Women in SF&F Month 2024: April 15–19 Schedule & Week in Review
Apr
14
2024

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Week three of the thirteenth annual Women in SF&F Month starts tomorrow. Thank you so much to all of last week’s guests for another wonderful week of essays!

There will be new guest posts on Monday and Wednesday of this week and a book giveaway on Friday. But first, before announcing the schedule, here are last week’s pieces in case you missed any of them.

All of the guest posts from April 2024 can be found here, and last week’s guest posts were:

And there is more to come, starting tomorrow! This week includes essays by the first two authors and a giveaway of two books by the third:

Women in SF&F Month 2024 Schedule Graphic

April 15: Amy Leow (The Scarlet Throne)
April 17: Laura R. Samotin (The Sins on Their Bones, The Way It Haunted Him)
April 19: Seanan McGuire (InCryptid, October Daye)

Women in SF&F Month: Genoveva Dimova
Apr
12
2024

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Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Genoveva Dimova! Both books in The Witch’s Compendium of Monsters, her Bulgarian folklore–inspired fantasy duology described as “The Witcher meets Naomi Novik,” are coming out this year: her debut novel, Foul Days, on June 25 and the sequel, Monstrous Nights, on October 22. I’m delighted she’s here today to discuss her favorite character to write, some influences, and representation of older women in “Female mentors in fantasy.”

Cover Artist: Rovina Cai
Cover Designer: Jamie Stafford-Hill

Female mentors in fantasy

People occasionally ask me which one of my characters was my favourite to write, probably expecting it to be a difficult question, like asking a parent to choose a favourite child. Except, my answer is always immediate: Vila.

In my debut Slavic fantasy, Foul Days, Vila is a prickly older witch with a penchant for sequined woollen vests and terrible jokes, living in a chicken-legged house. She is an untouchable figure with many years of knowledge and skill behind her back, who serves as a mentor to our witchy protagonist, Kosara. In the sequel, Monstrous Nights, as Kosara grows in knowledge and skill herself, we get a more vulnerable side to Vila, as she has to come to terms with her own eventual mortality.

Some of my influences in writing this character are perhaps obvious. Firstly, Baba Yaga, the Slavic witch in her hut on chicken legs, is a figure that has always fascinated me. When she appears in fairy tales, she is all-knowing, otherworldly, and threatening. Yet, despite her frequent remarks about how much she appreciates the taste of human flesh, she’s often benevolent and willing to help our hero in their quest, sometimes for a price, sometimes just because she feels like it.

The second obvious influence is Granny Weatherwax from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, who we see taking on a mentoring role multiple times in the series, first in Equal Rites and then in the Tiffany Aching books. Granny is a complex character—stern, practical, distrustful, and powerful. Someone you can’t help but love, despite her being far from a “likeable female character”.

This is, perhaps, what always attracts me to female mentor characters. They tend to be older, settled in their ways, knowledgeable, skilful, and confident. They’re rarely ‘likeable’ or ‘relatable’ in the way we’re told our female characters have to be, or else readers wouldn’t sympathise with them—yet, I find them so easy to sympathise with, probably because they remind me of the older women in my own life. Frankly, I find them inspirational.

So, imagine my surprise when I deliberately searched out more fantasy books with older female mentor figures in them, and I found a distinct lack. Sure, there are some excellent examples out there: there’s Od from Od Magic by Patricia McKillip and Meghan from the Witches of Eileanan by Kate Forsyth. There’s the dust-wife in T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone and Baghra from Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone (and you can’t convince me she doesn’t share the Baba Yaga influences with my own Vila!). However, for every female mentor figure I encountered, there were three times more old, wise men. For every Granny Weatherwax, there was a Gandalf, a Dumbledore, and an Obi-Wan Kenobi.

As an archaeologist, I couldn’t help but dig deeper. I simply couldn’t figure out why this lack of female mentors occurred. In between reading ancient forums and more recent Reddit threads, in between blog posts and Reactor essays, I realised this is an issue other people have noticed, and a question other people have asked.

Ultimately, it seems, it boils down to this: there aren’t more older female mentors in fantasy because there aren’t many older women in fantasy, full stop. Or, to take this even further, there is a real lack of older women in media as a whole. Ageism is a well-documented problem in Hollywood, for example, where a recent study found that there is a sudden drop from female characters who are in their 30s (33%) to characters in their 40s (15%). Only 7% of female characters were aged 60 or over, which is nevertheless a slight improvement over the 5% reported by the same study conducted 2 years prior. While no such studies have been carried out about books, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if the numbers are very similar—after all, authors and screenwriters exist in the same cultural milieu and draw from the same inspirations.

