A lot of interesting mistakes

Phoebe Connolly's "How Social Media Is Science Fiction" reports on a recent panel discussion, conducted by Annalee Newitz, which included such sf luminaries as Maureen F. McHugh, Bruce Sterling, Charlie Anders. After noting that Matt Thompson posts "a spectrum that starts with collective intelligence, goes through social media and ends with AI," Connolly writes that Maureen McHugh interestingly

reminded the crowd of Robert Heinlein's definition of three levels of science fiction -- at the first level, we're inventors in the basement, at the second level we extrapolate an infrastructure and at the third level, we're positing changes in people's behaviors as a result of this changed world.

McHugh said we're well into the second level of abstraction in how we think about social media, but we're not yet into the third. Consider multitasking -- in general, we're still bad at it, as an MIT study recently demonstrated. "And we're freaked out. But Socrates was freaked out about literacy!" McHugh noted, and the result of literacy was a written record of history. The benefits we're going to gain from offloading part of our social interaction onto the net remain to be seen.

The discussion also talked about the apparently paradoxical shift away from allowing individuals to adopt multiple identities and keeping their Real Life identity private.

It's not just the conversation that we struggle to control online, it's our very avatars. "Part of being social animals is we construct identities," said [Matt] Thompson. Increasingly, our online avatars demand that our identities merge into one--we are asked to log-on to services using an existing Twitter or Facebook account, we're discouraged from interacting anonymously, be it on Craigslist or a discussion forum. This is a change from the fears about ourselves that we expressed in science fiction of say, the 1960s. Doris Lessing, to pick one example, took up this fear in The Golden Notebook. The novel's protagonist, Anna Wulf struggles with possessing multiple social identities.

Connolly's report ends with: "McHugh captured it best: "I think we're making a lot of interesting mistakes." You can read the entire geeky report here.

The Tiptree Award Book Club

This is up on WisCon's blog:

Join a conversation on Maureen McHugh’s evocative and powerful short story “Useless Things” at the James Tiptree Award website from March 1 to March 31. Moderated by Karen Joy Fowler, this discussion marks the start of the Tiptree Award Book Club, a forum for conversations about the works honored by the Award and the issues they raise. If you are interested in gender issues, the apocalypse, and the intersection of the two, you won’t want to miss this. “Useless Things” can be found in Eclipse 3, edited by Jonathan Strahan, and in the 27th edition of Gardner Dozois’ World’s Best Science Fiction.

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I wish I weren't so busy. This sounds as if it'll be fun and interesting. And "Useless Things" is an excellent story.

2010 Locus Award Nominations

Tis the season for award nominations. A new set is out, this time for the Locus Awards, and some Aqueductistas are that ballot, too. Congratulations to Rachel Swirsky, for yet another nomination for "Eros, Philia, Agape," to Nicola Griffith for "Second Time Around" and to Maureen McHugh for "Useless Things," and congratulations to Ursula K. Le Guin, for Cheek by Jowl (an Aqueduct Press book)!

Here's the full ballot:

Science Fiction Novel

• The Empress of Mars, Kage Baker (Subterranean; Tor)
• Steal Across the Sky, Nancy Kress (Tor)
• Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
• Galileo's Dream, Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperVoyager; Ballantine Spectra)
• Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)

Fantasy Novel

• The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
• Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett (Harper; Doubleday UK)
• Drood, Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)
• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
• Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland)

First Novel

• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)
• The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry (Penguin)
• Soulless, Gail Carriger (Orbit US)
• Lamentation, Ken Scholes (Tor)
• Norse Code, Greg van Eekhout (Ballantine Spectra)

Young-Adult Novel

• The Hotel Under the Sand, Kage Baker (Tachyon)
• Going Bovine, Libba Bray (Delacorte)
• Catching Fire, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic; Scholastic UK)
• Liar, Justine Larbalestier (Bloomsbury; Allen & Unwin Australia)
• Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)

Novella

• The Women of Nell Gwynne's, Kage Baker (Subterranean)
• "Act One", Nancy Kress (Asimov's 3/09)
• "Vishnu at the Cat Circus", Ian McDonald (Cyberabad Days)
• Shambling Towards Hiroshima, James Morrow (Tachyon)
• "Palimpsest", Charles Stross (Wireless)

