Historic Moments and Alternate Histories

Eight years ago, I stood in the cold at the Federal Building in Seattle with 5000 other people, registering a protest against the inauguration of George W. Bush. Today, finally, he and (most of) his minions are gone. And today people gathered all over the country to celebrate the inauguration of Barack Obama-- in vast numbers in Washington D.C., in more modest numbers in a variety of public places everywhere else.

While Eileen Gunn and I were at Victrola this afternoon for our writing date, a local Fox news team moved around the cafe from table to table, interviewing people about their sense of change, their expectations, their own priorities for what the new Administration should do first. The interviewer cited a list of 500 promises Obama made over the course of his campaign. My impression was that she was hoping to get sound bytes of people naming this or that particular item as the job Obama ought to accomplish first. Eileen, when interviewed, refused to be pinned down to such a narrow framework for discussion. Still, the interviewer was mightily taken with Eileen's statement that she had spent three hours today Twittering about the inauguration. (Technology vis-a-vis politics is very sexy just now.) Afterwards, during our brief postmortem of the interview, Eileen realized that in quoting a president ("I forget which president said that"), she had actually been quoting President Goldwater, in her Tricky Dick alternate history story.

It felt, truly, like a classic science-fictional moment.

Winter Sun (with two reviews)

After suffering through a horrible temperature inversion, we've now seen the sun here in Seattle for two consecutive days. And so I just had to take a break from editing to walk with Tom in Seward Park this afternoon. I'd assumed there'd be the usual runners and dog walkers and bicyclists and maybe a few fair-weather walkers like us. But the place was jammed, as though it were a hot weekend in August. I half expected to see people swimming in Lake Washington. By the end of our walk, the sinking sun had stained the horizon with thick lashings of burnt orange, casting a delicate alpine glow over all the mountains (which included both Baker and Rainier) and lighting up a lot of windows miles away across the lake in Bellevue and Bothell. Oh the glories of a fine winter day!

Lyndon Perry's review of Nisi Shawl's Filter House is up at The Fix.

My review of M. M. Buckner's Watermind has been posted at Strange Horizons.

I haven't been posting because I've been working hard. Real hard. But I'm making such headway that I'm hoping I can ease up a bit later this week and bring out an interesting piece an Aqueductista recently sent me and a conversation with a feminist activist and scholar I taped last month.

Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM, Part II

There have been a number of recent posts, mostly on LiveJournal, revisiting topics raised in the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM (see also Cultural Appropriation Revisited). If I had to single out one post as most critical, it would be Deepa D.'s I Didn't Dream of Dragons:

When I was around thirteen years old, I tried to write a fantasy novel. It was going to be an epic adventure with a cross-dressing princess on the run, a snarky hero, and dragons. I got stuck when I had to figure out what they would do after they left the city. Logically, there would be a tavern.

But there were no taverns in India. Write what you know is a rule that didn’t really need to be told to me; after having spent my entire life reading books in English about people named Peter and Sally, I wanted to write about the place I lived in, even if I didn’t have a whole bookcase of Indian fantasy world-building to steal from. And I couldn’t get past the lack of taverns. Even now, I have spent a number of years trying to figure out how cross-dressing disguise would work in a pre-Islamic India where the women went bare-breasted. When I considered including a dragon at the end of a story, I had to map out their route to the Himalayas, because dragons can be a part of a Tibetan Buddhist tradition—they do not figure in Hindu mythology.

There are far more eloquent writers who have pointed out how difficult it is to growing up reading books (and watching movies) about a culture alien to you, and how pernicious the influences thereof can be. I am lucky in that Indian culture is more widely represented in Western media than other colonised regions—when I talk about Bollywood in the yuletide chat room, there are people who have an idea about what I might be referring to, bastardised ideas of ‘pundit’ and ‘caste system’ and ‘karma’ and ‘reincarnation’ are present in the English vocabulary. Yet still, my ability to connect fannishly with people from different parts of the world is mediated through the coloniser’s language and representation. Enid Blyton, with her hideous caricatures of African tribal boys helping the intrepid British children is read from Johannesburg to Jaipur—Iktomi stories are not.

These imbalances of power are what frustrate me in several discussions regarding issues of representation and diversity in writing that I’ve seen recently. I am summarising some positions that I have heard, and my responses to them.

One of the most frustrating arguments I’ve encountered is—If you hate it so much, stop bitching and write your own.

This naive position stems from the utopian capitalist belief that all markets are equal, and individuals are free to be what they can driven only by their inner divine spark.

Other posts, roughly in chronological order (with much reference to helpful index posts by Rydra Wong):

Jay Lake, Another shot at thinking about the Other
Elizabeth Bear, Whatever you're doing, you're probably wrong
Micole, I blame Tempest
Avalon's Willow, Open Letter: To Elizabeth Bear
yeloson, The Remyth Project
Elizabeth Bear, Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else's liver
Micole, Resistance and Individuality
She Who Has Hope, Cultural Appropriation and SF/F
Deborah Kaplan, Race and reviewing
Cryptoxin, Cultural appropriation
Sarah Monette, race-(class-sex)
She Who Has Hope, Cultural Appropriation and SF/F (Once More, with Feeling)
Friendshipper, Cruel little lies
Yeloson, Othered, Only Because You Say So
Betsy, Getting called on your white privilege
Deepa D., White people, it's not all about you, but for this post it is
Vassilissa, About the Current Racism and Othering Discussion
The Angry Black Woman, What Is Cultural Appropriation?

WisCon 33 Call for Programming Ideas

Now's the time, folks, to send your ideas for programming to WisCon's program committee. Here's the call (which I found on WisCon's LJ blog):

The WisCon 33 program committee is excited to announce that program idea submissions are now open!

WisCon gets its best programming ideas from you. We invite you to submit programming ideas for WisCon 33 through January 31, 2009. To submit an idea, please go to the WisCon programming page and click on the link to the program idea submission form. We eagerly await your suggestions!

Please note that this web page is part of a new programming database system. We've tested it extensively, but please bear with any unexpected bugs as we implement it.

Joanna Lowenstein and Cat Hanna
Co-Chairs, Programming, WisCon 33.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part Nineteen: Oyceter

Oyceter:

I spent over two months in Taiwan for 2008 (and am writing from there now), more than I've been here since freshman year of college. All hail grad school vacation! That helped a great deal with my goal of reading and watching more by POC, although there are pluses and minuses to consuming POC culture in a setting in which that culture is the majority, as opposed to consuming Asian-American culture. I also mean to focus more on non-East-Asian cultures in 2009, along with continuing to try to focus on other POC cultures as well.

2008 is the year I got further sucked into kdramas (Korean television dramas), and the year I watched tons of Hong Kong martial arts fantasy movies to try and prep for the Not Just Japan: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy Wiscon panel. I also tried to read more manhwa and manhua (comics published in Korean and Chinese, respectively), with a particular focus on trying to find manhua. Manhwa at least gets slightly more exposure in the US, whereas before this summer, I could not have named a single manhua writer or series off the top of my head. Or even known where to start looking.

I decided to focus on non-Japanese Asian media because I consume a LOT of manga already, and plan on creating a best-of list for that on my blog in the near future. My apologies for the US-centricity of the availbility of the following media!

So here are my picks of the year out of Chinese and Korean media, in alphabetical order:

The Bride with White Hair (1993) - I watched this Hong Kong martial arts movie five years ago, but a rewatch improved the experience considerably. Birgitte Lin plays Lian Nichang, a girl who was raised by wolves and later taken by a martial arts cult ruled by insane conjoined twins (minus points for ablism) and trained as the ultimate assassin. She eventually meets up and falls in love with Leslie Cheung's Zhou Yi-Hang, a promising swordsman from a martial arts clan at war with her, and tragedy and betrayal result.

This may not be the best introduction to wuxia movies for people unfamiliar with them, given the amount of cracktastic plot involved, but the core story about star-crossed lovers is wonderful, as is Birgitte Lin as the vengeful bride. I was particularly fascinated by a sequence in which Lian Nichang crawls over hot coals and is whipped by all the members of the cult as an example of unsexualized violence to the female body as a means of showing the woman's strength (of body and of will), as opposed to making the woman a thing to be ogled at and victimized at the same time.

Available on DVD.

Chungking Express (1994) - And as an abrupt change of pace from the above movie, this is a lovely Wong Kar-Wai film that's very slice-of-life and meditative and quirky. Takeshi Kaneshiro and Birgitte Lin star in the first section, in which a heartbroken cop buys canned pineapples with his birthday as an expiration day and a mysterious woman tries to get out of a smuggling operation alive. In the second, Tony Leung is another heartbroken cop, and Faye Wong is the girl working at the take-out place he frequents. Both sections are small and quiet and melancholy, despite the occasional gunshots in the first, and they're about loneliness and connection in the modern jungle that is Hong Kong.

