WisCon 33 WisCon Chronicles 4

Hello Everyone.
As you may know, I've just become an Aqueductista, with my collection of SF essays coming out from Aqueduct at WisCon 33. And you doubtless also know, every year Aqueduct produces a volume covering the previous WisCon. Timmi has asked me to edit the 4th WisCon Chronicles, covering WisCon 33. It's an honour, but it also feels like a very big responsibility!

Chronicles 4 will concern me in my second hat, as editor, formal or informal, up to and including academic volumes, and I hope to blog, if sporadically, on the Chronicle's progress. For now, though, here’s a fullscale call for materials for WisCon Chronicles 4. In this volume we’re looking to include

Some academic papers,
Some extracts from work by people who read at the conference, including flash fiction, excerpts from longer fiction and poetry - especially Aqueductistas, of course.
Guest of Honour speeches, one already promised.

We’re also looking to include some panel reports.
Panels are the core of WisCon, where the important, the sensitive and the new issues for the SF and F and feminist scenes and increasingly, fandom in or out of the Blogosphere, come to light.
And we are looking from input from everyone who attended WisCon 33.

Panel reports could be on a single or several panels, or thoughts about such, any length under 4000 words, about any panel you felt was important, to you in person or to the feminist SF and F scene, or in general.

If you’ve posted such reports already, please consider passing them on to us to consider for printing. All contributors will be acknowledged, under whatever name they wish, in the Chronicles
We also want overall personal views. The notional title for the 4th Chronicls is My WisCon, and we would love to have as many of these as possible.

My Wiscons would ideally
Be under 4000 words but longer than 400
Possibly overlap with My WisCons from people who went to the same events
Need not cover everything, just your thoughtpoints
Could come as straight reports, but also as poems, letters, dialogue, recipes, and so on.

The only thing we can’t manage is illustrations, they are too expensive, so actual art or photos, sadly, might not be the best choice.

The current deadline for Chronicles 4 turn-ins is the 1st of August. Please send your thoughts and/or impressions to me at
sylvia.kelso@gmail.com
Attachments are possibly better, but in the body of the post will do.

Thoughts and queries cd. also be sent there. I hope to establish an LJ community for discussion as well.
Hope to hear from you!

40 Years Since Stonewall

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising against the police, which marked the beginning of the Gay and Lesbian rights movement in the US. Democracy Now has a video, "Remembering Stonewall," available online here.

And the SF Gate reports:

President Obama today marked an historic first when he issued a White House resolution for Gay Pride month that honors the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots -- marking the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.

What Remains

What Remains, which until now had been sold only at WisCon 33, is at last available through Aqueduct's site, where it can be purchased for $12. Published in conjunction with the appearance of Ellen Klages and Geoff Ryman as the Guests of Honor at WisCon 33, What Remains features three tales, two short tales by Geoff Ryman and an original novelette by Ellen Klages.

In Ryman’s “No Bad Thing,” a certain brilliant, world-famous scientist has become a vampire and duly turns hi intellectual gifts in a new direction; and in “Care,” a story set in the fascinating world of Belo Horizonte created by Sheldon Brown and the Experimental Game Lab, a little boy’s father stands with him on the Edge of the world looking down at Rio, shows him how to walk off the Edge, then disappears.

In Ellen Klages’s original novelette “Echoes of Aurora,” Jo Norwood goes back to her hometown to bury her father and meets a lovely, mysterious woman named Aurora, and through the summer, Jo and Rory make passionate love, poetry, and a story together—a story that begins “Once upon a time, you kissed me.”

What Remains also includes Eileen Gunn’s interview of Geoff Ryman and Debbie Notkin’s interview of Ellen Klages.

PS For more about the fictional world of Belo Horizonte, check out this trailer.

"An instrospective future history"

Charlie Jane Anders has posted an interview with Samuel R. Delany at io9, taking about his forthcoming novel, "Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders," about which he says

In a way, it's a very simple story, just about two working-class gay men, who meet when they're seventeen and nineteen, living on the coast of Georgia. They meet in 2007, and they stay together for the next 80 years, until one of them dies. Now you tell me whether that's science fiction or not. It definitely goes into the future, but on the other hand, they're absolutely out of the center of life, and things progress where they live, very very slowly. And they hear about things that are going on outside. They live on coastal part of Georgia in a little town that does go through cycles of being a semi-popular tourist spot in the summers, and then some years, nobody bothers to come at all. Eventually they move to a little island off the coast, and a little lesbian art colony starts up on the island. And they wonder if they're not being crowded out of their new home. But they're very fond of some of the people who live there, and some of the people who live there are very fond of them.

Now that's a description that hooks me.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Aqueduct Gazette, Summer 2009

The Summer 2009 issue of the Aqueduct Gazette is now available for download from Aqueduct's site. (This is the issue we distributed at WisCon.) Highlights include Nisi Shawl's reflections on finding herself the first African American to win the Tiptree Award, Gwyneth Jones's notes on the stories in The Buonarotti Quartet, an interview with Liz Henry about The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 3: Carnival of Feminist SF, and my thoughts on Aqueduct's fifth anniversary. There's also the usual-- word of works forthcoming from Aqueduct and descriptions of our most recent publications. You can download a pdf file of the issue here.

Back from Syacmore Hill

I returned home from Sycamore Hill late Friday night (sans checked luggage)-- only to wake at four the morning after with a full-blown, brutal cold and a cough that makes my chest burn. I'm drowning in not only mucus, but also in email. If you're one of the many people waiting for a reply from me, I beg you to be patient. I'll be getting to you soon. (I hope.)

Sycamore Hill was, as ever, wonderful. This year it rained most of the time, and the food was subpar. (Thank god for the salad bar.) But the stories the attendees brought were excellent and the company witty (Karen Joy Fowler was with us), stimulating, and often fun. Most of us, regardless of gender, painted our toenails garish colors at our end-of-the-workshop party on the last night. And as if that weren't enough fun, there was much singing, and several attendees burst into delightful song just before their stories were critiqued. (photos in this post by Jim Kelly.)

I wrote the following (hoping to finish and post it the next day, before the critiques began) on Friday, June 12 on a plane en route to Asheville:

By coincidence, the issue of the American Book Review that arrived in my mail box this week(May/June 2009) features a focus "Why Teach Creative Writing," while the issue of the New Yorker that arrived a couple of days earlier (June 8 & 15, 2009) has an essay by Louis Menand, "Show or Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught," that apparently takes its impetus from Mark McGurl's The Program Era, a book about creative writing programs recently published by Harvard University Press.

Menand's essay begins by revisiting the old argument about whether creative writing can be taught, then moves away from the specificity of that question to consider what creative writing programs are able to do (or not do) for their students, providing a bit of history of such programs along the way. The most striking statement Menand makes is this: "As McGurl points out, the university is where most serious fiction writers have been produced since the Second World War. It has also been the place where most serious fiction readers are produced: they are taught how to read in departments of literature." Menand's essay does not set out to discuss this, so I can't fault him for expanding on this; but this point certainly merits thorough consideration. And I think it'd be particularly interesting to consider the bearing this has on genre fiction in the US today (as opposed, say, to the status of genre fiction before the years in which creative writing programs proliferated).

