Eagles Not Included

Remember WisCon 31?
Wit flashed. Sparks flew.
Eagles carried off the guests of honor.

Subtitled "Provocative essays on feminism, race, revolution, and the future," Volume 2 of the WisCon Chronicles is edited by L. Timmel Duchamp and Eileen Gunn. The volume includes:

*Kelly Link and Laurie J. Marks on books they love
*Mark Rich's reflections on WisCon 31
*Nisi Shawl's "Because we are all so royal: the Carl Brandon Society party at WisCon 31"
*Tom LaFarge's "Multimindedness"
*Susan Simensky Bietila's "An artist at WisCon," which includes two pieces of her art
*Naamen Gobert Tilahun's "Thoughts on 'Colonialism...in...Space!' and on the ground"
*L. Timmel Duchamp's "Creating the 'second self': performance, gender, and authorship"
*K. Joyce Tsai's "On the 'Romance of the Revolution' panel at WisCon 31"
*Laura Quilter's transcript of the "Romance of the Revolution" panel
*Chris Nakashima-Brown's "Science fiction in the Year Zero"
*L. Timmel Duchamp's "Whose Romance? Whose Revolution? The operations of race and gender in panel discourse at WisCon"
*Wendy Walker's "Sexual Stealing"
*Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu's "Defeating the Default"
*Catherynne M. Valente's "Follow the Yellow Brick Road: katabasis and the female hero in Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and the Nutcracker
*Kelly Link and Laurie J. Marks's "Asbestos pants: an epistolary performance"
*M.J. Hardman, Nicola Griffith, Nora Jemison, Kate Schaefer, Elizabeth Bear, Lawrence Schimel, and Joan Haran on WisCon 2018
*Rosalyn Berne and Jacqueline Gross on their first WisCons

PLUS a thoughtful, intense forum instigated and edited by Rachel Swirsky: "How to deal with racist and sexist material in workshop," with contributions by Nora Khan, Ericka Crouse, Anna Schwind, Maria Deira, Jenny Zhang, Steaphie Denise Brown, Nisi Shawl, K. Tempest Bradford, Richard Jeffrey Newman, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Eugie Foster, Alyx Dellamonica, Ross Wagner, and Katherine Sparrow

Although The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2 won't be released until August, it's available now through Aqueduct's website (and will be available from Aqueduct at WisCon). You can purchase it here.

Enter the Filter House

Whether drawing upon the protective power of watermelon vines, the healing power of funk, or the pragmatic power of intelligent women, Nisi Shawl's collection of short fiction sparks the imagination. The tales in Filter House leap forward and backward through time and space, deftly weaving all-too-real topics like resource depletion, colonization, and racism within fantastical worlds of persuadable dragons, fickle gods, and interstellar travel.

Filter House is now available through Aqueduct's site for a special pre-release price of $15. Nisi's stories are preceded by an introduction by Eileen Gunn, who describes it as a collection of "remarkably involving stories that pull you along a path of wonder, word by word, in words where everything is a bit different." It's a beautiful book and has garnered these plaudits so far:

"Sometimes enigmatic, often surprising, always marvelous. This lovely collection will take you, like a magic carpet, to some strange and wonderful places." — Karen Joy Fowler, author of Wit's End and The Jane Austen Book Club

"From the exotic, baroque complexities of 'At the Huts of Ajala' to the stark, folktale purity of 'The Beads of Ku,' these fourteen superbly written stories will weave around you a ring of dark, dark magic." — Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Lavinia and Changing Planes

"A traveling story-bazaar, offering treasures and curios from diverse lands of wonder." — Matt Ruff, author of Set This House In Order and Bad Monkeys

"Nisi Shawl uses the tools of future and fable, usually used to explore the other, the future, and the mysterious, to magically reveal what and who we all are here and today." — Tobias Buckell, author of Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin

You can order it now here.

In the run-Up to WisCon, a cheat sheet

Ooh-la-la! Liz Henry has posted a Cheat sheet to L. Timmel Duchamp’s work, for WisCon at the Feministsf Blog. The "two-foot high stack" of Marq'ssan Cycle books is a bit of an exaggeration. But characterizing my writing as "mind-blowing coolness"-- well, how would I know? Authors simply can't. Which means, conveniently, that I'm not obliged to comment...

Unthinkable Thoughts

I'm just emerged from that strange, muffled space known as a migraine. Books, catalogs, and newsletters are flowing in here from Aqueduct's printers, about more of which soon, when we've got our ducks better organized. But in the meantime, a note about a book Jeff VanderMeer recently recommended, Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext, published by the always excellent Graywolf Press of St. Paul, Minnesota. I enjoyed reading this book, though I think his previous book of criticism, Burning Down the House, gave me more to think about. It's prose style is pleasing-- seemingly effortless, and wonderfully lucid. The categorization "writing" provided on the back by the publisher for the use of booksellers, though, is inapt. It is actually a book about reading. This sort of analysis of reading can, I believe, help writers indirectly, for I am utterly convinced that perceptive, skillful reading is of immeasurable help to writers in learning their craft (which ambitious writers never stop doing). But this is really a book for readers interested in heightening their consciousness of what makes fiction effective. It should, really, be classified as "literary criticism."


To give you a taste, I'll quote one of my favorite passages:

Although we live in a post-Freudian, post-humanist, postmodern, post-everything age, there are still plenty of unthinkable thoughts around, and in the Chekhov tradition they serve as the hard core of narratives. An unthinkable thought is not one that hasn't occurred to somebody, nor is it a thought that someone considers to be wrong. An unthinkable thought threatens a person's entire existence and is therefore subversive and consequently can be thought of and has been thought of, but has been pushed out of the mind's currency and subsumed into its margins where it festers. Dark nights of the soul are lit by inconceivable ideas. Any story may draw its source of power from an unthinkable thought.

This passage is by way of discussing the powerful subtext (of that unthinkable thought) driving a scene in a story by J.F. Powers. All in all, an enjoyable read. I heartily add my recommendation to Jeff's.

Todd Haynes Interview in The Believer

Having enjoyed and appreciated I'm Not There (which I posted about here), I read with considerable interest an interview with its director, Todd Haynes, in the March/April issue of The Believer by Robert Polito. Here are a couple of excerpts:

TH: [At Brown University] the first class I took was on sound theory, and it was taught by Phil Rosen, who was Mary Ann Doane's husband. I remember sitting in a class with him talking about the classic Hollywood text, and he said, "Of course, it comes to the obligatory heterosexual closure. And just hearing the words heterosexual closure was so radical to me, it was so meaningful, because it named something that our society basically suggests is natural and inevitable, and doesn't need a name, and doesn't doesn't need to be distinguished as a choice. And there are so many more examples of how through poststructural film theory I found a parallel language to things that i was already feeling and thinking. And ways that I might already have applied them in my work, but found an academic tradition and theoretical tradition to articulate it. So I just think it helped me mature, and be able to clarify things. But really, if it doesn't come to you from your gut, through your own life and experience-- it's meaningless. It's a trend, it's fashionable. It may have been that for some of my peers at Brown. But when it connects to your own experience and way of seeing the world, then you're set free.

