Reading for a Monday

Vandana Singh's column is up at Strange Horizons today: Diffractions: On Science, Emotions, and Culture, Pt. 1. She takes up an issue that has long been of interest to feminist science fiction:

There are two main stereotypes of the Western scientist: the mad scientist and the coldly logical Vulcan. One type is distanced from emotion entirely, while the other is literally deranged, with an emotional spectrum restricted to the dark pleasures of world domination. Both are usually male. In the Western perspective, science itself is emotionless, as is the universe at large, a view well expressed in the classic SF story, "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin. Reading Justine Larbelestier's excellent book, The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction, I was struck by how overt early American science fiction is with regard to both women and emotion. In one early SF story it is only after women are eliminated that humanity (i.e. men) can found a truly scientific culture. Other stories and letters from readers of the era reveal an attitude that conflates the existence of women with emotion, and science and real science fiction with things that are emotion-free.

Check it out.

Strange Horizons is also running a review, today, of Kristin Livdahl's A Brood of Foxes. If you haven't already read this novella, you probably need to know that the review is loaded with spoilers. Whether that matters to you or not depends, of course, on the kind of reader you are. 

More e-books from Aqueduct Press

Aqueduct Press has just released several more titles--all of them in the Conversation Pieces series-- in e-book formats. The latest titles are:

Aliens of the Heart by Carolyn Ives Gilman
Candle in a Bottle by Carolyn Ives Gilman
A Brood of Foxes by Kristin Livdahl
Of Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh
De Secretis Mulierum by L. Timmel Duchamp
Shotgun Lullabies by Sheree Renée Thomas

Each can be purchased for $5.95. You can find them all here.

Aqueductista News

--Vandana Singh has joined the ranks of Strange Horizons columnists. She is debuting this week with Diffractions: Soil, Water, and Pure Air.

--Alan DeNiro writes about Kristin Livdahl's A Brood of Foxes on his blog, and Gwenda Bond affirms his opinion on her blog:

One of the best things I've read lately is Kristin Livdahl's novella from Aqueduct Press's Conversation Pieces series, A Brood of Foxes. Her husband Alan may be biased, but I agree with everything he has to say in his post about it: "There are a lot of gestures in the fantasy field lately toward having an imaginary world mimic contemporary concerns–but in A Brood of Foxes, the shape of the narrative changes to reflect the very human cost of these concerns. There are no quick fixes or any lame “journey of the hero(ine)” knock-offs while paying lip service to some kind of transgressive ideal. No boss battles!" It is gorgeous and strange and lives up to the series' title.

-- Fred Cleaver reviews 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin for the Denver Post. He concludes:

Some of the tributes provide insights into the great writers paying tribute, such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Nancy Kress. It's a book of personal messages for someone I only know through her writing, but it's a joy to read these tributes from those who also know her as a friend and teacher.

Kristin Livdahl's A Brood of Foxes

Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the publication of A Brood of Foxes: A Novella by Kristin Livdahl as Volume 29 in the Conversation Pieces Series.

Uncanny, sweet, and shot through with fairytale weirdness, A Brood of Foxes takes Joey Napoleon into a world as bizarre as anyone’s first adulthood—with a few differences. Set in a place where time has its own logic, human and animal is a shifting perspective, and the people we love are always slightly other—and better—than we imagined, A Brood of Foxes faces us with the moral dimensions of environmental disasters—in a troublingly literal way.

You can purchase A Brood of Foxes now through Aqueduct Press's website.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2010, pt. 15: Kristin Livdahl

Reading and Viewing Favorites of 2010
by Kristin Livdahl

I read so many great books this year that it is hard to focus on just a few, but I will. The wonderful combination of the business of cooking and love in Poppy Z. Brite's Second Line really appealed to both the foodie and romantic in me. The book includes two short novels focusing on the beginning and later years of the life-long relationship and intertwined careers of two men, G-man and Rickey. It made me eager to seek out the two novels, Soul Kitchen and Liquor, that these stories book-end.

Justine Larbalestier's young adult novel Liar was clever and surprising. I adored the main character, Micah, who is the most wonderful of unreliable narrators.

While I enjoyed the first book in the young adult trilogy by Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, the most, Mockingjay, the final book, was a strong finish for the series. The main character, Katniss, is an independent young woman who can take care of herself and her family without any special powers. It was a nice antidote to the more typical helpless female characters in some popular young adult series.

In Blackout, Connie Willis returns to her world of time-traveling historians of previous work such as Doomsday Book. Despite some minor quibbles about technology, I felt like I was side by side with her characters through their harrowing adventures in and near London during the Blitz.

I discovered two webcomics this year that I've been recommending to anyone who will listen. Bayou, by Jeremy Love, is set in Mississippi during the 1930s and follows young Lee Wagstaff through her dark encounters with racism and creatures from southern and African American folklore. Both the writing and the artwork are rich and lush. Originally available from the now defunct Zuda Comics, you can now purchase the first volume, which collects the first four chapters as a graphic novel. The second volume is coming out in January. I also found it available by download through the ComiXology and Sony. The first chapter is free, so you can try it out. I was able to download it to my iPhone with the ComiXology app.