Menand offers up a lot of entertaining anecdotes about famous writers teaching creative writing classes. My favorite is his story of of what Angela Carter said once on the first day of class when she was teaching at Brown and a student asked her what her own writing was like: "My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man's penis." According to Menand, "the course turned out not to be oversubscribed." He also quotes McGurl's book on how certain styles have been adopted by "lower middle-class" writers like Carver and Oates as a means for "dealing with the highbrow world of the academy," to "shield oneself with words." And he rightly observes that "no one seems to agree on what the goal of good writing is, anyway." Interestingly, Menand concludes his essay by noting that he stopped writing poetry after he graduated and never published a poem which, he says, "places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing course." He comments, "I don't think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things."

The ABR focus section on "Why Teach Creative Writing" offers a spread of takes on the subject of creative writing by creative writing teachers, eliciting markedly different attitudes toward the question and understanding of its semantics. I found Lance Olsen's answer the most congenial. He believes that creative writing classes teach a method of reading. (Which may or may not be useful for student writers). My experience of writing workshops (which granted has always been as a teacher or a peer) confirms this. Interestingly, another teacher, Leslee Becker, takes the question personally, as in why she herself teaches creative writing (rather than why anyone should teach creative writing). Teacher Kelly Cherry recalls being a student of creative writing herself, saying that creative writing classes gives would-be writers "permission" to write, which for her, as a student, was "liberating and life-saving."

Some of the pieces in the ABR focus section assumed a defensive posture, most curiously Steve Tomasula's, which took the question as an attack on not only the very notion of making creative writing classes and programs available but even on the notion of creative writing itself. Given that the people asking the question were inspired to do it after attending the annual AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) meeting, this interpretation suggests an uncomfortable degree of sensitivity. (Easy to imagine how such a sensitivity could develop in the early 21st-century US.) Tomasula zooms in on the atmosphere in post 9/11 "Middle America": "everyone wants to live in a world where great stories make it easy to draw a line between good and evil." Although he doesn't say so directly, he implies that learning to understand "how language can be manipulated to create effects-- get us to vote, buy, feel sympathy or anger-- that to learn by doing in a creative writing classroom where manipulators and their audience meet face-to-face and feedback is immediate" will make students immune to the manipulative effects of narrative. The contrarian in me wonders whether it won't also produce more effective manipulators. Do most creative writing courses spend a significant amount of their time exploring ethical issues? I wonder. The people who use narrative to achieve certain effects are, after all, accomplished craftspeople and can be assumed to have learned their craft in the same classes that attempt to wise-up students about the manipulative effects of certain narratives. Certainly I know many people (among them numerous writers) who define successful narratives as those that entertain the majority of people reading or viewing them while making them feel optimistic, smug, and safe.

++++++++++++++++++

pretty much forgot about having started the above post while I was at Sycamore Hill, until one of the goldsmiths approached a group of us to anxiously urge us to read Louis Menand's essay. He seemed to think we needed to read it to help us understand something about our peer workshop. I'm utterly clueless about what he might have had in mind (except that maybe he felt we needed to submit ourselves to the middlebrow authority it represented to him by virtue of having been published in the New Yorker, we being mere science fiction writers). In fact, we spent the week taking apart and examining one another's fictions, continually worrying at narrative and its workings-- and above all, as critical readers, excavating and even constructing stories out of the narrative when they weren't at all obvious (as was often the case)-- and seeking to persuade everyone else of the validity of our readings. For me, peer workshops like Sycamore Hill chiefly offer insight into how readers engage with texts and how a group of readers negotiate collectively to produce meanings as they interrogate texts. Obviously, such insight is invaluable to fiction writers. But it occurs to me to wonder why literary critics don't workshop in a similar way. I suspect they could learn a lot about their craft as well as the works they write about if they did so. But I suppose most scholars of literature feel that their classroom work already teaches them as much as they need to know about how readers collectively engage with texts.

Feminist Collections

(As Timmi is off on a plane again, I get to do my own bragging* rather than modestly sitting back and letting her post it...)

I recently put my hand up to review a number of books relating to feminist sf for the journal
Feminist Collections: A Quarterly Of Women's Studies Resources, which “reviews the latest print, electronic, and audiovisual resources for research and teaching in women's studies”. Like many other wonderful things, the journal comes out of Madison, the University of Wisconsin System to be precise.

My review is the lead article in the Winter 2009 issue, entitled “What's a Bright Feminist Like You Doing in a Genre Like This? Reading Women's Science Fiction”. It was a lot of fun to write, and I got to mention a few Aqueductians - if nothing else I think I convinced the editor to go off and read some sf, so that’s a good sign!

ETA: *edited word here in the interests of harmonious US-Aus relations (as detailed in the comments!)

Quote o' the Day

But maybe there's no greater proof of skill than how he makes Bascombe's base elements seem like universal essences. By the end of the book, the realtor's self-pity, his fear that any break in the day's routine could lead to unspeakable dread he'll never recover from, even his urge to fish with his son, may well seem like the American experience, rather than the circumscribed experience of the white suburban male. Maybe nobody more than a provided-for white guy could be so certain that his crises were those of the world.

--R.J. Smith, Review of Richard Ford's Independence Day. Los Angeles Times 2 July 1995. Found by James Sallis.

WisCon 33 Report-- Day 1

I'd hoped to be able to write a series of WisCon reports during the con this year, but though I began writing up a report on Friday while sipping a latte and munching a cheese Danish in Michelangelos early Saturday morning, I didn't get far before Tom hauled me away, to get on with the day. The next chance I had to open my laptop was Monday afternoon, and by then I was too exhausted to do more than download my email. Later that evening, on the plane, it was all I could do to start making a list of the zillion things I needed to accomplish before leaving on my next trip (to Sycamore Hill). So although I haven't been very good about blogging and haven't quite worked my way completely through that list yet, I've crossed off an impressive number of items and now think there's a good chance that I'll get most of them (though not I'm afraid all) done by Friday.

This year, for me, WisCon afforded the usual pleasures of allowing me to renew contacts, providing continual brief bursts of intense close encounters, and a lot of feminist stimulation, but also the frustration of seeing people friends and acquaintance only in passing in the hall (or elevator) and never quite managing to connect. If I remember correctly, last year's intruder denigrated WisCon as a "hug fest." So what's to ridicule? I wonder, thinking about how good those hugs actually felt. As has become the case since starting Aqueduct, some of the time I spent attending or participating in programming, some of the time doing Aqueduct business, and a lot of time in conversation. I did manage to make some new acquaintances this year, which matters to me. I have less time because of Aqueduct in actively pursuing them, though, which is not so good. I regret that there were quite a few people I'd have liked to spent time with who found me already occupied. (I haven't quite figured out how to manage my time at WisCon better.) And also? For all the riches of the reunions I did enjoy, I did miss several people who didn't make it to WisCon this year. But of course not everybody can attend WisCon every year (especially in years like this one).

So, to Friday. Day 1 of WisCon, Friday was fairly chaotic. I spent part of the day helping set up our tables in the Dealers Room and trying to run some specific errands, but every time I ventured out of the Dealers Room, even to use the rest room, it would usually take me at least twenty minutes to return because I just couldn't not talk to people I hadn't seen for an entire year. Similarly, at our table, I tried to be helpful to Kath and Tom, but because people were continually stopping to talk to me, I didn't really pull my weight as a team member. (WisCon, as Kathy Nash remarked to me, is like a huge family reunion.) But there was something wonderful about setting up, even so. When Kath and I clustered Aqueduct's Tiptree winner & Honor List books together at one end of the table, with appropriate gold and silver stickers on them, just seeing them in association tickled me pink. Not long after that, as the display of books on our tables took its final shape, I had one of those odd moments, of suddenly seeing our books-- all 42 of them-- and thinking Holy Shit! Did we really produce that many books in just five years? We're the Real Deal!