Available on DVD.

Dal Ja's Spring (2007) - This is one of my very favorite kdramas out of all the ones I've watched so far. Oh Dal Ja is a thirty-two year old career woman when she meets the younger Kang Tae Bong. This is at heart a romantic comedy, but I particularly love it for its focus on various women's careers, from Dal Ja's to severeal of her colleagues'. Like many other kdramas, it has a strong portrayal of intergenerational bonds, and one of my favorite relationships is between Dal Ja's mother and her paternal grandmother, both of whom learned to live with each other after Dal Ja's father's early death. Although there are some annoying plot points, and though the drama isn't consciously feminist, I still love having the example of so many different Korean women of varying ages. And the romance is extremely, extremely cute.

This sadly is not available via Netflix, although you can get the DVDs from YesAsia or get the episodes via other sources.

Gourmet/The Grand Chef (2008) - My other favorite kdrama this year, since I counted Coffee Prince as something I watched in 2007. Unlike most of the other dramas I watch, this is not a trendy drama (romantic comedy). Instead, the drama is about Un Ahm Jung, a fictional Korean restaurant that creates gourmet meals based on the court cooking of the Joseon Dynasty. The owner of Un Ahm Jung has two sons, one adopted and one not, and the story follows adopted son Sung Chan as he makes his way through the world. I've only seen 10-some episodes of this so far, but I absolutely love the food talk. I do wish there were stronger women, although some of them may develop further with time, but oh, if you enjoy food, you will love this.

This is available from Netflix (whoo!) under the title "The Grand Chef."

Kim Yeon-Joo, Nabi: The Prototype - This is a lovely manhwa compilation of short stories, all of which are interconnected and presumably take place in the same fantasy world. If you ask me, I can't even reconstruct the content of half of the stories, but it's the overall mood and the art that struck me the most. First, the art is gorgeous. I could stare at it all day and am in fact tempted to buy more of her manhwa in Korean just to look at it (I sadly only have one semester's worth of Korean so far). Second, Kim writes stories about extremely charming children, some of whom turn into lonely adolescents. Everything is delicate and wistful, and I wish there were more.

Available in bookstores.

Mars (2004) - Ling is a rebellious college student who wants to be a motorcycle racer, and Qiluo is a shy and solemn artist. The two seem absolutely wrong for each other, but both of them have past traumas, and despite their seeming incompatibility, they fall in love and stay in love.

Soryo Fuyumi's Mars was one of the first shoujo manga series I ever read, and despite its many flaws, I still love it. Mars was also one of the earliest Taiwan idol dramas (usually romantic comedies, but not always) filmed, and I was afraid to watch it for the longest time because I loved the source so much. To my surprise, the drama is incredibly faithful to the source while improving on it in minor ways. Yet, all the tiny tweaks add up so that many of the irritating factors from the manga are softened, particularly the manga's focus on the hero Rei/Ling over the heroine Kira/Qiluo and the power dynamics in their relationship.

Not sure about US availability.

Nan Kongyuu, assorted manhua - The Chinese language manhua industry is still in its infancy, as most comics read in Chinese are translated from Japanese. But I managed to find Nan Kongyuu's works, which I love. Her art is reminiscent of CLAMP: sparkling eyes and flowing hair and a slightly goth aesthetic. Her stories tend to focus on the bittersweet and melancholy, on people who love too late because they are afraid, on how people accidentally hurt each other while meaning well, and on how people find each other and slowly heal. My favorite of her works are Lonesome Eden, which is about God's favorite doll living alone in a magical garden, and White Garden, about human-looking dogs who need owners. The latter in particular is much less sketchy than it sounds, and it always makes me tear up when I read it.

These sadly don't seem to be available anywhere except Taiwan, which is a shame, because they are gorgeous.

So Close (2002) - This Hong Kong action movie is about an assassin (Lynn), her computer hacker sister (Sue), and the cop going after them (Kong Yat Hong). It's a fairly standard action movie, very slick and pretty with many slo-mo moves done Matrix-style, but what sets it apart is that it's focused on the three women. I'm not sure if I like Lynn and Sue's sisterhood, Lynn and Kong Yat Hong's game of cat-and-mouse, or Sue and Kong Yat Hong's relectant alliance better, but I'm glad I get to pick among the relationships and the characters, as opposed to having the sole woman in an action movie being relegated to the love interest. Fun and stylish, with a lot of cool fight scenes.

Available on DVD.

Not Even Wrong. . .

A few weeks ago I responded to Niall Harrison’s call for items for his Year’s Best of 2008 column, over on Strange Horizons. As an opening, I made a comment some readers may have found either puzzling or inflammatory: “too many ever so clearly labelled girl-books and boy-books; too many notable books that I know I must not review, because I'm prejudiced, and my views (which were always leftfield, and I didn't mind) have become not even wrong....

Timmi’s asked me to expand, so I’ll try. You see, I’m what’s known as a “seventies feminist”. (I didn’t have an sf novel published until 1984, but I can’t seem to shake the label). What was different about the genre’s “seventies feminists” was that they didn’t write for feminists. They claimed to address the whole audience. Yes, this story, this novel, is about sexual politics; or has a sexual politics strand. No, it isn’t a form of chick-lit, no, it’s not just for bleeding-heart girlies. It’s the mainstream. Those days are gone, and I don’t regret them. There’s a limit to my desire, as a writer or a reader, to concentrate intensely on any single topic. What I do regret is the polarisation that has replaced our hopeful attempts to reach a new balance, so that (sigh) absolutely anything I write gets read as “feminist”, just because the whole genre has shifted so far over towards the masculine.

But there’s another point, which isn’t about feminism (honest!). As a critic, these days, often I can’t admire the books that are the height of fashion, but I no longer feel I should be the one taking them apart. There’s a younger generation, negotiating different boundaries, or negotiating the same boundaries (eg feminism) in different ways. There comes a point when you realise you could be stomping your horrible old elder statesman (or woman) dinosaur foot on the really interesting, different, and fragile blue-sky research of the genre, the kind of work that will never be mass-market but instead will nourish and inspire the mass-market. . . just because it doesn’t look the way you think it ought to look.

So that’s what I meant by “not even wrong”.

And maybe in 2009 I’ll teach myself how to recalibrate.

I do that trick all the time with music.

It can’t be rocket science.

Leslie What's Crazy Love

My review of Leslie What's imaginative, sharply observed collection of short fiction, Crazy Love, is now available at The American Book Review 's LineOnLine.

(Warning: the review must be accessed through a PDF file that takes about a minute to download.)

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part Eighteen: Cat Rambo

I tracked my reading this year, which was an interesting if somewhat obsessive, experiment. I learned, mainly, that I read a lot more crap than I'd like to think.  But among the more elevated reading highlights from 2009 were the following:

The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories by Joan Aiken

I was delighted to see an Aiken collection coming out that included four! new! Armitage stories. These pieces are funny and charming, and manage to have a dark edge at times in the tradition of the best children's literature. Any of Aiken's short stories are worth seeking out, I've found, which makes this book a bonanza for readers of children's fiction.

A Companion to Wolves, by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette

I read a number of Bear's books this year, and would heartily recommend many of them, including Dust, Undertow, and any of the Promethean Age novels. But this was one of my favorites, taking the trope of humans bonded with companion animals and having sex when the companion animals have sex to a logical and yet inexplicably hitherto unexplored direction. 

Triplicity, by Thomas Disch.

Tom Disch's death this year was a tremendous loss to the field. I picked up Triplicity in a used book store and remembered what a major talent he was. Three sharply distinct novellas that showcase his talent, his sense of humor, and his incisiveness.

From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, by Minister Faust

So far this is my favorite superhero book EVER. And it's a genre I like very much. Faust's book is clever and funny and wonderful and does fabulous things. I have said this elsewhere, but I loved this book. I blogged further about superhero lit here. (And hey, this is a good point to send a shout out to David DeBeer, who is consistently putting out great stuff on the Nebula awards blog, whose RSS feed is well worth subscribing to.)

Wild Life, by Molly Glass

This was not marketed as speculative fiction, and yet it featured Bigfoot and 19th century suffragists in the Pacific Northwest. Lovely and engaging and sweet. The book shifts in tone halfway through, and yet the shift manages not to be too jarring, and ends up providing a new lens through which to look at the first half.

The Lies of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch

This was a -fun- traditional fantasy read, just terrific.  For some reason, I'd thought Locke Lamora was actually Loch Lamora, and that it was some sort of geographical fantasy. This did not turn out to be the case. I pass along a small amount of what I read to my partner Wayne, and this (as well as its sequel) both ended up on his shelf.

