caitri | On the Erasure of SFF History

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On the Erasure of SFF History

I wrote a long post on FB inspired by a conversation from a friend who recently rewatched the DS9 ep "Far Beyond the Stars" and was under the impression that its portrayal of SFF publishing practices was accurate. So:

Cait rants about the erasure of science fiction history:

One of my problems with the current resistance to canon-formation and its associated gate-keeping is how it contributes to the erasure of science fiction as literature and to genre fandom. It perpetuates the myth that SFF is a literature created by and for cranky white dude incels, which the Puppies embraced wholeheartedly back in 2014. The insistence that women writers are new, that black writers are new, that lgbtq+ writers are new, all feeds into this intellectual myth that is harmful not just to the evolution of the field but actively erases our own history. (This is also why ISTFG every ten years someone has to write an article like "omg did you know women wrote before 1970"? Like motherfuckers Margaret Cavendish did The Blazing World in 1666 and Mary Shelley did Frankenstein in 1818! (Also obligatory rant as to how within the field itself there is/was a tendency to try to actively write Mary Shelley out because she didn't do "real science fiction" which is why The Wesleyan Anthology of SF--A TEXTBOOK--tried to position freaking Jules Verne and Nathanial Hawthorn as the progenitors of SFF like that makes any damn sense! Ahem.)

Further, science fiction studies has historically made a point of creating a Great Men narrative since the 1959 meeting at the MLA which ratified an honest-to-god "canon" of 106 SFF titles that were worthy of note; Mary Shelley and Leigh Brackett were the only women on that list. However, in formally making this critical argument as to what SFF as a literature of ideas entails effectively othered SFF fandom for over a half century and even today very seldom see discussions of genre fandom in any of the SFF journals or meetings--and then you don't see it in fan studies either because that discipline has been eclipsed by media studies that evokes a very specific sense of fandom activities that are biased towards fanfiction and transformative activities historically performed by women though it does include a limited sense of curative activities by dudes. ANYHOW.

Which is all to say that the history of science fiction publishing specifically in America--and I differentiate this from the fan cultures of other countries because those are significantly different and I only know bits of their publishing histories, eg. in the UK the import of American SF magazines was limited until the companies began printing UK editions there which would have totally different content in each issue which means to track specific writers you end up with a bibliographic mess. But if you look at who is present demographically in various contexts you do see women and other marginalized groups, but the problem is that because of the acceptance of the "myth" of SFF as white dudes you just don't see widespread knowledge or acceptance as to who was actively publishing even when the material is right frigging there. Instead you get an excess amount of "why this is unusual" or "there was only one writer" or "it's not *really* SFF" and it's all frigging bullshit.

TL:DR SFF is and always has been more than white dudes and if more effort was actually made to read older stuff rather than dismiss it out of hand you would see how very different our history is.

ETA: AND ANOTHER THING: Something "Far Beyond the Stars" alludes to but doesn't quite get at is how common it was to not know what SFF authors or fans looked like. This is why Alice Sheldon wrote as James Tiptree Jr. for like 20 years and people genuinely thought she was a dude until she was outed as female. Ditto the Carl Brandon Hoax (in which two white dudes pretended to be a black dude). There weren't author photos on SFF publications until very late, like, 1980s, so you wouldn't know what writers looked like unless you went to cons and saw them. Similarly, until like the last 20 years there was some systemic prejudice against SFF fans and such so that a number of people really went out of their way to hide who they were.

One final example of history erasure: Everyone lost their gd minds over the "historic" nomination of the AO3 Fanfic Archive for a Hugo in 2019. However, I know that fanfic was nominated for Hugos at least as far back as 1974 because reference is made to it in Star Trek Lives! (1975). But again with forgetting our history.

Bibliography and recommended reading:

Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 by Eric Leif Davin (2005). Quantitative study of women writers in the pulp age that identifies over 200 women writers. https://www.amazon.com/Partners-Wonder.../dp/0739112678

Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction by Andre M. Carrington (2016). Looks at black writers and fans through 1920s to 2000s. I think it's a little weak and would have been better served with additional archival research, but I think it was his thesis and am willing to cut him some slack. https://www.amazon.com/Speculative.../dp/0816678960

A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction by Nisi Shawl (2018). Shawl finds stuff going back to the 1850s because of course she does. I think I read something that this and her ongoing columns at Tor will be a book at some point. http://www.nisishawl.com/CCHBSF.html

Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement by Isiah Lavender III (2019). He goes back to the eighteenth century to reclaim Phyllis Wheatley for the genre and I need to read this. https://www.amazon.com/Afrofuturism-Rising.../dp/0814255566/

