400 replies to this topic

[Grack21]

See, I've known some SERIOUSLY fucked up 14 year olds, so I didn;t have a problem with that aspect at all.

[SkynJay]

sciborg2, on 15 April 2012 - 10:28 PM, said:

Heh, I swing like a pendulum on Prince of Thorns. Parts are good, parts are silly. It is like a D&D novel, not sure if that is a bad thing. Women could really have been written better.

I didn't like it about half way through, then I loved the ending(at the time, now I can't even remember it).  I called it "very good" when I rated it for Goodreads, but it has not stuck with me very well, and I am not sure if I will be in much of a hurry to read the sequel.  If i remember right, I liked the sparse world building quite a bit, but hated the main character(I know you are supposed to hate him, he is written that way, but I wasn't all that interested in him either, which may be worse).

[Procrastimancer]

When I read posts about the fourteen year old main character from Prince of Thorns, I can't help but picture a tiny, squeaky-voiced high school freshman.

[Mark Lawrence]

SkynJay, on 15 April 2012 - 10:35 PM, said:

I called it "very good" when I rated it for Goodreads, but it has not stuck with me very well, and I am not sure if I will be in much of a hurry to read the sequel.

Ah, the accursed ravages of time...

The guy who wrote:
.
"And it is a world that I can not wait to learn even more about."

and..

"A great debut novel, cant wait for more."

would have been all over King of Thorns.   But a year between books is always going to sharpen some appetites and erode others.

[PaulineMRoss]

For an instance of an author writing with total gender neutrality, there's Andrea K Host [*]. Her Medair duology (The Silence of Medair and Voice of the Lost) is a fine piece of fantasy on any level. There's also Glenda Larke, whose female characters might get captured, but they're perfectly capable of escaping under their own steam without needing a bloke to rescue them (Stormlords trilogy).
[*] Should have an umlaut in there.
On the other side of the coin, Richard K Morgan's The Steel Remains is a book I actually enjoyed hugely (great world-building, terrific action, a fascinating protagonist), even though the treatment of women made me very queasy (all highly sexualised, all defined in terms of men).

[Datepalm]

PaulineMRoss, on 16 April 2012 - 03:04 AM, said:

On the other side of the coin, Richard K Morgan's The Steel Remains is a book I actually enjoyed hugely (great world-building, terrific action, a fascinating protagonist), even though the treatment of women made me very queasy (all highly sexualised, all defined in terms of men).

It's kind of weird, Morgan clearly thinks about gender a lot, and is interested in dealing with it in Black Man (it was a bit sketchy but not too bad in context of the books narrow focus on the protagonists arc in Market Forces) but then he'll go and write this thoughtless smuttiness where all women are hookers or cloned sexbots in Altered Carbon or, apparently, The Steel Remains.

Makes me think about women-as-imagery. (Becuase Altered Carbon at least had these kind of noir stylings too.) For example, in Osama (Lavie Tidhar) which I just finished, gender comes off pretty badly - there only two women, really, and one is a kind of etherealized fantasy who never even gets a name and the other is a romanticized prostitute. But then, the whole thing is a super stylized noir pastiche (and it goes some way to subvert that at the end.) I can see a fairly good argument that these distanced and dilutes images of women were fairly integral to what he was trying to do there, along with all the other imagery he uses - the men were stock types too, all trenchcoated investigators and slick Men in Black, but when going back to that sort of thing, the stock images of men that there are to work with are active, and those of women are sexualized and passive, but does that mean you shouldn't use them, if you're trying to make a point about them?

Personally, I like stylization. Thats what I love about genre, first and foremost - the authors ability to make the whole world behave exactly the way s/he wants in every shade and nuace to benefit the story they're trying to tell. I like reading realities that are deliberately sort of nonsensical or literalizations of concepts or whatever. (ASOIAF fits in here too, IMO, with its grandeur and romanticism.) But I think it's a really fine line between using, say, a novel full of prostitutes to deliberately evoke something to the reader without embracing the logic that it's ok to have that, and just having a novel filled with prostitutes. (and maybe it's a catch-22. I got to think critically about the weakness of female presence in western nostalgia when reading Osama, but I didn't actually get to read about interesting women.)

