Hugo Voting on the Cheap

This post was written by Cheryl Morgan as part of the ongoing series about men-only short lists at the Hugo Awards. It’s full of excellent positive ideas about how we can change the men-only lists – for this year and for always! – and I hope people will comment with other ideas about nominating more women for the Hugo Awards. (I’ll post a follow-up when the short-lists go public.)

If you want to argue about whether this is worth doing, or about the Joanna Russ Amendment from last year’s Worldcon, I suggest you do so on one of the other posts on this topic, rather than take up discussion space on this one.

Guest post by Cheryl Morgan

It is another year, and Hugo nominations are once again open. What’s the betting that come April when the nominee lists are announced most of the people listed will be men?

Yes, I thought so. And the only way that’s going to change is if more women get involved in the process. But it costs money to participate in the Hugo process, and that’s a definite barrier. One of the many ways in which women are disadvantaged is that they are poorly paid, even for the same work, so an economic barrier will act against us. Therefore it is important to know how to participate cheaply.

Let start with some good news. Firstly, you do not have to go to Australia. Worldcon might be in Melbourne this year, but you don’t need to fork out for an attending membership, plane fares and hotels in order to vote in the Hugos. A simple “Supporting Membership” will suffice, and that only costs $50 (and may be cheaper in other currencies, depending on current exchange rates). [£31 in UK]

But, if you had a membership in last year’s Worldcon in Montréal then you already have nominating rights for Melbourne. You don’t have to pay anything more to nominate this year.

In case you are confused by that, here’s a bit more detail.
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“Just call me James”

Yesterday, James Chartrand, the founder of MenWithPens, came out: Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants:

Using a male pseudonym when you’re a woman isn’t anything new. Writers have been doing it for centuries. George Eliot, George Sand, Isak Dinesen. Even the Brontë sisters, championed today, wrote as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell back in their time.

Why did they do it? To have their work accepted, because women weren’t supposed to be writers. Their work had a much better chance if their audience didn’t have to get over initial skepticism that a woman could write at all, much less do it well.

Since then, we’ve had feminism. We have the right to vote, to own property, to be members of Parliament and Congress, to get a job, and to be the main breadwinner of the family. And yet apparently we haven’t gotten past those 19th century stigmas.

The evidence was right there in front of me.

When James Chartrand wrote under her own name, she “struggled to get gigs — there was tough competition from more experienced hustlers. When I did manage to grab a job before someone else could, I worked hard and wrote well. I wanted to do my best. I earned $1.50 an article. I averaged $8 a week. I was treated like crap, too. Bossed around, degraded, condescended to, with jibes made about my having to work from home. I quickly learned not to mention I had kids. I quickly learned not to mention I worked from my kitchen table.” When she changed her name to James Chartrand, “Instantly, jobs became easier to get. There was no haggling. There were compliments, there was respect. Clients hired me quickly, and when they received their work, they liked it just as quickly. There were fewer requests for revisions — often none at all. Customer satisfaction shot through the roof. So did my pay rate.”

As Kate Harding on Salon notes (and many others round the blogosphere today) it’s not a shock so much as a sobering reminder of what happens when you write like a woman.

I’d been meaning to do a statistics-laden follow-up to my posts on the Joanna Russ Amendment (Late Business at the Hugo Awards), and been putting off writing it because I didn’t have time (seriously: I got back from Canada and fell into work, and the only reason I have time to post this now is because I am off work with a cold).

The statistics I wanted to gather had to do with the number of people who nominate writers and novels for Hugo Awards: to confirm the point that many people have made, that shortlists for the Hugos – the top six, the top fifteen – are voted into existance by a very small number of people.

Adrienne Martini suggests that “The solution is to get more women involved with fandom so that they are invested in voting for the award” but this seems to me to be as misguided as her apparent belief that if Ursula K. LeGuin had won a Hugo for “The Royals of Hegn”, this would have been a “pity Hugo”, awarded to LeGuin because women writers “can only succeed if the rules are changed”. (“The Royals of Hegn” would have been added to the short-story Hugo shortlist under the Joanna Russ Amendment rules in 2001.)

