Good thread.

And look, I read Heinlein when I was in high school. But by the time I did I'd already found @dancinghorse and @TanyaHuff and @mercedeslackey and Anne McCaffrey and Ursula Le Guin and @pamelacdean and Dianna Wynne Jones. I grew out of Heinlein & Pern but not others. https://twitter.com/victoriadrew/status/1290879428105392128

I have bought the back catalog of those authors for my kindle where I could. If they're still writing, I buy their new books. Their work has enough depth to grow and change with me, unlike Heinlein's one stupid trick of the author insert banging all the young ladies.

I read SFF pretty voraciously as a teen but because "the internet" was my local bbs and I didn't know about Usenet, I wasn't "in fandom". I was just a fan. I saw the name of the Hugos on book covers but had no idea what it was or how it was awarded until my 30s.

So I had no idea whose work I was supposed to read and revere. I tried reading Tolkien because my Dead Estranged Asshole Father (just my Asshole Father at the time) urged the Fellowship books on me, and I found them intensely boring.

Given that I've always had an intense interest in history, it was @dancinghorse that shaped my expectations of the Fantasy genre, not Tolkien. And boy did she install some high expectations for research and world building. Y'all got a lot to live up to.

Also shout out to the Sword & Sorceress anthologies, edited by the execrable child abuser Marion Zimmer Bradley. I originally tracked them down for @mercedeslackey's story of Tarma's origins and then consistently devoured them because holy shit, whole books of stories about women

I just... I wanted to read about people like me. About women. And I wasn't going to find that in the world of the old men, where women were relegated to prizes for men to fuck.

My understanding of my own gender is different now but that doesn't change my past and what I was looking for then. Honestly it probably says something that I intensely identified with androgynous warrior Tarma, and not just because she got really good horses.

Anyway. Them old white dudes can fuck off. My canon will always be the back catalogs of the women I read as an adolescent.