sf mistressworks

If anyone's interested in reading some of these books I'm trying to get our good reads book group going again, selecting books to read from Ian's list. The idea will be to select four of five books from the list at random each month and then put them up to a vote, the winner we read in the group and discuss afterwards.
 
It might well be - I know a couple of the books that I've not read myself aren't actually, er, eligible. I suppose I'll double-check...
 
Good list Ian even if there is some strictly fantasy works. I dont think though non genre authors like Atwood should be in list like this. Atwood,Lessing has their non-SF fanbase and there is enough real SF mistresses in the genre that works in the actual field.

I have seen mainstream lit shows talk about the few times Atwood type authors write SF like its the best ever in the field automatically. Actual female SF authors dont get press like that.
 
Good list, I've picked a few to read over the next couple of months.
 
Ian,

I take it that your list of SF Mistress Works are supposed to be a list of the best classic SF by women but I was just wondering why, looking at the distribution of publishing dates, the list seems to be so heavilly weighted towards modern day?

This is what I mean:

Pre 1900: 1
1900-'20: 1
'20-'29: 2
'30-'39: 1
'40-'49: 0
'50-'59: 1
'60-'69: 6
'70-79: 14
'80-'89: 29
'90-'00: 35

Over half is post 1980. Is this a deliberate bias on your part? Or perhaps there is simply less quality female SF to choose from the when you go back to before the 80's?

Because I'm thinking that your list is manifestly failing to do what it sets out to do. According to your FAQ:
a) women have been writing science fiction since the genre’s beginnings,

b) many of their books should qualify as classics, and

c) many of their books are, in fact, better than “classics” by their male counterparts, and have at least aged better.
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I mean, okay, while you've shown women were writing SF since it's beginnings but not many and certainly there's not much to displace the male dominance of the 40's and 50's (however poorly you rate the likes of Heinlein and Asimov). And since most of your classics were published after 1980, it's not so easy to judge how well they've dated.
 
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It's not just the number of women writing science fiction which has increased with each year, but the number of people writing science fiction. So no, theren't many women writing sf in the 1920s, 1930s or 1940s. As a result, the distribution of titles is not really that surprising. Also, the list is almost exclusively novels, and of those few women sf writers writing in the first half of last century, even less had novels published.

I don't think the list fails at all to do what it claims. It demonstrates that women have been involved in the genre since its beginnings - or even earlier if you consider Frankenstein to be a germinal work. As for being better than their contemporaries... I'd certainly sooner read a Leigh Bracket story from the 1940s than an Isaac Asimov one, and I'd argue the latter's fiction has survived the decades since much worse than the former's. Partly that's the nature of the sf each wrote, but also Brackett was hands-down the better writer. Yet Asimov's books have remained in print ever since, and Brackett's have not. Some discrimination there, surely...
 
Ian, take the SF Masterwork series. While it is male dominated, it does not have anything like the time distribution that your SF Mistressworks list does. I haven't done any analysis of original publication dates but there are no shortage of works from the 50's, 40's and earlier. There are hardly any (if at all) that were published in the 90's.
As for being better than their contemporaries... I'd certainly sooner read a Leigh Bracket story from the 1940s than an Isaac Asimov one, and I'd argue the latter's fiction has survived the decades since much worse than the former's. Partly that's the nature of the sf each wrote, but also Brackett was hands-down the better writer. Yet Asimov's books have remained in print ever since, and Brackett's have not. Some discrimination there, surely...
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I haven't read Leigh Bracket so I can't comment on their relative merrits but the point is that's just one covering two decades that were littered with many classics of SF that were written by male authors. Even if Leigh Bracket does deserve to be better remembered (I'm not disputing that), where are all the others?

I saw you describe your list as an "antidote" the many male dominated lists of classic SF but it seems to me that there is very little overlap in terms of when they were published. Perhaps Women were truly challenging and surpassing men's dominance in the 80's and 90's but your list fails to demonstrate that it was happening much before then.
 
But a classics list doesn't have to be tied to a decade, it doesn't have to have x number of books from the 1940s, y number of books from the 1950s, and so on. Women sf novelists didn't really start to appear in significant numbers until the 1960s, and even then most of their works have been forgotten - anyone remember Doris Piserchia, for example? Why can't a list of classic sf include a 1960s title by a woman instead of a 1940s title by a man?

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, or even why you would want to make one. You can't compare like for like because in the genre's early decades it was indeed male-dominated - and women writers also found it much harder to get into print. And books by women sf writers from later decades have been forgotten and/or ignored just as much. Why not celebrate those forgotten books? Why leave them to languish in obscurity, especially if they're good books? Why accept that those male-dominated lists of classic sf do actually list the best books ever published during the twentieth century?
 
I agree about Leight Brackett and Asimov comparison totally Ian! Brackett is the better writer but since she wrote in pulp era of SFF she didnt get as much attention in her times, the years after. If she wrote in 70s,80s she would be much more reprinted today and not an underrated legend of the field. Same with CL Moore.

Same in other fields when i read literary classes, 99% of the class was focused on male authors. They think its enough with Shelley,Austen,Bronte....
 
