The Plesaures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2013

Our annual series of posts on reading, viewing, and listening in 2013 is about to begin! Once again I've solicited piece from a bevy of writers and critics to tell us what they particularly enjoyed reading, viewing, and listening to in the last year, and once again I'm finding the responses as fascinating as they are idiosyncratic. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's picked up suggestions for future reading, listening, and viewing from our past editions of the series. This year's edition will include posts by Eleanor Arnason, Lisa Tuttle, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mark Rich, Carrie Devall, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Rachel Swirsky, and many others. This time around I'm going to add links to this post (i.e., below) as I upload each new contribution, to provide a list for convenient reference.

Part 1:  Eleanor Arnason
Part 2:  Rachel Swirsky
Part 3:  Ursula K. Le Guin
Part 4:  Sarah Tolmie
Part 5:  Tansy Rayner Roberts
Part 6:  Kiini Ibura Salaam
Part 7:  Nisi Shawl
Part 8:  Cheryl Morgan
Part 9:  Alisa Alering
Part 10: Nancy Jane Moore
Part 11: Lisa Tuttle
Part 12: Andrea Hairston
Part 13: Fiona Lehn
Part 14: Richard Bowes
Part 15: Carrie Devall
Part 16: Vandana Singh
Part 17: Mark Rich
Part 18: Lesley Hall
Part 19: Brit Mandelo 
Part 20: Larissa Lai
Part 21: Kristin King
Part 21: Sheree Renée Thomas
 

Nicola Griffith to read at the Seattle Public Library

For those is the Seattle area:

Nicola Griffith will be reading Tuesday evening at the central branch of the Seattle Public Library. She will read from her new novel, Hild, and do a Q&A after, followed by a signing. The University Bookstore will be on hand to sell copies of the novel. More information can be found here.

I've had the pleasure of hearing Nicola read several times, so I can assure you that the occasion will be a treat.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013

One of the towering moral and political figures of our time, Nelson Mandela, died today. For a big chunk of my adult life, he held an iconic status as a bold, thoughtful political activist defying an extraordinarily intransigent authoritarian regime that enjoyed the full and total backing of the US Government--while confined to South Africa's notorious Robben Island prison in an 8x7 damp concrete cell at night after breaking rocks all day in the harsh sunlight. His story is long and rich, but here are a few of the highlights: Mandela became politicized in the 1940s, and joined the African National Congress. In 1953, he and Oliver Tambo opened the only black-run law firm in South Africa, which soon ran afoul of the authorities. In 1961, following the Sharpeville Massacre and other defeats of mass nonviolent protest, Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and Joe Slovo founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), with the aim of organizing attacks on South African infrastructure. At his trial in 1964, he argued the necessity of taking such a step:

[W]e felt that without sabotage there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the Government. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and when the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

But the violence which we chose to adopt was not terrorism. We who formed Umkhonto were all members of the African National Congress, and had behind us the ANC tradition of nonviolence and negotiation as a means of solving political disputes. We believed that South Africa belonged to all the people who lived in it, and not to one group, be it black or white. We did not want an inter-racial war, and tried to avoid it to the last minute.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as international opposition to apartheid grew and multinational corporations (banks, especially) began to find the pressure from shareholders as well as consumers increasingly difficult to stave off, Mandela became such a focus of international concern that the South African apartheid regime that in the mid-1980s President Botha tried bargaining with Mandela for his release. Heroically Mandela replied: "What freedom am I being offered while the organisation of the people remains banned? Only free men can negotiate. A prisoner cannot enter into contracts." Mandela passed his 70th birthday in prison. In 1990, the South African government released not only Mandela but all other imprisoned ANC members--and legalized all the political parties they had previously banned.

There's much, much more, of course. But these are the parts I remember best.

Suddenly, it's winter in Seattle

Winter is rolling in. We may not have reached the solstice yet, but it's a fact: here in Seattle the days are now short, the sun (when it appears)  low in the sky, and the leaves all fallen from the deciduous trees. When I went away for the long holiday weekend on Thursday morning, it still felt like fall, for the temperature was in the 50s and enough leaves remained on the grand old cherry tree in my backyard to turn the light shining through it golden. When I arrived home yesterday, the leaves had all vanished, and the temperature was dropping. Will the thyme and marjoram in the garden survive the winter? Who can say? Some winters they do, others they don't. (The marjoram usually doesn't.) Big portions of my yard have gone dormant. Some herbs and greens continue to thrive, but everything else is sleeping or dead. Which is, of course, as it should be.

I'm always aware that many people find winters in Seattle difficult to survive. The scantiness of the light, alone, can bring great suffering. But though I'm of a horribly moody temperament, I don't suffer from seasonal affective disorder. And so I can take great pleasure in Seattle's winter face. I've developed an affection for the strangeness of the light filtered always through the atmosphere (because, of course, of the sun's lowness in the sky). And I've learned to know to look for the birds, especially waterfowl, that visit here in the winter. (In a few weeks I can expect to find swans, for instance, swimming in Lake Washington, and snow geese on the Skagit Flats.) And of course the beaches are always beautiful, even when they're socked in with fog. (And of course for those who ski or snowshoe, day trips into the mountains can be spectacular.)

SPECULATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDATION ANNOUNCES GULLIVER TRAVEL GRANT WINNER

For Immediate Release: Nov 26, 2013

The Speculative Literature Foundation is delighted to announce that Daniel Jose Older is the winner of the 2013 Gulliver Travel Grant.

Older's novel, "The Book of Lost Saints," weaves post-revolutionary Cuba with present-day New Jersey, tied together by unsettled ghosts drawn to the music of a culture that has evolved without them. Older will use the $800 grant to travel to Cuba to research prisons that Cuban political prisoners were held in.

The Travel Grant judges said of Older's entry, "Wonderful narrative voice: playful, engaging, quick, and written with a seriousness, humor, and a storytelling acuity not often seen."

Also shortlisted were: Akwaeke Emezi, Russell Nichols, Eden Robins, Oksana Marifioti, and Alina Rios, for their outstanding submissions, which made the selection of the eventual winner a difficult but enjoyable process.

 

SPECULATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDATION

PO Box 1693 

Dubuque, IA 52004-1693

info@speculativeliterature.org - http://www.speculativeliterature.org/

 

Remember Gywneth Jones's Eve Wars?

