A Nineteenth-Century Utopian Explorer

A Nineteenth-Century Utopian Explorer

by Lucy Sussex

Catherine Helen Spence (1825–1910) was a philanthropist, social reformer, and the first woman to stand for Parliament in Australia. She was pictured in 2001 on the Australian five dollar note, and earned the soubriquet of "The Grand Old Woman of Australasia." In addition she wrote eight novels, of which two, Handfasted (1879) and A Week in the Future (1888–89), were utopian explorations of the future. Few other nineteenth-century women wrote so much futuristic fiction, precursive of the SF genre proper.

She was born in Scotland, daughter of lawyer David Spence and his wife Helen. Her father unwisely speculated, sending the family bankrupt, and they emigrated to South Australia in 1839. From her late teens Catherine was obliged to support herself and her mother from teaching and later journalism. Her social activism including campaigning for social welfare, women’s rights, and electoral reform. Though she lived in Adelaide for most of her life, she maintained a network of correspondence, being acquainted with notables such as novelist George Eliot, and economist John Stuart Mill.

Her first utopia, Handfasted, was submitted for the Sydney Mail’s novel competition (its prize £100). Its matter, an ancient Scots system of trial marriage, was famously rejected for being socialistic, dangerous, and calculated to “loosen the marriage tie”. Handfasted was only published in 1984, proving to be one of the most readable and durable of nineteenth-century utopias.

Her second utopia, A Week in the Future, was serialized in the Sydney Centennial Magazine. It was less of a novel than a blueprint for the future, covering economics, law, marriage, and the arts. The heroine Emily Bethel is single and of similar age and politics to Spence. She is dying, and her doctor grants her wish—to swap increasing invalidism for a week spent in London a century in the future. What follows is 1988, as Spence hoped it might be. She had read English social thinker Jane Hume Clapperton’s Scientific Meliorism and the Evolution of Happiness (1885). “Meliorism” referred to social advances via altruism; the “science” was evolution. Spence essentially popularizes Clapperton’s notions, depicting a highly evolved society of honest work, co-operation, and the rights of women and children. It is socialistic, communal in its living, and Christian. The utopia is presented day by day, from Monday’s Associated (communal) Homes to Friday’s Government and Laws, ending with Sunday’s Religion. A “good exchange” writes Emily Bethel, at the end of the narrative ready to die with good cheer at this happy future.

Some of Spence’s predictions occurred, such as women’s rights. Others, as happens with prognostic literature, are inaccurate. We do not practice eugenics, and modern fantasy literature is not her school of fiction, “purely ideal, in which spirits and fairies and supernatural beings…were called out to paint a moral and adorn a tale”. Spence was unaware of ecology and uninterested in non-Anglo-Saxon cultures (as was typical of Victorian utopianists). Yet what she gives us, in this optimistic vision, is a society run for the good of all, some of whose better features still might be achievable.

Handcuffing "post-racial possibility"

The charges against Henry Louis Gates, Jr., have finally been dropped. The Nation has a piece by Melissa Harris-Lacewell on how apolitical Gates actually is (rather than being the "radical" some reports have characterized hin as). In fact, I was astonished to read that

Gates said in an interview to TheRoot.com "I would sooner have believed the sky was going to fall from the heavens than I would have believed this could happen to me."

Here, by the way, is Harris-Lacewell's summary of the details of his arrest:

The Cambridge police and Professor Gates tell somewhat different versions of the story. But both sides agree that Gates came home to find his front door jammed. He used his key to enter by the back door. He and his driver then pushed at the front door until it opened. Witnessing this, someone called the police and indicated there may be a breaking-and-entering in progress. While Gates was on the phone with a property management company a police officer arrived. The officer requested identification. Gates produced it. Even after ascertaining that Gates had not illegally entered the property, the officer arrested him for disorderly conduct. The police report asserts Gates yelled and behaved aggressively. Gates denies this. The charges have been dropped. In short, Gates was arrested even though the police officer was fully aware that Gates lived in the home.

The heart of her piece is about how she had (before this) seen Gates as an embodiment of "post-racial possibility." Her conclusion is worth quoting:

It is hard to imagine many other African American men who would indicate such surprise. Even President Obama has spoken of the difficulty in hailing a cab and First Lady Michelle Obama has expressed her understanding of black men's vulnerability to random violence. But Gates seems genuinely surprised and deeply hurt. His sense of violation and humiliation evokes great empathy, but also some incredulity about his astonishment with racial bias in the criminal justice system.

I like and respect Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Although we have had intellectual and political disagreements he has always welcomed dissent and encouraged individuality. Our personal connection is not why I was so devastated to see his mug shot or images of him handcuffed on his front porch. I was not even distressed because of class implications that reasoned, "If this can happen to a Harvard professor then no one is safe."

My distress is squarely rooted in feeling that I watched the police handcuff American possibility.

A classic example

The Seattle Times is carrying a New York Times story by Abby Goodnough:Was arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. an act of racism? His Harvard colleagues think so. Gates lives only a few blocks from Harvard Square. According to Gates's lawyer (also a professor at Harvard), he arrived home from a trip to China and found his front door jammed.

He forced the door open with the help of his cabdriver, Ogletree said, and had been inside for a few minutes when Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department appeared at his door and asked him to step outside.

Gates, 58, refused to do so, Ogletree said. From that point, the account of the professor and the police began to differ.

According to his lawyer, Gates told the sergeant that he lived there and showed his Massachusetts driver's license and his Harvard identification card, but Crowley still did not seem to believe that Gates lived in the home, a few blocks from Harvard Square. At that point, his lawyer said, Gates grew frustrated and asked for the officer's name and badge number.

According to the police report, Gates initially refused to show identification.

In the report, Crowley said a white female caller had notified the police around 12:45 p.m. of seeing two black men on the porch of the home, at 17 Ware St. The caller was suspicious after seeing one of the men "wedging his shoulder into the door as if he was trying to force entry," according to the report.

A spokesman for the Cambridge Police Department did not return a call seeking comment. But in the report, Crowley said that as he told Gates he was investigating a possible break-in, Gates exclaimed, "Why, because I'm a black man in America?" and accused the sergeant of racism.

"While I was led to believe that Gates was lawfully in the residence," Crowley wrote in the report, "I was quite surprised and confused with the behavior he exhibited toward me."

Gates ultimately followed him outside, the report said, and kept yelling at him despite the sergeant's warning "that he was becoming disorderly." Crowley then arrested and handcuffed him.

Gates was held at police headquarters for several hours before being released on his own recognizance.

"He is cooperating now with the city to resolve this matter as soon as possible," Ogletree said, adding that Gates wanted the charges against him dismissed.

