I have a new interview up with Seanan McGuire, the awesome speculative fiction author. We talked about her new portal fantasy, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, her genre-queering approach to writing, and, of course, My Little Pony.
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When you were a kid, what did you read, and what did you feel was missing in the fantasy that you consumed?
I grew up on welfare, which I bring up a lot because it’s really relevant to what I used to read. Growing up super poor, you read what your mom brings home because you can’t get anything else. My mother would come home from flea markets and yard sales with these gigantic boxes of whatever people were getting rid of. She was bringing books with unicorns and space ships on them for her nine-year-old, so I was getting science fiction that was 20 years out of date and I grew up on that.
There were virtually no women [in those books]. What I noticed was that only boys got to have adventures and go out and fight dragons or befriend dragons. Then a woman would show up and she would, 90 percent of the time, be a sexual reward for the guys for going out and having these adventures that were never offered to her in the first place. I didn’t want to sit at home and then have sex with the hero when he came back from going on this grand quest.