Guardian Review goes SF
May. 15th, 2011 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylWhile it's probably a feature of the age of the contributors — which is probably, in turn, a feature of how long it takes to become established as a successful novelist — the median publication date of the favourite SF novels selected by the Great and Good in this weekend's Guardian Review is 1960. (This excludes favourite authors and corrects for a typical Guardian typo in the publication date of The Stars My DestinationQuicksilver).
The male to female ratio of selected works was 20:4, but, on the plus side, three of the selected women — Octavia E. Butler, Diana Wynne Jones and, Virgina Woolf — were nominated for their entire output rather than a single work; the only man to receive the same treatment was Lovecraft. It may also be worth noting that the only male writer who crossed gender lines by nominating a female author's work was Kim Stanley Robinson who, naturally, nominated Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.
The interviews towards the end of the section showed a similar bias towards dead white males — Adams, Asimov, Ballard, Clarke & Vonnegut. The end of the piece mentions that other interviewees, including Lessing and Le Guin, are also available from the same source. So why not include one of them, then? I may not be huge Lessing fan — I have issues with her style of writing — but she is a woman and alive and a Nobel laureate to boot...
Still, I shouldn't complain: the Graun took the trouble to cover SF and in the end they made a pretty decent fist of it, all things considered.
The male to female ratio of selected works was 20:4, but, on the plus side, three of the selected women — Octavia E. Butler, Diana Wynne Jones and, Virgina Woolf — were nominated for their entire output rather than a single work; the only man to receive the same treatment was Lovecraft. It may also be worth noting that the only male writer who crossed gender lines by nominating a female author's work was Kim Stanley Robinson who, naturally, nominated Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.
The interviews towards the end of the section showed a similar bias towards dead white males — Adams, Asimov, Ballard, Clarke & Vonnegut. The end of the piece mentions that other interviewees, including Lessing and Le Guin, are also available from the same source. So why not include one of them, then? I may not be huge Lessing fan — I have issues with her style of writing — but she is a woman and alive and a Nobel laureate to boot...
Still, I shouldn't complain: the Graun took the trouble to cover SF and in the end they made a pretty decent fist of it, all things considered.