I did manage to attend two programming items on Friday: a panel at four and Andrea Hairston's paper at nine. The panel at four, titled "We Do the Work" featured Fred Schepartz (moderator), Eleanor Arnason, Chris Hill, Diana Sherman, and Mike Lowrey. In his opening statement, Fred announced that the panel was going to avoid discussing definitions, since the reason most panels on class at WisCon fail have usually failed is because they typically get bogged down in arguing definitions. The focus, he said, will be narrow-- specifically on the lack of portrayals of working class characters in science fiction and fantasy. He then asked panelists to characterize the status quo of working class characters in sf.

Eleanor: Chunks of society as we know it now tend not to be represented.
Diana: Blue-collar labor is repetitive and unexciting. Working class life is conceived of as a trap to be escaped.
Chris: The story about class in sf is usually about escape or the failure to escape (from working class existence).
Mike: One of the few working class occupations to appear is soldiering (a grunt can sometimes have the opportunity to break out.) Also: there's a bias against collective action.
Fred: Class is a taboo subject in the US

Q: Why are there so few working-class characters?
A. Authors feel audience wants escapism, and working-class characters aren't conducive to escapist pleasure.
Mike: Its difficult depicting labor struggles-- it's easier to focus on leaders rather than on the collective.

Fred: Will there be a working class in the future?
Mike: Who built the Death Star?
Andrea Hairston (from the audience): Robots
Mike: Who built the robots?
Andrea: Robots

Chris: Why is there an absence of blue-collar work in most sf narratives of the future? Because a wonderful future then looks delightful, since it doesn't show all the dirty boring tedious work, which if seen straight on, would spoil the delight.
Diana: Such top-down world-building creates thin narratives. World-building from the bottom up will create a richer, more foreign-feeling place than top-down created world.
Fred: How do we get writers to write working-class characters and get publishers to publish them?

At the end of the panel, panelists suggested authors and novels that do a good job depicting working-class characters, including several of Melissa Scott's novels and Rebecca Ore's Slow Funeral and her Becoming Alien series.

The panelists had much more to say than I jotted down. (I recorded it, so I might eventually have a verbatim transcript of it to offer.) At one point during the discussion, Andrea and I had a brief whispered exchange about how working-class people and characters are less visible as such if they are female or non-white. Waitresses, secretaries, housecleaners are often not perceived as "working class." I thought this panel was unusually successful, but for me it would have been even more interesting if race and gender had been more fully incorporated into the discussion. In retrospect, I think also it might have been interesting if this panel had directly followed Andrea's paper. Of course the audience for both programming items wasn't identical, but it would have been really interesting to follow up some of the insights in Andrea's paper in the discussion of "We Do the Work."

After "We Do the Work," I returned briefly to the Dealers room to check on Tom and Kath, then ran off to have dinner with Liz H. (Much exciting Aqueduct talk, plus feminist stimulation, all quite wonderful.) When I got back, I collected Tom and at about five to nine swept him off to Conference 3. There Andrea Hairston presented a bona fide academic paper, but because she is a superb performer, she delivered it with great drama and verve, as if she were telling a fabulous, spellbinding tale (which she was!), wowing everyone present, even those suspicious of all things academic. (Andrea, when an audience member expressed pity at her being an academic, unapologetically declared she was glad to be an academic.)Her paper was titled "Romance of the Robot: From R.U.R. & Metropolis to Wall-E. She opened by declaring that fictions about robots address the "primal problem of distributing wealth." Stories about robots have forcefully challenged the dehumanization of the worker. She gave a wonderful overview of Karel Kapek's play R.U.R., which was extremely popular" following its 1921 premiere in Prague and was translated into English almost immediately and premiered in NYC in 1922. R.U.R. helped inspire Fritz Lang and Thea Harbou's Metropolis. Helena, in R.U.R., Andrea said, is a fabulous, unforgettable character.

And so to Wall-E, a Chaplin clown-figure. "Wall-E's gender is very much in the eye of the beholder," Andrea startled me by declaring. She then quoted Kate Bornstein's review, which reads Wall-E as a dyke who falls in love with Eve. Eve may be "the round one with the feminine acronym," but she fires off deadly missiles on cue and at first seems oblivious to the gentle Wall-E, who spots a plant growing in the middle of a dumpsite of humanity's non-biodegradable debris, which it is Wall-E's job to compact and tidy up. I'm afraid that at this point I became so caught up in Andrea's performance, so carried away by the tale she was telling, that I stopped taking notes, except at one point to scribble "Realist narrative takes the fantastic as an alternate world." Which reminds me that Andrea discussed how the fantastic can serve realist narrative ends through creating an alternate world that reveals the otherwise unseen, unaddressed social relations and reality of the everyday world we live in.

Because her co-presenter, Rosalyn Berne, did not appear, after she delivered the paper Andrea spent the extra time remaining in conversation with the audience, in a discussion that included talk about the uses of "anti-realism" in the theatre, how Bertold Brecht, though a "brilliant organizer," had appropriated the plays of his lovers, women he treated abominably, about Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, about Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed.

I apologize for offering such a disjointed set of points that doesn't begin to convey the powerful sense the paper made to me. I hope to get to read the paper soon. (Aqueduct will eventually be publishing a collection of Andrea's essays; I'm assuming this will be one of them. I'm also hoping it might find its way into the next volume of the WisCon Chronicles...)

After the time allotted to the slot had expired, Tom and I went up to the sixth floor and spent some time in conversation with Nisi S., Eileen G, and John B.-- as well as with Lynne T., an archivist from Northern Illinois University who is interested in acquiring the papers of writers like Nisi and me. (I had visions of clearing out the many boxes of mss of the Marq'ssan Cycle dating from the 1980s, including the first version of Reneagde, which I substantially rewrote a few months after first drafting it... I've managed to resist throwing them out several times, but mainly because they're stored in cupboards in the attic that we never open.)

And finally, we fled the sixth floor and went up to bed, where Tom immediately fell asleep while I read about ten pages of C.J. Cherryh's Regenesis, to try to rid my head of the buzz that naturally resulted from hours of feminist stimulation. And after a bit, I did actually manage to sleep.

ETA: Josh has sent me links to two more posts on the excellent "We Do the Work Panel": Badgerbag's is here, and Mary Read the Pirate Queen's is here.

Rosaleen Love receives A. Bertram Chandler Award

A bunch of Aquedistas attended the 48th Australian National Science Fiction Convention in Adelaide last weekend, and one of them, Lucy Sussex, has informed me that during the Ditmar awards ceremony another of them, Rosaleen Love, was given the A. Bertram Chandler Award for Outsanding Achievement. (Lucy herself received this award in 2003.) Congratulations, Rosaleen!

More Aqueductista Stuff

Here's a new Aqueductista link: Fantasy Magazine has reprinted E.C. Myers' Dear Superman, which originally appeared in Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies, ed. L. Timmel Duchamp, (#11 in the Conversation Pieces series).

