Take Back The Narrative

We who believe in freedom cannot rest!

Bernice Reagon

This is a time for action, for words of fire, for all of us thinking and acting together to find a way out of no way.

I’ve been in a rage. I’ve been crying and trembling, walking around in a daze. I’ve been grieving. Like everybody else I know. I have scrolled through Facebook, taking in the love, the anguish, the insight, the rage, the hope.

I washed and conditioned my hair with hot oil. I biked for two hours up into the hills.

I scrolled around obsessively for the answers, hoping to find the reasons for this tragedy, the answers to a nightmare. Finally, I realized what I was really looking for in every article and post was the miracle that would make it all better. I realized I wasn’t going to find the miracle answers. I’d have to make the answers, conjure miracles with all of my communities, with the majority of the electorate who voted for Hillary or someone other than Trump.

I wrote and called my friends. My friends called to check on me. Friends from Germany sent emails. I received meditations, dances, images for self-care.

I read eloquent essays and personal stories. I did not feel alone in my grief.

I resisted feeling that what I do is pointless. I am on sabbatical and two of my students emailed, asking if I was all right. They said they missed me and the classes I teach—where they and other students can feel safe as they challenge their minds and spirits, as they learn how to invent the future they want. I cried reading their note. How did they know this was just what I needed?

I offered love and support wherever I could. Timmi Duchamp asked me to write this blog. I agreed.

Many offered immediate and long term actions to take:

Friends said they would help Transgender folks with paperwork

The NRDC pledged to keep standing with Standing Rock.

100 women of color leaders (#our100) asked us to affirm our unity, and together recommit to continue our work towards this promise of liberty and justice for all.

The Union of Concerned Scientists asked us to work to keep science as a critical foundation for public policy.

The Sierra Club said we won’t stop fighting.

The ACLU said see you in court.

Michael Moore offered to-do lists on Facebook.

Moveon.org said let’s get together with folks and make the revolution.

18Million Rising.org reminded us that the number of women of color in the Senate quadrupled and we should support them.

Jezabel offered a list of organizations that could use our help.

And remember—the majority of the electorate voted for Hillary or someone other than Trump. Hillary won the popular vote. Let’s get a hold of the narrative.

Many artists wondered if what they do is significant—particularly in the face of the horror, why write magic or science fiction? Who wants to read our stories?

We, the people, your communities, we need your stories, your music, your insights, your dances, your films! Artists must not feel that what they do is insignificant.

Folks said they were too old for this and then talked about all they were going to do! So, offer shelter, be a shield, organize, fight like hell, write a book, have everybody’s back like they have yours. Do whatever you can do and go ahead and be cranky and too old for this shit!

I also saw folks saying Clinton failed to energize Black folks, Latinx, and the young (CNN for example.) And there have been numerous complaint articles and outrage posts at the white woman who voted for Trump rather than Hillary.

They (those who are not the majority of the electorate who voted for Hillary or someone other than Trump) want us fussing and cussing and blaming the black people who didn’t show up for Hillary like they did for Obama, or the college educated white women who voted for a racist/misogynist who’d like to grab their pussy if its cute, or the Latinax who voted more for xenophobe Trump than they did for Romney, or for the gay Republicans for whatever they are doing. All the while giving a pass to the white men (college educated or not) who voted for a white supremacist narcissist whose followers chant I hate Muslims, kill the bitch, fuck the nigger, gas the Jews.

This is the same pass too many have been giving to Trump all along: he’s racist, but you can hold your nose and vote for him because he’ll give us jobs. He hates women, Mexicans, disabled people, queers, Jews—but that’s not important, ‘cause he’ll fix the economy.

Don’t be derailed. Don’t be distracted. Let’s control the narrative.

We should expect as much from the (grown ass) white men who voted for Trump as we do from everyone else. Grown ass white men shouldn’t get an academy award for being reasonable or a pass when they’re pushing their horror as usual reality down our throats.

We don’t have time to waste or people to waste. We can’t throw away the black folks who did vote for Hillary because of the black folks who didn’t! Ditto the white women and the young people who voted for Hillary.

We need to do all those things that everybody has be writing and talking about together.

We have to fight for the women in the Senate, together.

We have to support each other’s work together.

We have to stand up to lies together.

We need to be shields for whomever we can, together.

We need to take back the narrative together.

