I am not long back from Stirling and the world famous Bloody Scotland crime festival. What a great time!
As some of you may recall, I attended Bloody Scotland a couple of years ago to do a breakout author spotlight, which took all of three minutes to deliver and an entire evening to prepare. This time, I was participating in an actual panel, Murder Most Speculative, with Ben Aaronovitch and Nick Binge. It was a reunion of sorts: I shared a panel with Nick at this year’s Cymera Festival in Edinburgh, while Ben and I appeared together at the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England. And, like Harrogate, the topic was the how (and why!) of writing SFF crime mysteries. The panel was chaired by Scottish writer Zoe Venditozzi, who carried out her task with charm, verve, and insight – no easy task, let me tell you: we were in a Scottish pub on a Friday night. The default setting was, er, rowdy.
One of Zoe’s questions – an observation, really – has stuck with me ever since. Not least because it’s got me worrying that I am a hopelessly naïve human being. She congratulated me on writing a book with strong female characters, a statement that left me somewhat at a loss. Not because it wasn’t true but because she thought it worth mentioning. A female character is a character, after all. Some are strong, some are weak, some are charming, and some are complete a—, well, not very nice people. I made the (to me) obvious point that women are half the human race and that if you’re not using them, you’re losing half of your potential story. To which Zoe responded that I would be surprised at how few female characters there actually are.
In the past, I thought to myself, but not now, surely? Isaac Asimov, one of the great writers of 20th century SF, had almost no female characters in his books, and certainly (with the stunning exception of the robot psychologist, Susan Calvin) no strong ones. And it’s the same with JRR Tolkien. There are female characters in Lord of the Rings, for instance, but they tend to be other-worldly and ethereal, far from the center of the action. That said, though, Tolkein was born in 1892, Asimov in 1920. They are authors of their time. Times have changed.
Or have they? There are definitely more female authors in SFF these days, and Crime has always had great female writers (think Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, P.D. James), but what about the characters? Thinking through the books I have read lately, there are plenty of female characters but, Tolkien-like, many of them are not at the center of the action, regardless of how strong or high-achieving they are. Digging around a little more, it turns out that Dutch academics carried out a study on this very subject in 2020 (Actual Fictions: Literary Representation and Character Network Analysis, Cambridge University Press). Comparing Dutch novels written in the 1960s with more modern times, they found almost nothing had changed with regard to female representation. As summarized by one of the authors:
“The emancipation in novels has made very little progress between 1960 and 2010. In general, the male-female ratio is pretty constant: 70% of the characters are male and only 30% are female. Not only that, but female characters in novels continue to operate on the margins of social networks.” So, Zoe is right it appears.
In which case, I have a simple suggestion for my fellow writers. Regardless of whether you plot meticulously or write by the seat of your pants, every time you introduce a new character, alternate the sexes unless there is a compelling reason not to. How hard can it be?