I recently read The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson. This book is lovely, but I was immediately reminded of something Daniel José Older said (which I cannot find) about writing for those who rarely get to be the main character but don’t need to be reminded that they are already fully human. Or being tired of only having POC protagonists in books where that humanity was finally proven to all at the end.
I’m past the point in my life and my feminism where I need someone to remind/convince me that I am as much a whole person as anyone else who isn’t straight/cis/white/male. I much prefer to read about women who are just living their fucking lives and does she even know people think she shouldn’t? Only when they get in her way as she rolls over them, and no, she will not apologize. This is likely why speculative fiction appeals to me so much. Kameron Hurley, N K Jemisin, Ann Leckie, Nnedi Okorafor and many more are building worlds where women are the default gender, where genders come in numbers greater than two, where women can be anything and are indeed everything.
Once you get there, it’s hard to go back to sweet, wonderfully written books about proper young ladies who must hide their ambitions in order to keep the pathetically underpaid work they managed to acquire only with good connections – books in which the lower-class women who work even harder and make even less money are invisible. Give me head-chopping bounty hunters and world-destroying goddesses any day of the week.
I’ve mostly been posting about travel and whatnot, but I’m going to start writing about books again more regularly. For certain values of ‘regularly.’