Each of us is put here in this time and this place to personally decide the future of humankind. Did you think the Creator would create unnecessary people in a time of such terrible danger? Know that you yourself are essential to this world. Understand both the blessing and the burden of that. You yourself are desperately needed to save the soul of this world. Did you think you were put here for something less? 

Chief Arvol Looking Horse of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations

WisCon Chronicles call for submissions: deadline extension

This from Jaymee Goh, editor of the forthcoming volume of The WisCon Chronicles:

WisCon, WisCon, DO YOU READ?

 In the face of the election results, I am EXTENDING the deadline for the WisCon Chronicles to December 1.And if you need to use this platform to talk about the trial of whiteness that is the election, that would not be amiss.

WisCon, WisCon, DO YOU READ?

The Day After

Once again, the United States will be inaugurating as president a candidate who did not receive the majority of the votes cast (commonly referred to as "the popular vote," as though it were a popularity contest). The conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which had the privilege of determining the outcome of the 2000 election, insisted then that our system does not guarantee that all citizens have the right to vote or that all citizens' votes count equally. Since then, the Supreme Court's 2013 ruling struck down a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. There's no question in my mind that the curtailment of the protections inherent in the Voting Rights Act was, a factor in the outcomes of yesterday's general election; it's impossible to say yet just how significant a factor it was in the assignment of Electoral College votes (one of the many elitist institutions built into our "democratic" system). I expect we'll be hearing more about this soon.

Very early this morning, over at The New Yorker, David Remnick, clearly in the throes of the initial shock, wrote:

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

I, too, feel sick and flattened. (And also angry.) But to my mind, we've had many sickening events in the history of the United States and liberal democracy, and over my lifetime I've witnessed or experienced a good many of them, some of which have come into my mind today in a sort of physical resonance of memory. Each time I've been through one of these sickening events it has felt as though this country has gone insane. Each time, I've just had to go on. Last night in the small hours I said to Tom and the friends who had come to watch election results come in, "I'm too old for this." Maybe I'd hoped I wouldn't find myself in this place yet again. Going into the election I'd known it would be a long hard struggle if Clinton won, but I hadn't been able then to bring my mind to bear on the long hard slog we'd face if Clinton lost--precisely because I knew it would be as arduous and exhausting as walking through waist-high mud, something that at my age would involve using muscles that were beginning to weaken and melt to flab. Now I have no choice but to let the fact of this defeat sink in--and then to go on, no matter how high or thick the muck.

A variety of explanations for the triumph of the Republicans, who will now control every branch and aspect of the federal government, are in the air. I could probably list a dozen that I've heard or read in the last eighteen hours. You can read a few of them, mostly centered on the gender issue, in a discussion on the Guardian's website: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/us-election-result-misogyny-america-panel-woman. Arwa Mahdawi's commentary particularly moved me:

Trump’s win has trained a spotlight on the extent of the misogyny that runs through America. Importantly, however, it also reveals just how far women’s rights have come; how much has been achieved; how threatened the denizens of a fading America feel. Trump’s victory is the last gasp of a desperate white patriarchy. Clinton may have lost the election but that doesn’t mean women lost on Wednesday morning. Our fight isn’t over.

Ah, but we also need to be careful not to frame Trump’s victory as a case of men versus women. Exit polls show that the majority of white women voted for Trump. It seems that upholding white privilege is a bigger priority for many women in America than protecting legislation that gives them control over their own bodies.

Indeed, if Trump’s win has taught us one thing it’s that we need to stop talking about “women’s rights”. We need to stop pretending that women in America are a homogeneous group with the same privileges and priorities. Feminism is meaningless unless we talk about intersectional feminism. It’s women of colour who should feel the angriest today. It’s women of colour who have been most let down. And it’s women of colour who have the most to lose.

What preoccupies me now, at this moment, is the future ownership of the public sphere.Will the media flip to fawning over the man who can't speak without lying and threatens vengeance on those who take note of this lies, and allow each and every lie to pass without challenge? Will the language of the most blatant, offensive white supremacy become socially acceptable and adopted by the "liberal" media? This occurs to me today because my body and spirit feel, this day after, as it did when the US public sphere went from massively opposing the invasion of Iraq in 1990-91 (with a whopping 90% of the population against it) to celebrating and glorying in the ease with which the US military machine was able to grind down its former ally. US public sentiment is fickle; it always sides with the winner.