Remember my post last month linking to a NY Times article about the problems faced by women and girls doing science? And about how the article discussed the difficulties created by US culture in particular? Browsing the SF Signal's linkpost for today, I came across a piece titled "Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters." (If you want the link, you'll have to go to the SF Signal to find it.) This lengthy rant is a farrago of assertions so confused and irrational that I finally had to give up trying to make sense of. What I did make out, though, is that the post's author, one John C. Wright thinks science fiction is (once again) being threatened, particularly by reviewers who draw a distinction between sex and gender-- on the grounds that it is obscuring the true, essential categories of "masculinity" and "femininity." I gather, also, that he sees the distinction as an attack on culture tout court (not on a culture, but on culture itself).

Here's the nub of his argument:

Anyone reading reviews or discussions of science fiction has no doubt come across the oddity that most discussions of female characters in science fiction center around whether the female character is strong or not.

As far as recollection serves, not a single discussion touches on whether the female character is feminine or not.

These discussions have an ulterior motive. Either by the deliberate intent of the reviewer, or by the deliberate intention of the mentors, trendsetters, gurus, and thought-police to whom the unwitting reviewer has innocently entrusted the formation of his opinions, the reviewer who discusses the strength of female characters is fighting his solitary duel or small sortie in the limited battlefield of science fiction literature in the large and longstanding campaign of the Culture Wars.

He is on the side, by the way, fighting against culture.

Hence, he fights in favor of barbarism, hence against beauty in art and progress in science, and, hence the intersection of these two topics which means against science fiction.

I suspect it's significant that the author's antagonism is directed at reviewers (who are, in his view, apparently only innocent dupes). Whether these reviewers are male or female or both is unknown, since we can safely assume that someone who suggests that innocent reviewers are subject to the corrupting influence of "mentors, trendsetters, gurus, and thought-police" is likely to insist that "he" is a "universal" pronoun. The very idea of a gender-neutral pronoun, of course, would be anathema to someone who believes that drawing a distinction between sex and gender is barbarous. And distinguishing between culture in general and US culture in particular is also probably anathema.  Regarding US culture as merely one of many cultures (and US culture as it currently exists as only one possibility among many) would of course make gender essentialism impossible, since the white heterosexual male of US culture could not then stand for the unmarked universal human such arguments insist he is. 

Why, you may wonder, am I granting any attention at all to such a confused mess of a post written by someone I've never heard of? I suppose it's because I see it as coming from the same place as the more laconic but equally simplistic pronouncements of more powerful speakers who keep insisting that "real girls" and "real women" have only limited capabilities for doing so science and that women/girls who excel at science must therefore not be "real women" or "real girls." What particularly interests me in this case is that it illustrates how visible and more apparent the complications of gender have become in our field than in US culture as a whole. This rant against "strong female characters" is not unusual within the field, of course. (And certainly the attack last summer on NK Jemison was by far more vicious.) But it strikes me as significant that the argument here has shifted from attacking the active presence of women in the field to attacking an acknowledgment of any degree of complexity of gender, making the very idea of gender the enemy of science fiction in particular and culture in general. It is precisely the scenario of Monique Wittig's utopia Les Guérillères.When a translation of that novel was first published in the US, the very idea of separating sex from gender was still new and strange. And so quite a few people reading it didn't understand that the war "the women" were fighting was not against men, but against gender essentialism. (Gwyneth Jones's "Eve Wars" in her Aleutian series offers another version of that war, fought by men and women on both sides of the conflict.)

Have defenders of gender essentialism actually become conscious of the distinction between sex and gender? If so, we might be entering a new phase of the struggle. Changed consciousness about gender isn't necessarily a positive thing. (See the Aleutian series for more on that.) But it is certainly something to think about, especially with reference to certain works of feminist sf.

Building Feminist Worlds reading list

The CSWS has posted a list of materials discussed on the Building Feminist Worlds panel I mentioned in my last post. You can find it at http://csws.uoregon.edu/wp-content/docs/events/40th/40th_anniversary_recommended_scifi_list. In addition to fiction, the list includes plays, films, and links to podcasts.

A few notes and thoughts on the Worlds Beyond World and Women's Stories, Women's Lives Symposia

I wanted to write at least a little about the conference I attended last weekend in Eugene, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. The conference kicked off with a documentary film, "Agents of Change: A legacy of feminist research, teaching, and activism at the University of Oregon" by Gabriela Martinez and Sonia De La Cruz, which I'm sorry to say I missed because I was helping Kath to unload Aqueduct's books and set up our tables in the vendors' room. But I did attend about half of the sessions of the first symposium and all of the sessions of the second. I took the occasional note on some of them.

The first symposium, titled "Women's Stories, Women's Lives," was held on Thursday. The sessions were nominally organized by decades-- 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s-- but since most of the work presented was historically conceived, in fact ranged over larger spans of times. Shelley Grosjean's presentation "Lesbian Lands in Oregon," for instance, began with the 1960s and went beyond the 1980s in tracing the history of a lesbian separatist community. It is quite a while since I've thought of feminist separatism-- probably since reading Joanna Russ's What Are We Fighting For (which devotes a chapter to it). Listening to the presentation, I realized that probably a lot of younger feminists don't realize that separatist communities often came about in the way this one seems to have done. Apparently, when a couple of women in a mixed-sex, "back to the land" group, Jeanne and Ruth, challenged the group's conservative gender roles, they were booted out--and promptly organized a group of women to form a new community. This community explicitly defined itself as seeking spiritual connection via women's physical bodies in relationship to the landscape, and published Woman Spirit Magazine (1974-1984) as a means of doing "long-distance consciousness raising." (I think she may have said that Mother Kali's bookstore in Eugene was associated with the community. I remember Mother Kali's from visits I made there in the 1980s. Just thinking about it made me long for the days when feminist bookstores were to be found all across the country.) The presentation did not attempt to gloss over the community's feminist shortcomings. The community was white-- lacking in "universal sisterhood in reality," and so "attempted to appropriate other cultures to give them sense of being universal." The presenter said that the women she talked to viewed separatism as "a hospital"-- a place for being healed. But, she says, the community discovered that women severely damaged by patriarchy could never leave separatism because they were never healed. The presenter summed up the community's ideological differences from contemporary feminism as "hugely emancipatory, hugely exclusionary."

