It’s All True

Lately I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about how women were not allowed to write science fiction/fantasy before some date.

The date varies, but I’ve heard anything from the mid- nineties to 2010.

And then Scientific American blew the entire thing wide open. Well, almost. They were still slightly wrong. Or cowardly. Perhaps I’m braver, or perhaps just tired of it. At this point the charade grows tedious, and I see no point in continuing it.

I’m here to tell you, yes, it’s all true.

Frankenstein, was of course penned by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary was just a pen name.

All the early science fiction writers, from Andre Norton to Leigh Bracket were in fact male.

And it continued that way. C. L. Moore was a hardworking salesman from Poughkeepsie, and we think he wrote his books in rebellion for the fact his birth place sounded really funny.

The less said about M.Z. B, the better.

Ursula LeGuin was actually Utter LeGuin, a hard-drinking Scottsman with a taste for cigars.

Anne McCaffrey was — as it was widely known in writing circles — an Irish boxing pro, who wrote “her” books on the side.

Margaret Ball, whom we’re honored to have blogging here is in fact Mark Ball, a brilliant and very masculine mathematician. In his youth he held the championship for skeet shooting.

Dorothy Grant? The mad lad is actually Don Grant, and if you saw his discharge papers, you’d completely understand the “Tatical Romance” genre “she” invented.

Cedar Sanderson? Oh, dear. I mean… Like you guys didn’t smell a rat with the genderless name, right? In real life, Cedar is a very tall woodsman who carries a very large ax.

Blake Smith falls in the same “genderless” category. I believe he runs a horse-breeding program in Montana.

Pat Uphoff writes in his spare time from keeping a chop house out in Texas. If you want the true wine of the gods, ask him for a jar of his moonshine.

Al Green, a Oklahoma truck driver, has grown tired of keeping up the pretense. And we’re very happy that Ken Meyers has joined our merry band.

I hope my colleagues forgive me for blowing their cover. I am sorry to say, it is time.

The truth is that women are still not allowed to publish. Not even on Amazon.

My Friend C(harles) V(incent) Walter who writes those delicious alien romances? He’s a lineman. I’m missing our weekly poker games, as he’s down in Florida, working to restore their power.

Lars Montgomery is indeed a space lawyer. And a brilliant and accomplished man. We don’t know where he finds time to write.

Alexander Boykin is indeed a redhead. He has a degree from Heidelberg and is known and feared in the world of competition fencing.

I? I’m Samuel Marques, from Rhode Island. Not only I’m not a woman, I’ve never seen a woman.

In fact, all the women you see on Facebook and online in general are constructs, and clever renders. Some of them are dogs, sure, and FBI agents, but mostly it’s just us guys.

As we all know, our patriarchy, in writing and in life, is so oppressive that women don’t exist. They might never have existed. Or it’s possible they were long ago smothered by the rise of the evil agriculturalist/settled males. At any rate it’s impossible to be sure, though some speculate.

Babies are born from the baby factory, of course, as you and I and all other men were.

Women are a curious and fanciful concept, that has been kept alive by the fantasists of academia, the better to oppress the poor and downtrodden. And us, the guys of words and letters have kept the ruse alive, because it’s so nice to dream of women, and what a world with them would be like.

True liberation will come when some genetic engineer creates a woman in his lab.

Until then, I’m glad to have come clean. It was getting hard to keep this cauldron of lies bubbling.

I hope my co-bloggers will forgive me for finally telling the truth, even if it means outing them as well.

As Kit Marlowe — a man’s man — once said “It would be worth it to tell the truth, just once, even if one had to die for it.”