Ian
Women sf novelists didn't really start to appear in significant numbers until the 1960s, and even then most of their works have been forgotten - anyone remember Doris Piserchia, for example? Why can't a list of classic sf include a 1960s title by a woman instead of a 1940s title by a man?
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Well, indeed it should. But how can you say that the classics of SF written by women, most of which (on your list) were published post 1980 have dated better than those written by men, which on average were published earlier? How can you even begin to judge how well books written in the 90's have dated?
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here, or even why you would want to make one.
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I'm all for uncovering great, forgotten works of female authors don't get me wrong. And I know you think that many of the so called classics from the mid 20th century are over-represented on your average list of classic SF. But that's not the point you're trying to make here. SF written in the 90's (by men or women) is generally very different to that written in the so called golden age. How much of that will eventually truly be judged as "classic", only time will tell. I personally think it is too soon to judge but I wholeheartedly agree we should at least be reading them.
 
I'm not making any like for like comparisons by decade. And I don't think it's fair either to say a book is a classic for a book written in the 1940s. If it's a classic, it's a stone-cold classic. Jane Austen's books, for example, are still considered classics and they're 300 years old. Likewise HG Wells from over 100 years ago.

Having said that, I do think time plays a part in a book's classic status. Which is why I'm limiting SF Mistressworks to pre-2000 books.
 
Ian,

If you say that "many of their books are, in fact, better than “classics” by their male counterparts, and have at least aged better. ", by counterpart surely you mean contemporaries which means writing at or around the same time?

Perhaps it was sexual discrimination that prevented many women from publishing SF in the 40's and 50's but we are hardly in a position to judge, from your list, whether female SF at the time was better or has dated better.
 
I still don't understand what point you're trying to make. For the list, I picked (mostly) well-known works by female sf writers. There aren't many from the early decades that I could find, and almost none are still in print. I never said every book written by a female writer during those decades was better than every book written by a male writer. But crap books by male writers are named on lists of sf classics, while good books by women have been forgotten - and yes, good books by men have also been forgotten, but less than a handful of good books by women appear on lists of sf classics. Books by women are under-represented... and still are now.

It is my experience - see Brackett vs Asimov above - and those of others I've spoken to/corresponded with, that the books on the list are better than many alleged classics from the years in question. If I couldn't find a suitable book from, say, 1948 or 1951, it may be that no woman had a book published in those years; or it may be a failure on my part. I would hope at least that people would read the listed books and make up their own minds. Or perhaps read books not on the list by women sf writers and perhaps make a case for them as forgotten classics of the genre...
 
You have to also understand SF Masterworks is not about great masterworks, its famous books by most famous classic SF authors and their works Gollancz/Orion can publish that isnt already published by others. Its not a list made by critics, authors,editors of the field to make an alltime great list, hall of fame.

Its also a bit laughable because its 90% male authors because literary history in SF field mirror the world history, the times books was written. There arent many classic SF books written by female authors in the 40s,50s for understandable reasons.

I have no problem with sf mistressworks list dominated by 80s,70s books. Its not too contemporary when there was only Brackett,CL Moore,Andre Norton type authors before the authors in Ian list. 30-40 year old books can be classics.

We shouldnt think books written in the 40s-60s are better just because they are old....
 
If I was going to list a classic of Norton's, it would be "Sargasso of Space" (1950s) rather than Witch World (which is fantasy with a thread of SF). Sargasso is straight-up space adventure which I can read 60 years later and thoroughly enjoy.

She's remarkably timeless and hit her stride, I think, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, producing books which read as different in tone but by no means foreign to today's readers. [I get great amusement out of "flimsies" where documents are encoded on tiny strips of plastic which are then viewed with readers. More microfiche than email. Otherwise there's rarely a technology used which can be consigned to the obsolete bin.]
 
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I must admit I'm not overly familiar with Norton's oeuvre. I read about a dozen of her books when I was 11 or 12, but I remember none of them. Witch World was recommended to be as her best, though others have said it is pure fantasy. I should probably read it. And if Sargasso of Space is a better one to put on the list, I should probably try reading that too.
 
The Golden Age was not that all-male. Apart from Brackett and Moore, forrest Ackerman cites at least half a dozen female authors published by Hugo Gernsback and includes some of their tales in the collection Gosh! Wow!. Will look up the names and post them here, they could serve as useful pointers for Ian's project.
 
iansales said:
I must admit I'm not overly familiar with Norton's oeuvre. I read about a dozen of her books when I was 11 or 12, but I remember none of them. Witch World was recommended to be as her best, though others have said it is pure fantasy. I should probably read it. And if Sargasso of Space is a better one to put on the list, I should probably try reading that too.
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I've actually read both of them fairly recently. I thought WW was a tad squishy in regards to the various mysterious and never adequately explored characters. One could hope that the various sequels got down to the nitty gritty. SofS, OTOH was a good old-fashioned space opera with blasters, space suits and rockets. Much more accessible, but, perhaps not as artistically rendered. The sequels didn't add much.

This probably doesn't help, but I liked the space opera better.
 
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