Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters — Complete
I wrote an essay, long even by my unwieldily prolix standards, to the point that the use of any characters in a story, male or female, should serve the purpose of entertaining and edifying the reader rather than serving the propaganda purposes of amateur social engineers convinced that the unintentional implications hidden in science fiction yarns, of all things, influences the virtues and standards of society.
- www.scifiwright.com/2013/11/saving-science-fiction-from-strong-female-characters-part-1
- http://scifiwright.com/2013/11/an-added-comment/
- http://scifiwright.com/2013/11/saving-science-fiction-from-strong-female-characters-part-2/
- http://scifiwright.com/2013/11/testing-the-bechdel-test/
- http://scifiwright.com/2013/11/saving-science-fiction-from-strong-female-characters-part-3/
- http://scifiwright.com/2013/11/saving-science-fiction-from-strong-female-characters-part-4/
- http://scifiwright.com/2013/11/saving-science-fiction-from-strong-female-characters-part-5/
- http://scifiwright.com/2013/12/saving-science-fiction-from-strong-female-characters-an-observation/
- http://scifiwright.com/2013/12/saving-science-fiction-from-strong-female-characters-part-6/
- http://scifiwright.com/2013/12/strong-female-characters-of-oz/
For this, I got hate-mail and hate-pingbacks (if there is such a word). I confess to a mild surprise at the sheer vehemence of the hate. Some of my surprise is that anyone would regard yours truly as important enough to bother hating, since, to the best of my knowledge, I threaten no one and nothing, and my opinion is of no concern to anyone who does not take steps to have it made known to him.
Some of the surprise is that anyone would condemn what he has not read. That strikes my poor, innocent, naive, but icy and dispassionate Houyhnhnm heart as illogical. And there is nothing we icy and dispassionate Houyhnhnms regard with our icy and dispassionate equivalent of pity as much as that one sin of which our island of pure reason disapproves, namely, a lapse in logic.
Much of the surprise was that no one saw fit to argue the point with an actual argument. We seem to have fallen into a stage of society where disagreement with Political Correctness is regarded as an unforgivable moral depravity rather than a error in reasoning open to correction by reason.
This is a symptom not of the strength but of the senility of Political Correctness: it has lost its confidence to win in the marketplace of ideas, so it rules the marketplace to be out of bounds. There seems, however, to be no provision to enforce the ruling, nor any reason to regard the ruling as legitimate.
Therefore, as a public service, and a gesture of conciliation, I here gather all the links of the sprawling essay in to one place: so that any readers deeply offended by the essay be allowed the opportunity to read it before condemning it.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
