Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

We've just launched the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge for 2013!  If you have any questions or comments on the challenge this is the place to post them.  As always we love to get feedback from our members so let us know what you think!

In anticipation of a few questions I'll just mention 2 things here to supplemnet the info on the WoGF page.

- Yes.  We will be adding more women authors all year.  If we get enough requests for a particular author we'll add them in.  No self published authors please.  (Unless they're established authors who are self publishing their work now.)  This is a quality control issue and a practical limit to the amount of time we have to make updates.

- Yes.  We will be adding more books by the women authors we have in our database.  We aknowledge our shortcomings in this regard and are working feverishly to improve the available pool of books.  If we don't have a book that you intend to read for your challenge please let us know and we'll get them added as soon as we can.  There is a missing books thread for these requests.  Any fiction book by the authors in our database is fair game for the challenge.

Welcome to the challenge!

Well, WWEnd is all about genre fiction so we try to stick to those works.  For instance we don't have any of Isaac Asimov's hundreds of non-genre books.  We often end up with novels that stretch the traditional definitions of of SF, Fantasy and Horror, like many of the books on the Guardian list, but those are still the exceptions.  We'll have to determine on a case by case basis as we get requests.

That's more a general policy than something specific to the WoGF though and applies to all our authors.  We try to keep a pretty narrow focus.

Great question!

Glad you like the theme!  You can trace back to Ian Sales' list.  His effort to highlight the imballance caused me to look at my own reading more critically.  Well, that and the gallery of old white men staring back at me from my Authors I've Read list   His Mistressworks list was a great addition to the site then we did the Award Winning Books by Women Authors list drawn from our own data to expand on the issue a bit.  This is certainly a more direct attempt to make an impact on the discussion than just adding those lists though I think they work hand in hand.  Those are great guides to helping WoGF readers find books for the challenge!

I'm glad you're not going to be the one to make that comment

Tantara, it sounds like the WoGF challenge was tailor made for you!  You've got enough authors to do a double challenge if you're up for it.

A double challenge?  Oh my... I'm not sure if that's more exciting or intimidating.  I'll get through the first  one and see where I'm at.  

 I was not sure where to mention this, but as I'm already replying:  I noticed that the James Tiptree Jr. Award is not currently an awards list that WWE tracks.  As it is a sf/f award given to books that highlight gender issues (founded in 1991 by Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler, both of whom are on the site - and it seems to have a large number of female authors on its roster,) it would seem well-suited to this challenge.  (I discovered that it isn't a WWE-included list while looking up Molly Gloss's "Wild Life," which won the award in 2000.  When I found that author and book weren't on the site, I went on to see if the award in general was here.)  I also note that many of the award's winners and nominees are already in place here.

  Anyhow...  I don't know if this particular award has ever been considered for inclusion, but it seems a pertinent mention at this juncture.

 http://tiptree.org/

Hey Allie, glad you like the new theme!  Seems like folks are taking to it which is a big relief!  We thought it would be a good choice but you never know for sure.

I can't wait to see the first reviews rolling in!  That's going to be a big help for me picking my books.

Rhonda, congrats on finishing the GMRC!  I know you were scrambling at the end like a lot of us.  I hope we can match or even surpass the GMRC for participation.  This challenge is much more open than the GMRC that only had 24 authors and we aught to be getting a lot more modern books into the mix which I'm looking forward to.

I know what you mean about the planning part!  So many possibilities.  I've changed my list a dozen times already.  (There was a lot of testing over the last few weeks.)  I should warn you that we're going to try and make you rethink your list throughout the year by adding many new authors and books!

I'm looking into the Tiptree now and you're right.  It's going to be a problem fitting in the short stories.  That's not what we're geared for.  I suspect we'll have to list the book the short story appeared in and make a notation of the story title that was nominated from the collection or anthology.  We'll have to noodle on that one for awhile.

Yeah, our site is heavily weighted towards male authors as a result of the awards and lists that form our core.  (I wonder if we covered short stories too if that would have made any difference?)  So here are some numbers to illustrate the disparity:

• Total authors in our database: 1,239
• Male authors: 907
• Female authors: 332

It's our goal to bring ballance to the force.  Er, uh, add more women authors to get the ratio a little better.  I hope we can get another 100 women added over this next year.  That would be a nice start.  It all depends on how much time we can put into it along with other site features and of course many many more books by the women we already have.

I'm looking forward to more forays for sure and those sound like great authors to me.  For anyone who has not read Scott's Forays into Fantasy blog series I suggest you go check those out.  Well worth your time!

@DrNefario: The SF Mistressworks list is a great place to search for your random pick!  It would not be inaccurate to say that the Mistressworks list was what inspired the WoGF challenge in the first place.  Take a look at the Award Winning Books by Women Authors list too.

@terrilynncoop: First, welcome to WWEnd!  Glad you found us and I hope you'll be joing in the WoGF.  It's going to be be fun if the initial reception is any indication!

As for adding new authors, we already have a list of authors we want to add and the list keeps growing.  We're going to focus on that list and try to get the most obvious gaps filled.  In another thread controuble pointed out that we don't have C. E. Murphy or Mercedes Lackey in our DB so you can see we've got some work to do already.  As long as your friends are not self published they're certainly eligible to be included though to be honest they're necessarily going to be down the list a ways.  It's all about need, demand and the limited time we have to fill those gaps.  Send me their names and info and I'll see about adding them to the list for later:  [email protected].  Thanks!

@burninglove: Welcome to you as well!  Great to see some new folks joinging for the challenge.  You were right, Anne Rice was not on the list.  Her real name is, believe it or not, Howard Allen O'Brien, and when we went through the hundreds of authors in the DB to assign gender, a necessary step for coding purposes, we accidentally tagged her as male.  D'oh!  It's been fixed now and she's showing on the All Women Authors page.  In a quirk of programming she shows under the "O's" because the list is sorted by real name not her pen name, Anne Rice.  Pseudonyms continue to be the bane of my existence.  Thanks so much for pointing that out!

Hey Skynjay, It looks like we really need one!  Let's use this one for author requests specific to the WoGF:  Women of Genre Fiction.  I moved that thread from the suggestions forum since it's specific to the WoGF.

I've added your authors to the list.  Oh, and welcome to WWEnd!