Unfaithful Cyborgs by Andrea Hairston

Pan Morigan and Andrea Hairston

Pan and I had a blast at Wiscon. We have now recovered from traveling across the country. (Two weeks to get over flight cancellation and midnight bus rides!)

My mind is still stirred up from the panels, the Guests of Honor, the hallway rants, the family reunions--the ghosts and spirits too, whispering in my ears. I was lucky to be on the CYBORG IDENTITIES Panel  with Sunny Moraine, Scott E. Gould, and Lettie Prell. We had a marvelous conversation with an engaged, articulate audience about the legacy of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto.

Sunny Moraine mentioned a man who went offline for a time period and didn’t find the real life nirvana that supposedly awaits those who unplug. I’ve been thinking about this anecdote and our confused relation to technology. The Internet is often viewed as the CAUSE of good or evil effects—mass addictive zombie behavior or successful revolution against oppressive regimes. The Internet as an effective tool facilitates revolution perhaps and also allows addiction (we get a dopamine hit for those I Likes), but CAUSE? That’s a powerful word.

The Internet is mythologized and mystified, maligned and worshiped. It brings wonders and joys and is also calibrated for predatory capitalist monetizing of humans as commodities. The Internet facilitates creative exchange across land and sea, shrinks time and space, and offers us public access to each other. Big Data is a treasure trove for pattern freaks, and human beings are serious Pattern Masters! (Read the Octavia Butler books for a SF meditation on this.). However, despite reverent claims for Big Data, information isn’t wisdom, and Smart Devices shouldn't make us lazy and dumb. We need struggle and serendipity; we need mistakes. Convenience is highly overrated and a wicked marketing tool. Information isn’t knowledge or wisdom. Abstract formulations aren’t the same as concrete experiences--everything can’t be written as an algorithm. But Online experiences are as much a part of REALITY as any other experience.

We are cyborgs, animals incorporating our tools/technology into our bodies and altering/creating the universe we inhabit and that produces us. Story is one of our most powerful, world changing, universe altering technologies! The story of the Net is magical, mythic.

Are we getting the stories we desire?

Do we have the technology we want?

I need a Smart Device that doesn’t interrupt my flow, that supports my creative capacities—not one that replaces them with the paint by numbers version. I need Smart Devices that challenge me and other folks to go beyond comfort zones and like minds to engage in a radical reckoning with difference.

Perhaps our tech and tech platforms are dominated by the same empire ideologies that allowed for colonization of the planet (and contribute to the ongoing destruction of diversity— deadly empire monoculture)?  So what are we doing with that?

In her Manifesto, Haraway notes that Cyborgs “are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.”

We make the meaning. So what are the ideologies behind, around, running through the Internet? How do we choose to use the Net, to structure it? The Net has never been neutral.  However, a predatory capitalist calibration of our technology is not inevitable--it is not the last word.

I’ll be considering unfaithful cyborgs in my next novel, Archangels of Funk.

The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 7: Shattering Ableist Narratives, ed. JoSelle Vanderhooft

I'm pleased to announce that the seventh volume of the WisCon Chronicles, Shattering Abliest Narratives, which JoSelle Vanderhooft edited, is now available through Aqueduct's site in both trade paperback and e-book editions. The trade paperback edition is accompanied by a CD providing e-pub, mobi, and pdf editions of the text, including material supplemental to the print edition.(You can purchase it here.)

In science fiction and fantasy, just as in the world we all inhabit, disability is often misunderstood, maligned, and disregarded, even by fans (as well as people in general) who are committed to social justice, anti-oppression, and equal representation for all in sf/f fandom. In the spirit of WisCon’s continuing mission to boldly go where no con has gone before in breaking down barriers, this volume of the WisCon Chronicles seeks to smash ableist narratives that keep disabled people from full participation in the present we inhabit and the speculative futures we hope to create. Contributors include Andrea Hairston, Debbie Notkin, Nisi Shawl, Josh Lukin, Ann Keefer, Tracy Benton, Jesse the K, B.C. Holmes, Beth Plutchak, Elise Matthesen, and Nancy Jane Moore, among several others.

Josh Lukin's "Pity Is Shadowed by Contempt"

Josh Lukin's "PITY IS SHADOWED BY CONTEMPT": AN INTERVIEW WITH ANNE FINGER has been posted at Wordgathering. Having read a book of short fiction by Anne Finger and having published Josh's "Ishmael in Love: Anne Finger and the Reclamation of Disability" in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, vol. 2, 1 (which is available for free download at thecsz.com/past-issues/csz-v2-n1-2012.pdf‎), I had to run right over to read it when he mentioned to me that it had been posted. In his introduction, Josh writes:

Activist, educator, and cultural worker Anne Finger has long been prominent in the U.S. disability movement. The author of three volumes of fiction and two memoirs, she has served as President of the Society for Disability Studies, written for Disability Studies Quarterly, and contributed to countless disability anthologies and conferences; at present, she is the board president of AXIS Dance Company, among the first dance companies to welcome disabled performers. In addition to disability-specific work, her career of activism extends from the 1960s peace movement to the Occupy movement: she has marched on the Pentagon and helped to shut down the Port of Oakland.

Finger's first book, the 1988 story collection Basic Skills, contains several disability-themed works, two of them drawing on her childhood experiences of polio. Her 1990 memoir Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy, and Birth, integrates accounts of her early life, her social activism, and her experiences at the hands of the medical profession, both as a polio survivor and as the mother of a baby in intensive care. In the process it explores the impact of sexist and ableist oppressions on her life and mind, and dramatizes her struggles with them. Her 1994 novel Bone Truth, incorporating a number of autobiographical elements, tells a story of a woman considering motherhood and struggling to frame a narrative explaining her own life and her difficult parents, particularly her abusive father. Among many other things, it is a historical critique of masculinism on the Old and New Left. With 2006's Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio, Finger produced an anti-individualist memoir, one that integrates her own experiences and feelings into a wealth of social and historical contexts. The stories collected in her 2009 Call Me Ahab, like Elegy, aspire to reveal the breadth of disability culture. The volume is a postmodern tour de force that re-envisions the experiences of legendary disabled characters from art, fiction, and history, through a disability-justice perspective.

The interview covers a good deal of feminist and activist territory. Here's just a morsel to pique your interest:

 JL: Then comes "Abortion" (1985), which contains the line, "'The flight from freedom,' my fingers snapped, 'the rise of the right-wing, the … it's not exactly freedom we're fleeing from … it's a half-way revolution, a quarter turn.'" How it felt in the late Seventies when we weren't getting the revolution we were hoping for.

AF: Right, right. And also that sense of having abortion rights but not having much that went along with it, and not having achieved the revolution in gender relations that we'd hoped for, trying to put that whole stew of things together.

JL: And not having achieved the revolution in class relations which would give abortion rights a context in which—

AF: Yes, and very specifically there, I'm thinking about a lot of the loneliness that people experienced. The lack of connection, and the isolation that people feel, and the lack of a sense of community, and the way that freedom can sometimes feel like more isolation, more being cut off, creating so many choices that you end up alone.

JL: The end of "Abortion" goes through the metafictional analysis that will become one of the glories of Call Me Ahab. It talks about the drama of the story, explains how real-life events were altered to turn it into a work of fiction, and ends with "a slogan, an image, a moral: and with a plea to reimagine our language, to tell and tell our stories again, until we have words to echo our lives." Needing new narratives and cutting through the received narratives. I keep hearing that in connection with what Occupy and other radicals today are trying to do. Can it be done? Can new narratives reach people?