Digger, by Ursula Vernon, can be found here. Digger (short for Digger-of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels), a wombat, finds herself negotiating a strange world inhabited by characters such as the god Ganesh and a matriarchal hyena society.

For movies, I'd recommend the grim and tough Winter's Bone, winner of the 2010 Sundance Grand Jury Prize. Jennifer Lawrence is absolutely amazing as 17-year-old Ree Dolly, raising her young brother and sister and caring for her ailing mother while trying to find her missing, meth-cooking father.

I also recommend Restrepo, a fast-paced, eye-opening documentary by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington that follows their year embedded with a platoon in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the toughest deployments in the world.

Ink is a dark, action fantasy about love, sacrifice, and redemption. The story follows Emma, wonderfully played by the young Quinn Hunchar, who is stolen from her bed into a battle between good and evil, and, her father, John, who is facing his own battle.

While Ink has an epic feel, Lo, also a dark fantasy with themes of evil and love, is more personal and heavy on dark humor. Justin summons a demon to help him find his missing girlfriend, April. Lo has the feel of a play and is almost all dialogue between the Justin and the demon, Lo, with a few staged flashbacks.

Kristin Livdahl lives in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota and works in animal welfare. Her novella, A Brood of Foxes, will be appearing in January from Aqueduct Press as volume 29 in the Conversation Pieces series. She runs Rabid Transit Press with Christopher Barzak and her husband, Alan DeNiro.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2007, Pt.4: Lesley Hall, Kristin Livdahl, and Wendy Walker

To continue with the lists...

Lesley Hall:

In any year when I re-read Middlemarch for the long-lost-count-ofth time, it is going to be The Best Book I Read This Year. Unless, of course, I've also re-read Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (certainly due for a re-read), in which case it would be a tough call to make. My major fiction discovery this year has probably been E. H. Young, who wrote quietly but definitely subversive 'domestic fiction' during the 1920s to 40s, much of which has been reprinted of recent years by Virago and by Persephone Books.Young's books are particularly engaging when they focus on the lives of relatively middle-aged women and the stories they continue to have, as in Miss Mole and Chatterton Square. The works of neglected early modernist writer May Sinclair are also becoming much more available - this is surely something that could not have happened without the internet, first to demonstrate the ongoing interest in this fascinating writer, and then to facilitate Print-On-Demand production and dissemination of the texts - and I managed to get hold of and read several of these.

There have been some really excellent new books out this year, both non-fiction and fiction, especially genre fiction. I've just been updating the Recent Recommended Reading page on my website after several months of letting it lapse, and my thoughts on a range of recent publications can be found there.

I've seen a whole lot fewer films than I've read books: they included an assortment of new movies, plus a number of classics - leaning heavily towards screwball comedy with a seasoning of Rogers/Astaire musicals (which perhaps count as fantasy, especially those sequences when, the protags having finally overcome the obstacles to their happy union, the whole world appears to break out in dancing). I have completely failed to keep up with any of current TV series. The media work that struck me most this year was definitely the 1996 television series Neverwhere, with a script by Neil Gaiman (it has also been turned into a novel and a graphic novel), recently out on DVD. I found this short series (only 6 action-packed episodes) quite amazing.

It takes place in a world where a phantasmagorical 'London Beneath', drawing on Hogarth, Dickens and Lewis Carroll, co-exists with the London we know. This is brilliantly depicted, drawing on the real-world underside of London - the cathedral-like Victorian sewers, the underground train system, the subterranean rivers, as well as the more metaphorical underside consisting of the invisible wreckage of urban life - and provides bizarre versions of the already evocative place-names of the city. Old Bailey is an aged eccentric living on the rooftops, there is an Earl with a Court endlessly moving in a Tube train, Hammersmith is a metal-worker, and there is a real Angel living in Islington. One of the characters remarks at one point that London Beneath has little bubbles of preserved history all over it, which is also true of the London we know, even if these don't consist of a camp of deserters from the Roman legions.

The story - the chase, the quest, the ordeals - are exciting and suspenseful as well as full of mythic resonance in themselves, but what I particularly liked was the very clearly multi-cultural nature of this hidden London and of the main group of characters, and the various riffs on conventional gender expectations. Door, though suffering from the massacre of her family and in extreme danger, is not a helpless damsel in distress - she has significant powers of her own, which other people want to use. Richard is not a macho hero but a version of the fairy tale innocent who intervenes to help someone with unexpected consequences. His ordeal is about overcoming inner doubts and fears and facing them down, rather than defeating an external enemy. While he is the viewpoint character - the Alice who falls into this underworld - he is not the central figure of the story but a sidekick in the quest at hand, even if one who performs several necessary tasks.

