The Geek Feminist Revolution: Essays

I've always considered myself a geek and I've always considered myself a feminist even when others would try to paint it as a bad word. What is a feminist but one who wants equal rights and pay for women all over the world. I know that white women in the United States make 79 cents for every dollar a man makes [Hispanic women make 55 cents and African American women make 60 cents. Asian American women make 84 cents.] but that does not really hit home until you read this book and see what the author goes through as a female writer of science fiction/fantasy novels. Also, I didn't realize how women still get looked over for jobs for various reasons even though they are unfounded. The example I will give here is when the author was working at a movie theater and was up for a manager position but was passed over because it was assumed she would not be able to pick up the sixty-pound film reels which were part of the job. The thing was, she could. Of course, she had no idea at the time that this was happening. I thought we'd left that stuff behind. This book is about a revolution that is happening in the world of geekdom. Women have always been geeks but over the years our numbers have increased and some of the white boys are getting upset with the disruption of the status quo. "Women have gone from making up 25 to 30 percent of gaming audiences just ten years ago to over 50 percent of video game players, and 40 to 50 percent of creators. Forty percent of science fiction authors are female, as are 60 percent of speculative genres. Thier voices, their presence cannot be denied or explained away with talks of tokenism and exceptionalism. Women are here." This author is the great-granddaughter of resistance fighters from France and studied resistance movements in South Africa for her Master's degree. She knows how to fight back and isn't afraid to do so. She also believes that she needs to in order to make things easier for those that will come after her. She's been fighting for over ten years now through her blog and in a way her books which broke barriers by featuring strong women characters and characters that are from the LGBT community. She has won the Sydney J. Bounds Award and the Kitschies Award for her first novel, God's War, and the Hugo award twice, once for a blog she wrote that is included in this book and has been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Nebula Award, and the Locus Award among many others. She is well qualified to speak on this subject. The first section of this book is titled "Level Up" and deals with helping you to try to hone your writing skills. One of the most important lessons is persistence and that anyone can be a writer if you keep at it long enough. Also how the book business is, in fact, a business and a cutthroat one at that and you will have to be tough to survive it so make sure that this is really what you want. She stresses the importance of responsibility of writing. That what you write is important and you have to own it so make sure you are not reckless or get something wrong or perpetuate a damaging stereotype. The second section is titled "Let's Get Personal" and lets you get to know her. She talks about why she writes what she writes, which is dark fiction and about how she has always been overweight and that that is just how she is built even though she eats healthy and excersises and how that has affected her life. When she lost a job after being very sick and put in the hospital where she found out she was Type I diabetic she needed to stay insured or risk having her diabetes being considered a pre-existing condition. So she paid a lot of money for private insurance while she looked for a job and eventually ended up living on the couch of a friend and using expired insulin and testing the minimum amount of times. Then she lucked out and got a job working at a company that paid for full coverage with no cost paid by her. She also writes about dealing with online criticism and being a rebel and fixing a broken system. The third section is titled Revolution and it's just that: a call to revolution. It's meant to inspire you to be the hero and go out shake things up and do your part. Yes, she does do one essay on Gamergate and one on Sadpuppy. She also covers bullying and censorship online. And the bullying can take the form of trolls whose only goal is to upset you in any way they can with suicide the ultimate prize. Then there's those who call a SWAT team to your house, stalk you, and threaten your life and there's nothing the police can do or are willing to do about these people. They tell women to just stay off of the internet the way you would tell a woman to avoid getting raped to stay at home. Maybe the laws need to be more strict. Also included in this section is her Hugo award winning blog "We Have Always Fought: Challenging the 'Women, Cattle, and Slaves' Narrative". This blog focuses on how women have fought in wars across time and have largely been ignored. This book really made me rethink what it is to be a woman and a feminist. It also inspired me to take up the banner and be a part of the revolution. The essays were quite interesting and if you are a blogger or writer you will definitely get something out of this. But even if you are only a geek this book is well worth reading. Quotes It’s easy to pretend you’re “normal”, just like everyone else. But normal is a lie. Normal is a story. -Kameron Hurley (The Geek Feminist Revolution p 104) For every good you do, you do harm somewhere else. Maybe sanity is simply accepting this truth, and carrying on regardless, and doing the best you can. -Kameron Hurley (The Geek Feminist Revolution p 197) The truth is that who is good and who is bad is highly dependent on who wins, and whose point of view we’re writing from. -Kameron Hurley (The Geek Feminist Revolution p 203) Life is a series of unrelated incidents. It is the human mind that seeks to string them together into narratives, into story. It is the human mind that gives events meaning. -Kameron Hurley (The Geek Feminist Revolution p 274)

There are some great thoughts in the collection. I found some of the essays really motivational and empowering, others hurt, but all are very well written.