I have been involved in fandom since I was 16 – for over a quarter of a century. I’ve been to four Worldcons (though at the first one I didn’t hold a voting membership). Two in Glasgow, easy to commit to buying a membership since I could get there and back each day if I had to: and of course Anticipation in Montreal, an expensive holiday but a fun one. Not one I could afford to take every year, even if I were willing to travel to the US any more. I am involved in fandom: but voting for the Hugos would be far too expensive to commit to every year, and rule changes to make voting for the Hugos less expensive can only happen if a majority of regular Worldcon attendees agree that they want to let people vote for the Hugos who won’t be coming to the Worldcon. (The WSFS rules can only be successfully amended by majority vote at two WSFS business meetings in succession, and proxy votes are not permitted: therefore, you cannot hope to make a change in WSFS rules unless you are able to attend – not just buy a membership, but physically attend – on a regular basis. I watched as elderly regulars argued against and voted down rule-changes requiring Worldcons to make it easier for parents to attend Worldcon with their families, or young people to buy cheaper memberships, and formed the pretty strong conviction that most regular attenders at Worldcons do not want anything about their Worldcon to change.)

In order to nominate in the Hugo awards, two conditions apply: one must be (or have been) a Worldcon member before February for that Hugo year; and one must be able to buy or borrow enough newly-published SFF fiction to be able to nominate. This year, the first condition applies to me: the second doesn’t, though I do plan to try to read enough to be able to fill in a nomination form (given the wasps-nest I stirred up, that seems only fair). Voting for the Hugos on a regular basis is something you can only do if you live in North America and are at least well-off enough to buy new science-fiction and take your annual holiday every year at Worldcon time – or if you are much more well-off and can afford to take an annual holiday in North America most years (in which case, you can probably also afford to buy plenty of new SF…) It’s not a game for the poor, and women tend to be much less well-off than men, and much less likely to think they can spend what money they have on their own pleasures.

I got a lot of flack from various sources for proposing the Joanna Russ Amendment. I will admit here that while it would certainly have been fun if it had passed, the best I hoped for it ever was to get through to the Saturday business meeting and have discussion time there – I was not altogether surprised, however, when it got shot down without discussion at the end of Friday’s business meeting. What I wanted was to get people talking about all-male shortlists, about why every year for the past ten years at least there has never been a Hugo that was free of all-male shortlists: SF writers who write under women’s names are systematically ignored and devalued. It’s the James effect: it doesn’t take much.

When I thought about it, I realised that I should never have expected many woman writers who might someday get onto a Hugo shortlist to speak up in support of the principle. (And indeed, Cheryl Morgan, who won a Best Fan Writer Hugo in 2009, was the only one who did – though her strong support and help was worth a thousand: thanks again.)

For professional writers, winning a Hugo is to a certain extent an advantageous award. (Well, primarily, it keeps your book in print for longer, according to what I’ve been told.) To go out of your way to offend the small group of fans who nominate writers for this Hugo and that, by pointing out their sexist bias is responsible for all-male shortlists and means better writers are ignored and devalued because of their gender, would be professionally disadvantageous… to say the least. Add the James effect on – that these fans are not inclined to pick women writers – and the best response to the Joanna Russ Amendment for a professional woman writer would be outrage and open anger – how dare I suggest that the voting pool is biased, that the reason so few women writers are nominated is because the fans who do the nominating are subject to the James effect?

Well, I am not a professional writer. I write fanfic, and – as I noted on another panel at the Worldcon – one of the chief advantages of being a fanfic writer is that you have absolutely no standards to live up to: you can take whatever literary risks you want, because everyone with any literary standards whatsoever has already judged your writing as worthless. And I am not a Worldcon regular: I have nothing to lose by proposing the Joanna Russ Amendment – or by suggesting that if there’s another set of all-male shortlists, someone else should bring that pesky apple to the next WSFS business meeting and throw it at that wasp’s nest.

Because we need to break the institutionalised concept that so long as men succeed, the rules don’t need to change. And that’s a nasty, backhanded message.