Cheris Kramarae, a longtime women's studies scholar, who is probably best known for her statement "Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings," presented next, on the subject of Global Antiviolence. "Feminism 'dies' continually," she remarked at the beginning of her talk. (So true, so true...) She finished by noting how the issues of sexual harassment, sex trafficking, and domestic violence remain important issues. "There is still no economic aid for battered women-- only individualized solutions for social problems." Most of the money appropriated for dealing with domestic violence, she says, goes to anger management programs for men rather than foucsing on the complexity of the social problem. "There is no ancient history as in 'gone'," she concluded. "The issues of the 1960s are still with us."

The third presenter in the session was Eugene's mayor, Kitty Piercy, speaking on reproductive rights activism. I couldn't help be struck by her story of being recruited at a NARAL booth in the 1980s. (I was recruited at a NARAL house party in 1981.) She referred, amusingly, to "speculum parties" where women had the opportunity to see their own cervices. As I recall, at least some of these parties had a lot to do with Our Bodies, Ourselves developments--which had a major impact on all feminists. (Indeed, it changes many practices in the medical mainstream, not only in gynecology, but in family practice as well. Medical practice in the US has never been the same, thank the goddess.)  Piercy emphasized that she was strongly motivated by personal experience to work for reproductive rights-- and as a result became a "more public person." (More personal resonance here-- the NARAL organizers I worked with in the 1980s also attempted to get me to do public speaking, but I begged off--and instead did a lot of writing and analysis for them.) In Piercy's case, one thing led to another-- which eventually included election to public office.

Margaret Hallock, a member of the faculty in Economics at the University of Oregon, spoke next on Pay Equity and union organizing in the 1980s. She helped organize the Oregon Public Employees Union. Clerical workers, whose jobs were labeled "unskilled," joined the fight for pay equity. Many of these public employees needed food stamps to supplement their pay. (Like quite a few workers today, actually.) Eventually they came up with the idea of a "rolling strike," which was do-able in the way a general strike was not. The rolling strike was so successful that the legislature has since outlawed it. Every day the clerical workers in a different department walked off the job. (Imagine the surprise of all the people relying on the labor of clerical workers discovering how dependent they were on it...) Briefly, the gender gap in pay was closed. (Sad closing note: the gender gap in pay is back.)

Shannon Elizabeth Bell spoke about the origin of the environmental justice movement in the poorest county of North Carolina. This is a movement aimed at protecting health and economic well-being of communities (rather than focusing on protecting the Earth). It is grassroots and on-going, particularly in Appalachia vis-a-vis the coal industry. The presenter played a moving audio clip of an Appalachian woman talking about why she fights for environmental justice and the backlash she faces within her own community.

Next we broke for lunch, after which we had the pleasure of listening to Molly Gloss reading from her Tiptree-Award novel Wildlife. I'm afraid I can't find my notes for the afternoon sessions. I missed most of the first session (presumably because I was talking to someone at the time, though my memory is weirdly hazy). The second afternoon session, on the 21st century, entailed Gabriela Martinez on the University of Oregon's Diversity Project, Nichole Maher on Native American Families ( a wonderful success story of community organizing and coalition work), Susan Sygall on disability rights in the global context, and Charli Carpenter on "interest gaps between intentions and outcomes" in national security policies. Carpenter is particularly interested in the gendered norms for defining civilian immunity and the "Making Amends" campaign, based on the idea that governments need to not only not commit war crimes, but also need to assist civilians harmed by violent conflict. (I have to say-- and several members of the audience agreed with me, this latter would have been more effective without an overwrought sound track.)

Dinner break was a bit of a rush, since seating for the Ursula Le Guin reading began at 6 p.m. The reading was, as you might expect, wonderful. Ursula read from an unpublished story that only three people (I think) had previously read. I won't say any more about it, though, since Ursula swore us all to silence. (Given the hundreds of people listening, I'll be interested to see if details of the story leak out.) After the reading, Ursula did some Q&A, first with a professor and graduate student and then with the audience. A signing, which I and several other writers participated in, followed.(I was seated between Suzy McKee Charnas and Kate Wilhelm.) And then it was back to the hotel and the hotel's bar, where a good time was had by many (including me), and it felt a lot like WisCon, if you know what I mean.

Saturday's symposium was "Worlds Beyond World," and was all about feminist sf. The first panel, moderated by Roxane Samer, featured three undergraduates and one graduate student talking about class projects using the University of Oregon archives (which includes the papers of Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ). Laura Strait talked about Ursula Le Guin's correspondence with Eleanor Cameron and Cameron's run-in with Roald Dahl and her critique of the racism in his work. Strait made the point that she believes an understanding of an author's intentionality can inform literary criticism of the author's work. Grace Shunn, who admitted knowing very little about science fiction, talked about reading UKL's correspondence with Alice Sheldon. Mahkah Wu, who spoke so quickly the person writing captions gave up even trying to follow his presentation, talked about men's advantages in debates-- because men are allowed to be verbally aggressive without penalty and can talk as fast as they want and still be intelligible (especially if their voices are deep). Debate, he said, creates a hostile atmosphere toward women. He mentioned debating the proposition that "Women should not be allowed access to political institutions" (on the con side)-- though I have no memory of how this related to anything else he was saying-- about which, later, someone (I think it may have been Vonda McIntyre) wondered why the proposition hadn't been "Men should not be allowed access to political institutions" instead. He finally, after much preamble, noted that he had chosen to focus on an argument Ursula had with Darko Suvin. Amy Jones concluded the session by talking about reading documents in the archives to trace changes in language use (which is something that interests me mightily).

I was a panelist for the next two sessions, one before and one after lunch, and so I'm afraid I can't really say much about them. (I was told that a written transcript of the sessions is being prepared. When/if I hear of one, I'll let you know.) I was a bit uncertain going into these because I wasn't sure of what our audience would be. Nevertheless, the level of the discussion was in no way a sort of "feminist science fiction 101." My impression after the event is that the audience's level of comprehension was varied. The first panel focused on "Feminist Science Fiction as Political Theory." Larissa Lai moderated this beautifully, and Suzy McKee Charnas, Vonda N. McIntyre, Kate Wilhelm, and I were the panelists. I enjoyed it immensely, as I did the second panel, "Building Feminist Worlds," moderated by Margaret McBride, with panelists Molly Gloss, Andrea Hairston, Larissa Lai, and me. I think we talked more specifically about particular works on the second panel. (Though I may be wrong!) My hope is that we conveyed a sense of just how lively, diverse, and burgeoning feminist science fiction is.

