Are there many other professional female sf writers?
Most of us belong to Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and I’m curious enough that I recently went through the directory and counted male/female. I got 194 total: 6 uncertain-gender initials, or first names like Lee and Chris, 68 women, and 120 men. So it looks like roughly two to one among professional sf writers. That seems about right. Sf readership, as the polls in Locus magazine show, has definitely moved toward more women and more older readers. I really wouldn’t have guessed that many. What unique perspectives do women bring to sf? This is a huge subject, because it involves us at once in the question of what, if any, unique perspectives do women bring to fiction in general. But I’d say that the entrance of a substantial number of women sf writers in the 60s and 70s, along with some unconventional males of the same generation, enlarged the scope of the genre, increased its literary and intellectual sophistication, introduced credible female and nonheterosexual char