Police officers are notorious for reconstructing events in their reports to justify their behavior after the fact. But even if I were inclined to take the cop's version over Gates's (which I'm not), there's no getting around the officer's arresting Gates-- in his own home-- even though he says he believed that "Gates was lawfully in the residence." One would expect the officer to have been apologetic on learning his mistake. Instead, he apparently expected apologetic, deferential behavior from the person he has falsely accused.

Ogletree said that Gates had "never touched" Crowley, but did "express his frustration at being subjected to the threat of arrest in his own home."

Well, duh. So it's illegal, now, to complain about being harassed in your own home? It's easy to imagine the scene: just arriving home after a long trip, from the other side of the world, exhausted and jetlagged. Wanting a bath or shower. And probably just to crash. Do you think that officer would have treated a white male executive as he treated Gates? "Disorderly conduct," out on the street, usually means not leaving the scene when the police tell you to, or asking questions they don't want voiced in their hearing. It's one of those flexible charges that can be arbitrarily flung at anyone who's being an inconvenience to the police. But what does "Disorderly Conduct" actually mean when you're inside your own home, whichh been invaded by police on a spurious charge?

Second, I wonder why Gates's neighbor didn't recognize him. And why, at noon, with a taxi driver helping him and presumably his luggage sitting nearby, the obvious explanation didn't occur to her.

And third: even if this doesn't offer one of those classic examples of racial profiling, the vile racist comments on the Seattle Times site make it impossible not to see this in terms of racism.

For the record? I once had to break into my house, when I got locked out. It never once crossed my mind that a neighbor might report me to the police for doing that. (Though of course it sounds as if Gates didn't actually "break into" his house: having unlocked the door, it jammed. Wooden doors do that sometimes.)

Book View Cafe Hits 1,000 Members

Book View Cafe, the online professional authors' cooperative, now has 1,000 registered reader/members and we're celebrating with cheers and giveaways. Of course, you can also celebrate by signing up and/or reading our fiction. New work is posted every day.

Aqueduct Press authors participating in Book View Cafe include Sylvia Kelso, Sue Lange, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Nancy Jane Moore.

Readercon, authority, and models of readership

[Cross-posted from my blog, where the discussion in the comments may be of interest.]

This weekend I went to my first Readercon. There's a lot to like about Readercon, but there's also a lot to dislike. To start off with, the name is false advertising. This isn't a con that centers itself on or meets the needs of readers, or enables readers to talk to each other. This is a professional networking conference that also meets the needs of a small set of fans, most of whom seem to be white, male, and over 50. It is designed, in many ways large and small, to reinforce the status of professionals--particularly writers, but also editors, paid critics, and academics--above that of people who are "just fans" or "just readers."

The con's setup (everything from the programming to the hotel selection) allows and encourages this group of people to talk to each other, and fans and readers to express appreciation to this set of authorities, but does very little to encourage literary conversation as a conversation among equals. Readership, audience reaction, is strongly encouraged to stay within strict bounds; criticism and participation in the discussion are treated as privileges accorded to a few, not the basic rights of every reader.

This description is probably startling to many of you, since many attendees praise the con for the high level of its discussion. Indeed, many of the panels are a joy -- panelists tend to be intelligent, erudite, and witty, with a deep knowledge of the panel topics. The problem is, they all tend to have the same kind of deep knowledge. There are a number of perspectives which simply do not appear--particularly those of people of color, but also those of younger generations, queer people, women, young professionals, poor or working class people, and fields of literary criticism developed since 1968. (HINT: Harold Bloom, b. 1930, most influential work The Anxiety of Influence [1972], should not be the youngest nongenre literary critic anyone on a panel can cite.) The con is missing out on a huge richness of diversity of experience and thought; it is missing out on some of the greatest pleasures of reading, not to mention the chance for writers and critics and "just readers" to challenge and change each other.

These lacks are not due to individual program participants, who seem in general eager to talk and welcoming to newcomers. Rather, they stem from basic assumptions shaping the con's programming practices.

Programming
Programming consists of two tracks of panel discussions, two tracks of readings, two tracks of workshops, individual discussion, and "special panels," one track of kaffeeklatsches, and one track devoted to autograph sessions of two to three authors. Program items are developed and assigned by the con staff in private. Panel discussions usually consist of four to six panelists discussing the program topic for forty-five minutes to an hour, with the remainder of the hour open to audience questions at the moderator's discretion. Kaffeklatsches are small meetings led by one or two hosts, and the topic and management of the space is up to the host's discretion.

Basically, all of this creates a top-down expert approach to literature and literary discussion, emphasizing authoritarianism, lecturing, and celebrity status, discouraging small or individual book conversations among people who are not panelists. A small group of experts is given dedicated time and space to speak; the mass of readers must speak in a conversation framed by the experts, and all discussion is mediated by the experts, rather than being reader-to-reader. Kaffeeklatsches may offer a space for reader-to-reader discussion, depending on how the host shapes conversation, but these are not even on dedicated topics; the audience may be brought together by their interest in a particular writer, but since that writer is the host who controls the conversation, the conversation can only occur in particular ways, even if the writing is the topic--and frequently it is not, nor supposed to be.

Of course people can form small discussion groups on their own, if they can hold a steady discussion in the public hallways, or have a hotel room they are willing to open up to strangers -- and I think we all know that depth and long duration are not typical of con encounters in hallways. My point is not that readers are mute or lack initiative, but that the con provides dedicated spaces and established methods for particular kinds of conversations, but not for others.

Additionally, the con provides no resources or dedicated programming for newbies. For a population that often claims to be welcoming the socially mal-adept, it's striking how little care is taken to ease new people into the community discussion. Or, rather, it's striking what kinds of new people are eased in. People who have trouble reading social cues but are confident enough to speak and volunteer discussion without explicit welcome may find this experience pleasurable. People who are hesitant to volunteer discussion without being explicitly welcomed, or who are reluctant to intrude on conversations without explicit invitation, will not. And these differences, although individual, are both gendered, racialized, and tend to trend according to age.

The scheduling shows both an indifference to the needs of typical young working attendees and to encouraging non-panelist communication. Readercon takes place the weekend after a holiday weekend, when people without organizational power (who tend to be younger) will be reluctant or unable to take the day off, but eleven of the con's 21.5 hours of programming are scheduled for Friday. Saturday and Sunday contain some rerun programming (items repeated from earlier Readercons), while the Friday programming is all new. Key program items, like the panel on the work of GOH Elizabeth Hand, took place in the middle of a workday. The kaffeeklatsch with GOH Greer Gilman took place at 11am, first thing in the morning, on a workday. The race panel, which could be expected to be difficult and controversial, took place at Friday at 5pm, meaning that anyone who could only attend the con after work could not make this programming item.

