the marching reference books
Mar. 22nd, 2010 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacIt wasn't my idea that I should read these books, and I'm beginning to wonder about the person whose idea it was, since here are two more of them.
Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Robin Anne Reid (Greenwood Press, 2009) is two books in one, literally. Volume 1 has some good wide-ranging thematic essays on chunks of the subject, with few clangers that I saw. Some on tangential topics like music or spirituality seemed cramped. Essays on the special topics of Wiscon and the Tiptree Award, both by people I know, were fascinating, but focused on the mechanics of running the things at the expense of what it all means for women in SF. For instance, I appreciated the picture of Wiscon's ebb and flow over the years (as an only occasional attendee I've been aware of little of this), but there could have been more specifics: not long lists of panel topics, just a few more concrete examples akin to Pat Murphy's announcement creating the Tiptree, of feminist enlightenment at work at various Wiscons. The essay on "Fandom" (i.e. the history of women in) by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nellorat and supergee is solid, probably sensibly cautious in treating fandom mostly as its archival records in fanzines, and defining achievement as award nominations.
If vol. 1 shows the advantages of a broad approach, vol. 2 - which I got first, so it kind of spoiled me - shows the disadvantages of a narrow one. This has the brief encyclopedic entries, mostly on individual authors, but it has a lot of thematic entries as well.supergee's name appears on a few entries, mostly on fannish topics. They're factually solid work, which puts them a cut above some of the rest of the book, though fannish topics tend to be recondite to a general readership, and one wonders what audience these entries are aimed at. If you have any idea what half the things mentioned in the entry on Avedon Carol are at all, for instance, you probably already know her personally.
Some other entries are good, especially those by other contributors I also know and respect, but other entries are badly written - I'll get to that in a minute - and the real problem is in the whole more than the sum of the parts. There's a relentless oversimplification to it all that is reinforced by the big typeface and narrow columns. Brief overviews are not the same as oversimplification: repeat, not the same, Gort. The choice of topics - which authors, and, even more, which media products, to include - is determinedly inconsistent. I can't imagine what the editor was thinking, even though I know her and she's a decent scholar. Nor can the volume be said to have been edited. I've seen both these bizarre problems in other such encyclopedias edited by other scholars I respect even more (the Drout Tolkien Encyclopedia in particular), so this isn't a personal criticism. It's more a "what's in the water?" question.
In any such specifically-focused encyclopedia, some topics - e.g., in this case, women SF/F authors - are inherently internal to the general topic, so anything you write about them is by definition relevant. But other topics are inherently external, and what the encyclopedists too often forget is that, especially if the topic is well-known, its place in this compilation should be its relationship with the general subject, not the topic on its own.
Take the entry on Isaac Asimov, though it's actually not one of the worst offenders. Of its four paragraphs, the second and longest is actually about the role of female characters in Asimov's fiction, or one character at least, Susan Calvin. The other three paragraphs are just basic biographical and critically-descriptive stuff that say nothing about Asimov vis-a-vis women, and could be gotten easily, more fully, and much better-written, somewhere else. There's much more that could be, and has been, said about Asimov's other women characters and the treatment of sex and sex roles in his fiction, the views on feminist issues in his non-fiction, and how this relates to his personal relationships with women (in Asimov's case, this personal stuff is no secret), but you won't find even an allusion to any of that here. Here's the paragraph:
Even more disturbing to me, especially considering that the editor knows the Mythopoeic Society, is that neither of the two entries (by different contributors) on awards, one for children's fiction awards and one for general SF/F awards, mentions the Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. Not only are these notable awards in the field, they're also probably the most friendly to women authors. Since the current system was set up in 1992, the MFA for adult fiction has gone to 15 books by women and only 3 by men, and the children's award has gone 11 times to women, 5 to men, and once to a husband-wife team. Even the earlier award, in the bad old days of the 70s and 80s, was evenly split: 8 each.
