Considering that the original modern science fiction novel-a thriller no less!-was written by Mary Shelley, what happened in the intervening two hundred years such that you cannot find a single female-authored book in the recent popular works of this subgenre? If I search for “techno thriller novels,” I get Michael Crichton (he’s inescapable), Tom Clancy, and Dan Brown. For example, if I Google “science fiction thriller novels,” the first books that come up are The Martian by Andy Weir, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, and then Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. When I say “dominant,” what I really mean are the name that are most commonly associated with these fields. I will pause here to note that in all three of these fields-thrillers, hard SF, and engineering-I can list numerous counter examples of excellence. Without that struggle, the associations become self-fulling prophecies. It takes effort to overcome these associations, whether you fit in the stereotyped demographic or not. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they do not permeate our popular consciousness.
Why do we struggle to break free of these narratives and associations? Because we have so few counterexamples that are publicized.
Unfortunately, many times the statistics bear these out in reality, too. School teachers are women, and academics are men. Engineers are Asian startup CEOs are white. We live in the year 2021, and yet we persist in associating certain jobs-and certain types of stories-with specific groups of people. (In contrast, see any fiction involving faster-than-light spacecraft, anti-gravity, or time travel.) Here, too, is a domain whose bestsellers are dominated by white men. This subgenre encompasses stories whose speculative science and technology elements do not put a strain on credibility. The same phenomenon appears in so-called “hard science fiction,” which is another label that people attach to Michael Crichton’s novels. Over almost 25 years in the industry, I have not seen these ratios improve. From the moment I set foot on the Caltech campus, to the most recent tech job I held, I found myself and my fellow female engineers vastly outnumbered by our male cohort. I went to Caltech to major in astrophysics, got sideswiped by computational neuroscience, and ended up working in electrical and computer engineering.
I didn’t start my adult life as a writer.
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