I've also seen some reviews in print publications, for which I have no links:

In her column, carrying the title "The Uses of Disenchantment" in the Aug/Sept Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Elizabeth Hand reviews Ursula K. Le Guin's Cheek by Jowl at length. Actually,Hand does more than review Cheek by Jowl; after praising its "centerpiece," "the long marvelous title essay on animals in children's literature," she launches into a set of interesting, disgruntled reflections on all that Le Guin has "to answer for"-- which she sums up as: "What irks me is the gentrification of fantasy [I'm a middle-aged bobo, therefore irked by gentrification in all its forms], which has grown so all-encompassing that I impatiently await Martha Stewart's contribution to the genre." Hand laments that the "self-referential, recursive nature of so much contemporary fantasy literature has made it increasingly difficult for a writer to deliver that grace note [the "take your breath away" note "found only in the greatest kind of fantasy"], without its sounding like it's already been winded on someone else's ivory horn. Our marvels have grown commonplace. Fairy fruit's available at Costco now, and Whole Foods."

FemSpec Vol. 9 Issue 2 arrived in my mailbox yesterday. It includes some interesting pieces, ranging from Cristy Dwyer's "Queen Lili'uokalani's Imprisonment Quilt: Indomitable Spirits in Protest Cloth" to Robiin McAlllister's essay on a Cuban feminist sf fotonovella by Daina Chaviano, and including lengthy reviews by Janice Bogstad of The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 1 and by Ritch Calvin of De Secretis Mulierum.

Here's Bogstad: "In its mix of writing levels, range of expertise of the interviewers, interviewees, panel transcripts and shorter pieces, this work demonstrates that knowledge can be transmitted at various levels of discourse, underlining the value of events like WisCon and chronicles of those events like this text. . . . I can recommend this book, especially as the chronicle of an event that cannot be repeated: a weekend in time that is also destined to be timeless. While it is neither a fanzine nor a critical work, it is a source document for future scholars of both fandom and the developmental states of feminism and science fiction."

And here's Calvin: "The narrative of De Secretis Mulierum is framed as a letter sent by Jane Pendler to a researcher, Elena, who is examining the relationship of "women in history" and "women who write history" (75). The selected history that a now-aging and -ailing Pendler provides further comments upon and complicates the question of historical accuracy and reliability. What sorts of women's secrets might history hold? What sorts of technologies might reveal them? What kind of evidence counts as evidence? Who might have better access to this information? To what extent do personal and professional ideologies interfere [with and] alter the "science" of history? Duchamp's novella asks profound questions about the limits of our historical knowledge, the socially constructed nature of knowledge, and the gendered and sexual biases therein."


Finally, don't miss the interesting conversation between Matt Cheney and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay on reading in general and reading James Tiptree Jr. Up the Walls of the World in particular.

Aqueductista Links

Niall Harrison has a long piece about Vandana Singh's work, specifically reviewing The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet but also discussing Distances and Of Love and Other Monsters.

Vandana Singh has an excellent post that includes thoughts on "writing the other" and "mammoth fail" here.

As already noted by Cat Rambo, Eileen Gunn interviews Nisi Shawl at Fantasy Magazine: their discussion ranges from Nisi's work (both fiction and nonfiction), to pie, to Nisi's thoughts on being the first African American to have been awarded the Tiptree (which she has also written about in the latest Aqueduct Gazette (soon to be posted at Aqueduct's site).

Liz Henry reflects on connections between women, inspired by her reading of two Conversation Pieces, My Death and De Secretis Mulierum. (link thanks to Josh Lukin)

Morgan Dhu also writes about My Death (here), Distances (here), and De Secretis Mulierum (here).

Urine-soaked seats: the future of air travel?

All my adult life I've been watching-- or should I say experiencing-- the constant worsening of the conditions of air travel. Discomfort, inconvenience, and airline contempt for passengers have been growing at such a rate since the early 1980s until finally anyone who finds it necessary to fly is left wondering how much worse it could actually get. Over the last couple of years, I've been joking with friends that in the end, since they probably can't squeeze seats any tighter, the airlines will simply pack everyone who can't afford first class in the baggage compartment (for the same prices we have to pay now) and charge a hefty extra fee for oxygen, while in the meantime, on the road to that satirical end, they'll start charging people to use the rest room. Well guess what. In today's Guardian, we read that a European airline has decided to strip their planes of most toilets (leaving only one per plane) and charge passengers 1 pound per rest room visit:

Ryanair boss, Michael O'Leary, insisted today that it will cost passengers a pound to spend a penny as he confirmed plans to charge for toilets on his aeroplanes within two years.

The chief executive of Europe's largest budget carrier said the airline would also generate extra revenues by removing two out of the three toilets on its Boeing 737-800 jets and filling the space with up to six seats.

O'Leary first mooted the toilet charges in February, prompting his press officer to warn that the outspoken executive "makes a lot of this stuff up as he goes along". However, O'Leary confirmed that he will ask Boeing to look at putting credit card readers on toilet locks for new aircraft.

Will this actually happen? Probably. And if it does-- and if Boeing equips toilet locks with credit card readers-- you can bet all the US carriers (which, after all, provide cut-rate service for premium prices) will follow suit. Anyone not flying first class is already charged whopping extra fees for checked luggage, aisle seats, seats closer to the exit, exit row seats; and never satisfied with all the cash they've forced their customers to fork over for degrading, uncomfortable "service," the airlines ceaselessly look for ways to further gouge the consumer. Any day now they'll start charging for water and soft drinks. Will they find a way to justifying charging extra for the awful polluted air that recirculates through the cabin? Under the late capitalist, regime, all and every indignity can be inflicted on the captive consumer with impunity. Stay tuned...

(Link thanks to oursin.)

ETA: Actually, once the rest room charges are in place, the flight attendants will probably spend most of their time going up and down the aisle, hawking adult diapers. Do you s'pose every airline will have develop its own brand of diapers and diaper accessories? Diapers, get your diapers here! Delta's Diapers are whisper soft, magically absorbent, and come in three delightful deodorizing scents! They'd have to make them cheaper than a rest-room visit, otherwise no one would buy them...

Nisi Shawl Interview

Fantasy Magazine has an interview with Nisi Shawl, conducted by Eileen Gunn, up here.

Centuries Ago and Very Fast reviewed in Locus

Centuries Ago and Very Fast gets some love from Faren Miller in her review in the June issue of Locus:

In Centuries Ago and Very Fast, Rebecca Ore pulls off an audacious experiment: using the raw language and deliberate focus on sexual encounters of "slash" fiction to relate a series of linked episodes and moments of reflection from the stupendously long life of a gay male, from his earliest days as a mammoth-hunting caveman to around the present.

Her review concludes:

...both Vel and Thomas (the latest modern lover who occasionally takes over the narration) compeltely won me over with their matter-of-fact acceptance of both their sexuality and the vagaries of time in a life where "history" is always directly lived and chronology doesn't govern the learning experience. These characters may be nothing like the standard concept of Everyman, with their enthusiastic coupling and all the procedures, rituals and bodily fluids it involves, but they have plenty of interesting things to say about what it means to human.