Novelette

• "By Moonlight", Peter S. Beagle (We Never Talk About My Brother)
• "It Takes Two", Nicola Griffith (Eclipse Three)
• "First Flight", Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor.com 8/25/09)
• "Eros, Philia, Agape", Rachel Swirsky (Tor.com 3/3/09)
• "The Island", Peter Watts (The New Space Opera 2)

Short Story

• "The Pelican Bar", Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse Three)
• "An Invocation of Incuriosity", Neil Gaiman (Songs of the Dying Earth)
• "Spar", Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 10/09)
• "Going Deep", James Patrick Kelly (Asimov's 6/09)
• "Useless Things", Maureen F. McHugh (Eclipse Three)

Magazine

• Analog
• Asimov's
• Clarkesworld
• F&SF
• Tor.com

Publisher

• Baen
• Night Shade
• Pyr
• Subterranean
• Tor

Anthology

• Lovecraft Unbound, Ellen Datlow, ed. (Dark Horse)
• The New Space Opera 2, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos; HarperCollins Australia)
• The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, ed. (St. Martin's)
• Songs of the Dying Earth: Stories in Honor of Jack Vance, George R.R. Martin & Gardner Dozois, eds. (Subterranean)
• Eclipse Three, Jonathan Strahan, ed. (Night Shade)

Collection

• We Never Talk About My Brother, Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon)
• Cyberabad Days, Ian McDonald (Pyr)
• Wireless, Charles Stross (Ace, Orbit UK)
• The Best of Gene Wolfe, Gene Wolfe (Tor); as The Very Best of Gene Wolfe (PS)
• The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny: Volumes 1-6, Roger Zelazny (NESFA)

Editor

• Ellen Datlow
• Gardner Dozois
• David G. Hartwell
• Jonathan Strahan
• Gordon Van Gelder

Artist

• Stephan Martinière
• John Picacio
• Shaun Tan
• Charles Vess
• Michael Whelan

Non-fiction/Art Book

• Powers: Secret Histories, John Berlyne (PS)
• Spectrum 16: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art, Cathy & Arnie Fenner, eds. (Underwood)
• Cheek by Jowl, Ursula K. Le Guin (Aqueduct)
• This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is "I"), Jack Vance (Subterranean)
• Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess, Charles Vess (Dark Horse)

A Handful of Reviews

Booklist (July 2008) reviews Nisi Shawl's Filter House:

In these stories, characters lack power in a traditional sense yet are strong and resourceful in worlds running a gamut from nearly contemporary to the strangest of futures. Beginning with "At the Huts of Ajala," the story of a girl with two heads, and proceeding to "Wallamelon," in which watermelon vines protect a neighborhood, magic is drawn from many sources and is disguised as science fiction, as in "Good Boy," in which a colony is stricken by a mysterious disease and healed by a woman possessed by the spirit of Elegba. The collection ends with the haunting fable "The Beads of Ku," about a woman who bargains in the marketplace of the city of the dead, and the foolishness of her husband. Shawl's stories afford fascinating glimpses into the magical underpinnings of worlds springing from all sorts of places within the world we all know.--Regina Schroeder

Rich Horton reviews Maureen McHugh's story in Plugged In in Locus (August 2008):

"The Kingdom of the Blind" is a good new Maureen McHugh story, from Plugged In, published in honor of her and L. Timmel Duchamp's appearance as WisCon Guests of Honor. This piece intelligently speculates on the nature of spontaneously arising AI in a medical system-- and even more intelligently looks at the work life of the computer system's programmers, particularly the protagonist, Sydney, who learns to better understand the nature of her coworkers [sic] intelligence-- and hers-- as well as the AI's.

And Joe Sherry reviews L. Timmel Duchamp's Alanya to Alanya at Adventures in Reading.


Zeldin’s journey through the invasion and her role as an agent of a government which hates her as much as it needs to use here is not only an interesting concept, but well executed by Duchamp. Most importantly Duchamp has written a highly readable and compelling narrative. Compelling is possibly the perfect word for Alanya to Alanya because most readers will feel compelled to keep going, to turn the page, to find out what happens next all the while being told a story which happens to be “challenging, feminist science fiction””. Alanya to Alanya works and works well enough that readers will want to seek out, run not walk, and grab a copy of the second volume of the Marq’ssan Cycle: Renegade.