The last session, moderated by Grace Dillon, included Kathryn Allan, Joan Haran, Andrea Hairston, and Alexis Lothian. Grace Dillon questioned the prevalence of frontier and pioneer metaphors in science fiction research and cited Katie King's Networking Re-enactments. "True tradition," she asserted, "is dynamic" rather than static. Joan talked about her article with Katie King in the new issue of Ada. (Which I liked to in an earlier entry on this blog.) She argued that new historiographies enable us to think about alternative futures (an idea I've gotten behind myself, particularly in my "Toward a Genealogy of Feminist Science Fiction"). She emphasized how wrong it is to assume that the present is single and unified. Alexis talked about feminist science fiction's exploration of ways of knowing, which allows us other ways of looking at the world. Andrea declared that when she sits down to write a paper, it is as "a performance monologue by Andrea the Professor." "I follow the desire for knowledge and then I write about it," she said. Kathryn Allan studies "feminist post-cyberpunk" as an independent scholar. She works on disability in science fiction and has written "Cripping the Future" using an approach to disability studies that takes the modeling of disability away from the medical estabilishment and gives it to the disabled.

In retrospect, I'm struck by how the discussions that unfolded over the last three sessions always came back to the importance of community for feminist science fiction. On one of the panels (probably "Feminist Science Fiction as Political Theory") I noted that for me, three metaphors characterize feminist science fiction. The first is the one Carol Stabile (one of the key organizers of the conference) articulated at the beginning of the Worlds Beyond World symposium: Feminist science fiction provides space for creating alternatives to "what is" (which is especially important now that most people in the US have been taught to believe that how things are is the only way they can be). Karen Joy Fowler gave me the second metaphor when she wrote to me (back in 2002, I think) that "feminist science fiction is the sea I swim in." The third metaphor is my own: feminist science fiction is a grand conversation. Each of these metaphor help us to see different aspects of feminist science fiction, all of them absolutely critical. The first explains what feminist sf does and why it matters. The second tells us about how the individual reader or writer engages in feminist science fiction within a crucial, indispensible context. (A work of feminist sf is only possible and intelligible because of the existence of feminist science fiction as a whole.) And the third metaphor makes explicit the connections the second one implies and explains how it is intelligible at all.

It was a wonderful weekend, y'all. I wish more of you could have been there.

Science Fiction as Theory Incarnate

I've just posted, on my personal website, an essay that was published in 2007 in Sci-Fi in the Mind's Eye: Reading Science through Science Fiction. It came to me, after my panels this weekend in Eugene, that it might be interesting reading for people wanting to know more about the relationship of feminist science fiction to political theory. You can download it at http://ltimmelduchamp.com/essays/theory_incarnate.html.

Ada's Feminist Science Fiction issue

I'm just back from Eugene and the CSWS's 40th-Anniversary Celebration. And I have lots and lots of stuff I want to blog about. The first thing I want to tell you about, though, is the new issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. This is Ada's third issue, which is devoted to feminist science fiction, edited by Alexis Lothian and the Fembot Collective, has a cover by Jeanne Gomoll, and a wonderful variety of articles by Joan Haran and Katie King, Donna Haraway, Marleen Barr, and others. Do, do, do go check it out! All of the journal's content is available for free download. Because I've been just a leetle busy since the issue launched last week, I've just begun to read individual pieces, but I can already assure you that I'm finding it interesting and provocative (two adjectives with overlapping meanings for me, anyway).  

Two new e-book editions from Aqueduct Press

Aqueduct Press has released two more volumes in the Conversation Pieces series as e-books:

--Spring in Geneva, a novella by Sylvia Kelso

--The XY Conspiracy, a novella by Lori Selke


 You can order them now, DRM-free, for $5.95 at http://www.aqueductpress.com/.


They'll soon be available elsewhere.

Quote of the Day

Many, if not most, Americans are unaware that the Constitution contains no explicit right to vote. To be sure, such a right is implicit in the Fifteenth, Nineteenth, and Twenty-Sixth amendments that deal with voting discrimination based on race, gender, and age. But the lack of an explicit right opens the door to the courts' ratifying the sweeping kinds of voter-restrictions and voter-suppression tactics that are becoming depressingly common.

An explicit constitutional right to vote would give traction to individual Americans who are facing these tactics, and to legal cases challenging restrictive laws. The courts have up to now said that the concern about voter fraud—largely manufactured and exaggerated—provides an opening for severe restrictions on voting by many groups of Americans. That balance would have to shift in the face of an explicit right to vote. Finally, a major national debate on this issue would alert and educate voters to the twin realities: There is no right to vote in the Constitution, and many political actors are trying to take away what should be that right from many millions of Americans.

Reps. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., and Keith Ellison, D-Minn., have introduced in Congress a constitutional amendment that would guarantee the right to vote. It has garnered little attention and no momentum. Now is the time to change that dynamic before more states decide to be Putinesque with our democracy.--Norm Ornstein, The U.S. Needs a Constitutional Right to Vote

The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Vol. 3, 4

The Fall issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is out! You can purchase the issue for $3 (or subscribe for $10) at http://www.thecsz.com/.

Vol. 3, No. 4:Vol No. 4 — October 2013

Essay

Seeing C.M. Kornbluth as Gender-Egalitarian
  by Mark Rich

Poem

a tipping point
  by Gwynne Garfinkl

Grandmother Magma

Two Eleusinian Mysteries
Lud-in-the-Mist and
Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees
 by Michael Swanwick

Reviews

Big Mama Stories
by Eleanor Arnason
  reviewed by Andrea Hairston

We See a Different Frontier
edited by Fabio Fernandes
and Djibril al-Ayad
  reviewed by Cynthia Ward

Caution: Contains Small Parts
by Kirstyn McDermott
  reviewed by Kiini Ibura Salaam

She Walks in Darkness
by Evangeline Walton
  reviewed by Caren Gussoff

One Small Step
edited by Tehani Wessely
  reviewed by Karen Burnham

Sea Change
by S.M. Wheeler
  reviewed by Nisi Shawl

Featured Artist

Luisah Teish

The XY Conspiracy by Lori Selke

I'm pleased to announce another new volume in the Conversation Pieces series-- #37, The XY Conspiracy, a novella by Lori Selke. Among the questions driving Jyn to undertake a long road trip is this one: Why are there no Women in Black? Why is it always Men in Black?