RP: Is that questioning of traditional aesthetic paradigms one of the ways in which you would see your films to this day as political?

TH: Yes. Definitely.

RP: I'm glad you say that. Because as sharp as I'm Not There is about Bob Dylan, it seems to me this isn't just or even mainly a film about Dylan, or even the 1960s, for all the specific references to civil rights, Johnson, Nixon, or Vietnam. Of course I'm Not There is about Bob Dylan, but watching it the other day for the second time I started thinking, This is a film about now, about a country during a terrible war, and how you-- someone, anyone-- keep your art alive amid that war, and all this incessant media saturation, and how you sustain your politics.

TH: It's a desperate attempt to remember other ways of keeping your politics alive, and your creative voice alive, against a war, against political policies that one begins to find abominable, deeply flawed, and helplessly persistent. But I also felt I was trying to conjure up a lost consciousness or distant planet of existence in looking at and studying the 1960s during the height of the Bush-Cheney years. So it was and wasn't-- it was sort of an antidote to where we were on so many levels as well, but I think obviously I was fueled by a lot of contemporary rage and helplessness from our era.

A few paragraphs later, he notes his sense of "worlds being foreclosed and not fully accessible to us today."

And here, he talks about genre:

RP: I'm also wondering how you think about genre, because it seems to me that all your films play with, and play against, genres. Obviously there's a sense that I'm Not There is a biopic, the way that Far from Heaven was a woman's film, or Safe a disease film. How do you think genres operate inside your films?

TH: I think they are both utilized and hen pried open. But they have to maintain enough of their original shape and form to be able to excite and activate the reactions in a viewer, and that's what I am most interested in. What the genres do to the viewer, and the kind of expectations that they set i motion. So you have to excite them and get them going, and then hopefully broaden them and redirect them in ways that draw a different kind of consciousness to those expectations. Safe is maybe the cleanest example. The resolution in a disease film is one that is sort of antagonistic, or has an antagonistic component that I think most disease movies masks over, because disease movies basically ask their subjects to identify with their illness, and come to some kind of acceptance and acquiescence to their state. That often puts them in a very rigid box, one that reifies our whole cultural way of thinking of illness as at some level something that the subject is responsible for.

And so, in this film, you're supposed to accept your illness, and become a cancer survivor, or become an advocate for this or that. And when Julianne Moore does that at Wrenwood, it's basically asking her to say, "I really hated myself when I first came here, and I'm going through this process of accepting culpability for my illness." And you both want that because that's what the narrative expectations and the generic expectations require. But then you watch that basically crush this fragile person into acquiescence and self-hatred. So what you want a narrative level, you have to question on the human level.

TH: Do conventional biopics operate along those same lines here?

TH: Yes, I think so. They kind of crush and belittle the great artist, who we're supposed to comprehend in a line, or a brief summation. They reduce the person while also aggrandizing them.

Women and Madness I

A scholar of my acquaintance, a man in his thirties, recently regaled me with accounts of the run-ins he'd had with an eccentric female colleague of an older generation. His story took the three-stage form we're all familiar with from the folk and fairy tales of our childhood, with the third stage --the foot that fit the slipper, the pig in the brick house, the final denial of Christ, as it were-- being the older woman's rudest and most irrational outburst, at which time the younger man refuted her claims, denounced her solipsism, and turned on his heel, never to speak to her again.

Now, the guy is a rigorous and reliable person; and the older woman does indeed have bouts of aggressiveness and paranoia. But what got to me was the smarm, or at least the pride, with which the younger man described his put-down. As though he were Speaking Truth to Power, rather than just deciding that he lacked the patience to deal with a meshugeneh old colleague. 'Cause not only does the older woman lack power, but paranoid and emotionally volatile is not really a fun place for a person's head to be, you know.

Hence I'm pretty unnerved at the turns the denunciations of Priya Venkatesan are taking. Clearly she was a very bad teacher, she treated her students poorly, and she reacted with paranoid ideation to events in her classroom. But it also seems reasonable to infer from the article that a) She did indeed, prior to entering the classroom, have to deal with a crushingly hostile environment in the laboratory and b) She is at this point, to use an old phrase, "not right in the head." Yet even the gentle Scott Eric Kaufman responds to her odd, mad behavior with disgust (vindicating Martha Nussbaum's suspicion of that emotion's social utility); and the comments on other weblogs are much more condemnatory.

Indeed, eccentric or unreasonable claims on the part of a woman with an audience seem to act as blood in the water to the sharks of the internet. Followers of the sf blogosphere will recall the harsh comments about Judith Merril here and the nastiness in the comments on Readercon 16. Neither of those victims were paranoids on the level of Venkatesan; but both seemed to incur a disproportionate amount of venom for their eccentric opinions.

I find this sort of thuggery disconcerting even when it's aimed at deserving targets: Norman Finkelstein, to my mind, weakened his argument against conservative ideologue Phyllis Chesler when he ended his polemic against her (in Beyond Chutzpah) with the suggestion that "One wonders whether Women and Madness was autobiographical." Among fans and writers of comics, it's called playing the "bitch crazy" card: one can resolve any number of plot complications by appealing to the readers' understanding of the old Chandleresque trope "bitch crazy" (Chandler, to his credit, sometimes had strong, rational women providing a counterpoint to the wild femmes whom Marlowe had to chercher). Acephalous commenter JPool puts his or her finger on the uses of the Venkatesan case: here's someone who, by all appearances, seems to be breaking down in a very public way and . . . the swirl of uses and projections that that public breakdown (or at the least, very poor behavior) can be put to.

Conscientious Inconsistencies is now available

Nancy Jane Moore's Conscientious Inconsistencies is now available from PS Publishing. You have your choice between the elegant but pricey jacketed hard cover (signed by both Nancy and Timmi Duchamp, who wrote the introduction, and sure to be a valuable collector's item some day) and the more affordable regular hardcover edition.

The book will also be for sale at the Broad Universe table at WisCon.