This lack of older female representation, I believe, goes back to that belief that female characters need to be likeable to the average reader—so, we need to make them young, beautiful, nice, agreeable. Male mentors can be kooky and spooky and mad. Female mentors need to be palatable.

Except, as already discussed, female mentors don’t need to be likeable to be fascinating. They don’t need to be agreeable to have readers cheer them on. In fact, I believe it is precisely this lack of ‘relatability’ that gives female mentor characters their air of otherworldliness we, as readers, grow to love in characters like Baba Yaga and Granny Weatherwax. As fantasy is expanding, as more and more fresh, new, previously underrepresented voices enter it every day, I truly believe we’re due some excellent female mentors soon. I personally can’t wait.

Photo of Genoveva Dimova by Julie Broadfoot
Photo Credit: 2022 © JULIE BROADFOOT		 Genoveva Dimova is a Bulgarian fantasy author and archaeologist based in Scotland. Her debut novel inspired by Slavic folklore, Foul Days, is coming out in June 2024, with the sequel, Monstrous Nights to follow in October 2024. When she’s not writing, she likes to explore old ruins, climb even older hills, and listen to practically ancient rock music. To keep up to date with news and updates about Genoveva’s books, join her newsletter at genovevadimova.com/newsletter or find her on Instagram at @gen_dimova.
Women in SF&F Month: Gabriella Buba
Apr
10
2024

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Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Gabriella Buba! Her short fiction includes “Dying Rivers and Broken Hearts” and “A Unified Explanation for Elven Urbanization and Associated Morphological Changes,” and her first novel, Saints of Storm and Sorrow, is being released on June 25. The first installment in a Filipino-inspired epic fantasy duology, The Stormbringer Saga, her book is described as featuring “a bisexual nun hiding a goddess-given gift [who] is unwillingly transformed into a lightning rod for her people’s struggle against colonization.” I’m excited she is here to discuss one of the reasons she wrote her upcoming debut novel in “Fantasy Safe Spaces: Facing the Specters of the Past Now They’ve Come Back to Haunt Us.”

Cover of Saints of Storm and Sorrow by Gabriella Buba

Fantasy Safe Spaces: Facing the Specters of the Past Now They’ve Come Back to Haunt Us
by Gabriella Buba

Fantasy has always held a special place in my life. From school days when the quiet of the library was a rare sanctuary from bullying, through to the pandemic when once again Fantasy became a window out of the creeping isolation, dread, and anxiety of daily life.

But more than an escape, for me, Fantasy has always been the safest place to dig deep into the topics that most trouble and grieve me. I was once told I write like I’m wringing my grief onto the page, and I am. As a biracial Filipino-American child of immigrants, I struggled a great deal with feelings of disconnection. There is so much grief that is part and parcel of being diaspora. Displaced from homeland, language, history—handed down culture piecemeal and fragmented. Carrying these stories and this grief inside like seeds, growing ever growing, feeding a burning anger and resentment that modern life and the modern world has very few spaces or tools to unravel or examine.

But Fantasy can ask all the what ifs of history: what if all the victors destroyed and time has lost still remained? It can fill in the gaps between the lines of racist reports written by Spanish clergy—Spanish that I read with more fluency than my stumbling Tagalog.

And so reading and then writing Fantasy became the vehicle by which I could safely unspool and grapple with the history of colonialism and imperialism that created the war, want, and waste that sent my Filipino family across an ocean.

Taking this fragmented pre-colonial history together with re-imaginings of myths and folklore, Saints of Storm and Sorrow is a Filipino-inspired Fantasy in which Lunurin, a bisexual nun hiding a goddess-given gift, is unwillingly transformed into a lightning rod for her people’s struggle against colonization.

It is Lunurin’s efforts to protect those she loves from the crushing realities and abuses of colonialism and its twin tools of greed and religion that ultimately awakens her Goddess and forces Lunurin to act, to break the status quo, and finally face the past she’s become so good at running from.

Did you know, the Philippines is the only country in the world where divorce is illegal? Abortion is illegal and Human Rights Groups have faced backlash for attempts to push against the stance. In addition despite 2012 efforts to increase access to contraception it remains controversial. A once thriving pre-colonial tradition of women-led, and often queer and gender non-conforming spiritual leadership of the babaylan/katalonan/shamans, has been consistently denigrated and pushed to the edges of society, with every tool western powers had at their disposal. The long history of Spanish suppression of many of these shaman-led revolts against colonial rule is brutal and bloody from the earliest days of colonization in the 1600s to the dios-dios revolts of the 19th century.