[Contrarius]

Datepalm, on 16 April 2012 - 04:11 AM, said:

but then he'll go and write this thoughtless smuttiness where all women are hookers or cloned sexbots in Altered Carbon or, apparently, The Steel Remains.

Don't believe everything that people tell you about women in The Steel Remains. Contrary to Pauline's claim, in reality one of the three main characters is a woman advisor to the Emperor, who is no more sexualized than any of the men in the story -- and she is not "defined" by men in any sense other than she works with them. And an important secondary character, Ringil's mother, is a very intelligent and manipulative woman who sets Ringil on the quest that takes up the rest of the book. Neither of these women are either "hookers" or "cloned sexbots", I assure you.

Edited by Contrarius, 16 April 2012 - 04:41 AM.

[Roose Bolton's Pet Leech]

Mervyn Peake: A broad spectrum. Features women ranging from the tough and unyielding (Gertrude) to the emotional and passionate (Fuchsia) to the intelligent-but-awkward (Irma), to the stupid-and-awkward (Cora and Clarice). Male/female sibling relationships stretch from Sepulchrave's implied neglect of the Twins (and, to be honest, we're expected to laugh at C&C, not sympathise with them), to Alfred and Irma's genial-if-barbed existence, and then to Fuchsia's affection for Titus.

[PaulineMRoss]

Contrarius, on 16 April 2012 - 04:41 AM, said:

Don't believe everything that people tell you about women in The Steel Remains. Contrary to Pauline's claim, in reality one of the three main characters is a woman advisor to the Emperor, who is no more sexualized than any of the men in the story -- and she is not "defined" by men in any sense other than she works with them. And an important secondary character, Ringil's mother, is a very intelligent and manipulative woman who sets Ringil on the quest that takes up the rest of the book. Neither of these women are either "hookers" or "cloned sexbots", I assure you.

Yeah, you got me bang to rights, guv. <raises hand> It was a sweeping generalisation, based largely on the fact that I was trying to type on a tablet, and had already had one response zapped, so I was writing really fast.

To be more expansive: Archeth (the advisor to the Emperor) is not really sexualised, but she is defined by her relationship to a man (her employer) which limits what she can do. She is not at all an independent character. And honestly, being a bad-ass with throwing knives and having a liking for weed isn't enough to make her an interesting or strong character.

Ringil's mother is not particularly sexualised either, but she was married at 13 to a man she disliked, which doesn't exactly make her an independent or original female character, and tells you something about the world Morgan has created. She is also no more than a plot device, in pushing Ringil into doing what the plot requires him to do.

Both of them have the potential to be strong, independent, non-sexualised female characters, but they're not there yet. And just about all the rest are whores or sex-slaves or promiscuous or captured and awaiting rescue by a man. Even the female dwenda is bitchy.

[john]

Well, I'm currently reading some Stainless Steel Rat where Angelina, the main secondary female character, is kickass, gorgeous and often more competent even than Slippery Jim himself.  Although she is lamentably subject to those cursed debilitating feminine instincts such as cooing over babies and being unreasonably jealous of her husband's affections.  To be fair, all the other women in the universe are very bouncy and alluring.

Glen Duncan's Last Werewolf, which is all first person introspective musing, devotes a fair bit of time to gender issues.  The protagonist doesn't want to be a misogynist so he only sleeps with women he genuinely doesn't like.

[Lyanna Stark]

Right so, how about some Urban Fantasy? Even to genre readers, UF tends to get a lot of flak as "Twilight enabling shite" and thereabouts.

However. I quite like Kim Harrison's "Hollows" series featuring Rachel Morgan as the kickass heroine. Sure, it has some of the UF tropes of leatherclad really hot chicks, super hot vampire lovers, but I think more importantly, what takes up more room is female friendship (sisterhood is FTW and so incredibly rare, especially in genre). The main character is not defined solely by her relation to male characters and her initial story is to break free from a male boss and start up a business with a female colleague. They also manage to work together quite well and be supportive of one another.