Only one mealtime during the con is scheduled for the entire con, removing another opportunity for people to mingle. There are no official parties and no official Saturday evening events that encourage mingling. The "Meet the Prose" party on Friday evening once again centers on having readers communicate with writers rather than each other, and also offers a painfully evident demonstration of relative status within the Readercon community: You can tell who's generally considered important by how stationary they are.

Unsurprisingly, given the con's focus on traditional status markers, panels are dominated by white people, men, and people over forty. Women, younger attendees, and people of color led the readings track much more than in the panel discussions. POC hardly appeared as panelists outside the dedicated race discussion. I am not convinced more than two people under 30 would have been on the panels without the intervention of GoH Greer Gilman, who had clearly encouraged and endorsed the participation of several young female academics and writers in several program items. Despite the heavy female presence at the con (three female Guests of Honor, including the Memorial GoH; an attendee base that I'd guesstimate at 40-50% female), programming showed a disturbing trend to gender segregation: in panels of 4-6 people, many panels were all one gender or had only one male or female participant out of all the panelists.

For me, the cap for the con's evident unconcern for people who do not fit a narrow set of criteria came in the advertisement for Readercon 21 in the printed Program Guide to the con, which has the tagline "This IS your father's Readercon." Yes, I am familiar with the phrase's history. This does not eliminate the sexism of the assumption that genders science fiction and science fiction conventions male (it was "your father's Oldsmobile" because it was assumed men had the money, the purchasing power, and the moral right to make unilateral decisions about the household's major purchases). And it relies on the idea that what the Concom values in Readercon is the golden past, that it wants to contract rather than expand.

The result of all this, quite clearly, is the reluctance of people under forty to come to the con without the additional impetus of professional networking. In a con taking place in the city with the youngest age distribution in the United States because of the concentration of colleges in the area, I did not meet a single person under thirty who was there without some professional reason to be (academic, editor, professional critic, writer or aspiring writer); in fact, I only know of three people under forty, including myself, who were there without some professional reason. People of color are especially unlikely to attend without professional obligation, given the overwhelming whiteness of the con and the unthinking cultural imperialism of many of the panels.

Race
People of color at the con: 8-12 (personal count vs. personal count of friends)
Con attendees: 600 (guesstimate based on discussion with other attendees)
Percentage of people of color at the con: 1-2%

This con is 98% white. The United States is 66% or 74% white (depending on whether white Latinos are included). Boston is 58% white.

Accessibility
This is the worst con I've ever seen for accessibility; no one appeared to have given it any thought at all. The signage for rooms was small, poorly formatted, and difficult to read even for someone without major vision problems (or, to be precise, for someone with artificially corrected vision problems). The pocket program font size is nearly illegible. The aisles in panel rooms may have been large enough for wheelchairs, but only barely. I believe there was no ramp access to the panel podiums, but may be wrong on this. The steps up and down to the podiums were clearly difficult for at least some of the panelists. There were no seats or spaces up front set aside for wheelchairs or people with vision or hearing problems.

Miscellaneous

1. The hotel not only didn't have free wireless, it had thirteen-dollar-a-day wireless that did not work for a substantial number of people. It is just plain ridiculous that the hotel charged for this to begin with, or that the con failed to set up a network themselves for attendees in this situation.
   
2. The lack of official party space means that people run parties out of their rooms, inconveniencing guests who do not keep those hours. Admitting that people at cons have parties and declare some dedicated space for them in a single floor or wing will make things easier on everyone, including people who want to sleep on quiet floors.
   
3. The program guide devotes an entire page to defining science fiction awards (which attendees probably either know or can google) and devotes 37 pages to participant bios, largely because no one seems to have spent any effort imposing length limits. Some of the bios are five paragraphs long.
   

I'll try to get up something on alternative discussion models tomorrow, but I'd like to separate it out because it's a general sf con issue even if Readercon is a particularly extreme example. Even the smaller sf cons seem dead-set on the panel discussion model. I don't honestly see Readercon as likely to change its practices, but I think there's some stuff we can experiment with at Wiscon.

WisCon Chronicles 4 - Update

(Aqueduct at WisCon 33 - part of Nisi Shawl's hand to the right as a special favour)
I last posted about this a fortnight - or is it three weeks ago? Things are slowly gathering momentum here. Almost enough academic papers are promised, or on the way, or actually submitted Lots of other interesting things beginning to appear, eg. we hope one Guest of Honour speech already, courtesy of the publisher, plus 2 pieces from Nisi Shawl, our Tiptree prize winner, 2 poems on panels from Anne Sheldon, that a truly excellent poet, and a My WisCon in verse in process from Robin Small-McCarthy, attending her first WisCon.

A piece on language at Cons and elsewhere from MJ Hardman is on the way, and I'm hoping for an ethnography of WisCon from a writer and archaeologist with a similar interest in Peru, Meg Turville-Heitz. Nancy Jane Moore is doing a response to one of the academic papers, and a report with Diane Silver on a panel about a Writers' Community, and other panel reports are also coming in. There's also some fiction and poetry from people who read at the Con. I'd really like at this stage, some more overall views or My WisCons, and more panel reports. The ones I'm getting are excellent, so more please. More!
Current deadline for materials is August 1st, so if you have any thoughts or retrospects about WisCon 33 that you'd like to have considered for print, send them off to me, preferably in .rtf or Word format (easier for the typesetters, helloooo, Kath...) at
sylvia.kelso@gmail.com

A Pair of New Reviews

A review of Vandana Singh's Distances has been posted at Tangent Onine. Reviewer Bob Blough concludes his review:

Individual sections illuminate and provide a rounded backdrop to the whole, until by the end of this finely layered novella I felt as though I had met a fully formed human being—not to mention a number of fascinating characters—and all with a mathematical conundrum of epic proportions with dire import for the cultures of two planets.

“Distances” is a richly rewarding experience. Vandana Singh is relatively new to the genre, having seen published a mere handful of popular and critically acclaimed stories in the past few years. If you've not yet encountered her work, “Distances” would be a fine place to start.

And Joe Sherry has reviewed the third book of the Marq'ssan Cycle, Tsunami, at Adventures in Reading. In his view,

Ultimately, Tsunami is a novel about power. The power of the Executive. The power of the Marq’ssan. The power of the Free Zone and the power of change. One of the many ways Duchamp demonstrates this is through Elizabeth Weatherall. Weatherall has been the de facto leader of the Security branch of the Executive for more than a decade. As the personal assistant to Robert Sedgwick, she wielded Sedgwick’s power when he was not able to. Weatherall had all the power of Security in everything but name. At any time any of the other senior leaders of the Executive could trump Weatherall by going to Sedgwick. Tsunami features a major power struggle between Weatherall and Sedgwick and this struggle is central to the narrative and the shape of the series.