I raise this concern not to wallow in despair, though certainly even the most optimistic of us are indeed wallowing today as we reel from a blow we aren't yet able to take in. Rather, I want us, looking to the weeks and months ahead, to do what we can to speak the truth and protect one another from the force of a hatred that will be flowing full-bore through some of the most powerful channels on the planet. Those of us who know how to use words and know how to think past double-speak and dog whistles need to occupy the public sphere to the utmost of our ability. Please, my friends: think, speak, and write. We are not defenseless.    

Quote of the Day

I'm generally not a big fan of Rousseau, but sometimes he does nail it. This observation strikes this particular Usian who, whatever the outcome of this general election, knows it won't bring an end to our national state of anxiety:

Citizens only allow themselves to be oppressed to the degree that they are carried away by blind ambition. Since they pay more attention to what is below them than to what is above, domination becomes dearer to them than independence, and they consent to wear chains so that they may in turn give them to others. It is very difficult to reduce to obedience anyone who does not seek to command.--Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men

Lola Robles' Monteverde: Memoirs of an Interstellar Linguist

I'm pleased to announce the release of Monteverde: Memoirs of an Interstellar Linguist, a novella by Lola Robles translated by Lawrence Schimel, in both small trade paperback and e-book editions, as the fifty-second volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series.  You can purchase it now from Aqueduct at www.aqueductpress.com.

Terran scholar Rachel Monteverde journeys to Aanuk, a paradisiacal planet famous for both its beaches and the generosity of its nomadic inhabitants. The aanukiens are not the only people on the planet, however: Rachel is eager to meet the Fihdia, a cave-dwelling people who share a congenital condition that makes them blind. Rachel’s relentless determination to communicate with them despite the Aanukien’s dismissal and the Fihdia’s secretiveness will yield more than she ever hoped for.

Rachel Cordasco writes of the novella in a review for Speculative Fiction in Translation, "Robles expertly mixes notes that Terran linguist Rachel Monteverde took for her report to the Society for the Study of Interstellar Languages with Rachel’s reminiscences about life on Aanuk and the ways in which language acts as the common denominator among otherwise wildly distinct cultures. At its heart, this is a story about translation’s importance in breaking down barriers between people, and Lawrence Schimel’s translation of this story about translation is so smooth you almost forget that Monteverde wasn’t originally written in English....Monteverde is unlike anything else you’ll read this year. It raises language itself to the level of a main character, one who may be invisible but nonetheless forms the basis of all interaction and understanding. Without language, we wouldn’t have Monteverde, and without translation, us English-language readers wouldn’t have access to this small but brilliant book."

 A few details about the author and translator:

LOLA ROBLES is the author of three science fiction novels, La rosa de las nieblas (1999), El informe Monteverde (2005) and Flores de Metal (2007) as well as a collection of lesbian science fiction short stories co-written with Ma Concepción Reguiero, Historias del Crazy Bar y otros relatos de lo imposible (2013). Her most recent book is the essay En regiones extrañas: un mapa de la ciencia ficción, lo fantástico y lo maravilloso (Palabaristas, 2016), a panoramic overview for the lay reader of the basic concepts of non-realist genres, their divisions and overlaps.

She has also published numerous articles and studies focusing on Spanish-speaking women authors of science fiction and fantasy, with pioneering works analyzing Gothic narratives through a feminist lens or the treatment of trans* experience and identity in genre literature. From 1987 to 2002, she coordinated the cultural activities of the Biblioteca de Mujeres (the Women's Library) of Madrid and was one of the founding members of the Red de Bibliotecas y Centros de Documentación de Mujeres (The Newtwork of Women's Libraries and Documentation Centers). Since 2006, she has given a monthly lecture and reading group discussion called Fantástikas, focusing on women writers and characters in genre literature. This workshop is adapted for people with visual disability, especially since the author herself has low vision. Blog: Fantástikas: http://escritorasfantastikas.blogspot.com.es/

LAWRENCE SCHIMEL writes in both Spanish and English and has published over 100 books as author or anthologist in many different genres—including fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and comics—and for both children and adults. He has won the Lambda Literary Award twice, for PoMoSEXUALS: Challenging Assumptions about Gender and Sexuality (with Carol Queen; Cleis) and First Person Queer (with Richard Labonté, Arsenal Pulp Press), and has also been a finalist for this award 13 other times. His anthology The Future Is Queer (with Richard Labonté;, Arsenal Pulp Press) won the Spectrum Award, and he has also won an Independent Publisher Book Award, and a Rhysling Award, among others.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone, October 2016