Now, this series is pretty light reading, but it manages to get a lot of things right that more serious works get wrong. Female friendship (more than one female friendship actually), strong and independent female characters with their own agendas and clear wishes by female characters not to be bossed around by men. It deals with trust issues between female friends without it being in relation to "omg you stole my guy" which is the normal thing for women to fight about in books.



EDIT: Loving the "humourless PC feminazis" tag!  

Edited by Lyanna Stark, 16 April 2012 - 07:57 AM.

[SkynJay]

PaulineMRoss, on 16 April 2012 - 05:57 AM, said:

Yeah, you got me bang to rights, guv. <raises hand> It was a sweeping generalisation, based largely on the fact that I was trying to type on a tablet, and had already had one response zapped, so I was writing really fast.

To be more expansive: Archeth (the advisor to the Emperor) is not really sexualised, but she is defined by her relationship to a man (her employer) which limits what she can do. She is not at all an independent character. And honestly, being a bad-ass with throwing knives and having a liking for weed isn't enough to make her an interesting or strong character.

Am I not remembering the same book?  Wasn't Archeth defined by her sexual orientation?  Given a sex slave by the emperor?  Seriously contemplate taking advantage of said slave several times in the text?  A couple months out it is basically all I remember of the character, how the author sexualized her.

Or maybe I am mixing up characters, which believe me, I have been known to do.

[Ixodes]

Lyanna Stark, on 16 April 2012 - 07:23 AM, said:

Right so, how about some Urban Fantasy? Even to genre readers, UF tends to get a lot of flak as "Twilight enabling shite" and thereabouts.

I like the Mike Carey Felix Castor books.  It's very light on romance for an urban fantasy series.  For the most part the author writes relationships between the male and female characters in a realistic fashion.  There is a female demon (succubus, I believe) that is defined by her hypersexualized nature.  It borders on cliche to some extent but Carey manages to do enough development that makes her interesting.  He seems to make character driven relationships rather than the typical supernatural-porn of some of his peers.

Another that comes to mind is the Charlie Huston Joe Pitt series.  He doesn't have too many female characters and the protagonist love interest suffers from the damsel in distress trope.  The female secondary characters he does write sometimes have a bit more intriguing backgrounds, in that he scratches the surface of some feminist and transgender issues.  Not much, mind you, but enough that they can rise above the typical patterns.

[russjass]

I think Robin Hobbs portrayal of a character who describes himself as "A man raised among men", in the farseer series in particular is very interesting. She shows, to me at least, how the relationships forged between men, particularly student and mentor, are long lasting and deeply formative. She does perhaps go a bit to far with her "Man ceremony" perhaps showing a lack of understanding of the internal workings of a group of men.

However, when she portrays a group of women trying to work together to achieve a common goal they are catty, bitchy and apt to work at cross-purposes out of spite.

[PaulineMRoss]

SkynJay, on 16 April 2012 - 07:52 AM, said:

Am I not remembering the same book?  Wasn't Archeth defined by her sexual orientation?  Given a sex slave by the emperor?  Seriously contemplate taking advantage of said slave several times in the text?  A couple months out it is basically all I remember of the character, how the author sexualized her. Or maybe I am mixing up characters, which believe me, I have been known to do.

No, you're remembering right, that's the one. But I wouldn't say she was 'defined' by her sexual orientation any more than Ringil was. She happened to be lesbian, he happened to be gay (and a large part of the plot was driven by his gayness, whereas her lesbianism was more of a side-issue). The Emperor gave her a (female) sex-slave more as a way of displaying his domination over her, I would have said. YMMV.

But you know, there's a lot of sex in The Steel Remains, so it's hard to find a character who's not defined by it in some sense or other. I read it straight after a whole series of books with wonderful female characters and egalitarian societies, so the difference kind of jumped out at me. It made me uneasy. But I haven't read anything else by Morgan, so I'm not going to give him too much of a hard time about it until I see how the rest of the series pans out.

[ljkeane]

sciborg2, on 15 April 2012 - 06:07 PM, said:

Night Circus, where the characterization is admittedly on the shallower end, did a good job of balancing out the male and female players. Part of that, I think, is because the very nature of the plot has two magic users competing, one a male and one a female.

