Taking time out to revisit The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. It’s over 40 years’ old now and one of the great SF novels of all time: multi-layered, thoughtful, and beautifully written. And nearly all the major characters are female. I remember picking it off the bookshelf as a teenager: and I remember why. I had never come across a SF novel written by a woman. I was curious.
Of course, I had read SF books written by women, I just didn’t know it. They hid themselves behind initials (C.J. Cherryh, for instance) because publishers felt that readers (young men like me, in particular) would not pick up a book that had a female author. Of course, it was the 80s, so everyone was sexist, right? But moving forward in time we have the Harry Potter books written by J.K. Rowling, who was apparently advised to use initials for exactly the same reason. And right now we have triple Hugo Award winner N.K. Jemisin, not to mention the recently published (and totally excellent) The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes. I don’t actually know whether fear of reader sexism prompted these latter two to take the initials route, but I strongly suspect it had something to do with it. So, two things: first, kudos to Joan D. for not being J.D. and opening my eyes to a new realm of possibilities; and second, shame on the rest of us for tolerating a situation where too many female SF authors still feel the need to camouflage their gender when they should be free to shout it out from the bookshelves.