This weekend I was trying to participate in #storycraft while making dinner (dinner succeeded, my participation in the chat, not so much). The chat was about characterization, and one guy raised the old question about how do you write someone of the opposite gender. A couple of us pointed out that women are people too, which he didn’t seem to find a satisfactory response (he did get some more specific answers).
I suspect he was writing mainstream, because really, if you’ve got to worry about a few different alien/nonhuman species, men versus women aren’t all that tricky.
Gender stuff is one of the reasons I like to write secondary-world settings. I can declare that on planet x, there are no predefined gender roles. No endless parade of stories about the First Girl to do y. Just people. Perhaps this is cheating, but if I want sexism in my stories, I’ll read the newspaper, and I bet there are other readers who feel the same way.
For you other secondary-world writers, what real-world issues do you like to avoid, or address?
So are they mistakes or are you suddenly reading about a fantasy world?.On the other hand what happens if you pick up a book set in a Canadian city named Hogtown which has a population of four and a half million a weird concrete needle several hundred metres high near its waterfront and a truly terrible hockey team that sets new standards for futility? If the magic is so highly-developed that history has changed or in general that the world of the story is radically other than the world as we understand it then it is effectively a fantastic parallel world that we re looking at..So if we read a story about King Arthur set in England and Merlin casts a spell we re not necessarily reading an invented secondary world.