Links for the Weekend

It's been one of those days. I spent several hours of it tramping through the rain so that I could get one of my precious electronic gadgets fixed. (Seattle's pretty decent bus system proved inadequate in this case.) I'd never crossed the Montlake Bridge (which is a drawbridge) on foot before, and so made the astonishing discovery that when buses cross its steel grid, they make the cement sidewalks running along the sides tremble in a rather scary way. So, a bit later than I'd planned, here are a few links of interest:

--Nicola Griffith, Hard SF and Soft, or Girls vs. Boys. Here's a brief taste: "For the Old Guard, a novel’s hardness depends to some degree on the biological sex of bodies entwined. Women are perceived as literally and metaphorically softer than men. If the viewpoint character having sex in an SF novel is a woman, the squick factor is doubled. If she’s having sex with another woman, the Old Guard passes out."

--At Locus's Roundtable, Karen Burnham speculates about what in New Wave sf makes readers today uncomfortable.

--Abigail Nussbaum sounds the clarion for A Few Good Women: A Call for Reviewers at Strange Horizons.

--N.K. Jemisin writes an open letter to Hollywood: Dear Hollywood: How’s That Bigotry Working Out for You? ---an absolute must-read.

--Gillian Pollock has posted an excellent collection of guest posts for (last month's) Women's History month. You can see the list of guest posts by Lucy Sussex, Ann Vander Meer, Jane Routley, Cheryl Morgan, and numerous others, here.