Nomimations for this year’s Hugo Awards should open in early 2010. Are we going to see another year of “Just Call Me James” shortlists?

Happy Birthday, Ursula K. Le Guin

Today, Ursula K. Le Guin celebrates her 80th birthday. Her wonderful stories have immensely widened my political outlook and inspired my commitment to social change. Here’s to many more birthdays!

Birthday Celebration Links:
Happy Birthday, Ursula! – Ambling Along the Aqueduct
Happy Birthday Ursula K. Le Guin – SFWA
гардеробиHappy birthday to Ursula le Guin – The F Word
21st October is Ursula Le Guin’s Birthday – Aliette de Bodard
Notes from the Labyrinth
Isn’t that “Le WIN”? – Geek Feminism Blog (also compiling links)
Happy Birthday, Ursula! – Victoria Janssen
Ursula Le Guin – Nerves Strengthened with Tea

As new blog posts show up, please post in the comments and I’ll edit and add them.

Anarchism & Science Fiction Panel in Seattle

For those of you in the Seattle area, you might be interested in a panel I’m moderating at the Seattle Anarchist Bookfair on anarchism and science fiction.

This panel, presented by Common Action, will consist of local anarchist fans, writers, and scholars of science fiction. The panel will discuss major works of anarchist and leftist science fiction, and anarchist themes in science fiction; i.e. anarchist utopias and dystopias, class struggle, radical social movements and revolutions in sci-fi. We will also explore the intersection of feminist, anti-racist and Marxist science fiction with anarchist sci-fi. We will discuss the dynamics of anarchists in sci-fi fandom, and sci-fi fans in the anarchist movement. The panel will also cover the relationship between social movements and sci-fi’s representations of the future, and the transformative power of speculative literature.

Panelists: L. Timmel Duchamp, Eileen Gunn, Kristin King, Saab Lofton, Nisi Shawl, Ariel Wetzel

This panel is this Sunday (October 18) at 11 am, but the bookfair will be going on all day on Saturday and Sunday.

Underground Events Center
2407 1st Ave
(between Battery St & Wall St)
Seattle, WA 98121

Free and All Ages

Star Nonviolent Civil Disobedience

I love it when science fiction is linked to real life radical social movements. When I saw Derrick Jensen speak a few years ago at my university, I loved his retelling of Star Wars to critique of reform-centered environmentalism. Now filmmaker Franklin López, who plays the anarcho-cyborg Stimulator on the popular web show It’s the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel Fine, has translated Jensen’s memorable talk into video.

True Blood, Jocks, and Consent

(This post contains mild spoilers for the HBO vampire series, True Blood.)

The most recent episode of True Blood, “Frenzy,” had a feminist reminder coming from a jock of all people. In this episode, the second to last of season two, the town-folk of fictional Louisiana town of Bon Temps are brain-washed/possessed by maenad Maryanne and run around partying, having outdoor orgies, and eating human hearts. Police dispatcher Rosie hits on Jason Stackhouse, a promiscuous jock whose sexual escapades frequently get him in trouble, when Jason tries to break into the police station to arm himself and fight his possessed neighbors. He plays along enough to tie Rosie up so she can’t sound the alarm until he tells her, “Rosie, I ain’t never taken advantage of someone while she was fucked up.”

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Orson Scott Card, meet Alan Turing

Reading various discussions and justifications online about whether or not to boycott Shadow Complex – a new game which is written as a prequel to Empire, Orson Scott Card’s novel/game about a liberal conspiracy taking over the US – brought this to mind again. There’s a thoughtful article by Christian Nutt in Gamasutra: The Complex Question and another by SurplusGamer in Destructoid – both defending the principle of a boycott, whether or not you take part.

Peter David, the writer of Shadow Complex, takes the rather disappointing position that (Kotaku) “If anyone wants to boycott the game and thus damage me or Chair while doing nothing to change Orson’s opinions, that’s naturally their right. Or…They can display the sort of tolerance for someone who is different from them that they feel is lacking in Orson and thus prove they’re better. Your choice.”

