Today, we’re very excited to welcome back Lavanya Lakshminarayan to the Hive!

We’re thrilled that Lavanya has written the perfect guest post for Women in SFF – a look back on the women in SFFH that have influenced Lavanya over the years. Lavanya also wrote a brilliant piece for us for last year’s Women in SFF: Artifical Intelligence: A Mirror to the Patriarchy.

Before we find out more, we’re sure you’d like to hear about Lavanya’s own upcoming novel, Interstellar MegaChef:

Looking for your one shot to rise to the “top of the pots” in the cutthroat world of interstellar cuisine? Look no further—you might have what it takes to be an Interstellar MegaChef!

Stepping off a long-haul star freighter from Earth, Saras Kaveri has one bag of clothes, her little flying robot Kili… and an invitation to compete in the galaxy’s most watched, most prestigious cooking show. Interstellar MegaChef is the showcase of the planet Primus’s austere, carefully synthesised cuisine. Until now, no-one from Earth—where they’re so incredibly primitive they still cook with fire—has ever graced its flowmetal cookstations before, or smiled awkwardly for its buzzing drone-cams.

Corporate prodigy Serenity Ko, inventor of the smash-hit sim SoundSpace, has just got messily drunk at a floating bar, narrowly escaped an angry mob and been put on two weeks’ mandatory leave to rest and get her work-life balance back. Perfect time to start a new project! And she’s got just the idea: a sim for food. Now she just needs someone to teach her how to cook.

A chance meeting in the back of a flying cab has Saras and Serenity Ko working together on a new technology that could change the future of food—and both their lives—forever…

Interstellar MegaChef is due for release 7th November 2024. You can pre-order your copy HERE

A Room of My Own

or

A post-colonial, millennial, South Asian woman writer’s reflections on reading women in SFFH through the ages

by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

I was a teenager when I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and it shook my reality. It was the first time I perceived my identity as a young woman as the “other,” and realized that a complex interplay of power structures beyond my control would always attempt to impose limits upon me, no matter what I might do to fight it. Capitalism and the patriarchy loomed upon my future.

I rushed to my bookshelf to take stock of the women on it through the ages. Cornelia Funke, Susan Cooper, Diana Wynne Jones and KA Applegate were among the handful—a rare collection in India, acquired in part thanks to friends and family overseas. Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters were there, too, predating Woolf, and representing the literary canon we inherited as a former colony. And there was a smattering of entirely problematic writers whose racist representations were yet to be called into question, or whose bigoted views hadn’t made it to Twitter, yet. The experience of betrayal is another story altogether, but on that day, I heaved a massive sigh of relief at the evidence of women writers on my shelf. Clearly, things had got better since Woolf had written her critical work… but a feeling of unease continued to linger.

My ability to articulate where this unease sprang from sharpened over the years. In university, I delved into feminist critical theory. Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler expanded my understanding of the dimensions of gender and its construction. I stumbled upon Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, who looked at the intersections of race and class with gender. Emi Koyama and Julia Serano introduced me to transfeminism, and Gayatri Spivak finally provided a post-colonial framework from within which I could perceive the shape of my gender relative to the shape of the power structures dominant in the world. There have been many others over the years.

And this is the background against which I choose to write about the women writers—writing science fiction, fantasy and horror, in particular—who inspire me. If you are a woman writer, cis or trans, writing from any part of the world in any language, even as I write these words in English, you are a powerful part of an immense, centuries-long journey to question, criticize, and rebel against a system that has been designed to erase you—an unstoppable force, and you are an inspiration to women all over the world. To be a woman writer at all is an act of defiance and power.

Reading Virginia Woolf gave me my first set of lenses through which I was made aware that the world was not equal for men and everyone else. Over the years, I’ve encountered women writers who have been pivotal to my own journey as a writer, and this is an attempt to reflect upon the impact some of them have had on me.

This is not a history of women writers in genre fiction, but a personal reading history that is springing revelations upon me, even as I struggle to pin it down, relying upon my memory. I’m proceeding chronologically, in the order in which I first encountered these women writers, and this is going to reflect some of the biggest problems we still face as writers from the margins—especially representation and access in geographies as far-flung as India, with the additional baggage of a colonial history.

It makes sense to start with the oldest work on my list: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I’ve read from several perspectives. I first encountered the novel as a “classic,” part of India’s inheritance of the colonial canon. Much of my early reading was informed by India’s colonial past—a legacy that cannot be ignored, but whose examination is an entire essay unto itself. I shall simply say that the adoption of English as my de facto first language was a byproduct; it’s the language I think and dream in, for better or for worse. In this context, as a woman writer, it translates to the adoption of the struggles of womanhood far beyond the borders of my local milieu in South India which comprises the struggles of Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Dakhani women, expanding its horizons. It also permits me to celebrate the many accomplishments of women from across time and space, and that brings me back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written over two hundred years ago. I’m not going to spell out exactly how extensively women were relegated to the sidelines.