You can read the whole review here.

Update on Plugged In

In a post over at io9.com, titled "UNIX-based A.I. and a Siemens Arificial Womb for Men," Annalee Newitz has reviews Plugged In. Here's a snippet:

Need a quick dose of weird, brainy science fiction but don't have time to commit to an entire short story collection? Then consider a new kind of book, from Aqueduct Press, which you might call a short story single, with an A-Side and a B-Side (though both stories get an A from this reader). Plugged In contains "The Man Who Plugged In," by L. Timmel Duchamp and "Kingdom of the Blind" by Maureen McHugh. Both authors were guests of honor at Wiscon in May, and I grabbed a signed copy at that event. We hear that it will soon be available from Aqueduct.

As a matter of fact, copies of Plugged In will arrive at Aqueduct on Friday, so we'll be putting the title up on our Orders page in the next day or two. I'll be sure to let y'all know when we've got it set up.

ETA: Plugged In can now be purchased through Aqueduct's site here.

Plugged In

Update 6/6/2008: Plugged In is now available through Aqueduct's site.


This year at WisCon Aqueduct Press will be offering for sale a slim volume titled Plugged In, featuring stories by this year's Guests of Honor, Maureen McHugh and L. Timmel Duchamp (i.e., moi). Maureen's story, which was written specifically for the volume, is called "Kingdom of the Blind."

“In the kingdom of the blind,” Sydney said, “The one-eyed girl is king.” In “The Kingdom of the Blind,” Sydney, one of the codemonekys who maintain DMS, the software system that keeps the physical plants of the Benevola Health Network running, suspects the recent outages in the system may be a sign of the system’s sentience rather than due to simple corruption of its code. Her fellow geeks view the reset button as a possible if drastic solution for restoring the system’s integrity, but Sydney fears it might be a much too Final Solution...

My story is titled "The Man Who Plugged In," which appeared last year in the MIT Press volume re:skin, edited by Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth, in a gorgeous hardcover selling for $40. As far as I can tell, no sf reader or critic has even seen this story, and since it struck me as such a good match with Maureen's story, I decided to use it rather than an original story.

In “The Man Who Plugged In,” Howard Nies becomes the first male to plug into a Siemens Carapace. And as an ad in the February 2013 issue of The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology notes, the Siemens Carapace is “a prenatal cradle of caring” at the cutting edge of technology, “made of the finest, strongest, most lightweight materials ever produced. Its clean, round lines and soft, silvery matte finish can’t fail to reassure both the parents and the gestational carrier who wears it that the child within is getting better care and protection than any naturally gestated child…”

Sci Fi Reading List, Recommended to Feminists

I wrote this recommended reading list of science fiction work for the folk at Alas, a Blog, who aren't deep into the science fiction culture. I doubt anything on it will surprise anyone in this audience -- since, you know, some of it was *written* by y'all -- but just in case there's anything here that intrigues anyone, I thought I'd toss it up for your perusal.

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Awhile back there was a thread at I Blame the Patriarchy about feminist science fiction. Here's an incredibly incomplete list of some feminist-minded science fiction that I love. The stories and novels won't be shockingly new to most people who are well-versed in fantasy & science fiction, but I think they're newish to people who don't really watch the genre. I'm also going to skip some of the more obvious feminist canon, such as Tiptree, Butler, Delany, Russ, LeGuin, Atwood, and Piercy. If you haven't read them, go out and read them!

With those provisos in mind, I'm confining myself to three short story recommendations, and three novel recommendations, so please don't take this list as representative of anything except the first few wonderful things that occurred to me. I'll probably revisit the topic later. :)

SHORT STORIES:

• Knapsack Poems by Eleanor Arnason
  
  "Knapsack Poems" by Eleanor Arnason is what I've been calling my favorite short story since I ran across it in an anthology last year. It's about some convincingly alien aliens whose physical presence involves a radical reinterpretation of gender and body. Since it's online, I'm not going to say more. Go read. :)
  
  
• Love's Body, Dancing in Time by L. Timmel Duchamp
  
  Love's Body, Dancing in Time is a short story collection by L. Timmel Duchamp, the editor of the feminist publisher Aqueduct Press. In this collection, she explores gender, sexuality, and self-definition, through interesting characters, worlds, and extraordinarily beautiful imagery. All of the stories reflect a deep engagement with feminist ideas, rendered striking and moving through Timmi's unique interpretations.
  
