My essay in She’s Such A Geek is about being a policy wonk, which is a huge part of my professional identity. I feel really strongly that wonks are a subset of geeks, and that it’s worth advancing the cause of wonk pride as well as female wonkdom. But it occurred to me the other day that I could also have written about being a speculative fiction author.

I’ve been writing speculative fiction for about 10 years, ever since I bought a copy of the Science Fiction Market Guide which claimed it’s possible to make a great living writing SF, fantasy or horrror. Especially short fiction!

I joined a writing group, the Revisionaries of Raleigh, which struggled with having a transgender person in its midst. No, not me. I hadn’t even started thinking about modding my gender yet. But that small group (usually half a dozen people) had a transwoman, an ex-marine like so many of us. Everyone else in the group seemed fairly straight and a bit bewildered by her, and I can’t imagine how they would have dealt with it if I’d tried to go all transtastic on them too.

All of which is to say, I started writing (mostly very bad) science fiction as a man. But I found speculative fiction a natural forum for exploring gender issues, as you can imagine. What if you had a species with only one biological sex, and they linked their wombs together to make one funcitonal womb and gestate their infant? What if you had six biological sexes, and they established a hierarchy with different tasks for each sex? Etc. etc. etc.

I sort of wandered away from writing speculative fiction in favor of “literary” fiction, but I’ve been coming back over the past few years. And I’ve decided to focus on speculative fiction more in the coming year or two. At the same time, I’ve been very self-consciously writing feminist science fiction. I’m interested in dealing with gender as a fungible “what if” sort of issue, but also as a locus of oppression and exploitation.

In theory, speculative fiction writers and readers should have the openest of minds. After all, they can conceive of dragon/unicorn hybrids, or planets where the “fifth force” (which affects dark matter) is stronger than gravity. So the idea that I’m a chick, that gender is customizeable, that things aren’t always simple or binary, should be no big whoop for the SF crowd, right?

Well, mostly. Most speculative fiction fans, like most geeks, have been accepting if occasionally clueless and obnoxious. What’s made me saddest is the lack of acceptance from some people in feminist SF forums, who dredged up old-school fears of “infiltrators” getting inside their tree fort. Bah! But for the most part, I’m just another life form.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Progress and politics, Sex & gender. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.