Dragonforge, by James Maxey

I'd read Dragonforge's predecessor, Bitterwood, last year and had no idea where James might be going with the books next. Dragonforge takes Bitterwood and makes origami out of it, turning an already excellent world and characters into something truly original and interesting. These aren't traditional dragons, by a long shot.

I was introduced to a new genre this year, bizarro fiction, when I read (and highly enjoyed) Carlton Mellick III's The Egg Man. It's indescribable and wonderful and full of fabulous weirdness. I see a new magazine featuring bizarro fiction has opened up recently, and I'm looking forward to reading more of it.

About a quarter of my reading this year was urban fantasy. Favorites included Patricia Briggs, Charlaine Harris, T.A. Pratt, and Carrie Vaughn. But above and beyond those, I ended up reading all of Lilith Saintcrow's work and putting it top of my list. I'd write more about urban fantasy, but Saintcrow, Vaughn, and Elizabeth Bear have all written about it more eloquently than I could recently. Go check their blogs.

Catherynne M. Valente's The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden rocked my socks off with the lusciousness of its prose and the intricacy of its construction. Reading it is a bit like eating gold-encrusted chocolate truffles - you don't know whether to pay more attention to the taste or the artistry of the construction, but you can't lose either way.

The indefatigable Ann and Jeff VanderMeer produced a number of anthologies in 2008. Of them, my favorite was The New Weird, which combined all sorts of tasty fiction along with some critical nuggets. I will admit some of my fondness may be spurred participating in a round robin exercise for the book that I found enjoyable as well as instructive. Also notable were their Steampunk anthology and the best of a recent swarm of pirate anthologies, Fast Ships, Black Sails, which included what may be my all-time favorite pirate story: Katherine Sparrow's "Pirate Solutions".

The Glass Castle, by Jeanette Wall

This memoir chronicles a highly unusual childhood being raised by parents who seem little more than children themselves, dragging their offspring through a life that is described with candor, affection at times, and an astonishing lack of anger. By the time you reach the moment where the author, now a successful career woman, encounters her parents as homeless on the street, you understand (although you may not agree) how they've reached that point. Not through bankruptcy or bad financial decisions, but a resolve not to get caught up in a soulless system.

I dissed Twilight this year, and so I'll supply some titles of a couple of this year's authors that I think would better suit YA readers: Libba Bray and Cassandra Clare. But frankly, if I had a teen reading at the Twilight level, I wouldn't be restricting their choices to the YA section only, but would be steering them towards some of the adult urban fantasy out there. I got my first ideas about sex from reading a James Bond novel -- I'm not sure learning about it from Laurell K. Hamilton would damage anyone's psyche too much. But then again, I'm not a parent.

Cat Rambo writes speculative fiction that has appeared in such places as Weird Tales, Asimov's, and Strange Horizons, as well as serving as Fiction Editor for Fantasy Magazine. Her collection of short stories, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, appears from Paper Golem Press this year.

Quote of the Day

Government authority and the law represent at any given time not the progressive ideals of liberty of which the people are capable, but the amount of liberty the forerunners of the people have been able to wrest from earlier and equally unwilling governments.--- Teresa Billington-Greig, "The Militant Policy of Women Suffragists" (1906; written in Holloway prison)

Aqueductista News

Over at The Fix, Val Grimm reviews the latest volumes in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series-- My Death: A Novella by Lisa Tuttle; and De Secretis Mulierum: A Novella by L. Timmel Duchamp. It's a long, thoughtful review.

Over at the UK feminist site the f word, Jess McCabe reviews Vandana Singh's collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, just out from Zubaan Books. You can check it out here.

The Preliminary Ballot for the Nebula Awards has been announced, and I see that two Aqueduct authors have entries: In the novella category, Kelley Eskridge's "Dangerous Space" (which appears in her collection, Dangerous Space, from Aqueduct); and Gwyneth Jones's "The Tomb Wife" (which Aqueduct will be reprinting in a new Conversation Pieces volume to be titled The Buonarotti Quartet, due out this spring). Congratulations, Kelley and Gwyneth. The full ballot is available here.

Nancy Jane Rants on the Radio

By Nancy Jane Moore

NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday program let me rant on the radio this morning -- they aired my comment criticizing Isaac Mizrahi for advocating high-heeled shoes.

I notice that my comment was preceded by one from a doctor who treats women suffering from the damage inflicted by high heels. His instruction to avoid heels in any situation where you might need to walk or stand is great advice.

However, they left out one line of my commentary -- my observation that high-heeled shoes make women more vulnerable. That's at the heart of my rant. If your shoes put you off balance, and keep you from walking far or running at all, they keep you from taking care of yourself in a tight situation.

Wearing high heels makes a woman a little bit helpless, but the myth persists that women look "sexier" in heels. I've asked before and I'll ask again: Do you really want a lover who is attracted to you because you look helpless?

Nisi Shawl reads tomorow in San Francisco

Heads up, all you Bay-area folks: Nisi Shawl will be reading and signing at Borderlands Books tomorrow from 1-2:30 p.m. It's a wonderful bookstore run by people who love science fiction, and it accommodates events very comfortably. I read there back in October 2004 with Eileen Gunn and Gwyneth Jones. After each of us read for about fifteen minutes, we conducted a panel-style discussion with the audience, which was stimulating and enjoyable. The audience was great, and when a bunch of us went out for wine and tapas at a neighborhood place afterward, we took a piece of the discussion with us.

Borderlands is located at 866 Valencia Street. (Phone: 415.824.8203) The store's website provides directions, for anyone who needs them. Oh, and just so you know, they carry lots of Aqueduct's books.

R.I.P. Donald E. Westlake

Very sad. Westlake was a great artisan, capable of wit that's rare in U.S.ian novels. I rank his novel Dancing Aztecs alongside Delany's Motion of Light in Water and Ellen Raskin's The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues as exemplars of the "love letter to New York City" genre. Readers of this blog might like his more overtly anti-misogynist novels, Trust Me on This and Baby, Would I Lie?. And the two dozen novels he wrote as Richard Stark stand as refutations to the old canard that genre fiction written to a strict formula is artistically inferior to other kinds of writing: indeed, I have twice heard someone challenge that claim with "What about Richard Stark?"

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part Seventeen: Eileen Gunn

Eileen Gunn:

Pleasures (and otherwise) of reading in 2008

These first three books were not necessarily pleasurable, except in the broader sense of being intellectually absorbing. Difficult books to read, undoubtedly painful books for the authors to write, they form a sort of randomly assembled trilogy on the Holocaust and its effects. I acquired them all separately, read them opportunistically, and until I started reviewing my year’s reading for this essay, hadn’t thought of them being particularly related. Considering them now, however, it seems not only that they are obviously related, but that I read them in a meaningful order: that of increasing complexity.

The first, Strange and Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memories, is a memoir by Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, a Holocaust survivor who was just fifteen at the start of World War II. Her town, on the border between Poland and Ukraine, was invaded in 1939 by the Soviet Union and in 1941 by the Nazis, and her story, a series of harrowing incidents of escalating cruelty and betrayal, is made deeply personal by the author’s memory for dialogue and detail. The author willed herself to remember and testify to events that, although they are familiar in the context of Holocaust memoirs, are horrifying and inexplicable in what they reveal about human beings and their so-called civilization.

Threaded through her account is the story of a young Ukrainian policeman who fell in love with Fanya and risked his life over and over to help her and her family survive, even though she was not in love with him. This is not a sentimental story, and it has no feel-good finale: at the end of the war, pressured by family members, Fanya makes a realistic assessment of what her life would be like if she stayed in Ukraine, quickly marries another survivor, and flees with what remains of her family, leaving her rescuer behind in Eastern Europe as the Soviets close in.

There the book ends, with a brief coda to summarize the next fifty years. What is is, and what was is gone; what happened after the war is another story, and Mrs. Heller does not reflect on it in the book, although it is clear that she continued to be bothered by what happened, and eventually dealt with it via psychoanalysis. She and her husband worked hard, had a family, and were successful. She became a psychologist and is now a well-known philanthropist and a speaker on the Holocaust. Her book was published sixteen years ago, and Mrs. Heller is still quite active: a video of a talk on women and the Holocaust that she gave at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in April, 2008 is available at Thirteen Forum. She covers there, briefly, many of the issues in this book, and admits that, even now, she compulsively carries a piece of bread in her purse in case she is arrested.