AF: Oh absolutely. I just think we always have to be off-balance. We always have to realize that whatever story we tell, it's never going to be the final story. Until the end of the human race, which I guess will be the final story, but only by happenstance. I think of it in terms of disability studies, that whatever point we come to, we're never going to come to a final understanding, we're never going to come to a final resting point, we're always going to be needing to see that, whatever we've created, it's silenced some people, it's excluded some things. And to just constantly be aware of that exclusion. And I think the same thing in terms of finding that language to speak. It's always going to be partial, there's always going to be a kind of yearning at the edges, a sense that we haven't fully articulated things.

I've been involved in an online forum where somebody was discussing a book and used the term "mental illness," and somebody else fired back, "You know, this is a really offensive term, and people in the mad pride movement or the psych survivor movement don't like this terminology" ;and there's been a very interesting conversation about terminology. The idea that we're going to come up with the perfect term — I understand why people can have a very strong reaction to the term "mental illness," and the dangers of it; and I understand that maybe at times it makes rhetorical sense to deploy that, and that we always have to be aware and we always have to be negotiating those things.

JL: We need words for things, and the dream of a pure language isn't going to happen; and so we'll always have our scare quotes and brackets and strikethroughs and footnotes and the like.

AF: Exactly.

JL: There's a story in Basic Skills called "A Tragedy" — originally published as "Our Tragedy" (1985) — which has the line, "We were no short-haired, thin-lipped Maoists out to offer ourselves up as the vanguard to Providence's working class." But you talk a lot about the asceticism of the radicals and their grandiose self-image.

AF: And I have mixed feelings about that. Because any revolutionary change has to come about by being really unreasonable. It has to come about by people being driven. It has to come about by people being grandiose. And at the same time that grandiosity and that unreasonableness has to be tempered. And the work of tempering that has to happen within movements. And it's hard to live with.

***

Now go read the complete interview here: http://www.wordgathering.com/issue26/interviews/finger.html.

Podcast of the Squaring the Circle event at the Seattle Public Library

As promised, the Seattle Public Library has posted a podcast of the May 9 event in which Ursula K. Le Guin and Mariano Martin Rodriguez discuss translating Gheorge Sasarman's Squaring the Circle and read tales from it in both English and Spanish. You can download the file here: http://www.spl.org/Audio/5_9_13_Ursula_LeGuin_Mariano_Martin_Rodriguez.mp3. Happy listening!

Links for early June

--Autostraddle profiles Andrea Hairston in Eleven Women of Color You Should Know and Admire.

--My story, "The Fool's Tale," which engages with Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, appears in the June issue of Lightspeed Magazine, along with an exceedingly crunch interview with me. (I promise you, some of those questions made me sweat.)

--Vonda N. McIntyre has just posted at Bookview Cafe about the event launching Squaring the Circle at the Public Library last month. She has three more photos in addition to the one of Ursula Le Guin signing a guitar.

--Gay City News has an article on Richard Bowes by Kelly Jean Cogswell, titled "Time Traveling with Richard Bowes." She muses that in his books, "gender doesn't stay on its assigned track," then concludes:

In another recent book, “The Queen, the Cambion, and Seven Others,” Bowes takes on fairy tales, plunging further into the ambiguities of time and gender. Here, he narrates most of the stories from a female point of view, and he seemed a little puzzled, telling me about a writer who asked him why — and how — he pulled it off. “There’s no trick to it,” he responded. “All the characters are still me.”

--My review of Karen Lord's The Best of All Possible Worlds has gone live at Strange Horizons.

--If you haven't already, you'll want to check out two excellent recent posts by Kameron Hurley: Dear SF Writers, Let's Chat about Censorship and Bullying, and We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative.

The Simons Foundation blog has an entertaining article by Natalie Wolchover, Is Nature Unnatural?, reporting on a cosmological controversy among physicists that the confirmation of the Higgs Boson has only exacerbated.

“Ten or 20 years ago, I was a firm believer in naturalness,” said Nathan Seiberg, a theoretical physicist at the Institute, where Einstein taught from 1933 until his death in 1955. “Now I’m not so sure. My hope is there’s still something we haven’t thought about, some other mechanism that would explain all these things. But I don’t see what it could be.”

Physicists reason that if the universe is unnatural, with extremely unlikely fundamental constants that make life possible, then an enormous number of universes must exist for our improbable case to have been realized. Otherwise, why should we be so lucky? Unnaturalness would give a huge lift to the multiverse hypothesis, which holds that our universe is one bubble in an infinite and inaccessible foam. According to a popular but polarizing framework called string theory, the number of possible types of universes that can bubble up in a multiverse is around 10⁵⁰⁰. In a few of them, chance cancellations would produce the strange constants we observe.

--The US Justice Department has launched an anti-trust court case charging Apple with colluding with the world's top publishers to bump up the price of e-books. The Guardian reports:

The closely watched trial will review evidence from late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley luminaries. Though the company does not face a fine, it could face damages in a separate trial by the state attorneys general if found guilty.

The outcome could shape what deals online retailers can make with content owners. The DoJ is seeking a block on Apple engaging in similar conduct in future. The company denies any wrongdoing and its lawyer dismissed the case as "bizarre".

In court Monday Buterman argued Apple rallied top publishers to fight off Amazon's $9.99 per book deal for new releases and bestsellers. They then used that deal with Apple to renegotiate with Amazon, threatening to pull titles if they did not get a better rate. Buterman said customers paid "hundreds of millions of dollars more than they would have," because of the agreement.

The five publishers have already settled with the DoJ. The trial judge has urged Apple to follow suit, after looking at evidence including emails from Steve Jobs to James Murdoch, then head of News Group-owned Harper Collins. Jobs, who died in 2011, told his biographer: "We told the publishers, 'We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30% and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway.'"

Apple is being represented by Orin Snyder, one of the US's top lawyers whose other clients have included Facebook and Bob Dylan. Snyder told the court Apple had done nothing wrong. He said the government was taking emails out of context to make "sinister inferences" and that Apple had fought hard with the publishers in negotiations.

"What the government wants to do is reverse engineer a conspiracy from a market effect," Snyder said.

Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler

I'm pleased to announce the publication of Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler, an anthology edited by Rebecca Holden and Nisi Shawl, which Aqueduct Press is releasing in trade paperback and e-book editions. Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler celebrates the work and explores the influence and legacy of the brilliant Octavia E. Butler. Author Nisi Shawl and scholar Rebecca J. Holden have joined forces to bring together a mix of scholars and writers, each of whom values Butler’s work in their own particular ways. As the editors write in their introduction:

Strange Matings seeks to continue Butler’s uncomfortable insights about humanity, and also to instigate new conversations about Butler and her work — conversations that encourage academic voices to “talk” to the private voices, the poetic voices to answer the analytic… How did her work affect conceptions of what science fiction is and could be? How did her portrayals of African Americans challenge accepted assumptions and affect others writing in the field? In what ways did her commitment to issues of race and gender express itself? How did this dual commitment affect the emerging field of overtly feminist science fiction? How did it affect the perception of her work? In what ways did Butler inspire other writers and change the “face” of science fiction? How did she “queer” science fiction? In what ways did she inspire us and motivate us take up difficult subjects and tasks? In other words, what is her legacy?”

