William
Sanders
Senior Editor and Mean Old Bastard
Notice anything about this issue? Anything strike you as...unusual?
Yes indeed. All the stories and poems for this issue are by women. How about that? There's something you won't see at any of the big deadtreezines any time soon.
This is, as you might also have noticed, our anniversary issue, marking the beginning of our second year of publication. So we wanted to do something a little different to mark the occasion.
But please don't get the wrong idea. This isn't meant as some kind of Major Statement. Certainly it's not intended to prove that women can write SF, or that they can write it well. That's something that doesn't need proving; it's been proved over and over again — anybody who needs further proof by now is beyond hope. And indeed to present this as such proof, as if it were needed, would be an insult to the many women writers who have already established themselves solidly as major names in the field.
The truth is that all of the stories you see in this issue had already been accepted before I decided to do this. In fact that's where the idea originated: I was looking over the stories I had in stock, choosing which ones I wanted to use for the next issue, and I noticed that I had quite a lot of excellent stories by women — and had in fact already picked several of them — and suddenly the light bulb went on and I said to myself, "Self, you ugly old son of a bitch," (myself understanding this to be in the spirit of good-natured bandinage), "why not an all-women issue?"
And that's all there was to it. No crusade, no grandstand play, just a little something special to kick off our second year.
Sorry if I seem to be belaboring the point, but I don't want this to come off as some kind of Special Olympics: look, let's help the poor little girls.... That kind of patronizing attitude deserves nothing but a sharp kick in the crotch.
Of course Helix has always published a good many stories by women. In our first year of publication, out of 28 stories published, 13 were by women. This is a considerably higher proportion than a lot of major SF magazines can claim, and we are very proud of it — just as we are proud of having published work by a diverse range of racial, ethnic, and national affiliations.
So this really doesn't represent any big departure for us. We'd already published an issue (#2) with a majority of stories by women; this was just the next natural step.
But you know, in a way it's a pity that this should even be worth talking about. Really, if things were as they should be, nobody should think it surprising or remarkable that an SF magazine should publish an all-women's issue — any more than if, say, all the contributors were from Illinois, or all their last names began with R, or they all had red hair.
Or if they were all straight white guys. That happens all the time, and nobody seems to find it strange.
Well. Whatever. First and foremost, these are all good stories and poems and very much worth reading. See if you don't agree.
And if you do agree, how about sending us some money so we can pay the writers as they deserve?
Melanie
Fletcher
Website Designer, Belly Dance Consultant and Guest Editor
"Baby," My Well-Established Female Ass
Heya. If you take a gander at the Staff page you'll see that I'm not Lawrence Watt-Evans at all, but the webmistress for this fine publication. Fret not — Lawrence will be back next issue with his usual pithy observations on publishing at large. For this quarter, however, William asked me if I would step in and do a guest editorial because of my gender.
My gender, by the way, is female, as is the gender of all the writers and poets in this issue. Yes, Helix is kicking off its second year with an all-femme issue. Naturally, a lot of people are going to assume that this is some sort of wacky PC stunt designed to garner attention from the bleeding heart liberal crowd. Let me assure you that no, it isn't, mainly because women writing SF and fantasy just isn't news anymore.
To be honest, the specfic genre hasn't been a boys-only clubhouse for years. The days of John Campbell and the need for male pseudonyms are long gone; speculative fiction publishing is pretty much run by women these days. If you don't believe me, ask Toni Weisskopf at Baen, Susan Allison at Ace/Roc, Anne Lesley Groell at Bantam Spectra, Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey, Jennifer Brehl at EOS/HarperCollins — hell, Betsy Wollheim and Sheila E. Gilbert own DAW. And that list doesn't include all the small press and periodical publishers/editors with uteri (hi, Selina!), nor does it include the wide array of talented, award-winning writers with XX chromosomes, including yours truly.
So it's not a big deal that the Summer '07 issue of Helix is pretty much all female — like the almost all male Hugo ballot this year, it just shook out that way. And yet there was much hue and cry across the land about the 2007 Hugo nominees' preponderance of testosterone, so we're probably going to catch some shit about the clouds of estrogen wafting about this issue. Frankly, both complaints strike me as pretty damn stupid because it shouldn't matter what flavor of gonads a writer is packing; what does matter is whether or not they can tell a cracking good story.
Instead of banging on about the gender of the writers, let me ask this; can the writers in this issue tell cracking good stories? The answer is: hell yes. They wouldn't be in Helix in the first place if they weren't damn good at their craft. And what's even more delightful about the writers in this issue is how they spread out across the writing spectrum. We have Nebula award-winner Esther Friesner, Nebula and Hugo nominee Brenda Clough, Rhysling nominee Elizabeth Barrette, Stoker nominee Marge Simon and Helix vet N.K. Jemisin, who received an Honorable Mention in the 18th Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. We have stunningly good young Turks in the form of Eugie Foster, Yoon Ha Lee and JoSelle Vanderhooft. We have established writers such as Serena Fusek, Samantha Henderson and Margaret Ronald, and the newly published Barbara Walsh. And we've got a poem by former SFWA president Jane Yolen, for God's sake. I don't know about you, but I just sat there gobsmacked after reading "The Bull."
So we have an issue full of talented writers who all happen to be female. Would this issue be just as good if male writers had been included? Well, yeah — that's sort of our job, after all, to pick the best stories available. But this quarter the best stories were all written by women. No stunts, no affirmative action or handouts to "the girls," just the best fiction and poetry that we could find and present to you, Gentle Reader. And if that raises some sort of chauvinistic ire or draws complaints from MRA types, please do remember that straight white males have been in charge of this world since time immemorial (and the less said about the job they've done, the better). A little bit of turnaround is fair play, after all.
And also remember that the first true science fiction story, Frankenstein, was written by a woman named Mary Shelley (whose mother was the famed writer, philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Good genes, there). Women specfic writers don't need special permission or dispensations, you see. We've been here all along.