Expanding Our Idea of What Reason Is

Yesterday when President Obama announced Sonia Sotomayor as his choice for replacing Supreme Court Justice David Souter, I was glad, finally, to hear that he was doing something I could really get behind.**** Naturally, then, that choice immediately came in for a barrage of nasty, even hateful attacks. Today, feminist theorist Linda Martín Alcoff has a piece on Common Dreams, Sotomayor's Reasoning, that addresses criticism of the nominee's forthright declaration that gender and ethnicity "may and will make a difference in our judging." As Alcoff notes, "Such views are widely held, but not widely expressed or defended. The difference with Judge Sotomayor is simply that she has put the view out there." Alcoff, by the way, addresses criticisms from both the right and the left, noting that many on the left are confused about identity and see any open articulation of it as susceptible to rigid stereotypical spinning. "Meanwhile," she notes,

people on the street know better. They know that identity is a rough guide to experience, and that experience affects how we see things, what we notice, how we gauge the plausibility of a story, or the credibility of a speaker. It also affects what background understanding we have at our disposal, such as what life is like for children in diverse families, or among those who live paycheck to paycheck, or without paychecks. And it affects what baseline information we happen to know without having to do any research, such as knowledge about the sterilization abuse inflicted by the United States on Puerto Rican women or the history of treaty violations with American Indian tribes.

Reasoning involves judgment calls, not deductive logic. The judgment of relevance, coherence, and plausibility can be more or less rational, but they are never axiomatic.

Alcoff refers back to the inability of the Senate Judiciary Committee to hear and understand Anita Hill's testimony during Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearing.

Judge Sotomayor has simply stated upfront what most of us know full well: identity affects experience, and experience makes a difference in our judgment. It is never absolute or foolproof: Clarence Thomas's own background did not lead him to the left, thus showing that no identities are flat or monochromatic. We each have to interpret on our own what our identities mean, and in what way our experience is, or is not, relevant to a given situation. Acknowledging the relevance of identity does not replace reason with politics; it simply expands our idea of what reason is, and makes it more reasonable.

Glenn Greenwald's Justice Samuel Alito on Empathy and Judging (originally appearing at Salon.com), considers the double-standard Judge Sotomayor faces, in comparison with the reception given Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court. His piece begins:

As is true for any Supreme Court nominee, there are many legitimate questions to raise about Sonia Sotomayor, but the smear attacks on her as some sort of "identity politics" poster child -- which are still being justified largely if not entirely by the Jeffrey Rosen/TNR gossipy hit piece on her -- are nothing short of disgusting. As Anonymous Liberal put it: "Apparently, the only way to avoid 'identity politics' is to pick white men for every job." Both Adam Serwer and Daniel Larison note the glaring, obvious hypocrisy in simultaneously insisting that "empathy" has no place in the law while protesting Sotomayor's decision in Ricci on the completely law-free ground that what happened to the white firefighters is so "unfair." And Matt Yglesias writes that he is "really truly deeply and personally pissed off my the tenor of a lot of the commentary on Sonia Sotomayor" and, in a separate post, notes the wildly different treatment between Sotomayor and Sam Alito despite very similar records.

Do check out both of these pieces.

PS I hope to be doing some WisCon reporting soon.

****ETA Looks like I spoke too soon. I really can't get behind anyone who isn't clearly going to be supporting abortion rights-- as it now appears may be the case with Sonia Sotomayor.*****

*****ETA Although I probably did speak too soon, it looks as though my misgivings on abortion rights are misplaced. See Nancy's comment below.

Deletions

I just got back from Wiscon, where I talked to people both about Mammothfail and The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

I think I'm in over my head on both topics and have deleted the two posts I wrote.

I've Hit the Ground Running

I may be operating on an hour and a half of sleep, but I'm in Madison and have delivered a stack of What Remains (the GoH book by Ellen Klages and Geoff Ryman) to A Room of One's Own bookstore for this evening's reading and am feeling very happy to be here. Need I say that before I left the bookstore, I had assembled a stack of books of about comparable bulk that I just had to buy? & what a lift it gave me to find, as I browsed, all five volumes of the Marq'ssan on the shelf (taking up a hell of a lot of space in the science fiction section). Room, you see, is not just any bookstore. I fell in love with the place when I first discovered it in 1996. And so I get a thrill, finding my work stocked there.

I began bumping into WisCon people long before reaching the hotel, of course. The gate in the Minneapolis airport for the early afternoon flight to Madison fairly teemed with familiar folks, including Cynthia Gonsalves (who was fascinated to see the new volume of the WisCon Chronicles, which I'd been reading on the plane) and Bill Humphries. And on arrival in Madison, I discovered that Eileen Gunn and John Berry had been on the same plane out of Seattle with me, only I never noticed because they were seated way in the back, surrounded by a youth choral group and a high school champion volley ball team who were, even at 7 a.m., in high spirits. Eileen's still in a cast (she claimed she broke her finger skateboarding, but then admitted that she got so carried away looking at the cherry blossoms that she tripped and went sprawling). From her description of her accident, it sounds like the sort of thing that could happen to me.

So many people kept arriving at the airport that the hotel shuttles were unable to keep up with the demand. Oyceter, by the way, was among those riding sharing the shuttle with me; she entertained us all by describing a fantasy book that included every fantastical creature the author could thing of. "With her," Oyce said of the author (whose name I didn't catch), "More is more."

Next on the agenda, the reception at Room.

Do I sound as though I'm manic? Let's just say I'm a little excited.

PS Someone told me that Nisi is here, but I haven't seen her yet.

Aqueduct Goes to WisCon-- a preview

Once again, Aqueduct will be at WisCon. Kath has packed up her station wagon with Aqueduct books and party supplies and will be heading off on the long haul to Madison later today. Tom and I will fly in on Thursday. Fewer of our authors will be attending this year, but those who do will be helping us to celebrate our Fifth Anniversary. And, no small thing, Nisi Shawl will be accepting the Tiptree Award on Sunday night.

Besides me, the other Aqueduct authors will be attending: Eleanor Arnason, Eileen Gunn, Lesley Hall, Andrea Hairston, Liz Henry, Sylvia Kelso, Ellen Klages, Nancy Jane Moore, Geoff Ryman Nisi Shawl, and Anne Sheldon. In addition, some of the members of our blog who aren't authors will be attending, as well. Aqueduct will be in the Dealers Room beginning early Friday afternoon. Come and see us and admire our fabulous list of-- can you believe it?-- 42 titles.

We won't be putting our newest titles, What Remains by Ellen Klages and Geoff Ryman and the WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 3, ed. Liz Henry, onto Aqueduct's orders page until after WisCon. We'll be bringing 150 numbered copies of What Remains and be selling them for $8 apiece in the Dealers Room. Those that we don't sell will retail, after the con, for $12. That's because this little volume is intended to complement WisCon. If we sell out, we'll think about reprinting an unsigned, unnumbered edition, depending on demand. But I suspect this little book will be a one-off. And of course we'll have plenty of copies of the new volume of the WisCon Chronicles on hand.

As I did last year, I'm posting here a list of most of the programming Aqueduct's writers and blog members will be doing:

Thursday

6:00 Reception and reading at Room of One's Own-- Ellen and Geoff will be giving short readings & everyone present will be celebrating the beginning of another WisCon

Friday

Writers' Workshop—Rachel Swirsky
Fri 9:00AM - 12:00PM Room 634
M: Rachel Virginia Swirsky

Cultural Appropriation 101 Workshop
Fri 2:30 - 3:45PM Assembly
E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman, Victor Jason Raymond, Nisi Shawl

Where Are the Minority Mad Scientists?
Fri 4:00 - 5:15PM 629
Moderator: Jessica Lynne Morris. Email Jessica Lynne Morris, Lesley Hall, Jenny Sessions, Betsy Urbik

We Do The Work
Fri 4:00 - 5:15PM Conference 4
M: Fred Schepartz, Eleanor A. Arnason, Chris Hill, Michael J. Lowrey, Diana Sherman

Urgent and Essential: The Role and Function of Science Fiction in the Societal Stabilizing the Converging Technologies/Romance of the Robot: From R.U.R & Metropolis to Wall-E
Fri 9:00 - 10:15PM Conference 3
Rosalyn Berne, Andrea D. Hairston

Turns Out This Is Your Dad’s SF/F
Fri 9:00 - 10:15PM Senate B
M: David D. Levine, Eileen Gunn, Chip Hitchcock, Brad Lyau, Pat Murphy

Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading
Fri. 10:30 PM Assembly
M: Nancy Jane Moore, J. Kathleen Cheney, Tina Connolly, Lori Devoti, Moondancer Drake, Gwynne Garfinkle, Kimberley Long-Ewing, Kathryn Sullivan, Katherine Mankiller, Morven Westfield, Phoebe Wray


Saturday

The Mismeasure of Man and the Rest of Us, Too: Science, Colonialism, Genocide and Science Fiction
Sat 10:00 - 11:15AM Senate B
M: Rachel Virginia Swirsky, Evelyn Browne, John H. Kim, Micole Iris Sudberg, K. Joyce Tsai

Book View Cafe: A New Venture in Online Publishing
Sat. 10 - 11:00 AM Conference 5
M: Nancy Jane Moore, Sylvia Kelso, Madeleine Robins, Jennifer K. Stevenson

Keeping Up with Science
Sat 1:00 - 2:15PM Capitol B
M: Keffy R.M. Kehrli, Sandra Ulbrich Almazan, Eleanor A. Arnason, Gary Kloster, Chris Stockdale

Feminism, Anarchism, & Power: The Marq'ssan Cycle
Sat 2:30 - 3:45PM Senate A
M: Kate Mason, Lesley Hall, Keffy R.M. Kehrli, Alexis Lothian

Ask A Pro
Sat 2:30 - 3:45PM Capitol A
M: Eileen Gunn, Shana Cohen, James Frenkel, Jack McDevitt, M Rickert, Geoff Ryman

Genuinely Multicultural Panel
Sat 4:00 - 5:15PM Wisconsin
M: Alan Bostick, Rachel Kronick, Isabel Schechter, Ekaterina G. Sedia, Nisi Shawl

The Treatment of Aging in SF and F
Sat 4:00 - 5:15PM Capitol A
M: Eleanor A. Arnason, Gerri Balter, Richard J. Chwedyk, Magenta Griffith, Diana Sherman

A New Paradigm: Reading by Book View Cafe Writers
Sat. 4 PM, Michelangelo's
Anne Harris, Sylvia Kelso, Nancy Jane Moore, Madeleine Robins, Jennifer K. Stevenson

The Fiction of Geoff Ryman
Sat 4:00 - 5:15PM Conference 5
M: Margaret McBride, Eileen Gunn, Sandra J. Lindow, Farah Mendlesohn, Steven E. Schwartz, Delia Sherman

Taboo II: Electric Bugaloo
Sat 4:00 - 5:15PM Conference 2
Vylar Kaftan, Ted A Kosmatka, Jennifer Pelland, Rachel Virginia Swirsky

Aqueduct Press/Carl Brandon Society party
9 p.m-- ?? Room 607


Sunday

Why You Should Write Book Reviews
Sun. 10:00 - 11:15 AM Senate A
M: L. Timmel Duchamp, John M Gamble, Steven H Silver, Gretchen Treu, Gary K. Wolfe

Andrea Smith's Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide
Sun 10:00 - 11:15AM Senate B
M: Micole Iris Sudberg, Andrea D. Hairston, Diantha Day Sprouse, K. Joyce Tsai

Something Is Wrong on the Internet!
Sun 10:00 - 11:15AM Capitol B
M: Vito Excalibur. Vito Excalibur, Piglet, Liz Henry, Julia Sparkymonster

"Going Native": Gender, Colonialism, and C.J. Cherryh
Sun 1:00 - 2:15PM Conference 4
Panelists M: Micole Iris Sudberg, Matthew H. Austern, Chip Hitchcock, Janine Ellen Young

Aqueduct Press Reading I
Sun 2:30 - 3:45PM Conference 2
Eileen Gunn, Liz Henry, Sylvia Kelso, Pat Murphy

Aqueduct Press Reading II
Sun 4:00 - 5:15PM Conference 2
Eleanor A. Arnason, L. Timmel Duchamp, Andrea D. Hairston, Nisi Shawl, Anne Lane Sheldon

The Anvil Chorus: Historical Fiction and Social Justice
Sun 4:00 - 5:15PM Wisconsin
M: Lesley Hall, Jane Acheson, Ellen Klages, Deepa D.

Birthing a Writer's Community
Sun. 4 PM Conference 4
M: Diane Silver, Stickshift Bear, Nancy Jane Moore, Michelle Murrain, Monica Valentinelli


Monday

Writing SF While Living in a SF Disaster Novel
Mon 8:30 - 9:45AM Senate A
M: Suzanne Allés Blom, John Joseph Adams, Eleanor A. Arnason

Not Enough Tricksters
Mon 10:00 - 11:15AM Senate B
M: Joell M. Smith-Borne, Charlie Anders, Lesley Hall, Julia Sparkymonster

Sign-Out
Mon 11:30AM - 12:45PM Capitol/Wisconsin
John Joseph Adams, Barth Anderson, Eleanor A. Arnason, Melodie Bolt, F. J. Bergmann, Alex Bledsoe, Suzy Charnas, Richard J. Chwedyk, Lori Devoti, Moondancer Drake, L. Timmel Duchamp, Carol F. Emshwiller, Eileen Gunn, Anne Harris, Deborah Lynn Jacobs, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Sylvia Kelso, Marianne Kirby, Ellen Klages, Naomi Kritzer, Ellen Kushner, Ann Leckie, David D. Levine, Kimberley Long-Ewing, Kelly McCullough, Sarah Monette, Nancy Jane Moore, Pat Murphy, Larissa N. Niec, Nnedi Nkemdili Okorafor, Jennifer Pelland, Sarah B. Prineas, Mary Robinette, Margaret Ronald, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Geoff Ryman, Fred Schepartz, David J. Schwartz, Ekaterina G. Sedia, Nisi Shawl, Delia Sherman, Kristine Smith, Jennifer K. Stevenson, Caroline Stevermer, Kathryn Sullivan, Catherynne M. Valente, Monica Valentinelli, Joan D. Vinge, Morven Westfield, Laurel Winter, Phoebe Wray, Patricia C Wrede, Doselle Young, Janine Ellen Young

The Green Country of Fantasy

This weekend's Los Angeles Times has a feature on Ursula Le Guin as well as a review of Cheek by Jowl by Kate Bernheimer." While I'm happy to see a piece like "Ursula Major" taking note of Le Guin's importance, I'm less than thrilled by its author's taking Thomas M. Disch's attack against her seriously. On the other hand, Kate Bernheimer's review, while on the brief side, offers a deeper perspective:

"Fantasy's green country is one that most of us enter with ease and pleasure, and it seems to be perfectly familiar to most children even if they've never been out of the city streets," writes Ursula K. Le Guin in "The Critics, The Monsters, and The Fantasists," which appears in her collection of essays "Cheek by Jowl," just published by the valiant, feminist press Aqueduct.

Le Guin continues, "I will defend fantasy's green country. . . . Although the green country of fantasy seems to be entirely the invention of human imaginations, it verges on and partakes of actual realms in which humanity is not lord and master, is not central, is not even important."

