ASMSG Scifi Fantasy Paranormal Emagazine April 2015 | Page 8

the tough impression the alien soldiers
made, and female attention to shallow
subjects would make the plot meander.
I knew right away that this kind of
thinking was ludicrous, because I myself
am not soft or shallow in urgent
situations. But reading science fiction,
military fiction, and other ‘hard’ fiction
had conditioned me so thoroughly to
expect all tough characters to be male,
that I didn’t even think about what an
unrealistic assumption it was. If this was
true of me in the 21st century, I can
only imagine the conditioning Mary
Shelley must have had.
But choosing to think past the
conditioning and make some of my
strong characters female has improved
my writing. It felt particularly good to
see one of the reader comments on my
Star Trek serial Cracking Cardassian. It
said, “I hope we see Karadel again.”
Karadel is one of those alien soldiers I
found so difficult to make female. But
getting past the gender stereotype
forced me to make her a person instead
of a charicature, and that has given the
whole story greater depth and realism.
The same positive side effects have
happened in most of the rest of my
science fiction, as well.
But being female and being feminine
are not the same thing, and once I
started paying attention to gender, I
realized that I had to stop assuming that
our own culture’s traditional gender
styles would necessarily be the found in
people from another planet. So in
writing the primary alien culture of my
Fletcher Variable stories, I decided to
remove the artificial link between
masculine/feminine and male/female.
As a result, femininity is now a cultural
trait normally found in sea-dwelling
Chuzekks, and masculinity in Chuzekks
who live on land.

I suppose that most of today’s writers
and readers would say there’s no harm
in linking our aliens’ genders with their
masculinity or femininity. And in a
sense, I would agree - just as there’s no
harm in making our strong characters
male. Our culture’s conditioning against
strong females didn’t come from the
presence of strong male characters in
fiction; it came from the absence of
female ones, and it probably wasn’t
done on purpose. So while I’m working
to correct that problem, I don’t want to
accidentally add another one by
influencing future generations to think
that feminine characters can’t be male and much more importantly, that they
have the right to mistreat their realworld neighbors for not conforming to
gender stereotypes.
And that, really, is the whole reason
gender matters in our writing. Having
trouble imagining a strong female
character in fiction is relatively
harmless. What’s not harmless is how
that kind of thinking crosses over into
real life. Minds conditioned to think
that females in fiction are soft and
shallow will think the same of real
women and girls. And that’s just one of
a whole package of assumptions that
fiction teaches us to make about the
people around us. I don’t blame Mary
Ann Evans, Mary Shelley or anyone else
for depriving us of of heroes and
villains that were anything other than
male, masculine and straight. They
themselves were conditioned by earlier
influences, and were probably never
made aware of it.
But I am aware of it, which means I
have the responsibility to help fix the
problem - not because I’m a female
writer, but because I’m a writer.

Mary Jeddore Blakney’s Blog:
http://www.maryjeddoreblakney.com
You can buy her book Resist the Devil Here:
Resist the Devil on Smashwords

8|Page

WOMEN IN
genre
fiction
1818 Mary Shelly publishes
Frankenstein, considered by many
to be the first science fiction story.
1827 Jane C. Loudon publishes The
Mummy! anonymously. It was a
tale told in the 22nd century based
on realistic expectations of
advances in technology and culture.
1927 Thea von Harbou, wife of Fritz
Leiber, writes the book Metropolis
as well as the screenplay for the
movie of the same name which her
husband directs.
1934 Andre Norton publishes her
first book, The Prince Commands
1952 Andre Norton begins
publishing
1966 Ursula Le Guin publishes her
first book Rocannon's World and
Planet of Exile
1963 Marion Zimmber Bradley
becomes the first woman to win the
Hugo Award for best novel with her
work The Sword of Aldones

For a complete list of important
dates for women in science
fiction, visit:

A Brief History of
Women in Science
Fiction