This Shattered World Blog Tour + Giveaway Author discussion: Gender in Science Fiction

This Shattered World blog tour is hosted by The Midnight Garden

Go HERE for the first stop on the tour (see below for the full schedule)

This Shattered World is book two in Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner's Starbound trilogy. Although the planet and narrators are different from These Broken Stars, the danger these characters are fighting against is only getting more strange and frightening. You're going to want to get to know Lee and Flynn, and see them get to know each other. 

Read my five point review of This Shattered World.   

Even for a mild science-fiction reader like me, it's obvious that Amie and Meg have made a conscious effort to pull their main characters out of the "standard" sci-fi gender roles (thank goodness). But even more telling, are the quieter ways they've crafted their story to challenge our perspectives. I don't know if it's good or bad that I didn't realize how intentional they were, but it makes me incredibly thankful they've shared this post with us! 

Welcome to Love is not a triangle, Amie and Meg!

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He Said/She Said: Gender in Science Fiction

by Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner

Gender, feminism, equality, diversity—all charged words, especially in the current landscape of YA literature. For us, one of the best things about creating the far-future universe of the Starbound Trilogy was that we could decide what issues would still haunt humanity and what humanity would have moved beyond. Characteristics like race and sexual orientation, in the Starbound universe, are no longer excuses to discriminate, abuse, or divide people from one another. And the biggest one, for us, was gender.

It’s no secret that for a long time science fiction has been considered a boy’s game. Pulpy SF covers with busty green girls in silver bikinis hasn’t really helped matters, but when you consider the panoply of women in classic (and not-so-classic) fantasy wearing chainmail underwear and anatomically implausible breastplates, science fiction isn’t alone there. But with science fiction there’s an added level of “but girls don’t like science” that makes bringing science fiction out in the YA industry an uphill battle.

Both of us grew up reading classic science fiction, ranging from “soft” SF authors like Anne McCaffrey to the “harder” stuff like Asimov, Heinlein, and Bradbury. And it’s no accident that science fiction written by women is often labeled “soft” while that written by men isn’t. Stories driven by characters and philosophical morality are soft. Stories driven by plot and scientific abstracts are hard. (Don’t ask us why. We didn’t make the rules, we just like to break them.)

We can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard comments like “this is pretty good… for girl’s sci-fi” or “science fiction by women isn’t real science fiction.”

But that’s another blog post.

For now, we’ll assume that you, dear reader, are among the enlightened who get that “science” doesn’t mean “boys only,” and talk instead about how science fiction (specifically, far-future science fiction) lets us create our universe our way.

In These Broken Stars, it’s easy to mistake Tarver’s initial disregard for Lilac as sexism, because so many of us in current society have been dismissed because of gender. But in TBS, that prejudice is all about her class, her pampered lifestyle, her family’s wealth. We were surprised to discover, after the book’s publication, that readers were surprised and tickled by Lilac’s electronics expertise because of her gender. It was meant to be a surprise based on her station in society, but the fact that electronics and engineering are careers dominated by men in our society meant that this characteristic subverted that expectation.

So in This Shattered World, we wanted to play with that even more. We could only take things so far in book one, with only two characters who have any significant “screen” time. In This Shattered World, though, we’ve got a planet populated by an entire cast of soldiers, rebels, and civilians. And while our pacifist rebel Flynn and warrior Jubilee required very little to make them gender trope benders, it’s the little pieces, the characters who show up for one line and never again, that paint the bigger picture. If your main characters are the only exceptions, then all you’ve done is create exceptional characters in a universe that is, despite them, still the same as your own.

To that end, every choice we made while drafting, we went over with a fine-toothed comb in revisions to make sure that the preconceptions we have due to our current society when it comes to things like race and gender weren’t influencing us subconsciously. And that involves a whole toolbox of techniques.