Reasonable? Who Decides?

Today's online Seattle Times has a link to "Million-Dollar Doctors," an article by John Ryan, posted on local NPR affiliate KUOW's site, revealing astonishing levels of compensation paid by "nonprofit" hospitals to their top executives and certain physicians. Interestingly, one of the newspaper's headline stories reports steep (double-digit) hikes in health insurance rates by the state's largest health insurers, utterly slamming "consumers" at a time when many people have lost their jobs or are taking mandatory cuts in pay (aka "furloughs"). The Times reports that Washington State's insurance regulators have ruled the rate hikes justified and left them "virtually untouched." I infer that the editors of the Times were loath to make a direct connection between the KUOW report it links to and their article on rate hikes: it would probably have pissed off corporate interests if they had. But I'm glad the link was there, lower down on the page. Presumably the regulators know all about these multimillion-dollar salaries. I guess they think people who routinely rake in 2 mill a year need $4 million dollar going-away presents.

Back in the late 1980s, I worked as a secretary for a couple of docs at one of these very hospitals. I would often come home acutely nauseated by what I had no choice to learn about the relations between drug companies and doctors, and technology companies and doctors, and asbestos manufacturers and doctors-- and by my being required to participate in it. I kept wondering: are these things legal? Ought I to be writing these letters and these bills and these reports on University time? I just couldn't tell, because the corruption was so thoroughly normalized. "I'm not a bad guy, Timmi," one of the docs told me. (Apparently my control over my eyebrows had slipped, betraying my dismay when he told me to charge the asbestos company he was testifying for in court $200 an hour for his travel time, plus, of course, expenses and the fee for deposing the patient who was going to get screwed by his testimony.) (That $200 an hour would probably be a lot more now.) "This is just how we do business, he said," eager to justify himself to me. (One day, telling me about his passion for Ferraris, he told me he'd already put away the money needed to send his five children to Princeton-- which was when, he said, he decided he deserved to spend his money on Ferraris and other treats, given his sober diligence as a breadwinner.) In short, I learned then, from the back end, the real reason health care is so expensive in the US. Which is why, of course, the routine denial of health care to millions of people and the industry's ability to stave off government-mandated universal health care is particularly enraging: it's so totally unnecessary and is the best illustration I know of for what is wrong with the current state of politics in the US.

After reading these two pieces, I found myself wondering how any reasonable person could conclude that the people running hospitals that can't be taxed-- because they're "nonprofit"-- can get away with paying themselves millions a year plus "golden handcuffs." The KUOW article noted that one of these hospitals has as its motto "We seek simplicity in our lives and in our work." (Its CEO was paid $2.1 million in 2007.) It notes, too, that another of these hospitals laid off 200 employees this year. And I also recall reading some time ago that many of these hospitals' employees don't receive health insurance with their wages. (Is that still the case? I'd be surprised if it wasn't.) According to Ryan,

The IRS can impose tax penalties or even revoke a charity's nonprofit status if it deems compensation to be unreasonable.

An IRS report this year on the nation's tax–exempt hospitals found almost no executive compensation violating the federal standard for reasonable pay. But the agency says it has a hard time enforcing the law because the notion of what is reasonable is so imprecise.

Reasonable? I suppose if you assume that bosses need to be paid 200 times as much (or more) as most of their employees, millions in salary a year for the so-called "employees" of a so-called "nonprofit" is "reasonable." But I wonder why someone holding such an attitude gets to decide what is reasonable in the first place. (What are such people doing, working for the IRS?) Why not put some ordinary people in charge of deciding what "reasonable" is. We could ask the surviving relatives of people who die from curable conditions because they can't afford or are denied health insurance and thus health care what reasonable is. Or perhaps we could ask some of the people just laid off by these hospitals: they might have a more informed notion of what reasonable is. "Reasonable," obviously, in this case doesn't mean reasonable to the ordinary person on the street, but something else entirely.

Nisi Shawl Reading "Wallamelon"

Nisi Shawl read her wonderful "Wallamelon" at Google.com, here in Seattle last month, and Google made a YouTube video of it:



Enjoy!

Links for a Monday

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reuters reports that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WisCon 33 WisCon Chronicles 4

Hello Everyone.
As you may know, I've just become an Aqueductista, with my collection of SF essays coming out from Aqueduct at WisCon 33. And you doubtless also know, every year Aqueduct produces a volume covering the previous WisCon. Timmi has asked me to edit the 4th WisCon Chronicles, covering WisCon 33. It's an honour, but it also feels like a very big responsibility!

Chronicles 4 will concern me in my second hat, as editor, formal or informal, up to and including academic volumes, and I hope to blog, if sporadically, on the Chronicle's progress. For now, though, here’s a fullscale call for materials for WisCon Chronicles 4. In this volume we’re looking to include

Some academic papers,
Some extracts from work by people who read at the conference, including flash fiction, excerpts from longer fiction and poetry - especially Aqueductistas, of course.
Guest of Honour speeches, one already promised.

We’re also looking to include some panel reports.
Panels are the core of WisCon, where the important, the sensitive and the new issues for the SF and F and feminist scenes and increasingly, fandom in or out of the Blogosphere, come to light.
And we are looking from input from everyone who attended WisCon 33.

Panel reports could be on a single or several panels, or thoughts about such, any length under 4000 words, about any panel you felt was important, to you in person or to the feminist SF and F scene, or in general.

If you’ve posted such reports already, please consider passing them on to us to consider for printing. All contributors will be acknowledged, under whatever name they wish, in the Chronicles
We also want overall personal views. The notional title for the 4th Chronicls is My WisCon, and we would love to have as many of these as possible.

My Wiscons would ideally
Be under 4000 words but longer than 400
Possibly overlap with My WisCons from people who went to the same events
Need not cover everything, just your thoughtpoints
Could come as straight reports, but also as poems, letters, dialogue, recipes, and so on.

The only thing we can’t manage is illustrations, they are too expensive, so actual art or photos, sadly, might not be the best choice.

The current deadline for Chronicles 4 turn-ins is the 1st of August. Please send your thoughts and/or impressions to me at
sylvia.kelso@gmail.com
Attachments are possibly better, but in the body of the post will do.

Thoughts and queries cd. also be sent there. I hope to establish an LJ community for discussion as well.
Hope to hear from you!

40 Years Since Stonewall

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising against the police, which marked the beginning of the Gay and Lesbian rights movement in the US. Democracy Now has a video, "Remembering Stonewall," available online here.

And the SF Gate reports:

President Obama today marked an historic first when he issued a White House resolution for Gay Pride month that honors the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots -- marking the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.

What Remains

What Remains, which until now had been sold only at WisCon 33, is at last available through Aqueduct's site, where it can be purchased for $12. Published in conjunction with the appearance of Ellen Klages and Geoff Ryman as the Guests of Honor at WisCon 33, What Remains features three tales, two short tales by Geoff Ryman and an original novelette by Ellen Klages.

In Ryman’s “No Bad Thing,” a certain brilliant, world-famous scientist has become a vampire and duly turns hi intellectual gifts in a new direction; and in “Care,” a story set in the fascinating world of Belo Horizonte created by Sheldon Brown and the Experimental Game Lab, a little boy’s father stands with him on the Edge of the world looking down at Rio, shows him how to walk off the Edge, then disappears.

In Ellen Klages’s original novelette “Echoes of Aurora,” Jo Norwood goes back to her hometown to bury her father and meets a lovely, mysterious woman named Aurora, and through the summer, Jo and Rory make passionate love, poetry, and a story together—a story that begins “Once upon a time, you kissed me.”

What Remains also includes Eileen Gunn’s interview of Geoff Ryman and Debbie Notkin’s interview of Ellen Klages.

PS For more about the fictional world of Belo Horizonte, check out this trailer.

"An instrospective future history"

Charlie Jane Anders has posted an interview with Samuel R. Delany at io9, taking about his forthcoming novel, "Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders," about which he says

In a way, it's a very simple story, just about two working-class gay men, who meet when they're seventeen and nineteen, living on the coast of Georgia. They meet in 2007, and they stay together for the next 80 years, until one of them dies. Now you tell me whether that's science fiction or not. It definitely goes into the future, but on the other hand, they're absolutely out of the center of life, and things progress where they live, very very slowly. And they hear about things that are going on outside. They live on coastal part of Georgia in a little town that does go through cycles of being a semi-popular tourist spot in the summers, and then some years, nobody bothers to come at all. Eventually they move to a little island off the coast, and a little lesbian art colony starts up on the island. And they wonder if they're not being crowded out of their new home. But they're very fond of some of the people who live there, and some of the people who live there are very fond of them.

Now that's a description that hooks me.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Aqueduct Gazette, Summer 2009

The Summer 2009 issue of the Aqueduct Gazette is now available for download from Aqueduct's site. (This is the issue we distributed at WisCon.) Highlights include Nisi Shawl's reflections on finding herself the first African American to win the Tiptree Award, Gwyneth Jones's notes on the stories in The Buonarotti Quartet, an interview with Liz Henry about The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 3: Carnival of Feminist SF, and my thoughts on Aqueduct's fifth anniversary. There's also the usual-- word of works forthcoming from Aqueduct and descriptions of our most recent publications. You can download a pdf file of the issue here.

Back from Syacmore Hill

I returned home from Sycamore Hill late Friday night (sans checked luggage)-- only to wake at four the morning after with a full-blown, brutal cold and a cough that makes my chest burn. I'm drowning in not only mucus, but also in email. If you're one of the many people waiting for a reply from me, I beg you to be patient. I'll be getting to you soon. (I hope.)

Sycamore Hill was, as ever, wonderful. This year it rained most of the time, and the food was subpar. (Thank god for the salad bar.) But the stories the attendees brought were excellent and the company witty (Karen Joy Fowler was with us), stimulating, and often fun. Most of us, regardless of gender, painted our toenails garish colors at our end-of-the-workshop party on the last night. And as if that weren't enough fun, there was much singing, and several attendees burst into delightful song just before their stories were critiqued. (photos in this post by Jim Kelly.)

I wrote the following (hoping to finish and post it the next day, before the critiques began) on Friday, June 12 on a plane en route to Asheville:

By coincidence, the issue of the American Book Review that arrived in my mail box this week(May/June 2009) features a focus "Why Teach Creative Writing," while the issue of the New Yorker that arrived a couple of days earlier (June 8 & 15, 2009) has an essay by Louis Menand, "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught," that apparently takes its impetus from Mark McGurl's The Program Era, a book about creative writing programs recently published by Harvard University Press.

Menand's essay begins by revisiting the old argument about whether creative writing can be taught, then moves away from the specificity of that question to consider what creative writing programs are able to do (or not do) for their students, providing a bit of history of such programs along the way. The most striking statement Menand makes is this: "As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War. It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature." Menand's essay does not set out to discuss this, so I can't fault him for expanding on this; but this point certainly merits thorough consideration. And I think it'd be particularly interesting to consider the bearing this has on genre fiction in the US today (as opposed, say, to the status of genre fiction before the years in which creative writing programs proliferated).

Menand offers up a lot of entertaining anecdotes about famous writers teaching creative writing classes. My favorite is his story of of what Angela Carter said once on the first day of class when she was teaching at Brown and a student asked her what her own writing was like: "My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis." According to Menand, "the course turned out not to be oversubscribed." He also quotes McGurl's book on how certain styles have been adopted by "lower middle-class" writers like Carver and Oates as a means for "dealing with the highbrow world of the academy," to "shield oneself with words." And he rightly observes that "no one seems to agree on what the goal of good writing is, anyway." Interestingly, Menand concludes his essay by noting that he stopped writing poetry after he graduated and never published a poem which, he says, "places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing course." He comments, "I don't think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things."

The ABR focus section on "Why Teach Creative Writing" offers a spread of takes on the subject of creative writing by creative writing teachers, eliciting markedly different attitudes toward the question and understanding of its semantics. I found Lance Olsen's answer the most congenial. He believes that creative writing classes teach a method of reading. (Which may or may not be useful for student writers). My experience of writing workshops (which granted has always been as a teacher or a peer) confirms this. Interestingly, another teacher, Leslee Becker, takes the question personally, as in why she herself teaches creative writing (rather than why anyone should teach creative writing). Teacher Kelly Cherry recalls being a student of creative writing herself, saying that creative writing classes gives would-be writers "permission" to write, which for her, as a student, was "liberating and life-saving."

