Quote:
Originally Posted by Worldwalker
In simpler terms (I'm trying to make my posts shorter, really!) if we say "these books are different because they were written by women" we're saying the people who wouldn't buy books by a woman named Alice, who wouldn't publish books by a woman named Carolyn, and who insisted that a woman named Joanne hide her gender, were right. And I refuse to believe that.
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I think you're making a false equivalency here.
The OP has asked for recommended sf works by writers who happen to be women, for his or her own personal reasons.
They could have just as easily asked for recommended sf works that appeared to be written by twitchy hunchback dwarfs with connections to royalty*.
And that would still be a perfectly okay request because they're not saying that they would completely toss out and exclude works not created by twitchy hunchback dwarfs as being unacceptably marketable reading and therefore they would block it from publication unless certain changes were made to disguise the twitchiness.
Only that they would like help finding the
good twitchy hunchback dwarf stuff to read.
This is like me, as an individual reader, giving extra cool points to authors who are Canadian and write good works. If they're non-Canadian and write good works, great, I enjoy them anyway. If they also happen to be Canadian, then bonus!; now where can I find more?
You are then equating this request — for something which helps expand someone's individual reading list according to the criteria they have set to keep from being overwhelmed by works of lesser personal interest — to the widespread institutionalized discrimination that was then (and still is now, though to a lesser extent) societally practiced against all women to limit their public roles as a group, on what is apparently a 1-to-1 basis where their act of merely asking for recommendations for sf female writers to read is fully equal to the publishing industry's prior blocking of openly female-appearing names on those books of theirs they deigned to publish.
Not the same thing at all, either in scale or scope.
* Though I don't think they'd have much luck, unless Lois McMaster Bujold-as-Miles Vorkosigan "decided" to write out his memoirs first-person.
Although if the OP were looking for
fantasy twitchy hunchback dwarf-written stuff, they could always go straight to R.A. MacAvoy's
Lens of the World trilogy.