To start your morning off right, an excellent rant on io9 about how obnoxious it is when people (like, say, the people running the sci-fi channel) start blabbing crap about how women don't like science fiction. (Speaking as a woman who reads and writes science fiction, and as a woman who used to be a girl who read and wrote science fiction, I can personally affirm that it's crap.)

Read it here,* or see below for a few gems:

"If there's something keeping women away from enjoying science fiction, it's not spaceships. It's not "aliens on some far-off planet." It's the fact that people on our very own planet keep telling us that women aren't supposed to like science fiction. It's a self-confirming prophesy, because the more that scifi creators are told this, the more they imagine that their audience is all boys. So they write rich, believable male characters and boring, cookie-cutter lady characters....Many women wind up assuming that there's something wrong with them for liking SF. After all, everybody keeps telling them that SF is for boys, and the only reason why women would like it is if the definition of SF is "expanded" to include magic and romance."

This strikes me as an especially pernicious stereotype to trickle down to kids and teenagers, because for a lot of people, reading sci-fi is a gateway to getting interested in real world science.  If girls are given the impression that it's somehow weird for them to like science fiction, I don't think that bodes very well for the next generation of female neurochemists and rocket scientists.

But all is not doom and gloom!

When I was a kid/teen, my sci-fi obsession remained mostly a secret shame, because even for someone as irredeemably geeky as the teen me, watching Star Trek and gorging on Asimov, Heinlein, etc, was seen as beyond the pale. Which is why I get so excited that things like Battlestar Galactica, Lost,  Uglies, etc have not only entered mainstream pop culture, but started to dominate it. (At least among most of the people I know and like. Many of whom, by the way, are women.)

Fifteen years (ugh) have gone by since I was a gawky, geeky fifteen year old clutching my torn, dog-eared copy of Stranger in a Strange Land. I'd like to think that if I were a teenager these days, I could carry it with the cover facing out.

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*The comments section is also worth a perusal, not least because someone posted this piece of awesomeness. (The original caption is "How It Works.")