I share the view that this novel is a prescient work of science fiction—more relevant than ever before, as humans tinker with AI, recklessly dreaming of sentience without wholly embracing the many ethical dilemmas that must be reckoned with in its creation, including the exclusion of all marginalized peoples who aren’t Dr. Frankenstein, himself. Its timelessness is staggering.

I then skip forward by over a hundred years to Orlando by Virginia Woolf, and a further one-hundred-and-fifty years to The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter, and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin. If that time lapse doesn’t reveal what women have had to work against in genre fiction, I’m not sure what will. These three books are explorations of gender and sexuality, and these writers, and their entire bodies of work, have been instrumental to shaping me as a writer. I’m often moved by Le Guin’s self-awareness as a writer; she demonstrates that avenues to reflect and grow are limitless. I’ve read several essays in which she revisits her earlier work, viewed reflexively as her own feminist perspectives evolved over time. She was once interviewed in The Guardian about the Earthsea series, and said: “from my own cultural upbringing, I couldn’t go down deep and come up with a woman wizard.” That’s a sound reflection of the world she was writing into, and that we often still find ourselves reckoning with.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke was another incredible teenage discovery—an aunt couriered me a well-thumbed copy, and it made me want to write a novel. So did reading Connie Willis and Margaret Atwood.

If you’re paying attention, you’ve probably noticed the absence of women of colour and trans-women on this list so far, and that’s a function of what it was like living in India in the ’00s. We didn’t have bookshelves dedicated to genre fiction, and if we did, they tended to be dominated by white male writers from the Golden Age, with a few notable exceptions who were mostly male, too. Women SFFH writers were practically lore, in my experience. All my recommendations were thanks to my family, and friendly elderly aunties who’d seen and read a wider slice of the world. If publishing included women of colour at all, then their work was impossibly difficult to find in India—ironic, to say the least, given our own past as a colony.

The first time I encountered a woman of colour writing science fiction was when I stumbled upon Octavia Butler and her novel, Kindred. Her centering of women of colour, against a social history of violence, racism, and misogyny shattered me. I can never read her work without being deeply shaken, and it retains relevance in a world that remains alarmingly fraught with inequality, oppression, dehumanization, and violence, including but not limited to the axes of race and gender.

Everything changed when I acquired my first e-reader. With the advent of social media, I was aware that there were more diverse voices in genre fiction, but their books seldom made it to bookstores in India—placing special orders was scarily expensive. But with an e-reader, the doors to entire realms of work written by diverse women were open to me. I devoured NK Jemisin’s The Broken Earth trilogy, its many layers oceans deep with social and political commentary. I delighted in reading Spirits Abroad by Zen Cho, where folklore and social milieu are beautifully and seamlessly woven into every story, and I loved the exquisite coming of age story in All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. Mariana Enriquez, Sofia Samatar and Yoko Ogawa’s forays into surrealism have always blown me away. Aliette de Bodard, Nnedi Okorafor, and Malka Older continue to write spectacular visions of the future.

Closer to home, as an Indian and a South Asian, I seldom encountered science fiction, fantasy and horror written by South Asians, let alone by South Asian women, both in India and overseas. In the late 2010s, it was tremendously exciting to witness Tasha Suri, Vandana Singh, Roshani Chokshi, and SB Divya carve a path forward in global publishing, around the same time as Tashan Mehta, Sharanya Manivannan, Achala Upendran, as well as several short story writers, were doing so in Indian publishing.

Womanhood is an act of several resistances, and writing is one of them. It is impossible to take the world for granted because every woman must constantly strive to claim her place in it. In addition to the patriarchy, and supported by its many facets, we face a reality in which we must also contend with TERFs and gender essentialists, racist feminists (yes, they’re real) who center the white feminist experience, social and economic inequalities furthered by capitalism, where caste and class dictate opportunities and limit choices, and the persistent, still-lasting effects of colonialism that marginalizes and threatens the legitimacy of our voices.

My journey recognizing this began with reading Virginia Woolf, and in the years that have followed, I have been amazed, time and again, at what has been accomplished by all those women who came before, and what is being achieved by women writing today, while simultaneously despairing for the long road ahead. A blend of hope and melancholy underscores my writing, but I would not be writing at all if it weren’t for all the women who have been doing so over the centuries. It is thanks to them that I have a room of my own, so I can be a part of this movement, and journey with it for some of the way, marvelling at the manifold experiences that we bring to the page, creating space for ourselves and for those who will follow.

Interstellar MegaChef is due for release 7th November 2024. You can pre-order your copy HERE

Lavanya Lakshminarayan is the author of Analog/Virtual: And Other Simulations of Your Future. She is a Locus Award finalist and is the first science fiction writer to win the Times of India AutHer Award and the Valley of Words Award, both prestigious literary awards in India, and her work has been longlisted for a BSFA Award. She’s occasionally a game designer, and has built worlds for Zynga Inc.’s FarmVille franchise, Mafia Wars, and other games. She lives in India, and is currently working on her next novel.