She concludes her review:

Hundreds of writers still work today from fairy tales and for the green country in large part because of [Frank] Baum's popular [Oz] series. For more exploration of why fantasy and its astral-ecology is the Real Thing, Le Guin's "Cheek by Jowl" is the source.

Earlier this week, Publishers Weekly also reviewed Cheek by Jowl:

The work of poet and novelist Le Guin (Lavinia, The Left Hand of Darkness) spans genres, including science fiction, fantasy and kid lit, and here she collects scholarship and opinion on the importance of fantasy in every stage of our lives. Aside from taking on “the whole misbegotten procedure” of condemning a genre with the standards of another (why not “judge Moby Dick as science fiction” or “Pride and Prejudice as a Western”?), Le Guin delineates a number of intriguing points just by focusing on animal characters, and their relationships to humans, in her multi-part essay “Animals in Children's Literature”: Jack London’s White Fang, for example, uses the perspectives of canine and human characters to create a genuine understanding of the love between them. Le Guin’s most charged argument tackles the idea that fondness for fantasy equals lack of maturity; instead, Le Guin attests that fantasy is the only type of fiction that can be fully appreciated at any age, and is often involved in important poetry and unique imagery. This compact collection will stoke readers' affection and appreciation for fantasy by highlighting important but overlooked qualities in many familiar tales (such as the duplicity at work in Lewis Carroll) that prove its lasting value as literature. (May)

The First Mother's Day Proclamation, 1870

Mother's Day Proclamation

by Julia Ward Howe
(1819-1910)

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: "Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God -
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Why Is That So Hard?

One of the hot sf novels of the season, Neal Stephenson's Anathem, has been getting feminist scrutiny from Nic at Eve's Alexandria, who found the novel "heavy-going," and from Liz Henry at the Feminist SF blog, who writes "I love the book, I think it’s fabulous, I wallowed in it and couldn’t stop reading it" but was constantly jolted out of her enjoyment by the book's "unnecessary sexism." After looking at specific instances of this, Liz writes:

A general complaint, not directed in particular at Stephenson. I don’t ask that every book be all things. But this book tries to be so much, and it fails so notably at this thing which to me seems so simple. Just make women characters as human as the male characters. Why is that so hard? How can anyone so smart and cool write something that fails to do that simple thing? Why do we as female readers and geeks so often get left behind and disappointed in this way by male writers? I am haunted by these questions in general while reading science fiction. Men, and heterosexual ones who claim to love and appreciate women and who in their daily lives surely do just that, fail to be able to write STORIES where women have full human agency and are important in any way other than romantic symbols or sadly cardboard sops to “strong female hero”.

Yeah. What you said, Liz.

Both are insightful, incisive reviews worth checking out.

Gwyneth Jones's The Buonarotti Quartet

Aqueduct Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Buonaraotti Quartet by Gwyneth Jones, the twenty-fifth volume in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series.

The man who'd given his handle as Drummer raised heavy eyes and spoke, sonorous as a prophet, from out of a full black beard. “We will be ordered to the transit chamber as we were ordered to this room; or drugged and carried by robots in our sleep. We will lie down in the Buonarotti capsules, and a code-self, the complex pattern of each human body and soul, will be split into two like a cell dividing. The copies will be sent flying around the torus, at half-light speed. You will collide with yourself and cease utterly to exist at these co-ordinates of space-time. The body and soul in the capsule will be annihilated, and know GOD no longer.”—from “The Voyage Out”

In Gwyneth Jones’s White Queen Trilogy, the reclusive female genius called Peenemunde Buonarotti invented the instantaneous transit device of the same name. In the four stories of The Buonaraotti Quartet, Gwyneth Jones shows us humans traveling via the device to alien worlds and situations. Some are diplomats, some are extreme travelers, some are prisoners. All are in for a rough, wild ride.

The volume is available now through Aqueduct's website here. (And just a reminder: Subscriptions of ten consecutive volumes (beginning with the volume of your choice) may also be purchased through the site for $80.)

Here are notes Gwyneth has written about the fiction in this volume:

The Buonarotti Transit

The Buonarotti Transit first appeared in White Queen, a novel about an alien invasion of Earth —in which human gender issues come up against another way of cutting up the world, and a mechanist global civilization is overcome by a non-mechanist, highly intuitive and devious crew of buccaneers. Meanwhile, reclusive genius Peenemunde Buonarotti has been researching a means of instantaneous interstellar transit. She’s been piggy-backing her experiments on the Big Science giant accelerator nearest to her place of work: translating herself into pure information, splitting the code and sending two code-versions of herself around the ring, to collide at lightspeed and reach fusion with the State of All States. Not quite ready to publish, she returns from her first successful landing on an alien planet, the night the (apparently) faster-than-light-powered Aleutians announce their presence. . . “That’s torn it,” says Peenemunde, robbed of her big moment.

The “Buonarotti Device” features in the next two episodes of the Aleutian story as a lost treasure, as proof that humans were not always colonized and inferior; and as the symbol of an Utopian future, in which Humans and Aleutians will share the freedom of the stars as equals.

"The Fulcrum"

It all seems so long ago. . . “The Fulcrum” is the first Buonarotti story I wrote, and the most loosely connected to the universe of Spirit, the novel for which all these stories are preparatory sketches. It was my contribution to a themed anthology called Constellations. Orion is my favorite constellation, so that choice was obvious. I already had a device that sent people across interstellar distances, with unpredictable results. I found out about the Bok Globule, the star nursery in the Orion Nebula (also the Osiris angle), and there I had my science/astronomy strand. The fiction is a pure spoof on post-cyberpunk sf noir —hyper-masculine playground for nihilist vigilantes, where ordinary people (whatever their sex) had better shut up, accept that violence rules, and keep off the streets. I like a little fantasy mayhem as much as the next fan, but I despaired at the message that the critically acclaimed sf of the new millennium was giving to women, especially young women, as genre readers and as writers . . . and my response was laughter.

If you’re fond of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, or rather the 1941 John Huston movie, you’ll spot liberally scattered references to this great and venerable “noir” in my plot, characters, and McGuffin. Orlando and Grace, besides being named for a (heterosexual, but conventional!) cat couple in a UK classic series of children’s picture books, are not aliens, they are humans with body-mods who like to call themselves aliens. Nice Eddie is the name of a character in Reservoir Dogs, another favorite old movie. Look out for what happens to the perfect (virtual) girlfriends: Sara Komensky, and “Annie-Mah.”

"Saving Tiamaat"

Every so often, science fiction futures need to be refreshed. New Space Opera is Space Opera updated, with the Cold War-ish scenario that’s been around since Star Trek I finally consigned to the recycle bin, the media taking their modern share in the making of governments, the megadeath weaponry refurbished, and sci-fi concepts like robotics, cyborgs, mind-control, total surveillance enhanced by contact with the actual technology. There was modern Space Opera before NSO (try C.J Cherryh’s Cyteen), but what’s really new is that in C21 the globalization of planet Earth is inescapable. If the proper study of science fiction is the present day, then right now NSO is the genre mirror of our world —a multi-state organization (choose your political flavor!) of diverse but basically similar peoples; struggling toward unity, beset by horrific genocidal wars, where the privileged few can cross staggering distances in no time, while the many casualties of the process are just moved from one internment camp to another. When I wrote “Saving Tiamaat,” my vague idea that I’d like to write a novel-length (new) Space Opera had become a firm intention, so this isn’t only a drama about a moral dilemma at a peace conference —and the mistake we still make (though we should know better!) when we assume that a woman will be nicer, more all-round civilized than a man. It’s also a sketch for “Speranza,” my interplanetary capital, the latest incarnation of a long-gone seedy space station called The Panhandle — the public architecture, the vast bureaucracy, the staffers’ breakfast bars; and the secret, ruthless shadow-self that every Utopian State conceals.

