ASMSG Scifi Fantasy Paranormal Emagazine April 2015 | Page 7

Women in Science Fiction
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Mary Jeddore Blakney
When SFP Indie editor M. Joseph
Murphy asked me to write about what
it’s like to be a female science fiction
writer, my first thought was, “I’m not
really qualified. I don’t write science
fiction as a female; I just write it.”
Of course, that’s exactly the point.
Writing is like marriage. It is done by
people, and those people usually (but
not always) are either male or female,
and their gender may or may not have
anything to do with it. Yet our culture
still tends to assume that gender is one
of the most important factors in the
whole operation.
In high school, I was taught that Mary
Ann Evans put a stop to this kind of
thinking back in the 1800s with her
book Silas Marner. Evans went by the
pen name George Eliot. And she wrote
her male characters with the kind of
deep personal insight that (it seemed

obvious to readers of her day) only
another male could possess.
An indispensable skill for any fiction
writer is the ability to climb into our
characters’ heads and understand what
they think and feel. Obviously, not all
our characters will possess all the same
specifics as we do. Some will have
different genders. Some will have
different ancestries. Some will have
bigger feet or longer hair. More to the
point, they will have different life
experiences, tastes, preferences and
motivations. These are the challenging
differences, and compared to that,
writing a character with a different
gender is easy.
But Mary Ann Evans didn’t write
science fiction. So maybe that’s the
difference. Like restoring old muscle
cars, science fiction is just one of those
hobbies that don’t draw a lot of women.
It has been pretty much a male thing,

ever since it got its start from the pen of
Mary Shelley in 1818.
Wait, Mary Shelley? That’s right. The
creator of Frankenstein, commonly
credited with starting the genre, was a
woman.
So if science fiction has never been the
realm of male writers, what, exactly, is
so predominantly male about it? For
one thing, there are the characters. I
find it interesting that even in
Frankenstein, all the really important
characters are males.
And I think I know why. When I
started writing science fiction, all my
alien characters were male. Once I
realized that, I knew it was a problem I
needed to fix, but it wasn’t easy. At one
point, I even caught myself feeling that
adding females would hurt the stories.
Female softness would take the edge off

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