Orson Scott Card was born on 24th August, 1951, six years after Alan Turing had received an OBE from the British Government for his services to the Foreign Office during WWII. Those “services” at that time remained unspecified: we know now that Turing had been working at Bletchley, building a computer out of stone knives and bearskins that could crack the German codes of the Enigma machine. He called his computer the Bombe.

In his lifetime, Alan Turing visited the US twice, two years at Princeton University (1936-38), and a stay of five months over nine years before OSC was born: November 1942 to March 1943. Before he went to Princeton, he published a paper famous now in computer science: “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in which he outlined the concept of a Turing Machine. The Universal Turing Machine was, in concept, a programmable computer. Like Ada Lovelace before him, Alan Turing could conceive of computer programs before technology was sufficiently advanced to build the machine that could run them.

In 1942-43, Turing worked with U.S. Navy cryptanalysts on Naval Enigma and Bombe construction in Washington DC. Alan Turing was probably more responsible for the Allied victory in WWII than Winston Churchill: as Churchill himself would have agreed, if he hadn’t been there, someone else would have stood up: but there was only ever one Alan Turing. (He enjoyed long-distance running, and apparently used to frequently avoid the wartime transport difficulties by running the 40 miles between Bletchley and London when summoned there for an important meeting.)

The paper which was to make Turing posthumously famous far outside his particular fields of mathematics, logic, and cryptology was published in Mind, in 1950, Computing Machinery and Intelligence: in it he proposes what was to become known as the Turing Test. He wrote a computer program to play chess, before there was a computer built on which that piece of software could be run. He invented the concept of storing a program in a computer, long before anyone built such computers. He was the founder of computer science. He is acknowledged and honoured by the annual presentation of the Turing Award to the person responsible for the greatest innovation in computer science.

“Jane”, the AI software that becomes sentient, in Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide, is Orson Scott Card’s clearest literary debt to Turing: though there is another fictional character whom Card dealt with very similiarly to Turing. Anssett, the former Songbird, who is chemically castrated in Songmaster as a consequence of having a sexual relationship with another man.

In November 1951, Turing had finished his first long paper in mathematical biology. In December, Alan Turing picked up a young man, invited him home for sex, met him a couple of times more, and then the young man broke into Turing’s house with a couple of friends and robbed him. In the course of their investigations into the burglary, the police established that the young man and Turing had had sex, and Turing (who kept his notes on the case in card folder labelled “Burglary and Buggery”) found himself on trial for homosexuality. He was convicted – he was unquestionably guilty of the crime! – and lost his security clearance, so he could no longer work on government cryptanalysis; he was given the choice of jail or chemical castration, and chose castration.

This was all in accordance with the principles which Orson Scott Card advocated in 1990 (and has since, consistently, defended) – principles which he explicitly says should be applied to “the polity, the citizens at large”:

Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.

The goal of the polity is not to put homosexuals in jail. The goal is to discourage people from engaging in homosexual practices in the first place, and, when they nevertheless proceed in their homosexual behavior, to encourage them to do so discreetly, so as not to shake the confidence of the community in the polity’s ability to provide rules for safe, stable, dependable marriage and family relationships. The Hypocrites of Homosexuality

Just as Card advocates, Turing did not go to jail: he was nonetheless sent a clear message that he could not be permitted to remain an acceptable, equal citizen of British society. He had flagrantly violated society’s regulation of sexual behaviour – and the penalty was one which Orson Scott Card could have written of with relish.

Alan Turing was born in 1912: it’s possible he could be alive today, aged 97. In 1953 he was writing what biographer Alan Hodges describes as a “sudden explosion of ideas about the fundamental physics of quantum mechanics and relativity”. But he’d lost so much: he’d lost what Orson Scott Card proposed a man like Alan Turing should lose – the right to be regarded as an acceptable, equal citizen. His friends at Cambridge spoke for him in court and stood by him until death: but he lost his job, he was subjected to routine harassment by the police, and – a known side-effect of the hormones used to castrate him – he had grown breasts. On 7th June 1954, he ate a cyanide-laced apple, and he died.

