• evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    Yeah, I think he actually admitted that he didn’t really know any women when he first started writing until he met and then married his wife, so he avoided writing them. It is weird though cause his writing style (from what ive read) is not very character focused, anyway, so a lot of his male characters could easily just be declared female and no one would spot the difference.

    • Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      I wonder if he just assumed that his own bias would affect the gender of the characters or if that just wasn’t a consideration. It would have been pretty cool if he had used gender-neutral names to the point where it was never clear, but also didn’t matter anyway.

      • evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        he had used gender-neutral names to the point where it was never clear, but also didn’t matter anyway.

        He almost does that. He uses a lot of made-up scifi names that aren’t obviously gendered, but then point out that the character is male.

        He does get a lot better over time, though.

        • Remember_the_tooth@lemmy.world
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          11 days ago

          I’ll have to go back and read. The gender dynamics of competitive sci-fi literature would be a wild class.

          Edit: I meant “comparative sci-fi literature,” but I’m leaving the mistake because I think it’s funnier, not unlike the grammar mistakes that I try to pass off as erudite subversion of trite conventions, not unlike this meandering, run-on sentence, and I stand by it.