Earlier this week Publishers Weekly ran a review of Strange Matings:

This noteworthy anthology—published by a feminist small press in memory of Butler, an African-American science-fiction author—consists of a wide-ranging selection of sometimes-dense scholarly essays, highly readable reminiscences and personal essays, poems, correspondence, photographs, and interviews. Though she wasn't prolific, Butler (1947–2006) produced several important novels (Kindred, Lilith's Brood, Parable of the Sower) and short stories (“Blood Child,” “Speech Sounds”) that changed the genre of science fiction and helped empower many new SF writers of color. Highlights of this anthology include “Gambling Against History,” Susan Knabe and Wendy Gay Pearson’s queer reading of Kindred, Butler’s seemingly heterosexual time-travel/slave narrative; “The Spirit in the Seed,” writer, performer, and Ifa/Orisha priestess Luisah Teish’s heartfelt recollection of her discovery of Butler’s early novel Wild Seed; reminiscences by genre writers Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, editor Shawl, and Nnedi Okorafor about what Butler and her work meant for their careers; and scholar Shari Evans’s “From ‘Hierarchical Behavior’ to Strategic Amnesia,” undoubtedly the most perceptive essay yet written on Fledgling, Butler’s final novel. Readers unfamiliar with the author’s fiction should start with her novels, but her many devoted fans will find this volume highly satisfying.

 

Nisi and Rebecca organized a panel at WisCon on the book, which included the two of them plus Candra Gill, Ben Rosenbaum, and me. It was, at moments, deeply emotional for audience and panelists alike. Rebecca also presented a talk based on her paper. I have an essay in the book myself--which I presented at WisCon in 2008; at that time, the book had been accepted for publication by a university press. The editors turned to Aqueduct to publish it when the university press flaked out on them (something that is happening with academic presses with alarming frequency, and by no means a reflection on the quality of the book). One last thing I should mention: Strange Matings boasts numerous photos of Octavia Butler, black and white in the print edition, full color in the e-book editions. You can purchase Strange Matings now through Aqueduct's website.

Another WisCon report to check out

This year at WisCon, I had the pleasure of seeing Aqueductista Kiini Ibura Salaam graced by the Tiptree tiara. Kath took numerous photos of Kiini wearing the tiara, but my camera made a really poor showing this year, and not one of the photos Kath took of her were even remotely clear enough to post. (Which is why I'm posting the photo of her we've been using on her author's page on Aqueduct's site.)

As you probably already know, many of us present on Sunday night at the official presentation of the Tiptree Award were moved by Kiini speech. Kiini did not read from a prepared speech, but after WisCon she took the kernel of her speech and expanded it into a short essay that has been posted on SF Signal here: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/05/guest-post-james-tiptree-jr-award-winning-author-kiini-ibura-salaam-on-doing-what-we-can/. Surely most women who are writers have at one time or another found themselves beaten down by the doubt that almost always accompanies discouragement. It is a commonplace that the world (often in the form of friends and relatives) assume that writing that hasn't won significant recognition simply drains time from all those things women are supposed to be doing with their time (chiefly nurturing and caring for others). I know I had some pretty grim moments, particularly in the late 1980s, myself, even in comparison with the skepticism I naturally encountered when I decided not to finish my doctorate in history so that I could write novels I had no reason to believe anyone would ever care about. I still sometimes wonder how I managed to keep writing when it seemed the entire world was telling me that I was wrong to think doing so would ever matter to anyone besides myself. So many of us have been there (or are, at this moment, suffering that negative pressure.) Kiini's words both acknowledge and challenge the crushing power of such doubt. 

Kiini has also written a con report-- on her second WisCon, this one attended with her daughter, and as the co-winner of this year's Tiptree Award. I of course adore her observations on hugging at WisCon and have to admit I experienced a moment of frisson at her description of her reading (which I myself attended): "As part of the Kindred Reading Series with my fab New York peeps–Alaya Dawn Johnson, K Tempest Bradford, Jennifer Brissett, and Daniel José Older–and I read the first half of “Bio-Anger,” a science fiction horror story from my collection. I actually traumatized myself while reading it and found myself getting shaky-voiced and emotional as the story progressed."Anyway, you can read her entire con report here: http://kiiniibura.com/2013/05/29/vol-91-wiscon-37/.

A con report to check out

WisCon 37 was Lesley Wheeler's first experience of a science fiction con of any kind. (You remember Lesley, right? She's the Aqueduct Press author of The Receptionist and Other Tales, which has been honor-listed by last year's Tiptree Award jury?) I had the pleasure of meeting her in person there for the first time, ever. On Friday night at WisCon, she moderated a panel on feminist speculative poetry that was brilliant; Lesley's co-panelists were Amal El-Mohtar, Shira Lipkin, and Sofia Sanatar. (I wish, wish, wish I'd taken detailed notes. I'm hoping, though, to write a little about this in another post.) Everyone I know who attended thought so, too. And then on   Monday morning, at Michelangelo's, she read from The Receptionist and Other Tales. She was clever in her selection, such that she left us all gasping from the final rapier-light-but-but-deadly strike of her wit.

Anyway, I wanted to point you to her post, In which the modernism scholar attends her first con. (And then writes her first con report!) It has a link, by the way, to the delightful "Rhymes with poetess" inspired by her experience attending academic conferences, as well as this lovely sentence: "I have never attended such a FEMINIST feminist conference: safe spaces for every identity plus constant access to chocolate conceived as a basic human right."

And while I'm on the subject of Lesley Wheeler and her delightful work, I might as well share with you a newspaper reviewby Moira Richards  that came out the day I arrived in Madison, from the Cape Times, May 24, 2013:

A feminist spec-fic fantasy in which a dastardly college dean, who will quash the budget of any campus colleague rash enough to attempt a thwarting of his sexual predations, is served his just desserts. So too, after nudging from Yoda and the (re)discovery of her own powers, is the reluctant hero of the novella.

Lesley Wheeler narrates her tale in 33 10-standza vantos, every one crafted in the plaited terza rim form that is as seductive of the senses as ouma's koeksusters. And, albeit in a different sort of way, just as sweet.

You have to read The Receptionist once through to root the hero on, as you boo the villain; a second time just to savour the metaphors; and a third to marvel at the craft with which the poet finesses the form in the service of her content.

That sounds about right to me. And if I don't know what the words"ouma's koeksusters" denotes (OR connotes), well, I'm ready to take a chance and assume they're (that is a plural, right?) genuinely "seductive of the senses."

Eleanor Arnason's Big Mama Stories

Don't we just really need more tricksters in our lives? For that reason and more, I'm pleased to announce Aqueduct Press's publication of a new collection of stories from Eleanor Arnason, Big Mama Stories, five edgy, satirical tales of wily tricksters for the 21st century. In “Big Green Mama Falls in Love,” Big Green Mama duplicates herself and discovers just how life-threatening a Big-Mama-sized case of love can be while the skwork learn that one cannot train a microbe to be patriotic. In “Big Red Mama in Time and Morris, Minnesota,” Big Red Mama gets pissed-off when she discovers the Cretaceous has been invaded by an obnoxious human who has stolen a time-machine—and decides that some information probably shouldn’t be free, particularly since as a group, humans underestimated the damage they did and rarely took responsibility for anything. On the basis of these stories, the one thing you can say for sure is that Big Mamas' lives are never dull.

We launched this book at WisCon, where Eleanor read the opening of one of these tall tales. And now it's available through Aqueduct's site in both trade paper and e-book editions. In a couple of weeks it will be available elsewhere. I promise you, Eleanor's at her wittiest in these tales.

Home again, from WisCon 37

I wanted to post from WisCon, to bring you photos and reports (however brief), but it turned out, as has usually been the case over the last few WisCons, that my every brain-functioning moment was jammed full with engagement. I love nothing more than engagement, whether it's with tests, ideas, or live conversations, but for me, engagement has a downside (though one I can easily live with): I can't adequately report on it (much less reflect on it) while it's in progress. (Pace the twitter coverage of this year's WisCon.) Hence, my regretted silence here. I hope to offer up some reports and reflections in the days to come, but I can't promise. (Because of all those books Aqueduct launched at WisCon, I've come home to a mountain of work.) The photo of me, by the way, is from one of the Aqueduct Press readings held at Michelangelo's, around the corner from the Madison Concourse.

In the meantime, let me point you to a post by Jeff VanderMeer for Ominvoracious, which I think as a complement to my post of May 10, Last Night at the Seattle Public Library: Translation as an Act of Love: Ursula K. Le Guin and Squaring the Circle. As he often does for his Omnivoracious posts, Jeff contacted Ursula to supplement his review. Really, it's all about the beauty and the love.

Ebook Edition of Nancy Jane Moore's Conscientious Inconsistencies

Nancy Jane Moore's collection, Conscientious Inconsistencies, which was originally published in a now out-of-print limited hardcover edition by PS Publishing, is now available as an ebook from Book View Cafe.

The ebook includes the original introduction by Timmi Duchamp and the cover is based on the original cover painting by Edward Miller. You can see more of Miller's art on the Les Edwards website.

An excerpt from one of the stories in the collection, "Three O'Clock in the Morning," is on the Book View Cafe blog.

Seattle Science Festival

Here's a press release from the Seattle Science Festival (June 6-16), which will be offering a program of interest to anyone even slightly geeky:

I would like to take this opportunity to invite you and your organization to the second annual Seattle Science Festival. This year, the region’s largest celebration of science will take place June 6-16, 2013 to celebrate the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to our community’s culture and to its continued growth and prosperity. The Seattle Science Festival will consist of the following components:

·         Science EXPO Day, Saturday, June 8, will feature exciting, engaging events all day long throughout the grounds of Seattle Center. Over 15,000 students, parents, scientists, educators and other community members are anticipated to take part in this FREE event. Science EXPO Day will showcase over 150 hands-on activities and demonstrations; it will also feature live science performances on the EXPO Day Stage. FREE BUS PARKING IS AVAILABLE ON SCIENCE EXPO DAY! Contact Jordan Adams at jadams@pacsci.org for more details.

·         Signature Programs, June 6-16, will provide events developed by our program collaborators specifically for the Seattle Science Festival. Signature Programs include behind-the-scenes tours, science adventures, field trip opportunities for classrooms, workshops, screenings of science-themed films, a Cool Jobs Series at the Seattle Public Library on June 9-Computer Science, June 12-Green & Clean Technology, and June 13-Biomedical Science, plus many other events held at venues all over the Puget Sound region.

·         Opening Night at the Paramount Theatre, June 6, 8 – 10 PM Beyond Infinity? The Search for Understanding at the Limits of Space and Time. Featuring Brian Greene, Sean Carroll, Adam Frank and the West Coast premiere of Icarus at the Edge of Time, and music by Philip Glass, conducted by Marcus Tsutakawa and performed by the Garfield High School Orchestra. Avoid service charges by purchasing tickets IN PERSON at the Paramount Theatre Box Office at 911 Pine Street, Seattle, or for 10 or more tickets, contact their Group Sales Manager at (206) 315-8054. 

·         Closing Night at the Seattle Repertory Theatre, June 15, 7:30 – 9:30 PM Our 11th Hour: Straight Talk on Climate Change from People Who Know. Featuring Kevin E. Trenberth, Richard Alley, Andrew Revkin and a performance of Seattle Opera’s Heron and the Salmon Girl. Buy tickets at www.seattlesciencefestival.org.

These high profile events will present some of the greatest scientific and creative minds of our time and weave together science, music, art and philosophy for two inspiring, thought-provoking and engaging evenings.

How can you get involved?

·         Sign up for the Seattle Science Festival E-Newsletter

·         Coordinate a group of students to bring to a Seattle Science Festival event

·         Become a Seattle Science Festival Ambassador and help spread the word

·         Sign up to be a Seattle Science Festival volunteer by May 22

Visit www.seattlesciencefestival.org to learn more about how you can get involved and I hope to see you there!

Tanith Lee's Space Is Just a Starry Night

I'm pleased to announce that Aqueduct Press has taken delivery of Tanith Lee's new collection, Space Is Just a Starry Night. The tales in Space Is Just a Starry Night range across genres, as elegant as the field of stars spanning a clear dark sky. A lone survivor of plague receives a mysterious visitor; a prison planet tortures political prisoners by methodically manipulating their memories; a young woman uncovers the ghastly truth about the cryogenically preserved ancestor who’s been thawed; a ship's officer struggles with his suspicions about a shy drab woman taking passage aboard a ship of sun-worshipers—Tanith Lee explores these and other scenarios in her ever intense sensual prose.

Tanith Lee's work has long been noted for its masterful beauty and sensuality. Wierdifctionreview.com's list of 101 Weird writers slotted her in at #10, observing that “Whatever her subject, Lee's vision is intense and feverish; like many of her characters, she seems to navigate the waters of unseen worlds. And it’s difficult to resist the call of that spell; there's something haunting about these visions.”

And here's the first review:

Lee’s powerful science fiction collection assembles 12 tales published between 1979 and 2011, plus two originals. All of them showcase her strong, entertaining, and often gorgeous writing. “The Beautiful Biting Machine” packs an irresistible wallop as it describes a sensuous sideshow at the Nightfair, a sort of giant carnival of dark desires. The werewolf myth takes on a deep space element in “Moon Wolf,” in which Lee's prose is lovely: “The ocean came in, sigh on sigh, quintessential sea, to solace the onyx shore, under the solar light that did not glare any more but was smooth as the taste of cream.” The intriguing “With a Flaming Sword” puts an unusual spin on the story of Adam and Eve (in a manner that might fluster Biblical literalists). “Written in Water” also tackles creation myths, with a far grimmer outcome. This is a solid grouping of stories that deserves a broad audience. —Publishers Weekly July 06, 2013

"Once worlds have ended, and the curtains of space closed upon them, where does their genius go? Their great music and art, their architecture, literature, and thought, their beauty—all held till then in vessels of physical form, or the records of machines, or simply in the memory of humankind. Is everything obliterated merely, rinsed away and lost?"   —from “Within the Ghost”

You can purchase the book now, in trade paperback as well as e-book editions, in advance of the official release date, directly from Aqueduct Press. Eventually, of course, it will be available in all the usual places. 

Last night at the Seattle Public Library

Good things happened last night in the auditorium of Seattle's Public Library. Ursula Le Guin, who came up from Portland, Mariano Martin Rodriguez, who flew to the US from Brussels, author Gheorghe Sasarman's daughter, who flew to the US from Munich, and his nephew who came down from British Columbia, all joined forces with University Bookstore and the Seattle Public Library to launch Sasarman's Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony, into the anglophone world. Misha Stone opened for the Seattle Public Library with a brief introduction, then presented Sasarman's daughter, Anna, who read his letter to the audience in fluent English, detailing a bit of the book's history dating from the mid-1970s (and its vicissitudes under the insanities of the infamous Ceausescu regime) and the importance to him of its finally achieving an English-language publication.

The book's Spanish translator, Marian Martin Rodriguez, spoke next, describing the book's happenstance survival through the diverse sorts of misfortunes that can befall books (and which often end in their eternal obscurity). He himself somehow came upon the French translation of some tales from  Squaring the Circle, and then found the Romanian original edition. Francisco Arellano, a Spanish publisher of speculative literature who had read the French translation of the book, which was nearly lost forever when its publisher went bankrupt shortly after the book was printed, wanted to publish the book in Spanish. When he told Mariano his wish, Mariano proposed to translate Squaring the Circle from the Romanian original. He then tracked down its author and undertook the Spanish translation with the author's blessing. When his Spanish translation was published, Mariano sent the book to Ursula, his favorite English-language author. It was a little like putting a message in a bottle, he said-- a gesture of hope with little certainty that she would actually one day read the book.

Next Ursula took the microphone. Many people send her their books, she said, and so as she usually does, after receiving the book, she paged through it, appreciating the beauty of its design, and sent Mariano a polite note thanking him. In most such cases, the audience was left to infer, that would be the end of the story. But the book persisted in remaining on her desk-- where, Ursula said, very few books ever stay for long. And so before long she picked it up and decided to try one of its tales. Its language appealed to her, and she tried another. Then she decided she wanted to translate what she was reading because, she said, it was only when she makes a translation into English that she feels she really understands the Spanish.

And here's the thing: Ursula loves making translations of work she likes because translating is very much like the part of writing that she loves best: revising and rewriting. The hard part of writing fiction, she said, is getting the first version of the story into words. But revising? "Revising is gravy." At this point I was swooning with pleasure, because that's exactly how I've come to feel about fiction writing, myself (even if I didn't start that way).

And then Ursula told the rest of the story, about translating the first few with the idea of getting them into English-language sf magazines, and then deciding (when that didn't look promising) to translate enough of the book's 36 tales for a book that a publisher like Aqueduct might want to publish. In the end, she translated 24. By this time she was in contact with Mariano, and eventually they together consulted the author on points they couldn't be certain of. And thus was born the English-language edition Aqueduct has published.

The next part of the program also delighted me. Ursula read the collection's second tale, "Arapabad" in her translation (in English), Mariano read it in his translation (in Spanish), and the author's nephew, Vlad, read the original tale (in Romanian). Ursula also read "Vavylon," and she and Mariano read the English and Spanish versions of "Kriegbour" (which Mariano dramatized as he read).

Next came  questions from the audience with answers from Ursula and Mariano, followed by their

signing books. Which took a long, long time, since many people had books for Ursula to sign. And not only books to sign-- as you can see from Misha's photograph, Ursula also signed a guitar last night.

I believe there will eventually be a podcast of the event available, made by the Seattle Public Library. As soon as I've heard anything about that, I'll let you all know. 

Event alert!

On Thursday evening, Ursula Le Guin and Mariano Martin Rodriguez, translators of Gheorghe Sasarman's Squaring the Circle, will be celebrating its release at the Seattle Public Library. The event promises to be a bit off the beaten path of readings, because Ursula and Mariano will be discussing the translation process that brought the English version of the collection into existence as well as taking turns reading tales in English, Spanish, and the original Romanian.

Here's the SPL's press release:

Ursula K. Le Guin and Mariano Martin Rodriguez discuss 'Squaring the Circle' at The Seattle Public Library May 9


Acclaimed poet and author Ursula K. Le Guin and Mariano Martin Rodriguez will discuss translating Gheorghe Săsărman's "Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony" from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday, May 9 at The Seattle Public Library, Central Library, 1000 Fourth Ave., Level 1, Microsoft Auditorium.

The program is free and open to the public. Registration is not required. Limited parking is available in the Central Library garage for $5 after 5 p.m. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m.

"Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony" is a collection of stories that explores imaginary societies and human nature through architectural descriptions of alien cities. The stories were originally published in Romanian in 1975.

Le Guin is an award-winning poet and author. She has received five Hugo awards, six Nebula awards and the PEN/Malamud Award for "excellence in a body of short fiction" in 2003. She lives in Portland, Ore.

This event is supported by The Seattle Public Library Foundation, author series sponsor Gary Kunis, and media sponsor The Seattle Times. It is presented in cooperation with University Book Store.  Books will be available for purchase and signing.

For more information, call The Seattle Public Library at 206-386-4636 or Ask a Librarian.

For more information contact:

Andra Addison, communications director
206-386-4103

On discovering a "first sale" I somehow never knew about

For years I've had dreams in which I discover a cache of stories I've written and completely forgotten about, only to discover them with amazement and delight. What's just happened to me shares something of the feel of those dreams-- only with an unpleasant affect.

Thanks to Google Scholar, I just this afternoon learned-- 24 years after the fact-- that a story of mine was published without my permission or even knowledge in the minnesota review. Though this is not exactly catastrophic news, it's turned my stomach inside-out and is making my brain buzz with so much noise that I'm finding it difficult to concentrate on anything else. Perhaps the best way of putting it is to say that my sense of reality feels threatened. (I'm expecting that this rocky feeling will vanish soon, when I've processed this revision of my personal history.) What adds an extra little force to the punch is that this would have been my first sale (had my permission for publication been solicited by the journal).

 One part of me is trying to imagine the difference this sale would have made to me in 1989 (the year I made my first sale, "O's Story," to Susana Sturgis for her Crossing Press anthology Memories and Visions: Women's Fantasy and Science Fiction), when I had given up on marketing the Marq'ssan Cycle or indeed any of my novels and was trying to break into the short fiction market. When I didn't hear back from the minnesota review after ten months, I assumed they'd rejected the story, "Ms. Peach Makes a Run for Coffee," and next tried Interzone-- around the time the minnesota review published it. The story then received 19 rejections from a mix of literary and genre magazine, until Terra Incognita bought first serial rights to its publication in 1996. Some of the rejections were brutal, because the story was overtly political. It went through numerous line-edits over those years. So the version published by the minnesota review is slightly different from the one published in Terra Incognita. I have no idea why the editors published it without contacting me. But I do note that the contributors page omits my name-- presumably because they did not solicit a bio from me.

Another part of me is wondering whether I've been naive about this. I always tell writing students that reputable publications do not publish submissions without permission-- that they have little to fear from publications with an established reputation. I'd probably say that still--and yet, I wonder whether I ought to. This strangely improbable thing happened to me-- something I wouldn't have known about if Project MUSE hadn't archived old pre-internet issues and Google hadn't included that issue in its search. One part of me is sure there must be some benign explanation. Some mix up in paper work. An overworked assistant dropping the ball. Is that naive? I don't think so. As a publisher myself, I know enough about the nuts and bolts of publishing to imagine such a thing happening even with the best intentions.

 A third part of me worries about a question I can't answer and might need an attorney to instruct me on: did minnesota review's appropriation of my work rob me of my rights? Did I lose the rights to that story after they pirated it? I fervently hope not. I've had it posted on my website for free download for several years now-- not knowing that someone else had published it first. And it would seem the height of injustice that their violation of my copyright would result in my loss of ownership. (Which is not to say that even more egregious injustices don't often happen.) Ought I to remove "Ms. Peach" from my website?

And yet another part of me-- the part that is always producing sfnal thoughts-- is yearning to imagine an alternate history, in which I received an acceptance letter informing me of my first sale (likely prior to my sale of "O's Story"). Would it have made any difference to me? After all, I'd already written "The Forbidden Words of Margaret A." and "Sadness Ineffable, Desire Ineluctable" and was at the peak of my political activism and about to go on to write The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding)." Probably it wouldn't have substantially affected my writing or my self-confidence (except to make me interested in submitting to that journal again-- which I never did, simply because they couldn't be bothered to send me even a form rejection). So, no significantly divergent alternate history. But in a way, it feels as though two splits in the historical thread have suddenly converged. I suppose this is because something involving myself happened that I've only now become conscious of. As though where my own words have been can't have happened in real time unless I know about those places... which is just wrong, of course. People usually have to learn the hard way that once something's been out on the internet--say, posted to an obscure list-serv, it's to all intents and purposes there for good. And now it seems unaccepted submissions to pre-internet print publications may fall into the same category, too. (God knows I've learned that pre-internet letters to the editor, invidiously doctored by the editors, are now out and accessible on the internet.)  

(The image shown, by the way, is W. Gregory Stewart's illustration to "Ms. Peach Makes a Run for Copy" published in the first issue of Terra Incognita.)

Storyteller and listener: an ongoing dynamic interaction between two brains

One of the points I strive to make when I'm teaching writing is that though the words on the page flow from the story in the writer's head, the words on the page aren't the story, but the means through which readers can imagine and re-create the story in their heads. Writers notice when the stories they've created differ from those re-created by readers more than they do the congruences-- presumably because we take the latter for granted and tend to assume that if we and our readers are both doing what we should, there ought not to be many differences between the created and re-created stories. Maybe that assumption is just hopeless wishful thinking. After all, the reasons for those discrepancies are many and many, not necessarily the fault of either side.

Given my longtime preoccupation with this relationship, I'm fascinated to find that neuroscientists are comparing, via fMRI, what happens in the brains of people telling a story with those hearing it. One  attempt at such a comparison is the paper Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (July 26, 2010) available (free) online, by Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson.(One of the lovely features of this online publication is that rolling the cursor over hyperlinks will bring up figures and references without the user having to click away from the page to see them.)

I especially like that the authors characterize communication as an "ongoing dynamic interaction between two brains." Would it astonish you to learn that the authors report that the brains of those hearing a story mirror-- usually with a one-to-three-second delay-- what happens in the brains of the person telling the story? (Though of course once I start thinking about it, I have to wonder to what extent the brains of persons engaged in antagonistic communication might mirror one another.) The authors suggest that this "neural coupling resembles the action/perception coupling observed within mirror neurons." Particularly interesting for writers is that those listening to stories do a certain amount of anticipating-- and that the more their brains anticipate, the greater their comprehension of the story communicated:

Our analysis also identifies a subset of brain regions in which the activity in the listener's brain precedes the activity in the speaker's brain. The listener's anticipatory responses were localized to areas known to be involved in predictions and value representation (20–23), including the striatum and medial and dorsolateral prefrontal regions (mPFC, dlPFC). The anticipatory responses may provide the listeners with more time to process an input and can compensate for problems with noisy or ambiguous input (24). This hypothesis is supported by the finding that comprehension is facilitated by highly predictable upcoming words (25). Remarkably, the extent of the listener's anticipatory brain responses was highly correlated with the level of understanding (Fig. 4B), indicating that successful communication requires the active engagement of the listener (26, 27).

I've long believed that the stories that are least likely to be grossly misread are those that are in important ways already familiar to readers. Intelligibility is all about familiarity-- which is why it's so difficult for writers to get good readings for new, unfamiliar-to-the-reader stories. A more recent study conducted at Emory--reported here looked at how the brain reacts to metaphors:

"We see that metaphors are engaging the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in sensory responses even though the metaphors are quite familiar," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "This result illustrates how we draw upon sensory experiences to achieve understanding of metaphorical language."

Sathian is also medical director of the Center for Systems Imaging at Emory University School of Medicine and director of the Rehabilitation R&D Center of Excellence at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Seven college students who volunteered for the study were asked to listen to sentences containing textural metaphors as well as sentences that were matched for meaning and structure, and to press a button as soon as they understood each sentence. Blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging. On average, response to a sentence containing a metaphor took slightly longer (0.84 vs 0.63 seconds).

In a previous study, the researchers had already mapped out, for each of these individuals, which parts of the students' brains were involved in processing actual textures by touch and sight. This allowed them to establish with confidence the link within the brain between metaphors involving texture and the sensory experience of texture itself.

"Interestingly, visual cortical regions were not activated by textural metaphors, which fits with other evidence for the primacy of touch in texture perception," says research associate Simon Lacey, PhD, the first author of the paper.

"I don't think that there's only one area responsible for metaphor processing," Sathian says. "Actually, several recent lines of research indicate that engagement with abstract concepts is distributed around the brain."

"I think our research highlights the role of neural networks, rather than a single area of the brain, in these processes. What could be happening is that the brain is conducting an internal simulation as a way to understand the metaphor, and that's why the regions associated with touch get involved. This also demonstrates how complex processes involving symbols, such as appreciating a painting or understanding a metaphor, do not depend just on evolutionarily new parts of the brain, but also on adaptations of older parts of the brain."

All of which underscores the importance of using sensory detail in fiction, no? (And probably in nonfiction, as well-- whenever possible.)

A couple more links-- for the outrage

Amanda Filipacchi, in an op-ed for the New York Times, "Wikipedia's Sexism Toward Female Novelists," writes:

I JUST noticed something strange on Wikipedia. It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too. 

The intention appears to be to create a list of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. The category lists 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred of them are mainly men. The explanation at the top of the page is that the list of “American Novelists” is too long, and therefore the novelists have to be put in subcategories whenever possible. 

Too bad there isn’t a subcategory for “American Men Novelists.” 

People who go to Wikipedia to get ideas for whom to hire, or honor, or read, and look at that list of “American Novelists” for inspiration, might not even notice that the first page of it includes far more men than women. They might simply use that list without thinking twice about it. It’s probably small, easily fixable things like this that make it harder and slower for women to gain equality in the literary world. 

Read the whole piece here.

Allison Flood, at the Guardian, follows up with an update, noting:

Their observations sparked a widespread condemnation of the policy on social media. "Women writers are consistently underrepresented, their work receiving much less attention than that of their male counterparts. In 2012 the New York Review of Books reviewed only 40 female authors, as opposed to 215 male authors," wrote Abigail Grace Murdy on the publisher Melville House's blog. "The subcategory 'American women novelists' "simply reflects a widespread and belittling perception of women writers that already exists. But in reflecting that perception, Wikipedia perpetuates it, and the sexism marches on."

Wikipedia editors have now begun the task of adding the female writers back into the wider category, while debating the situation among themselves. "This is embarrassing us on a global basis. If you don't segregate males and gender unknowns, then don't segregate women (and that's how it's being perceived)," wrote one.

Another said: "Removing women from the list of novelists is like removing black or foreign-born novelists. Its effect is inherently biased. For those who want to find women novelists, a sublist is acceptable, but it cannot fairly involve removal from the main list. The effect is too discriminatory and drastic. The same applies to all women-nationality lists (not only novelists). I think this kind of category, based on the characteristics of the novelist, is very different from a subcategory based on the characteristics of the novels, eg, mystery novelists or science-fiction novelists."

Read her entire piece here.

Stuff of interest

First off, congratulations to Nicola Griffith! The Lambda Literary Foundation has announced that she is one of two writers being awarded the 2013 James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize. The judges commented: "Trebor Healey and Nicola Griffith are both writers who are unafraid to take risks in their writing, stretching the strictures of genre to ask bigger questions. They use the lens of their LGBT experience as a prism through which universal themes of love, society, and the meaning of life are refracted, disassembled and reassembled in ways that are at once challenging and rewarding to the reader. Their work deepens and enriches the tapestry of LGBT literature: worthy of a place in the modern canon of English literature while expanding the notions of what LGBT literature can be."

Also of interest:

--Over at Strange Horizons, Niall Harrison has produced his annual gender statistics fest for reviewing in the sf/f field. I'm sorry to say his results are pretty much what they were last year. Do check them out here.

--Ethan Robinson productively continues the conversation on Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 with his thoughtful post, Proust on Mercury and other issues in coming to terms with 2312.

 --The Digital Public Library of America launched last week. Among other things, the site offers its Digital Library Digest, which collects annotated links to news about digital issues as well as about public libraries. The Digest for April 25, 2013, for instance, links to five items, including an announcement from the House Judiciary Panel that they'll be starting "a comprehensive review of copyright law" and an article on Simon & Schuster's pilot library ebook project. The DPLA has an interesting (to me) web address:  http://dp.la/.

--Over at The Guardian, Alison Flood discusses digital matters of concern for readers, authors, and publishers: Ebook anxieties increase as publishing revolution rolls on.

--And finally, also over at Strange Horizons this week, Julia Rios interviews Rose Lemberg in Noticing Language.

The April 2013 issue of the CSZ is out

The April 2013 issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is now available at http://thecsz.com. I have a long essay in it myself, one prompted by a recent re-reading of Raccoona B. Sheldon's "Your Faces, O My Sister, Filled of Light" and the reflections on changing perceptions of sex and gender that it (inevitably, I think) provoked. I've written on this subject before, but obviously its not through with me yet. The issue has a second (shorter) essay, for our Grandmother Magma column, that was especially pleasurable to read: Karen Joy Fowler's piece on Sylvia Townsend Warner's classic feminist fantasy, Lolly Willowes (or the Loving Huntsman).

Here's the entire table of contents for the issue:

Current Issue
Vol. 3 No. 2 — April 2013

Essay

Asking the Wrong Questions: Alice Sheldon,
the Gender Learning Curve, and Me
  by L. Timmel Duchamp

Poem

1995
  by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back

Grandmother Magma

Lolly Willowes
(or the Loving Huntsman)
by Sylvia Townsend Warner
  reviewed by Karen Joy Fowler

Reviews

These Burning Streets
by Kelly Rose Pflug-Back
  reviewed by Evan Peterson

Sister Mine
by Nalo Hopkinson
  reviewed by Ama Patterson

Necessary Ill
by Deb Taber
  reviewed by Nic Clarke

A Stranger in Olondria
by Sofia Samata
  reviewed by Nisi Shawl

How to Greet Strangers
by Joyce Thompson
  reviewed by Daniel José Older

Bio-Punk: Stories from the Far Side of Research
edited by Ra Page
  reviewed by Victoria Elisabeth Garcia

Featured Artist

Cheryl Richey

Gheorghe Sasarman's Squaring the Circle

Aqueduct Press has just taken delivery of Squaring the Circle: A Pseudotreatise of Urbogony, which collects 26 fantastic tales by Gheorghe Sasarman, selected and translated into English by Ursula K. Le Guin. The printed book is a small gem: Kath has outdone herself in designing this one, which includes graphics for every tale, provided by Mr Sasarman. We're selling both the printed book and the e-book editions now through Aqueduct's site (www.aqueductpress.com), and they'll shortly be available in the usual places.

There's a story behind this book (no, actually at least two stories, first the author's, and then the translator's), which I'm happy to relate to y'all. And we have a lengthy, thoughtful blurb from Eleanor Arnason (which we couldn't use in its entirety on the back cover of the book) as well as two advanced reviews. So. Let me start with the stories behind the book. Mr. Sasarman writes in his postscript to the French edition of the book:

The idea of writing a book of brief descriptions of imaginary cities, condensing into it the grandeur and tragedy of five millennia of urban history, came to me by chance, while I was in charge of the Architecture and Urbanism section of the review Scanteia.  A writer had protested in an open letter against the demolition of an historic building, and the editors asked me to respond, which I did by writing the story “Musaeum.”  It was the autumn of 1969, a year after the Russian tanks invaded Prague, an invasion openly condemned by Ceausescu, a time when many people, not only in Bucharest, believed (what a mistake!) that Rumania was evolving towards democracy.

By the time Ursula saw the book, it had been published in French and Spanish translations. She first encountered the book in the Spanish edition, rendered by translator Mariano Martín Rodríguez. As she writes in her introduction to Aqueduct's edition of the book:

A year or two ago I was sent a handsome little book titled La Quadratura del Círcolo. It was inscribed to me in English and a language that I thought was Rumanian. With it was a charming letter from Mariano Martín Rodríguez, explaining that the book was his translation from the Rumanian original by Gheorghe Sasarman, and that both he and the authorhoped I would find it interesting and might have some idea how to go about finding someone to translate it into English.

The book was a set of brief stories, each about a different city—like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, of which I’m very fond. That similarity was interesting, and the first couple of stories seemed promising, but I was busy, and my Spanish is slow. So after thanking the sender and author I did nothingabout the book for quite a while. But it kept on lying around in one place or another in my study. Maybe just because I liked the cover (a splendid Tower of Babel by an anonymous Fleming), or maybe because it was exerting the effect.

Some books, unread books, exert the effect. It’s not rational,not easy to explain. They don’t glow or vibrate, though that’s what they’d do in an animated movie. They just are in view, they’re there. There’s this book, on the shelf in a book store or the library or like this one in a pile on my desk, and it is visible, silently saying read me. And even if I have no idea what it is and what it’s about, I have to read it.

So, gradually, I obeyed.

The end result of Ursula's compulsion was the book Aqueduct published.

And then there was my own compulsion... Aqueduct Press exists to publish feminist science fiction. Squaring the Circle is by no stretch of the imagination feminist. (In fact, Publishers Weekly's review make an oblique point about this.) Nevertheless, these spare, dryly and mischievously humorous tales conjured such visions in my mind that I couldn't resist them and found myself agreeing with Ursula that they needed to be available to the part of the world that reads mostly English-language texts. In fact, sitting here at my desk, typing with the book before me, every time I stop to look something up in the book, a random sentence on a random page will catch my eye, and I'll just have to read the entire tale. (I've done this three times since I started writing this post.) The tales are short, of course. but I'm pretty sure that most people will end up reading them more than once.

Now, to Eleanor's praise for the book:

Squaring the Circle reminds me of some of my favorite books: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Angelica Gordodischer’s Kalpa Imperial and Ursula K Le Guin’s Changing Planes. I don’t know if there’s a name for this kind of fiction – Faux history? Fantastic geography? Imaginary anthropology? Whatever it is, I love it. Humans have always liked to hear about fabulous journeys and strange distant places. Othello told Desdemona, “of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline.” Maybe books like this meet our need for amazing stories, now that the world is mostly mapped.
   