* * *

After Long Silence, by Helen Fremont, a fictionalized family memoir by the daughter of Holocaust survivors, is a far more problematic work. Unlike Fanya Heller, who wrote her book at least partly to testify to what happened to her and her entire shtetl, Helen Fremont’s mother and aunt did not want their story told. As young women in Nazi-occupied Lvov, they devised a cover story about their origins and posed as Polish Catholics, which enabled the two sisters not only to escape Lvov, but to survive Nazi-occupied Rome. After the war, they continued in their new identities, at least partly from fear that the balance would shift once again, and it would be dangerous for their children to be Jewish. Fremont’s parents immigrated to the United States and raised their two daughters as Catholics, keeping the truth hidden from the children. This book is their daughter Helen’s story, told in a non-linear fashion that makes it appear to be her parents’ stories as well, although in fact it is not.

Like other children of Holocaust survivors, the two girls, from an early age, had to piece together their parents’ story as best they could, while the parents themselves strove to rebuild their lives in new country, distance themselves emotionally from a dreadful past, and support their family. The sisters, accustomed to silences and inconsistencies in their mother’s reminiscences, didn’t discover their Jewish heritage until they were in their thirties.

For Fremont, a lesbian who had at that point not yet come out to her parents, this additional displacement from the truth seems to have engendered a fierce desire to bring all the secrets out into the open. Her need to openly discuss what happened to her family baffled and angered her parents and her aunt and, as might be expected, they opposed her plans to write a book. Although she writes quite frankly about this conflict, Fremont, who is a lawyer, does not go into any detail about the ethical issues involved in publishing the details of someone’s life against their will; she seems to have reframed the argument, after much thought, as a conflict of loyalties: she could be loyal either to her parents or to herself; she could be an individual or a directionless component in a family that had no tolerance for individuality.

Fremont notes at the beginning of the book that she has changed the names of people and places to conceal their identity, and that she has “imagined details” of her parents lives, presumably because they didn’t want to disclose those details. This is to me the most problematic aspect of the book: the reader cannot trust the facts of the Holocaust account. This part of the book is both fact and fiction –“creative non-fiction,” as it is called -- and the reader doesn’t know which is which.

Memoir and family history provide parallax views of an event, and each has its biases and lacunae, acknowledged or not, which the reader weighs differently when assessing the book and its relation to objective “reality.” Although the author is not trying to deceive the reader, she may easily be mistaken about details, or she may have changed them for reasons of privacy.

The most affecting part of the book, where the author is in command of dialog and tone, is her own story of discovery and rebellion, and the parts of her parents’ story that are imparted in conversation with her parents or aunt, which show the power that horrific memories can wield. She shows an impressive command of the dialog and emotional tenor of conversations in which one speaker casually explodes a verbal bomb in the face of another.

I myself have written a story (as yet unpublished, because I am reluctant to send it out) based in part on my father’s account of his wartime military experience, and I can well relate to some of the problems Fremont encountered in writing this book. Whose story is it? What unsavory parental detail and private information is appropriate – what is optional and what is necessary? Should it be fiction or fact -- there are limitations to each. Is there any such thing as truth and accuracy when it comes to telling someone else’s story? Isn’t is always really your own story that you’re writing, whether it’s a family history or a memoir or a novel? Though I take issue with her solution to these problems, I respect her courage in addressing them.

* * *

Art Spiegelman’s new large-format art book, Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, forms the third in this unlikely trilogy. In part, this is a full-size reprint of Spiegelman’s first published book, Breakdowns (1978), which was a collection of some of his most memorable work from the previous six years. It included a three-page comic entitled “Maus,” a predecessor to his ground-breaking graphic novel of the same name, and the searing “Prisoner on the Hell Planet,” an account of his mother’s suicide, as well as a number of other ambitious, experimental works of comic art in a diversity of styles.

Spiegelman’s remarkable graphic-art memoir, Maus and Maus II, like After Long Silence, tells both the tale of the author’s parents in the Holocaust and selective parts of the author’s relationship with those parents. Unlike in Fremont’s book, however, Spiegelman’s father told his story willingly for his son to recreate as a comic, and, although the story fades cinematically back and forth between the Holocaust and the late 1970s, it is always clear which part is the father’s testament and which part is the son’s memoir. The use of cartoon mice and cats to portray the Jews and the Nazis somehow heightens the reality, rather than ameliorating it, catching the reader unawares, with her defenses down. When I first read it, serialized in Raw magazine in the early ’80s, it seemed to me somehow pornographic in its directness. The underground comix of the ’60s and ’70s had certainly liberated funny animals from sweetness and light, but Maus plucked them from fantasy in its entirety and used them to depict a very grim reality from which most Americans have shielded themselves.

The new edition prefaces Breakdowns with a lengthy autobiographical essay in comic form that gives a whirlwind tour of the artist’s childhood, his psyche, and his artistic roots. Its allusive and episodic nature no doubt puts demands on readers unfamiliar with Spiegelman’s personal story, but the author’s informatively rueful afterword adds context to the comic. Readers who find it hard to track the graphical narrative at the beginning of the book are advised to read the end first.

Taken as a whole – autobiographical comic, Breakdowns, and final essay -- this is a dynamic documentary of the origins, synthesis, breakdown, and re-synthesis of a remarkable artist who is the child of Holocaust survivors, and who has used both his own experience and that of his parents in creating his lifework.

These three books seem to be written with an intent to tell the truth about certain matters, and Spiegelman especially focuses on telling painful truths that may not reflect well on himself. I found them all compelling reading; considering them now, they form a progression: starting with the stories of the Holocaust and the survivors’ prodigious efforts to recreate their lives, proceeding to the effect the Holocaust had on the children of its survivors, who try to tell their parents’ stories, and finishing with the survivors’ children telling their own stories. Through all of this, the telling of stories is both a way of testifying to horror and a means of gaining some control over it.

* * *

A novel I especially enjoyed this year was Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, which is both an engaging, kid-wise young-adult thriller and an excoriating critique of the current state of surveillance technology and its potential for abuse. Perhaps because it is aimed at kids and has a realistic, present-day setting, it takes a kinder view of the human potential for cruelty than, say, 1984 or any of the holocaust narratives mentioned above. Many of the grim government enforcers who pursue the protagonists seem, upon examination, to be motivated merely by a misguided authoritarian desire to protect the US: they are more like abusive parents than like the KGB. But then, even under the Bush administration, the US has not achieved Nazi or Stalinist levels of demented cruelty, at least to its own citizens.

Two exceptional short-story collections that I read this year were Leslie What’s Crazy Love, and Nisi Shawl’s Filter House. Since I provided a promotional blurb for Crazy Love and wrote the introduction to Filter House, I will not repeat myself here. Each is available on Amazon and in a few select bookstores, despite getting enthusiastic critical attention. This is the reality of short-story publishing.

*

Finally, I would like to call attention to Farah Mendlesohn Rhetorics of Fantasy, a work that calls to mind Susan Wood’s distinction between academic writing and scholarly writing. Mendlesohn’s scholarly book is rich in its thinking and juicy with ideas. She is interested here in examining how fantasy plots are constructed, so as to provide tools for further thought on the matter. I have not read the whole book, and I probably will not read it end-to-end, forming a clear picture of the author’s intent and argument. But I will continue to dip into it at random, for its wonderful effect of having a series of thoughtful conversations with Mendlesohn about whatever is on her mind at the moment.

In writing fiction, I avoid overly rigorous planning. I am, however, always looking for ways to think about what I am revising – work that I have written but not published, work that is still becoming whatever it will be. I am not a believer in rules and categories – if I see a rule, I want to break it; if I am put in a category I want to claw my way out – but I believe in tools and techniques, and I believe in thinking about what I have done while it is still malleable. Most academic work does not provide me with the means to do this, but I think, after dipping into it and finding intriguing observations on every page, that Mendlesohn’s book could prove very useful in opening my mind to possibility without making me claustrophobic. I am not saying that it will do this for you, or that it will always do this for me, but do recommend to other writers that they get their hands on it and dig in.

* * *

Books discussed:

Strange and Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust Memories by Fanya Gottesfeld Heller. (KTAV Publishing House, Hoboken, 1993) [republished as Love in a World of Sorrow by Fanya Gottesfeld Heller. (Devora Publishing, Jerusalem, 2003)]

After Long Silence by Helen Fremont. (Delta, New York, 1999)

Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! , by Art Spiegelman. (Pantheon, New York, 2008)

Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. (Tor Teen, New York, 2008)

Crazy Love, by Leslie What. (Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC, La Grande, 2008)

Filter House, by Nisi Shawl. (Aqueduct Press, Seattle, 2008)

Rhetorics of Fantasy, by Farah Mendlesohn. (Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 2008)

Eileen is the author of the collection Stable Strategies and Others (2004) and the co-editor of The WisCon Chronicles, Volume Two, which Aqueduct published in 2008. She is the editor/publisher of the Infinite Matrix and in the dead of night can hear it stomping around in the attic. She has been a member of the board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop for the past twenty years, and she thinks it’s time for someone else to step up to the plate.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part Sixteen: Jeanne Gomoll

Jeanne Gomoll:

Early in 2008, I read Alastair Reynolds’ Pushing Ice and Tim Powers' Three Days to Never for a book discussion group. We liked both books. I enjoyed the portrayal of a futuristic, space-going labor union’s camaraderie in Pushing Ice, and the time travel aspects of Three Days to Never. I’m a sucker for time travel stories, especially ones that deal intelligently with paradox, which Powers does in Three Days. The repercussions of time traveling characters’ future actions finally explain the bizarre happenings early in the novel. People owe their characters to their future self’s choices. Loved it.