Gender Flipping

As author Jim C. Hines so vividly (and hilariously) demonstrated, sometimes characteristics and clichés we don’t even notice when attributed to a woman seem ridiculous on a man, and vice versa. There are things we’ve been trained to accept. So for some of our side characters, we’d try gender-flipping them as an experiment to see if we’d made character choices about them based on gender. With one of these experiments we realized we’d totally done that, and we ended up leaving said character a woman, because we liked “him” much better that way.

Inverting Tropes

A poet and an engineer. A pacifist and a warrior. Right or wrong, we attach gender to characteristics, professions, and hobbies. Male nannies used to get raised eyebrows, and sometimes still do. Female attorneys are constantly asked how they balance work and home. So in our books we try—whenever it works with the story—to invert these tropes. In This Shattered World, the heroine is the soldier and the hero is the diplomat. Our military base commander is a woman. The person in charge of teaching and caring for the children at the rebel base is a teenage boy.

Language Choices

Never have we more wished that English had gender-neutral pronouns that don’t imply inanimate objects. In the end, we had to bend the rules of grammar a little in This Shattered World to avoid the male default. It’s startling how often male-as-default comes up in our own society, but we don’t notice it because we don’t really have alternatives. Sure, we could say “him or her” every other sentence, but how awkward is that?

Take this example from This Shattered World:

“One of the techs must have had [the footage] on a local drive so they could keep working while evicted from the repository.”

In copy edits, “they” was changed to “he,” because “one of the techs” does imply singular. But we insisted on changing it back to the gender neutral “they,” because we just couldn’t stomach the idea of Jubilee, the POV character at the time, making the subconscious mental assumption that the computer tech in question would have been male. In our far-future society, that assumption just wouldn’t happen. There’d be no reason for it. And while that, in itself, is only one tiny sentence, it’s the way all the little tiny sentences add up that create the larger impression of the universe and the society. We were more than happy to sacrifice grammatical correctness to preserve our vision of that universe.

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About Amie and Meg

Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner are longtime friends and sometime flatmates who have traveled the world (but not yet the galaxy), covering every continent between them. They are sure outer space is only a matter of time. Meagan, who is also the author of the Skylark trilogy, currently lives in Asheville, NC, while Amie lives in Melbourne, Australia. Although they currently live apart, they are united by their love of space opera, road trips, and second breakfasts.

Visit the These Broken Stars website for the latest news on the series and follow the authors on Twitter at @AmieKaufman and @MeaganSpooner.This Shattered World is available for pre-order (with fun swag!) and will be released in North America on December 23, 2014.

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Follow the Blog Tour

Monday, December 8          The Midnight Garden    Secrets of Starbound: Characters   
Tuesday, December 9         The Book Smugglers    Making an Audiobook
Wednesday, December 10  Ivy Book Bindings        Secrets of Starbound: Science and Settings
Thursday, December 11       Cuddlebuggery             How Amie & Meagan Met
Friday, December 12            Little Book Owl             Video Interview
Monday, December 15         Mundie Moms               Shooting the Cover
Tuesday, December 16        Xpresso Reads             Starbound Inspirations
Wednesday, December 17   A Book Utopia               Video: Your New Book Boyfriend
Thursday, December 18       Supernatural Snark       Q & A
Friday, December 19            Love is Not a Triangle   Gender in Science Fiction

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 Giveaway

THANK YOU Disney-Hyperion for these amazing prizes!

Grand Prize:

— Autographed copies of These Broken Stars and This Shattered World
— Starbound swag
— A secret letter from Tarver to Lilac, which you may keep secret for yourself, or may be posted and shared with others (PLEASE SHARE IT WITH MEEEE!!!)
— Your choice of coffee with the authors at one of their upcoming U.S. tour stops (locations TBD) OR a Skype chat!

Runners up:

5 people will win hardback copies of This Shattered World

Open to US and Canadian residents aged 18 and up, or 13 and up with parental permission. See entry form for complete details. Good luck!

If the Rafflecopter form isn't showing up, go HERE.

a Rafflecopter giveaway