Some of the pieces in the ABR focus section assumed a defensive posture, most curiously Steve Tomasula's, which took the question as an attack on not only the very notion of making creative writing classes and programs available but even on the notion of creative writing itself. Given that the people asking the question were inspired to do it after attending the annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) meeting, this interpretation suggests an uncomfortable degree of sensitivity. (Easy to imagine how such a sensitivity could develop in the early 21st-century US.) Tomasula zooms in on the atmosphere in post 9/11 "Middle America": "everyone wants to live in a world where great stories make it easy to draw a line between good and evil." Although he doesn't say so directly, he implies that learning to understand "how language can be manipulated to create effects-- get us to vote, buy, feel sympathy or anger-- that to learn by doing in a creative writing classroom where manipulators and their audience meet face-to-face and feedback is immediate" will make students immune to the manipulative effects of narrative. The contrarian in me wonders whether it won't also produce more effective manipulators. Do most creative writing courses spend a significant amount of their time exploring ethical issues? I wonder. The people who use narrative to achieve certain effects are, after all, accomplished craftspeople and can be assumed to have learned their craft in the same classes that attempt to wise-up students about the manipulative effects of certain narratives. Certainly I know many people (among them numerous writers) who define successful narratives as those that entertain the majority of people reading or viewing them while making them feel optimistic, smug, and safe.

++++++++++++++++++

pretty much forgot about having started the above post while I was at Sycamore Hill, until one of the goldsmiths approached a group of us to anxiously urge us to read Louis Menand's essay. He seemed to think we needed to read it to help us understand something about our peer workshop. I'm utterly clueless about what he might have had in mind (except that maybe he felt we needed to submit ourselves to the middlebrow authority it represented to him by virtue of having been published in the New Yorker, we being mere science fiction writers). In fact, we spent the week taking apart and examining one another's fictions, continually worrying at narrative and its workings-- and above all, as critical readers, excavating and even constructing stories out of the narrative when they weren't at all obvious (as was often the case)-- and seeking to persuade everyone else of the validity of our readings. For me, peer workshops like Sycamore Hill chiefly offer insight into how readers engage with texts and how a group of readers negotiate collectively to produce meanings as they interrogate texts. Obviously, such insight is invaluable to fiction writers. But it occurs to me to wonder why literary critics don't workshop in a similar way. I suspect they could learn a lot about their craft as well as the works they write about if they did so. But I suppose most scholars of literature feel that their classroom work already teaches them as much as they need to know about how readers collectively engage with texts.

Feminist Collections

(As Timmi is off on a plane again, I get to do my own bragging* rather than modestly sitting back and letting her post it...)

I recently put my hand up to review a number of books relating to feminist sf for the journal
Feminist Collections: A Quarterly Of Women's Studies Resources, which “reviews the latest print, electronic, and audiovisual resources for research and teaching in women's studies”. Like many other wonderful things, the journal comes out of Madison, the University of Wisconsin System to be precise.

My review is the lead article in the Winter 2009 issue, entitled “What's a Bright Feminist Like You Doing in a Genre Like This? Reading Women's Science Fiction”. It was a lot of fun to write, and I got to mention a few Aqueductians - if nothing else I think I convinced the editor to go off and read some sf, so that’s a good sign!

ETA: *edited word here in the interests of harmonious US-Aus relations (as detailed in the comments!)

Quote o' the Day

But maybe there's no greater proof of skill than how he makes Bascombe's base elements seem like universal essences. By the end of the book, the realtor's self-pity, his fear that any break in the day's routine could lead to unspeakable dread he'll never recover from, even his urge to fish with his son, may well seem like the American experience, rather than the circumscribed experience of the white suburban male. Maybe nobody more than a provided-for white guy could be so certain that his crises were those of the world.

--R.J. Smith, Review of Richard Ford's Independence Day. Los Angeles Times 2 July 1995. Found by James Sallis.

WisCon 33 Report-- Day 1

I'd hoped to be able to write a series of WisCon reports during the con this year, but though I began writing up a report on Friday while sipping a latte and munching a cheese Danish in Michelangelos early Saturday morning, I didn't get far before Tom hauled me away, to get on with the day. The next chance I had to open my laptop was Monday afternoon, and by then I was too exhausted to do more than download my email. Later that evening, on the plane, it was all I could do to start making a list of the zillion things I needed to accomplish before leaving on my next trip (to Sycamore Hill). So although I haven't been very good about blogging and haven't quite worked my way completely through that list yet, I've crossed off an impressive number of items and now think there's a good chance that I'll get most of them (though not I'm afraid all) done by Friday.

This year, for me, WisCon afforded the usual pleasures of allowing me to renew contacts, providing continual brief bursts of intense close encounters, and a lot of feminist stimulation, but also the frustration of seeing people friends and acquaintance only in passing in the hall (or elevator) and never quite managing to connect. If I remember correctly, last year's intruder denigrated WisCon as a "hug fest." So what's to ridicule? I wonder, thinking about how good those hugs actually felt. As has become the case since starting Aqueduct, some of the time I spent attending or participating in programming, some of the time doing Aqueduct business, and a lot of time in conversation. I did manage to make some new acquaintances this year, which matters to me. I have less time because of Aqueduct in actively pursuing them, though, which is not so good. I regret that there were quite a few people I'd have liked to spent time with who found me already occupied. (I haven't quite figured out how to manage my time at WisCon better.) And also? For all the riches of the reunions I did enjoy, I did miss several people who didn't make it to WisCon this year. But of course not everybody can attend WisCon every year (especially in years like this one).

So, to Friday. Day 1 of WisCon, Friday was fairly chaotic. I spent part of the day helping set up our tables in the Dealers Room and trying to run some specific errands, but every time I ventured out of the Dealers Room, even to use the rest room, it would usually take me at least twenty minutes to return because I just couldn't not talk to people I hadn't seen for an entire year. Similarly, at our table, I tried to be helpful to Kath and Tom, but because people were continually stopping to talk to me, I didn't really pull my weight as a team member. (WisCon, as Kathy Nash remarked to me, is like a huge family reunion.) But there was something wonderful about setting up, even so. When Kath and I clustered Aqueduct's Tiptree winner & Honor List books together at one end of the table, with appropriate gold and silver stickers on them, just seeing them in association tickled me pink. Not long after that, as the display of books on our tables took its final shape, I had one of those odd moments, of suddenly seeing our books-- all 42 of them-- and thinking Holy Shit! Did we really produce that many books in just five years? We're the Real Deal!



I did manage to attend two programming items on Friday: a panel at four and Andrea Hairston's paper at nine. The panel at four, titled "We Do the Work" featured Fred Schepartz (moderator), Eleanor Arnason, Chris Hill, Diana Sherman, and Mike Lowrey. In his opening statement, Fred announced that the panel was going to avoid discussing definitions, since the reason most panels on class at WisCon fail have usually failed is because they typically get bogged down in arguing definitions. The focus, he said, will be narrow-- specifically on the lack of portrayals of working class characters in science fiction and fantasy. He then asked panelists to characterize the status quo of working class characters in sf.

