The fire from yesterday’s Daily Dot explosion continues to rage across the Internet this morning, folks.
Scalzi, not content to have issued yesterday’s A Note to Sean Fodera, has followed that up with a scathing critique of the attacks on Mary Robinette Kowal.
Money quote:
How many more award nominations and wins does she have to have before she is somebody, I wonder? How many more books does she have to publish? How many more television shows does she have to work on? How many more years of unpaid, volunteer service to the trade organizations in her field does she have to offer? How many more years of abject, unambiguous and wholly undeserved contempt does she have to endure before she is allowed to be someone “you should have heard of”?
Kowal herself, more soft-spoken but no less pointed, has offered herself up as a representative example of the sexism women face in the genre.
Silvia Morena-Garcia shows some of the pics of Kowal that have gotten lambasted–which, I point out, are exactly the sorts of dresses that you’d see in the A&E production of Pride & Prejudice, a fashion sensibility which is hardly daring, at least if you live in a mindset later than 1805–and describes how she’s had to evaluate her own clothing choices for fear of the same kind of attack, the fear that she’d get labeled a “cheap tart” if she wears the wrong thing.
James Nicoll is breaking out the popcorn over here. I think he’s going to need more popcorn.
There’s not much I can add to a lot of this, except to say that I have read Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey, as well as her shorter works “First Flight” and “Lady Astronaut of Mars”. I quite enjoyed all three, and I will very much enjoy going through the rest of the novels in her series, including Book Four, Valour and Vanity, due to be released in the US in April. Her speaking out in support of the good that SFWA can do and has done is in fact a contributing factor to why I keep paying attention to what goes on with the organization–because if she can speak in favor of it even given the shit that’s been hurled at her head, I respect that a lot.
And I for one feel that her words accomplish the very best of what any writer hopes for: to make her, indeed, someone you should have heard of.
P.S. Yoiks, I got linked to by Ansible! If you’re coming over from there, greetings to you!