Physically (er, given that it’s inside a hollowed asteroid), Speranza is modeled on the EU glass and concrete hives of Strasbourg and Bruxelles: please substitute the majestic, allegedly good-willed super-government behemoth of your choice.

"The Voyage Out"

If the Buonarotti stories followed a fixed chronology (which they don’t, I never thought about it), “The Voyage Out” would come soon after “The Fulcrum.” The Panhandle has become a deep space Remand Center, where condemned prisoners wait to be transported to the unknown shore where they’ll serve life sentences. They don’t know if the Landfall planet even exists: maybe when they lie down in those couches they simply get vaporized; but they soon discover that the Buonarotti Torus, where the barrier between mind and matter is broken, makes spooky company. . .

When I wrote “Voyage” for Lynne Jamneck’s Periphery collection (it’s an anthology of Lesbian sf erotica), I'd been reading L.Timmel Duchamp's Alanya to Alanya. I think "Ruth Norman" is sideways-related to Timmi's "Kay Zeldin," a high-powered elite-academic in a similarly lawless yet oppressive future. A woman who has starved herself of pleasure so that she can live a life of principle; who has beaten herself up repeatedly, to keep her career (as a political activist, in this case) intact, but who has all kinds of longings and untapped potential. The secret life of nightdresses is a very ancient fantasy of mine, to do with a fairytale about some princesses who used to sneak out of bed at night and go dancing in fairyland. I used to spend a fair amount of time ill-in-bed when I was a little girl, and was devoted to my nightclothes. Much nicer than the clothes I had to wear in the waking world, where it was school uniform and other depressing outfits. The original Hilde was a girl at school with me, who had frizzy cinnamon braids and a beautiful smile. I always liked the look of her, but I never said anything, she was sporty, it was hopeless. I don't think I need to explain the Gruffaloes.

"The Tomb Wife"

Here’s the rationale, a C21 variation on a venerable sf trope: the material universe, in the final analysis, cannot be logically distinguished from the perceptions of the observer, the maps of firing neurons that light up when you see the stars or think about string theory. We can manipulate one of these sets of information, pretty much without limit: why not the other? Once you’ve broken the barrier between mind and matter (for instance using the Buonarotti method; there are more dangerous ways, outlined in a series called Bold As Love, but they’ve been outlawed) you can do just about anything. If you know the 4-space coordinates of your destination you can simply arrive there, by an act of will, and your informational self will take material form from the ambient chemistry it finds —not merely your body, but your survival gear; or even large hunks of ancient masonry, if you’ve had the proper neuro-training.

The catch is that what really happens is an equation of staggering complexity, a huge volume of information space resolved into a new pattern. Conscious travelers, (and some of the party must be conscious, or nobody’s going anywhere) experience this complexity as an intense, disturbing dream. In White Queen, Buonarotti’s lab rats didn’t know about this effect, which proved to be a bit of a nightmare. In “The Tomb Wife,” the last story I wrote before the new novel, the perils of non-duration travel have been tamed, to an extent. There’s a consensus reality (we’re on a starship). There’s a navigator, who knows exactly what she’s doing. But things can still go wrong.

There are genre stories that are only genre because a strand of the arbitrarily strange has been threaded into the everyday world. “The Tomb Wife,” on the other hand, is a sci-fi tale with added strangeness.

CFP: Race and Ethnicity in Fandom

Special issue: Race and Ethnicity in Fandom (Summer 2011)

Transformative Works and Cultures
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/
editor AT transformativeworks.org

SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS:

Sarah Gatson, Sociology, Texas A&M University, http://sociweb.tamu.edu/faculty.php?faculty_id=12
Gatson@tamu.edu

Robin Reid,  Literature and Languages, Texas A&M University-Commerce, http://www.tamu-commerce.edu/litlang/reid.asp?menuName=people&pageName=faculty Robin_Reid@tamu-commerce.edu


DESCRIPTION

Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC), an online-only, peer-reviewed journal focusing on media and fan studies, broadly conceived, invites contributions for a special issue on race and ethnicity to be published in summer 2011.

Academic scholarship on fan cultures and fan productions over the past few decades has focused primarily on gender as the sole category of analysis. There has been little published scholarship on fan cultures and productions that incorporates critical race theory or draws on the rich array of methodologies that have been developed during the past century in both activist and academic communities in order to incorporate analysis of the social constructions of race and ethnicities in fandoms.

In contrast, fan activism and fan scholarship (at cons, workshops, and on the Internet) has produced a growing body of work (personal narratives, essays, carnivals, and in recent months, a press) focusing on not only analyzing but also confronting hierarchies of race and
ethnicity and their relationship to gender, sexuality, class, and disability. Submissions by academics, acafans, fan scholars, and fans are encouraged. In all categories, people of color are especially encouraged to submit.

Topics might include but are not limited to:

*Online activism and the circulation of critical race theory and women of color feminisms in fan communities, in particular the relationship between fan online discourse and other online activist communities.

*Critical analysis of the instantiation and critique of racial hierarchies in fan communities and the surrounding cultural productions.

*Racist and antiracist issues in commercial transformative works (comics, film, mashups, remixes, machinima, etc.), especially recuperative race readings (e.g., Randall's The Wind Done Gone, Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea).

*Race concerns in source texts (characters of color and their fannish reception, fandoms for work by authors of color, writing fannish original characters, etc.) and fannish responses (such as the Carl Brandon Society, Verb Noire, and other panfannish and professional
projects).

*Intersection of race and ethnicity with gender, sexuality, class, and ability in fannish contexts in fan works and fan communities (pre-Internet, Internet, conventions, vids, fan fiction, artwork, etc.).

SUBMISSIONS

Submit final papers directly to TWC by October 1, 2010. Please visit TWC's Web site (http://journal.transformativeworks.org/) for complete submission guidelines. Please contact the guest editors with questions or inquiries.

ARTICLE TYPES

Theory: Apply a conceptual focus or theoretical frame. Peer review. 5,000-8,000 words.

Praxis: Apply a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicate fan practice; perform a detailed reading of a specific text; relate transformative phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks. Peer review. 4,000-7,000 words.

Symposium: Provide insight into developments or debates surrounding fandom, transformative media, or cultures. Editorial review. 1,500-2,500 words.

"R.A.Lafferty...collaborating with Harlan Ellison"

Don D'Ammassa has posted a review of Rebecca Ore's Centuries Ago and Very Fast at Critical Mass:

I was struggling to think of something to which I could compare this slim but well written collection of very odd, related stories, and the closest I could come was R.A. Lafferty, although only if he was collaborating with Harlan Ellison. The common character is an immortal who was born in prehistory and is still around in the modern world. He has a series of encounters with typical and atypical characters, including rebellious college students, a drag queen, and others. The tone of the stories is a balancing act between the serious and the comic. One of the most difficult books to describe I’ve read recently, this should appeal to fans of literary SF, satire, and nifty prose, and it is almost certainly not going to be what you’re expecting. 4/22/09