In the video linked to here (Alan Turing’s death) his friends discuss the motivation for his suicide and all assert that it couldn’t possibly have been the hormone castration or the police harassment, because he was always so witty and amused about that, never seemed troubled at all.

I first heard of Alan Turing in my high school biology class, when I was 14, and the teacher was talking to us about what was life and what was sentient life and how could you tell: I first played with an AI program (as a joke – it used BASIC arrays and BASIC’s not-very-random numbers – worked to fool teenage boy-nerds, but that’s an easy game) when I was 19. I was a computer science nerd: I knew what I owed to Alan Mathison Turing.

There is a petition now active on the Prime Minister’s website, that will remain live till 20th January 2010: if you’re a UK citizen, you can sign it here. The petition asks for a formal apology to Alan Turing – an acknowledgement, by the government, of their wrong-doing towards him, and recognition of the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended Turing’s life.

I have never been sure how Orson Scott Card justifies his homophobia to himself: I know he loathes being identified as a homophobe, because he would rather think of himself as a normal person with a normal distaste for and hatred of gay men who normally wants gay men to be kept in the closet, and chemically castrated or otherwise punished if they fail to keep themselves out of sight. Peter David feels we should show tolerance towards Card for being “different” from us: though that is not what Card himself advocates. I’m not in a position to say one way or another about a boycott of a game I wouldn’t buy – I’m not a gamer.

The Alan Turing Year, 2012, will be a celebration of the life and scientific influence of Alan Turing on the occasion of the centenary of his birth on 23rd June 1912. He never got to be 42. Orson Scott Card, whose writing career was made by computers both real and fictional, shared a planet with Turing for less than 3 years.

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Update: 9th September. The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has released a statement in response to the petition: “So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.”

Fandom to researchers: We are not your lab rats

The problem people have who decide to “study fandom”, if they do not do sufficient prior research, is that they frequently underestimate fannish intelligence.

A pair of “cognitive neuroscientists”, ink barely wet on their PhDs, decide that online slash fandom is the perfect place to run an untested, untried, unreviewed survey to get material for a book deal for Dutton (a subsidiary of Penguin) about “how the Internet reveals new insights into some of the oldest circuits in our brain which control romantic attraction and sexual behavior”. [Update: this thread discusses in some detail the serious ethical issues raised by the way in which Drs Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam are conducting their research.] They launch the survey three days ago (29th August) after about a month’s prep work (apparently the book contract was signed in August), and…

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I, Zombie With Disabilities

An unusually tall, strong young girl with no name grew up miserable in an institution, and tried to kill herself. She wakes up, not quite dead, smarter and with a zombie-worker pack installed in her brain, piled in a stack of other corpses in the hold of a spaceship.

On a freezing cold mining planet she lives in the zombie barracks pretending to obey the remote control helmets of the overseers while sabotaging the factory and stealing stuff to feed the ooppressed and almost extinct frog aliens who have psychic powers.

Meanwhile, she talks to and cares for her fellow zombies very tenderly, interpreting their personalities and their lives and histories, protecting them and helping them resist the pointlessly sadistic bosses. The zombies are a diverse crew and she cares for them whether they’re repulsive and rotting or whether or not she likes them. As she analyzes the situation she’s in as an oppressed worker she compares the misery of the lives and deaths of her fellow zombies to their state now in a fairly radical way. I get the impression she was in the institution or asylum because she had Downs or some other mental challenge, but she doesn’t go into any big exposition there – it’s all contained in scattered throwaway statements about how people didn’t listen to her before because she was stupid and now because she’s a zombie, they don’t even notice that she’s not really dead like the others.

She also notices the messed up things happening between the bosses with power and gender – for example Bates, the boss who’s the nicest to the zombies, is constantly sexually harassed by Peterkin, who’s kind of evil. Peterkin notices something’s weird about this latest batch of zombies. He starts to kill them off. Zombie fight scenes with crowbars! People sizzling into giant vats of molten metal! Full of awesome!

