Tag: mary shelley

martymartinloki:

writing-while-female:

damnsmartblueboxes:

teysaoforzhov:

writing-while-female:

damnsmartblueboxes:

writing-while-female:

Yes, a woman invented this genre, but we hate women so how can we discredit her and give a man the credit? 

They did an entire set of episodes on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein here’s the first one:

A valid complaint would be they haven’t covered a female author’s works since those episodes.

If you read what they said it basically boils down to 

Mary Shelly = Creator of Sci Fi and the philosophy of the genre.

Jules Verne = Expanded upon Sci Fi to create the subgenre of Hard Sci Fi.

A subgenre which doesn’t focus on what could possibly happen but what could probably happen. 

The Martian is Hard Sci Fi while say Superman is soft Sci Fi.

A link on the concept: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness

The point is, why do you have to do Mary Shelly down to big Jules Verne up? 

You never see a tweet or headline saying “Jules Verne wrote his first book when he was 35, but Mary Shelly was half his age when she penned her masterpiece”

Men are almost never negatively compared to women.

Why is she even mentioned in a tweet about Jules Verne? And if she is mentioned, why negatively? “Well yes she did this, but he did better”? What is the point of that, unless it’s to take something away from Mary Shelly and give it to Jules Verne.

It’s not necessary and it’s sexist. The kind of sexism that pervades society but because we’re so used to women being put down, especially in relation to men, we hardly notice.

Shelly’s mentioned because they’re linking the first part of the series to the second part. It’s explaining the progression of the genre, not a value judgement.

^^^ This. 

BTW that is the first episode in the SERIES so Mary Shelley is literally the first thing people watching have for context of the history of sci fi.

Then you say something like 

“Mary Shelley invented Science Fiction, then Jules Verne took the next step.”

Or 

“Mary Shelley used science as the basis of her story, while Jules Verne took a more rigid approach to scientific principles”

Or

“We began our series with Mary Shelley, now we’re moving onto her worthy successor, Jules Verne”

Trust me, there are 101 ways to write essentially the same thing without putting one author down. 

Why is this so hard for people to understand?

Because as you said, it is what we are SO used to seeing/hearing/reading that we don’t really see it.  And when we bring it up, those who haven’t been on the losing end of this type of speech don’t see the problem.