Anne McCaffrey's Women

[ailbhe]

Summary reposted from elsewhere:

Look! I am a feisty and independent heroine with real dialogue and plot-centric actions! Whoops, there's a man, I'm a sharp-tongued but essentially brainless vagina on a stick.

Comments

[the0lady.livejournal.com]

Alas, that description is not limited to McCaffrey. Those SF/F books I've read that are not out-and-out misogynistic and/or make like "females" are an absurd liberal myth mostly tend to fall into this trap. It comes from thinking that a) men are the natual protagonist in any narrative and b) character development is a zero sum game. Naturally, in any situation where character development is happening on the page, therefore, it's only natural that the men hog it all while women are reduced to the most threadbare of static pasteboard cutouts, like the backdrops in old style animation.

Two exceptions (which are not perfect and do occasionally fall, but are in general above and beyond the norm in creating independent female characters) are Robin Hobb and Ian Banks.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

There is some better stuff being written now. Tammy Pierce has made it her goal to write heroes that young women and girls can identify with. And her stuff is actually fun. (Plus, she is personally awesome.) In adult fiction, Jo Walton (papersky) writes three-dimensional characters, about half of whom are female, and so does Elizabeth Bear. Just to go with people on my friends list.

[libellum.livejournal.com]

Seconded Tamora Pierce and Elizabeth Bear for well-rounded female characters. Ursula le Guin's later stuff is also excellent - by which I mean anything she wrote after Tehanu.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I'd add the the exceptions Ursula K Le Guin, C. J. Cherryh and Octavia Butler who all write excellent female characters at least some of the time (I have not read everything ever written by these authors) and for the younger reader Trudi Cannavan (still good for growups, and by 'younger', I mean YA not small-child).

Some SF is almost entirely lacking in characterisation of any sort; Egan, Clarke and Asimov come to mind. The women are 2D characterised of people who exist largely to say plot-relevant things but then so are the men, the aliens, the robots, the computers and just about anything else that you might expect to have a personality. I don't think it's anti-women to write women this way if you write men this way too; but I also don't think it's especially feminist either.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

More noted exceptions: Sarah Hall, Elizabeth Moon.