However, I think beyond that the grounding of the plot in performances and stages also worked to its advantage, it manages to have interesting - if not well fleshed out - characters of both genders who work in professions that I am guessing might have allowed for more females despite the time period the book takes place in.

Without seeming like she's trying to set quotes quotas, Morgenstern manages to ensure that characters that have major impacts and have power to influence the plot are both male and female. If a character fails, it never seems like the character fails because of their gender.

Perhaps because it is written by a woman, and one writing outside of the genre's usual conventions, you don't have the damsel in distress, the ice queen, or the fan service sex plots.

I think it's interesting that you chose The Night Circus because honestly it seems to me that it's largely about the circus and the details of the characters are fairly incidental. I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with the depiction of gender in the books but I do think that you could quite easily stick any gender in either of the two main roles and it wouldn't have made a great deal of difference to the story. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.

ETA: I do like the way Mike Carey has female characters in the Felix Castor books who fill what could be traditionally fairly bad roles (sex demon, female librarian in need of help, friend he fancied at uni) but has the story go in different directions than you'd expect.

Edited by ljkeane, 16 April 2012 - 08:47 AM.

[Sci-2]

Heh, like I said at the bottom of that post, it was hard to think beyond the usual snark. For whatever reason I started a lot of books last year and finished I three, Night Circus, Labyrinth and Prince of Thorns.

So my choices drawn up from immediate memory were few. I think it was a good thing, for that book. I think there are books that can simultaneously address typical gender roles while also showing strength and agency but sometimes for the story it can also be good to have women and men on equal footing as it was in that magical circus setting.

[Nukelavee]

X-Ray:  I just re-read that Vinge a few months ago, and I agree.

I'm also a bit surprised you are the only other person here who has ever seemed to mention Joan D Vinge.  I think most of her books feature strong, well written females, and males.  "Outcasts of Heaven's Belt", and "dreamsnake" come to mind, too.

Oh- here's one for ya, folks - Bone Dance, by Bull.

Spoiler

The main character comes across as male for most of teh book, but....yeah, hermaphrodite, and subtly handled as a major plot point.  Plus, "psi-adepts" that jump from body to body, and handled so much better than the Wildcards version.

[MinDonner]

I'm going to cheat a bit and pick Babylon 5*, which is of course not a book, but which has some of the best (though flawed) approaches to gender in SF.

You can tell they've tried really hard to include a wide range of female characters, with important speaking roles, with varied morals and agendas, many of whom have complex characters and conflicts with each other, not just with the men (and not usually over catty bitch-fight matters either). The Talia-turns-evil episode even has a bona fide three-way psychological conflict between Talia, Lyta and Ivanova to which the men are barely even peripheral, and that's a thing you hardly EVER see. The different races have different approaches to gender division - from the Narn, where the females are fighters and look mostly identical to the males, to the Centauri where the dress and roles are entirely separate. And yet...

And yet, there's still a whole load of unexamined attitudes in the background. Yes, female Narns have the tokenistic face of kickass Na'Toth, who swears blood vengeance on the woman who killed her family, etc etc... but at the same time, none of the other Narn soldiers are female (bar, I think, one immediately-killed warship officer). G'Kar says things like "but there were females and pouchlings on that ship!" Yes, the head of the Mars Resistance is female, but pretty sure she's the only one. Where are the rest of the female Minbari? Yes, there's Delenn... and three giggling girls making new uniforms... the entire rest of the race appears to be male.

There are very few (or none?) low-grade bad guys who are female - no swaggering-oaf drunk chicks at the bar, no petty female alien bureaucrats or unscrupulous traders; if they're bad, they tend to be full-on high-status villainesses.

So, many, many points for effort. But still shows that there's a long way to go, for a fully equal representation of both genders across the whole spectrum of characterisation.


*I'm mid-rewatch right now, so it's at the forefront of my mind, apologies for this derail in the Lit forum

[Galactus]

Quote

Loving the "humourless PC feminazis" tag!

If you've ever seen Datepalm's Goodreads you know she has a serious love of tags