Tina S. Beier – On Learning from Old Science Fiction

Welcome to another Creator’s Roulette! I have posted a couple of articles related to Science Fiction and today I am excited to bring another one. Touching on Old Science Fiction books and moves, Tina shares her love for old books and how analyzing them has given her pointers for her own writing. This guest post is jam packed with information, including a list of tests that you can apply to storylines to check for diversity and inclusion. Also, for your next trip to the second hand book store, there are recommendations for old scifi books!

Let me introduce you to Tina first: Tina S. Beier is a self-published author, a book reviewer, and co-owner of Rising Action Publishing Co., a company that offers a la carte self-publishing services. Her novel What Branches Grow, has a diverse cast with her three main characters being two BIPOC men, one of whom is bisexual, and a woman.

Enjoy the post! 🙂

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On Using the Past to Create a Future
By Tina S. Beier

The genre of science fiction is more immense than even devoted readers tend to realize. Besides the well-known or iconic books (such as Dune, Neuromancer, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ender’s Game, etc.), there is a hefty sub-genre of trade paperbacks. Like movies, when it comes to the Sci-Fi (and Fantasy) genres, there are what I like to call A-list titles and B-list titles. Especially in the 1960s and 1970s, presses pumped out “B List” trade paperbacks at an alarming rate (presses such as Ace Science Fiction, Del Rey, Laser Books – most of which were subsidiaries of larger publishers). This was well before online shopping and definitely before the advent of Kindle and self-publishing as we know it today. The presses would sell books in bulk sets from their back pages, which was a free and direct advertisement to their target market.

If you’ve been in any used bookstore, you’ve likely seen the wall devoted to these titles, most of them priced around the $2 mark.

I am obsessed with these novels. I can’t leave a used bookstore without buying several. And before COVID-19 I would go to garage sales on the hunt for what I call “hidden gems”.

Essentially, the more absurd the cover, the better.

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I also love reading them, partially to see how “bad” they are, much in the way some people watch twentieth century low-budget horror films (eg., C.H.U.D., Leprechaun, Critters) to laugh at the corny special effects. I also read these novels to be surprised and amused at the depictions of what people forty years ago thought the future would be like. Yet, my real goal with these “hidden gems” is to discover novels that seem ridiculous in premise but are in fact well-written, interesting takes on the future.  

Yet even the truest of gems suffer from a lack of diversity.

Much like movies from the same time period, these novels are helmed and always represent the experiences of white men. Sometimes you will get a white, heterosexual female-identifying lead and sometimes a Black male lead. Rarest of all is a female BIPOC protagonist lesbian. People of Indigenous descent are also rare, and if there are transgender people it is also rare and usually unflattering. There are a lot of these books to wade through, so it’s possible one is out there, but the usual protagonist I get is the white dude. 

There are outliers. Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany (both who produced more literary science fiction than pulp) took pains to include BIPOC and women in their novels in prominent roles. Jo Clayton’s novels often feature female-identifying leads who have agency and power.

In the 1950s, less than fifteen percent of science fiction readership was women, likely due to the genre not being marketed towards women. As such, it was mostly men who grew up reading the stuff, and therefore made up the majority of writers in the later decades. By the 1970s, the readership had increased to thirty-five percent women, possibly due to the rise of the genre on the silver screen (and Star Trek) and while the majority of writers were still men, there are several well-known female authors who wrote under pseudonyms (Andre Norton, James Tiptree, and C.J. Cherryh, to name a few).   

Yet, like science fiction movies of the 1960s-80s that are heavily white and male (Star Wars, for one), these novels still have value. Not only do they create worlds and scenarios that are unique and enchanting as entertainment, but we as writers can learn what not to do regarding gender, sexuality, and race. 

As an example, one of my favorite old novels is Doris Piserchia’s The Fluger, about an alien monster rampaging a super-city. Yet, as much as I enjoy the plot (it’s wild), the female characters are treated abysmally. There is less than a page’s worth of focus on them, aside from when one woman is brutally killed to further a male character’s arc. 

These novels can also be hyperbolic in how they treat women’s suffering. In The GodWhale (T.J. Bass), a female warrior is sexually assaulted by a male character. In short, despite her claiming she hates this man, in the end of the story she joins his harem of “breeder” women. Yet, we never see her make this decision. It is said in passing that she’s his “first bride”; her journey, feelings, and story are not important. Less horrendously, in Psychodrome (Simon Hawke), we have three female characters with more depth. Yet all three are conventionally-attractive love interests of the male main character and contribute little to advancing the story.  