Nicola Griffith Reads at Hugo House

Tomorrow night at 7 p.m. Nicola Griffith and Corinna Wycoff will be reading from their Lambda finalist works at Hugo House. Nicola is a finalist in the memoir category, for And Now We Are Going to Have a Party; Corinna Wycoff is a finalist in the Lebian debut fiction category.

The details:

Tuesday, May 6 at 7:00 pm
Hugo House
1634 Eleventh Ave, Seattle

Nicola's portion of the reading will be video'd for YouTube.

Beyond Intellection and Cognition

Almost no one reads gender theorists any more. (Which is why most people are pretty much stuck in the late 80s/early 90s in how they think about gender.) & so this passage in Linda Zerilli's book (Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom) struck me as worth quoting:

We should not be deceived by [Monique] Wittig's straightforward account of sex as a politically constructed category. What she calls the "'already there' of the sexes" is an exceedingly complex problem, one inadequately addressed by the feminist commonplace "sex/gender is constructed." Once a radical response to the idea of sex/gender as natural, this commonplace, over the course of time, has led to the mistaken view that sex/gender, being constructed, can be seen as just that and revealed as contingent, usually, as I argued in the previous chapter, through an incredible act of intellection and skeptical doubt. This act turns on the mistaken idea that we could obtain an external standpoint from which to see cultural artifacts and practices like sex and gender as wholly constructed. In addition to highly problematic assumptions about the practice of doubting (for example, that we could doubt all gender at once), the basic fallacy of this approach is to confuse truth with meaning. For feminism, sexual difference concerns meaning, not merely truth or cognition. What is cognizable under rules in a (determinant) judgment is called "sex difference," and it is the proper (and, in principle, knowable) object of the social and biological sciences. The criteria that support judgments of binary sex difference are not grounded in putatively apodictic first principles but rooted in relatively stable modes of human praxis. They are what Wittgenstein calls a prior agreement in judgments in our form of life. These criteria are not beyond question and, in fact, have been questioned by feminists. What persists once binary sex difference as an object of knowledge is destabilized (for example, once we "know" that there are at least five sexes, not two, as Anne Fausto-Sterling reminds us) is difference as a question of meaning. It is a question we do not stop thinking about and a condition we do not eliminate once we know that binary sex difference is a contingent social and historical construct.

To engage sexual difference as a question and condition of meaning, understanding, and action rather than truth or knowledge, then, is to engage not one's cognitive abilities but one's capacity for imagination.

Interestingly, Zerilli argues that Wittig's theory is at odd with what she does in her fiction, & that what she does in her fiction is much more interesting & illuminating than her theory.

In the previous chapter, Zerilli commented:

When we see an intersexed body, for example, we are confronted with what Butler calls the strange, but our tendency, as Fausto-Sterling shows, is to fold that act of seeing into what we have seen all along: sexed bodies. Thus if the exception to the rule rarely disrupts our tendency to subsume all bodies under the rule of sex difference, that may be because what we lack is not an appropriately denaturalized position from which to doubt what we think we see but an alternative figure of the thinkable with which to organize anew the very experience of seeing, that is, of meaning. Figures of the newly thinkable are crucial for a form of feminist critique that resists the lure of epistemology and the twin temptations of dogmatism and skepticism. Such figures are integral to a mode of judgment that is reflective and creative.

A few paragraphs later, continuing to talk about the need for "figures generated by radical imagination," she notes,

The sex/gender distinction that animated second-wave feminist theory, for example, was once a figure of the newly thinkable, though it was (mistakenly, in my view) interpreted as an epistemological category for producing knowledge of what was in any case already given. As such a figure, the sex/gender distinction did much more than produce knowledge; it provided a form, generated by radical imagination, for giving new meaning to women's experience and opened a space for thinking about how that experience could be created otherwise. And, like other such figures of the second wave, the sex/gender distinction, too, eventually hardened into a speculative theory used to discern systematic regularities and objective laws, which third-wave feminists rightly rejected.

Try asking the person sitting next to you to define the word "gender." You probably won't get an answer. My definition, for years, has been that gender is a system for making meaning. Many feminists I know can't get beyond statements about gender being constructed and distinct from sex, or about gender not mattering or needing to be eliminated from human social organization, and feel frustrated by gender's continuing to impact our lives in both obvious and invisible ways. The nonfeminist world at large acts as if gender is a characteristic of women (but not men)-- because, I suppose, they think it affects only women's lives, which is why it doesn't count as a political issue but is simply a symptom that will always be with us. Zerilli's emphasis on the radical imagination for creating political freedom is brilliant. She's absolutely right that we can't see gender as though we were outside of it and detached, that imagination, not cognition, is what feminists need to challenge the status quo.

How does one dismantle a system for making meaning? How do you stop an entire set of associations from carrying any meaning at all?

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…”

Agatha Christie's pink bedslippers

I've just listened to a delightful interview with Karen Joy Fowler, which was broadcast on KPFA yesterday afternoon. It's available here. (Link thanks to Todd Mason.)

Besides talking about her new novel Wit's End, some of the highlights of the interview include political discussion in the US following the Supreme Court debacle of 2000, Agatha Christie in mink and pink bedslippers, how email has sabotaged the epistolary novel, and her mis-taking feminist sf as "the living, beating heart of science fiction" when she first started reading it.

Is It Just Me?

My abdominal muscles are sore today from reading a Shirley Jackson story late last night. Most of her stories aren't hilarious. But this one made me double over in laughter, which meant I had to stop reading until I could get my compulsion to laugh under control because it's impossible to read while one's eyes are streaming and one's body is folded up like a jackknife. This happened several times as I tried to keep reading. And then, when once I had managed to finish it, I just had to read parts of it again, I was so taken with its concise, witty pleasures. And the need to laugh actually got worse. So there I was, laughing and coughing and addicted to reading my favorite bits over and over like a drug, wondering how I'd ever settle down to sleep if I started laughing every time I recalled the funniest lines in the story.

And now I have the urge to read the parts that crack me up to others, though I know very well that without reading the whole story may favorite lines probably won't seem funny. I even have to wonder if anyone else will find it as hilarious as I do. The story's very short-- only six pages. Anyone else read this story lately?

Oh, the title. I almost forgot: "Of course." (Which, by the end, are very funny words indeed.)

A Brief Conversation with Lucy Sussex

Like many sf writers, Lucy Sussex is also a scholar in addition to writing fiction. I recently had this conversation with her.

Timmi: Could you tell us, please, about the "woman of mystery" who signed herself as "W.W" or "Waif Wander" and about the research project you and linguist John Burrows undertook that involved her?

