Aqueductista Events This Weekend

Two Aqueductistas will be talking, reading, and signing at bookstores on Saturday. Nisi Shawl will be appearing at Book People in Moscow, Idaho. According to the Daily Evergreen, this will be a "brown bag lunch" event and that besides reading from Filter House, Nisi will also sing with accompaniment from Brian Clark on guitar. Here a snippet from the article in the Daily Evergreen:

Her work is helping pioneer the capacities of the sci-fi genre beyond the cliches from questioning the most rigid social norms. She will be reading from her latest collection of short stories, “Filter House,” from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at the BookPeople of Moscow bookstore on 521 S. Main St.

“I use science fiction to question the authority of the way things are. It’s good for challenging the status quo and that’s what I use it for," she said.

Defying any branch of mainstream storytelling, Shawl said her ratio of female to male protagonists is nearly nine to one and the women are rarely preoccupied with locking down a love interest. Yet, Shawl said she doesn’t feel particularly aware of trying to write feminist literature.

“It’s not a conscious or preachy thing, gravity is a part of my work too,” she said.

On the other side of the country, in Phialdelphia, Josh Lukin will launching Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States by giving a lecture-- "How Dreams of Freedom Survive in a Conservative Time"-- at Big Blue Marble Bookstore in Mt. Airy at 3 p.m. Here is the bookstore's description:

Invisible Suburbs: Recovering Protest Fiction in the 1950s United States. Reading with Josh Lukin. An examination of fiction from repressed voices in a misunderstood decade, with essays by Stephanie Brown, Ladislava Khailova, Kathlene McDonald, Ian Peddie, Harry Thomas, and Jennifer Worley. Were the 1950s an oppressive or a liberating time? Some scholars argue that the Red Scare, newly institutionalized discrimination against gays, and a public discourse saturated with sexism left wounds in American society. Others trace the origins of sixties liberation movements to the fifties and celebrate America's postwar prosperity, or argue that such new phenomena as rock 'n' roll, teenage consumerism, and Beat poetry gave Americans a new sense of freedom and identity. Invisible Suburbs advances a new synthesis of both views from the perspective of literary scholarship. Josh Lukin is lecturer of English at Temple University. His work has appeared in many periodicals, among them Modern Language Notes, Minnesota review, Comics Journal, and Exquisite Corpse, as well as in the anthology Daughters of Earth: Feminist Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century.

Have to say, I'd love to be able to attend both of these events and am sorry I can't.