Friday, August 07, 2009
You're kidding, right?
At Tor, there is a discussion of an anthology titled "The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Science Fiction" that includes not a single female author or author of color. The discussion include links to an outstanding post by Angry Black Woman on the same subject. As a straight white male science fiction and fantasy author (SWMSF&FA for short) I can't begin to tell you how much it pisses me off to see anthologies populated entirely by white male science fiction and fantasy authors. More than that, I am utterly appalled by the reflexive (some might say kneejerk) defense of such things. Take for example the one by Paul Di Filippo which the Angry Black Woman takes apart so beautifully in her post. It makes me want to turn in my SWMSF&FA union card. Oh, and footnote 29 in the Angry Black Woman's post is made of awesome.
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5 comments:
"...I can't begin to tell you how much it pisses me off to see anthologies populated entirely by white male science fiction and fantasy authors."
I'd buy it just for that.
Then you should have a veritable plethora of options.
I would hope that the works in this anthology were picked on merit of quality and how they fit in with the theme. However, it does seem surprising that there would be so little diversity among the stories chosen. I've read a bunch of these "mammoth" books--but am not recalling what the ethnicity/sex the authors were (again, I was concerned about the content of the stories, not the sex/race/color/hat size) of who wrote them.) Mr. Anon
It's a nice hope and one that I might buy if this were an isolated event. Unfortunately, there's rather a lot of history that suggests it's not an anomaly but rather part of a broader cultural pattern in which women and people of color are excluded from all sorts of venues through various conscious and unconscious practices. I suspect this particular case falls more under the unconscious heading, but it's the sort of thing editors--especially editors making broad claims like publishing "The 21 finest stories of awesome science fiction"--ought to be working very hard to avoid doing.
It's also statistically very unlikely to have happened by simple chance. In the thread at SF Signal Ian Osmond notes: So, if the science fiction field is 97% white males, then there'd be a 50% chance that this would happen just by chance. If the field was 99% white males, then there would be an 80% chance of this happening.
On the other hand, if a quarter of science fiction writers are women or POC, then the odds of every story being written by a white male are about 0.2%
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