Lucy: Her name was Mary Helena Fortune, and she was probably the first woman to specialize in crime fiction, writing the longest early detective serial known, "The Detective's Album," from 1867-1908. It comprised over 500 stories/novelettes, all published under the pseudonym of W. W. For more feminine writing, like her (unreliable) memoirs and some quite gothic melodramas, one called "Clyzia the Dwarf," she used the name Waif Wander, apparently a self-description. The connection between the two pseudonyms was not revealed until the 1880s, and her real name did not emerge until the next century, in the 1950s. She wrote quite unknown to her large reading public, who had no idea who she was.

Pseudonyms were common with Victorian women writers, such as Charlotte Bronte (Currer Bell) and George Eliot. But none were quite as secretive as Fortune. It involved concerted archival research to establish that she was born a Mary Wilson in Belfast, Ireland, of Scottish ancestry, emigrated to Canada with her father and married a surveyor, Joseph Fortune. She subsequently emigrated to Australia, to join her father George Wilson on the gold-diggings. In 1858 she married a policeman, Percy Brett, from whom she gained much of the knowledge for her crime writing. She had two sons, one by Fortune, the second born in Australia between the two marriages.

The complications of this particular life narrative was that Brett later remarried, and that divorce was very hard to obtain at the time. It seems that Fortune left her first husband in Canada, had an illegitimate son in Australia, and comitted bigamy when she married Brett. The most likely explanation of her move to Australia was that she was running away from Fortune, who would have inevitably otherwise gained custody of their child in any formal separation.

These secrets made Fortune a "scarlet woman" in terms of conventional Victorian morality. Small wonder she kept her identity hidden, as it could have affected her living from writing. In the 1890s the mores had begun to change, and she was described as a "bohemian." But she and her surviving son had paid a price--he became a jailbird, and she was alcoholic, living in defacto relationships.

I edited her memoirs, and later a book of her short crime stories.

[Timmi: The memoirs, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune, have been published by Spinifex Press. The book of short fiction, The Detectives' Album: Stories of Crime and Mystery from Colonial Australia, has been published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box.]

Fortune began writing crime stories apparently as a response to "inauthentic" crime memoirs by the writer James Skipp Borlase. They went on to collaborate on a short story serial, published anonymously. I wanted to know which stories had been written by her and which by Borlase. Professor John Burrows of the University of Newcastle had developed a software program which looked at writers in terms of stylistic nuances, and could identify and quantify differences at the grammatical level. We fed the disputed stories through, and compared them to works definitely by Borlase and Fortune. Not only was Fortune's early work identified, but an early story claimed by Borlase, "Mystery and Murder," proved to be by her hand.

I have just used that story as the basis for a science fiction tale, "Mist and Murder," which won a Sir Julius Vogel award. It is set in the New Ceres universe, and features a female detective, as well as her sidekick, who is disguised as a man and writes detective series.

Timmi: In your interview with Maureen Kincaid Speller, which was published in your Conversation Pieces collection Absolute Uncertainty, you make the fascinating comment:

it is actually easier for a modern writer to imitate a nineteenth-century woman, than a man from the same era. The only way to do the latter was to utterly immerse yourself in overheated, overwrought masculine Victorian prose —which was like learning to swim in jelly. Once you had the mindset, or had set yourself inside an ornate jelly mould of the era, then you could do it. But I still don’t think you can ever really get inside the mind of someone from the past.

Could you unpack some of that for us? I'm fascinated by the idea that the prose of a Victorian woman is closer to modern sensibilities than the prose of a Victorian man. What are some of the differences between them? And given that so many nineteenth-century women wrote under male names, I'm wondering whether you'd peg pseudonymous women's writing as male or female? (And incidentally, I wholeheartedly agree that you can't ever really get inside the mind of someone from the past.)

Lucy: As John Burrows has discovered, when searching for quantifiable differences in style, there are yawning gaps in gender in C18th-19th writers. It has to do with education. Men went to grammar school and had formal habits of prosody literally beaten into them. Women were taught by governesses or not at all. Autodidactic men and women thus wrote far less elaborately than the gentleman--which makes them much more accessible to modern readers, who get impatient when a spade is described as "an agrarian or horticultural device favoured by sons of hoary-handed toil." In a project I'm involved in with ship's diaries, a man and a woman travel on the same boat, but while she describes the departure in one simple sentence, he meanders on for half a page, with classical allusions. The differences tend to level out with the reforms in schooling from the mid-century onwards, but are still present.

Even now computer analysis can identify gendered differences in writing, style being as distinctive as DNA.

Timmi: Having edited a volume of Fortune's memoirs and another of her crime fiction, are you now done with her, or do you have more such projects in the works?

Lucy: I'm still finding works of hers...

Timmi: And are there any other C19th writers you're working on?

Lucy: I'm finishing two books at the moment, one a collection of C19th travel writing, the other a study of the first women to write crime and mystery fiction. Must find a publisher for the latter...

Timmi: You often use historical themes or interests in your science fiction tales, which interests me a lot (particularly since I sometimes do myself). Most sf writers approach history by writing alternate versions or secret histories. Your approaches strike me as more interrogative and playful. Would you care to comment about that vis-a-vis particular stories?

Lucy: Alternate histories are a bit like historical novels--heaps of research, but often the sense of the time itself is missing. And depend on it, some detail will be wrong, so that you will get a pedantic but perfectly justified note of complaint from some local historian. Even a good writer might not know that when the Victorians mentioned lovemaking, it wasn't referring to sex but verbal or written courtship or flirtation. Or the values of our time are imperfectly hidden in the novel, so that the heroine is improbably feminist or improbably keen on oral sex (often in novels by men, surprise).

It's more fun to interrogate a text, like the time I had a go at the Australian song "Waltzing Matilda." I decided I didn't believe a word of it. So I introduced a very unreliable narrator, and an alternate explanation of the song's narrative, guaranteed to annoy any number of people. Here fantasy met history, with I hope the notion conveyed that the grand narratives of history are not necessarily the only ones. I similarly took Mary Fortune's story "Mystery and Murder," kept the plot but introduced a female detective (something she very rarely used) and an alternate murder explanation. Thus in my "Mist and Murder" I teased out a subtext in the original, which had really bothered me. Most fun was learning how to write in the C18th mode--Latinate roots and what I can only describe as using words now more usually known in their noun forms, but as verbs. Mentally plumbing for the more decorated and formal modes of expression rather than the colloquial and terse. By trying to replicate the language I think I got a sense of the mind-set. But I'd never try writing in Middle English!

Timmi: Ah, I think you must be talking about "Matilda Told Such Dreadful Lies," which appears in Absolute Uncertainty. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to reading "Mist and Murder"!

