Friday afternoon

I had very little to do with getting Aqueduct Press set up in the Dealers Room this morning. Mostly I stood around and admired the clever new bookmarks Kath had made and snapped pictures of Tom, Kath, and Lynne cutting open boxes and arranging books on the tables, making order out of chaos. And then I had a pleasurable lunch (perch!) with Lesley Hall, after which we visited a store that calls its the Community Pharmacy to buy aspirin-- a pharmacy that prominently features homeopathic remedies in its window and is redolent of the scent the soaps it also sells.

On my return to the hotel and the Dealers Room, I began dispensing Aqueduct's yearly swag for authors attending. (Since I'm an Aqueduct author, I get one of these, too.) Kath made these, using beads that spell out AQUEDUCTISTA. Since Kath and Tom have the sales apparatus working just fine without me, I've been doing nothing but talk to our first visitors to the table. In one such conversation, Margaret McBride told me that she recently counted up all the books on the Tiptree lists-- winners, short list, Honor Books, and long list-- and that are almost 400-- and she's not only read all of them but own copies of most of them. That made me recall how I did that myself for the first few years, but somehow eventually fell behind...

Oh, and by the way: Karen Joy Fowler is organizing a book club for reading Tiptree winners and Honor Books. There's an ad in this year's souvenir book about it. It says that to join the Tiptree Bookclub, one needs to "send an email tobookclub@tiptree.org and tel us why you'd like to join the bookclub. You will be enrolled and given a password with which you can participate in the on-line discussion."

Now I've come upstairs to lie down a little, but I thought I might first post a few pictures. I particularly wanted to get some pictures up showing the full complement of stock on display.

A little more on the 2009 Tiptree Awards

One of the interesting things about the Tiptree Award is that its juries often provide comments about their choices. I had to rush off to my semi-annual dentist appointment this noon, so I didn't have time to post either the jury's specific comments on works published by Aqueduct or the long list.

Here's the long list:

Stephanie Shaw, “Afterbirth” (in Interfictions 2 edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak, Small Beer Press 2009)

Jeremiah Tolbert, “The Godfall’s Chemsong” (Interzone 224, 2009.09-10)

Helen Keeble, “A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, as Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc” (online at Strange Horizons, 2009.06.01-08)

Sarah Schulman, The Mere Future (Arsenal Pulp Press 2009)

Cat Rambo, “Ms. Liberty Gets a Haircut” (online at Strange Horizons, 2009.10.26)

Shweta Narayan, “Nira and I” (online at Strange Horizons, 2009.03.16)

Sylvia Kelso, Riversend (Juno 2009)

Claire Light, Slightly Behind and to the Left (Aqueduct Press 2009)

Alaya Dawn Johnson, “A Song to Greet the Sun” (online at Fantasy Magazine, 2009.10.26)

Xiaolu Guo, UFO in Her Eyes (Chatto & Windus 2009)

And here's the comment on Vandana Singh's Distances:

Singh has packed this novella-length work with an amazing complexity. Distances is: the story of a woman’s development as an artist in a context where science, art and religion are indistinguishable; a meditation on the uses of knowledge and the power structures they engender; and a nuanced depiction of cultural difference, loss and exile. While not as directly focused on gender as some other works on our list, we saw Distances as a work that expanded and challenged a number of inherently gendered cultural categories. Also, almost incidentally, there are some very interesting depictions of alternative sex and gender arrangements.

And finally, here's what they say about my Marq'ssan Cycle:

After reading the thousands of pages in L. Timmel Duchamp’s five-volume Marq’ssan cycle (Alanya to Alanya, Renegade, Tsunami, Blood in the Fruit, and Stretto, following decades of changes across the world in both large-scale politics and the everyday interpersonal beauties and violences of individual lives, you don’t emerge quite the same as you were when you went in.

Gender is a central focus, as we experience a very gender-segregated society largely from a female point of view and occasionally from that of a post-gender alien species. But any separation of one of the cycle’s themes must necessarily be a shallow depiction of what it is like to read these novels.