Squaring the Circle is highly readable. (I got it through in one sitting.) And it’s fun. There is a playfulness in this kind of fiction, a subversive undercutting of the 19th-century idea of the novel. It gives us all the pleasure of a travel guide, and the additional pleasure of being – in spite of the meticulous description -- unreal. As it turns out, a cityscape can be as interesting as a bildungsroman and as meaningful. The first section of Squaring the Circle, “Vavylon,” is a fine description of a class society that claims to be egalitarian. Anyone can climb to the top of ziggurat, except the ramps are greased. I thought of Stalinist Romania when I read it, but it could also apply to the US.

Here's the Publishers Weekly review:

These trippy, cutting 24 stories, chosen by SF/F grande dame Le Guin from a collection of 36 originally published in Romanian in 1975, inevitably draw comparisons to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Both explore society and human psyche through architectural descriptions of imaginary cities, but Sasarman’s masterfully crafted prose poems feel more immediate, serving as spellbinding descriptions of architectural impossibilities as well as slyly subversive social commentary. The equality of all citizens is an enshrining principle of the ziggurat Vavylon, with steep ramps oiled every day to prevent ascent, though descent is very rapid. The elite of Musaeum create immortal artworks that remain unknown, for they are too busy with their own works to look at one another’s. The intrepid explorers of Selenia vainly hunt for a building site uncontaminated by the psychic refuse of Earth’s poets, lovers, and dreamers, which litters most of the lunar surface. Perhaps the only area where Sasarman falls short is in his rare, dismissive portrayals of women (Le Guin’s introduction implies some of the untranslated stories are worse in this respect), all the more startling when contrasted with the extraordinary, timeless nature of his prose. (May) Reviewed on: 03/11/2013

And here's a bit of Rick Kleffel's review:

Any one of these stories will craft in the reader's mind an entire world, a society, a country and then slowly but surely transform that imaginary way station into a refracted aspect of what is happening here and now, and ever and forever. This is the sort of book that is well worth seeking out, as are the cities of the imagination it creates for us. —Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column, Jan 30, 2013 (read the whole review)

Criticism alone is not an Assault, Witch Hunt, Lynch Mob, or Crucifixion

I try to draw a line between criticism and violence.

I do, actually, get online threats of actual violence. This isn't unusual for bloggers, especially ones who belong to oppressed groups. I tend to get mine because I'm a woman, a feminist and a Jew. If someone receives rape and/or death threats -- and people do, far too often, especially if they belong to marginalized groups -- I find that horrifying.

However, I also find it clearly distinct from criticism.

Criticism (especially in a social justice context) is often described as assault, a witch hunt, a lynch mob, or a crucifixion. (There are a couple other go-to metaphors, but those are the major ones.) Of these, "witch hunt" and "lynch mob" are the most upsetting. However, they are all attempts to silence criticism by comparing it to a violent, unacceptable act. It is unacceptable to assault someone, ever; therefore, it's implied, that the criticism is likewise by its very nature unacceptable.

The use of the terms witch hunts and lynch mobs (or mobs in general) also implies that the criticism is not being offered in good faith, and certainly not with thoughtfulness, deliberation or sincerity. Instead, it implies that the criticism is the result of a mass delusion. It implies that there is nothing to criticize at all--that the very nature of what is being criticized is superstition--since witches don't exist and lynched victims are innocent. It implies that the only goal of criticism is bloodletting, that it will only be satisfied by burning stakes, pressing stones, or hung corpses.

Now, I do not mean to imply that no one who offers criticism is ever an asshole. People are totally assholes. You can easily show me examples of someone criticizing someone else, even taking a position I broadly agree with, and acting like a flaming asshole. And I will look at that and say, "Wow, that person is acting like a flaming asshole." This happens--it is, in fact, inevitable. Groups of people contain assholes.

I'm down with criticizing assholes for being assholes. But the terms "witch hunt" etc assume that the grounds for criticism are vaporous. When applied to groups, it also implies that no one (or almost no one) in the group is offering good faith or meritorious arguments.

It is sometimes true that a person is, in fact, offering a critique that stems from delusional, bad faith bloodthirstiness. It is sometimes true that groups are doing the same. When a group of people bullies a trans person until they commit suicide, I am comfortable saying that this is the result of delusion (transphobia is based on delusional principles), bad faith (transphobia itself may be something an individual feels in good faith; bullying is not an activity pursued in good faith), and bloodthirstiness (as it ends in death). Bullying exists at an intersection where words can become assault. That intersection *does* exist.

But people are very free with the comparisons of criticism to violence. And I would counsel being, instead, very strict with them.

Be aware of (among other things):

*The stakes. Is physical safety actually on the line? With a bullied gay teenager, it may be. With an adult blogger being criticized by anti-racist bloggers, it's probably not.

*Whose history you are invoking. Are you defending a person who is (in this argument) privileged by comparing their situation to violence or death that was explicitly directed toward people who were (in the salient situations) oppressed? Are you comparing a person whose speech is being criticized for being racist to someone who was killed by a lynch mob?

*Are you legitimately comfortable saying that the people you're accusing of participating in a witch hunt would like to see their victims subjected to physical violence? Or, instead, when you fill in the abstraction of "people criticizing this person I'd like to defend" with "Blogger X," does the metaphor start to make you uncomfortable? When you fill in the actual implications of the metaphor by defamiliarizing the language (instead of "this person is engaged in a witch hunt," something like "this person experiencing a mass delusion that makes them want to see people die"), does that make the comparison seem apt or appalling?

*(As a complicating factor to the above, are you using the history of the oppressed group against them? Are you using the real, historical deaths of people of color to suggest that criticism from people of color is like murder?)

Just because speech is being criticized doesn't mean that the criticism is legitimate. People can offer good faith criticisms, even criticisms that are theoretically rooted in correct ideas such as anti-racism, that are still totally wrong. People can be unreasonable assholes, and groups can pursue unreasonable, assholish arguments. As noted, sometimes speech does actually rise to the level of actual assault when violence is involved, either directly (as in threats) or implicitly (as in bullying). But most of the time, even the people who are being unreasonable jerks aren't actually arguing in bad faith or lusting for blood. They are arguing stupid points and doing it stupidly. Rather than attempting to shut them down by calling their criticism assault (unacceptable in any circumstances) as if it's the fact of *criticism itself* that is the problem, the best response is usually to explain why their *particular* criticism sucks. Unless their criticism *really is* assault, in which case, please do call it out. Explain why. Be savvy and aware. But don't just use these terms as short-hand or rhetorical flourish when they're not really what you mean. They're silencing, inacccurate, and in some cases offensive.

Real people really died as a result of lynch mobs. It's particularly insensitive for white Americans to use that as a metaphor for someone being criticized. As a Jew who lost a lot of relatives in the Holocaust, I would be upset if the go-to metaphor was to imply that criticism was like pushing people onto trains that would take them to gas chambers. That's taking the deaths of my relatives experienced and making them something trivial.

If you find yourself wanting to argue that I'm taking metaphorical language too seriously, then I ask you to really stop and think about the things you care most about, the ones that pinch and hurt, and imagine them being used this way. Try to take it out of the abstract for yourself. Find the places where you are tender. Now really, and in good faith, imagine that everyone presses on those tender places all the time, that they see them as fodder for winning internet arguments, and not actual, painful things. If you've done that and you still feel that you want to argue abstractions about language, then all right. I won't agree with you, but I'll believe you've tried to take my position into account. But please, first go to the place that hurts, and then imagine that being used against you as a way to stop you from arguing the positions you are passionate about.