Ironically, the genre has always had a reputation for valuing ideas over execution.
I re-read a lot of Ray Bradbury stories while I was staying in Los Angeles two years ago. (He was buried just two blocks away from my apartment, so I thought it would be neighborly.) And sheesh--the guy could have used some really savage editing! Ditto for Isaac Asimov, who wrote some great stuff that set my imagination on fire, but also a lot of stuff that feels robotic even when he's not writing about robots. I often felt that the same Asimov character I'd met elsewhere was appearing in a different Asimov story under a different name.
I was floored when I found out that some of the giants of the genre when I was a kid were actually women writing under male names. Alice Mary Norton became Andre Norton. Carolyn Janice Cherry became C.J. Cherryh. As a kid, I enjoyed both, and I particularly loved C.J. Cherryh's female characters and her explorations of gender-related stereotypes, but I had no idea that either of these writers was not the stereotypical white guy. I assume that a lot of their male readers never figured that out, either. Was this subterfuge a good thing, because it helped these women find an audience that otherwise would probably have dismissed their writing...or did it just perpetuate the widespread assumption that pretty much all the good authors in the genre were male, and therefore any author with a recognizably female name probably had nothing interesting to say? [Edited to say: our own M.A. Griffiths seems to have been ambivalent about this, sometimes saying she enjoyed the way that a genderless pen name made her sexual identity irrelevant to readers, and sometimes going out of her way to announce proudly, "I am woman, hear me roar."]
I loved the fact that Ursula K. LeGuin had a recognizably female name, mainly because it made the notion that I, too, might someday become a respected writer seem a bit less impossible. I also loved that she was writing about social justice and gender, and guys were
listening because her craft was so damn good.
Orwn, I didn't see
Citizen...but as it never appeared on the list of nominees for the
Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, I'm not sure what point you're making, except that relying too heavily on social justice content doesn't necessarily make something a compelling piece of art. Sure, but neither does relying too heavily on anything (gee-whiz special effects come to mind) at the expense of the plot, character development, pacing, enjoyable dialog, etc. And a politically correct cliché is as boring as a politically incorrect one.
The 2015 Hugo Awards
Hybrid Mode
