Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl. There are only fake geek boys. Science fiction was invented by a woman.
Specifically a teenage girl. You know, someone who would be a part of the demographic that some of these boys are violently rejecting.
Isaac Asimov.
yo mary shelley wrote frankenstein in 1818 and isaac asimov was born in 1920 so you kinda get my point
If you want to push it back even further Margaret Cavendish, the duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673) wrote The Blazing World in 1666, about a young woman who discovers a Utopian world that can only be accessed via the North Pole – oft credited as one of the first scifi novels
Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms)was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it
even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?
PbbBFFTTBBBTBTTBBTBTTT so desperate to discredit the idea of Mary Shelly as the mother of modern science fiction you didn’t even do a frickin google search For Shame
And if you want to go back even further, the first named, identified author in history was Enheduanna of Akkad, a Sumerian high priestess.
Kinda funny, considering this Isaac Asimov quote on the subject:
Mary Shelley was the first to make use of a new finding of science which she advanced further to a logical extreme, and it is that which makes Frankenstein the first true science fiction story.
Even Isaac Asimov ain’t having none of your shit, not even posthumously.
You know what else was invented by women? Masked vigilantes, the precursor to the modern superhero. Baroness Emma Orczy wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1905.
The character would later inspire better known masked vigilantes such as Zorro and Batman.
Got that?
Stick that in your international pipe and smoke it
I have literally been telling people this for over a year.
the first extended prose piece – ie a novel, was not, as many male scholars will shout, Don Quixote (1605) but The Tale of Genji (1008) written by a woman
The first autobiography ever written in English is also attributed to a woman, The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s).
For those wanting to learn more about Margery, here’s a podcast (x).
today i found out that victor hugo has had more sex than possibly almost any other human that has lived on this planet.
he had so much sex his biographers straight up gave up trying to document all of his sexual partners. he was reported to fuck up to 3-9 times a day. He had a secret sex diary written in code. He had “official” and “unofficial” mistresses. One estimate was that he had ~200 sexual partners in two years.
Icon.
don’t forget that on the day of his funeral all the brothels in Paris were closed because every single prostitute in the whole goddamn city was busy mourning him
Hey quick question what the fuck
the man reported on his hookups in his diary using latin code words and 2 million people attended his funeral, if that isnt balling idk what is
The thing about Persuasion that just kills me is that the central premise— “I hope the person who broke my heart has a miserable life and I get to watch them be humiliated while I get everything I ever wanted” is so universal.
But Wentworth is only able to fully enjoy it for like A DAY before he starts realizing how terrible it is. He watches Anne suffer in silence and he hates it. He watches her being treated like an inconvenience and a joke and a piece of furniture and he hates it. He hears sneering comments at her expense and he hates it. He spends evening after evening in her company, where he is celebrated as a handsome, dashing hero while she is shoved to the side and ignored and he hates it.
He probably spent a lot of heartbroken hours out on the sea wishing revenge on her (like ten years’ worth), but then he gets to see it happening and revenge turns out not to be that sweet after all. He probably thought “I hope she never gets married to anyone else and she has to spend the rest of her miserable life with her miserable family, listening to them talk about nothing and regretting ever letting me go.” But then he has to watch her live through it, and it is just excruciating. Watching her bite her tongue. Watching her keep her eyes down on her clasped hands. Watching her silently accept everything as if she deserves it.
He’s like, “YES, it’s all HAPPENING! She’s all ALONE and PALE and OLD and…sad. And her family treats her terribly, and she’s— no one is talking to her. No one even knows that she’s funny and smart, they just— they just make her sit in the corner. She’s hardly eating anything. And she really isn’t that old, but they are acting like she’s dead? Her family is even worse than they used to be, how is that even possible? Why isn’t anyone helping her? Why is she the only person taking care of anyone? Why isn’t anyone taking care of her?”