Some readers will focus most on the story of human engagement with an utterly different alien race, determined to alter the course of human politics yet determined to be something other than colonizers. Some will be most fascinated by the tale of the Free Zones, anarchist enclaves where co-operative, anti-authoritarian politics develop over decades in the US and elsewhere. These communities are not utopian but are filled with conflict and occasionally violent, yet they remain optimistic nevertheless. For other readers, the most memorable aspects of the cycle will be the near-future dystopian image of an intensely class-divided United States, with its startlingly prescient depictions of torture, imprisonment, and political violence, told with an unsettling understanding of the oppressors’ perspective and yet never without losing sympathy for the victims. And for yet more, it will be on the level of character that Duchamp’s work inspires: her many point of view characters––almost all women––whose personal and political transformations, power-laden interpersonal, frequently sexual relationships, and critical analyses of the world, drive the many intersecting narratives.

Reading this makes my inner 35-year-old weep with emotion. But then back in 1986, for me, James Tiptree Jr. was still male, and there was no place in the world for anything like the Marq'ssan Cycle. I can't begin to express how gratified I am by this recognition.

ETA: Scratch the penultimate sentence. James Tiptree was not male in 1986-- not even to me. But finishing the Marq'ssan Cycle made me more lonely than I can say, until I was finally able to put it away and half-forget about it. This morning (Thursday), thinking about all this I'm finding it very strange-- disorienting, actually-- to find myself living in a world where the Marq'ssan Cycle makes the kind of sense it now does. And yet I have the sense that my thinking was a lot harder-edged, less accommodating, back then that it is now. But how can one know? One's past life, indeed one's past self, is a foreign country.

2009 Tiptree Awards

JAMES TIPTREE JR. AWARD WINNERS ANNOUNCED

A gender-exploring science fiction award is presented to Greer Gilman for Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales and Fumi Yoshinaga for Ooku: The Inner Chambers, (volumes 1 & 2)

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council is pleased to announce that the 2009 Tiptree Award has two winners: Greer Gilman’s trilogy of interconnected stories, Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales (Small Beer Press 2009) and Fumi Yoshinaga’s alternate-history manga, Ooku: The Inner Chambers (volumes 1 & 2) (VIZ Media 2009).

The Tiptree Award will be celebrated on Memorial Day weekend at WisCon (www.wiscon.info) in Madison, Wisconsin. Each winner will receive $1000 in prize money, an original artwork created specifically for the winning novel or story, and (as always) chocolate. A panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winners and compiles an Honor List of other works that they find interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note. The 2009 jurors were Karen Joy Fowler (chair), Jude Feldman, Paul Kincaid, Alexis Lothian, and Victor Raymond.

Cloud & Ashes contains three memorable and poetic tales that draw images and elements from folk tales and ballads of the British Isles. Told in lyrical Jacobeanesque dialect, the stories are striking for their language and their originality.

Juror Paul Kincaid praised Cloud & Ashes as “A book whose hold on your mind, on your memory, is assured. It is a story about story, and stories are what we are all made of.” Jury chair Karen Fowler reflected on the intriguing complexity of the interwoven themes in the work: “Patterns repeat, but also mutate in kaleidoscopic fashion and then mutate again…. Power shifts about, much of it gender-based; time eats itself like a Möbius strip.”

The first two stories in Cloud & Ashes were published previously. The first, "Jack Daw's Pack," was a Nebula finalist for 2001. The second, “A Crowd of Bone,” won the 2003 World Fantasy Award. The third story, “Unleaving,” is original to Cloud & Ashes.

Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku: The Inner Chambers (volumes 1 & 2) explores an alternate version of feudal Japan, in which a plague has killed three out of every four boys. In this world, young men are protected and sheltered; women have secretly taken positions of authority and power. The Japanese ruler or shogun and the feudal lords are women and much of the story takes place among the men in the shogun's harem. The title of the work refers to the living quarters for the shogun’s harem, contained within Edo Castle.

The selection of Ooku: The Inner Chambers marks the first time that manga has been chosen for the Tiptree Award. Though no one on the jury is an expert on manga or on Japanese history, the jurors fell in love with the detailed exploration of the world of these books, a world in which men are assumed to be weak and sickly, yet women still use symbolic masculinity to maintain power. Throughout the two books, Yoshinaga explores how the deep gendering of this society is both maintained and challenged by the alteration in ratios. “The result,” juror Jude Feldman writes, “is a fascinating, subtle, and nuanced speculation with gender at its center.

Ooku was awarded the Sense of Gender award by the Japanese Association of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005), the Excellence Award at Japan's Media Arts Festival (2006), and the Grand Prize in Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize (2009).

