I want to cut to the bone, ALWAYS.
- James Tiptree, Jr
ChickWHAT? Yeah, I know it sounds funny, but bear with me; it’s the best I can do on short notice. Chickpunk is my rough and ready name for a number of women who write hard SF or military SF with a cyberpunk slant and who I think are creating a new and exciting kind of science fiction.
These women are turning many of the underlying assumptions of feminist (and anti-feminist) SF on their heads. Their writing crosses genre boundaries to draw on spy thrillers, hardboiled detective stories, and other traditionally masculine genres. Their heroines are hackers and physicists, soldiers and street samurai. They're realists for the most part, no great believers in easy answers. But their realism is more than just an echo of cyberpunk street cool; in the hands of these writers it's also a way of reexaminining the assumptions of both mainstream SF and cyberpunk and opening up new visions and new possible futures. There's been a lot of controversy about these writers, partly because they don't fit neatly into any of the boxes people have built for SF written by and about women. Mafalda Stasi's description of Gibson's Neuromancer lays out some of the accusations that are still being launched against cyberpunk-influenced writers today:
Cyberpunk prefers a different feminism from the more mainstream one; while the latter proudly emphasizes the differences between man and woman, cyberpunkers see 'la difference' as passe, genteel, nostalgic and late-hippyish. Cyberpunk feminism harks back to an earlier historic age of feminism, the one advocating equality at all costs ... Molly from Neuromancer is a typical example: strong and ruthless, violent and independent ... Cyberpunk xenophobia, like cyberpunk antifeminism, is cloaked in the language of extreme individualism.
I've find this sort of criticism of Gibson odd for two reasons. First, because he's made as serious and consistent an attempt as any male SF writer I can think of to create realistic and thoughtfully-drawn female characters. Second, because it identifies as "bad" in his work exactly what most people praise in the work of a writer by whom he was much influenced: James Tiptree, Jr. (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon).
On the other hand, I suspect that Tiptree's 'masculine' qualities (and, yes, the scare quotes are there for a reason) are precisely why her books have largely vanished from bookstores shelves while colleagues who embraced more conventionally 'feminine' virtues have gained lasting critical acclaim and racked up the kind of heavy hitting sales numbers formerly reserved for the top men in the genre. Personally, I find this sad. I believe that the kind of feminist SF that celebrates women's differences from men and focuses explicitly on gender issues has contributed a great deal to the genre -- and has a lot more to contribute in the future. However, I also believe that Tiptree was pushing toward a different kind of writing: a kind of writing more like what Virginia Woolf was talking about when she said she wanted to write as a human being, not as a woman. Our society still hasn't given women, or any other minority for that matter, permission to write as they please without being judged on how well they fit into the little boxes we've stereotyped them into. I think we all lose by it. Especially when it ends up depriving people of the chance to read the very writers who are trying their best to defeat the 'conspiracy of conformity' and blow those boxes wide open.
Here is an essay by Adam Roberts that points out the tragedy of reading Tiptree purely as a "feminist" writer so clearly that . . . well, there's no sense in reinventing the wheel, is there? All I'd add is this:
I've read few writers who struck as elegant a balance as Tiptree did between daring to write from her own experience as a woman and demanding to be read as a human being (gender none of your business, thanks very much) who could write with authority and conviction about whatever s/he goddamn well pleased. Tiptree accomplished in the realm of science fiction what post-colonial writers like Seamus Heaney, V. S. Naipaul, and Arundhati Roy have struggled with in other genres; she mastered and celebrated the tradition in which she wrote without surrendering her own identity to it. And in doing so she managed to link ideas about women's place in American culture with ideas about America's place in the world and humanity's place in the universe in a way that is as relevant today as it was thirty-five years ago.
Another writer whose name comes up again and again in conversations with younger female SF writers -- especially those who write hard sf, space adventure, and military sf -- is C. J. Cherryh. Like Tiptree, Cherryh frequently writes on 'masculine' themes and from the point of view of male characters. But she does so in such a nuanced way that her books have an uncanny ability to function simultaneously as feminist critiques and as "straight" SF about so-called non-gendered issues. Even today I suspect that many of Cherryh's fans aren't aware of or even very interested in her gender, and would greet the notion of her as a "feminist" writer with surprise. On some level this is just as it should be; Cherryh's books are above and beyond everything else just plain fun. They embody the exuberant inventiveness of the great sagas of SF's golden age, in which no-holds-barred space battles collide with highly technical explanations of the ins and outs of FTL travel and brainbending speculation about incomprehensible alien life forms. But still . . . there's even more there than meets the eye. Books like Downbelow Station or Hellburner exude a Tiptree-like sense of sex and gender as something which is central to human identity, and yet so malleable, manipulable, and unfathomable that predicting people's behavior on the basis of the body they happen to be wrapped in is likely to get you laughed at . . . or dead.
And then there's Cyteen, which belongs in a category all its own. Because once you've read Cyteen you'll never make it through another day in the real world without recognizing that, one way or another, they're always running tape on you.
Whether or not you agree with Mafalda Stasi's take on Gibson -- or my take on Alice Sheldon and c. J. Cherryh -- it's clear that the post-cyberpunk era has given rise to a whole group of women writers whose writing expresses a new and distinctive image of the world, and what it is to be a woman in the world. This genre, if it even is a genre, is hard to define -- and I hope it stays that way. Here are a few writers, however, whose work I think fits under the chickpunk umbrella. Enjoy the list, and let me know if you can think of anyone else who ought to be on it . . . .
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