Tonight in Toronto

A reminder:

Chan Davis and Josh Lukin will be at the Toronto Public Library, the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, & Fantasy, tonight at 7:00, doing one of their fascinating discussion sessions and (perhaps) reading from It Walks in Beauty. 

Because novels have more entropy

The latest issue of Science Fiction Studies, a special issue titled "Science Fiction and Sexuality," arrived in mailbox this week. I expect I'll be posting on the issue itself soon, but in the meantime, I thought the many contributors of The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2: Provocative Essays on Feminism, Race, Revolution, and the Future would like to know that the issue includes a lengthy, strongly favorable review of WCC2 by Jane Donawerth, one that mentions nearly every contributor in the book. Here are a few excerpts from her review:

Contributions range from some outstanding academic essays, to interesting reflections by writers, to a workshop on responding to misogyny or racism in writing workshops, to a blog....

I shall begin with the threads that the hold the volume together, then review the high points. The guests of honor, Laurie J. Marks, and her editor and also a writer, Kelly Link, interview each other about fantasy writing to open the volume and conduct a dialogue on sf to close it.... Writers might be interested in their description of the process of revising and editing, here in Marks's words: "When you're editing, it only affects the particular piece you're working on, but when you're revising, if you change something it changes everything." Scholars will be interested in Link's description of "communal writing," sf writers sitting in a cafe and writing in parallel; she cites herself, Shelley Jackson, Holly Black, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Karen Joy Fowler. At the end of the volume, in an epistolary exchange conducted by email, Link and Marks leave analysis behind and give us pure pleasure, ruminating on the nature of writing, but also on their friendship and the nature of friendship in general. Here are two good quotations from that exchange. In a sentence only a lover of science fiction could have written, Marks tells us, "I think novels need a higher coherence quotient because they have more entropy." On the nature of writing, Links adds, "I want the story to have enough momentum so that at the moment of ending, it's as if the reader has been hurtling along, picking up enough speed as she goes that she keeps on going past the point where the story ends."

The review then goes on to describe and discuss the material between the opening and closing pieces. And then Donawerth closes the review with this:

I would recommend this volume for anyone who has attended WisCon, for scholars and readers interested in the nature of conventions as a forum, for general readers interested in the liberatory end of sf, and for libraries that emphasize popular culture. While I have never been to WisCon, this volume makes me want to come see what all the fuss is about.

Links for a Monday

**Dan Hartland writes about Vandana Singh's and Ian McDonald's work for Strange Horizons.

**On the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, the Fort Worth Texas police raided a gay bar, resulting in the arrests of seven people (for "public intoxication") and the hospitalization of one man with a brain injury inflicted by the police. 200 people turned out to demonstrate against this egregious police violence within 18 hours of the attack. Joel Burns, the city's first and only openly gay City Council member, noting the attack's occurrence on the anniversary of Stonewall, declared that “Unlike 40 years ago, though, the people of this community have elective representation that will make sure our government is accountable and that the rights of all its citizens are protected.” Read about it here.

**In Honduras, the police and military cut off electricity and the Internet (no Twitter there!) and imposed a curfew in the capital city, as citizens took to the streets to protest the overthrow of their constitutionally elected government by a military coup d'etat:

There is virtually no power or Internet in the Honduran capital in the wake of the coup d’etat. Electricity was gradually cut throughout the city, which is being overflown by war planes and helicopters. The few media outlets that continue to broadcast are only airing music.

The police have reportedly fired tear gas to disperse the growing crowds that have taken to the streets to protest.

There is also a blackout in some neighbourhoods in San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in this Central American nation.

Reuters reports that

On Sunday shots were fired, apparently into the air, near barricades of chain link fences and downed billboards erected by the protesters to block off the presidential palace. Some demonstrators were masked and wielding sticks.

Troops in full fatigues with automatic weapons lined the inside of the fenced-off presidential palace. Some covered their faces with riot gear shields as protesters taunted them, and a tank sat nearby, its cannon facing the crowd.

Honduras, an impoverished coffee, textile and banana exporter with a population of 7 million, had been politically stable since the end of military rule in the early 1980s.

Apparently the overthrown president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, had attempted to fire the chief of the armed forces, and the Supreme Court had as a result authorized(???) the overthrow of the president. More details here and here.

Jeremy Scahill reflects on the coup, taking note of US associations and connections of its conspirators, particularly with the infamous School of the Americas and the certainty that the US Government knew it was coming. At the Nation, John Nichols notes Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's "reasonably muscular condemnation" of the coup and the Wall Street Journal's suggestion that the Obama Administration worked (unsuccessfully) behind the scenes to avert it. But Nichols then quotes Roberto Lovato, an expert on US relations with Latin America, who considers "expressions of concern" insufficient:

President Obama and the U.S. can actually do something about a military crackdown that our tax dollars are helping pay for. That Vasquez and other coup leaders were trained at the WHINSEC, which also trained Augusto Pinochet and other military dictators responsible for the deaths, disappearances, tortures of hundreds of thousands in Latin America, sends profound chills throughout a region still trying to overcome decades U.S.-backed militarism.

Hemispheric concerns about the coup were expressed in the rapid, historic and almost universal condemnation of the plot by almost all Latin American governments. Such concerns in the region represent an opportunity for the United States. But, while the Honduran coup represents a major opportunity for Obama to make real his recent and repeated calls for a "new" relationship to the Americas, failure to take actions that send a rapid and unequivocal denunciation of the coup will be devastating to the Honduran people -- and to the still-fragile U.S. image in the region.