Back from Wiscon
I spent the Memorial Day weekend in Madison, Wisconsin, at my favorite science fiction convention: Wiscon, which is devoted to feminism and all things progressive in scifi. I spoke on two panels, one about Dollhouse and the other about bisexuality in science fiction. The Dollhouse panel wound up being incredibly interesting, with other panelists and the audience riffing for an hour about what the Dollhouse might represent – prison, the military, a brothel, a chattel house? We also hashed out which characters really were the heroes of the show, determining that in fact nobody is really a hero and that’s probably why the show will ultimately fail to gain a broad audience. My favorite character has wound up being Adele DeWitt, the ambivalently amoral manager of the Los Angeles branch of the Dollhouse. There were a surprising number of people who agreed with me.
I also attended a ton of interesting panels, and wrote about one of them on io9: The “what gender is your Roomba” panel, which raised a lot of interesting questions about why we feel compelled to gender technology which is essentially genderless. Read about that here.
One of the issues I heard a lot about over the weekend was the increasing difficulty of getting published in the current market. As the publishing industry shrinks, there is less room for the kinds of social science fictional explorations that many Wiscon attendees write and read. It seems anecdotally that women are being hit harder by this downturn than men are – but then again, the women at Wiscon are ones who like to deal with unpleasant truths and difficult ideas in their fiction, and the publishing industry’s aversion to such stories has always crossed gender lines.
I attended several panels where people talked about how outrageous it is that science fiction remains such a white-dominated field, despite the huge numbers of people of color who read and write SF. This bias is reflected in which authors get contracts, but also in the subject matter of published novels. When was the last time you read an SF novel where all the main characters happened to be black or Asian or native? It seems bizarre that the future-looking genre of SF should remain so white in the US, especially at a time when our president and one of the wealthiest entertainment moguls in the country (Oprah Winfrey) are black. Some of our most popular literary authors are black, like Toni Morrison. And one of the biggest bestsellers in American history, the novel Roots, has a cast of characters which is entirely black. Another mainstream mega-bestseller, Joy Luck Club, has an entirely Asian-American group of characters. If the mainstream can do it, why can’t SF?
Obviously the answer is for publishers to reach out to authors who are people of color. But in addition readers who are concerned about this issue should consider donating money to groups like the Carl Brandon Society, which give out scholarships to people of color who write science fiction. If we want to support the careers of people of color in SF, one way to do it is quite frankly to give them money so they can write.