May Day

May Day (aka International Workers' Day), for those who aren't historically minded, has since 1890 been a day to celebrate the international labor movement and commemorate the infamous Haymarket Massacre, when the Chicago police killed numerous demonstrators during a general strike (fighting for an eight-hour work day) in 1886. And for me, personally, it's the 112th anniversary of the birth my extraordinary grandmother, Helen Jannusch Timmel.

On this May Day, The Los Angeles Times reports that dockworkers at 29 ports up and down the West Coast of the United States have stopped work for the day to protest the US's ongoing war against Iraq.

I'm also heartened to see the Bangor Daily News's report that a Maine jury has refused to find six protesters arrested for civil disobedience guilty of criminal trespass. No one who regularly reads this blog will be at all surprised to hear that I found the following absolutely fascinating:

Brendan Trainer, assistant district attorney for Penobscot County, prosecuted the case. He referred questions to District Attorney R. Christopher Almy.

“I think that the public in Maine is so disgusted with the war in Iraq that they demonstrated their disgust with this verdict,” said Almy, a Democrat. “And, that they are upset with [Sen. Olympia] Snowe and Collins for getting us involved in this debacle.”

State law, he said, does not allow the prosecution to appeal a not guilty verdict.

Almy, who praised Trainer’s presentation of the case, said the verdict most likely would affect whether his office prosecutes protesters arrested in the Federal Building in the future.

“At this point,” Almy said, “we’re going to have to consider the precedent that this verdict sets and we may very well have to consider giving these cases to the U.S. attorney to prosecute because this state court case may preclude successful future prosecutions.

“Also, I would like to say that Snowe and Collins got us involved in this mismanaged war and it may be up to them to persuade the U.S. attorney to take on these cases,” he concluded.

When informed of the verdict, Jen Burita, a spokeswoman for Collins, said Wednesday, “We are pleased that the matter has been resolved.”

U.S. Attorney Paula Silsby, who is based in Portland, said she would have to research whether her office had jurisdiction to prosecute people arrested in the federal building in Bangor. Many years ago, she said, protesters arrested at the Federal Building in Portland were prosecuted in federal court.

A woman juror who refused to be identified talked to the defendants on the courthouse steps after the verdict. She said that the war really did not factor into the verdict.

The juror said that the state did not meet its burden of proof on the first element needed to prove them guilty of criminal trespass - whether the protesters were in the Federal Building knowing they were not licensed or privileged to be there.

“I testified that I felt we had an obligation to be there,” Freeman said, when asked if he felt he had a right to be in the Federal Building after he had been told to leave.

He speculated that his acquittal and that of his co-defendants would increase the number of protests against the war.

Happy May Day to us all!

ETA: There is, as I write this, a march supporting Latino workers, in progress. I can hear more than one helicopter, monitoring it (probably out of concern for rush hour traffic than in any real interest in the march itself). The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article noting some of the day's activist events.

A New Review of Dangerous Space

A new interview with Kelley Eskridge, as well as a new review of Dangerous Space, has been posted at the short review. The reviewer, Tania Hershman, is new to science fiction:

As with the Logorrhea anthology, Dangerous Space opened my eyes to new definitions of "genre". When this book was described to me as "feminist science fiction", I had no idea what this meant. Tales of independent female aliens or space travellers? What I was not expecting was seven poignant, sensual and often poetic stories, of musicians, actors, theatre directors, journalists, most of whom inhabit worlds much like my own but with slight twists, shifts of fundamental rules and expectations.

Eskridge deals with familiar themes - gender, identity, love, passion - in unfamiliar ways, using the imaginative license granted by "science fiction", which permits a writer a greater freedom than those "restricted" by the conventions of traditional literary fiction.

About the interview, I will note only this: the word "gender" never occurs, even once.

Cosmetic Gestures

The April 18 issue of Science Magazine reports that despite the Bush Administration's public response to the "impending calamaity" of food shortages around the world-- ordering $200 million dollars in food aid-- "behind the scenes, however, researchers charge that the US government is moving to slash funding for international agricultural research."

Last week, several concerned scientists circulated an online petition seeking to reverse cuts to research funds they say are being planned by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), calling them "unacceptable mistakes that will damage worldwide food production for many years to come." The group argues that international agricultural research should be expanding. "Restoring [support] isn't really enough; this should be an area of major growth," says Jeffrey Bennetzen, a plant geneticist at the University of Georgia, Athens, and a petition organizer.

The disastrous shortfall in grain production has already sparked food riots in several countries. But it's obviously going to get worse:

[A] perfect storm is brewing. Across the developing world, farmland and water for irrigation have been lost to urban development and industrialization. Grains are being diverted to feed livestock to meet rising demand for meat and to make biofuels. Droughts in Asia and Australia have severely curtailed grain production. And productivity has stagnated, says Zeigler [director general of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines], due to cuts in agricultural research in the 1990s.

The result is a steady rise in grain prices. On 20 March, the UN's World Food Programme issued an appeal for help in covering a $500 million shortfall in its $2.9 billion budget this year to feed 73 million people in 78 countries. In the 3 weeks since, food prices shot up another 20%. "You could see the train wreck coming for years," says Zeigler.

In other words, this policy began with the Clinton Administration.

Resonance, Anyone?

I'm sure I'm not the only reader who tends to find that news stories make interesting pairings? Here are a few that recently struck me:

--Retired Col. Ann Wright's Is There an Army Cover Up of Rape and Murder of Women Soldiers? about US soldiers raped and murdered by their colleagues in Iraq and Afghanistan (which I also thought of pairing with the unfolding story of the punishment and silencing of US women working for military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan) paired with the ongoing story of the rising violence against Iraqi women for enforcing a new, more repressive set of gendered behaviors, as exemplified in this article in the Independent.

--The International Herald Tribune's Guantanamo Drives Prisoners Insane, Lawyers Say paired with The Belleville News-Democrat's The War Within: Experts Say Millions Could Seek Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which discusses the high rate of post-traumatic stress disorder for those who have served the military in Iraq.

--The New York Times's Bicycle-Sharing Program to Be First of Its Kind in US paired with The Los Angeles Times's Diamond Lanes for the Rich.

--The Washington Post's Studies on Chemical in Plastics Questioned: Congress Examines Role of Industry in Regulation paired with Science Magazine's EPA Scientists Unhappy about Political Meddling, which reports on a survey taken by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Your suggestions for interesting pairings are of course welcome.

