"Writ[ing] a book that includes that" is a fine suggestion to make to someone who has been published and probably has a publisher more than willing to print more of their stuff. To do so as a first effort is probably a good pathway to the rejection of your manuscript, however. Never mind that the grammar of the suggestion is pretty bad (it should be "you should write a book which includes that", but I'll put the teacher-aspect aside...).
I think that you can make all kinds of statements about the treatment of gender, in general, in sci fi. Very few authors do it well. Even some that get lauded for it don't do it very well. I think that Ursula K. LeGuin is one of the few that I've read who does a good job of making gender almost irrelevant to the story. My girlfriend bemoans McCaffrey's tendency to build strong, independent female characters, only to make them seem to have one goal in all of their struggles; to find the man of their dreams and become a nice wife to him. But that's her opinion; I've not read McCaffrey, so I can't make my own judgments. Just know that the one series of hers that I'd thought about reading, I didn't get started on until a couple of books had come out, and it seemed that the main character had been developed in that way.
It's disappointing that the panelists wanted to joke about the topic at first. I bet that had the panel been "Race as Trope" and they'd wanted to do nothing but joke about race rather than discussing race in sci fi that they would be in deep crap. Why should this be any diff...oh, that's right, transfolk aren't people with emotions and feelings, and we're used to being the butt of jokes anyhow! We should just get over ourselves and accept it. *groans*
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-28 04:41 pm (UTC)I think that you can make all kinds of statements about the treatment of gender, in general, in sci fi. Very few authors do it well. Even some that get lauded for it don't do it very well. I think that Ursula K. LeGuin is one of the few that I've read who does a good job of making gender almost irrelevant to the story. My girlfriend bemoans McCaffrey's tendency to build strong, independent female characters, only to make them seem to have one goal in all of their struggles; to find the man of their dreams and become a nice wife to him. But that's her opinion; I've not read McCaffrey, so I can't make my own judgments. Just know that the one series of hers that I'd thought about reading, I didn't get started on until a couple of books had come out, and it seemed that the main character had been developed in that way.
It's disappointing that the panelists wanted to joke about the topic at first. I bet that had the panel been "Race as Trope" and they'd wanted to do nothing but joke about race rather than discussing race in sci fi that they would be in deep crap. Why should this be any diff...oh, that's right, transfolk aren't people with emotions and feelings, and we're used to being the butt of jokes anyhow! We should just get over ourselves and accept it. *groans*