Dan Simmons’ The Terror held me completely engrossed, though it did make a very cold Wisconsin winter even colder. The Terror might be more comfortably read in the summer or at a warmer latitude than Wisconsin. The Terror is mostly a historical novel about a lost British exploratory expedition in the mid-1800s whose mission was to discover the Northwest Passage. The sailors endure extreme cold, clothes that are never dry or warm, food that rots due to poorly sealed tins and food poisoned by lead used as solder for those tins, work loads that might have killed healthy men, and, of course, darkness. Simmons includes a monster in his story (which is the only thing that qualifies the book as a sort of kind of fantasy), but the actual horrors for two ships’ crews attempting to survive on the Arctic ice for several years provide more than enough terror. After reading it I searched out a non-fiction depiction of life above the Arctic Circle and discovered the excellent Kabloona — a journal written by a Frenchman (Gontran de Poncins) who lived for a year with the Inuit only a few decades after the period of time described in Simmons’ horror novel.

My partner Scott’s favorite writer is Iain M. Banks, and when I picked up a Banks book for the first time — Consider Phlebas — Scott suggested that we read it aloud. This turned out to be so much fun that we shortly afterward read Look to Windward, which is a sequel of sort to Phlebas. Later in the year we read aloud Banks’ Use of Weapons and The Player of Games too. I’m now firmly hooked on the read-aloud version of Banks’ Culture novels. I love the way he discusses utopia always from the outside, and usually from the point of view of someone who has left it / disdains it / fights against it, but who nonetheless shows by their actions that they actually endorse the same utopian ideas. Oh, and his books are funny too. That counts for a lot.

Sarah Hall won the 2007 Tiptree award for her novel, The Carhullan Army, and I read it before WisCon in hopes of meeting Hall at the Tiptree ceremony. Those hopes were dashed, of course, because Hall was unable to attend WisCon. But I’m still hoping to ask her someday about the very different way Brit feminism (as opposed to American feminism) informs her story. Hall makes a strikingly different statement than Joanna Russ or Suzy McKee Charnas made with similar raw (plot) materials in the American 70s. In Hall’s book, there’s a revolutionary group of separatist women living in the wilderness, but there is never a suggestion that they blame men for the disasters that have befallen humanity. In Hall’s world, Big Brother enforces birth control, whereas the evil method of control in U.S. feminist fiction has traditionally been the opposite: birth control withheld. Rather than an attack on feminism, Hall’s novel is a meditation on violence and gender. An excellent choice for the Tiptree Award, I think.

I spent a large part of the summer in 2008 recovering from surgery on my right hip. My left hip had been replaced several years ago, and so I knew what to expect: a marked decrease in my ability to concentrate. So I stored up some light reading that would be easy to get through in spite of medicinal interference. I figured it was the perfect time to catch up on some YA reading. My niece Rachel loves to read and had been begging her mom to let her read Stephanie Meyer’s series (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn); I decided to check out the books. If I liked them, I’d give them to Rachel for Christmas. As it turned out, I was intrigued by Meyer’s creative take on Vampire-Werewolf relations but, I have to tell you, the drugs weren’t nearly good enough to make reading this series a pleasant experience. Besides being a much-too-prolonged groan of repressed sexual tension, Meyer’s heroine is a throwback to the kind of female character I thought we’d advanced beyond … sometime in the late 1950s. The heroine, Bella, responds to every problem with the same solution: self-sacrifice. She sacrifices herself over and over and over and over again whenever she perceives her boyfriend, her father, her mother, her friends or her boyfriend’s family to be in trouble. She doesn’t even have to know exactly what kind of trouble they are in; she assumes she’s to blame and figures the best way to save them is to place herself in mortal danger in their place. Of course that means that her boyfriend, family, etc. end up having to rescue her over and over and over and over again. Bella is not my idea of a role model so I really don’t want to encourage my niece to read these books. Nevertheless, I suppose Rachel will eventually read them. But I’m hoping I have enough cool-aunt cred to suggest an alternate interpretation in contrast to the one she’ll be hearing from her friends (e.g., Ooooh, how romantic!).

Happily, the other YA books that I stocked up for post-operative pain-med-haze reading were far superior to Meyer: Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies, Pretties, Specials, and Extras. Now there’s a great young-girl role model! I loved Westerfeld’s books, loved the excellent hard SF ideas, and loved his heroine, Tally, who found the strength in herself to change first her own life, than the lives of those closest to her, and then her whole society. But my sister Julie won the game of rock, scissors, paper, and she got to give Rachel Westerfeld’s series for Christmas.

Our niece got some good books this year. Besides Westerfeld’s Uglies series from Julie, she got the next three YA books I read when I wasn’t exercising my new hip: Pat Murphy’s The Wild Girls, and Ellen Klages' historical/science books, The Green Glass Sea and White Sands, Red Menace, all signed by the authors. The girls in all these books do things: they write, they make art, they do science experiments, they learn to understand themselves from within and resist letting others define them from the outside. They make life-long female friends. Completely the opposite of Bella.

I did eventually get back to reading fiction for adults. Ellen Kages’ anthology of short stories, Portable Childhoods, isn’t really for children, portable or permanent. And as it turned out most of the stories were familiar because I’d heard Ellen read them aloud at conventions. But it was fun reading them (with Ellen’s voice always in my ears) and thinking about how strangely sweet Ellen’s stories are. Not the first word I would use to describe Ellen herself. Ellen will be honored as one of the guests of honor at the 2009 WisCon (with Geoff Ryman), and I’m looking forward to new stories from her.

The Mercury 13: The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Space Flight by Martha Ackmann is an amazing story. I had been vaguely aware of the history of the aborted women’s astronaut program, but was glad to read this book and know the whole infuriating story of how this group of women put their lives on the line to reach for their dreams and then were sabotaged by the Johnson administration, Congress, and by one of their own, a famous woman aviator who was too old to qualify for the program. This is one of those stories (“How to Suppress Women…”) that should not be forgotten, but sadly, that is exactly what almost happened. I’m glad Ackmann wrote this book.

Most mystery and western fiction fails to interest me. I am quite aware that I sound uncomfortably like those unenlightened folks who dismiss the entire genre of science fiction and then make an exception for a certain author, acting as if the exception merely proves the rule. Because I do like Nicola Griffith’s mysteries and I do like Molly Gloss’s westerns. But I AM willing to acknowledge that I am probably missing lots of good stuff. Molly Gloss’ The Hearts of Horses came out and I remembered how much I loved reading The Jump-Off Creek, so I began reading Hearts on the way home from the bookstore. I don’t know how likely it is that in 1917 a strong, independent, and shy horse-whisperer like Martha would fall in love with someone willing to contract such an unorthodox and enlightened marriage agreement, but I cheered her on and suspended my disbelief. Maybe it’s the science fictional attitude of this writer of westerns that attracts me.

Wit’s End, by Karen Joy Fowler, made for a lovely weekend read. It features a mystery writer whose characters start invading her real life with a little help from her fans. I’ve got the feeling that I missed quite a few references to well-known mystery fiction because of that previously mentioned prejudice against certain genres. Having read each of Jane Austen’s novels several times made Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club a more familiar experience for me. But I will brave any genre to experience Fowler’s brilliant wit. We may not have any more Austen novels to read, but happily, we have Karen Joy Fowler and I hope, many more books by her.

My sister Julie gave me a copy of Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man, a non-fiction journal of Norah’s year as Ned. Written at the start like an undercover exposé of the male world, Norah/Ned was able to convincingly disguise herself as a man and insinuate herself into a series of masculine subcultures: a blue-collar bowling league, patrons of strip joints, the dating scene, a sales scam company, and a male bonding group. The technical aspects of her disguise impressed me, especially how she faked a 5 o’clock shadow and adopted male speech patterns. I was less impressed by her conclusions, which generally seemed to boil down to: we’re all people; guys aren’t as alien as she thought.