2007 Nebula Awards

Last night in Austin, this year's Nebula Awards were presented:

In the Novel category: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
In the Novella category: "Fountain of Age" by Nancy Kress
In the Novelette category: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang
In the Short Story category: "Always" by Karen Joy Fowler
In the dramatic Script category: Pan's Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro

Other presentations included:

The Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
The Damon Knight Grand Master for 2008: Michael Moorcock
The SFWA Service Award: Melisa Michaels and Graham P. Collins
And Ardath Mayhar was honored throughout the weekend as Author Emeritus.

The SFWA site has posted pictures.

Rick Moody Misses the Obvious

I'm glad to see the excitement over the reissue of Joy Williams's The Changeling. But it's frustrating for a cultural historian to see Rick Moody's explanation of the hostility that initially greeted the novel:

The Changeling, which is rich with the arresting improbabilities of magic realism of the folkloric revival (Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was published about the same time), and with the modernist foreboding of Under the Volcano, would have seemed perfectly legible in 1973 when Gravity’s Rainbow was published, or Gaddis’s JR. But the late 70s, with their punk rock nihilism and their Studio 54 fatuousness, were perhaps not properly situated to understand the variety of challenge. To their shame.

Joy Williams's innovations were regarded as incompetence, unlike the innovations of Gaddis, Pynchon, and Lowry; and Rick Moody blames The Ramones? Hmmm . . . what other cutting-edge Seventies authors were slammed or underappreciated . . . how about Carol Hill? Joanna Russ? Gayl Jones? What in Heaven's name could be responsible for reviewers' uncharitable responses or insufficient attention to such authors? Nihilism and Studio 54 fatuousness? [Image of Dana Carvey in drag, looking smug and saying: "Could it be . . . MISOGYNY?"]

Men and Women in Public Space

The outrage du jour is tired, tedious, and old-fashioned, however dressed-up it might be in new language. The "Open Source Boob Project," for all its claim to hipness, once again figures women's bodies as property (a practice commonly known as sexual objectification). The point is not sex--it never is--but the terms on which women negotiate (or are allowed to negotiate) public space. It's the same issue that arose when the POTUS put his hands on the German Chancellor at a high-level public function. Do white men figure themselves as property? The thought never even crosses their minds.

There've been moments in my life when I've felt such rage at experience a constant stream of groping, leers, and insolent remarks that I've found it almost impossible to resist the urge to knee every one of the jerks in the groin. In my mid-twenties, the term "sexual harassment" and the theorization that accompanied it didn't yet exist. It was a constant feature of my life, though, and I had long understood that its point was humiliation of girls and women, to demonstrate to them that in public spaces and institutions they have no right or expectation to bodily privacy-- which white men, of course, do. (Needless to say, I had learned that this was also true in private spaces-- at home, where family members or their friends could infringe on that privacy with ease.)

For centuries, the attitude has been that a woman out in public without an appropriate male to protect her is fair game. Feminists' insistence that they don't want or need owner/protectors seems not to have made a dent in that attitude. And so, in my mid-twenties, finding myself sexually harassed by the professor I TA'd for, I had two choices. (These days I'd have three choices. But since we did not have the term "sexual harassment" back then, my university, not surprisingly, had no policies for dealing with it.) So I could go to either my advisor (the harassing professor's sworn enemy) or the chair of the department for help, or I could handle it myself. Both the chair and my advisor were men. I couldn't stand the thought of begging their protection and thus being treated as a piece of property the harasser was poaching on, and so I decided to handle it myself by replacing his public acts of aggression with my own.

In short, I humiliated him as he was lecturing and caused him to falter and then end his lecture prematurely. It was a risky ploy. For one thing, if he hadn't been so insecure, he could have called my bluff and made me look bad in front of our students. For another thing, he was on my doctoral exams committee. The result, however, was excellent. Though he expressed biterness at my undermining him before our students, the sexual harassment ceased--even the lascivious leers. When a few months later I took one of his courses, he made a practice of firing a dozen or more random questions at me during each class meeting. Although this arguably constituted a form of hazing, I much preferred it to sexual harassment and suspected that my taking it without complaint would make my prelims go easier. (It did.)

The lesson? Rage is the appropriate response to outrageous beahvior. I don't think any other experience of sexual harassment I've had so drove home the point to me that it's all about whether a man thinks a woman has the same place in public space as a man does. Sf conventions, like universities, are public spaces. Although here in the US feminists have forced the issue of allowing women entry into public space (and this was certainly one of the most significant achievements of second-wave feminism), we haven't yet managed to change the terms on which women are allowed to negotiate public space.

Links to a few of the many feminist posts on yesterday's outrage:

mystickeeper's I find it highly amusing that his username is ferret
Rachelmanjia's "A proposal to crush the button-enabled sexual harassment proposal"
Micole's post
Liz Henry's The Internets Work How They're Supposed To"
Misia's A Modest Proposal: the Open Source Swift Kick to the Balls Project"
Oursin's The ick just keeps on a-coming and Invizbel soshul contrakt
Vito_Excalibur This Is Not a Joke. This Is Not Satire. This Is Not a Test.

Tactics of Plausibility

The Winter 2008 issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society has a fascinating article on the activist art of Women on Waves, "Twelve Miles: Boundaries of the New Art/Activism" by Carrie Lambert-Beatty. Noting that "while political art represents political subject matter, activist art does politics," Lambert-Beatty cites Lucy Lippard's distinction ["Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power" (1984)]:

Although "political" and "activist" artists are often same people, "political" art tends to be socially concerned and "activist" art tends to be socially involved.... The former's work is a commentary or analysis, while the latter's art works within its context, with its audiences."

Women on Waves carries a portable gynecological clinic operated by two physicians and a nurse from port to port on a ship they rent with a largely female crew, flying the Dutch flag. The clinic is funded largely by the Mondriaan Foundation (a Dutch arts foundation dedicated to the visual arts and design):

In port it offers legal and medical workshops, sex education, and contraception; on the way out to sea it gives sonograms and counseling; and in international waters it provides the abortion pill to women who want it. Its missions have been controversial enough to earn its doctors and volunteers not only bombardment with eggs and paint but also court cases and even death threats; it was radical enough in its challenge to national sovereignty to move the Portuguese government to launch warships to protect its populace from the feminist invasion. As a result, Women on Waves has spurred debate on aboriton law where such debates had not occurred for years. Its visits galvanized the local groups of activists that invited the abortion boat to each country, and more such pro-choice groups were formed in its wake. A Polish government survey in 2003 found that popular support for liberalizing abortion law had gone up 12 percent in a year and cited the Women on Waves visit that summer as a source of the change.