An Asian-American lesbian, Jyn makes her living stripping in clubs in San Francisco. But stripping is only her day job. Her true vocation is UFO hunting. One night, working at her day job, she sights a Man in Black and realizes he is stalking her.

But why would they be after me? Sure, I’d posted a few things on various message boards, and, like everyone else these days, I had a blog and a mailing list that I was supposed to send monthly newsletters to, except it was more like quarterly. My correspondents didn’t know about the day job, though. How had they found me? Why did they care?

Unless I was onto something? Unless I was right? My theories aren’t entirely orthodox within the UFO community, after all. Maybe I had accidentally stumbled on something a little too hot, a little too close to closely-held secrets that I’m not supposed to question.

Jyn’s “not entirely orthodox theories” involve the origins and history of the XY chromosomes. The next day, Jyn packs up her car and sets off on an extended road trip—part “serious UFO tourism” and part flight from the MIB—that takes her though a variety of western states, stripping in clubs and bars as she goes, drawn, inexorably, to New Mexico…

Aqueduct is selling The XY Conspiracy for $9 at www.aqueductpress.com. We'll be releasing an ebook edition soon. And of course the book will soon be available in the usual places you can find our books.

Spring in Geneva by Sylvia Kelso

I'm pleased to announce the release of a new volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series: Spring in Geneva, an original novella by Sylvia Kelso. (Sylvia, as you'll recall, has published with Aqueduct before-- as editor of the fourth volume of the WisCon Chronicles, and as author of Three Observations and a Dialogue: Round and about SF.)  In her new novella, Mary Shelley, a young banker's son, and William, an excessively tall man with a "lividly hued visage, watery eyes, and blackened lips within a straggling beard," pit their wits and derring-do against Lord Byron, master of steampunk technology, and his thuggish minions.

"...my beloved Percy’s ardor bore him to lengths I could not go. There were plans, between him and Byron, that I could not condone. I nerved myself to protest: you may conceive how difficult, against such visions, such intellects. When protest failed, I forced myself to act.” She took her hand quickly from my arm and drew out a handkerchief. I paced beside her, managing not to exceed my position as mere listener, until she recovered herself. “Then—I was forced to depart, in haste, and to choose between discovery, outcry, wrath—perhaps, retribution—and my child.”—from Spring in Geneva

“I loved it! By heaven, this woman can tell a story. I was entirely gripped, right from the hyacinths.”
—Caroline Stevermer, author of Sorcery and Cecilia
“The voice and character of Anton render it delightful; haven't seen that much earnest gallantry since Reepicheep. “
—Lois McMaster Bujold, author of Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance 

Aqueduct is selling it for $9 at www.aqueductpress.com. We'll be releasing an ebook edition soon. And of course the book will soon be available in the usual places you can find our books.

Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA SF and Fantasy Anthology

by Alisa Krasnostein

One of the best things small presses can do is to publish work that sits outside of “mainstream publishing” and to champion works that large corporations don’t consider. At Twelfth Planet Press we look to publish fresh, original, well-written work that seeks to interrogate, commentate, inspire or provoke thought. We look to provide opportunities and to advocate for fiction that might otherwise not be written or find a home and audience. Kaleidoscope (http://www.pozible.com/project/34920) is an anthology of diverse contemporary YA science fiction and fantasy stories. Our crowdfunding campaign ends in just a few days.

I became passionate about the idea of making Kaleidoscope after listening to an episode of the Outer Alliance Podcast. It was a panel discussion about the lack of QUILTBAG characters in YA dystopian novels (http://outeralliance.podbean.com/2012/06/), and it made me want to publish more YA stories with underrepresented voices so young adult readers would see themselves reflected in the fiction they read. 

I’ve always been committed to publishing diverse material, and I was very interested to work with Julia Rios, who has been actively promoting diversity in our field for quite some time. She’s half-Mexican and bisexual, and the ideals of feminism and intersectionality are important to both of us. She was enthusiastic about the idea, and we set about collecting some wonderful stories.

At present we have five stories by Sofia Samatar, Vylar Kaftan, Ken Liu, Jim Hines, and Sean Williams. They are beautiful, fun, heartbreaking, and adventurous, and their protagonists are neurodiverse, people of color, mentally ill, and part of the QUILTBAG. These stories are strong anchors, but the anthology is still in its nascent stages. We have much material still to come, and we are hoping to see many great stories in our open submissions call (http://kaleidoscope.twelfthplanetpress.com/?page_id=42).

We're not limiting this book to authors who have already established themselves in the field. We're reaching out to anyone anywhere who might have a story to share. We want to see protagonists who are not the mainstream default (straight, white, cisgendered, able-bodied, neurotypical) character. We want to delight in their adventures, be awed by their magic, and geek out over their tech. 

If you're a writer, or know someone else who is, spread the word about our call. If you're a reader, like us, and if you want to see these stories for yourself, please back Kaleidoscope today! (http://www.pozible.com/project/34920)

Social learning in non-human animals

Received wisdom  assumes that most non-human animals are almost entirely instinctual in their behaviors (except, of course, when humans deliberately train them either through stimulus-response mechanisms). This assumption underlies the fantasy that should human culture result in the extinction of most mammal and avian species, all humans need do to restore them is find a way to use extant genetic materials to bring these species back to life-- presumably just as they were. (I.e., that DNA=the magic blueprint for replication.)

