Introduction to Men Writing Science Fiction as Women

In a recent novel of mine called The Outpost, one of the characters asks a somewhat-larger-than-life hero: “What’s the most dangerous race you ever came across?”

“Women,” says the hero.

“I mean an alien race,” explains the questioner.

“So do I,” answers the hero.

That’s the gist of it. If women have trouble understanding men, and they do, men have even more trouble understanding women. It’s as if the God of Science Fiction, who has a truly caustic sense of humor, took two races that would forever be alien to each other, dressed them up as human beings, and turned them loose on Planet Earth.

Science fiction, in its early days, was aimed primarily at adolescent boys, so almost all the heroes were men. Women were there to hold the hero’s spaceship, get captured by the villain and threatened with a Fate Worse Than Death, or to flash a malicious smile (while flashing other even more enticing things) and attempt to seduce or at least distract the hero while the Bad Guys were off doing evil deeds.

It was exceptionally rare for the main character of a science fiction or fantasy story to be a female. C. L. Moore created Jirel of Joiry, but she could be forgiven since she was a female writer. Arthur K. Barnes invented Gerry Carlyle, perhaps the least believable interplanetary female big game hunter of all time. It remained for the big guns to do a somewhat better job of it—Isaac Asimov with his robotics expert, Susan Calvin, and Robert A. Heinlein with Podkayne, Friday, and a handful of others, none of whom quite rang true.

No male science fiction writer ever attempted a major novel written in the first person of a woman. Heinlein, always willing to try something new, came close with I Will Fear No Evil, but that was a first-person story of a man who had taken over ownership (possession? residence?) of a woman’s body. It remained for Ian Fleming, who was almost a science fiction writer, to pull it off, rather lamely but at least courageously, with the James Bond thriller, The Spy Who Loved Me.

And, since science fiction is, at least partly or occasionally, about truly understanding alien viewpoints (and how we must appear to aliens), we challenged a number of the best male writers around to write science fiction stories not just about women but as women.

There were only two rules: first, the story had to be in the first person of a woman, and second, if changing her from Victoria to Victor didn’t invalidate the story we didn’t want it.

Welcome to some truly alien worlds.