One of the various blogs I glance at now and then is Tamara Pierce’spersonal blog. Tamara Pierce is my absolute favorite YA author, and as it turns out, she’s as violently liberal as I am. Reading her take on current events is often entertaining.

Recently, she called my attention to an editorial from the Guardian, titled “When Harry met Sexism”

In terms of which books sell plentifully and are acclaimed among knowledgeable fans, speculative fiction is not male-dominated at all – quite the opposite. It is the critical establishment which marginalises women. Bestselling female contenders remain unacknowledged while their male counterparts are robustly namechecked, absorbed reliably into the official history of the genre.

I have to say – I find it very curious that we have developed a society where we pay people who have no interest in books to pretend to read them (how much of the book do these critics actually read, anyways?), and then lumber forth with their ponderous opining on speculative fiction, which they had no interest in, think is childish at best, and certainly isn’t “high culture”.

I’m vaguely reminded of the ship full of hairdressers and phone cleaners depicted by Douglas Adams, a space ship full of people who had been deemed “too useless” by their own planet, and sent out into space to go colonize another world (or die trying) as an attempt to simply get RID of them. Perhaps we have developed this type of “critic” as an attempt at keeping cranky people out of doing further harm in, say, politics?