Lately, though, I've been noticing reports (particularly in Science) suggesting that education plays a role in birds' and mammals' behaviors. Crows, of course, have come in for a lot of attention over the last decade (though I suspect that even before scientists began to study crows' intelligence most of us already knew from personal observation that crows share information about particular humans with other crows, sometimes, disconcertingly, over a period of years). In the August 30 issue of Science, though, researchers are now reporting that whooping cranes bred in captivity have to be taught migratory performance. Here is the abstract of the report:

Successful bird migration can depend on individual learning, social learning, and innate navigation programs. Using 8 years of data on migrating whooping cranes, we were able to partition genetic and socially learned aspects of migration. Specifically, we analyzed data from a reintroduced population wherein all birds were capitve bread and artificially trained by ultralight aircraft on their first lifemtime migrations. For subsequent migrations, in which birds fly individually or in groups but without ultralight escort, we found evidence of long-term social learning, but no effect of genetic relatedness on migratory performance. Social learning from older birds reduced deviations from a straight-line path, with 7 years of experience yielding a 38% improvement in migratory accuracy.

The authors note more generally that in some bird species, "innate programs alone are not sufficient, and experiential learning is critical to successful navigation, as adult animals often have markedly better navigational capabilities than juveniles. Information transfer from more experienced individuals to inexperienced ones can be essntial to navigational success, especially for species that travel in groups. Current hypotheses, richly supported by theoretical studies, posit that social learning, coupled with interindividual coordination of movements, is esential to successful migration and the maintenance of group structure."

Whooping cranes, of course, are being bred in captivity because they are an endangered species. There is much to learn, also, from other species whose social structure is being altered by human impacts. The September 20 issue of Science, interestingly, has a focus on recent changes in the behavior of species subject to hunting. Some cougar behavior, for instance, has changed in Washington State because in the 1990s, the state, under pressure from livestock owners, extended the hunting season on cougars and increased the number of cougars a hunter was allowed to take while also decreasing the cost of a hunting license. Cougar deaths have skyrocketed in Washington state--along with "complaints about problem animals." What has now become clear is that cougar society and therefore behavior is changing as a result:

[Wildlife] managers hadn't considered what happens to cougar society with such a high mortality rate. "A stable cougar society has senior, adult males," who patrol large territories and protect the kittens of several females, [WSU wildlife ecologist Robert] Wielgus explains. When a male dies, incoming younger males will fight over his territory, and kill kittens in order to bring the females into estrus again, as his team will report in Biological Conservation in November.

When the researchers looked at the cougar population of the Selkirk Mountains in eastern Washington, where lion complaints had increased, they discovered that most of the older male cats had been replaced by adolescent males. Because of the threat from these infanticidal young males, many of the female lions there had also moved to higher elevations with their cubs, Wielgus's team discovered. "The females moved to areas they would normally never use, where they eat prey they normally wouldn't eat, including the highly endangered mountain caribou," Wielgus says. The younger males also attacked livestock. "They're the ones that haven't learned to avoid people and so get into trouble."

The article also discusses alterations in bear and wolf behavior. It's all fascinating and thought-provoking. Nurture and education is nature, and not some artificial additive outside of it. When will it become common sense to see that nature vs. nurture is a false dichotomy? I'd love to see more sf writers getting that one right.

US Culture vs Women & Girls doing Science

The New York Times Sunday Magazine has an article by Eileen Pollack on the problems faced by women in science. Here's the opening paragraph:

Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts.

Interestingly, Pollack reports that before she met Meg Urry, a Yale astrophysicist, in 2010, Urry

predicted that the female students in her department would recognize the struggles she and I had faced but that their support system protected them from the same kind of self-doubt. For instance, under the direction of Bonnie Fleming, the second woman to gain tenure in the physics department at Yale, the students sponsor a semiregular Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at Yale. Beyond that, Urry suggested that with so many women studying physics at Yale, and so many of them at the top of their class, the faculty couldn’t help recognizing that their abilities didn’t differ from the men’s. When I mentioned that a tea was being held that afternoon so I could interview female students interested in science and gender, Urry said she would try to attend.
Judith Krauss, the professor who was hosting the tea (she is the former dean of nursing and now master of Silliman College, where I lived as an undergraduate), warned me that very few students would be interested enough to show up. When 80 young women (and three curious men) crowded into the room, Krauss and I were stunned. By the time Urry hurried in, she was lucky to find a seat.

The students clamored to share their stories....

Their stories included treatment from instructors that one would have supposed long gone from the college classroom. Pollack confirms that conditions at Yale are not anomalous:

In the two years that followed, I heard similar accounts echoed among young women in Michigan, upstate New York and Connecticut. I was dismayed to find that the cultural and psychological factors that I experienced in the ’70s not only persist but also seem all the more pernicious in a society in which women are told that nothing is preventing them from succeeding in any field. If anything, the pressures to be conventionally feminine seem even more intense now than when I was young.

For proof of the stereotypes that continue to shape American attitudes about science, and about women in science in particular, you need only watch an episode of the popular television show “The Big Bang Theory,” about a group of awkward but endearing male Caltech physicists and their neighbor, Penny, an attractive blonde who has moved to L.A. to make it as an actress. Although two of the scientists on the show are women, one, Bernadette, speaks in a voice so shrill it could shatter a test tube. When she was working her way toward a Ph.D. in microbiology, rather than working in a lab, as any real doctoral student would do, she waitressed with Penny. Mayim Bialik, the actress who plays Amy, a neurobiologist who becomes semiromantically involved with the childlike but brilliant physicist Sheldon, really does have a Ph.D. in neuroscience and is in no way the hideously dumpy woman she is presented as on the show. “The Big Bang Theory” is a sitcom, of course, and therefore every character is a caricature, but what remotely normal young person would want to enter a field populated by misfits like Sheldon, Howard and Raj? And what remotely normal young woman would want to imagine herself as dowdy, socially clueless Amy rather than as stylish, bouncy, math-and-science-illiterate Penny?

Although Americans take for granted that scientists are geeks, in other cultures a gift for math is often seen as demonstrating that a person is intuitive and creative. In 2008, the American Mathematical Society published data from a number of prestigious international competitions in an effort to track standout performers. The American competitors were almost always the children of immigrants, and very rarely female. For example, between 1959 and 2008, Bulgaria sent 21 girls to the International Mathematical Olympiad, while the U.S., from 1974, when it first entered the competition, to 2008, sent only 3; no woman even made the American team until 1998. According to the study’s authors, native-born American students of both sexes steer clear of math clubs and competitions because “only Asians and nerds” would voluntarily do math. “In other words, it is deemed uncool within the social context of U.S.A. middle and high schools to do mathematics for fun; doing so can lead to social ostracism. Consequently, gifted girls, even more so than boys, usually camouflage their mathematical talent to fit in well with their peers.”