Lambert-Beatty compares Women on Waves to the Yes Men. The Yes Men, in case you've forgotten, are those devious, ingenious parodists who create strange and wonderful moments in the corporate business of the day. They declare, on their website:

The Yes Men agree their way into the fortified compounds of commerce, ask questions, and then smuggle out the stories of their hijinks to provide a public glimpse at the behind-the-scenes world of business. In other words, the Yes Men are team players... but they play for the opposing team.

In 2004 the BBC mistook one of them for a spokesperson for Dow Chemical and broadcast the "breaking news" that Dow had decided to own up to its responsibility for Union Carbide's poisoning of the population of Bhopal and offer compensation to the multitude of victims (whose lives have been wrecked by Union Carbide's criminal negligence). The Yes Men provided a more frivolous moment in 2006 at the Catastrophic Loss Conference when claiming to represent Halliburton, they unveiled the "SurvivaBall":

"The SurvivaBall is designed to protect the corporate manager no matter what Mother Nature throws his or her way," said Fred Wolf, a Halliburton representative who spoke today at the Catastrophic Loss conference held at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Amelia Island, Florida. "This technology is the only rational response to abrupt climate change," he said to an attentive and appreciative audience.

Here's where I think Lambert-Beatty's article gets really interesting:

To me there is still no more moving statement of faith in the revolutionary force of imagination than the one on the streets of Paris during the uprisings of 1968: "Under the cobblestones, the beach." But "twelve miles from the beach, the Netherlands," Women on Waves might respond, for the project is driven by a similar determination to replace what is with what could be. Instead of the 1960s vision of liberation, however, it imagines something concrete: a world in which women have access to safe and legal abortion no matter where they live. And instead of symbolically promoting change, the project's method is to make it so: to use maritime law and the concept of international waters to actually create--however temporarily and provisionally--the dreamed-of situation. This, the performative quality of Women on Waves, was captured in 2001 by critic Jennifer Allen. The project "does not thematise, represent, or illustrate the problem of abortion," she wrote, "it imposes a new geo-political reality that challenges [the] status quo in ways that cannot be fathomed, let alone controlled."

It is at this point that she makes the comparison to the Yes Men. After which she argues:

From one perspective, the opposition between the legalistic, earnest Women on Waves and the mischievous, hoaxing Yes Men is as complete as that between the genders in their names: as clear as the difference between real and virtual,between what one group calls campaigns and the other hijinks. [...] And yet, while they do not have the power to make real the changes they announce, the Yes Men nevertheless have real effects--on Dow's stock price that day in 2004, for example. And for its part, Women on Waves lists toward the unhappy performative more than one might think. For the fact is that two of the group's three campaigns to provide legal abortions were thoroughly thwarted. [...] And yet this does not mean the project failed--far from it...Indeed, its brilliance is in recognizing the special power of doing both [i.e., media politics and medical service] at once: of using bodily care to do representational work.

Lambert-Beatty describes this as "the politics or aesthetics of plausibility":

By providing opportunities for belief--however fleeting, and no matter how stymied--such tactics of plausibility provide especially rich, emotional experiences of "what-if." The art of the plausible works to edge an imagined state of affairs from the merely possible to the brink, at least, of the probable.

Lambert-Beatty insists that "the category of activist art starts from [the] belief that the aesthetic is not a retreat from the real but is in and of it." "Those of us who believe in a political and activist art," she says, "want to eat our cake and have it too."

We do not accept that art is an apolitical space apart from worldly pressures, and yet we want it to be a zone of special freedom. This is either an embarrassing lapse or, as Jacques Ranciere would suggest, a structuring paradox for political art today. According to Ranciere, there is a constant tension in modernity "between the logic of art that becomes life at the price of abolishing itself as art, and the logic of art that does politics on the explicit condition of not doing it at all." But consider a corollary: the possibility that the category of activist art is not just defined against but actively requires its nonactivist counterpart--it needs borders around art so that it might sail through them; or, so that, as Ranciere puts it, "the border be always there yet already crossed."

Lambert-Beatty concludes her article by discussing the "political unconscious" of the Women on Waves project, which is characterized as some critics as having colonialist undertones or by others as being meolilberal. All in all, it's a fascinating piece. Check it out if you get the chance.

Adamic Privilege

Check out Laura Q's post on the naming of women's body parts, women: the undiscovered country on the Feminist SF Blog.

"Human Nature"

I've long had problems with "human nature" as a meaningful explanation for anything. Just now I came across this passage in John Dewey's 1939 Freedom and Culture:

[T]he shift that has occurred from time to time in theories that have gained currency about the "ruling motive" in human nature suggests a question which is seldom asked. It is the question whether these psychologies have not in fact taken the cart to be the horse. Have they not gathered their notion as to the ruling element in human nature from observation of tendencies that are marked in contemporary collective life, and then bunched these tendencies together in some alleged psychological "force" as their cause? It is significant that human nature was taken to be strongly moved by an inherent love of freedom at the time when there was a struggle for representative government; that the motive of self-interest appeared when conditions in England enlarged the role of money, because of new methods of industrial production that the growth of organized philanthropic activities brought sympathy into the psychological picture, and that events today are readily converted into love of power as the mainspring of human action.

In any case, the idea of culture that has been made familiar by the work of anthropological students points to the conclusion that whatever are the native constituents of human nature, the culture of a period and group is the determining influence in their arrangement; it is that which determines the patterns of behavior that mark out the activities of any group, family, clan, people, sect, faction, class. It is at least as true that the state of culture determines the order and arrangement of native tendencies as that human nature produces any particular set or system of social phenomena so as to obtain satisfaction for itself. The problem is to find out the way in which the elements of a culture interact with each other and the way in which the elements of human nature are caused to interact with one another under conditions set by their interaction with the existing environment. For example, if our American culture is largely a pecuniary culture, it is not because the original or innate structure of human nature tends of itself to obtaining pecuniary profit. It is rather that a certain complex culture stimulates, promotes and consolidates native tendencies so as to produce a certain pattern of desires and purposes. If we take all the communities, peoples, classes, tribes and nations that ever existed, we may be sure that since human nature in its native constitution is the relative constant, it cannot be appealed to, in isolation, to account for the multitude of diversities presented by different forms of association.

All sf writers take this view, right?

The James Tiptree Jr. Award

Today in the US, working folk face the deadline for filing personal federal tax returns. It's worth reflecting that this is a tax paid largely by middle-class and poor people that chiefly flows into the pockets of defense and military contractors and those who lend money to the government to finance its economy-busting, never-ending War.

