning: the latter can stain the brain. Avoid unless you are someone who enjoys sick horror films.)
The Iron Dream goes dangerously close to being unironically pro NS. Which is what makes it appealing.
He did something similar with Osama bin Laden more recently. I don't think he got many sales.
What's the name of the book?
https://www.amazon.com/Osama-Gun-Norman-Spinrad/dp/1479405892
Haven't read The Men In The Jungle. Don't read much fiction any more, but maybe I'll check that one out someday.
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
-‘Iron’ Mike Tyson esq., prophet
The very existence and writing careers of CL Moore, Margaret St. Clair, Andre Norton, and Leigh Brackett negate her entire argument. Due entirely because the former never entered with an eye to do Kennedy style changes from the Top down.
The type of person who even thinks she can force top-down changes onto an art form (and have it still be art) is someone who lacks the spirit of an artist, someone who doesn't understand the difference between art and propaganda. Case in point: Kathleen Kennedy.
Women don’t design, they have designs.
This is a very true and very quotable statement!
So hysterical! But seriously could that be our future……… Really think the gender divide as well as all other forms of separation is only a smoke screen the adversary of ALL Humanity is using to alienate us from our Creator. That is the underlying theme and trajectory this world is on
Glad you enjoyed it! I think the pendulum is swinging back the other way with the rising generation -- as long as the psychopaths currently in power don't destroy everything beyond the point of no return!
The Body of Christ is indestructible I believe. Christ conquered death - it no longer has power. The adversary is a cuckold, horned and impotent Mankind has been reconciled to God it remains for each of us as individuals with free will to repent of our pride and follow Christ.
This is the third time I have had to subscribe to you. Substack seems to randomly unsubscribe me from people without notifying me. It has happened with numerous others.
Thanks for staying with me! Not sure why that happens. I have had to resubscribe to some substacks I know I used to follow. Maybe they have cast a black hat algorithmic spell on accounts that delve into forbidden subjects?
Having now read the OP, I guess we shouldn't be surprised that the hard sci-fi depiction of the future - gritty, spartan, difficult and dangerous - appeals more to young men than to young women.
But this isn't because hard sci-fi authors are mean or suffering from an overabundance of testosterone. It's because they know their math and physics, and understand that's how it will have to be if you want to travel in space.
We didn't start depicting spacecraft as luxury yachts and bland flying cubicle farms until the space fantasies of Star Wars and Star Trek captured the popular imagination. But these things are, as far as we know, physically impossible. The parts of space fantasy that are not impossible are simply unconscionably costly (like, if you think a superyacht is outrageous, wait until you see the pricetag for a spacecraft "upgraded" to the luxury level of a mere boomer cruise ship).
The Cold Equations, often denounced by the science fantasy crowd, is not a story about trivializing execution-by-way-of-calculus, it's a story about how much impact every single gram of payload has on fuel demands in interplanetary transit. The scenario gives emotional weight to this complication, which is often overlooked when space fantasy authors feel the need to load their spacecraft with casinos and hardwood executive desks.
The same goes for most other science fantasy. When you're poking at the extreme limits of physics, you have to deal with increasingly severe trade offs. You want to run your utopian society on solar power? Well, say goodbye to either most of your population or most of your lifestyle expectations, pick one.
Would you rather run it on fusion and avoid that whole conundrum? Bad news, you're going to need some people doing the very difficult, dirty, dangerous job of fueling and maintaining those reactors, assuming we figure out how to make them, which assumes making them is possible (spoiler: it won't be "clean" and no you can't run it on seawater in any case).
Or maybe you'd like to put the solar panels up in space and beam the power down (RIP birds)? Well now we're back to those difficult, dangerous, scary physically-possible spacecraft.
Want to write a story about how a friendly AI connected to a benevolent brain chip is going to schedule you a slot at the local park whenever you have the sads? Well someone more serious is going to write a dark, dystopian novel about one of the many ways that technology could be abused.
There's nothing wrong with writing fluffy science fantasy. Fantasy is fantasy. If you want your magic reskinned as tech gadgets, by all means. Just understand that this isn't "serious" science fiction; you're no longer writing about possible futures, at least not according to the physics we know today. You're writing about elves and unicorns, whatever you want to call them in your setting.
Considering that most starships in OG Star Wars weren't luxury yachts, but old boats, your argument kind of falls apart.
To say nothing of the fact that John W. Campbell's push for scifi as message fiction via hard scifi is the ideological seed that femoids like Griffin and Kennedy used to make disgusting genre changes justified by the message.
A seed which has also affected fantasy as well. Realism has been a proven negative for fiction and should just be thrown in the trash alongside subversive as marketing ideological writing terms. You can't claim to be realistic in Speculative fiction because one simply does not know what the future holds (That science is never settled is one point in favor of this. That Telekinetics Ala Warhammer Psykers were considered hardscifi material is yet another. And the constant pendulum swings on Giant Robots just push this point forward). One can't claim to make realistic fiction dealing with an Alternative world due to not knowing how that world's laws work (Be they magic, science, or quantum techno color luminescent bio spiritual mechanics).
If you mean Kathleen, Krazy KK wouldn't know scientific realism if it hit her upside the head. This is the problem with the whole The Science crowd, they don't know the first thing about science. All the KK Star Wars shit did was take star Wars' fun but entirely fantastical space magic and pile on absurdities like mile-long windows, space horses, and the total retardation of weaponizing hyperdrives which breaks the whole setting in a thousand ways.
Nobody considers 40k hard sci fi. I don't know where you got that idea. The closest thing to hard sci fi we had in pop sci fi in the past 50 years was the Expanse, in that the human technology more-or-less conformed to known physics, though it goes way beyond what we know we can do and into the realm of "known physics doesn't forbid this." But the alien tech is pure fantasy and bumps The Expanse out of the category of hard sci fi and into what some authors call "resilient sci fi," in which one proposes some limited modifications to physics and then thinks carefully about the consequences.
That is what hard sci fi is, conforming strictly to what we know right now is possible, not what we wish to be true. Which among other things means no faster than light travel, no reactionless drives, no effectively unlimited energy sources, no time travel, no stealth space ships, no "force fields," no "plasma blasters," no laser swords... Basically no anything Star Wars or Star Trek.
We don't know what the future holds, this is true. It is at least remotely possible that everything we think we know about physics is wrong, and new understanding might make all of those things and more possible. But hard sci fi deals only with what we know.
"Realism" in the context of pure fantasy is mouthbreather shit. In good fantasy the author stays consistent with the established rules of the setting. Star Trek's fantastical warp drives have speed limits, and the dilithium crystals can only produce so much power, cap'n, as convenient to introduce plot complications, and physically exceeding the speed of light without warp means traveling backward in time. Whatever, everyone's happy as long as the established rules aren't violated to the point of insulting the audience. When someone umakshullys space fantasy by invoking real physics, send them out the airlock.
Lol. Okay Gamma Male.
😂 what the fuck is that supposed to mean
You tell me? ;^) 😜🤣🤣😅😅🙃🙃🙃
I am at a total loss, I lost track of genders after the first 2. You're gonna have to fill me in.
This is why I principally write about female characters in my fiction....
Well, that's one way to make sure your stories have plenty of drama!
🤣
The Flight of the Silvers
by Daniel Price
is a fun one, sorta normie not fake and gay.
Thanks, I'll check it out.
cf: Big Mother: https://landmademan.com/big-mother/