I have a confession to make – I haven’t read any of Kameron Hurley’s novels. Don’t get me wrong: I have every intention of reading them, but they’re currently buried on the TBR mountain along with a couple dozen other authors I know I want to read. I just haven’t yet, and honestly, while I know they’re going to be fantastic books, they aren’t why I’m a fan. I stumbled onto Kameron Hurley on Twitter when someone linked to one of her blog posts on the writing industry (probably Chuck Wendig, but I can’t be sure – I’ve been following her blog for too long to narrow it down at this point). It was an instant ‘yes’ for me – Hurley’s no-nonsense, honest approach to talking about what really goes on behind the scenes in the publishing industry was both informative, depressing as hell, and encouraging by turns (depending on my mood when I reread it – and I did reread it multiple times, along with a good number of the rest of the blogs in her archive). I shared the blog with my writing group; they shared it with other writer friends. All in all, it was more than worth a read. After than I followed her on Twitter, signed up for her newsletter, supported on Patreon; basically if there was a way I could get access to her words, I went for it. I knew there were others floating around in the ether – ones published on different sites or far enough back in the blog that I hadn’t seen them. But hunting down all of them was going to take more work than I was up for at the time. Then I got word she was publishing THE GEEK FEMINIST REVOLUTION, a collection of various essays she’d previously written plus new ones written specifically for the book release. I preordered so, so fast, guys. As it happens, one of Hurley’s most well-known essays, “We Have Always Fought,” is one I hadn’t read before, but damn is it ever fantastic. All of this book is, quite frankly. Essays are a format I rarely read in book form; I think the last one was FINDING SERENITY, and I bought that one mostly to appease my Browncoat sensibilities. Essays just aren’t something I go looking for often. That will be changing after this one, though damn but the bar is set high now. I could give an in-detailed review, but honestly it’s hard with the breadth of topics Hurley covers here. Just trust me when I say if you’re a geek and even remotely feminist, this really is an essay collection you’ll want to read. I’ve lucked out in that I’ve got the type of friends who, whether they’ve heard of Hurley or not, have seen the book cover and gone, “Ohhhh….” And most of them promptly asked to borrow it when I finished. A good chunk of those ended up ordering before I could lend it to them. Following Hurley online, I saw her say over and over again that this book was released almost in a rush due to just how topical, just how “right now” the premise is, and I think she and her agent were right to put a rush on it. However, I don’t think it’s a book that’s going to go out of style anytime soon. I’ve re-read her blogs multiple times, and I have a deep suspicion the essay collection will be no different. It’s just – hell, it’s worth a read, y’all. Not sure whatever I can say in praise. It’s worth a read (or reread – or several).

I hate to admit that I hadn't read anything by Kameron Hurley until seeing this book mentioned on Twitter. It sounded fascinating, and that impression proved true. The Geek Feminist Revolution is a powerful, moving discussion of life, culture, and - oh, yeah, - great insight into writing. Other people have reviewed the individual essays better than I can. I want to talk about the feel of the book. The essays cover a wide range of topics, but at the core is a spirit of endurance. Not the "beaten down by life & endure the suffering" type of endurance - no, this is the spirit that says live your life, stand your ground, know it may be hard and unfair, but you can do this and on your own terms. It was a bit painful to read some experiences similar to my own, but it was even more motivating. There's something to be said for the validation of shared experience, even when we're not looking for it. Perhaps more important than the above, the essays describe personal struggles in a way that puts the reader into the experience far better than anything I've read before. I've struggled to explain what it was like to be a female geek back before being a geek was cool (though, on the plus side, far fewer online trolls!). I haven't even tried describing my experiences being a woman in a male-dominated tech field back then - partly because that's improved greatly over the years, but also because it's not something that's easy for people to understand unless they've experienced it. The Geek Feminist Revolution makes these types of experiences understandable and very real.

Really solid collection of essays, and opinions from a really interesting in reading writer. Her essays have made me want to read her fiction.

Had I known this is a call to arms for those who care about the future of science fiction and fantasy, I would have said "Oh that applies less to me than pretty much 0.00001% of the population". I don't like either genre, have never participated in flaming, in fact I'm pretty oblivious to comments sections, period. I like memes, but not as much as reading my daily New York Times. I don't aspire to "bad-assedness" for myself or my daughters, and I find author Kameron Hurley's writing here too colloquial and pat for my taste. But I'm glad I read it anyway because there were some points that I appreciated, as a feminist in general (body shaming, self-defense, double standards, etc). Hurley is brutally honest about mistakes she's made, her medical history, and freely offers advice for would-be Sci-Fi Fantasy writers and marketers alike. There weren't a lot of names Hurley dropped that I recognized, but those I knew I liked - with the exception of Claire Messud (had no idea she wrote sci-fi fantasy): Isaac Asimov (did not know he was a perverted misanthrope!), Anita Sarkeesian, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and William Gibson. I would whole-heartedly recommend this book to geek feminist aspiring sci-fi fantasy writers.

The Geek Feminist Revolution collects over 30 of Kameron Hurley’s non-fiction essays, on a range of topics: being a geek, being a feminist, being sick in the US, being a writer, being a woman SF writer, being a copy writer, sexism, sexism in SF (both in the community, and in the literature), being trolled. Some of these pieces are from her blog, one is her magnificent Hugo award winning essay “We Have Always Fought: Challenging the ‘Women, Cattle and Slaves’ Narrative” (reprinted here with added illustrations), some are new to this collection. All are worth reading. The essays cover a wide range of topics, yet there is a common theme running through many of them: that of writing; from being a writer (including the value of sheer persistence, which here has to be read to be believed), to reviewing and critiquing the literature and community, all from an unabashedly feminist perspective. As always with books about writing, I look to see how well they take their own advice. Here, the prose style is admirably transparent, punchy, and readable. And the content is passionate, insightful, and well-argued. These essays make fascinating, if sometimes uncomfortable, reading. Recommended.

Lovely book. Just read It.

After reading this, i think that every storyteller, every person who reads, writes, publishes etc. should read the first collection of essays. The Geek Feminist Revolution is a pretty decent starting point for people starting to get into feminist non-fiction. It takes on a more liberal feminist approach, but with points that really encourage you to think about,