On another front, the 2007 Tiptree jury has announced that Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army has won the Tiptree Award. The Honor List (which seems to have replaced the short list) has also been announced:


* "Dangerous Space" by Kelley Eskridge, in the author’s collection Dangerous Space (Aqueduct Press, 2007)
* Water Logic by Laurie Marks (Small Beer Press, 2007)
* Empress of Mijak and The Riven Kingdom by Karen Miller (HarperCollins, Australia, 2007)
* The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Hyperion, 2007)
* Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press, 2007)
* Glasshouse by Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
* The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Collins 2007)
* Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Pia Guerra (available in 60 issues or 10 volumes from DC/Vertigo Comics, 2002-2008)
* Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

From the press release, posted on juror Gwenda Bond's blog:

Each year, 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 2007 jurors were Charlie Anders, Gwenda Bond (chair), Meghan McCarron, Geoff Ryman, and Sheree Renee Thomas.

The Carhullan Army elicited strong praise from the jurors. Gwenda Bond said, “Hall does so many things well in this book – writing female aggression in a believable way, dealing with real bodies in a way that makes sense, and getting right to the heart of the contradictions that violence brings out in people, but particularly in women in ways we still don't see explored that often. I found the writing entrancing and exactly what it needed to be for the story; lean, but well-turned.” Geoff Ryman said, “It faces up to our current grim future (something too few SF novels have done) and seems to go harder and darker into war, violence, and revolution.” Meghan McCarron said, “I found the book to be subtle and ambiguous in terms of its portrayal of the Army, and its utopia….The book became, ultimately, an examination of what it means to attain physical, violent power as defined by a male-dominated world. And it asserted that it could be claimed by anyone, regardless of physical sex, provided they were willing to pay the price.”

The book, which is Hall’s third novel, also won the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) from Britain or the Commonwealth written by an author of 35 or under.

Victoria Hoyle's review of this book piqued my interest, but it wasn't available in the US at the time. I gather it will soon (or may even now) be available in the US under a different title, Daughters of the North. Colin Greenland also reviewed it, here.

Of the titles on the short list, I've so far read only three (but will soon, of course, be remedying that):

--The Stross novel is curiously old to be on this list for a mainstream book. My lengthy, comprehensive review of it is still available at Strange Horizons.

--Interfictions is an interesting mixed-bag anthology (that has little to do with gender exploration). My favorite story in it is Vandana Singh's "Hunger," which I highly recommend.

--Much has been written about "Dangerous Space." You can find excerpts of and links to many of the reviews here and purchase it here.

Why Publish With an Independent or Small Press?

Tuesday evening I'll be participating on a panel at Hugo House, in Seattle, as a part of its InPrint series. Judging by the publicity material, I'll be in very fine company. Here's the scoop:

The Hugo House InPrint Series presents:

Why Publish With an Independent or Small Press?

An Evening with Northwest Independent Press Publishers

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008, 7:00 – 9:00



Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave. Seattle
Admission $3 members/$5 non-members

Why Publish With an Independent or Small Press?


The Northwest features a handful of excellent independent press publishers who are producing interesting work and attracting positive critical attention and awards.

Tonight editors and publishers from several publishers will be on hand to explain the advantages of publishing with an independent small press and how to go about it. Our speakers will cover the editing and business side of small press, from queries and pitches to editorial preferences and distribution.

Small press publishers can serve audiences that aren’t normally served by larger publishers who can only publish very commercial work, allowing them to get away from publishing only work that appeals to the largest common denominator of readers. Once books have been published and received positive reviews, they often attract the attention of larger publishers for broader distribution. All of your questions will be answered and you’ll come away with valuable information and contacts for publishing.


OUR PANEL:

Black Heron Press: Jerry Gold, publisher and editor-in-chief Black Heron Press is one of the oldest literary presses in the Pacific Northwest. It specializes in literary fiction. Its books have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Stranger, Booklist, Publishers Weekly and other newspapers and journals. Several books it has published have won national or regional awards. Black Heron Press leans toward books that make a philosophical or moral statement, as well as being well-written. Sinc e 1996, it has given the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction.



Chin Music Press: Bruce Rutledge, journalist and author - Chin Music Press resurrects some of the best practices of publishing in past centuries in books that tell decidedly modern stories. As a reporter and writer living in Japan during the 1990s, Rutledge was struck at how US news media was devoting less and less space to international news. Chin Music Press was founded to catch those fascinating and insightful stories about our world that were being ignored by an increasingly myopic and profit-driven media.


Copper Canyon Press: Copper Canyon Press is a nonprofit publisher that believes poetry is vital to language and living. Since 1972, the Press has published poetry exclusively and has established an international reputation for its commitment to authors, editorial acumen, and dedication to the poetry audience. Copper Canyon has published more than 300 titles, including works by Nobel Laureates Pablo Neruda, Odysseas Elytis, Octavio Paz, Vincente Aleixandre, and Rabindranath Tagore.


Fantagraphics: Eric Reynolds, editor - Fantagraphics authors have garnered more favorable press attention than any publisher’s in the history of the medium of graphic novels and comics. Recent books alone have received significant, positive coverage in TIME, Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, Spin, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, and others. Fantagraphics was ranked among the top five most influential publishers in the history of comics in a recent p oll by an industry trade newspaper; it was the only independent publisher on the list, and the only contemporary publisher named alongside corporate behemoths Marvel and DC.

Aqueduct Press: L. Timmel Duchamp, author, publisher and editor – Aqueduct Press dedicates itself to publishing challenging, feminist science fiction that stretches the imagination and stimulates thought. Acqueduct Press authors include award-winning British authors Gwyneth Jones and Nicola Griffith, as well
as Northwest authors Ursula K. Le Guin, Nisi Shawl, and Kelley Eskridge.

Payseur and Schmidt: Jacob McMurray, publisher - Payseur and Schmidt resides in the lacunae between art and genre, producing literary-based art projects with ridiculous packaging. The Payseur & Schmidt stable of awesomeness includes works from Thomas M. Disch, Nicola Griffith, Art Chantry, John Clute, and Marvin Bell. www.payseurandschmidt.com


Wood Works Press: Paul Hunter, publisher and editor - Recently featured on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, Paul Hunter has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works for the past 14 years, currently including 24 books and 55 broadsides. The press seeks to offer the best in contemporary poetry and poetry in translation, in an attractive, durable, inexpensive format. Three of his titles have been finalists for the Washington State and Colorado Book Awards.



The InPrint Series is a quarterly forum designed to connect writers with agents, publishers and publishing industry experts. The mission of Richard Hugo House is to build a vital learning community that develops and sustains practicing writers doing essential work. (206) 322-7030 www.hugohouse.org