Men and Women SF Writers

I was going to post this comment over at SFSignal. Then I decided to post it here.

I do notice -- fairly often -- that women are underrepresented in magazines and anthologies. This matters to me, because I tend to be more interested in stories written by women.

Why? Here I am going into the area of possibly stupid generalization.

I think many male SF writers think violence is cool. They do not sound as if they've had much experience with violence, and they irritate the heck out of me. More and more, I flip pages or put books down when the characters start pulling out guns, swords, death rays, doomsday machines...

Another trait, which I tend to think of male, is abstraction. A lot of SF stories by contemporary male writers appear to me to be about nothing important. I don't think this was true of the (mostly male) SF writers I grew up with in the 50s. They wrote about McCarthyism, the threat of nuclear war, and the dread suburbanization of America.

I can't be more clear about what I mean by abstraction, unless I write an essay. Maybe I will, over at my blog. The briefest way to describe it is, I finish a story and say, "Okay. It was well written. It was intelligent. It was science fictional. Who cares?"

If memory serves, I have this response more often with stories by men.

I mention this, because it's possible that the bias towards male writers is actually as bias towards violence and abstraction.

Who are contemporary male writers who do seem (to me) to write about important topics. Delany, when he was writing SF. Kim Stanley Robinson. Walter Jon Williams. Ian M. Banks, though I don't like his violence... Patrick has added William Gibson and Bruce Sterling...