The study’s findings apply equally in science. Urry told me that at the space telescope institute where she used to work, the women from Italy and France “dress very well, what Americans would call revealing. You’ll see a Frenchwoman in a short skirt and fishnets; that’s normal for them. The men in those countries seem able to keep someone’s sexual identity separate from her scientific identity. American men can’t seem to appreciate a woman as a woman and as a scientist; it’s one or the other.”
That the disparity between men and women’s representation in science and math arises from culture rather than genetics seems beyond dispute.

Do go read the entire article. After looking at entry-level problems and their cultural context, Pollack goes on to examine the discrimination-- much of it based on unconscious bias-- that qualified and successful women in science in the US continue to face.

Worlds beyond World Symposium

In about a month's time, the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon will be celebrating their 40th anniversary with two symposiums, one of them focusing on feminist science fiction. All the programming will be free and open to the public. So, if you live in the Pacific Northwest, you might well want to consider attending, especially when you see who will be participating. (I'm thrilled to say, the list includes several Aqueduct Press authors. including me.)

 Here's the relevant scheduling info:


Symposium 2: Sally Miller Gearhart “Worlds Beyond World” – Nov. 8-9 
In this symposium, authors and cultural critics explore feminist creative production and the roles of science fiction and utopian ideas in imagining feminist futures. Sessions include the following:

FRIDAY, 6:30-9 PM • Keynote event: “A Conversation with Ursula K. Le Guin”

SATURDAY, 9 AM-6 PM

• Session 1: “Feminists in the Archives,” a panel featuring Clark Honors College students working with the papers of feminist science fiction authors housed in Knight Library Special Collections and University Archives

• Session 2: “Science Fiction as Feminist Political Theory” featuring Suzy McKee Charnas, L. Timmel Duchamp, Vonda N. McIntyre, and Kate Wilhelm

• Session 3: “Building Feminist Worlds” featuring L. Timmel Duchamp, Molly Gloss, and Andrea Hairston

• Session 4: “Directions in Feminist Science Fiction Research” featuring Andrea Hairston, Joan Haran, and Alexis Lothian

Registration: Free and open to the public, but registration is required at guestli.st/164928. For travel and other event information, go to csws.uoregon.edu and click on “40th Anniversary.”

Quote of the Day

The influence of the feminist publishing movement can be seen far and wide. It's there in the enormous power of women in publishing today and in the ongoing insistence that women's voices should be taken seriously, that if literature is important – if it both shapes and reflects our lives – it should represent something beyond a narrow corner of the world. And it is there in every story where women's lives are central, in mediums well beyond the book world. For instance, Callil says, she is madly in love with the Danish TV show Borgen, which centres on a female prime minister. "Borgen is a Virago modern classic times 500," she says. "It's human life, and it's wonderful."--Kira Cochrane, Has Virago Changed the Publishing World's Attitudes towards Women?

This week at Strange Horizons

As a special feature of its fundraising drive, currently underway, Strange Horizons has posted three excellent essays I know most Aqueduct readers will find interesting:

--Recentering Science Fiction and the Fantastic: What would a non-Anglocentric understanding of science fiction and fantasy look like?, by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay

--Set Truth on Stun: Reimagining an Anti-Oppressive SF/F, by Daniel José Older

--Recent Brazilian Science Fiction and Fantasy Written by Women, by M. Elizabeth Ginway

I'd also urge you to make a contribution to Strange Horizons. Many Aqueduct Press and Cascadia Subduction Zone writers publish both fiction and nonfiction with Strange Horizons. Strange Horizons reviews more of Aqueduct Press's books than any other review publication. And finally, a donation will give you a chance at winning one of many excellent books, including several recent titles from  Aqueduct Press book. Details can be found at http://www.strangehorizons.com/fund_drives/2013/main.shtml.

Banned Books Week

September 22-28 is Banned Books Week! Here's the press release of the American Library Association:

Readers from across the United States and around the world will demonstrate their support for free speech by participating in a Virtual Read-Out of banned and challenged books during Banned Books Week, Sept. 22 – 28, a time when the nation celebrates the freedom to read and the American Library Association (ALA) brings attention to the censorship of books in schools and libraries.

The Virtual Read-Out is the digital centerpiece of Banned Books Week, featuring individuals reading from their favorite banned or challenged book. Participants, libraries and bookstores will upload videos at [http://tinyurl.com/bbwvro13]  for posting to the Banned Books Week YouTube Channel [http://www.youtube.com/bannedbooksweek ]. Contributors are encouraged to share a reading, discuss the significance of their favorite banned book, or mention a local book challenge.

The event will serve as the backdrop for the announcement of Banned Books Week Heroes. It takes courage to stand up for intellectual freedom, and Banned Books Week sponsors will honor outstanding individuals and groups that have stood up to defend the freedom to read.

More than 1,500 videos have been submitted since the read-out began in 2011, including many by bestselling authors.  Sherman Alexie (“Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”), Laurie Halse Anderson (“Speak”), and Khaled Hosseini (“The Kite Runner”) are among those contributing new videos.  Bookstores and libraries across the country are already participating in the Virtual Read-Out. Bookmans Bookstore (Ariz.) produced the video “Bookmans Does Banned Books” and Mooresville (Ind.) Public Library produced two promotional trailers.

For the first time this year, Twitter parties will help promote the message of Banned Books Week.  A party will be held on Monday, Sept. 23, from 10 a.m. to noon, Eastern time; a second party is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 25, from noon to 2 p.m., Eastern.  Supporters are urged to tweet using the hashtag #bannedbooksweek. More information about the Twitter parties is available on the Banned Books Week website, http://bannedbooksweek.org .

Banned Books Week is sponsored by ALA, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the Association of American Publishers, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the National Association of College Stores, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the National Council of Teachers of English, PEN American Center, and Project Censored.  The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress has endorsed Banned Books Week.

For more information on Banned Books Week, book challenges and censorship, please visit the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom’s Banned Books website at www.ala.org/bbooks, or www.bannedbooksweek.org.

Biologically speaking, what is an individual, pray tell?

The New York Times published a fascinating article yesterday, DNA Double Take, by Carl Zimmer, that calls into question the nearly universal belief that every cell in an individual's body contains the same DNA-- the DNA determining an individual's biological identity. This now appears to be a gross oversimplification.

