Over at Tor.com, Kate Nepveu has written an interesting post about depictions of pregnancy and childbirth in sff.
I’m not great at coming up with examples on the fly (it takes me a while to sort through the bookshelves of my mind), but if you have examples either from work you’ve read or work you’ve yourself written, please go over there (or mention here and I’ll post it there) about sff that has non cliched or unusual depictions of pregnancy and/or childbirth and which don’t rely on the same few common tropes.
I should probably comment on the live journal site, but this is so much easier.
I’ve tackled pregnancy twice as a writer, and from opposite ends of the technological spectrum, once with artificial wombs and most recently, with utterly low-tech/natural childbirth in The Dread Hammer. How original the latter was, I can’t say, but it drew a lot on my own experiences. From a literary standpoint though, if the plot only requires that someone be born, there’s no point in throwing in detail for the sake of detail. So if there is something unusual about the pregnancy (however you want to define unusual) it really should be integral to the plot.
Linda, this is actually my “official” blog now — lj seems to be getting far less traffic (or else I just drove everyone off with too many posts about Cold Fire during the release month).
The pregnancy in Dread Hammer is an excellent example of a pregnancy being wrapped into the plot in a way that is natural and necessary.
Which book has the artificial wombs?
I hope you’ll go post at the original post, as I think there is more of this out there and that it is mostly forgotten, not seen, or (in certain ways) elided.