Eleanor: Chunks of society as we know it now tend not to be represented.
Diana: Blue-collar labor is repetitive and unexciting. Working class life is conceived of as a trap to be escaped.
Chris: The story about class in sf is usually about escape or the failure to escape (from working class existence).
Mike: One of the few working class occupations to appear is soldiering (a grunt can sometimes have the opportunity to break out.) Also: there's a bias against collective action.
Fred: Class is a taboo subject in the US

Q: Why are there so few working-class characters?
A. Authors feel audience wants escapism, and working-class characters aren't conducive to escapist pleasure.
Mike: Its difficult depicting labor struggles-- it's easier to focus on leaders rather than on the collective.

Fred: Will there be a working class in the future?
Mike: Who built the Death Star?
Andrea Hairston (from the audience): Robots
Mike: Who built the robots?
Andrea: Robots

Chris: Why is there an absence of blue-collar work in most sf narratives of the future? Because a wonderful future then looks delightful, since it doesn't show all the dirty boring tedious work, which if seen straight on, would spoil the delight.
Diana: Such top-down world-building creates thin narratives. World-building from the bottom up will create a richer, more foreign-feeling place than top-down created world.
Fred: How do we get writers to write working-class characters and get publishers to publish them?

At the end of the panel, panelists suggested authors and novels that do a good job depicting working-class characters, including several of Melissa Scott's novels and Rebecca Ore's Slow Funeral and her Becoming Alien series.

The panelists had much more to say than I jotted down. (I recorded it, so I might eventually have a verbatim transcript of it to offer.) At one point during the discussion, Andrea and I had a brief whispered exchange about how working-class people and characters are less visible as such if they are female or non-white. Waitresses, secretaries, housecleaners are often not perceived as "working class." I thought this panel was unusually successful, but for me it would have been even more interesting if race and gender had been more fully incorporated into the discussion. In retrospect, I think also it might have been interesting if this panel had directly followed Andrea's paper. Of course the audience for both programming items wasn't identical, but it would have been really interesting to follow up some of the insights in Andrea's paper in the discussion of "We Do the Work."

After "We Do the Work," I returned briefly to the Dealers room to check on Tom and Kath, then ran off to have dinner with Liz H. (Much exciting Aqueduct talk, plus feminist stimulation, all quite wonderful.) When I got back, I collected Tom and at about five to nine swept him off to Conference 3. There Andrea Hairston presented a bona fide academic paper, but because she is a superb performer, she delivered it with great drama and verve, as if she were telling a fabulous, spellbinding tale (which she was!), wowing everyone present, even those suspicious of all things academic. (Andrea, when an audience member expressed pity at her being an academic, unapologetically declared she was glad to be an academic.)Her paper was titled "Romance of the Robot: From R.U.R. & Metropolis to Wall-E. She opened by declaring that fictions about robots address the "primal problem of distributing wealth." Stories about robots have forcefully challenged the dehumanization of the worker. She gave a wonderful overview of Karel Kapek's play R.U.R., which was extremely popular" following its 1921 premiere in Prague and was translated into English almost immediately and premiered in NYC in 1922. R.U.R. helped inspire Fritz Lang and Thea Harbou's Metropolis. Helena, in R.U.R., Andrea said, is a fabulous, unforgettable character.

And so to Wall-E, a Chaplin clown-figure. "Wall-E's gender is very much in the eye of the beholder," Andrea startled me by declaring. She then quoted Kate Bornstein's review, which reads Wall-E as a dyke who falls in love with Eve. Eve may be "the round one with the feminine acronym," but she fires off deadly missiles on cue and at first seems oblivious to the gentle Wall-E, who spots a plant growing in the middle of a dumpsite of humanity's non-biodegradable debris, which it is Wall-E's job to compact and tidy up. I'm afraid that at this point I became so caught up in Andrea's performance, so carried away by the tale she was telling, that I stopped taking notes, except at one point to scribble "Realist narrative takes the fantastic as an alternate world." Which reminds me that Andrea discussed how the fantastic can serve realist narrative ends through creating an alternate world that reveals the otherwise unseen, unaddressed social relations and reality of the everyday world we live in.

Because her co-presenter, Rosalyn Berne, did not appear, after she delivered the paper Andrea spent the extra time remaining in conversation with the audience, in a discussion that included talk about the uses of "anti-realism" in the theatre, how Bertold Brecht, though a "brilliant organizer," had appropriated the plays of his lovers, women he treated abominably, about Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, about Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed.

I apologize for offering such a disjointed set of points that doesn't begin to convey the powerful sense the paper made to me. I hope to get to read the paper soon. (Aqueduct will eventually be publishing a collection of Andrea's essays; I'm assuming this will be one of them. I'm also hoping it might find its way into the next volume of the WisCon Chronicles...)

After the time allotted to the slot had expired, Tom and I went up to the sixth floor and spent some time in conversation with Nisi S., Eileen G, and John B.-- as well as with Lynne T., an archivist from Northern Illinois University who is interested in acquiring the papers of writers like Nisi and me. (I had visions of clearing out the many boxes of mss of the Marq'ssan Cycle dating from the 1980s, including the first version of Reneagde, which I substantially rewrote a few months after first drafting it... I've managed to resist throwing them out several times, but mainly because they're stored in cupboards in the attic that we never open.)

And finally, we fled the sixth floor and went up to bed, where Tom immediately fell asleep while I read about ten pages of C.J. Cherryh's Regenesis, to try to rid my head of the buzz that naturally resulted from hours of feminist stimulation. And after a bit, I did actually manage to sleep.

ETA: Josh has sent me links to two more posts on the excellent "We Do the Work Panel": Badgerbag's is here, and Mary Read the Pirate Queen's is here.

Rosaleen Love receives A. Bertram Chandler Award

A bunch of Aquedistas attended the 48th Australian National Science Fiction Convention in Adelaide last weekend, and one of them, Lucy Sussex, has informed me that during the Ditmar awards ceremony another of them, Rosaleen Love, was given the A. Bertram Chandler Award for Outsanding Achievement. (Lucy herself received this award in 2003.) Congratulations, Rosaleen!

More Aqueductista Stuff

Here's a new Aqueductista link: Fantasy Magazine has reprinted E.C. Myers' Dear Superman, which originally appeared in Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies, ed. L. Timmel Duchamp, (#11 in the Conversation Pieces series).

