The good folks at SF Signal have done one of those Mind Meld things on the question of gender imbalance in SF. I was asked to contribute to this, but I turned them down: not because I have anything against SF Signal – the Mind Meld thing is very popular and works quite well, so I was honored to be asked – but because I think that the whole debate has got very narrow and very silly. I may try to write something more general and (hopefully) more useful sometime soon.
Meanwhile David Moles has entered the affray, including the following:
I’d love to edit a fiction magazine that was run like a proper academic journal, by which I mean one based on anonymous independent peer review by experts in the field, which is in this case to say by published authors with expertise in the genre or subgenre of the story under submission.
I’m sure this would be totally dysfunctional, but it would be totally dysfunctional in a different way than our current totally dysfunctional short fiction publishing system.
And that is so true. If there is anything that a career in regulatory economics teaches you it is that no matter how many whiz ways people come up with to “fix” things that are “wrong”, the primary effect of all this huffing and puffing it to create something that is totally dysfunctional in a different way.
Oh, thank God someone else is thinking this as well. Every time I hear about the whole supposed gender imbalance in genre publishing I want to scream.
I am reminded of something that Scalzi said last week:
Which is not so say that there aren’t issues, it is just that the whole way the debate has gone has made it way too easy to characterize as a personal crusade against a few editors, and that won’t fix anything.