The big strong compassionate witty zombie girl helps the frog aliens steal an enormous engine or mini-nuclear-reactor from a warehouse so that they can start to melt the ice and grow their crops. Yay!

The book is usually marked as by Curt Selby but that’s the pen name of Doris Piserchia, one of my favorite oddball 70s feminist SF writers!

I liked this book when I last read it, but it’s even better now when I read it with more of a feminist marxist eye and some disability rights and human rights consciousness.

August Short Stories by Women

Here are all of the sf/f/h short stories published by women in August that I’m aware of:

• Charms by Shweta Narayan in Strange Horizons
• Chimera by Justine Graykin in The Absent Willow Review
• Uncategorized by Sue Lange in BookViewCafe.com (reprint)
• Bound to Dance by Thea Hutcheson in Lucrezia Magazine
• Wingspan by Aliya Whiteley in The Future Fire
• Cancer God by Barbara Krasnoff in Space and Time
• In the Gingerbread House by Barbara Krasnoff in Electric Velocipede, Issue 17/18
• There Are No Great Truths Here by D.T. Friedman in Flash Fiction Online
• Brahma’s Missle by Kimberley Long-Ewing in Crossed Genres, Issue 9
• Traveling by Petroglyph by Ripley Patton in Flash Me Magazine (reprint)
• The Moth Collector’s Daughter by Ripley Patton in Reflection’s Edge
• The Consciousness Problem by Mary Robinette Kowal in Asimov’s
• First Flight by Mary Robinette Kowal at Tor.com

If I missed a story, please post it in the comments. You can also add any stories published in 2009 to our wiki. To get your story on this monthly list, simply fill out the form found here. Editors and readers are also encouraged to submit data.

Late Business at the Hugo Awards

The Hugo Awards are intended to be (according to their own website) “awards for excellence in the field of science fiction and fantasy” run by and voted on by members of the World Science-Fiction Society: that is, everyone who bought a voting membership in the previous and/or current year’s Worldcon.

Voting for the Hugos is formally restricted to a fairly limited group of people – you must have bought your voting membership before the voting deadline passes, some weeks before the date of the Worldcon itself, though you can then use your voting membership to vote again in next year’s Hugos. The cheapest place and time to buy a Worldcon membership is generally at the Worldcon two years earlier, after the winning site is decided on.

(I have never gone to a Hugo award ceremony. The time I came nearest to it was at the Worldcon in Glasgow, 2005, when I wandered past the gopher hole and was told that the ceremony needed more gophers, did I want to volunteer for a few more hours? Sure, I said – only it turned out that the reason they were short of gophers was that they were requiring all volunteers for the Hugo Ceremony to be dressed in “smart, not casual” clothing, and as I had packed jeans and t-shirts only, I wasn’t eligible to volunteer, so I shrugged and left them to their self-created volunteer problems. I mentioned this to Charlie Stross, and got the darkly bearded LOOK of a a Hugo nominee: “They ARE a black-tie event, you know,” he said. I have to admit, this did not impell me with enthusiasm for going to one, unless I ever got nominated in a new category for Most Annoying Fan in a year when the Worldcon was being held in the UK.)

Need I say? I’d never gone to a Worldcon Business Meeting, either. Continue reading »

Mindblowing SF Lists

The other day I asked folks to name me some mindblowing sf stories, novels and authors in response to this silliness here. As I expected, you came through, as did a bunch of other people over on this post asking for mindblowing sf by women. I collated all of the data and came up with these massive lists of mindblowing SF. Thank you for all of your help :)

There were a couple of reasons why I posted it on Tor.com instead of here or The Angry Black Woman. One, I can always link to them, and that’s important and useful, too. Two, I wanted these lists to exist on a mainstream site that wasn’t particularly about race or gender activism but instead about science fiction and fantasy in general. Because I want people who stumble across or seek out those lists to see that these are not just the concerns of women and POC, but concerns of the entire community. Some folks need a reminder of such.

I’m really grateful to everyone who commented because you introduced me to some authors and fiction I hadn’t heard of or previously considered. I hope it spurs others to read some new stuff as well.