And though in the modern era the Philippines is one of the most conservatively Catholic countries in the world, I grew up on a steady diet of my grandmother’s stories of the suffering that ultra-conservative Catholicism created in her own life and the lives of her friends and family. From forced marriages in cases of rape, to the dangerous ends women pursued to stay in school if an accidental pregnancy was discovered, to even worse abuses of power the Church allowed to run rampant.

I was told of how war and greed exacerbated poverty that threatened to steal away every gain my grandmother made to better her own life. Of years spent stealing newspaper scraps so she wouldn’t forget how to read when she was forced to leave school. Darker stories about how the soldiers who uphold empire will never face the consequences for their cruelties.

For me the worst thing was the inevitability in my grandmother’s stories, in the lack of accountability or justice, or sense in the suffering of herself and others. There was only grief, only pain.

And so in Saints of Storm and Sorrow I wrote a story where women and girls looked that hopeless inevitability in the face and had the power to say No More. It ends here. It ends with me. In addition to addressing colonialism, Saints tackles difficult realities of sexual abuse enabled by the Church, a resulting teen pregnancy and abortion.

Because sadly, these abuses don’t only live in our past but in our present as well.

In a political climate where women and girls all across the world are rapidly losing rights to bodily autonomy and necessary healthcare, the suffering my grandmother uprooted her family to escape has started proliferating anew all around me. In the year after Texas’s near total abortion ban teen birth rates rose for the first time in 15 years. And every day the reproductive rights of women in the state are eroded further.

This year the 5th Circuit recently upheld a Texas decision to prevent Title X federal clinics in the state from providing birth control to teens without parental consent—effectively blocking any ability for teens with unsupportive parents to control their reproductive health and safety. Decades of progress towards helping women and girls control their reproductive futures and have a chance at education and economic independence is being undone, by a minority of greedy power-hungry men determined to drag us all back into the dark ages.

So I wrote Saints of Storm and Sorrow in part because the writing of it was the safest, kindest space to own my anger and lay my grief to rest. But also because I hope that if we remember to stand together we will discover we have the power to make sure that this kind of suffering goes no further. I hope we can create a truly safe space for all of us, and that we do not repeat and repeat these cycles of suffering. I hope that we can stand together and say No More. It ends here. It ends with me.

Photo of Gabriella Buba Gabriella Buba is a mixed Filipina writer and chemical engineer based in Texas who likes to keep explosive pyrophoric materials safely contained in pressure vessels or between the covers of her books. She writes adult epic fantasy for bold, bi, brown women who deserve to see their stories centered. SAINTS OF STORM AND SORROW comes out June 2024 from Titan Books.
Women in SF&F Month: Amber Chen
Apr
08
2024

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Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Amber Chen! She’s the author of the contemporary webnovel The Cutting Edge, which was adapted for television as an eight-episode miniseries released in 2021, as well as the fantasy story “Hugging the Buddha’s Feet” in Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia. Of Jade and Dragons, her young adult novel coming out on June 18, is described as “silkpunk fantasy about a girl who must disguise herself as a boy and enter the famed and dangerous Engineer’s Guild trials to unravel the mystery of her father’s murder.” I’m thrilled she’s here today to discuss one of its themes in “Using Fiction to Empower Girls in STEM.”

Of Jade and Dragons by Amber Chen Book Cover

Using Fiction to Empower Girls in STEM
by Amber Chen

Few may know that I am, in fact, a scientist. I graduated with a degree in Biochemistry, and I’ve been a science student my entire life, so sometimes I wonder how in the world I ended up writing fantasy novels. I suppose my own inclination toward STEM was what led me to shape the silkpunk world in Of Jade and Dragons, my debut YA fantasy, because to me, science has always been the equivalent of magic. As a child, I remember being fascinated with finding out what made the world tick—whether it was the microscopic structure of a living cell or the macroscopic nature of the universe—and that sort of curiosity and hunger for knowledge is a trait that I have, for better or worse, passed on to the protagonist of my novel, Ying.

When I first wrote Of Jade and Dragons, I crafted a tech-infused fantasy world that closely mirrored the societal structure of Qing dynasty China in the 1600s, one that was steeped in patriarchy and where roles were strictly delineated along gender lines. A girl living in those times would have been expected to abide by those societal expectations, and to dream of stepping out of those boundaries would be unthinkable. That is the world that Ying lives in, and what she has to stand up against in order to achieve her dream of becoming an engineer.