  Timmi's work has an academic cast which the pedant in me really enjoys; one of the stories in this collection is an alternate history examination of Abelard and Heloise, written as an academic paper. My favorite story in the collection is "The Gift," the story of a woman from a world with a binary gender system who travels to another world and falls in love with a man who is a member of a third gender.
  


• With Her Body by Nicola Griffith
  
  The stories in this collection are striking and dark, with strange, beautiful imagery. My favorite story in the collection is "Yaguara," the last story, which carried me away -- past writer brain, past self reading the book.
  
  In the afterword, L. Timmel Duchamp writes a fascinating analysis of Griffith's stories; she discusses Griffith's exclusive use of women as sexual creatures which creates a world where women are not othered in response to men's sexuality. She also talks about the constructs our culture has built around feminine versus masculine fiction -- for instance, how universality is constructed as masculine, so that feminine characters are seen as 'limited' and 'embodied.' While Nicola's stories were so beautiful as to carry me past the intellectual interpretation of the work while I was reading, I was pleased to have the concepts brought to my attention by Timmi's afterword when I was done.

NOVELS:

• Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson
  
  This book weaves through the consciousnesses of three black women in different places and historical periods: a slave in the Carribean; a dance hall girl who was the lover of Charles Baudelaire; and an Egyptian slave girl who worked in a brothel, and later became a saint.
  
  I found this book utterly seductive. Reading it was a profoundly moving experience, for me. The prose is gorgoeus, and there's a kind of fiery, driving strength that propels the tension through disparate places and events. The reader gets to know each character intimately, and Nalo's deft, insightful, poetic prose allows each storyline to carry the weight of untold and unwritten histories. Unsurprisingly, it's really smart about the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, spirtuality, history, and the tension between colonized and pre-contact reality. For more good reading, check out Nalo Hopkinson's blog.
  


• The Slave and the Free by Susie McKee Charnas
  
  The Slave and the Free seems to be a rerelease, compiling the books Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines which were originally released separately. I wasn’t sure whether or not to include these books, because they seem to me to be just as much feminist classics as Tiptree or Delany, but I don’t think I’ve met many non-science-fiction-oriented people who’ve read them. And that’s sad.
  
  These books postulate a post-apocalyptic dystopian future in which women's oppression has become literal slavery, homosexuality has been naturalized, and the men interact according to the hierarchical guidelines of age cohorts. A female slave escapes the dystopian society at the same time as it begins to collapse. Leaving the boundaries of the country where she was born, she joins the Freewomen who live outside. Among them, she finds not utopia, but an ambiguous society. The novels raise sophisticated questions about what utopia and dystopia are or should be, always choosing the complicated answer over the simplistic one.
  
  
• China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh
  
  I wasn't sure whether or not it was fair to call this book explicitly feminist -- not that it doesn't reflect feminist ideas, but feminism doesn't seem to me to be one of its projects. And then, as I was poking around on the internet, I saw that it's a recipient of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award -- which is given to science fiction work that plays with gender. The characters in this novel are indeed portrayed with deep characterization that doesn't abide by gender roles, but I imagine that the Tiptree committee may have been drawn by this book's portrayal of a world in which homosexuality has been heavily stigmatized (in America) and made illegal (in China). In this novel, China is the major power, and America is a colonial backwater, which has significantly altered the political and cultural landscape of the world.
  
  The novel is told in episodic bursts. The main character has three or four chapters, but the people who wind through his life get to tell their own stories, often in ways that don't relate directly to the main character's plot. I was drawn in by the book's simple imagery and prose, and by the effortless way in which it drew deep characters and a startling world. The prose is both deceptively light and emotionally evocative. Each turn on world politics, race relations, and gender, feels effortlessly smooth and accurately drawn.