Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

On re-reading the piece I posted earlier about girl cooties in SF, I noticed I never actually explicitly stated another point I was trying to make: People often equate emotion with stupidity, and assume that books whose raison d’etre is an emotion--a womanish emotion, at that--are all automatically intellectually bankrupt and could’ve been written by a chimp with a typewriter. This assumption is implicit in Day’s contemptuous dismissal of female SF writers and the romance novels in space they write. Romance bad, esoteric physics theories good, unga unga ooka ooka. Another false dichotomy, of course. A good love story is, in my opinion, extremely hard to write. Traditional romance novel authors don’t need to worry about the implications of nanotechnology; instead, they have to deal with something as squirrelly and in some ways every bit as complex, exotic and difficult: portraying a couple falling in love, and doing it convincingly. Someone like Catherine Asaro often juggles both types of squirrelliness at the same time. Not too bad for a mentally-polluted woman.

3 comments • Trackback •
Categories: Random Musings

Tags: This entry has not been tagged yet.