In my opinion, Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan had far more interesting insights about gender than Vincent’s book even though gender is not its focus. Morgan refers several times to Susan Faludi’s book Stiffed in the course of this novel about a genetic superman who has no more place in this (slightly futuristic) world than does the macho dock workers that Faludi described in her book. Thirteen is fast-moving and packed with amusing and intriguing references to the political landscape and virtual/nano technology of its world, so it was great fun to read. I may also have enjoyed it because I read it soon after having seen the movie The Dark Knight, and so was already primed to look for themes of super-heroism-as-a-curse.

There were other books in 2008 for me, but these were the highlights.

Jeanne is a graphic designer who has been twice nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist. Probably her most famous design is the Space Babe icon, known and loved by all WisCon habitues. But probably her greatest claim to fame is her oft-cited manifesto, "An Open Letter to Joanna Russ." Oh, and back in the early days of feminist sf, she was joint editor, with Janice Bogstad, of Janus, a feminist science fiction fanzine.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part Fifteen: Lucy Sussex

Lucy Sussex:

2008 as an Antipodean arts consumer? A bit of a blur. I tend not to buy music myself, as these days it comes through the door courtesy of the resident record collector. And most of the films are forgotten, with the exception of the totally unrecommended Towelhead (I walked out around the time of the second sexual assault) and Australia, which I just saw. Hmn. Firstly it is an exercise in genres—comedy turns into western turns into war story with the bombing of Darwin, then race relations melodrama. Secondly, the Australian Tourist Commission must have been leaning heavily on the producers, hoping for the hobbit goldmine New Zealand gained from the Lord of the Rings. Thirdly, it’s only a story, and the historical accuracy is never allowed to get in the way of filmic conventions. Fourthly, it’s made for the overseas markets. Fifthly, Nicole is not as bad as she’s painted. If you want better films about Australian indigenes, try The Rabbit-Proof Fence, or Ten Canoes.

As regards books, here followeth an assortment, stuff I liked, which should be readily available via your friendly internet terminal.

Best anthology

AUSTRALIAN GOTHIC: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AUSTRALIAN SUPERNATURAL FICTION 1867-1939
James Doig, ed.
Equilibrium

The Gothic was the predominant literary form as Australia was settled, and it took to the new land with an eldritch vengeance. Doig is an archivist, and his selection is full of pleasures. Possibly the most striking story is Marcus Clarke’s “Cannabis Indica,” a nightmare reverie that despite the name was written under the influence of opium. Elsewhere Fergus Hume, best known for the pioneering crime bestseller The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), shows a deft hand at the comic with a Banshee in the now touristy Queenstown, NZ. Vampires, ghosts and werewolves all figure, but the predominant motif is the hidden guilt behind colonization, the fear of the indigenous supernatural. Enjoy! Available from www.equilibriumbooks.com.


Best biographical writing

MIRACLES OF LIFE: SHANGHAI TO SHEPPARTON
J. G. Ballard
Fourth Estate

In the 1960s, the major writer of Britain’s New Wave was a single father living in suburbia. J. G. Ballard’s wife had died suddenly, leaving him with three young children to raise. So he penned his poetic, dark visions of the future after (a) getting the kids to school in the morning (b) a Scotch. His children, not his works, are the miracles of his title. Another miracle was Ballard as a child surviving internment by the Japanese, which gave rise to Empire of the Sun, his most famous book. The first part of this autobiography revisits that time, formative for Ballard the acute, dispassionate observer. His fiction and his memoir are both marked by coolness of tone; he is not a cold man, just an odd one. On the whole he does not like other authors and he observes himself and his writing with neither pity nor egomania. Typical is his observation that his friend Kingsley Amis was an acute fiction judge, who nonetheless “disliked a good part of my later writing.” At the end of the book Ballard notes that he is dying of cancer. Even then he avoids self-pity, being gracious, almost cheerful about his impending dissolution.

STELLA MILES FRANKLIN: A BIOGRAPHY
Jill Roe
4th Estate

Some may know Miles Franklin from the Australian classic film of My Brilliant Career, based on her New Woman debut novel. Her life was like—and unlike—the novel. In the Australian bush, where she was born, women were mothers, wives, and helpmeets. To wish for anything else was eccentric and unnatural; to actually achieve it nigh impossible. My Brilliant Career made her name as a young woman author, but the Australian literary market was small. Earning a living from writing meant living overseas, tragic for a writer whose attachment to home was total. She worked for American women’s organizations, struggled with a follow-up novel, and avoided an easy and risky surrender to marriage. From our perspective her life was unimaginably hard, but her courage blazed like a bushfire. She worked as a nurse in WW1, returned to Australia, and found new writing life via a male pseudonym. Jill Roe’s biography has been some twenty-five years in the making, and is worth the wait. It presents a full and engrossing account of a talented and exquisitely contradictory personality: a gifted writer, of letters and novels; a delightful personality; a Nationalist; and perhaps most significantly, an independent woman


Best essays

MAPS AND LEGENDS: READING AND WRITING ALONG THE BORDERLANDS
Michael Chabon
McSweeney’s

“Chabon,” said the reader, “is a writer who can do whatever he likes.” Including violating a border as tightly policed as any Chinese Olympiad, that between literary and genre fiction. This collection of essays begins with a quotation from Herman Melville, on fan fiction. Really? Read it and see. Maps and Legends reads like a breath of fresh air, being intelligent and audacious. At its (big) heart is Chabon’s sheer enjoyment of literature, and the writing of it. He deplores the contemporary novel as an exercise in disenfranchising the reader, where arty words and dull characters are expected to carry the plot. Why should storytelling be banished to genre? he asks. This book ranges from Sherlock Holmes to Walter Benjamin to McCarthy’s The Road, which Chabon fruitfully reads as horror. It also contains some of the best autobiographical essays on the writing process that I have ever read.

Best non-fiction

GANG LEADER FOR A DAY: A ROGUE SOCIOLOGIST CROSSES THE LINE
Sudhir Venkatesh
Allen Lane

Sociology has been responsible for some of the driest texts in known space. This book is an exception, as sociologist Venkatesh has the acute eye of an investigative journalist. As an Indian immigrant and complete outsider he could venture into the toughest parts of Black Chicago and survive. It helped to be a “Brown” man, something which intrigued crack gang leader JT. He protected Venkatesh, who thus gained entrée into a hidden world. His subjects, people largely abandoned by US society, lived in a black economy, a mixture of violence, street-smarts, and co-operation. Gangs did favors for preachers and youth workers and expected favors in return. Venkatesh documents a milieu that was dangerous, rough, but bound together by community spirit.


Best crime fiction

THE PRICE OF DARKNESS
Graham Hurley
Orion

Among the very best crime writers is Graham Hurley. His milieu is Portsmouth, but his broader concern is modern England. Hurley has two sleuths, Faraday, detective inspector and bird-watcher, and DC Winter, a rough and unorthodox cop. Within a short space of time a property developer dies in an apparent gangland execution, and a government minister is assassinated by terrorists. The two cases show an almost forensic efficiency, but does that alone mean a link? Hurley’s major target is the devastation wrought by Thatcherism, which ten years of Labour government has failed to fix. When those in power worship market forces and hate community, it is hardly surprising that their enforcers—the police—suffer. Consequently burnt out and bitter, they are prey to the temptations of the dark side. Powerful stuff.

THE BUILD UP
Phillip Gwynne
Macmillan

A key feature in crime fiction since the Mysteries (of London, of Paris, even of Melbourne) genre is the importance of place. Gwynne, who made his mark initially as a writer for younger readers, innovates now in his Darwin setting. Here be fringe-dwellers, the disaffected, and a milieu strongly tinged with the Asian. The title refers to the period prior to the Monsoon rains, a time of climatic and social tension. Detective Dusty, a maverick female cop, finds it a busy time for crime as well. A body appears, then disappears from a billabong. The possible culprits include a serial killer or an activist group of Vietnam veterans. So a chase begins, amongst a rich cast of characters, including bird-watchers, and a pot-bellied pig. The humor is quick, but rarely judgmental. The Build-Up is a first crime novel which heralds the start of a fine police procedural series. Sample prose: ‘The Chick Cop/Bloke Cop routine was based on a very simple psychological premise—men don’t like women telling them what to do. Once again it’d worked a treat.”


Science fiction

HALTING STATE
Charles Stross
Orbit

Charles Stross can write the hard technology, but also has a winning sense of humor. Halting State is a techno-crime story, using a device much favored by William Gibson—alternate narrators who will eventually converge. Small wonder Gibson was asked for a blurb, for once accurate: extremely smart fun. Sue is a Scottish uniformed cop; Jack a computer programmer; and Elaine an auditor with a fondness for role-playing games. They all investigate a very strange robbery: in a virtual world, a bank heist is performed by orcs and a fire-breathing dragon. While Halting State uses the thriller format, its object entertainment, the book also speculates and educates. In an era where so much is reliant upon computer networks, Stross asks what happens when spycraft spills into the virtual world. Will warfare follow? The book contains much serious thought about the future of network security, gift-wrapped in a package including murder and sword-fights.


Best Travel

ME, MYSELF & PRAGUE: AN UNRELIABLE GUIDE TO BOHEMIA
Rachael Weiss
Allen & Unwin

I admit I approached this book with faint groans: the sub-genre of Bridget Jones travel books can be cringe-making. What makes Weiss’s work different is its total honesty and that a search for family history/identity underlies it. When she found herself forty, with a sense of carpe diem, it was her Czech background she seized. She had already published one travel book, and now she thought she might, in Prague, write a novel. She didn’t, but this book resulted. It details an alien life, of a country used to invasion, with a distinctive pragmatic black humor. Buildings vary between picture postcard and Soviet shoddy, and the typical response to a stranger is rudeness. Weiss went through stages of loneliness, hanging out with expats, and family reunions without a language in common. When her money ran out, she left—and found herself missing Prague. The book is warm, and wittily observed: Weiss didn’t find a great love, except of motherland.


ELVIS IS TITANIC: CLASSROOM TALES FROM THE OTHER IRAQ
Ian Klaus
Hodder & Stoughton

For an American to teach English and his country’s history in Iraq seems now foolhardy. But Klaus was young and in Kurdistan, where Gulf War II was less problematic. At Salahaddin University he would teach people whose lives were blighted by Saddam Hussein’s regime. They in turn would teach him. Klaus was a Rhodes Scholar, idealistic, and insular in a very American way. He taught Martin Luther King, Lincoln, the good and the bad about his country. His students, diverse and smart, ranged from Islamists to entrepreneurs. They quizzed him about US motives, and thus a dialogue opened up—about the complexities of history, and where cultures meet. While Klaus’s students might disagree with him passionately, it was always with respect. He made friends and created links.


Best History

PARADISE LOST: SMYRNA 1922: THE DESTRUCTION OF ISLAM’S CITY OF TOLERANCE
Giles Milton
Sceptre

The city of Smyrna (now Turkish Izmir) was a cool place in the early 1900s. The coffee and food were good, and a multicultural mix of Turks, Jews, Armenians and Greeks co-existed without rancour. Its geography, between West and East, would ultimately doom it—and the ending was savage. Milton paints a broad canvas here, with characters as diverse as a wily and tolerant Turkish governor, wealthy English expatriates, and a mild-mannered American YMCA worker, Asa Jennings. He needs the epic mode, for a clash of empires is depicted here. WWI saw the end of the Ottoman empire, and the hope of a resurgent Greek one, the Megali idea. The Greek army invaded, with dreams of an Anatolian province, but were defeated by Ataturk. His army burnt the city, trapping refugees between an inferno and European ships—who were neutral and would not intervene. Jennings did, and saved hundreds of thousands. An extraordinary if grim read.


Best Science

A GUINEA PIG’S HISTORY OF BIOLOGY
Jim Endersby
Arrow

This book is cultural history applied to science. The theme is the development of biology and how we came to understand the complex system of animals and plants around us. Endersby takes apparently insignificant organisms, from weeds to the titular cavy, and explains how they have enriched our knowledge. His focus is not on divine inspiration, but hard teamwork. As he writes, “the ideas of science come second, in every sense, to the work of science.” It is a collaborative, sharing enterprise, and few have worked harder for it than the experimental plants and laboratory animals. The guinea pig has contributed to no less than 23 Nobel prizes, which should earn the species a gong of its own. Small things, Endersby shows, have big consequences: the repeal of the English tax on glass led to Charles Darwin’s greenhouse and the plant observations in the Origins of Species. He is clear-eyed, but not wide-eyed about science, recognizing the ethical problems of vivisection and OncoMouse. A fascinating read.


Best Music

1000 SONGS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE
Time Out
Ebury Press

Music is the soundtrack to many lives, but finding the good stuff among the dueling guitars can be difficult. Hence this book, in which 30 extremely well-informed essayists and guest artistes like Bjork discuss some 1500 songs. Also scattered through the pages are rewinds, extracts from Time Out’s formidable archive of interviews. Not all of the content is from the rock canon. An essay titled “Better the Devil” concerns Opera baritones, who get some of the best roles and songs; we also get a section on jazz improvisation. Some juxtapositions are cheeky, with the “Countdown to Ecstacy” section dealing with Disco, Drugs and Gospel, the connection being altered states of mind and body. Some content is predictable, as with the top ten of drinking songs. And some is provocative, as when Colin Irwin argues that Death Metal and Hip Hop are pussycats compared with the moral depravity in folk song lyrics.


Best Novel (Mainstream)

AMENABLE WOMEN
Mavis Cheek
Faber

Amenable Women is a slyboots of a novel. The cover suggests yet another Tudor historical, but between the pages is a story of parallel lives. Flora is the plain widow of a dashing egomaniac; Anne, properly Anna of Cleves, was the famously “plain” fourth wife of psychopathic King Henry VIII. Alone of all his wives she escaped a dire end, with a generous divorce settlement and the respect of her royal stepchildren. Clearly she had brains. That Flora’s husband, in an unfinished local history, dismissed Anna as much as he did his wife is the impetus for this story. In a decorous revenge, Flora sets out to finish the history and rehabilitate Anna. Her hope is to rehabilitate herself, though her obstacles are less formidable. The book toys with magical realism, as when Flora interrogates Anna’s glorious Holbein portrait, perhaps not with complete success. The real gems of this novel are the wry observations, which can make you smile several times a page. And the sense of character, as people maneuver and manipulate so vividly they almost step off the page. At the end Flora is her own mistress, her house and income to herself, as was the case with Anna of Cleves.


Best Religion

BEHIND THE EXCLUSIVE BRETHREN
Michael Bachelard
Scribe

“You can always tell a cult from a religion,” says Karen Joy Fowler. “A cult is just a set of rules that lets certain men get laid.” Such is the case in the first chapter of this book—and the resultant sex scandal is still vehemently denied by the Exclusive Brethren. There is much denial detailed here, which is one of the most sober and well-argued exposés I have ever read. For most, the Brethren were an inoffensive religious group, notable only for the women’s headscarves. That attitude changed with the revelation of their political meddling, particularly rich for a sect that does not vote. Perhaps the nadir was their hiring of a private detective in New Zealand, to smear Prime Minister Helen Clark’s husband as gay. However, this book details less sordid but equally nefarious practices. Perhaps worst is the Brethren’s technique of social control, in which members are policed with the threat of exclusion. Such practice has caused custody havoc, as an excluded member’s family will be torn apart. Bachelard reveals the Brethren’s God as Mammon, their behavior as that of schoolyard bullies, and their Christianity all about self-love.


Best fashion

THE ONE HUNDRED: A GUIDE TO THE PIECES EVERY STYLISH WOMAN MUST OWN
Nina Garcia
Collins Living

Fashion writing has always been prescriptive, since its buying power lies in making women feel insecure. Project Runway judge Garcia’s approach is less bossy than, say, Trinny and Susannah. In this book, as in her earlier The Little Black Book of Style, the emphasis is on finding the look that suits you, rather than the red-hot fashionable. Here she considers classic items, wardrobe essentials. Some of these are predictable, such as the trench coat, and some hardly dress at all, such as champagne and iPod. The little black dress appears, but also the little white dress. The illustrations by Ruben Toledo are fun, and as Garcia says, you should always self-edit.


Best True Crime

DEATH IN THE MOUNTAINS: THE STORY OF A TUSCAN MURDER
Lisa Clifford
Macmillan

Writer Lisa Clifford married into an Italian family and fell in love with her in-laws’ stories. One of the most dramatic was a murder mystery. In 1907 her husband’s great grandfather was murdered in the mountains of Tuscany. The police were never involved, and nobody was ever brought to justice. Why? Wondered Clifford, as Tuscany is not a Mafia area. She investigated the cold case, unearthing the story behind the crime. What emerges reads like more of a social realist novel, as she details the stories of those involved. The victim, Artemio, was a peasant farmer, working as a sharecropper on another’s land. From dawn to dusk he and his family labored, with even the small children working, guarding livestock. With so little to share, envies arose and could turn murderous. Clifford describes a life far removed from today’s Tuscany and its holiday villas. Here is Italian peasant cookery, as it is not in glossy cookbooks: dictated by the seasons, and with the specter of starvation always present. And she solves the murder, too.