The Tiptree Award Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. This year’s Honor List is:

“Beautiful White Bodies” by Alice Sola Kim (online at Strange Horizons, 2009; published in two parts on 12-7 and 12-14) — a heartbreaking meditation on the meaning of beauty and femininity in the media and popular culture.

Distances by Vandana Singh (Aqueduct Press 2008) — a novella-length work packed with an amazing complexity. Expands and challenges a number of inherently gendered cultural categories.

“Galapagos” by Caitlin R. Kiernan (in Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books 2009) — a mysterious space disaster, a terrifying alien reproductivity, a story reminiscent of the work of Octavia Butler. There can be no higher praise.

Lifelode by Jo Walton (NESFA Press 2009) — explores the coexistence of a very traditional social hierarchy and understanding of marriage alongside an accepted polyamorous structure. Makes the world of polyamory feel comfortable and cozy and the threat of a new monogamous order feel alien and terrifying.

“Useless Things” by Maureen F. McHugh (in Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books 2009) — A non-reproductive woman makes idealized child-objects in an uncertain world. An incredibly evocative, sparely written, powerful story.

“Wives” by Paul Haines (in X6 edited by Keith Stevenson, coeur de lion 2009) —A sharp and powerful but deeply ugly look at white working class Australian masculinity in a world where women are scarce.

In addition, the jury wishes to extend a special honor to L. Timmel Duchamp’s Marq’ssan Cycle, noting the importance of this stunning series, which envisions radical social and political change. Published over a period of four years, this five-book series began with Alanya to Alanya (Aqueduct Press, 2005) and concluded with Stretto (Aqueduct Press, 2008).

The James Tiptree Jr. Award is presented annually to a work or works that explore and expand gender roles in science fiction and fantasy. The award seeks out work that is thought provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. The Tiptree Award is intended to reward those writers who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

The James Tiptree Jr. Award was created in 1991 to honor Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. By her choice of a masculine pen name, Sheldon helped break down the imaginary barrier between “women’s writing” and “men’s writing.” Her insightful short stories were notable for their thoughtful examination of the roles of men and women in our society.

Since its inception, the Tiptree Award has been an award with an attitude. As a political statement, as a means of involving people at the grassroots level, as an excuse to eat cookies, and as an attempt to strike the proper ironic note, the award has been financed through bake sales held at science fiction conventions across the United States, as well as in England and Australia. Fundraising efforts have included auctions conducted by stand-up comic and award-winning writer Ellen Klages, the sale of t-shirts and aprons created by collage artist and silk screener Freddie Baer, and the publication of four anthologies of award winners and honor-listed stories. Three of the anthologies are in print and available from Tachyon Publications and one is in print and available from www.lulu.com and directly from the Tiptree Award website. The award has also published two cookbooks featuring recipes and anecdotes by science fiction writers and fans, available through www.tiptree.org.

In addition to presenting the Tiptree Award annually, the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council occasionally presents the Fairy Godmother Award, a special award in honor of Angela Carter. Described as a “mini, mini, mini, mini MacArthur award,” the Fairy Godmother Award strikes without warning, providing a financial boost to a deserving writer in need of assistance to continue creating material that matches the goals of the Tiptree Award.

Reading for the 2010 Tiptree Award will soon begin. As always, the Tiptree Award invites everyone to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org. You can also find more information about the award and about past winners at the website.

For more information on the Tiptree Award or this press release, contact Pat Murphy at zapmurphy@gmail.com or write to the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council at 680 66th St., Oakland, CA 94609.

Winners of the 2009 Tiptree Award:

Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales by Greer Gilman (Small Beer Press 2009)
Ooku: The Inner Chambers, volumes 1 & 2 by Fumi Yoshinaga (VIZ Media 2009)

Honor List

“Beautiful White Bodies” by Alice Sola Kim (online at Strange Horizons, 2009; published in two parts on 12-7 and 12-14)

Distances by Vandana Singh (Aqueduct Press 2008)

“Galapagos” by Caitlin R. Kiernan (in Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books 2009)

Lifelode by Jo Walton (NESFA Press 2009)

“Useless Things” by Maureen F. McHugh (in Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books 2009)

“Wives” by Paul Haines (in X6 edited by Keith Stevenson, coeur de lion 2009)


A special honor to L. Timmel Duchamp’s Marq’ssan Cycle

Nisi Shawl and Patrick Ness win the Tiptree Award

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council announced that the 2008 Tiptree Award will be going to Patrick Ness's young adult novel The Knife of Never Letting Go and Nisi Shawl's Filter House, an Aqueduct Press book.

