Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

and move hastily on.
It is also quite obvious that there are some fiction categories that women seem to prefer over others. A
lot of women write fantasy and crime fiction, comparatively fewer write SF. Again, I have no idea why the
figures should cluster around these categories, though I note in passing that I read comparatively little
fantasy. I do read a certain amount of crime fiction, and my favourite writers in this genre are all female
(Lindsey Davis, Ellis Peters and Sarah Paretsky, if you are interested).
I could offer some specious justifications for the bias my books exhibit, I suppose. A huge part of my SF
collection dates from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s when SF was almost exclusively a male preserve (and
often the few women writers that existed would take male pseudonyms or simply use their initials in
order to disguise their gender). To an extent that is bound to skew the statistics. But that's just playing
with numbers. What we are really asking, I suspect, is whether or not I find any difference between men
and women writers and if so, what might that difference be. And why do I seem to prefer one over the
other?
In an introduction to the James Tiptree Jr. story collection Warm Worlds and Otherwise Robert
Silverberg remarked:
It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me
something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen
could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the
same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.
Silverberg must have greatly regretted putting these words into print when, several years later, it was
revealed that James Tiptree Jr was the pseudonym used by Alice Sheldon. Nonetheless the fact that he
phrased this the way he did suggests that at some fundamental level he was reacting to the style of the
prose presented to him and making deductions about the gender of the writer based on what he read.
That he was wrong in this particular case does not mean that all such deductions are necessarily invalid.
To an extent we all make such extrapolations all the time and there is a tendency in some people to
confuse the writer with the work and ascribe opinions stated by the characters in the books to the
writers themselves. Such attributions are suspect at best and occasionally downright misleading at
worst (particularly in the areas of politics and sociology with which a lot of modern SF concerns itself).
Nobody would seriously argue against this (it's the premise behind ninety percent of the essays I've
written). So why should deductions of gender be any more or less suspect than deductions of opinion?
Both are value judgements and the value may well be less than the evidence supports, in a critical sense.
Silverberg claims that there is a difference between male writing and female writing; male insights as
opposed to female ones. He further claims that Tiptree succeeded brilliantly in illuminating the male
insights. However as events later proved, the deduction he made from his observations was wrong.
Perhaps (with the wisdom of hindsight) a better deduction would have been that "Tiptree" exhibited
brilliant insights and was therefore a writer of the first class. Stop there and I think nobody would argue.
The fault (if there is one) lies in the assumption that only a man could exhibit such an insight, and this is
demonstrably false.
What is demonstrably true is that biologically I am male. I have a reasonable insight into what motivates
and interests me. I know how my mind works and how I react to external stimuli. I am the only person I
know that well -- I have never been inside the head of anyone else and I cannot explain any other person
as well as I can explain myself. And the same applies to you. The person you know best (though often
imperfectly) is yourself.
I can extrapolate my feelings and reactions and make predictions about other people I know (and
sometimes I am right and sometimes I am wrong; so it goes) but in every case I feel more certain about
the reactions and motivations of my male friends than I do about those of my female friends. This is
hardly surprising, I suppose since I have lived as a male for umty ump years and it is easier to apply my
own experiences to a situation than to try and do it from an external or foreign point of view. We all