And I cannot accept your apology, as I was a major participant my ownself. You can send me a cookie if you want.
I just think the situations are entirely different in historical fiction and fiction set in the future. In the former, we have (in some cases) a good idea of what the attitudes were; in the latter case it’s only a guess.
Science is very broad. If you’re writing a novel about James Clerk Maxwell, why would you bring up Marie Curie?
Because she was hot?
Two posts after the OP, someone asked if you meant works set in the past, or works written in the past, and you responded ‘feel free to discuss either.’
Well, it’s not just that, and I’m not advocating any false allocated quota of minorities! That’s a strawman. But yeah, having almost all the senior people be white American men is racist, even if it’s not on the lines of lynching or genocide, and I can understand why they did it. Once again, the show was very good for its time.
In the same way that Uhura as an officer was a good role model for black women, all those white male officers were also role models for white men, and there were a lot more of them - a hell of a lot more.
When I was on PLATO I could hit term and type cookie, and it would be done. I think we need to update the SDMB to give similar capability. We are so primitive, here in the future.
True, but first of all, attitudes were not universal, and, second, we can create characters to demonstrate the attitudes were incorrect.
If not her, you could create a woman who somehow was a crackerjack scientist in the next lab.
For an example, I saw a movie about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, called the Copyist I think. Beethoven asked a friend for his best music student to help him copy the score, and who turned up but a woman. Who he of course warms to (not romantically) and gives advice on composing. All of this good political correctness is somewhat reduced when, at the debut, he is too deaf to even keep time, and she has to prompt him to do it, crouched on the floor in her low cut dress. Like Madame Curie, she was hawt. In this version, she was the one who turned him around to see the applause.
In the radioactive sense . . .
“It’s the Curies! We must flee!”
I SAID I had participated in the hijack.
Well, it doesn’t seem like a hijack if someone asks the OP for clarification within the first couple of posts. Fine, though - if you want to consider half the thread a hijack, then I apologise from the bottom of my heart for posting on a topic you said was fine to discuss.
Except crackerjack woman scientists were not common back then. Curie was the exception, not the rule. Now, one may argue that she was the exception because of social norms rather than any innate incapacity of women to be scientists; and I, in fact, would agree. But including a crackerjack woman scientist in a period piece when women would not, in the west, have typically been doing science in any great numbers is presentism.
I realize you’re being sarcastic, so I should drop it, but I am of course a dope.
I honestly should have been more specific in the OP, and should not have okayed the inclusion of SF stories, because the topics only look similar. I will happily concede that any mistake made was mine.
Actually, there were quite a few women scientists - for some reason there were a fair few in palaeontology (like Mary Anning), biology’s always been a more women-friendly field, and, of course, there was Ada Lovelace; it wouldn’t be bizarre to meet a female scientist at almost any point in the past and definitely not once women were allowed to study at university.
However, I agree in general - if you did include a female scientist in a period piece then it should be in a realistic way, making it clear that she’s unusual, that she’ll have to work harder than anyone else and still probably won’t get any credit, that she won’t really be treated as an equal by the men around her, etc.
Well, they seem like very similar topics to me, but YMMV of course.
Here’s the difference.
The presence or absence of racism, sexism, and other bigotries in a historical context is a matter of verisimilitude warring with palatability. If we know that, say, the United States of circa 1870 was not filled with black men in positions of governmental authority, then casting Will Smith as a Federal agent in that time period, having no one think that’s odd, and having only the villain be racist, is jarring, because it’s not true to the period. But we don’t want to restrict minority and female characters to servile roles in period pieces, because we find that unpleasant to watch and a bad role model for the youngsters in the audience.
But Trek and Heinlein and other SF stories set in the future are a different story. We don’t know at all what the 24th century will be like. It’s conceivable that the gender roles will be like they are today, or more egalitarian than they are now, or that one gender or the other will be dominant. It’s silly to say “The sexist attitudes of Star Trek are inaccurate to what the 23th century AD is really like,” because the 24th century AD doesn’t exist, and we simply don’t know. It’s pointless to pretend otherwise.
Incidentally, here is the psot you referred to earlier.
I’ll happily admit that I should have written Feel free to discuss either, as long as they are about actual historical periods. Because, again, the tension between versimilitude and palatability cannot exist in stories set in an imaginary future.
Oh, I agree. There seem to be a few options.
(Now I look at it, there are all sorts of jokes hiding in that last sentence, but it is Friday afternoon and I don’t feel like rewriting it.)