toft_froggy discussing the worst academic article in the world. A real scientist reviews the Norton anthology of science fiction (North American Science Fiction 1960-1990, edited by Ursula Le Guin and Brian Attebery)."There seems to be a sizeable number of authors in this collection who have contributed vanishingly little to the corpus of science fiction... a disproportionately large number are female." Luckily as a scientist he was able to throw the light of factual quantitative reasoning on the defects of female writers:- "Being of a quantitative mind, I classified the authors according to my own notion of whether they are seminal or, to use Le Guin's term, "ovular".
- Astonishingly, he found that the authors he considered seminal were men, while the ovular authors were women. "This relationship was highly significant, indicating a real sex difference between my constructed categories of seminal and ovular."
More facts:
- "Interestingly, of the 41 stories by male authors, only 4 were not science fiction, while of the 26 stories by female authors, 6 were not science fiction."
- "Of the 41 stories by male authors, I found 31 were good stories and 10 were bad stories, while of the 26 stories by female authors, I found 15 were good stories and 11 were bad stories."
Yes, he 'found' they were good and bad. He did not merely 'feel' this, or even 'think' it. Anyway, I've merely skated over the essay, assuming that the defects in his reasoning are obvious to the casual reader, while
toft_froggy eviscerates it in detail. 