Best Post-colonial and Women’s History

SARA BAARTMAN AND THE HOTTENTOT VENUS: A GHOST STORY AND A BIOGRAPHY
Clifton Crais & Pamela Scully
Princeton

This biography faced a formidable job of research, in resurrecting a highly influential but forgotten colonized woman. Sara Baartman was born on the South African frontier and lived from the 1770s–1815. She was a Khoekhoe (then known as Hottentot), who found Eureopean fame in an ethnographic freak show. Because she was steatopygous, she was displayed in “traditional” garb, near-naked in Northern hemisphere cold. As the “Hottentot Venus,” she attracted discourses of race, gender, and sexuality, most of it using her difference as evidence of inferiority. Anti-slavery activists tried to make an issue of her, but her exoticism was too powerful a commodity. As was the agenda of scientists who wanted her as a link between human and animal. When she died, from the cold, her body continued to be exhibited—it would only return to South Africa for burial in 2002. Faced with such a complex but unknowable subject, the authors refrain from putting words into Sara’s mouth. Rather they reconstruct her life and times, placing her in context. Sara bore at least three babies, all of whom died, she worked as a servant, was fluent in Dutch, and adapted to changing circumstances with courage and dignity. A remarkable story.

Best Cookbook (for non-vegetarians)

MEAT: HOW TO COOK, CHOOSE AND EAT IT
Adrian Richardson with Lucy Malouf
Hardie Grant

For chef Richardson, being a carnivore is perfectly natural, provided you respect the animal that died for your dinner. His first cookbook aims to teach the reader about quality meat meals. So I sent out an SOS to the Barbeque Blokes, connoisseurs of blackened meat and good grog. A couple of serious girl cooks came too. The terrine was pronounced tasty, though the recipe got nitpicked: “What size onion?” “Does smoky bacon mean streaky?” and “How do you get the b--- terrine out of the mould?” The barbecued kangaroo was found to be divine, and the pork ribs were good, even though one step was accidentally missed. The salad and beetroot jam recipes were fine too. Direct quote from a happy attendee: “It’s good enough I’d like it for Christmas!”

Lucy writes science fiction and young adult fiction; she's also a scholar of Australian literary history. (She knows a lot about 19th-century Australian pulp mysteries and the women and men who wrote them.) She's edited four anthologies (including She's Fantastical, which was nominated for the World Fantasy Award) and is the author of Scarlet Rider, a novel that combines crime, Victoriana, and the fantastic. Aqueduct published her collection, Absolute Uncertainty in 2006.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2008, Part Fourteen: Liz Henry

Hello! I'd like to offer a grab bag of music, games, books, movies, and other great stuff that I came across this year.

Music

Here are a couple of albums that the artists have made available for free download.

Jane Jensen - Comic Book Whore : Link to download Comic Book Whore (there are annoying ads; just click through them) Lush, layered, loud, obnoxious.

Gangstagrass - Gangstagrass album. Hip hop bluegrass. A nice clean site to download from! Gangstagrass.com.

And here's The Large Hadron Rap, by Katherine McAlpine.

Games

Galcon. This is a fun, fast-moving iPhone game. I played Galcon Lite for free one night. In the morning I bought the full game for 5 bucks for the iPod Touch. It is sort of "space Risk" and has the feel of old play-by-email games. You start out with a planet with 100 population. Using the touch screen, you drag ships from your planet to colonize neutral planets or conquer the planets of your enemies. It's a good game against the AI, with many increasing levels of difficulty. Playing the networked game, with whatever other players are on the server, or locally with friends, is fiercely addictive. Scary eat-your-life addictive. Call me Admiral!

Trap! is a free game for the G1 Android. It starts with 5 balls bouncing around; you control the drawing of lines which trap them into small spaces. Once you master the physical skill of this game you can try to max out the various bonuses and multipliers. This simple game has kept me engaged for a couple of months.

Carcassonne - This game isn't new, but it continues to be great. I prefer the Hunter-Gatherers version to the original, but I haven't played the more recent variants.

Hey! That's My Fish! A silly board game of penguins greedily eating all the fish while icebegs melt underneath them. Good for kids maybe 5 and up. Not boring for grownups (this is so crucial !)

Zar - A fast paced, simple card game good for 2-9 players. Not boring, but still suitable for tiny children and drunk people as well as people with brains. When a game is enjoyable by tiny children, drunks, and brainiacs all at the same time, someone's doing something right. (Zar, Fluxx, and Ice Towers are all good for that mix!) Dragons, peacocks, wasps, frogs, moons, stars, and galaxies give the game a really nice fantasy/sf flavor. Here's the site: playzar.com

Movies and TV

The Wire. This is the best TV show I've ever seen. It's stunning. I watched the DVDs of the first four seasons this year. It builds an incredibly complicated story with characters who have great depth. Its presentation of differing social classes and of race is just great. I will say I noted that it focuses very much on men and masculinity, and men's relationships with each other. While there are strong and interesting female characters who give the feeling of having dimensions to their lives, they are not the focus.

Dhoom 2. This is a Bollywood action movie. It has James Bond-ish action scenes, goofy and rather annoying romance, and musical numbers that manage to combine the two. I am especially appreciative of the following dance number, which expresses the spirit of the movie fairly well:

Enjoy!


Legend of the Shadowless Sword (Muyong geom)

This is a movie made in South Korea, a fun historical drama with romantic and comedic elements. It had a ton of great action scenes -- non stop combat, very well choreographed. There are several good female characters. It is notable when a woman heads up a band of, well, they were either bandits or warrior monks or all of that, anyway a band, but when a woman heads up a band of warrior monks and isn't the only woman in the band, that's rare and cool. I can't say more about the main female character without spoilers, but she was great -- tough, kick ass, dedicated, able to stare anyone down like Michelle Yeoh, a good actress, and great with her sword. The political and historical details are quite interesting. Here's the Wikipedia description for Muyong geom, which has lengthy spoilers and some background. Here's the trailer!




Cycler - A book about being an awkward teenager -- one who switches gender for a few days each month. The gender switch is a medical condition, not something that happens because of magic. I read a lot of kids' and YA fiction. This fit the teen-angst tropes perfectly, but with mind-blowing gender related twists.

Victory of Eagles Fifth in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, and my favorite so far. Novik continues to explore ideas of slavery, rights, personal loyalty, politics, war, and gender.

Blood in the Fruit & Stretto. I can't do them justice here! They need a long review. But I was very, very happy to get the last two volumes to the Marq'ssan Series this year. It's very intense. I am still thinking over the politics and of the stories it tells of the relationships and the politics of women.

Fun Home - Alison Bechdel. Fantastic!

I Am A Cat - Soseki Natsume. A 1905 novel, or trilogy, told from the point of view of a cat.

Genesis: An Epic Poem - about the terraforming and colonization of Mars.

Amelia Earhart - Maureen Owen. This is an out of print poem cycle. I love it deeply! Here are a few excerpts from AE, and a sample for you here:

At breakfast the question    of nuclear weapons in space

Now    the voices were faded      they sang to her     Her own
name     in bits    Underneath 2556 miles of water whistled
shore    tunes    it's soft clapping a comfort   & a horror
The plane is the point at which the fog & the sea would meet.  
A koan is a puzzle that cannot be answered in ordinary ways.  
All my
        Electrons Lord!    all my protons    neutrons   leptons
    mesons   haryons     all my Gravitons!  "this will be
the secret of my disappearance          A massless particle 
is a particle   of zero rest mass all of its energy   is energy

                                                   of motion"

Other

The Computer History Museum I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountainview. The old computers are so beautiful! And I got to see a demonstration of a working Difference Engine. I took photos of many of the exhibit signs in the huge "warehouse of really old computers" room, went home, and looked up all the computers in online archives and Wikipedia for a lovely, geeky evening.

Discussion in comments of Always Coming Home
One of the best blog discussions I had this year was over on Feminist SF: The Blog! as many people weighed in at length in response to my post on Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home. Frowner and Yonmei's discussion was great. I noticed that several people I talked with who grew up outside the U.S. did not know at all that the Kesh or the other people in Always Coming Home were based on or used elements of various Native American cultures.

Yuletide just blows me away. I recommend that you start with their elegant, useful quicksearch page and scan over the listed fandoms. I'm slowly working my way down the alphabet and taking notes for a big review post with links to my favorite Yuletide fic. I will be evil, though, and throw you all a link to an extremely silly NC-17 Galaxy Quest story, By Grabthar's Hammer. And just one more... Laura Ingalls starring in this very nicely done story, LIttle Settlement on the Moon. I would not only read that entire novel, I'd devour the whole series. There is a missed opportunity here!


- Liz Henry
http://blogs.feministsf.net/
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com