They tend to get married and then disappear as an active person. Not always- but often. Kip’s mother was the best student his father ever taught. Then she married Kip’s father. Thorby’s cousin is better at understanding corporate politics than Thorby - but she arranges for him to take over the company instead. Podkayne wants to be a starship pilot, until she spends some time in a nursery and decides that motherhood is what she really wants (Poddy’s uncle - the guy who takes two kids along when investigating a dangerous political cabal, because he wants to use them for cover, says that Poddy’s mother’s career is endangering the kids!). Wyoming disappears from the revolution she started halfway through the book). Etc, etc.
Hey, I get that impulse, but I keep it firmly entrenched where it belongs - fantasy. The main protagonist of my current WIP is a violent debaucher with a truckload of issues, which means he’s terrifically fun to write. But I personally wouldn’t touch the guy with a ten foot pole. More power to the lucky lady who helps him heal.
My favorite genre is science fiction, but I find with the older, more classic stuff, it’s harder for me to get into it. Both because it really wasn’t very character-driven, and because women tend to be either conspicuously absent, or… I dunno… just hard to believe. Still I love everything Bradbury, and I thought Ender’s Game did a good job with Valentine, so there are always exceptions.
I just like how the genre has evolved to be more character-driven and represent a broader spectrum of human experience, which I think is very much the point of science fiction, even more so than other genres. When you look at the women characters in, say, the Battlestar reboot, or The Expanse, there’s no contest.
I think part of it is, if you write a woman character, and that’s your only woman in that story, she’s more of a stand-in than a person. Whereas, the more you populate your stories with women, you see smart women, sexy women, drunk women, women who commit evil acts for the sake of revenge, women who commit evil acts for the sake of diplomacy, women who could shatter your jaw… I’m basically just talking about the The Expanse. But my point is, women get to be flawed. When I first saw the Battlestar remake I had never seen women in science fiction ever get to be as flawed as Starbuck got to be, and it was oddly liberating. And you know I’m not talking about the stereotypical feminine flawed, in the sense that all women were considered flawed. I’m talking falling down drunk and belligerent ruining their own lives just as good as any man and still you actually cared about their story.
Where did that happen in the past? I’m a huge Bujold fan but Cordelia was obviously the baddest bitch in Barrayar. I think she kinda had to be because the stakes were that high for women in science fiction. But now we’re allowed to fuck shit up, and not always in an admirable way.
I’d say part of the change in how women are portrayed in science fiction is that more women are writing it, and doing a helluva job. They’re also taking the tired old tropes about women in fantasy and folk tales and turning them inside out and upside down.
Absolutely. It wasn’t too long ago I saw women sci-fi and fantasy writers counseled to make their pen names sound masculine to increase the likelihood of selling books. I’m not saying none of them are doing that anymore, but it seems like we have more of a chance than we used to.
Almost everything I read for pleasure these days is in the fantasy genre, and almost all of the authors are women. There’s amazingly good books being written by them in that genre these days, with amazing world-building, complex characters and plot lines.
I think the biggest problem with Heinlein is that he had about a dozen different stock characters, and while some of them could be either gender, and some were more-or-less agendered, most of them were mostly male, and the one that wasn’t was the one modeled on Ginny.
Asimov is also often criticized for his female characters, but there, the issue was really just that he wasn’t very good at writing humans, of any gender. And I’d argue that his best, most well-rounded character was Dr. Susan Calvin.
He wrote himself as the main hero/protagonist, his idealised version of himself. All of the women were his wife Jenny or Virginia. The strong willed, very smart, usually red-headed woman, who didn’t need anyone to save her. That was Virginia. When you understand this and re-read his stories you can see it clearly. Man sure did love his wife.
In his Operation: Whatever stories Poul Anderson had a married couple in which the wife was a strong, capable, independent, red-haired woman. I spotted that one right off, and I wondered if Anderson was making the Heinleins the heroes of his story, or if he was doing something else.
trump digs sexy overdone blondes. Darn near every woman who is anyone important in the RW-osphere or its hangers-on looks like that archetype. Newspeople, political appointees, wives or GFs, etc. If female, she must have The trump-Approved Look.
If you’re curious, googling “Mar-a-Lago Face” will return a host of articles and illustrations on it. It’s why Kristi Noem, Melania, Kimberly G. (and even Matt Gaetz) have a similar look.
I’ve seen this claim a lot, but he did have several distinct stock characters, and he couldn’t have been all of them. I suppose they could all be different facets of his personality, but then, that’s true to some extent of every fictional character by every author.
Lazarus Long, for instance, was definitely not the same character as The Boy Scout (protagonist of many of the juvies). In fact, the character most similar to Lazarus Long was probably Grandmother Hazel, gender notwithstanding.
“Look at these overdone blonde bimbos!” assumes that whatever the speaker doesn’t personally find desirable about a woman is worthy of mockery. It’s easy to turn to this because Trump and his ilk are detestable in a number of other ways and it feels like scoring political points, but it does so at the expense of women. (And yes, women do this to other women. It’s easy social capital.)
I mean, there definitely is a pattern to the appearance of women highly-placed in right-wing spheres, and it’s probably worthwhile to investigate why that is, and how it’s perpetuated. Is it women choosing to look like that because that’s what other women in that sphere look like? In that case, is it a healthy decision on their part? Or only women who look like that being accepted in that sphere? In which case, the mockery is really directed at whoever’s doing the accepting. Probably a combination of both.