The new issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is out. It features poetry by Gwynne Garfinkle and Sonya Taaffe and an essay about anger by L. Timmel Duchamp; the issue's Grandmother Magma column is by Sarah Zettel, writing about work by Elisabeth Sanxay-Holding; David Findlay, Nancy Jane Moore, and J. M. Siorova contribute reviews; and Madeline Galbraith is our featured artist. You purchase the issue here and download the April 2016 issue for free here.

Current Issue: Volume 6, Number 4 October 2016

Essay

Sometimes Anger Is the Necessary Response: Reading Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick
  by  L. Timmel Duchamp

Poems

Una O’Connor unleashes her scream
   by Gwynne Garfinkle

A Death of Hippolytos
The Other Lives
   by Sonya Taaffe

Grandmother Magma

The Girl We Forgot (and Really Shouldn’t Have) Sarah Zettel on Speak of the Devil and Other Work by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Reviews

The Apothecary’s Curse, by Barbara Barnett
   reviewed by J.M. Sidorova

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene , by Donna Haraway
   reviewed by Nancy Jane Moore

Sleeping Under the Tree of Life ,
by Sheree Renée Thomas
   reviewed by David Findlay

Featured Artist

Madeline Galbraith

Please support Strange Horizons!

Just a little signal-boost here: Strange Horizons has begun the last week of its fund drive. Many Aqueduct authors have been published in or have served as editors for this excellent publication, which shares some of Aqueduct's dearest values and goals. Here's the pitch from the site:

Our annual fund drive is underway! We're aiming to raise $15,000 to fund Strange Horizons in 2017, and a bit more than that for some special projects. You can make a one-time donation via PayPal or NetworkForGood, or support on an ongoing basis via Patreon—all donors are entered into our prize draw, and various other rewards are also available (and in the US your donations are tax-deductible). As an additional thank-you to donors, as we raise money we're publishing extra material from our fund drive special issue. We've just published "The Troll Who Hid Her Heart" by Jenn Grunigen! When we reach $13,000 we'll release podcasts of all our bonus material!
Special Patreon goal! In addition to the main fund drive special, if our Patreon reaches 300 supporters, as a preview of Samovar, we will publish Lawrence Schimel's translation of "Terpsichore", a story by Argentinian writer Teresa P. Mira de Echeverría. Read a bit more about it here.

Some of the prizes are Aqueduct Press books. Here are the descriptions provided by SH:

Conversation Pieces bundle
A selection of offerings from Aqueduct Press's "Conversation Pieces" series, which showcase connection and conversations within feminist SF. This bundle includes Marginalia to Stone Bird, by Rannu Award winner (and SH contributor) Rose Lemberg, her debut collection reviewed by SH here; A Field Guide to the Spirits, by Jean LeBlanc, exploring the interwoven pathways of ghost, memory, imagination, and desire; Unpronounceable, by Susan diRende, a novel LASplash.com called "reminiscent of the space fantasies of Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut"; and Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, by Sheree Renee Thomas, a collection of the celebrated author's poetry and short stories. All in all, a great introduction to the series. (Donated by Aqueduct Press.)


Will Do Magic for Small Change
A trade paperback copy of Will Do Magic for Small Change by Andrea Hairston. Cinnamon Jones dreams of stepping on stage and acting her heart out like her famous grandparents, Redwood and Wildfire. But at 5'10" and 180 pounds, she's theatrically challenged. Her family life is a tangle of mystery and deadly secrets, and nobody is telling Cinnamon the whole truth. Before her older brother died, he gave Cinnamon The Chronicles of the Great Wanderer, a tale of a Dahomean warrior woman and an alien from another dimension who perform in Paris and at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The Chronicles may be magic or alien science, but the story is definitely connected to Cinnamon's family secrets. When an act of violence wounds her family, Cinnamon and her theatre squad determine to solve the mysteries and bring her worlds together. Publishers Weekly had this to say: "The entire work is filled with magic, celebrating West Africans, Native Americans, art, and love that transcends simple binary genders. Hairston's novel is a completely original and stunning work." (Donated by Aqueduct Press.)

 Roadsouls
A trade paperback copy of Roadsouls by Betsy James. Timid Duuni has spent her life as abused and guarded property. Blind, arrogant Raím is determined to be again what he once was: hunter, lover, young lord of the earth. Desperate to escape their lives, the two lift up their hands to the passing Roadsoul caravan, and are—literally—flung together naked. Each of them soon learns that saying "yes" to the Roadsouls is more than just accepting an invitation to a new life—it's a commitment that can't be reversed. For Duuni and Raím, nothing is as it was. Lost to their old lives, hating each other, they are swept out of their cruel old certainties into an unknown, unknowable, ever-changing world of journey and carnival, artists and wrestlers and thieves. Behind them, inexorable, pads a lion. Inexorable, too, is Duuni and Raím's inevitable encounter with it, an encounter that will change everything. (Donated by Aqueduct Press.)

The Waterdancer's World
A trade paperback copy of The Waterdancer's World by L Timmel Duchamp. Humans have been struggling to live on Frogmore for almost five centuries, adapting themselves to punishing gravity and the deadly mistflowers that dominate its ecology. Financier Inez Gauthier, patron of the arts and daughter of the general commanding the planet's occupation forces, dreams of eliminating the mistflowers that make exploitation of the planet's natural wealth so difficult and impede her father's efforts to crush the native insurgency. Fascinated by the new art-form of waterdancing created by Solstice Balalzalar, celebrating the planet's indigenous lifeforms, Inez assumes that her patronage will be enough to sustain Solstice's art even as she ruthlessly pursues windfall profits at the expense of all that has made waterdancing possible. (Donated by Aqueducut Press.)

 Hwarhath Stories
A paperback copy of Eleanor Arnason's Hwarhath Stories. A collection of a dozen Hwarhath tales with commentary by their translator. As the translator notes, "Humanity has encountered only one other species able to travel among the stars. This species, who call themselves the hwarhath, or 'people,' are also the only intelligent species so far encountered." Reviewing for Strange Horizons this September, Kelly Jennings said "This is a powerhouse of a collection. It is not to be missed." Includes stories nominated for the Nebula, Sturgeon, Tiptree and Locus Awards. (Donated by Aqueduct Press.)

  
Flesh & Wires
A trade paperback of the Locus Recommended first novel for 2015, Flesh & Wires, by Jackie Hatton. Following a failed alien invasion the world left is sparsely populated with psychologically scarred survivors, some of them technologically-enhanced women like Lo, leader of the small safe haven of Saugatuck. A book Publisher's Weekly calls "a promising work of feminist science fiction." (Donated by Aqueduct Press.)

Two Travelers
A trade paperback copy of Two Travelers by Sarah Tolmie. In "Dancer on the Stairs," a woman wakes up on a stone staircase in a baroque palace, not speaking the language of the place and lacking the chemical signature that allows people to identify each other within a complex social hierarchy. Unable to communicate in words, she resorts to dance. In "The Burning Furrow," a man who runs a diner in present-day America is also a freedom-fighter in the northern, courtly realm of Dinesen. His people are abused foreigners at home, the servants of strangers, bound not by their overlords, but by their world itself, through a ritual known as the burning of the furrows. Only he and his family are free—for a time. Now that time is ending. (Donated by Aqueduct Press.)

Life-sized ugliness: a mirror for right-wing politicians

I'm in Port Townsend again, writing. Reading essays is one part of my daily routine here. No matter what I read, serendipity always comes into play, and what I read helps me think about the fiction I'm working on. This morning's reading, though, resonated so powerfully with the violent political theater that this year's presidential campaign season has devolved into that I'm going to share a bit of it with you here (with the hope that the distraction from my work will then pass). My current reading is bell hooks' Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, which is a relatively old book-- Routledge first published it in 1994. It's a collection of essays that includes a 1993 interview conducted by Marie-France Alderman, chiefly discussing films of the day. The films they discuss are likely unfamiliar to many people now, but the discussion itself doesn't strike me as in the least out of date. Here is the resonant passage:

You know a film I saw recently that was very moving to me--and I kept contrasting it to Menace II Society-- was the film Falling Down. There is a way to talk about Falling Down as describing the end of Western civilization. Black philosopher Cornel West talks about the fact that part of the crisis we're in has to do with Western patriarchal biases no longer functioning, and there is a way in which Falling Down is about a white man who's saying, I trusted in this system. I did exactly what the system told me to and it's not working for me. It's lied to me." That doesn't mean you have the right to be so angry that you can attack people of color or attack other marginal groups. In so many ways, though, that's exactly how a lot of white people feel. There's this sense that if this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy isn't working for white people--most especially for working-class white men, or middle-class white men--it's the fault of some others out there.

Sound familiar? 1994 was the year the Newt Gingrich cohort took over the House of Representatives with a take-no-prisoners approach to holding the federal government hostage (a tactic that has since become a standard arrow in the far-right wing's quiver), that a few years later resulted in the virtual elimination of welfare assistance. And then of course, later, came the even more extreme Tea Party faction, which, though it is a minority, has successfully imposed a state of apparently permanent gridlock in Congress. Gingrich and the Tea Party politicians share most of Trump's values and attitudes. So why are some of these same far-right politicians now so dismayed by Trump's performance? Can it be that they are horrified to see the embodiment of some of their most cherished attitudes and values? (Never have their opinions and values looked as ugly as they do when expounded by Trump, whose primary form of disguise is to claim after he's said something more than usually outrageous he said was joking.) That makes more sense to me than the mainstream media's argument that they're fearing that Trump's boasts targets the kind of women their wives and daughters are. They've certainly never before opposed the language of rape culture. (And in fact, yesterday Rudy Giuliani got laughs at a Trump rally by joking about "locker room talk," which is how Trump characterized his boasting about his adventures sexually assaulting white women.)

Later in the interview, hooks muses on the reactions of many people to women presuming to speak in the public sphere (which in 1993 belonged solely to men--witness the Anita Hill hearings and Alan Simpson's rebuke of then president of NOW Molly Yard for what he called her "tiresome arrogance" in presuming to speak before Congress):

I was just home recently at a family reunion, and people said such mean and brutal things to me that I started to think, "What's going on here?" And my brother said that a lot of what's going on here is envy. [Envy for hooks' success as a well-published author.] ....We hear all these statistics about how many women are raped and beaten every so many seconds yet when we talk about having fear in patriarchy, we're made to feel that that's crazy. What incredible women today--especially those who are feminists--aren't talked about in many contexts as mad?

      Trump keeps playing the crazy card because the crazy card worked just about every time it was deployed against a woman for most of the twentieth century in the US. (I can recall numerous instances in personal life where the conclusion, on a woman's behaving willfully, which is to say, without regard for what the dominant man in her life was insisting on, was that she was "crazy.") These days, this trope doesn't work all that well with younger generations. Targeting Clinton as a woman out of control (crazy and criminal in the same breath--in any case, needing silencing and institutionalization of one sort or another) does work with people who share what hooks calls "this sense that if this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy isn't working for white people--most especially for working-class white men, or middle-class white men--it's the fault of some others out there."

Okay, having vented, I can now get back to work.   

L. Timmel Duchamp's The Waterdancer's World

I'm pleased (if I'm honest, wildly excited) to announce that my new novel, The Waterdancer's World, is just being released byAqueduct Press in trade paperback and e-book editions. Humans have been struggling to live on Frogmore for almost five centuries, adapting themselves to punishing gravity and the deadly mistflowers that dominate its ecology. Financier Inez Gauthier, patron of the arts and daughter of the general commanding the planet's occupation forces, dreams of eliminating the mistflowers that make exploitation of the planet's natural wealth so difficult and impede her father's efforts to crush the native insurgency. Fascinated by the new art-form of waterdancing created by Solstice Balalzalar celebrating the planet's indigenous lifeforms, Inez assumes that her patronage will be enough to sustain Solstice's art even as she ruthlessly pursues windfall profits at the expense of all that has made waterdancing possible.

Carolyn Ives Gilman, author of Dark Orbit and Halfway Human, writes of the novel: "Timmel Duchamp specializes in rule-breaking fiction, and The Waterdancer's World lives up to her reputation. This passionate book explores the interdependence of art and oppression on a vividly imagined colonial world. It is as challenging and ethically complex as anything Duchamp has written."

Reviews

Frogmore is not the ideal world for human colonists, but they have arrived, they intend to stay, and the military is in control and determined to eliminate any threat to the human population, even if that means doing major damage to the local ecology and trampling the rights of the indigenes. The major player in the story is the daughter of the commanding general, who commands a commercial empire in her own right, and who is firmly behind the plan to terraform the world despite her fascination with a new artform that is directly inspired by the life forms she hopes to eradicate. The interplay of emotions unfolds on both an individual and a mass level, and the role of art in human history becomes a major theme. This author's work is almost always just a bit outside the mainstream of science fiction, and that is I think part of the reason that it is so often, as in this case, intensely appealing.  —Critical Mass, Don D'Ammassa,  October 5, 2016

This creative (though at times academic) novel takes place on the planet, Frogmore, as seen by five different individuals, and features the analytical guidebook, "A Star-Hoppers View of the Galaxy." The narrative explores the struggles the first few generations face while establishing life on the harsh and unforgiving planet... Generations later, when Frogmore is thriving, a government-like group, the Combine's Council for Developmental Strategy, seeks to use the planet only for its resources. The balance of the planet is on the line while groups grapple to gain control while managing oppression and ostracism. Readers looking for a breezy beach read will need to keep looking, for this is a formidable novel that takes concentration and patience. The rewards are great, however, for those who stick with it and wind up reflecting on it long after they've finished.  —Booklist, Stormie Petrakovitz,  September 29, 2016

You can get the book now from Aqueduct at  http://www.aqueductpress.com.

Karen Heuler's Other Places

I'm pleased to announce the release of Other Places by Karen Heuler, a collection of short fiction, as the fifty-first volume in Aqueduct Press's Conversation Pieces series. In Other Places' tales, life unfolds in strange ways. You may encounter people from your past living in your former apartments, or realize you have a penis as you engage in war-dreams, or find a planet filled with ghosts that look exactly like the ghosts back home. Is it possible they are the same as the ghosts back home? Wherever you travel, you'll have to make tough decisions about the aliens you may have harmed and the aliens who may harm you. Other Places, Karen Heuler's latest story collection, follows travelers as the familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes life.

Publishers Weekly has reviewed Other Places: "Prolific fantasy and horror writer Heuler continues defying convention and categorization in her latest collection of stories. The first tale, “The Rising Up,” wherein a young woman unexpectedly realizes she has a penis while engaging in dream combat, sets the stage for the weirdness to come. There is fairy tale opulence in “Twelve Sisters, Twelve Sisters, Ten,” in which a dozen sisters spend their evenings dancing in an underwater house. “The Apartments,” in which a woman visits her old haunts and discovers some unsettling personal information, is as much a stroll down memory lane as it is a meditation on narrative. Each story is as inventive as the last. Heuler’s prose illuminates the strangeness of both her characters and her settings. Establishing elaborate themes and morals is no easy feat in such short narrative arcs, but Heuler does it admirably, quickly laying the groundwork for her myriad of worlds, cultures, and travelers. There is no doubt as to Heuler’s creativity, but some of the stories have less pull than others, though the collection as a whole does not feel unbalanced. Exploring difficult questions with imaginative prose, Heuler leaves readers with much food for thought."

 Other Places is available in both print and e-boook editions. You can purchase it now through Aqueduct's website.

Nisi Shawl Reads & Signs Her First Novel

Yesterday, Tor released Nisi Shawl's debut novel, Everfair, and last night at University Bookstore in Seattle, a crowd of sixty hung on Nisi's every word spoken and note sung. No one who's been to a recent reading by Nisi will be surprised to hear that she opened her reading with a song important to the characters in her just-released Everfair; but not only did she sing a capella, she also directed the audience to join in the chorus (which we all did). Flashing us a mischievous smile, she promised to read us a sex scene--which she did--but I had to laugh when someone later, standing in the long queue of people waiting to get their copy of the book signed, grumbled with amusement that it was actually a scene of sex interrupted. At any rate, I came away with my own copy in a mood of exultation.

Nisi commented to another writer before the reading that it had taken her sixty years to achieve this book. This resonated powerfully with me when University Bookstore host Duane Wilkins reminded us of Nisi's long view by beginning his introduction with an anecdote of how Nisi had many years back asked him if she could read her first novel at the bookstore and that when he'd said sure and asked her when it was due to be released she replied that she hadn't yet written it. Obviously, she was thinking ahead.  

Nisi's going to be reading in a variety of locations across the US this fall. Tor.com has posted her schedule for September (and presumably will be updating that with more appearances that I know she has planned). I know this blog's regular readers will want to read Everfair. I haven't yet read it myself, but the blurb on the front cover, by Karen Joy Fowler, reads: "A book with gorgeous sweep, spanning years and continents, loves and hates, histories and fantasies...Everfair is sometimes sad, often luminous, and always original. A wonderful achievement." Enough said.

WisCon Chronicles Vol. 11: Call for materials

I'm pleased to announce that the editor of the next volume of the WisCon Chronicles is Jaymee Goh, and she's eager to receive submissions. Here's her call for materials:

Call for Submissions

The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 11: Trials by Whiteness

WisCon40 followed a seismic shift in the demographics of the convention. Following the success of the POC Safer Space, there is now a Genderqueer/Trans Lounge, and a Disability Lounge. Programming actively seeks a diversity of panelists. How have these changes come about, and what have their ramifications been?

The theme, "Trials by Whiteness," examines how what bell hooks calls the white-supremacist capitalist (cishetero)patriarchy has affected the feminism of WisCon and created difficult confrontations and conversations on the clashing perceptions of attendees. "Whiteness" refers to the position from which white supremacy operates. It has constantly moving goalposts by which everyone is measured. Whiteness does not refer only to white people; non-white peoples can also identify with this position and perspective. "Trials by whiteness," therefore, refers to all the problems people have to go through as a result of white supremacy, on various scales from microaggressions to abuse, whether institutionally or through individual behaviours.

I welcome essays and contemplations on the following:

·         the changing faces of WisCon;

·         the challenges in transmitting and sharing knowledge across generations;

·         clashes of ideology, theories, and/or practices as feminism grows; 

·         panel reports;

·         nice listicles, for example suggestions for how to ally with (and not over!) the various folks that come to WisCon!

I encourage personal essays, poems, or roundtable discussions that deal with any of the following, especially in the context of WisCon and within the SFF industry:

·         dialogs and difficult conversations about the rising discomfort of white SFF fans; 

·         intra-community conflicts within marginalized groups, which we fear to discuss because we fear whiteness turning these conflicts against us;

·         spillover of hegemonic whiteness onto other forms of oppression, such as disability, class, and gender expression;

·         productive outcomes of difficult conversations, e.g. Nalo Hopkinson's Lemonade Award;

·         what DID happen over the summer before WC39? for good or for ill, how did that affect WisCon40?

Further afield, I am a big fan of Academic Lite articles and welcome experimental and non-academic forms discussing the following topics:

·         how POC and conditionally white people are treated by people comfortably entrenched in whiteness;

·         the internalization of white/Eurocentric standards and difficulties of unlearning them in order to recognize oneself, whether as part of the system, or apart from it;

·         the challenges of being a white person confronting whiteness and demonstrating solidarity and good allyship, earning trust;

·         uncovering whiteness, the ramifications of naming it and dealing with the cognitive dissonance that it demands.

While this anthology does center the POC gaze, I am also interested in white essayists interrogating these difficult subjects from the intersections of their identities as well.

Don’t reject yourself—that’s my job!

I am particularly interested in articles that are conversations, especially between newer and older attendees, between attendees who identify differently, or in response to WisCon events. For example, attendees of color and white attendees who attended the Hamilton Sing-Along. Pitch me!

Send pitches and submissions to jhameia.goh@gmail.com with "WCC11: [title]" in the subject line. DOC / DOCX / RTF. Submissions open Aug 15, and close Oct 31. All pitched articles should be in by November 15.

Poets House Showcase

This year two of Aqueduct's recent poetry titles, Jean LeBlanc's A Field Guide to the Spirits and Rose Lemberg's Marginalia to Stone Bird are appearing in Poet House's annual Showcase. Here's the description from the Poets House website:

The only event of its kind, the annual Poets House Showcase is a free exhibit featuring the new poetry books and poetry-related texts published in the United States in a single year from over 700 commercial, university and independent presses. Displaying volumes by individual authors, anthologies, chapbooks, biographies, critical studies, essay collections, CDs, DVDs, and more, the Poets House Showcase is a diverse and inclusive exhibition in which books from micro-presses receive the same care and attention as major publishers.

Opening on Thursday, July 14th, the 2016 Showcase is on view through Saturday, August 20, 2015. More than 3,000 items are in the 2016 exhibition.


If you live in NYC and are a poetry lover, this may well be for you.

(Photos furnished by Jean Le Blanc.)