The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of SF Feminisms by Helen Merrick (2009). She does a dual history of 20th c. SFF publishing dual with fandom, though her scope is limited since she only looks at a handful of fanzine titles which I think misrepresents a quantitative study that could be way bigger. https://www.amazon.com/Secret-Feminist.../dp/1933500336

The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction by Justine Larbalestier (2002). Similar to Merrick but using way more fanzine titles and convention listings to find women. She also looks at how some women sf authors purposely misrepresented themselves to make themselves seem more groundbreaking in a "hostile" field even as they were being actively promoted by women editors like Judith Merril and others in the 1940s and 1950s. https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Sexes-Science.../dp/081956527X

The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism: Judith Merril's Nonfiction by Judith Merril ed. Ritch Calvin (2016). SPEAKING OF JUDITH MERRIL let's talk about a major woman editor who literally founded the Year's Best Science Fiction anthology series in 1956 that created the model for the anthologies that continue today. She really got screwed over literally in the field because her ex-husband Fred Pohl made a big fucking deal about how much she slept around despite the fact that they were both in an open marriage, but she's the one that got punished for it. In way too many histories if she gets name-dropped its to mention who she published and then who she slept with. Grr. https://www.amazon.com/Merril-Theory-Litry.../dp/1619760932

The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin: A Library of America Special Publication ed. Lisa Yaszek. Yaszek reprints a lot of older material from the 1910s to the 1960s and is now doing a full series for LoA because she's awesome. https://www.amazon.com/Classic-Science.../dp/1598535803

See also Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008) where she lays out the case for recovering women sff writers. (I love her so much.) https://www.amazon.com/Galactic-Suburbia.../dp/0814251641/

And finally, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction ed.

by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link (2019). It has extended essays on all this, but even I haven't read it because they did it through Cambridge and it costs $125. SIGH. Another reason we end up in erasure feedback loops is because too many scholars fall into the academic trap and put together books that most people are never gonna buy because of the pricetags. SIGH AGAIN. https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-History.../dp/1107166098

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Oh Fred Pohl no, I thought you were a good guy.

*saves and signal boosts this excellent essay*

TBF I don't think he meant talking about her sex life in a bad way, but it was unnecessary details that made literally everyone else go "wait whut" and then they had to talk about it too but with definitely moar judgement.

Oh. So he failed to consider the consequences rather than deliberately smearing her. OK, I downgrade my dismay from "off my to-read list" to "smack upside the back of the head".

Yup, because he always brings up they were both in an open marriage, but like, everyone who references him LEAVES THAT OUT.

Ooo, lovely, yessssss...although as I recall there is also a problem with Eric Leif Davin's Partners in Wonder in that he is sort of there was no sexism, dudes, look at all these wimminz!.

I do know you posted citation for Davin's work--but I like liking for people!

Yeah, his argument is flimsy but the quantitative bibliography is so GD useful.

I mean, he presents hard numbers, and hard numbers are one of the only things I've found that will make people pause!

True--and there are worse sexists out there.....but I had to deal with him to get something for the Encyclopedia on Women in SFF (which is yes horribly expensive but it would never have been done otherwise), and he really pissed me off in multiple ways. (Not as bad as the dude who was like the ONLY one I could find who could write about women writing sff poetry who kept calling me to ask dumb questions and kept trying to get me to visit him for ComicCon and sleep on his floor it would be fun..until I told him I slept on floors in my twenties and wasn't going to do it in my fifties--he suddenly stopped calling after that (ROFLMAO).

TOTALLY off topic, but do you have any recs for women writing sci-fi poetry? (I mean, there are poets like Tracy K Smith & Franny Choi who write poetry that's influenced by SFF, but I don't think most of it is SFF in and of itself, if that makes sense??? And the poems I know of that are SFF are mostly by men, a la Aniara)

https://www.sfpoetry.com/

I'm afraid I don't read sf poetry--I sort of feel almost all lyric poetry is sf in a way which is completely unhelpful, and I have fallen out of the habit of reading it in recent years--but I can point you to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association which is *the* place to start.

And there is a chapter in the Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy encyclopedia that is all about 20th century sf poetry (there's a chapter on 19th century poetry as well). The article is not current (the encyclopedia was published in 2009 and hasn't been reissued/updated), but here are some of the names.

Suzette Haden Elgin (one of my favorite feminist and one of the few linguist sf writers) founded the SFF Poetry association and its magazine Star*Line. SF poetry really took off in the 1970s.

Poets discussed in the chapter are: Ruth Berman; Lee Burwasser (filk writer--but overlap between song and poetry is well there!); Mercedes Lackey (also filk writer); Yale Dragwyla; Janet Fox; Terry Garey; Millea Kenin; Frances Langelier; Esther Leiper; Kendra Usack; Leilah Wendell; Elissa Machon; Marge Simon;

There is also science poetry which overlaps with sff poetry--some of the writers write both. The names in this group are: Bonnie B. Gordon; Dianne Mackerman; Lois Bassen; Amy Clampitt; Lucille Day; Helen Ehrlich; Lara Gargas; Anne S. Perlman.

Others: Sonya Dorman; Ursula K. LeGuin; Helen Ehrlich; Susan Palwick; Jane Yolen (in this list, especially there are some who write fiction and poetry!); Laurel Winter; Rebecca Marjesdatter; Sonya Taafe; Linda Addison; Corinne De Winter; Ardath Mayhar.

Hope this helps!

too many scholars fall into the academic trap??

Well, this implies there is an easy way out when the trap is "publish *in peer-reviewed high enough status as shown by stupid quantitative rankings that mostly don't apply to humanities journals* OR perish (don't get tenure). It is fucked as all hell, but the trap has big nasty teeth especially for academics in marginalized groups.

Hell, when I was nearly turned down for tenure, I was advised by various administrators I was told to go ask for advice, not to 1) publish books! (asshole social scientist), and 2) don't publish on TV (writing about books is bad enough but Star Trek DS-9!! (asshole chemist).

Edited 2020-08-23 20:41 (UTC)

There's a yes-but there because there are respectable publishers who do affordable paperback editions like U Michigan, U Iowa, and so on. There's also less respectable ones like McFarland and it's acknowledged that they make their works affordable. So it's a catch-22 with prestige. Especially right now I've found consistently that a lot of tenure committees are willing to look at the access question if you put it to them, but this is very new and scattershot.

Edited 2020-08-23 20:43 (UTC)

New, scattershot, and likely to work out badly because tenure committees can only recommend--there are Deans, college committees (my department UNANIMOUSLY voted me for tenure and promotion--it was the College Committee that said I didn't deserve either), VPs etc. And that's where it can really go fucking wrong (it wan't just me--I saw it happen to a number of academics in my 27 years here--including one gay man whose Dean decided his work wasn't peer reviewed ENOUGH (because he wrote about gay youth in the Social Work department). My friend appealed, but....

Here via

minoanmiss because for God's sake tl;dr yes. In case you have not already seen this title, relevant to your bibliography: The Women of Weird Tales (2020).

ooh, thank you thank you! My bib above is meant to be illustrative rather than exhaustive, but I am happy to find more new stuff!!!!! <3 <3 <3

ooh, thank you thank you!

You're welcome! I was very happy to see it myself.

I want to add another name, although you do have a lot of examples from the pulps. C.L. Moore wrote as a single author, and also with her husband (H. Kuttner), and often under writing-team pseudonyms.

Similarly, I've noticed (as a long-time SF reader) that a number of male-name authors, in their later years, started adding a female-named coauthor (wife or relative, usually). I'm guessing that some, at least, were unofficial coauthors for much of the oeuvre, only acknowledged when it was socially acceptable, in the 80s and after.

There were a few writer-couples who did that too--the Robinsons, and I think Merril and Pohl too maybe?

On the flip-side, in the 90s I saw A LOT of women writers doing collaborations together as well!

THANK YOU

Thank you for reading!! <3

There's been some discussion at File 770 about the issue of SF canons (F gets dropped right out, snicker), with most of the old skool experts (mostly but not entirely white men) listing all the authors THEY think should be in the sf canon (almost all, shock oh shock, white men, though I think Delany got one or two mentions, as did Octavia Butler--though she didn't get as many mentions as Le Guin). And they get all huffy when I point out how sexist that was (and posted link to Jeanne Gomoll's letter to Joanna Russ). So yes, erasure then, now, and ongoing.

I'm having incomplete thoughts about how hostility to canon-formation feeds further into erasure because it's overlooking textual links and then erasing recovery work. I'm still thinking about it though.

I do not see how canon formation can be discussed without analysis of who is doing it. So much of the debates tray the process like a natural force outside human agency.

I mean that's exactly it though. Canon formation is a function of politics, values, and thus systemic hierarchy; the point of the 1959 SF canon ratification was that it 1) was very much Great (White Male) Authors and 2) emphasizing specifically SF over fantasy/horror.

Ah, well, you know it, and I know it, and lots of our friends know it--but I can say from decades of teaching *and* hanging around fandom that a lot of people who do not have specialized training do not see the politics operating (and often accuse those of us who talk about it as, you know, making it all political! *headdesk*).

But I'd love to hear more about the issue of hostility to canon formation leading to erasure....I don't know that I'd describe myself as Officially Hostile to Canon Formation -- I'm more the, meh, the 1970s especially led to the One True Canon blowing up and multiple canons forming all over the place which have changed since then, and here we are today, isn't it fascinating.

But try to shove Great Books/Western Civilization at me, and I get pretty nasty.

And if all you can list as examples of figures in your (generic file 770 commenters) are books by white men, Imma gonna point that out in a snarky tone.

And how come nobody's mentioning Alice Mary Norton, better known as Andre Norton? Or Catherine (C. L.)Moore? or Carol Emshwiller? They were my role models in 1957, when I was a young girl who read SF, and rankled at the concept that only boys were interested in it (or could write it)

Right?!!! And then a shocking number of people want to write out the flux of women writers in the 60s and 70s like Anne McCaffrey and Joanna Russ. It's so aggravating!!

I've been out of touch with "active fandom" for decades. I went to my first con when I was 13, and I was appalled at the political shenanigans some of the so-called "adults" were getting up to. Since there are more of them now, it must be worse. I'll just read what I want to read, quote Heinlein every chance I get, and stay out of academic arguments.

*chinhands*
I had never heard about a canon list of SFF books (stories?), but it makes sense. I'd always kind of wondered how "the real SF" got defined, since it seemed to leave out a lot of good works, and many of the people I talked to (and editorials in sf books) always declared the same works were "the greats."

I've been enjoying the part of recent Hugos drama where "traditional" sf fandom (at least, that's what it calls itself) is going bonkers over finalists and winners that aren't a single person or a couple but a large sprawling team. I've not been enjoying the part where a whole lot of "traditionalists" seem to have decided those categories must be pretty much irrelevant and we don't need to make any space at the convention for them.

Re: what authors looked like - even after photos on (hardcover) books became common, they weren't universal. All an author needed to do to hide their identity, was not go to conventions under their pen name. It's not like it was unusual for an author to not seek direct contact with fans; it wasn't strange that nobody had met this author in person. All anyone would know about their private life is what they put in the intro section of their books.

I'm sure the formalized canon listing is obscure knowledge, but that is my specialty, so. ;)

The ongoing culture wars in SFFdom really are the last dying gasp of the donkey, you know? The grumps are being replaced and they know it!

And good point on the non-universality of author photos. NGL I now want to do a quantitative study on that sometime, because I would. >_>

Is the "canon" list available anywhere online? I'd love to see it.

Author photos were a marketing gimmick. They were added for photogenic authors whose faces were presumed likely to sell books; not-pretty authors did not get photos. What counted as "not pretty enough" likely varied wildly by publisher - but it was likely that a woman writing with initials wouldn't get a photo, and neither would older women. Older men can look "distinguished" while older women are assumed to look either "tired" or "grandmotherly," neither of which was a plus for selling SF books.

Another potential book for the collection (Disclaimer: I'm involved with this one): Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963), 14 stories by 13 authors. (Two are by Rosel George Brown.) The selections were made with a focus on the more obscure stories even when the authors themselves were well-known.

ooh ooh! Rediscovery is on my wish list right now--I've been meaning to get it and *gestures at ....everything really* But oh well done you, it's a great looking collection!!

re: Here's a citation for the canon as printed in Extrap: Hillagas, M. R. (1961), ‘A Draft of the Science-Fiction Canon to be Proposed at the 1961 MLA Conference on Science Fiction.’ Extrapolation 3 (1): 26-30.

Now I remember there was a partial archive of Extrap freely available online for a while but darn if I can find it right now! The full archive is available through LUP if you have institutional access tho.

I do not have institutional access, but I found this dissertation which has a table of them on pg 509.

I extracted it to a spreadsheet.

I did one of the intros in Rediscovery and the ebook formatting; Gideon Marcus from Galactic Journey is the editor.

I looked over the "sf canon" list, and it really is amazing how much of it is "Noble White Dude Conquers the Weird Wildlands."

Also, the gender balance is worse than it looks on initial check. Four of the listings are anthologies; they contain a total of 110 stories. Those stories contain:
* 1 by C.L. Moore
* 2 by Lewis Padgett
* 1 by Leslie F. Stone
* 106 by men.

One anthology was published in 1946, a "Best Of" roundup of the few years before that - I'd wondered why so many works on the Retro Hugos came from a single anthology. I suppose now I know.

Excellent work, thank you!

Hee, glad you enjoyed it!

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On the Erasure of SFF History

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