Sf&f - Tumblr Posts
I have connected the dots
Looking for active writeblrs to follow!
I just realized that most of the writeblrs I follow aren't posting much anymore. A hazard of being on this site for so long, I guess. I'm particularly interested in:
Original fiction
Fantasy
Weird stuff that defies all categorization
... and everything else, because let's be honest I love all writing
I'm a writer and editor who mostly posts/reblogs writing advice and inspiration, although I occasionally share about my WIPs or recent publications/zines. Interact with this post, or follow me & I'll follow you back. Can't wait to fluff up my dash with new writers and writing! It's been dead much too long.
Fantasy books written by women are often assumed to be young adult, even when those books are written for adults, marketed to adults, and published by adult SFF imprints. And this happens even more frequently to women of color.
This topic’s an ongoing conversation on book Twitter, and I thought it might be worth sharing with Tumblr. And by “ongoing,” I mean that people have been talking about this for years. Last year, there was a big blow up when the author R.F. Kuang said publicly that her book The Poppy War isn’t young adult and that she wished people would stop calling it such. If you’ve read The Poppy War, then you’ll know it’s grimdark fantasy along lines of Game of Thrones… and yet people constantly refer to The Poppy War as young adult – which is one of its popular shelves on Goodreads. To be fair, more people have shelved it as “adult,” but why is anyone shelving it as “young adult” in the first place? Game of Thrones is not at all treated this way…
Rebecca Roanhorse’s book Trail of Lightning, an urban fantasy with a Dinétah (Navajo) protagonist has “young adult” as its fifth most popular Goodreads shelf. The novel is adult and published by Saga, an adult SFF imprint.
S.A. Chakraborty’s adult fantasy novel City of Brass has “young adult” as its fourth most popular Goodreads shelf.
Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, an adult fantasy in a world based on Mughal India, has about equal numbers of people shelving it as “adult” or “young adult.”
Book Riot wrote an article on this, although they didn’t address how the problem intersects with race. I also did a Twitter thread a while back where I cited these examples and some more as well.
The topic of diversity in adult SFF is important to me, partly because we need to stop mislabeling the women of color who write it, and also because there’s a lot there that isn’t acknowledged! Besides, sometimes it’s good to see that your stories don’t just end the moment you leave high school and that adults can still have vibrant and interesting futures worth reading about. I feel like this is especially important with queer rep, for a number of reasons.
Other books and authors in the tweets I screenshot include:
Witchmark by C.L. Polk
A Ruin of Shadows by L.D. Lewis
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
The Day Before by Liana Brooks
A Phoenix First Must Burn edited by Patrice Caldwell
Shri, a book blogger at Sun and Chai
Vanessa, a writer and blogger at The Wolf and Books
TLDR: Women who write adult fantasy, especially women of color, are presumed to be writing young adult, which is problematic in that it internalizes diversity, dismisses the need and presence of diversity in adult fantasy, and plays into sexist assumptions of women writers.
PLEASE for the love of the universe read anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy written from marginalized perspectives. Y’all (you know who you are) are killing me. To see people praise books about empire written exclusively by white women and then turn around and say you don’t know who Octavia Butler is or that you haven’t read any NK Jemisin or that Babel was too heavy-handed just kills me! I’m not saying you HAVE to enjoy specific books but there is such an obvious pattern here
Some of y’all love marginalized stories but you don’t give a fuck about marginalized creators and characters, and it shows. Like damn
This is the latest @midnightburgr. No I will not elaborate on that