In its anxiousness to prove that women are rooked by the SF/F awards system, the article on SF/F awards also claims that no woman won a major genre award until Juanita Coulson's Hugo in 1965. That is not true; the first woman to win a Hugo was Elinor Busby in 1960, and Pat Lupoff in 1963 also preceded her, all of them in the same category, as co-editors of Best Fanzine. (All three, though not the firstness of any, are actually noted in the entry on Fan Editors.) It doesn't really make that much difference: co-editor with your husband of Best Fanzine does not have the prestige of Best Novel on your own, which didn't happen until 1970, but if the book is going to make a claim, then get it right.
The other book is Superheroes and Gods: A Comparative Study from Babylonia to Batman by Don LoCicero (McFarland, 2008), ten light chapters on selected top-ten characters from nine national mythologies, and one on "The Super Antihero." LoCicero loves comic books. The U.S. chapter consists entirely of comic book superheroes, except for an exceedingly long description of Philip Wylie's Gladiator, presented as the precursor to Superman. Batman and Spiderman, though, go under "Antihero" along with the Hulk, Frankenstein (in which "there are no superheroes" [p. 206], so what is it doing here?), and Dracula - this word "Antihero," I do not think it means what he thinks it means. The Mighty Thor is, of course, in the Scandinavian chapter, and, wouldn't you know it, Wonder Woman and The Flash are under Greece. LoCicero is actually better on these than he is on the traditional myths, showing a persistent confusion between sequential events in a mythological hero's life and the different versions of his life; and in his introduction he shows himself absolutely baffled by the concept of demigods (a word he doesn't appear to know). Except for the examples I've already mentioned, treatment of any modern literature other than comic books is essentially non-existent here. If you want to study comic book superheroes and their relationship to traditional mythologies, which is the only thing this book is at all good for, there are much better sources and ones that don't approach it from such a cockeyed view of the subject.
Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Robin Anne Reid (Greenwood Press, 2009) is two books in one, literally. Volume 1 has some good wide-ranging thematic essays on chunks of the subject, with few clangers that I saw. Some on tangential topics like music or spirituality seemed cramped. Essays on the special topics of Wiscon and the Tiptree Award, both by people I know, were fascinating, but focused on the mechanics of running the things at the expense of what it all means for women in SF. For instance, I appreciated the picture of Wiscon's ebb and flow over the years (as an only occasional attendee I've been aware of little of this), but there could have been more specifics: not long lists of panel topics, just a few more concrete examples akin to Pat Murphy's announcement creating the Tiptree, of feminist enlightenment at work at various Wiscons. The essay on "Fandom" (i.e. the history of women in) by
nellorat and supergee is solid, probably sensibly cautious in treating fandom mostly as its archival records in fanzines, and defining achievement as award nominations.If vol. 1 shows the advantages of a broad approach, vol. 2 - which I got first, so it kind of spoiled me - shows the disadvantages of a narrow one. This has the brief encyclopedic entries, mostly on individual authors, but it has a lot of thematic entries as well.
supergee's name appears on a few entries, mostly on fannish topics. They're factually solid work, which puts them a cut above some of the rest of the book, though fannish topics tend to be recondite to a general readership, and one wonders what audience these entries are aimed at. If you have any idea what half the things mentioned in the entry on Avedon Carol are at all, for instance, you probably already know her personally.Some other entries are good, especially those by other contributors I also know and respect, but other entries are badly written - I'll get to that in a minute - and the real problem is in the whole more than the sum of the parts. There's a relentless oversimplification to it all that is reinforced by the big typeface and narrow columns. Brief overviews are not the same as oversimplification: repeat, not the same, Gort. The choice of topics - which authors, and, even more, which media products, to include - is determinedly inconsistent. I can't imagine what the editor was thinking, even though I know her and she's a decent scholar. Nor can the volume be said to have been edited. I've seen both these bizarre problems in other such encyclopedias edited by other scholars I respect even more (the Drout Tolkien Encyclopedia in particular), so this isn't a personal criticism. It's more a "what's in the water?" question.
In any such specifically-focused encyclopedia, some topics - e.g., in this case, women SF/F authors - are inherently internal to the general topic, so anything you write about them is by definition relevant. But other topics are inherently external, and what the encyclopedists too often forget is that, especially if the topic is well-known, its place in this compilation should be its relationship with the general subject, not the topic on its own.
