Friday, February 13, 2004
As part of my spending on new stock for the Closed Library (£5000 for science fiction stock! £1000 for graphic novels!) I came across the lists of Science Fiction Masterworks and Fantasy Masterworks. Now, I'll definitely be buying these, we've had some of them in the library before and they are generally very well produced and packaged. But when you look at the lists the one thing you get almost immediately is that the lists are very male. I don't know a huge amount about the Golden Age so it's possible I'm missing a few who wrote under pseudonyms, but of the sixty or so Science Fiction Masterworks there's Ursula Le Guin for three books and Sheri Tepper for one, compared to the eleven Philip K. Dick titles published so far, or the four Arthur C. Clarke books in the series thus far, which doesn't yet include either 2001 or a Rama book. The Fantasy Masterworks is similarly dominated by the Y chromosome.
Is this simple prejudice or lack of knowledge of decent female writers? Of what I've read and enjoyed there's a lot that I would hesitate to call 'a masterwork', but if Moorcock can get in with stuff that he often says he knocked off briefly in the sixties you have to wonder how seriously the 'Masterwork' tag is meant. So, based on the lists I've linked to above, is there anything missing that you think merits being a 'Masterwork' by a female writer?
Is this simple prejudice or lack of knowledge of decent female writers? Of what I've read and enjoyed there's a lot that I would hesitate to call 'a masterwork', but if Moorcock can get in with stuff that he often says he knocked off briefly in the sixties you have to wonder how seriously the 'Masterwork' tag is meant. So, based on the lists I've linked to above, is there anything missing that you think merits being a 'Masterwork' by a female writer?
