Frequently Asked Questions

I get asked this question a lot, and I've never really come up with a satisfactory answer. The one thing I know with a relative degree of certainty is that it was never a "marketing" or demographic decision on my part. I never really thought of it as a "selling point" for a novel. In that regard, it genuinely is something that just happened.

          Having said that, I also have to say that I've known a lot of strong women in my life, starting with my mother and certainly including my wife Sharon, and that I'm comfortable with them. That I prefer strong people to weak people, whatever their chromosome balance may be, and that I prefer strong protagonists to weak protagonists. It's not exactly as if I don't have strong male characters and protagonists, either. Colin MacIntyre in the Dahak books, for example, or Bahzell in the Norfressa novels. And there have always been strong male characters in the books which do have female protagonists.

           I'm inclined to think that there is a little quirk in my gallop which enjoys putting women into traditionally "male" occupations and positions. To be honest, I quite frequently end up literally flipping a coin to decide whether a new character is going to be male or female, but there does appear to be a significant bias towards female commanders and authority figures generally in quite a lot of my work.

          I suspect that part of that stems from my own belief, on the one hand, that we're on the right track in terms of gender equality, coupled, on the other hand, with my distaste for the more strident forms of feminism. Mind you, if I were female myself, my tolerance for "feminism" might well be significantly higher than it is under the actually obtaining circumstances. I'm certainly well aware of that. However, it's always bugged me when I read a novel or short story set hundreds or even thousands of years in the future in which the female characters are experiencing exactly the same sorts of problems and prejudices which women have faced in Western society over the last hundred years or so. My own feeling is that if we're on the right track here (and I clearly think we are), then by the time we get a few centuries down the road the question of whether or not women ought to have exactly the same opportunities, receive exactly the same compensation, find themselves being promoted in step with their male compatriots, etc., is going to be a done deal. It's going to have about as much burning significance as a topic for debate as the moral rectitude of the African slave trade does for 21^st-century Americans. And by the time you get a couple of centuries beyond that, the significance is going to have dropped to about that of Pharaoh's policy towards the Hittites.

          If you look at the universe of Honor Harrington, or of Alicia DeVries, or of Li Han, the question of whether or not a woman ought to be doing what they're doing simply doesn't arise except under very special circumstances (like pre-alliance Grayson). In that sense, I suppose one might call me a post-feminist science fiction writer, but I think that what I write is actually a healthy manifestation of feminism. My female characters posit societies in which the relationships between beings have advanced (or, as I prefer to think of it, matured) to a point at which attitudes which have victimized so many people for so long have simply died. And I also think that my female characters and their societies recognize the fundamental strength of women -- the fact that when half the human race puts its formidable intelligence, abilities, and determination to work to achieve complete equality, it's going to happen and anybody who thinks he can turn back that particular clock probably likes standing directly in front of speeding locomotives, too.

I think the best advice any perspective author can be given is that he should write what he likes to read. There are a lot of reasons for giving that particular piece of advice, beyond the mere fact that it will be a lot more fun. There's also the fact that you'll probably do a better job of writing something you enjoy reading than you would of writing something simply because you might be able to sell it.

          In my own case, I've enjoyed reading science fiction since I was about 10 years old, although I didn't get around to figuring out why I enjoyed it until much later in my reading career, of course. When I started writing, the fact that I'd already been reading science fiction for the better part of 30 years before I sold the first novel made the genre a natural fit for me.

          That's why I chose to start writing science fiction. The reason that I've continued to write it instead of some other genre [and there are other genres I'd like to write in, including historical fiction and fantasy] is that I've continued to enjoy it a great deal and the stories have succeeded rather better in many cases than I'd ever anticipated when I first started out.