And his nasty “she’s so altered I should not have known her again” comment that he KNOWS got back to her starts ringing in his ears. And his cocky “yeah I’m just here to find a YOUNG, HOT girl to marry now that I’m SUCH A CATCH, whatevs” approach starts to make him feel queasy, because she’s HELPING, she’s trying to stay out of his way and help him pick a young wife, and she hardly ever smiles anymore, not really. He watches her slip out of rooms when he enters them and he hears her laughing with her nephew sometimes but then go quiet when anyone else approaches, and he doesn’t know what to do.
Anyway, every fandom has a bunch of Pride and Prejudice AUs, but I WANT PERSUASION AUS. I NEED THEM. I NEED THEM.
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am
too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself
to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke
it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner
than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but
you.
As a professor, may I ask you what you think about fanfiction?
I think fanfiction is literature and literature, for the most part, is fanfiction, and that anyone that dismisses it simply on the grounds that it’s derivative knows fuck-all about literature and needs to get the hell off my lawn.
Most of the history of Western literature (and probably much of non-Western literature, but I can’t speak to that) is adapted or appropriated from something else. Homer wrote historyfic and Virgil wrote Homerfic and Dante wrote Virgilfic (where he makes himself a character and writes himself hanging out with Homer and Virgil and they’re like “OMG Dante you’re so cool.“ He was the original Gary Stu). Milton wrote Bible fanfic, and everyone and their mom spent the Middle Ages writing King Arthur fanfic. In the sixteenth century you and another dude could translate the same Petrarchan sonnet and somehow have it count as two separate poems, and no one gave a fuck. Shakespeare doesn’t have a single original plot–although much of it would be more rightly termed RPF–and then John Fletcher and Mary Cowden Clarke and Gloria Naylor and Jane Smiley and Stephen Sondheim wrote Shakespeare fanfic. Guys like Pope and Dryden took old narratives and rewrote them to make fun of people they didn’t like, because the eighteenth century was basically high school. And Spenser! Don’t even get me started on Spenser.
Here’s what fanfic authors/fans need to remember when anyone gives them shit: the idea that originality is somehow a good thing, an innately preferable thing, is a completely modern notion. Until about three hundred years ago, a good writer, by and large, was someone who could take a tried-and-true story and make it even more awesome. (If you want to sound fancy, the technical term is imitatio.) People were like, why would I wanna read something about some dude I’ve never heard of? There’s a new Sir Gawain story out, man! (As to when and how that changed, I tend to blame Daniel Defoe, or the Modernists, or reality television, depending on my mood.)
I also find fanfic fascinating because it takes all the barriers that keep people from professional authorship–barriers that have weakened over the centuries but are nevertheless still very real–and blows right past them. Producing literature, much less circulating it, was something that was well nigh impossible for the vast majority of people for most of human history. First you had to live in a culture where people thought it was acceptable for you to even want to be literate in the first place. And then you had to find someone who could teach you how to read and write (the two didn’t necessarily go together). And you needed sufficient leisure time to learn. And be able to afford books, or at least be friends with someone rich enough to own books who would lend them to you. Good writers are usually well-read and professional writing is a full-time job, so you needed a lot of books, and a lot of leisure time both for reading and writing. And then you had to be in a high enough social position that someone would take you seriously and want to read your work–to have access to circulation/publication in addition to education and leisure time. A very tiny percentage of the population fit those parameters (in England, which is the only place I can speak of with some authority, that meant from 500-1000 A.D.: monks; 1000-1500: aristocratic men and the very occasional aristocratic woman; 1500-1800: aristocratic men, some middle-class men, a few aristocratic women; 1800-on, some middle-class women as well).
What’s amazing is how many people who didn’t fit those parameters kept writing in spite of the constant message they got from society that no one cared about what they had to say, writing letters and diaries and stories and poems that often weren’t discovered until hundreds of years later. Humans have an urge to express themselves, to tell stories, and fanfic lets them. If you’ve got access to a computer and an hour or two to while away of an evening, you can create something that people will see and respond to instantly, with a built-in community of people who care about what you have to say.
I do write the occasional fic; I wish I had the time and mental energy to write more. I’ll admit I don’t read a lot of fic these days because most of it is not–and I know how snobbish this sounds–particularly well-written. That doesn’t mean it’s “not good”–there are a lot of reasons people read fic and not all of them have to do with wanting to read finely crafted prose. That’s why fic is awesome–it creates a place for all kinds of storytelling. But for me personally, now that my job entails reading about 1500 pages of undergraduate writing per year, when I have time to read for enjoyment I want it to be by someone who really knows what they’re doing. There’s tons of high-quality fic, of course, but I no longer have the time and patience to go searching for it that I had ten years ago.
But whether I’m reading it or not, I love that fanfiction exists. Because without people doing what fanfiction writers do, literature wouldn’t exist. (And then I’d be out of a job and, frankly, I don’t know how to do anything else.)
Y’all gotta remember she exaggerated a bit about how this all went down because Shelley likes things dramatic. According to everyone else at this party, she was actually the first one to finish her story-draft and when she read it to them, her own husband-to-be fainted from how grotesque it was.
You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character – because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned – and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.
But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.
And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.
But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.
Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character – Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.
Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.
And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.
Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.
Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”
You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable.
You tell him – this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow.
But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo – enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.
And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.
It’s like the world clicking into place.
And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.
This is an excellent post to keep in mind when you see another recent post criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder.
Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes, for obvious reasons. (Where are you hiding, book. Shelves too full. Need moar shelves.)
Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words (Randall Munroe, xkcd)
What If? (same author; so worth it, eldest podling loves them both)
The New Way Things Work – more science, still awesome
*picks up notepad and goes downstairs to stare at library shelves*
Historical Atlas of… by John Haywood. Useful guides, a set of three: Ancient World, Classical World, and Medieval World; 4 million years ago to 500 BC, 500 BC to AD 600, and AD 600 to 1492. Hella useful maps WITH explanation on what was going on WITH good index and glossary in the back.
Any book in the Wonders of series by Brian Cox
Titanic, an Illustratd History, Don Lynch – this book isn’t just useful for getting a non-movie story about the Titanic, but for showcasing Edwardian Life at the time on both that boat and others like it, the fallout, and what it changed in terms of naval navigation, safety, and the importance of Wireless communication.
Norton Anthology of English Literature – dense motherfucking set of books but they’re really comprehensive. (And remember, this is English as in the country/kingdom, not the language. American Lit or otherwise are other sets) Basically starts from the earliest stories we still have in full form and moves on through to the end of the 19th century, since 20th century lit is usually it’s own field
A History of the English Language by Albert, Baugh, and Cable. – I hate this book. I fucking hate it. But if you want to understand why the English language is a complete clusterfuck, this is going to explain it to you in the most comprehensive fashion. Just don’t try to read it all in one sitting or your brain will mutiny.
Language, the Basics, R.Trask – FAR easier to read than A, B, & C above, and focuses on language structure as a whole instead of just English. Useful as fuck.
1491, by Charles Mann – I will probably never stop pimping this book. It’s not a linear narrative, but it’s also so comprehensive and does what a lot of texts still won’t do–acknowledges that civilization in the Americas is far older and FAR MORE COMPLEX than the 13k Clovis hypothesis (which was discreded immediately but KEPT AND TAUGHT ANYWAY).
Native American Testimony, Peter Nabokov – do not keep alcohol in the house while reading this, but if you want actual testimonials about how shit things were during the1800s…here’s a good place to start. Lakota Woman is an autobiography by Mary Crow Dog and is another source for how shit the reservations were/are in the 20th c., though the writer’s husband is often a controversial figure in many circles. (She gave birth to one of her children at Wounded Knee during a standoff with the FBI.)
The rest of it, at the moment, aside from random book finds, is the willingness to reword a Google Search over and over again until I find a thread that leads me to the information I’m looking for–but you said books, so here are books. ❤
Steel Phoenix Studios 