Another reason I’m grateful is that, when arguments about representation happen, often times we’re asked to give long lists of authors and stories the editor/reader/whoever should read or pay attention to or whatever. Just going off the top of my head I can often give them a few, but a big huge list is usually beyond me. I do not know of every author, every piece of fiction. When we’re confronted by people who claim that there just aren’t very many outstanding women or POC writers in the field, we can point to this and say: bullshit, bucko. Try again.

We have to be responsible for keeping track of and highlighting and celebrating and giving notice to our own and recording the accomplishments of our best. Because no one else is going to do it for us. If they’re not ignoring, they’re actively suppressing. Neither of which is acceptable.

Make lists, write reviews, pass on books, stories, and authors you love. Be heard.

(x-posted to ABW)

Mindblowing Science Fiction by Women

In case you’re not up on the latest instance of gender fail in the SF community, let me give you a short summary. SFSignal posted the table of contents for a book titled The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF edited by Mike Ashley. Quickly, people cottoned to the fact that there were no women in it. I commented that, alongside, there also did not appear to be any people of color.

Folks reacted to this along predictable lines, with many chiming in to say how annoying and stupid this was and a few cluelessly wondering what the fuss was about — because surely what gender or race an author is has nothing to do with how good the stories are. (I know, I know.) It got particularly heinous (yet hilarious) when anthology author Paul Di Filippo showed up and Di Filipped out, comparing having women and people of color in the anthology to pieces of lettuce shoved in with copy paper. Oh yes. I made a few posts about this issue, including one specifically taking Paul’s points apart and one asking Mike Ashley to please explain why there are only white authors, since he had been so kind as to explain why there were no women.

Actually, that last bit is part of the point of this post. here’s what he said:

In assembling this anthology (and EXTREME SF) the emphasis was on stories that took unusual scientific concepts and developed them in even more unusual ways. When I checked out stories for these books I just picked stories that worked for me. I didn’t even always check out the by-line. In fact I was a bit surprised that as the list of likely contents grew that I didn’t have anything by women.

That probably has something to do with my concept of “mind-blowing”. Women are every bit as capable of writing mindblowing sf as men are, but with women the stories concentrate far more on people, life, society and not the hard-scientific concepts I was looking for.

Maybe, in retrospect, I should’ve looked harder, but I didn’t want to include women writers on a purely token basis. I did in fact contact a couple of women writers early on hoping they could contribute new stories, but one didn’t respond and for the other, the timescale for compiling the anthology proved too tight, which was a shame.

I’ll let that sink in for a bit.

Over on my blog we’re creating a list of Mindblowing SF by people of color. Over here I’d like to create a list by women. In comments, please list authors or stories or novels you would include in a list of mindblowing science fiction. If you’d like to include a bit on why you feel these choices are mindblowing, feel free. There is no restriction on time period, both modern and decades long past authors and fiction are desired. If someone has already mentioned an author, story, or book you were going to, co-sign.

SF/F/H Short Fiction by Women

Last month on the Carl Brandon Society blog I started listing short fiction written by authors of color month by month. I’d wanted to do a project like this for a long time because we’d done it on the SF Bookswap blog. However, the bookswap is on hiatus at the moment and we haven’t updated the short fiction lists in months and months. There are many reasons for this, and the big one is time and people power. (Going through every magazine every month looking for female authors takes a while and folks have jobs!)

Due to the difficulty in determining which authors are POC based on name alone, I decided that the best way to gather the data there was to have the authors and editors deliver the data to me. That way I would not have to guess and leave people out accidentally. Then the other day it struck me that I could do the same for women writers as well.

So now I’ve created this handy form that writers, editors or readers can fill out to alert me of short fiction published or upcoming. At the end of every month I will gather this data and list stories currently available both online and in print.

These lists will help us gather data for the FeministSF wiki as well. If you had a story published earlier this year, head over there and add it.

Recommended reading

The people and their cultures: POC and the movies, by unusualmusic, blogging at the Angry Black Woman blog. (Hat tip to delux_vivens at deadbrowalking for the link.)