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Post by a***@yahoo.comPost by AhasuerusI guess the first thing that we need is the compiler's definition of
"erased". One that would include C. J. Cherryh who has been nominated
for various awards close to 100 times.
There are at least 2 SF ways to erase an author. In the first one,
you wipe the minds of everybody who read them. (I think I read
Tanith Lee. It might have been Electric Forest?)
In the second way you go back in time and kill their parents or kill
them before they start writing. Someone must have written a story in
which someone goes back and kills H.G. Wells. In which case that story
couldn't exist.... Hmmm who wrote the second time travel story?
the guys who rewrote SF history to make their own achievements loom
larger by erasing the women who came before, and all the people who
curate lists of “must read” spec fic that are almost entirely beret
of books by women.
and linked Jeanne Gomoll's "A Open Letter to Joanna Russ" --
http://www.reocities.com/athens/8720/letter.htm . The letter says,
in part:
"In the preface to Burning Chrome, Bruce Sterling rhapsodizes about
the quality and promise of the new wave of SF writers, the so-called
"cyberpunks" of the late 1980s, and then compares their work to that
of the preceding decade:
"The sad truth of the matter is that SF has not been much fun of late.
All forms of pop culture go through the doldrums: they catch cold when
society sneezes. If SF in the late Seventies was confused, self-involved,
and stale, it was scarcely a cause for wonder."
With a touch of the keys on his word processor, Sterling dumps a decade
of SF writing out of cultural memory: the whole decade was boring,
symptomatic of a sick culture, not worth writing about. Now, at last,
he says, we're on to the right stuff again.
All the people who were made nervous or bored or threatened by the
explosion of women's writing and issues now find it safe to come out
and speak out loud of their dissatisfaction. Of course, it's safer to
criticize generally ("It was a self-involved, me-decade,' and nothing
worthwhile was created") than to say specifically what they mean. (The
women writers of the 70s bored me because I didn't care about their
ideas; I felt left out. "They wrote it but it was a boring fad.")"