I'm not sure it's for everyone (there are undoubtedly some criticisms that can be made of the production) but I found it haunting and memorable.

Kristin Livdahl:

I spent most of 2007 catching up on books I missed from previous years and following random fancies with my husband through Netflix such as Paul Verhoeven (not Showgirls) or South Korean movies. So, I didn’t read as many new books as I usually do nor see as many movies. The Verhoeven spree did lead us to go see his latest movie, Black Book at the beginning of the year. The movie is set in the Netherlands during World War II and stars the fabulous Carice van Houten as Rachel, a Jewish singer who begins in hiding and eventually goes undercover in Nazi headquarters for the Dutch resistance. She gives a superb performance and the movie sparked a few good discussions about Verhoeven’s portrayal of women and attitudes about sex. My year was book-ended with very good, yet relentlessly dark movies as I just saw No Country for Old Men. Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh is one of the scariest characters I’ve ever seen in a movie.

For TV, I really enjoyed a couple of new series this year. AMC’s drama, Mad Men, is set at a Madison Avenue advertising agency in 1960, a setting that provides a great backdrop for an exploration of gender, class, sex, and nuclear family politics, including a chilling look at the psychiatry of the era, as well as a series of interesting story lines. I’ve also really enjoyed Saving Grace, starring the wonderful Holly Hunt as Oklahoma City police detective. Her character Grace is reckless and unabashedly sexual with a deep, caring heart and sharp wits. The supporting cast is great, especially Leon Rippy as Earl, the angel sent to help Grace.

For books, I really enjoyed two books marketed as young adult novels, China Mieville’s Un Lun Dun (Del Rey, 2007) and Patrick Cave’s Sharp North (Athenuem, 2006). (Sharp North came out in 2006 but I didn’t get it until this year, so I’m including it!) Both featured strong female main characters on nonstandard quests. I particularly enjoyed Mieville’s play on the hero-sidekick trope. I was introduced to Joe Sacco when he came to town for a talk recently and that gave me a chance to pick up the beautifully bound, special edition of Palestine (Fantagraphics, 2007). Sacco is a reporter using the comic form. (In his talk, he stated that he preferred that term to graphic novel.) He puts himself into his reporting and this provides an illuminating, personal view of his visit to the Occupied Territories. Finally, there were two other new books that I really enjoyed but want to disclose that the authors are both friends of mine. M. Rickert doesn’t need me to recommend her first collection of stories, Map of Dreams—her recent World Fantasy Award wins should do better than I can—but really this collection of dark fantasy and horror is not to be missed. Christopher Barzak’s bittersweet and deeply moving novel, One for Sorrow, is also a debut and puts a new twist on both coming-of-age and ghost stories. Both are highly recommended.

Wendy Walker:

My reading is completely determined by what I am writing at the moment, either as contributing to it or affording escape from it. So my reading this year tended to fall along the fault line of what I intuited to be relevant to the origins of Gothic literature, and what could take me as far away from that subject as possible.

The following outstanding books contributed, directly or indirectly, to my understanding of Gothic:

Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (history/anthropology)
Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (novel)
Rohan Kriwaczek, An Incomplete History of the Funerary Violin (alternative history)
Roy Heath, Kwaku, or The Man Who Could Not Keep His Mouth Shut (novel)
Ingeborg Bachmann, Last Living Words (fiction and poetry)
Eliot Weinberger, What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (essays)
Elechi Amadi, The Concubine and The Great Ponds (novels)
Yashar Kemal, Memed, My Hawk (novel)
Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine and Fontamara (novels)
Flora Tristan, Peregrinations of a Pariah (travel and memoir)
Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language (history/cultural studies)
Tete-Michel Kpomassie, An African in Greenland (travel and memoir)

For escape I found the following books completely successful choices:

Torgny Lindgren, Light (novel)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale (autobiography)
Sigurd Hoel, The Road to the World’s End and The Troll Circle (novels)
Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe (novel)
Margaret Wertheim, A Field Guide to Hyperbolic Spaces (art/mathematics)
Olivier Cadiot, Colonel Zoo (novel)
Yuri Rytkheu, A Dream in Polar Fog (novel)
Philip Rawson, The Art of Tantra (art history)

In film the Gothic seems to be flourishing in documentary and semi-documentary form around the world. Here are some must-sees that fall into the unacknowledged genre I call “environmental/industrial Gothic”:

The Charcoal People
Iron Island
The Devil’s Miner
The Boys of Baraka
Turtles Can Fly
The Falls

and other Gothic:

The Magdalene Sisters
The Lives of Others
Tidelands
Osama (not about Osama bin Laden, but about a young woman who is a brilliant carpet weaver who must disguise herself as a man so she can support her family)
Magic

and others not Gothic but also great:

The Weeping Camel
The Cave of the Yellow Dog
I’m Not There