The idea of empowering girls to not only take on but also excel in traditionally masculine fields, like engineering, is an important theme in Of Jade and Dragons, and a theme that is particularly close to my heart. I count myself lucky to live in a time and place where many of these restrictions that were once placed upon women have been lifted, to have been given the opportunity to pursue my interest in science to the highest level, and to have my voice heard in traditionally male-dominated spaces. That said, I realise that this privilege is not uniformly accorded across all parts of the world, and there is still much work to be done to truly level the playing field. The deeply entrenched patriarchy and its accompanying misogynistic attitudes and casual sexism still exist in the realms of science and tech, even in countries that are considered “progressive”, and sometimes when I reflect on the state of our world as it is today, I wonder if we’ve truly moved on from those Qing dynasty days, or if the supposed progress is merely a façade.

Regardless, I believe that fiction is an incredibly powerful tool that we can and should tap on to effect real change in the world, because fiction allows us to show possibilities. To remove the blinkers that we may not realise we have. I would very much like a reader to pick up Of Jade and Dragons and think “hey, maybe a girl like me can build airships and mechanical beasts one day” and then go on to do it the way Ying has—because why not?

Cover of Gearbreakers by Zoe Hana Mikuta Cover of Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao Cover of The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

Some readers have told me how much they appreciate the representation of women in STEM in Of Jade and Dragons, and it always makes me so happy to hear that. This goes to show that there’s still plenty of room for more of such stories and protagonists to fill the shelves! To round off, here are some of my book recommendations for those who are interested in stories featuring girls in STEM or girls generally wreaking havoc in male-dominated worlds (as they should):

  • Gearbreakers by Zoe Hana Mikuta follows the journey of Eris Shindanai, a Gearbreaker who specializes in taking down Windups, the giant mechanised weapons wielded by a tyrannical regime, from the inside. When she ends up in prison after a mission goes awry, Eris meets Sona Steelcrest, a cybernetically enhanced Windup pilot who has infiltrated the Windup programme so that she can bring down the regime from within, and the both of them must work together to achieve their common goal.
  • Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao follows 18-year-old Zetian, who volunteers as a concubine-pilot for the Chrysalises, giant robots that are used to fight aliens that threaten humanity, so that she can assassinate the male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. When her psychic abilities prove far stronger than anyone expected, she attempts to use them to undo the misogynistic pilot system in order to prevent more girls from being sacrificed.
  • The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei follows Asuka, the last member of a space crew picked to leave Earth when it is on the verge of environmental collapse, in order to save humanity. On their journey to a livable planet, an unexpected bomb knocks their vessel off course and Asuka must find the culprit before humanity’s last chance of survival is thwarted for good.
Photo of Amber Chen Amber Chen is a Singaporean-Chinese author of SFF and contemporary fiction. She holds a BA and MSci from the University of Cambridge and also has a diploma in screenwriting.

Amber spends much of her free time living within Chinese fantasy novels and dramas, and also drinks one too many cups of bubble tea. Her debut silkpunk fantasy novel, Of Jade and Dragons, is forthcoming from Penguin Teen in Summer 2024, and her work has also been published in Wilted Pages: An Anthology of Dark Academia. One of her webnovels, The Cutting Edge, has been adapted for television.
Women in SF&F Month 2024: April 8–12 Schedule & Week in Review
Apr
07
2024

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Tomorrow marks the start of the second week of the thirteenth annual Women in SF&F Month. Thank you so much to all of last week’s guests for making it an excellent first week!

There will be more guest posts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week, too. Before announcing the schedule, here are last week’s essays in case you missed any of them.

All of the guest posts from April 2024 can be found here, and last week’s guest posts were:

And there are most guest posts coming up, starting tomorrow! This week’s essays are by:

Women in SF&F Month 2024 Schedule Graphic

April 8: Amber Chen (Of Jade and Dragons, “Hugging the Buddha’s Feet“)
April 10: Gabriella Buba (Saints of Storm and Sorrow, “Dying Rivers and Broken Hearts“)
April 12: Genoveva Dimova (Foul Days, Monstrous Nights)

Women in SF&F Month: Eliza Chan
Apr
05
2024

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Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is speculative fiction author Eliza Chan! Her short fiction has appeared in The Dark, Fantasy Magazine, PodCastle, and other publications, and her work includes stories selected for the Locus Recommended Reading List (“Weaving in the Bamboo“) and The Best of British Fantasy 2019 (“Joss Papers for Porcelain Ghosts“), as well as a British Fantasy Award finalist (“The Tails That Make You“). Fathomfolk, her fantasy debut novel inspired by East Asian mythology and ocean-related folktales, was released in February, and I’m thrilled she’s here today with “Into the Retelling-Verse.”

