Women writing sf under pseudonyms

Trojan

Saw this elsewhere:



That must have been strong motivation not to use your real name.

I wonder how many books from female authors I've read.

Anyone know any pseudonyms used?

ixoy

If you read around on some of the SF blogs, you'll see women's place in SF/F is a hot topic right now. There's a (quite irritating) trend for demanding any Top 10 Sci-Fi list or Fantasy list include an equal number of female authors and one of the arguments they've used is that women write under pseudonyms or names which don't shout gender.

So for example - Robin Hobb is really Megan Lindholm but wrote under Robin both to separate her writing style and see how she fared with a name readers could interpret as male.
JK Rowling was, allegedly, told to use her initials and not her full name so as again not to put off people seeing a female author's name.
KJ Parker is another example - nobody knows if the author is male or female.

Oh and if you're a fan of Warehouse 13, you'll know all about HG Wells :P

Trojan

Did you just spoiler Warehouse 13 on me?!

Affirmative action and gender quotas in Top 10 lists? WTF.

I loved Hobbs earlier stuff but I think she jumped the shark with the Soldiers Son stuff.

DeWinterZero

James Tiptree Jnr (Alice Sheldon) is probably the most famous case of a woman writing SF under a pseudonym.

Julian May while her real name was thought to be a male writer by many people for a long time.

Manach

The only one I was ever confused due to the name was in fact Julian May- still think her Torc series one of the great series in SciFi. The fact that I got Lois and Louis mixed up in Lois MacMasters Bujold my own fault.
Offhand though, fairly sure KJ Parker is a women author, came across that somewhere.

Morag

So much bullsht about women not being able to write scifi/horror esp when you consider who wrote Frankenstein.

But the assumptions are not just in Scifi and they are not just one way.
Dav Pikey of the capt underpants fame wrote a series of books for younger kids and they were published under the name Sue Denim as it's considered women write better for young kids.

Stenth

Well, given that female authors got this kind of blurbs, who can blame them?

Women are writing science-fiction!
Original!Brilliant!!Dazzling!!!
Women are closer to the primitive than men. They are conscious of the moon-pulls, the earth-tides. They possess a buried memory of humankind’s obscure and ancient past which can emerge to uniquely color and flavor a novel.

Such a woman is Margaret St. Clair, author of this novel. Such a novel is this, SIGN OF THE LABRYS, the story of a doomed world of the future, saved by recourse to ageless, immemorial rites…
Fresh!Imaginative!!Inventive!!!

(The book itself is... not really like that.)

Tomk1

That was 1926.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Winger_Harris

Also if you look many male-writers also wrote with initials or else they wantted to hide the fact that they were male. I almost hate the line between conspiracy and "the special treatment for women" as if it must be some kind of disabillity. Just watched the movie "After-life" screenplay/directed by Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, great dark movie, really enjoyed even if American critics didn't, the only problem I would have is I can't pronounce her name.

I would consider Sci-fi & fantacy as the one area that gender equallity has always been at forefront.

seagull

How old is the clipping in the original post? I think the prejudice against female writes in SF is pretty much a thing of the past. It would have gone along with the astonishment that there were actually such things as female engineers.

Morag

seagull wrote: »

How old is the clipping in the original post? I think the prejudice against female writes in SF is pretty much a thing of the past. It would have gone along with the astonishment that there were actually such things as female engineers.

Or even engineers who happen to be women.

bradyle

seagull wrote: »

How old is the clipping in the original post? I think the prejudice against female writes in SF is pretty much a thing of the past. It would have gone along with the astonishment that there were actually such things as female engineers.

It's weird the astonishment about female engineers hasn't fully gone away.

Like don't get me wrong no one thinks I cant be an engineer just because I'm a girl or even thinks i'll be worse at it (well 99% of people anyway) but still whenever I tell people what I do the majority are surprised and a lot cant help but say wow that's an odd thing for a girl to choose to study/work as.

Maybe its the same with sf/f authors, no one really thinks females cant write they just find it odd they choose to write in this area. I know people find it odd as a girl I read sf/f, in lots of peoples minds its a boy thing.

So while I'd say the prejudice against female authors in large has disappeared the astonishment might not have gone away fully just yet.

If that makes sense

RDM_83 again

bradyle wrote: »

It's weird the astonishment about female engineers hasn't fully gone away.
.....
So while I'd say the prejudice against female authors in large has disappeared the astonishment might not have gone away fully just yet.

If that makes sense

I've been buying the best new sci-fi series for years and they always seem to have quiet a few female authors in it, but what I would notice is a woman writing at the "hard" end of the genre or the more military sci-fi thing

Stenth

RDM_83 again wrote: »

I've been buying the best new sci-fi series for years and they always seem to have quiet a few female authors in it, but what I would notice is a woman writing at the "hard" end of the genre or the more military sci-fi thing

Like, say, Lois McMaster Bujold for military sf, or Linda Nagata, Justina Robson, Elizabeth Bear, or M.J. Locke for the hard end of the spectrum?

RDM_83 again

Oh I am not saying they don't exist, just that I would have the "astonishment" factor bradyle was talking about for those sub-sections of the genre where as in the genre as a whole I wouldn't pay any notice/be suprised if a certain author was a woman. Thanks for the names though and this thread has reminded me I have Queen City Jazz on the bookcase.

PS am I the only person that thought Kim Stanley Robinson was a female author for ages

Trojan

^ I only found that out a couple weeks ago here when someone corrected me.

flazio

ixoy wrote: »

If you read around on some of the SF blogs, you'll see women's place in SF/F is a hot topic right now. There's a (quite irritating) trend for demanding any Top 10 Sci-Fi list or Fantasy list include an equal number of female authors and one of the arguments they've used is that women write under pseudonyms or names which don't shout gender.

So for example - Robin Hobb is really Megan Lindholm but wrote under Robin both to separate her writing style and see how she fared with a name readers could interpret as male.
JK Rowling was, allegedly, told to use her initials and not her full name so as again not to put off people seeing a female author's name.
KJ Parker is another example - nobody knows if the author is male or female.

Oh and if you're a fan of Warehouse 13, you'll know all about HG Wells :P

Well known Chick Lit writer Jenny Colgan wrote a Doctor Who long form tie in Novel 'Dark Horizons' under the pen name J.T. Colgan which came out last year .I think it was more to hide her assciation with other works rather then gender. The book has been republished in paperback this year but the name is now Jenny T Colgan.

CorsendonkX

flazio wrote: »

Well known Chick Lit writer Jenny Colgan wrote a Doctor Who long form tie in Novel 'Dark Horizons' under the pen name J.T. Colgan which came out last year .I think it was more to hide her assciation with other works rather then gender. The book has been republished in paperback this year but the name is now Jenny T Colgan.

Exactly, just look at the amount of pseudonyms that male sci-fi/fantasy writers have had over the years. It allows the writer more freedom to experiment without preconceptions from existing fans. JK Rowling would be another example.