Why Don’t You See We’re Here: On Visibility in Genre

I’m not the first to comment on a list of cutting edge sci fi that has only white, male authors. I’m not going to link, but you can find it easily on SF Signal, a site I enjoy and read frequently. Here’s Juliet McKenna’s post, which is how I found out about the latest one.

Let’s start with an anecdote. I get friend requests on Goodreads. I’ll go over and look at their profile briefly. I accept most people who friend request me, though I’m not all that active on there aside from logging the books I read. But pretty regularly, I’ll get a friend request by a (almost always) man, and all the favourite authors listed on the profile are men, and almost all the books read on their profile (sometimes hundreds of books) are by men. Sometimes every single book. I don’t accept the friend request. I don’t know why they bothered adding me in the first place: they are very unlikely to ever pick up my book. Do they even consider me an author?

You can’t be cutting edge if you’re relegated to the edge.

Barnes and Noble put up a list of their bestselling SFF books in January. I scroll past a list of male after male authors. Again, almost entirely white, probably almost entirely straight and probably able-bodied. I see Mary Robinette Kowal’s breakdown of SFF books in airports across the US. Same thing again. The Locus Recommended Reading list breakdown. Thing like Sad/Rabid Puppies appearing year after year come the Hugos. They’ll show up and start peeing on the floor again any day now. I write in YA as well as SFF, so it’s a double dose. Someone will ask on Twitter: do we really need diverse authors if white people can write PoC really well? Here’s yet another thinkpiece asking if a woman can really write a convincing male protagonist. Here’s another white man who writes YA deriding the entire genre, saying he writes books that aren’t like other YA. My books, he’ll say again, are serious and worthy of attention, not like the histrionic romcom love triangle drama all those female YA authors he’s never actually read write.

Over and over and over again.

It’s hard not to let it get to you. It’s hard not to feel disheartened. I went on sub with my sci fi and felt I had to put my initials on it instead of Laura (this had a happy ending, though: my publisher encouraged me to keep my own name). I’m a white, female writer. The publishing industry still looks like me, most of the time.  These unthinking articles are, I’m sure, even more disheartening for PoC and disabled writers. I exist in my bubble of progressive people who read widely and rec widely. These articles where we’re all summarily ignored pop that bubble and leave us cold. It’s hard not to feel angry, and then when we’re upset told we’re overreacting and taking it personally. Yeah, we’ve never heard that one before.

Genre, both YA and SFF, has never been and never will be only white, straight, male authors. That everyman character found in so many novels is not actually an everyman to a significant percentage of the people who support this genre. The rest of us have been writing and reading these books since the very beginning, we have appeared in and written those cutting-edge futures, even if you haven’t read them. Stop trying so hard not to see we’re already here and we’re not going anywhere, either here in the present, or on those spaceships in the stars.