Cover of Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan

Into the Retelling-Verse
Eliza Chan

At a recent event, I was asked what the lure of retellings was. Why are mythological retellings trending right now? My answer is… Spider-Man.

I grew up with Tobey Maguire as my Spider-Man. (Yes, even the emo Spider-Man 3 that we don’t talk about.) Then along came Andrew Garfield. As an elder millennial, I turned up my nose at him, why do we need another Spider-Man? Tobey was fine. Aren’t Hollywood executives just being lazy and money grabbing? Then Tom Holland’s charmingly boyish Spider-Man came along and I swallowed my words. Even if you hate Spider-Man, you know roughly how that story goes: high school boy bitten by radioactive spider; with great power comes great responsibility; swinging between New York skyscrapers.

We know the story, and yet we are drawn to its retellings precisely because we know the story. When Teletubbies first came on TV it was criticised for having a repeated section in the middle. What an obvious way for them to save money, having the same clip twice! In reality, children love repetition. Again, again. That’s why we sing the same nursery rhymes and listen to “Let It Go” for the umpteenth time on repeat. As adults we pretend we are different, when we are just as comforted by these familiar things. Who has not watched a rerun of a favourite TV show or reread a beloved book?

Take fairy tale retellings. Many of us grew up on Disney fairy tales which were much more sanitised than the original Hans Christian Andersen or Grimm brother versions. Happy endings for everyone. Every children’s story book abridges and rewrites familiar fairy tales with the sensibilities of the time period they are in. I recently read an old nursery rhyme book to my son and hastily glossed over all the whippings and beatings that happened in it. We all do it to an extent. Modern YA and adult books go further, deliberately playing with conventions: from Hannah Whitten’s For the Wolf to Naomi Novik’s Spinning Silver. A familiar template, Easter eggs scattered throughout, and yet ultimately they are not the same stories you remember as a child.

Fathomfolk is a The Little Mermaid retelling. The Disney version is all about love at first sight and wanting something different to what her father wanted for her. In the Hans Christian Andersen original, it’s an unrequited love. It’s a million stabbing knives every time she walks on her newly acquired feet. It’s a literal fish out of water, not being able to fit into her new society, voiceless with devastating consequences. I saw the opportunity to retell the fairy tale to be about the liminal space between land and sea, the culture shock of moving to a new country, the lack of power or agency for minorities groups.

This brings me to folklore and mythology retellings. I love mythology and actively seek out different local mythologies when I go travelling. Fathomfolk was born from all the stories from the sea: from kappas to kelpies, water dragons to sirens. Water is important across cultures and yet female figures in mythology are often reduced to seductresses or damsels. Like many modern writers, I wanted to subvert the trope of a fridged woman with no agency other than to wait for a man. From Vaishnavi Patel’s Kaikeyi to Madeline Miller’s Circe, I am glad to be part of that movement of feminist mythological retellings.

In my Spider-Man filled opening, I didn’t mention the best version: Miles Morales and Into the Spider-Verse. This version is in conversation with the screen versions before, with the comic book versions and with those yet to come. More than that, it’s a version that offers a BIPOC Spider-Man. A female Spider-Man. A spider…pig. It pushed boundaries not simply with representation, but with animation style and plot.

I could have written my themes in Fathomfolk just as easily by using aliens or original creatures of my own creation. Instead, I chose to use figures from different mythologies because of the familiar touchstone. By offering a multicultural melting pot of mythologies, I was reflecting the realities of modern cityscapes and all the stereotypes that come with it. A siren is a seductress. A water dragon is wise and old. I wanted to take what is familiar and subvert it, making everyone, myself included, interrogate our own prejudices and expectations. It’s not the Spider-Verse, but I hope my retelling will continue to be in conversation with all those which came before, and all those that will come after—another interpretation that is both comforting and surprising in equal degrees.

Photo of Eliza Chan
Photo Credit: Sandi Hodkinson		 Eliza Chan is a Scottish-born speculative fiction author who writes about East Asian mythology, British folklore and reclaiming the dragon lady. Her short fiction has been published in The Dark, Podcastle, Fantasy Magazine and The Best of British Fantasy. Her debut novel FATHOMFOLK — inspired by mythology, ESEAN cities and diaspora feels — was published by Orbit in Feb 2024.

She has been a medical school drop-out, a kilt shop assistant, an English teacher and a speech and language therapist, but currently she spends her time tabletop gaming, cosplaying, crafting and toddler wrangling.

Find out more on her website www.elizachan.co.uk.