[S]cientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people.

“There have been whispers in the matrix about this for years, even decades, but only in a very hypothetical sense,” said Alexander Urban, a geneticist at Stanford University. Even three years ago, suggesting that there was widespread genetic variation in a single body would have been met with skepticism, he said. “You would have just run against the wall.”

But a series of recent papers by Dr. Urban and others has demonstrated that those whispers were not just hypothetical. The variation in the genomes found in a single person is too large to be ignored. “We now know it’s there,” Dr. Urban said. “Now we’re mapping this new continent.”

Dr. James R. Lupski, a leading expert on the human genome at Baylor College of Medicine, wrote in a recent review in the journal Science that the existence of multiple genomes in an individual could have a tremendous impact on the practice of medicine. “It’s changed the way I think,” he said in an interview.

Scientists are finding links from multiple genomes to certain rare diseases, and now they’re beginning to investigate genetic variations to shed light on more common disorders.

Science’s changing view is also raising questions about how forensic scientists should use DNA evidence to identify people. It’s also posing challenges for genetic counselors, who can’t assume that the genetic information from one cell can tell them about the DNA throughout a person’s body.

Carrying more than one type of DNA is called "chimerism." It was previously considered rare, since evidence for it only occasionally thrust itself into visibility. Now that sequencing the human genome has become much less expensive to do, chimerism is becoming more visible. These weren't previously unknown-- Zimmer notes that in 1953, when a woman donated a pint of blood, some of which was Type O and some Type A, it was concluded that she'd acquired some of her blood from her twin brother, while in the womb. But now, scientists have begun to search systematically for chimeras-- and are finding that chimerism is not at all rare, and in fact occurs

in a remarkably high fraction of people. In 2012, Canadian scientists performed autopsies on the brains of 59 women. They found neurons with Y chromosomes in 63 percent of them. The neurons likely developed from cells originating in their sons.

In The International Journal of Cancer in August, Eugen Dhimolea of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and colleagues reported that male cells can also infiltrate breast tissue. When they looked for Y chromosomes in samples of breast tissue, they found it in 56 percent of the women they investigated.

Besides the implications for medicine, the discovery of the prevalence of chimerism is likely to complicate forensic science. Zimmer cites a case that arose last year, in which a saliva sample and sperm sample from the same suspect in a sexual assault case didn't match because the suspect had two sequences of DNA in his body.

I see the discovery of the prevalence of chimerism as further undermining the common, even cherished conception of the genome as a master blueprint that allows everyone to be neatly pigeonholed and offers the means for tinkering with and easily controlling desirable traits once the practical issues of genetic engineering have been worked out-- and, of course, bolsters the illusions people have about the biology of sex differences. Some people, of course, will be certain that acquiring neurons with Y-chromosomes will make a significant difference to the operation of women's brains following the birth of sons. I imagine there may even be a few neuroscientists willing to squander grant money in attempt to locate and prove such a difference. But such old, cliche-ridden projects will inevitably begin to look less and less interesting. Just the other day I read an article in Science reporting that the hottest, fastest-moving research of the day is on bacterial immune systems (and to tell the truth, until I read that article I hadn't even known bacteria have immune systems!)-- and that bacterial immune systems are being used to harness features to target the destruction of specific genes in human cells. Nothing about human biology is as simple as it once seemed. And I say: Glory hallelujah!

Quiet pleasures

When back in 1979 I first moved to Seattle, my number-one favorite destination in the Pacific Northwest was the Washington coast, especially the La Push area, and after that, the San Juan Islands. I've spent a lot of time in those places over the decades, but a couple of other places have been edging their way into my heart, particularly the Columbia Gorge, which straddles a good stretch of the Washington-Oregon border. The Gorge possesses a stark beauty that the many dams that have been foisted onto the river haven't begun to diminish. Its pleasures, for me, are of the quiet sort. And interestingly, as one moves away from the Columbia River (north or south, back into the Cascades), the climate quickly shifts and the land moves from scrubby chaparral to lush Pacific Northwest forest. I think I intuitively understand why such pleasures failed to draw me when I was younger, but I can't easily put that understanding into words. If I were a poet, I think I'd give it a shot. Seems like that's the sort of thing poetry can address without rendering the subject dull and labored-- which I suspect my attempt to write about it in prose would inevitably be.

When I spend time in the Columbian Gorge, I almost always visit the museum at Maryhill (which has a winery associated with it-- wineries being as thick on the ground in the Columbian Gorge as they are in Sonoma, California). During my visit the week before last, I found, in the museum's sculpture park, a sculpture of a horse that evoked, for me, a sort of Wild West Steampunk aesthetic.

Dixie Jewett's sculpture, titled Merriweather (2011), was constructed from scrap metal-- specifically welded metal, wheels, and gears. According to the placard accompanying the sculpture, the artist specializes in larger-than-lifesize horses. I generally think of Steampunk aesthetic as all shiny brass and polished wood powered by steam and lubricated by springs and gears, but the materials in Jewett's horse evoke mechanized locomotion shaped to look like a horse. Hmm. Maybe this is more an 18th- rather than 19th-Century conceit-- pre-steam rather than steampunk, when mechanized creatures in Enlightenment circles were all the rage. (I don't know that anyone other than E.T.A. Hoffman ever wrote about those.) Was such an evocation the artist's intention? Probably not. The materials she used were probably chosen for their aesthetic rather than associational qualities. But the image she has created engages my imagination, and I delight in that evocation nonetheless.

WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 8-- an update

I've been pretty much off-line for the last month. But now I'm back, and my first post in this long while must be an announcement:

 Farah Mendelsohn has found it necessary to withdraw, regretfully,  from the editorship of the next volume of the WisCon Chronicles. This is sad news, but the show must go on, right? And so I'm happy to say that longtime WisCon attendee Rebecca Holden, who co-edited Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler with Nisi Shawl, is stepping up to take her place. Rebecca has asked me to put out a call on her behalf to anyone who might be interested in contributing pieces in the usual forms (essays, panel notes, poetry, and fiction) or even in unusual forms. If you attended WisCon this year and have something to say about it, please query or contact her for further information on deadlines and word counts etc at rebecca (at) holdens.net.