The Tiptree Award will be presented on Memorial Day weekend at WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin. Each winner will receive $1000 in prize money, an original artwork created specifically for the winning novel or story, and a confection, usually chocolate. (I've amended the wording of the press release because Nisi cannot eat chocolate, since it's a migraine trigger for her. And I distinctly recall that one winner was given something other than chocolate, because it was not a favorite with her.) The 2008 jurors were Gavin J. Grant (chair), K. Tempest Bradford, Leslie Howle, Roz Kaveney, and Catherynne M. Valente.

This year's Honor List is as follows:

• Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing (Bantam, 2008)
• Jenny Davidson, The Explosionist (HarperTeen, 2008)
• Gregory Frost, Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet: A Shadowbridge Novel (both published by Del Rey, 2008)
• Alison Goodman, Two Pearls of Wisdom (HarperCollins Australia 2008), published in the United States as Eon: Dragoneye Reborn (Viking 2008), also Eon: Rise of the Dragoneye in the United Kingdom
• John Kessel, “Pride or Prometheus” (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 2008)
• Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels (Knopf, 2008)
• Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia (Harcourt)
• John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In (Quercus (UK) 2007), original Swedish title Låt den rätte komma in (2004), first published in English as Let Me In, St. Martin's Press (2007), Translated by Ebba Segerberg)
• Paul Park, A Princess of Roumania (Tor, 2005), The Tourmaline (Tor, 2006), The White Tyger (Tor, 2007), The Hidden World(Tor, 2008)
• Ekaterina Sedia, The Alchemy of Stone (Prime Books)
• Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy (Canongate U.S., 2007)
• Ysabeau S. Wilce, Flora's Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) (Harcourt, 2008)

The press release also had this to say:

The Knife of Never Letting Go begins with a boy growing up in a village way off the grid. Jury chair Gavin J. Grant explains, “All the villagers can hear one another's thoughts (their 'noise') and all the villagers are men. The boy has never seen a woman or girl so when he meets one his world is infinitely expanded as he discovers the complications of gender relations. As he travels in this newly bi-gendered world, he also has to work out the definition of becoming and being a man.”

Juror Leslie Howle praises Ness’s skills as a writer: “Ness is a craftsman — the language, pacing, complications, plot - this story has all of the elements of great story-telling. It's a page-turner, and I continued to think about the story long after reading it. Todd's understanding of gender is constructed as the story progresses, making his perceptions feel fresh and new. It reminds me of the kind of SF I loved when I was growing up.”

In addition to the Tiptree Award, The Knife of Never Letting Go also won the 2008 Booktrust Teenage Prize (U.K.), which celebrates contemporary fiction for teenagers, and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.

Publishers Weekly, which selected Filter House as one of the best books of 2008, described it as an “exquisitely rendered debut collection” that “ranges into the past and future to explore identity and belief in a dazzling variety of settings.” Tiptree jurors spotlight Shawl’s willingness to challenge the reader with her exploration of gender roles. Juror K. Tempest Bradford writes, “The stories in Filter House refuse to allow the reader the comfort of assuming that the men and women will act according to the assumptions mainstream readers/society/culture puts on them.”

Juror Catherynne M. Valente notes that most of Shawl’s protagonists in this collection are are “young women coming to terms with womanhood and what that means in terms of their culture, magic (almost always tribal, nuts and bolts, African-based magical systems, which is fascinating in itself), [and] technology.” In her comments, Valente points out some elements of stories that made this collection particularly appropriate for the Tiptree Award: ' “At the Huts of Ajala" struck me deeply as a critique of beauty and coming of age rituals. The final story, "The Beads of Ku," deals with marriage and motherhood and death. "Shiomah's Land" deals with the sexuality of a godlike race, and a young woman's liberation from it. "Wallamellon" is a heartbreaking story about the Blue Lady, the folkloric figure invented by Florida orphans, and a young girl pursuing the Blue Lady straight into a kind of urban priestess-hood.'

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.

*

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.