I've also seen some reviews in print publications, for which I have no links:

In her column, carrying the title "The Uses of Disenchantment" in the Aug/Sept Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Elizabeth Hand reviews Ursula K. Le Guin's Cheek by Jowl at length. Actually,Hand does more than review Cheek by Jowl; after praising its "centerpiece," "the long marvelous title essay on animals in children's literature," she launches into a set of interesting, disgruntled reflections on all that Le Guin has "to answer for"-- which she sums up as: "What irks me is the gentrification of fantasy [I'm a middle-aged bobo, therefore irked by gentrification in all its forms], which has grown so all-encompassing that I impatiently await Martha Stewart's contribution to the genre." Hand laments that the "self-referential, recursive nature of so much contemporary fantasy literature has made it increasingly difficult for a writer to deliver that grace note [the "take your breath away" note "found only in the greatest kind of fantasy"], without its sounding like it's already been winded on someone else's ivory horn. Our marvels have grown commonplace. Fairy fruit's available at Costco now, and Whole Foods."

FemSpec Vol. 9 Issue 2 arrived in my mailbox yesterday. It includes some interesting pieces, ranging from Cristy Dwyer's "Queen Lili'uokalani's Imprisonment Quilt: Indomitable Spirits in Protest Cloth" to Robiin McAlllister's essay on a Cuban feminist sf fotonovella by Daina Chaviano, and including lengthy reviews by Janice Bogstad of The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 1 and by Ritch Calvin of De Secretis Mulierum.

Here's Bogstad: "In its mix of writing levels, range of expertise of the interviewers, interviewees, panel transcripts and shorter pieces, this work demonstrates that knowledge can be transmitted at various levels of discourse, underlining the value of events like WisCon and chronicles of those events like this text. . . . I can recommend this book, especially as the chronicle of an event that cannot be repeated: a weekend in time that is also destined to be timeless. While it is neither a fanzine nor a critical work, it is a source document for future scholars of both fandom and the developmental states of feminism and science fiction."

And here's Calvin: "The narrative of De Secretis Mulierum is framed as a letter sent by Jane Pendler to a researcher, Elena, who is examining the relationship of "women in history" and "women who write history" (75). The selected history that a now-aging and -ailing Pendler provides further comments upon and complicates the question of historical accuracy and reliability. What sorts of women's secrets might history hold? What sorts of technologies might reveal them? What kind of evidence counts as evidence? Who might have better access to this information? To what extent do personal and professional ideologies interfere [with and] alter the "science" of history? Duchamp's novella asks profound questions about the limits of our historical knowledge, the socially constructed nature of knowledge, and the gendered and sexual biases therein."


Finally, don't miss the interesting conversation between Matt Cheney and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay on reading in general and reading James Tiptree Jr. Up the Walls of the World in particular.

Aqueductista Links

Niall Harrison has a long piece about Vandana Singh's work, specifically reviewing The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet but also discussing Distances and Of Love and Other Monsters.

Vandana Singh has an excellent post that includes thoughts on "writing the other" and "mammoth fail" here.

As already noted by Cat Rambo, Eileen Gunn interviews Nisi Shawl at Fantasy Magazine: their discussion ranges from Nisi's work (both fiction and nonfiction), to pie, to Nisi's thoughts on being the first African American to have been awarded the Tiptree (which she has also written about in the latest Aqueduct Gazette (soon to be posted at Aqueduct's site).

Liz Henry reflects on connections between women, inspired by her reading of two Conversation Pieces, My Death and De Secretis Mulierum. (link thanks to Josh Lukin)

Morgan Dhu also writes about My Death (here), Distances (here), and De Secretis Mulierum (here).

Urine-soaked seats: the future of air travel?

All my adult life I've been watching-- or should I say experiencing-- the constant worsening of the conditions of air travel. Discomfort, inconvenience, and airline contempt for passengers have been growing at such a rate since the early 1980s until finally anyone who finds it necessary to fly is left wondering how much worse it could actually get. Over the last couple of years, I've been joking with friends that in the end, since they probably can't squeeze seats any tighter, the airlines will simply pack everyone who can't afford first class in the baggage compartment (for the same prices we have to pay now) and charge a hefty extra fee for oxygen, while in the meantime, on the road to that satirical end, they'll start charging people to use the rest room. Well guess what. In today's Guardian, we read that a European airline has decided to strip their planes of most toilets (leaving only one per plane) and charge passengers 1 pound per rest room visit:

Ryanair boss, Michael O'Leary, insisted today that it will cost passengers a pound to spend a penny as he confirmed plans to charge for toilets on his aeroplanes within two years.

The chief executive of Europe's largest budget carrier said the airline would also generate extra revenues by removing two out of the three toilets on its Boeing 737-800 jets and filling the space with up to six seats.

O'Leary first mooted the toilet charges in February, prompting his press officer to warn that the outspoken executive "makes a lot of this stuff up as he goes along". However, O'Leary confirmed that he will ask Boeing to look at putting credit card readers on toilet locks for new aircraft.

Will this actually happen? Probably. And if it does-- and if Boeing equips toilet locks with credit card readers-- you can bet all the US carriers (which, after all, provide cut-rate service for premium prices) will follow suit. Anyone not flying first class is already charged whopping extra fees for checked luggage, aisle seats, seats closer to the exit, exit row seats; and never satisfied with all the cash they've forced their customers to fork over for degrading, uncomfortable "service," the airlines ceaselessly look for ways to further gouge the consumer. Any day now they'll start charging for water and soft drinks. Will they find a way to justifying charging extra for the awful polluted air that recirculates through the cabin? Under the late capitalist, regime, all and every indignity can be inflicted on the captive consumer with impunity. Stay tuned...

(Link thanks to oursin.)

ETA: Actually, once the rest room charges are in place, the flight attendants will probably spend most of their time going up and down the aisle, hawking adult diapers. Do you s'pose every airline will have develop its own brand of diapers and diaper accessories? Diapers, get your diapers here! Delta's Diapers are whisper soft, magically absorbent, and come in three delightful deodorizing scents! They'd have to make them cheaper than a rest-room visit, otherwise no one would buy them...

Nisi Shawl Interview

Fantasy Magazine has an interview with Nisi Shawl, conducted by Eileen Gunn, up here.

Centuries Ago and Very Fast reviewed in Locus

Centuries Ago and Very Fast gets some love from Faren Miller in her review in the June issue of Locus:

In Centuries Ago and Very Fast, Rebecca Ore pulls off an audacious experiment: using the raw language and deliberate focus on sexual encounters of "slash" fiction to relate a series of linked episodes and moments of reflection from the stupendously long life of a gay male, from his earliest days as a mammoth-hunting caveman to around the present.

Her review concludes:

...both Vel and Thomas (the latest modern lover who occasionally takes over the narration) compeltely won me over with their matter-of-fact acceptance of both their sexuality and the vagaries of time in a life where "history" is always directly lived and chronology doesn't govern the learning experience. These characters may be nothing like the standard concept of Everyman, with their enthusiastic coupling and all the procedures, rituals and bodily fluids it involves, but they have plenty of interesting things to say about what it means to human.