Bidisha on SF

[sawyl]

Bidisha has a good comment piece in today's Guardian on feminism and speculative fiction. She argues, based on the appalling way that JK Rowling has been treated, that double standards seem to apply when considering whether SF novels are worthy of serious analysis, with male writers lionised and female writers dismissed and neglected.

I particularly liked the penultimate paragraph which, after comparing Sauron's All Seeing Eye to a vagina — very Angela Carter! — the article name-checks three of my favourite books in a single sentence:

They hail William Gibson's prescience, oblivious to Marge Piercy's prophetic sci-fi masterpieces Body of Glass and Woman on the Edge of Time and Liz Williams's intelligent, knotty novels like Darkland.

Actually, I'm not quite convinced that the comparison valid. Gibson is a wonderful writer with a slick style and gift for predicting the future. But in terms of breadth and depth of ideas, I don't think that he can hold a candle to either Williams or Piercy. Woman on the Edge of Time, for example, examines a wide range of ideas and combines conflicting visions of the future with a polemic against the appalling way people with mental illness are treated in 1970s America. Not something that could be claimed for Neuromancer, however influential it may have been...