Some novels try harder to make their women people and not periphery characters, but the women tend to fall into one of three tropes: the sexy scientist (Flinx in Flux, Alan Dean Foster), the hypersexualized villain (The Quest of the DNA Cowboys, Mick Farren), or the tag-along girlfriend who does one small act to advance the plot (Tongues of the Moon, Philip Jose Farmer).

Much like those who analyze movies for gender and diversity, I have an (admittedly weird) hobby where I do a deep read of these novels while applying a critical lens to it. Along with the more well-known Bechdel Test (link at the end of the post), there are a growing number of tests used to raise awareness of gaps in media regarding diversity and inclusivity. Some examples include The Bechdel Test, The Mako Mori Test, The Sexy Lamp test, the Aila Test, the DuVernay Test, and the Vito Russo Test (all explained in detail at the end).

It would be rather dull to read a novel with a checklist to these tests, but I use the concept behind them as a way to dig deeper into the novel. I find it entertaining to do a feminist or New Historicist read of a book that was never intended to be analyzed in that way. And much like classic literature, as long as a novel isn’t intentionally misogynistic or racist (of which I’ve come across a few) I still tend to enjoy reading it for the story. 

What does this have to do with writing? No one writes in a vacuum, especially today with social media providing a channel for readers to weigh in on these issues (and weigh-in, they will).

Looking to the past works of our preferred genres can show us a way to move beyond them. The lack of diversity and treatment of women is very apparent in these old novels, but it’s made me conscious of making the same mistakes in my own writing.

Sci-fi is a genre that is so heavily rooted in its past (which is rather paradoxical, given it is often speculating on the future), that books written today tend to fall into the same traps as that of their predecessors. Writers need to consciously be balancing tradition with modernity. 

With the advent of self-published novels, people can produce whatever they want, and B-list trade paperback sci-fis have been replaced by self-published sci-fis, some of which treat women as set dressing or there is a severe lack of diversity in terms of race and sexual orientation. While it tends to be less flagrant today than in novels of the past, instead of taking a leap forward, some authors seem to think that including one or two women or a token BIPOC character allows them to check off a diversity box. This likely is not born of bigotry but lack of precedent in the publication. Similar to the movie industry, it’s likely there were many women and BIPOC-driven stories that simply were not published. If most of our old science fiction (including our best-sellers) keeps everyone but white men on the periphery, what examples do we have? 

We have an example of what not to do.

If you’re writing a novel, take a moment to think about your cast. Do you have women in your novel who are only there to be rescued, die simply to inspire vengeance, or are created as someone to sleep with a hero? If so, try to refocus their purpose and broaden it. Do you include characters of different races who have fully realized lives? Could one of your characters be LGBTQ+ (and not in a way that makes their sexuality the entirety of their personality)? If you’re not sure, apply a media test to it. Listen to podcasts by and about diversity in the sci-fi you love. Or read an old sci fi; what’s laughably egregious there should not be permissible now. 

A Sampling of Media Tests

• The Bechdel Test – Does the piece have at least two named, female-identifying characters who have a conversation about something other than a man.
• The Mako Mori Test – Does the piece have at least one female-identifying character that does not simply exist to support a male character’s plot arc.
• The Sexy Lamp Test – Can the main female-identifying character can be replaced by a sexy lamp and the plot would not change? If so, not good.  
• The Aila Test – Is there an Indigenous woman as a main character who does not fall in love with a white man and does not end up raped or murdered by the end of the story. 
• The DuVernay Test – Do the Black characters and other minorities have fully realized lives rather than serve as scenery in white stories.
• The Vito Russo Test – Does the piece contain a character that is identifiably lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender who is not defined solely by their sexual or gender identity, and are significant to the plot.

Recommended Titles

• Jade Darcy and the Affair of Honour (1988), by Stephen Goldin and Mary Mason
• Vector Analysis (1978), by Jack C. Haldeman II
• Slow Fall to Dawn (1981), by Stephen Leigh
• The Fall of the Towers (1976) by Samuel Delany (this is my favourite, but he’s well known for Babel-17, Nova, and Empire Star. I don’t recommend starting with Dhalgren.) 
• Dawn (1987), by Octavia Butler
• An Alien Heat (1972), by Michael Moorcock
• Orphan Star (1977), and/or Nor Crystal Tears (1979), by Alan Dean Foster

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Have you read any obscure old science fiction? Did you enjoy it? 

I hope you enjoyed this exploration of old SciFi by Tina. Learn more about her on her website and connect with her on Twitter. The ebook of her self-published post-apocalyptic science fiction, What Branches Grow, is on sale for .99 this month on Amazon.

Banner Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay