On Reviewing, elsewhere

Other writers have been thinking about reviews, too. Check out these interesting pieces from Matt Cheney and Jeff VanderMeer:

Falling into Oblivion without a Parachute on The Mumpsimums

and Reviewing Books on Ecstatic Days.

And speaking of reviews, Julie Phillips' Kurt Vonnegut's Unpublished Writings discusses Armageddon in Retrospect.

"A Reviewer's Hardest Task"

Joanna Russ writes, in her F&SF column of January 1975 (reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen):

A reviewer's hardest task is to define standards. "Good" can mean almost anything: what the British call "a good read," "for those who like it, this is what they'll like," "it won't poison you," "good enough for minor entertainment," "mildly pleasant," "intelligent, thoughtful, and interesting," "charming!" and just plain "good"--excluding the range of better, from fine to splendid to superb to great. Reviewers also tend to adopt a paradoxical sliding scale in measuring a book's quality, i.e., the more ambitious a book, the more it's likely to fail; yet the competent, low-level "success" can be less valuable and interesting than the flawed, fascinating, incomplete "failure." For example, in July 1973 I reviewed James Gunn's The Listeners (which belongs emphatically in category two, above) and managed to make it sound worse than Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, a considerably lower-level (although fun and interesting) category one. Novels don't only provide different kinds of pleasures; they involve a reader more or less profoundly. Listeners was "bad" because parts of it were so wonderfully good. Dream was "good" partly because it demanded so little of the reader-- some of this by the author's deliberate choice, which only adds to the complexity of the whole business.

None of this months' hardcover novels* lives up to its author's own best work and in that sense they are not good books. They're certainly not in the "good-by-any-standards" class. Yet none of them is in the droopy-eyeball or loathsome class, either, and all have some excellences. The reviewer's business (as so many reviewers have said) is distinguishing between various levels of failure, keeping in mind that by "good" here I mean very high standards indeed.

I'm variously a reader of reviews, a writer of reviews, a writer's whose work receives reviews, and an editor/publisher who hopes to see the work she publishes reviewed. I have long read reviews for pleasure-- and not as a guide to what I ought or ought not to be reading. I think I first began reading reviews as a graduate student, most often in the form of review essays (which I also, of course, was required to write). Review essays encompass more than a simple review does, exploring the subject matter of several books in a thoughtful, critical way. This probably has something to do with my interest--as a reader--in reviews these days. When I read a review for pleasure (as I still often do), it's in the hope of being given something interesting to think about, or even the occasional gem of insight. This is certainly why I'm reading Russ's old reviews. Reviewers who offer intellectually or emotionally threadbare descriptions or assessments of the books they're reviewing don't interest me; if after several encounters I see that their reviews consistently fail to give me anything worth thinking about, I stop reading their reviews. I also stop reading their reviews for pleasure if I see that a reviewer is intractably ignorant or stupid-- that they have a penchant for misreading or under-reading or for continually praising the banal. I'm a bit like Mr. Darcy, I'm afraid, in that my good opinion of a reviewer once lost, is unlikely to be regained. I'm a busy woman, you know?

As an editor/publisher, I'm largely unconcerned with whether or not a review is pleasurably insightful or even intelligent. It's still a mystery to me what actually sells books. A reviewer's writing intelligently about a book will likely make its author happy, but it probably won't make that much difference to sales. Because I read every review of Aqueduct's books (that I know of), I'm constantly made aware of how few reviewers are careful readers. More to the point, though, is that many of those reviewers who have passed beyond the naive-reader stage are so caught up in their own particular set of dogmas that their readings tend to be inflexibly rigid and skewed to conform to their dogmas such as they are. This doesn't concern me as a publisher, but I can't help reflecting on it as a reader and writer of reviews myself.

Not surprisingly, I try to write the kind of reviews I enjoy reading. It can be hard to do it, though, when a book is so poorly written that I can barely bring myself to keep reading it. (I've twice forced myself to finish really bad books and reviewed them, but the experiences were so painful that I have a deep aversion to doing it ever again.) Russ has no hesitation in characterizing books as "bad." But aware as I am of what inadequate readers so many reviewers are, I've been reluctant to deliver such bald judgments myself. [Though so as not to mislead anyone, I will cop to once having delivered an unequivocally scathing judgment of a book that really should not have been published.] And so I have to wonder just how useful terms like "good" and "bad" can be in reviews today. Russ, unlike most reviewers, offers insight into the books she reviews; so I'm tempted to think she knows what she's talking about. Even so, for me at least it is more her discussion of the books rather than her verdict on a given book's quality that "defines" her "standards." The "whole business" is indeed complex.

___________
*The books under review were by Robert Silverberg, James Gunn, John Brunner, Philp K. Dick, and Howard Waldrop & Jake Saunders.

Lisa Tuttle's My Death

I'm pleased to announce that Aqueduct will be releasing Lisa Tuttle's My Death this summer. This creepy but feministically delicious novella will be the twenty-first volume in our Conversation Pieces series. It has previously been published in the UK, by PS Publishing, but this will be its first North American publication. Who can resist a story about an all but forgotten early twentieth-century feminist novelist who becomes the biographical subject of an early twenty-first century feminist novelist? And one who painted a watercolor she titled "My Death"? Here's an excerpt:

I gazed at the painted image of an island, a rocky island rendered loosely in shades of brown and green and gray and grayish pink. I remained unimpressed, and baffled by Alistair’s attitude towards this uninspired daub. Risky?

And then, all at once, as if another light had been switched on, I saw the hidden picture. Within the contours of the island was a woman. A woman, naked, on her back, her knees up and legs splayed open, her face hidden by a forearm flung across it and by the long hair – greenish, grayish – that flowed around her like the sea.

The center of the painting, what drew the eye and commanded the attention, was the woman’s vulva: all the life of the painting was concentrated there. A slash of pink, startling against the mossy greens and browns, seemed to touch a nerve in my own groin.

And why did she title such a painting "My Death"? I won't spoil it!

Snow in Late March in Seattle

It is, for the second time this week, snowing here on Capital Hill in Seattle, and I'm still coughing and sneezing and otherwise miserable with the Cold That Would Not Go Away. The winter, it seems endless...

In the meantime, let me toss you a few links. Kelley Eskridge sent me this one:

Labor of Love by Thomas Beatie. The transgendered Beatie, who is legally male and legally (i.e., officially) married to a woman, is pregnant and carrying a child.

Inter Press Service has an article on a report by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) to the United Nations Human Rights Council: "There have been “huge harassments of human rights organisations and defenders have been increasingly subject to abusive and suppressive actions by government actors… in the majority of Arab countries, particularly Egypt, Syria, Bahrain and Tunisia." The article notes:

The U.S. and other Western governments have had close ties with Arab governments in the Middle East and North Africa for many years. These ties have grown closer since the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on Sep. 11, 2001.

But since the administration of President Ronald Reagan (1981-89), promoting democracy and freedom in the Arab world has been a staple in U.S. political rhetoric. The rhetoric has ratcheted up significantly during the administration of President George W. Bush. In his second inaugural address, Bush said, “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”


The gap between the Bush Administration's rhetoric and its actions is derisible. A letter to the Washington Post from Venezuela's Communications Minister, also published on the Commondreams.org site, by its proximity prompted me to do a bit of a compare-and-contrast exercise. Imagine, if the Bush administration held its democracy-hating allies to the standards of Venezuela... (Well no, actually, I can't imagine it ever doing that. They wouldn't be allies any longer if they did.)

And finally, the best link of all, with thanks to Josh Lukin: an excellent, intense six minutes of an interview with James Baldwin on YouTube.

Voices from Fairyland by Theodora Goss

I've been sick for the last several days: hence my silence. But now I've got some exciting news.

I'm pleased to announce that this spring Aqueduct will be publishing Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew, and Sylvia Townsend Warner by Theodora Goss as a volume in the Conversation Pieces series. We'll be launching this volume at WisCon in May.

The volume will include fantastical poems by Coleridge, Mew, and Warner, accompanied by four fascinating essays and several poems by Dora Goss in conversation with the Coleridge, Mew, and Warner's poems. To give you just a little taste of Voices from Fairyland, here are a few paragraphs from Dora's Introduction:

Coleridge, Mew, and Warner are only three examples of what I consider a broader phenomenon, the rest of the ice that must be present, underwater, when we see icebergs floating on a northern sea. That underwater ice is the tradition of women writing fantastical poetry. I will show you what I mean by focusing on one theme. Over and over again, women have written about witches. In "Witch-Wife," Edna St. Vincent Millay describes a woman whose "voice is a string of coloured beads, / Or steps leading into the sea" who "was not made for any man," not even the narrator, to whom she is married. The witch in Anne Sexton's "Her Kind" is fiercer and stronger. She tells us,

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.

She creates a domestic space for herself in a place that is decidedly undomestic, that is wild, feeding worms and elves rather than the children that the women who are not witches presumably feed. "A woman like that is misunderstood," Sexton tell us, and we can certainly understand why, if her voice is a string of colored beads or those mysterious steps. She must speak differently, in a language that we cannot quite understand. And here is Emily Dickinson:

Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day—

Whatever you do, she implies, you cannot eradicate witchcraft. It is part of the world around us, always present. And we—History and Emily Dickinson—need witchcraft. I wonder what they need it for exactly, but Emily Dickinson, always her enigmatic self, does not tell us.

When People Talk about Aqueduct Books, We Listen...

Cheryl Morgan reports that she's reading the first volume of The WisCon Chronicles:

It isn’t often that I get an opportunity to talk about a book because I’m in it, but there are a couple around at the moment. The book I’m currently reading is The WisCon Chronicles, edited by Timmi Duchamp. It is a collage of material taken from WisCon 30: interviews, panel transcripts and so on. I’m in it because of a panel called (rather pretentiously) “Is Reading Feminist SF a Theory-Building Activity”. (Wiscon, for those of you who do not know, is a feminist science fiction convention.) I have to confess that I was very nervous being put on that panel and didn’t have much a clue what to say beforehand. I also think I performed better at other panels at that con. However, I wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity to be on a panel with Karen Joy Fowler, and if we really did need to talk about feminist theory I knew I could rely on my fellow panelist to do the business. As it turns out I seem to have ended up talking a lot about trans issues.

Read the rest of her post here.

And Jeff VanderMeer has this to say on Amazon.com's Omnivoracious:

L. Timmel Duchamp's The Blood in the Fruit - The latest book in the Marq'ssan Cycle might just be the best yet, part of a series that is the most important political SF published in the last decade. Praised by the likes of Cory Doctorow and Samuel Delany, Duchamp's accomplishment here is deadly, sharp, emotional, and intelligent.

A Handful of Links

I've been too busy lately to write a real post, sorry to say. But I'm still managing to do some browsing...

--The Independent reports that the British Government is attempting to "rewrite" the history of the Iraq war as it is taught in UK schools:

Britain’s biggest teachers’ union has accused the Ministry of Defence of breaking the law over a lesson plan drawn up to teach pupils about the Iraq war. The National Union of Teachers claims it breaches the 1996 Education Act, which aims to ensure all political issues are treated in a balanced way.

Teachers will threaten to boycott military involvement in schools at the union’s annual conference next weekend, claiming the lesson plan is a “propaganda” exercise and makes no mention of any civilian casualties as a result of the war.

They believe the instructions, designed for use during classroom discussions in general studies or personal, social and health education (PSE) lessons, are arguably an attempt to rewrite the history of the Iraq invasion just as the world prepares to mark its fifth anniversary.

The article notes numerous distortions and lies (including the canard about Iraq's "failure to surrender" its [nonexistent] Weapons of Mass Destruction). Read more here.

--An event called "Winter Soldier," organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War was held in Silver Springs Maryland. "Winter soldiers, according to U.S. founding father Thomas Paine, are the people who stand up for the soul of their country, even in its darkest hours." Dahr Jamail reports (for Inter Press Service) on a panel on the rules of engagement (or lack thereof) for Iraq, held on the first day of the gathering:

Garret Reppenhagen received integral training about the Geneva Conventions and the Rules of Engagement during his deployment in Kosovo. But in Iraq, “Much of this was thrown out the window,” he says.

“The men I served with are professionals,” Reppenhagen told the audience at a panel of U.S. veterans speaking of their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, “They went to Iraq to defend the U.S. But we found rapidly we were killing Iraqis in horrible ways. But we had to in order to remain safe ourselves. The war is the atrocity.”

The event, which has drawn international media attention, was organised by Iraq Veterans Against the War. It aims to show that their stories of wrongdoing in both countries were not isolated incidents limited to a few “bad apples”, as the Pentagon claims, but were everyday occurrences.

Read the whole article here.

--In the midst of the uproar over Geraldine Ferraro's remark managing to disparage both affirmative action and Obama in one mean stroke, the Inter Press Service reported that the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) based in Geneva, Switzerland released a report concluding that the US is failing to meet international standards on racial equality. The US, you see, is a signatory of an international treaty-- the 1969 Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination-- and the CERD is responsible for monitoring global compliance with the treaty:

In concluding the CERD report on U.S. record, the panel of experts called for the George W. Bush administration to take effective actions to end racist practices against minorities in the areas of criminal justice, housing, healthcare and education.

This is the second time in less than two years that the U.S. government has been found to be falling short of its treaty obligations. In March 2006, The CERD had harshly criticised the U.S. for violating Native Americans’ land rights.

Taking note of racial discrimination against indigenous communities, the Committee said it wants the U.S. to provide information about what it has done to promote the culture and traditions of American Indian, Alaska Native and indigenous Hawaiian peoples. It also urged the U.S. to apply the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The CERD also voiced strong concerns regarding environmental racism and the environmental degradation of indigenous areas of spiritual and cultural significance, without regard to whether they are on “recognised” reservation lands.

The Committee recommended to the U.S. that it consult with indigenous representatives, “chosen in accordance with their own procedures — to ensure that activities carried out in areas of spiritual and cultural significance do not have a negative impact on the enjoyment of their rights under the Convention”.

In its 13-page ruling, the U.N. body also raised serious questions about the death penalty and in the sentencing of minors to life without parole, which it linked to racial disparities between whites and blacks.

In their testimony, Bush administration officials held that the treaty obligations do not apply to laws or practices that are race-neutral on their face but discriminatory in effect. The Committee outright rejected that claim, noting that the treaty prohibits racial discrimination in all forms, including practices and legislation that may not be discriminatory in purpose, but in effect.

The gulag at Guantanamo also came in for criticism. Read the rest of the article here.

--An article in Foreign Policy in Focus by Ellen-Rae Cachola, Lizelle Festejo, Annie Fukushima, Gwyn Kirk, and Sabina Perez, Gender and US Bases in Asia-Pacific reports on the impact US bases overseas (including in Hawai'i, where the US military occupies one-fourth of the land) exercise on women's lives:

The power dynamics of militarism in the Asia-Pacific region rely on dominance and subordination. These hierarchical relationships, shaped by gender, can be seen in U.S. military exploitation of host communities, its abuse and contamination of land and water, and the exploitation of women and children through the sex industry, sexual violence, and rape. Women’s bodies, the land, and indigenous communities are all feminized, treated as dispensable and temporary. What is constructed as “civilized, white, male, western, and rational” is held superior to what is defined as “primitive, non-white, female, non-western, and irrational.” Nations and U.S. territories within the Asia-Pacific region are treated as inferiors with limited sovereignty or agency in relation to U.S. foreign policy interests that go hand-in-hand with this racist/sexist ideology.

At the end of their report, they conclude:

U.S. peace movements should not only address U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, but also in other parts of the world. Communities in the Asia-Pacific region have a long history of contesting U.S. militarism and offer eloquent testimonies to the negative impact of U.S. military operations there. These stories provide insights into the gendered dynamics of U.S. foreign and military policy, and the complicity of allied nations in this effort. Many individuals and organizations are crying out for justice, united by threads of hope and visions for a different future. Our job is to listen to them and to act accordingly.

The current elections in the US will have no impact whatsoever on the problem, of course.

--And finally, Carmen Boullosa's Garden of Monsters offers a fascinating review of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas. Since her piece delivers a delicious punchline, I won't spoil it by saying anything more.

Lambda Literary Awards Finalists

I'll confine myself to reporting on only two of the award's numerous categories and simply note that Samuel R. Delany's Dark Reflections is a finalist in the "Men's Fiction" category. The full list can be found here.

LGBT SCI-FI/FANTASY/HORROR

• Wicked Gentlemen, Ginn Hale (Blind Eye Books)
• A Companion to Wolves, Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear (Tor Books)
• Spaceman Blues: A Love Song, Brian Francis Slattery (Tor Books)
• The Dust of Wonderland, Lee Thomas (Alyson Books)
• Ha'penny, Jo Walton (Tor Books)

WOMEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

• Comfort Food for Breakups, Marusya Bocurkiuw (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, Nicola Griffith (Payseur & Schmidt)
• An Army of Ex-Lovers, Amy Hoffman (University of Massachusetts Press)
• Two Lives: Gertrude & Alice, Janet Malcolm (Yale University Press)
• Waiting for the Call, Jaqueline Taylor (University of Michigan Press)

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. I think it must be almost twenty years since I last celebrated it. I recall marches through the streets of downtown Seattle with a few thousand other women and forums and lectures and maybe even a film series or two. I thought of all this the other day when my eye happened to light on a bit of memorabilia that's been hanging on the wall (or, for awhile, the door) of my office for the last twenty years. My old friend and comrade in activism, Therese Spaude, made it for me; and yesterday, when I took it down from the wall, I found written on the back of it "Happy International Women's Day" (plus a few personal words). To make it, she photocopied a photo and inscribed the photocopy with tempera. I've scanned it, and as you can see, it's gotten a bit yellow with age and still, for some reason, retains the creases it acquired during its brief sojourn in an envelope that Therese taped to my back door one March day in the late 1980s.

Another Link

Liz Henry's Enough Reality! I've Got the Space Bug at the Feminist SF Blog discusses her recent reading, viz., Wen Spencer's Endless Blue, Maureen McHugh's Mission Child, my own Blood in the Fruit, Naomi Mitchison's Solution Three, Elizabeth Bear's Dust, and Karl Schroeder's Permanence (which she classifies as "Dudely SF that pisses me off").

Naturally my attention zoomed right in on her discussion of the Marq'ssan Cycle in general and Blood in the Fruit in particular. Here's a chunk of it:

Throughout the Marq’ssan series I have been more and more impressed with Duchamp’s skill at unpacking the infinite detail, the fractalness of thought, in human relationships, laid bare so relentlessly it feels like seeing another sort of interrogation — of the characters — and thus we can’t avoid interrogating and examining our own lives and relationships in similar ways. I know that some people will pick up Alanya to Alanya and won’t get it. But if you are the sort of science fiction reader who likes Middlemarch and books like that… You will be well rewarded by plowing through all the Marq’ssan books though I fear for most people it will take till the middle of book 2 to get really hooked. Then once you are hooked, watch out. It’s painful and scary. Talk about axe for the frozen sea. These are books that leave you staring at the ceiling for several nights or violently sobbing as you reevaluate bits of your life and think of all your failings and self-lies, denials and blindnesses and hypocrisies. I don’t think I’ve read anything that so well entangles that personal detail and complexity with political complexity, other than The Orphan’s Tales, which is a completely different flavor of story. How do people make moral decisions? What makes them tick? What is evil? Why is our society so gendered? What the hell? Can people of different social classes, or genders, ever really trust or believe each other? What truth is even possible? Can non violent revolution succeed, and how would we measure its success, and while we’re at it let’s think more carefully about what we mean by violence… Who is fighting what, and why, and how, and what result might it have? ZOMG. Like that.

Wow. My cup runneth over.

Wednesday Links

Richard Larson reviews Vandana Singh's Of Love and Other Monsters at Strange Horizons. In his review he observes:

Singh is successful in her assertion that we are all alienated from each other and that none of us can really know anyone else, at least not in the way that we come to understand that Arun's people—other aliens—can understand each other, using a "language" involving an intimate conjoining of minds. Arun agonizes over his predicament with Sankaran—("How does a man who is not a man or a woman, not a human or an alien—how does such a being confess his love to another man?" [p. 52])—which is a love that will ultimately elude him and which will come, in the narrative, to represent the tragic inability of humans to ever truly connect with one another.

On a completely different front, Carlos Martinez reminds us that the US-powered and -directed "Plan Columbia" has been interfering with Ecuadoran sovereignty for years, for instance by spraying toxic chemicals on its crops, animals, and human populations; which is to say, Ecuador has much to resent from its bully of a neighbor. (And I can't help but note that Columbia is merely following the US's example in refusing to respect the national borders of other countries. Can it be any wonder that that so many of the US's allies feel free to violate other countries' national borders as though it were their right to do so?) Martinez notes the typically antihistorical and skewed reporting on the situation by the US media:

While some press in the United States question whether Chavez is using this situation as an opportunity to distract Venezuelans from their social problems, this excessive focus on him is in fact distracting people in the US from having a much needed dialogue on their own government’s role in fomenting this so-called “Andean Crisis.” As a result, the tough realities and repercussions from the US government’s support for a military solution in Colombia are being overlooked. Emboldened and armed with the multibillion dollar support of Plan Colombia, the Uribe government has decided to violate international law rather than attempting mediated discussions with the FARC. This is simply the latest controversy to discredit Colombia, already renowned for having the greatest number of human rights violations and politically motivated murders per year in the Western Hemisphere.

Indeed. But human rights violations do not now and never have mattered to the US media (or Government)-- except, of course, when committed by designated enemies of the US Government.

In the Realm of Political Fantasy

The United Nations is currently engaged in two-week long discussion on the status of women worldwide. Thalif Deen, writing for Inter Press Service, notes that "peacemaking is still largely in the hands of men in suits, puffing on cigars." She cites the example of the ongoing peace talks in Darafur, where women and children are the most victimized, talks that nevertheless lack a "gender adviser." Getting women’s voices heard in the conference rooms would be a start, Gina Torry, coordinator of the non-governmental Working Group on Women, Peace and Security, says “but getting them to (positions of authority at the negotiating) table will show real progress.” The latter, however, "is still mostly in the realm of political fantasy, says the U.N. Fund for the Development of Women (UNIFEM)."

Deen observes:

A Security Council resolution (1325) adopted in 2000 called for equal participation by both men and women in maintaining and promoting peace and security. But that resolution “was a long way from being adequately implemented”, says Anne Marie Goetz, UNIFEM’s chief adviser on Governance, Peace and Security.

She told the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women — which concludes its two-week session Friday — that very few women participated in peace talks as official negotiators or observers.

“Disarmament, demobilisation and re-integration processes still rarely addressed the needs of women associated with fighting forces, and post-conflict planning and financing for women’s recovery, remained weak,” she added.

Goetz called for a gender-sensitive perspective on conflict resolution, peacemaking and rehabilitation.

On the positive side, UNIFEM has recently supported capacity-building of women’s groups in Darfur and national peace consultations with women, while facilitating women’s access to institutions involved in the peace process.

In northern Uganda, UNIFEM has joined hands with the Department of Political Affairs to appoint a gender adviser to the peace talks. At the same time, it has supported efforts to improve military and police tactics to prevent sexual gender-based violence in conflicts.

Assistant Secretary-General Carolyn McAskie, head of the U.N. Peacebuilding Support Office, points out that despite much rhetoric about women’s roles in peacebuilding, women’s contributions had rarely been fully recognised.

But both her office and UNIFEM have actively promoted women’s groups to participate in the peacebuilding processes in two countries: Sierra Leone and Burundi.

The government of Sierra Leone and the U.N. Peacebuilding Commission have adopted a Peacebuilding Cooperation Framework that recognises gender equality as a cross-cutting peacebuilding issue with specific commitments to advance that goal.

These commitments include family support units, capacity-building of national gender institutions and implementing laws relating to domestic violence, inheritance and property rights.

In Burundi, McAskie said, women have participated in the peace process, integrating gender equality into democratic governance and the peacebuilding framework.

As a result of quotas spelled out in the peace agreement and Burundi’s new constitution, women were now better represented in government, holding 30 percent of parliamentary seats and seven ministerial posts.

“Despite those significant achievements, much more must be done,” McAskie told the Commission on the Status of Women last week.

“We have learned that our ability to affect real change in gender equality through peacebuilding greatly depends on how the international community establishes its priorities and uses its resources,” she declared.

Read the complete article here.

Myths have a way of "supplanting" history? Tell me about it!

We have Potlatch here in Seattle this weekend, in the University District. For anyone who might be intereted: I'll be doing a reading tomorrow afternoon at 4 p.m. (I still haven't decided whether to read from Blood in the Fruit or Stretto.)

I've only this week gotten around to reading the Autumn 2006 issue of Foundation and tonight finished it in the tub after I arrived home from Potlatch. (But then I often don't read journal issues in the order in which I receive them.) Consequently, I had already read reviews (in other publications) of some of the books reviewed in this issue. For instance, I'd read a review of a book with the apparent mission of saving women sf writers from feminists last summer in Science Fiction Studies. (See, women writers have never at any time found it difficult to be published or read in the sf genre, for the real problem has always been that feminists have brainwashed women writers into believing that even the most conservative male editors and readers haven't all along been falling all over themselves encouraging women to write sf, and thus feminists themselves held back women writers and, even worse, deliberately erased the work of earlier women writers of sf. I don't know the reason for such sinister behavior. But perhaps we are to take the reason as self-evident? I'll never know, since not even Foundation's praise of this masterpiece can tempt me to read it.) The SFS reviewer says in summary:

I am highly sceptical of anything else in the text [except bibliographical information]. His approach fails to satisfy my standards for scholarship: the use of newspaper articles to support scientific claims; the way he dismisses the actual words of Katherine MacLean and Samuel Delany in favor of his own interpretations of events; and the repeated distortions of feminist scholarship are examples of how this book goes wrong. Luckily, there are other studies of women in early sf to turn to...

The Foundation reviewer, however, not only loves this book and repeats its author's accusation that Jane Donawerth is guilty of "shoddy scholarship," he even delivers a bitch-slap to Katherine MacLean, implicitly chastising her for her ingratitude to John Campbell, that Great Defender and Promoter of Women Writers:

Perhaps most surprising of all is that one of the most accomplished women writers, Katherine MacLean, also falls into the trap. In a fascinating piece of deconstruction,* Davin uses MacLean's own evidence against her in disproving her belief that John W. Campbell was anti-woman at Astounding and establishing how much he had helped and encouraged both her and Judith Merril, a fact that twenty years after the event, MacLean seemed to have completely forgotten.

As the reviewer has it, MacLean is either an ingrate or an idiot.

But that's not the worst. The reviewer surpasses himself with his next sentence: "Clearly myths have a way of supplanting history."

Please don't imagine that the reviewer is talking about the myths that women writers and artists have constantly to deal with. Far from it. Rather, he goes on to say that the author of this atrocious book "makes it his quest here to set the record straight and he does it very thoroughly."

Ack!!! Where is Joanna Russ when we need her?

Enough of this frivolous banter. I have to be in the dealers room at an ungodly early hour in the morning, and so I'm off to bed.

______
*Never fear, we can be certain that the reviewer is using the term loosely, since the SFS reviewer notes in her review that the author is constrained by rigid, binaristic thinking, which means he could never in a million years manage to deconstruct a single sentence, much less Katherine MacLean's "evidence" and probably wouldn't recognize an actual piece of deconstruction if it walked up and bit him.

Links for a Sunday Afternoon

The Angry Black Woman has posted a Guest Essay, "How Can We Conjure the WondrousWorld We Believe In?", by Andrea Hairston. Trust me, you don't want to miss it.

Oursin posts about Norma Clarke's new book Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington.

And Damien G. Walter blogs at the Guardian on New Women's Worlds in Fantasy (link via Locus Online).

When Is Fiction Adequate?

Today I found myself wondering what quality or qualities in a piece of fiction that is less than brilliant make it adequate-- which is to say, worth my time and attention regardless of its flaws?

I imagine that many people would reply in terms of the piece's characterization, its narrative drive, the beauty of its prose style, or its thematic coherence (or lack thereof). But when I was thinking the other day about what for me marks beginning writers as promising (even when their grip on craft is tenuous at best), it struck me that this must first and foremost be their ability to create a patch of what I think of as "thereness" in whatever fiction they write, however deficient it might otherwise be. "Thereness" is what draws me into a story and holds my attention. Even when every sentence is grammatically perfect, the narrative arc follows the rules, and the characters are well-delineated, a story without "thereness" makes me itch to toss it aside the way I itch to block up my ears when forced to hear a tedious diatribe I'd do just about anything to escape. On the other hand, if the story has "thereness," I'm likely to stick with it, even as consciousness of its flaws steals over me.

Let me offer an example. The novels of an early 20th-century English writer, Mary Butts, are deeply flawed. But Butts' novels nevertheless engage me, no matter that I don't much care for her characters and find her plots decidedly lame. The other day I read a passage in Death of Felicity Taverner in which a pause sets in during the middle of an intense, deeply emotional conversation among four people. Most writers would simply say, "There was a pause." And maybe depict a small piece of business. And then resume. (Or else would say baldly, "After a long pause, X said...") The pause is depicted in this way: One of the characters raises a question that Butts follows with an em-dash and a paragraph break. The narrative continues:

There was silence again, while Scylla prepared the next sequence, and the room had its turn. Instead of four voices, the fires spoke, the voice of flames disintegrating salted wood into the quiet light of light ash. The crack of old panels responding to heat, and behind them the ground-scratch of mice. A door in the kitchen quarters opened and shut. Nanna's feet and the maid's mounted the stair. The heavy shutters bolted-out the interminable conversations of the trees. Behind these incidental breaks, the pulse of the long room in the delicate candle-light beat in time with the house and the wood. In time with its own time, a pace inaudible, yet sensible to each. Felix had said that a sonata could be written on the room's tempo, whose finale should be a demonstration of relativity.



Then the long room took advantage of their silence, and its shadowless walls seemed to move each in its own direction to some uncharted place. Happy lovers, asleep together, sometimes imagine their bed sails out, indifferent to walls, and visit those countries which lie east of the sun, west of the moon. In this second silence the walls left them behind, preoccupied with Felicity's passion and death; aware only that something was happening to the place where they sat, to describe which the comparisons of poets have been used to obscure reality. So that a literal description passes, even among poets, for metaphor, as when Wordsworth said: "as if to make the strong wind visible"; "as if" discounting what he had to say, who had seen the wind, and not dared say so...

This is a somewhat exaggerated style, true; and no, in case you're wondering, Butts doesn't typically spend that amount of time on pregnant pauses. This elaboration of a pause in the conversation follows several pages of straight dialogue without description. Since the reader already knows well the house in which this pause takes place, these paragraphs effectively evoke the moment's reality within the narrative's overall emotional logic.

My guess is that it's that evocation that lies at the heart of "thereness"-- certainly not description, per se. Description, after all, can often be so dull, so banal. (Maybe because it lacks "thereness"?) That evocation can be accomplished by other means (and often is), perhaps depending on the work's genre, perhaps depending on the author's technical strengths. One might suppose that for sf, world-building would be a prime source of "thereness." Still, even extremely detailed world-building often fails to yield "thereness." Maybe because the world-building itself ignores whole parts of what must necessarily be included any world to grant it "thereness"?

The Mundane and the Magical: an Interview with Vandana Singh

by Jesse Vernon

The newly released Of Love and Other Monsters, by Vandana Singh, explores the boundaries that shape our world—distinctions that we often take for granted: between man and woman, body and mind, human and other. Arun, the narrator of this novella, takes readers on a journey across the globe and through the minds of many captivating characters he encounters along the way. His unique ability enables him to see beyond bodies into the complexity of identities and interactions surrounding him. Through a series of emails, I asked Vandana about the ideas and influences that shape this story.

******

How has your own experience with gender/your gender identity influenced your writing?

I have to start by admitting that I might be the least qualified person to comment on my own writing. I can tell you about my life experience of gender issues but I can’t tell you why or how I wrote a particular story except at the most mundane level. One reason is that I often don’t know what I am trying to say in a story until months or years later, or unless someone asks me and forces me to think about it.

Having made that disclaimer I can tell you that as far as life experience goes, I’ve been involved in various ways in gender issues, not least of which is being female. Unfortunately I’ve discovered that in the West some people expect me to write about downtrodden females because of course I must be one, or must have escaped from India because I was one in the past, because of course all women in India suffer so much and bear their sufferings meekly. The truth about being female in India (and probably elsewhere, too) is a lot more complex than the simplistic assumptions of people here. I grew up in a middle class family with hordes of strong female relatives (where “strong” does not necessarily mean “strident” but might include it). My brother and sister learned to cook; I didn’t. We had female cousins who were denied treats by their grandmother in favor of their brother, but my sister and I were never treated that way. At the same time it was obvious that women, including all the tough ones, did the housework even when they worked outside the home. I learned early that Hindu goddesses were people you didn’t want to mess with, but somehow men got most of the perks.

I got interesting conflicting messages: women were weak, so had to be protected, women were powerful, they had to be contained or else they might destroy the universe. When trekking through the Himalayas as a teenager I came across indigenous women’s movements initiated by illiterate village women who had never heard of Betty Friedan. I marched in Delhi streets against the murderous abuse of the custom of dowry, shouting slogans that translate as “we are women of India, we are fire, not flowers.” Later, when I found myself living in the U.S., I volunteered in a couple of Asian women’s support groups for victims of domestic violence.

I suppose what fascinates and puzzles me about gender is that only a small fraction of it seems to be rooted in biology; the rest is a social construct, which is why gender roles can differ across cultures. The rigidity of gender can be very limiting if you want to be a complete human being.

And conversely, how has the creative space of speculative fiction influenced your experience of gender (your own or others’) in everyday life?

The wonderful thing about speculative fiction (of the best kind) is that it allows you to play in so many ways. For me one inspiring eye-opener was Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic “The Left Hand of Darkness” which showed me one way to be creative about gender. Since then I’ve read other spec fic works that play with the notion in interesting ways. I think imagination is the key to freedom: you have to dream a dream before you can realize it. In my own writing I’ve noticed (upon looking back) that I talk a lot about boundaries that people—particularly women—have to negotiate in order to find out who they are or to become complete in some way. Sometimes those boundaries lie between human and animal, sometimes between childhood and adulthood, or the mundane and the magical.

When your main character, Arun, perceives the mind-signatures of strangers, he cannot determine if they are male or female. Later he observes:

My ability to sense minds enabled me to see human beings as entities beyond man-woman categories. I decided, after some months of informal study, that rather than two sexes there were at least thirty-four. Perhaps “sex” or “gender” isn’t right—perhaps a geographical term would be more appropriate—thirty-four climactic zones of the human mind!

Will you talk more about this perception and how it affects the rest of your story?

Some years ago, when I shared an early draft of this story with some American writers (on various occasions), there was a very vocal reaction from some of the men and also from a couple of women. They complained that Arun didn’t come across as male. One woman even said to me that since Arun didn’t watch sports or drink beer, she couldn’t think about him as a man at all. I was rather flabbergasted by all this. Later I thought about it very hard and those thoughts led to the next draft, including the extract above. I realized that there are some rather rigid notions of how gender is expressed in America, at least in urban middle-class America. In India, despite the rigidity of gender roles (which again can be different depending on family, religion, class and region) there is a lot more fluidity in terms of how gender is expressed. I mean, I’ve met men like Arun, for heaven’s sake! (All this is apart from the fact that Arun isn’t exactly typical in any way).

To give a small example, men in India often walk around with their arms around each other. It is just fine to express physical affection if you are the same gender as another person. It also does not mean you are gay, although if you are, it is very convenient. There’s no gender police out there saying if you do that you are not a man. Although, if a man walks around in a sari everybody would laugh at him unless he is a hijra (the traditional sub-culture of gelded men) or a male shopkeeper in a sari shop modeling a sari for a customer. Also if you watch Bollywood movies you’d see that the traditional hero is in some ways aggressively male, fights like a man, but cries unashamedly “like a woman” if his friend dies, and wiggles his hips like a seductress during the dance sequences. There is a lot of androgyny in Indian culture—look at our Hindu gods, especially my favorite, Shiva! He’s cool!

So I guess what Arun is trying to say is that at heart the difference between one individual’s mind and another’s may be greater than (or at least as important as) the difference of gender. Gender is just one dimension of a person’s being; there are so many more. I think (but can’t be sure, since he hasn’t told me in so many words) that Arun finds gender differences fascinating because they seem so artificial to him; yet they provide a sort of analogy for him to understand the boundary he’s negotiating: that between human and alien. And that’s all he’s telling me about it now.

Many people tend to conflate sex, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation—i.e., a biological male who identifies as a man will necessarily be ‘masculine’ and therefore attracted to women. Your character Arun challenges these assumptions across various lines of identity and relationships. Can you talk more about encountering these assumptions (in readers and perhaps yourself) and what it’s like to play with boundaries?

I think my childhood and young adulthood in India has a lot to do with how I perceive boundaries. In my first published story, “The Room on the Roof” (Polyphony, Volume 1, from Wheatland Press), the protagonist is a thirteen year-old girl in New Delhi, who, in the beginning of the story, has just realized that she lives within the intersection of many worlds. I used a mathematical analogy to explain that—Venn diagrams—and it is exactly how I felt growing up. Whether the boundaries were between animal and human, male and female, body and mind, I felt I was in some kind of space where these categories overlapped. Not everybody growing up in India has this experience so it was also me: I was the kind of shy kid who got along better with animals than with people. My friends included the local pariah dogs that throng Indian towns and cities along with the occasional human. My experience of gender was also interesting because I saw strong women at the helm of things in my family—matriarchs in all senses of the word—but mostly acting within roles defined by the patriarchy. At the same time education was a big deal in my family and women were as likely to have advanced degrees as men. So the complexity of it was really interesting.

I don’t really know how readers react to what is in my stories apart from the few people to whom I have shown my work, or the few who have written reviews. I have a sense that what I write isn’t really of interest to “mainstream” science fiction and fantasy in the U.S. although I hope I’m wrong about that!

You also write children’s literature. In an interview with author Samit Basu, you comment that you “read happily and indiscriminately across boundaries” of age categories in fiction. Do you notice a difference in the way you portray gender in your children’s characters compared to your novels for adults?

I should make clear first that when I set out to write a story I have no message or intent in mind. Most of the time I have a character in my head, sometimes with an image, and a feel for when the story has brewed enough in my mind and is ready to be written. Often I vaguely know the ending or the beginning but not much else. The first sentence leads to the next one and so on, and there are all kinds of surprises along the way. So for me writing is an act of discovery as well as a deliberate act, which is what makes it so interesting and addictive.

So I don’t deliberately set out to write something about gender, for instance. There are stories of mine in which it plays a limited role. But if I’m asked to look back I might be able to see a pattern in my work (or not), which is what I’m attempting to do now.

My Younguncle books for children do comment on gender, although in a subtle way. Younguncle, the main character, is a maverick problem solver who follows his heart and his whims and cares nothing for the frowns and disapproval of the world. He has no problem helping a Great-Aunt shop for saris, or dressing up as a bride to play a trick on an unpleasant man. He is likely to tap dance on the street if the impulse takes him, or burst into song, or cook the most incredible food for his nieces and nephew. When chased by villains he runs away, screaming “help,” while at the same time having some aces up his sleeve. And he’s no less a man, for all that.

These books also feature resourceful women, including one who is a super-manager and talks in capital letters, and another who uses tears and melodrama to cleverly get what she wants. Yet another young woman is a brilliant mathematician who considers marriage neither necessary nor sufficient, and figures out a solution (with Younguncle’s help).

Many of my short stories for children (published mostly in India) feature girls who discover important things about themselves: one in the context of a trip to Mars, and another in a situation set in a totalitarian future Delhi where she has a chance to change the course of events. So I guess gender issues do permeate a lot of my writing, although I may not always be aware of it until I look back.

How have different cultural contexts in this novella—rural India, the metropolis of New Delhi, small towns and large cities in the U.S.—influenced the identities of your characters?

Well, geography, including its cultural aspects, does affect character—hence the stereotype of country mouse and town mouse. Growing up, I experienced life in a big city, in small towns and also visited the ancestral village. Since I was mostly brought up in the bustling metropolis of New Delhi, the contrast between it and the small town and village scenario was striking to say the least.

One of the most obvious things that is affected by cultural geography is one's sense of time. I remember summers in the town where my grandparents lived, and where we also lived for two years. Time ran thick and slow as honey. Then there is space too. In the smaller places there was more of it to wander in. Time to explore ditches after monsoon rain, look for tadpoles, watch out for cobras, time to wander through the neighborhood at four in the morning and find our way to the fields where a lone farmer drove his oxen. A largesse of time and space make it possible to participate in and experience life in a completely different way, to mull over things, to wonder idly. This, I think, is important to have at least in one's youth. It shapes who you are.

In the story, Arun had that. I think his special ability might have helped him to retain that need to participate in the world, to be a taster of its mindscapes, its joys and sorrows, like a curious kid in a magic shop. It kept him from ambition, from becoming obsessed with getting to the top of the ladder like other young men. In a way it kept him from so-called growing up. Sankaran was like that too, in a different way from Arun, though. That's my astute observation of the day. I leave the rest of the analysis to interested readers.

******

For more information about Vandana Singh, visit her website. To purchase Of Love and Other Monsters, go here.

And so the SFNAL Imagination Kicks In...

Helen Thomas, one of the last genuine journalists in Washington D.C., reports that Repblican candidate John McCain is predicting a "100 Years War" if he's elected to the US presidency. Thomas writes:

If Americans want to continue the Iraq War, then Sen. John McCain - the apparent Republican presidential candidate and relentless hawk - is their man.

It seems McCain was not kidding when he said the U.S. might have to remain in Iraq for 100 years.

At a town meeting in New Hampshire, McCain was told that President Bush had indicated the possibility of U.S. forces staying in Iraq for 50 years.

“Make it a hundred,” McCain responded.

Presumably McCain means that still would be with a volunteer U.S. Army because even the “straight talking” senator would not dare to suggest that a military draft would be needed to carry out his grand imperialist plan for Iraq. Not if he wants to get elected.

Hmm. Recent estimates for the cost of the war (to the US only) put it variously at $1.3 trillion (according to Congress's Joint Economic Committee), at least $1 trillion (according to the Congressional Budget Office), and between $1-2 trillion according to Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz (who factors into his calculation the interest on the debt incurred to finance the war). Considering the apocalyptic pronouncements about the near-future US economy lately bruited about, I'm having a difficult time imagining what life in the US might be with 100 more years of this war. (100 years is a bit more concrete than the "Endless War Against Terrorism" of Mr. Dick C, but because of its concreteness, 100 years sounds a lot more ominous than a vague "endless," which could be-- and probably mostly is-- taken by most of us as mindless hyperbole.) And of course as Thomas points out, an important catch for imagining 100 more years of the US's occupation of Iraq is that of nailing a source for the necessary cannon fodder.

It's doubtful the US will be able to find a heavy enough stick or sweet enough carrot to re-assemble a "Coalition of the Willing" of sufficient size to keep the occupation going. So how is McCain imagining this 100 Years War will work in practical terms? Even more mercenaries (meaning: even more debt, not to mention lawlessness and violence)? Or the reinstatement of the draft (this time for both men and women)? Or should we assume that he's strategizing before thinking, as the Neocons who got us into this war so notoriously did?

You've gotta wonder.

Just so you know...

This now in from Agence France Presse:

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a bid by journalists and professors to challenge the legality of the US administration's wire-tapping program.

The program, brought in after the September 11, 2001 attacks, allows US national security agencies to monitor suspect telephone calls and emails between the United States and overseas without first obtaining a judge's order.

In 2006 journalists and teachers filed a suit against the program maintaining it violated their right to privacy, saying because they had regular contacts with the Middle East, their freedom of expression would be restrained.

They specifically targetted the National Security Agency in the case which has now come before the country's highest court.

Read the rest of the article here.

Reading Joanna Russ's The Country You Have Never Seen

I'm slowly working my way through Joanna Russ's collection of essays and reviews, The Country You Have Never Seen, one or two pieces at a time, usually at bedtime. You've probably heard a bit about this book already-- that it doesn't collect all of her reviews and essays, only an assortment, and that its overriding characteristic is that of sharp, critical clarity, which is both salutary and a pleasure to encounter, even though many (though not all) of the books reviewed have long since been forgotten.

Certainly I appreciate the sharpness of that clarity, which strikes me as singular-- that is to say, it's something I don't find in any current reviews that I can think of. Part of that singularity may be a matter of style, but not all of it. Russ's critical faculties could be fairly characterized as surgical, and her style of rendering judgment unflinchingly straightforward and even plain. But what interests me above all is her care and honesty. Anyone who has read her nonfiction (from her essays to How to Suppress Women's Wrirting to the lengthy What Are We Fighting For?) will know just how devastatingly witty she can be. Though she is often witty in her reviews, she seems mostly to have resisted the temptation to make witticisms at the expense of the authors of awful books. Not that she doesn't make cracks about the books themselves (or the books' editors/publishers). One of my favorite examples (so far) is the ending of her review of Colin Wilson's The Mind Parasites, published by Arkham House, of which she remarks, "Devotees of HPL will be disappointed, however, and so will everybody else; the Outsider's latest is not in the Lovecraft tradition but in the Boy's Life Gee Whiz tradition... It is one of the worst books I have ever read and very enjoyable, but then I did not have to pay for it." She briefly quotes a passage from this gem, then delivers her parting shot:

I have an announcement to make too. It concerns a severe letter to August Derleth (who seems to have suggested this book, possibly out of exasperation), a gallon of kerosene, a match, a certain 222-page home-cooked romance, and a copy of The Shadow Over Innsmouth to relax with afterwards. Howard Phillips, you never looked better.

"It's narsty," she writes, "to beat up on authors who are probably starving to death on turnip soup but critics ought to be honest. Both books are juveniles, though not so labeled, both books are awful, and I wouldn't want any juvenile to read either of them." Though she chooses to be honest with the reader, she never forgets the human being behind the book (who she knows damned well will be reading the review).

Another aspect of her reviews is her care in tracing the progression of individual writers' careers-- downs as well as ups-- making no bones about the fact that authors of good or even brilliant books do on occasion turn in mediocre or poor performances, which she clearly believes does not make them bad writers. I've been fascinated to read her reviews of several books by Kate Wilhem, talking successively about Wilhelm's promise as a writer and then the development of that promise as each new book comes out. Russ's 1971 review of The Abyss particularly piqued my interest, especially given her essays on female characterization in fiction and science fiction that she was writing and publishing around the same time. Here's a chunk of it:

The two novellas that make up Kate Wilhelm's Abyss are flawed, the first ("The Plastic Abyss") because it attempts more than most successes and the second ("Stranger in the House") because of Wilhelm's entirely original set of virtues and defects.

As George Orwell has pointed out, most human "worlds" are not represented in art at all, for to be a member of such a world demands that one not be an artist. Orwell's example is Kipling, who managed somehow to become a full member of colonial Anglo-Indian society and yet keep enough of an antithetical self alive to report well on that same society. Not only to describe but also to embody in oneself a world-view that leaves no room for art takes quite a lot of doing.

This is Russ's elegant way of setting up an analogy to assist people too blinkered by gender ideology to be likely otherwise to grasp the point she goes on to make about what Wilhelm is attempting to do in her work and why accomplishing that end is almost impossibly difficult. (Yes, indeed, Virginia, there's much to be learned about rhetorical tactics from Russ's reviews!)

And so Russ continues:

Kate Wilhelm is an escapee from the feminine mystique. As Shulamith Firestone points out, women and men live in different cultures though neither group knows it-- men consider the male experience to be the only reality, and so do women, who therefore distort and deny their own experience. Until recently we have had of the female experience only versions sentimentalized and distorted in the service of self-glorification and the status quo. Good women artists have generally had atypical experiences; as a friend of mine put it, they've brought themselves up as men, since "man" --in the general view-- was the equivalent of "human."

Russ has a footnote here to remark that she herself and Anne McCaffrey offer examples of women artists who've "brought themselves up as men." It's interesting, though, to note that in the passage above Russ uses the expression "in the general view." I find myself wondering what she meant by that. Did she mean that this view was shared by both men and women? Or that "the general view" is, simply and always, a view shared by most males? Given the context, the ambiguity seems eerily significant.

She continues:

Like Kipling, Kate Wilhelm manages to be both an artist and the voice of an experience that is already defined by its not having a voice. To find a voice one must move out of this culture and yet stay in it; Wilhelm almost does this. "The Plastic Abyss" is the eerie fusion of women's-magazine "reality" and real reality, as if sentimental pictures had suddenly begun to move and speak. There is a tall, glamorous, hard, patronizing husband in "The Plastic Abyss" who is breathtakingly close to the Ideal Husband of bad fiction; there is the Sweet, Ideal, Passive Wife of romance who almost makes it into artistic definition; and there is the magnificently irresponsible playing-around with reality only possible to those who don't have the conventional stake in it and are therefore wise enough not to believe in it. Still, there are vestiges of un-ironic cardboard. The heroine of "Plastic Abyss" says she "should go back to work, back to writing articles, to traveling, prying, learning" although it is perfectly clear from her character that she has never done any of those things; the heroine of "Stranger" has a "fashion" job that is never made real to her or anybody else. There is a stepdaughter in "Plastic" who (we are told) will do better than the heroine, although her situation is in no way different.

Russ continues evaluating the characters and Wilhelm's drawing of them, then notes:

I was struck in both novellas by what seemed to me the unearned adulation given to both women, but I wonder if this simply reflects our not being used to feminine protagonists who are involved in real activity. Most male protagonists in s.f. are glorified (or unrealized) in exactly the same way. It seems to be an occupational hazard.

I recall hearing someone at WisCon complain about Russ's saying in one of her essays written at around the same time as this review (early 1970s) that sf has mostly "images" of women as characters and not real women-- and my sense was that the argument waged against Russ for having made such a claim some thirty years back showed a lot of confusion about what Russ was actually talking about. I think her discussion of Wilhelm's novellas makes it pretty clear. An interesting pair of questions for me now is (1) to what extent this can be said to be true for sf written in the first decade of the twenty-first century (and for which sorts of characters), and (2) whether different sub-genres of sf rely more heavily on images than on fully-realized characterization.

The Other US War-- A Progress Report

In case you missed it, The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) issued a communique on Dec. 10, 2007 (Universal Human Rights Day), "The US and Her Fundamentalist Stooges are the Main Human Rights Violators in Afghanistan."

The communique doesn't pull its punches:

The US and her allies tried to legitimize their military occupation of Afghanistan under the banner of “bringing freedom and democracy for Afghan people”. But as we have experienced in the past three decades, in regard to the fate of our people, the US government first of all considers her own political and economic interests and has empowered and equipped the most traitorous, anti-democratic, misogynist and corrupt fundamentalist gangs in Afghanistan.

In the past few years, for a thousand times the lies of US claims in the so-called “War on terror” were uncovered. By relying on the criminal bands of the Northern Alliance, the US made a game of values like democracy, human rights, women’s rights etc. thus disgracing our mournful nation. The US created a government from those people responsible for massacres in Pul-e-Charkhi, Dasht-e-Chamtala, Kapisa, Karala, Dasht-e-Lieli, 65,000 Kabulis and tens of mass graves across the country. Now the US tries to include infamous killers like Mullah Omer and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar into the government, which will be another big hypocrisy in the “war against terror”.

Read the rest here.

Readership or Readerships?

As I've been going about my work today, Alice Notley's notion of "disobeying one's readership" has been knocking about in my head in the background. And I've realized that I don't think of my own readership as in the singular. Rather, I think of myself has having multiple readerships. ("Readership" strikes me as being a narrower, more particular entity than "audience"-- audience, after all, includes in addition to a work's readers both potential readers and readers who aren't particularly interested in the author so much as in the individual work or class of work of the type they see the work as being an instance of.) My sense of the plurality of my readership is likely a symptom of my writing in different genres (fiction, reviews, essays...) and writing in different modes within those genres. I can't think of a single person among my most devoted readers who loves every single thing that I've ever written. (I know for instance that among these, one loves [she claims] everything except "Portrait of the Artist as A Middle-aged Woman" [a story published in Leviathan 2], which she detests.)

Do writers (poets, novelists, short fictionists, essayists, reviewers & so on) who have a singular readership (i.e., fans devoted to all their novels-- or all their poems, or all their essays, or all their short fiction-- because they expect to get a particular sort of reading experience every time they pick up that author's work to read) feel a greater pressure to write in deference to the wishes and desires of their readers than do authors with multiple readerships? I have no intuition about this because I've never imagined my fiction appealing to a broad audience, much less that the set of readers who've loved one novel or story would necessarily enjoy any of the others.

I wonder how many f/sf writers see their readerships as plural? I realize that a consistent fan base is considered necessary and desirable for those who hope to make a living from their writing, but surely that need not be the goal of those of us who have no idea of living off their fiction? I also wonder whether the assumption that a consistent fan base is essential for commercial success is really correct. I can, after all, think of a few examples of commercially successful writers with multiple readerships. (Octavia Butler, for one.) Works may not appeal to all of a writer's readerships, but really, ought they to?

By corollary, I know very well that Aqueduct Press's books appeal to multiple readerships. Large publishers presumably don't expect their books to appeal to a singular readership, but some small presses do, and at a guess I'd say that's probably a smarter strategy than Aqueduct's.

Argh. I'm writing here as though I know what I'm talking about. There are, in fact, people who buy every book we publish (just as there are readers who read all of my work that gets into print), so it's obviously more complicated than opposing the singular to the plural...

Disobedience

Going through a pile of papers (and believe me, my office is filled with many such piles, some of which have been accreting for several years, containing stuff in the bottom layers that I'd forgotten the exstence of), I ran across a printout of an essay by poet Alice Notley dated February 1998, titled "The Poetics of Disobedience," and of course I had to reread it, knowing that I'd kept it because it interested me.

Notley begins by noting that she considers her job to be "bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past practices as well." She then talks a bit about her history of disobedience in her work. I'd like to quote two passages from the piece, to give you a taste of its thinking. (It's available here, for those who'd like to read the whole thing.)

Like many writers I feel ambivalent about words, I know they don't work, I know they aren't it. I don't in the least feel that everything is language. I have a sense that there has been language from the beginning, that it isn't fundamentally an invention. These are contradictory positions but positions are just words. I don't believe that the best poems are just words, I think they're the same as reality; I tend to think reality is poetry, and that it isn't words. But words are one way to get at reality/poetry, what we're in all the time. I think words are among us and everywhere else, mingling, fusing with, backing off from us and everything else.

And:

I think I conceive of myself as disobeying my readership a lot. I began the new work in fact denying their existence; it seemed to me I needed most at this point to work on my own existence so I couldn't afford to cater to them if they got in the way of my finding out things. But this is a work of mine, it should be published sometime. I'm now in a predicament I can't get out of, a form I can't manage for the reader, which just keeps leading me on and leading me on.

I can imagine many fiction writers saying that only a poet could seriously think of "disobeying [their] readership." Most fiction writers have an inbuilt reverence for their readership that is sternly articulated (by writers and readers both) in every discussion of what good fiction is, and this is usually the case regardless of how devoted the writer may be to making commercial fiction that is also art.

I remember now why I saved the printout; it struck me as worth exploring the implications of "disobeying one's readership" for what it might tell me about the state of our art. Hmm. Another time, perhaps...

Unintentionally Feminist: Looking at Synthajoy by D.G. Compton

By Nancy Jane Moore

I've recently moved from Washington, D.C., to Austin, Texas, and all my books are still in boxes. Since the only consideration in packing the books was making sure no one box was too heavy, I haven't got the foggiest idea where any particular book might be. So when I want something to read -- a daily occurrence -- I just open a box on top of one of the many stacks and rifle through it.

Using this method, I came upon a book I not only had never read, but don't even remember acquiring: Synthajoy, by D.G. Compton. (In fact, even though I somehow ended up with a copy of the book, I knew nothing about Compton, a British writer who has been honored by SFWA as an Author Emeritus.)

What I discovered was something I've decided to call an "unintentionally feminist" novel; that is, a book that makes a distinctly feminist statement even though I don't think that was the author's purpose.

The book, which was first published in 1968, is about a doctor who develops "sensitape," a recording of brain processes that can be played for others. Using sensitape, one can listen to great music with the mental processes of a great musician. Of course, it's only a matter of time before the doctor adds "sexitape" to the mix.

What makes this novel feminist is that it is told from the point of view of the doctor's wife -- a nurse, of course. Compton does an excellent job of developing this character, Thea Cadence. She rings true to me, as a woman of the changing times of the mid-60s. (The novel isn't particularly clear about when it's set, but I'd guess it was intended to be the 1990s, more or less. However, outside of sensitape, Compton didn't bother to create too many new technologies. Nor did he assume any changes in gender relationships -- another reason I'd call this book "unintentionally feminist.")

Thea starts out besotted by her husband and eager to help with his work, but gradually begins to think the work is wrong. Her doctor husband's treatment of her is emotionally abusive -- she is useful to him, and that is all she is. The doctor is a classic ambitious man who considers himself a genius and neither respects nor loves anyone else.

I've no way of knowing what Compton was thinking when he wrote the book, though I assume from the context he thought the doctor was a bastard for the way he treated his wife and a dangerous man for the way he developed his invention. But it is easy to view Thea's experiences through a feminist eye, to see her as a woman sucked in by the modern version of the traditional wife -- a useful support tool for a genius -- instead of pursuing any work of her own. And one can also view her as someone blinded by the love myths of the time, and a passive participant in her own life.

The book is written in a complex format: Thea has been convicted of killing her husband and is being treated in the clinic she helped found with guilt sensitape. She has few periods of actual consciousness, so the story is told through her memories as they come to her (in the disordered way of memories). The whole truth doesn't emerge until the end.

The whole truth is important to what I assume was Compton's purpose, but it's not to the feminist reading of the book. If one applies a feminist eye to Thea's life, a different understanding emerges, one that fits in well with the ideas of The Feminine Mystique or The Second Sex.

My feminist impression has more to do with the overall effect, rather than any particular sentences in the book, though there is a nice fantasy sequence in which Thea imagines being tried by women, who acquit her on the grounds that her husband deserved to die.

One passage that struck me particularly might be considered feminist, though it could equally as well reflect what I'd call Sixties values. Thea says of another male character in the book -- a decent man:

He was a man whose work was his life, yet the outcome of this work was inconsistent with everything he believed most deeply. This dichotomy I found infuriating.

I've noticed a similar attitude in many men over the years, and now see it in many professional women as well. They throw themselves into their jobs, and tamp down any questions they might have, perhaps convincing themselves that their doubts are not important when it comes to earning a living.

At any rate, this novel provides a great deal of food for thought and is worth a look. It's out of print, but used copies seem to be available.

The 2007 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Short Fiction and Other Work

This just in...

For Immediate Release – Please Distribute
February 7, 2008
Contact: Rob Gates (rgates@wavelengthsonline.com)

Washington DC: -- The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Council is pleased to announce the winners of the 2007 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Short Fiction and Other Work – Novel winners were announced in October 2007. The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards were created in 1999 to honor works in SF/F/H that deal positively with gay characters, themes and issues. The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Council was created in 2002 to manage and further the mission of the Awards, which is to educate and raise awareness of GLBT content in SF/F/H. Nominations for the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards are open to everyone. Winners and a short list of recommended works in each category are selected by a jury.

For 2007 Awards were being presented in three categories. The Novel category recognized works originally released in 2006 in the US/North America. The Short Fiction and Other Work categories recognized works released in 2005 or 2006 due to a one year jury break.

Three stories were selected by the judges as the best science fiction, fantasy or horror short fiction with significant positive GLBT content from 2005 and 2006. “In the Quake Zone” by David Gerrold from the anthology Down These Dark Spaceways, “Instinct” by Joy Parks from the anthology The Future Is Queer, and “The Language of Moths” by Christopher Barzak from the magazine Realms of Fantasy were identified as the three winners in the Short Fiction category. In the Other Work category the jury also identified three winners. They were the anthology The Future Is Queer edited by Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel, the television series Torchwood created by Russell T Davies, and the film V for Vendetta directed by James McTeigue.

The jury for each category also identified a Short List of Recommended works. The complete Short List for each category is below. The short lists reflect the remarkable diversity in the speculative fiction arena, with titles from a variety of publishers and distributors, publishing technologies, authors, genres, literary styles, and GLBT content. “The judges were extremely impressed with the variety and quality of the works considered. Indeed one judge commented that the difficulty was not in finding quality works, but whittling a pool of quality works down to a Short List” reported Rob Gates, Executive Director of the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Council. The juries encourage readers to seek out not only the Short List titles, but all of the nominated works.

Nominations for the 2008 Awards are open and the 2008 Awards will be presented at Gaylaxicon 2008 in Washington DC in October 2008.

For more information about the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, including a complete listing of all nominated works from 2007, a handout listing winners and short list recommendations with brief descriptions, or to nominate works for the 2008 Gaylactic Spectrum Awards, you can visit the website at http://www.spectrumawards.org/ or send email to info@spectrumawards.org.

In The Quake Zone, David Gerrold (Down These Dark Spaceways – SFBC) – WINNER
Instinct, Joy Parks (The Future Is Queer – Arsenal Pulp) – WINNER
The Language of Moths, Christopher Barzak (Realms of Fantasy) – WINNER

The Beatrix Gates, Rachel Pollack (The Future Is Queer – Arsenal Pulp)
Bones Like Black Sugar, Catherynne M Valente (Fantasy Magazine #1 – Prime)
The Captive Girl, Jennifer Pelland (Helix SF, Issue 3, Fall 2006)
Caught by Skin, Steve Berman (Sex in the System – Thunder’s Mouth)
Facing Down Your Demons, Alexander Potter (All Hell Breaking Loose – DAW)
Fairy Tale Ending, L-J Baker (From The Asylum – March 2006)
Obscure Relations, L Timmel Duchamp (The Future Is Queer – Arsenal Pulp)
Plums, Camilla Bruce (Shifting Again – Torquere)
Sleeping Bears Lie, Alex Draven (Shifting Too – Torquere)
The Specter of Sin, Kristina Wright (Call of the Dark – Bella)
There's a Hole in the City, Richard Bowes (SciFiction – SciFi.com)
Voce, Kimberly DeCina (Sleeping Beauty Indeed – Torquere)
We Recruit, Julia Watts (Stake Through the Heart – Bella)

Other Work Winners and Short List

The Future Is Queer (anthology), Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel et al – Arsenal Pulp – WINNER
Torchwood Season 1 (television), Russell T Davies et al – BBC – WINNER
V for Vendetta (film), James McTeigue et al – Warner Bros – WINNER

The Dance of Uzume-no-Ama (poem), Catherynne M Valente – Prime
Doctor Who The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances (television), Russell T Davies et al – BBC
Drawn Together (television), Comedy Central – Comedy Central
Eerie Queerie (manga), Shuri Shiozu et al – TokyoPop
Gaylaxicon 2006 Sampler (anthology), Don Sakers et al – (Speed-of-C)
Hard Pill (film), John Baumgartner et al – (Baumgartner)
Sleeping Beauty, Indeed (anthology), Joselle Vanderhooft et al – (Torquere)
Young Avengers (comics), Allan Heinberg, Jim Cheung et al – (Marvel Comics)