Take the entry on Isaac Asimov, though it's actually not one of the worst offenders. Of its four paragraphs, the second and longest is actually about the role of female characters in Asimov's fiction, or one character at least, Susan Calvin. The other three paragraphs are just basic biographical and critically-descriptive stuff that say nothing about Asimov vis-a-vis women, and could be gotten easily, more fully, and much better-written, somewhere else. There's much more that could be, and has been, said about Asimov's other women characters and the treatment of sex and sex roles in his fiction, the views on feminist issues in his non-fiction, and how this relates to his personal relationships with women (in Asimov's case, this personal stuff is no secret), but you won't find even an allusion to any of that here. Here's the paragraph:
The I, Robot series comprise [sic] nine stories centered around robot psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin as she investigates the impact of robots on society. Calvin is a woman scientist, the chief robopsychologist, at a company that manufactures robots. She is presented as having never married, being totally devoted to her work, and preferring the compnay [sic] and character of robots to men. Little academic research has been published on Asimov's construction of a woman scientist in a field that tended to relegate women to the position of wife or daughter, but readers and fans have noted the importance of seeing a woman married to her work. Other critics dismiss her as a "man with breasts," a characterization of a number of female characters created by male writers. As the protagonist in a number of the Robot stories, one who speaks for the robots at times, Calvin remains an important example of an early portrayal of a woman scientist.I'm not even going to try to deconstruct this. Even leaving aside the typographical errors and the awkward grammar, the bad writing and superficial comprehension of the topic give the impression that the author tried to write it while she was being vigorously beaten about the head with a rubber mallet.
Even more disturbing to me, especially considering that the editor knows the Mythopoeic Society, is that neither of the two entries (by different contributors) on awards, one for children's fiction awards and one for general SF/F awards, mentions the Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards. Not only are these notable awards in the field, they're also probably the most friendly to women authors. Since the current system was set up in 1992, the MFA for adult fiction has gone to 15 books by women and only 3 by men, and the children's award has gone 11 times to women, 5 to men, and once to a husband-wife team. Even the earlier award, in the bad old days of the 70s and 80s, was evenly split: 8 each.
In its anxiousness to prove that women are rooked by the SF/F awards system, the article on SF/F awards also claims that no woman won a major genre award until Juanita Coulson's Hugo in 1965. That is not true; the first woman to win a Hugo was Elinor Busby in 1960, and Pat Lupoff in 1963 also preceded her, all of them in the same category, as co-editors of Best Fanzine. (All three, though not the firstness of any, are actually noted in the entry on Fan Editors.) It doesn't really make that much difference: co-editor with your husband of Best Fanzine does not have the prestige of Best Novel on your own, which didn't happen until 1970, but if the book is going to make a claim, then get it right.
The other book is Superheroes and Gods: A Comparative Study from Babylonia to Batman by Don LoCicero (McFarland, 2008), ten light chapters on selected top-ten characters from nine national mythologies, and one on "The Super Antihero." LoCicero loves comic books. The U.S. chapter consists entirely of comic book superheroes, except for an exceedingly long description of Philip Wylie's Gladiator, presented as the precursor to Superman. Batman and Spiderman, though, go under "Antihero" along with the Hulk, Frankenstein (in which "there are no superheroes" [p. 206], so what is it doing here?), and Dracula - this word "Antihero," I do not think it means what he thinks it means. The Mighty Thor is, of course, in the Scandinavian chapter, and, wouldn't you know it, Wonder Woman and The Flash are under Greece. LoCicero is actually better on these than he is on the traditional myths, showing a persistent confusion between sequential events in a mythological hero's life and the different versions of his life; and in his introduction he shows himself absolutely baffled by the concept of demigods (a word he doesn't appear to know). Except for the examples I've already mentioned, treatment of any modern literature other than comic books is essentially non-existent here. If you want to study comic book superheroes and their relationship to traditional mythologies, which is the only thing this book is at all good for, there are much better sources and ones that don't approach it from such a cockeyed view of the subject.
