Support Writers Writing

All this week I’ve been asking people to sponsor me for the Clarion West Write-a-thon (apologies if this is the second or third time seeing something about it). I’m casting the net wide because my fundraising goal is high for me: $1500 in pledged donations. Considering I got $1000 within the first 24 hours I am very confident I can reach this goal as long as I keep spreading the word about it.

You can learn about my writing goals, Clarion West, The Butler Scholarship (which I’m also raising money for), and details on sponsoring me here. Instead of going into that, I want to talk a bit about why workshops like Clarion West are important to the stuff we talk about here all the time.

Quick info for those who don’t know: Clarion West is a 6 week intensive writing workshop for people who are looking to be professional authors. Every week the students have the chance to meet and have their work critiqued by a professional writer or editor as well as the other 16 – 18 students in the class. There are other similar workshops around, including the original Clarion, now housed in San Diego, and Clarion South in Queensland, Australia.

I know for sure that the people who run Clarion West very much want to ensure a diverse mix of students and instructors. Students are chosen based on merit alone, but the administrators do what they can to get a good mix of applicants which then leads to a good mix of eventual acceptances. My class was about even in terms of women and men, included about 25% POC and three students from overseas. We also had a wide range of ages, class and social backgrounds, and genre interests.

Getting my stories read by the likes of Nancy Kress, China Mieville and Samuel R. Delany (just to name three) was pretty fucking awesome, but I also benefited a great deal from the views of my fellow students on all of the stories.  There were times of intense frustration and even a moment of RaceFail, all of which was instructive to me and, I’m sure, most of the others.

Learning to be a better writer is about more than just being better at putting sentences together or including all five senses when describing things (Nancy is right, a lot of people forget smell!). There’s a lot to be gained from meeting people you might never have encountered and getting exposed to points of view you may never have considered.

This is the reason why I support Clarion West and raise money for them every year.

I would love it if you sponsored me in the write-a-thon, but I’m not the only one doing this. Last year over 50 writers participated and this year they’re hoping to get 75. Check out this page for a list of writers currently signed up and check back again in a week, there are likely to be many more. Most of the writers are Clarion West alums — note how many women you see on the page.

Nisi Shawl interviewed by Eileen Gunn

Nisi Shawl interviewed by Eileen Gunn. This is a great interview! Thanks for the link, Tempest!

Nisi mentions a book in progress, “The Heroine’s Journey”, which I hope gets finished and published someday! And her next novel, which, well… let me just quote, because it sounds great:

It’s science fiction. There are these two clones made by the same woman. She keeps clones as pets. One of them is much older than the other and had escaped from the original woman long ago, before the book begins. The older clone leads an expedition to rescue the newer one. Set about 300 years in the future.

Nisi also mentions feminist sf as an inspiration. I agree with her it is high time to start up some more activity on the “retrospective Tiptree” front and Octavia Butler should be right up there as a candidate.

Well, the Tiptree Award itself is of course hugely significant to me. Just about everyone I try to emulate in my writing has won it. Feminist SF is what gave me the idea that I could write; Russ and Charnas in particular. I distinctly remember thinking, “Wow, you can get away with doing stuff like that – and get paid for it!”

But also significant is my place as the first black Tiptree winner. I was pretty much astounded when I realized that that was what I was. I couldn’t believe it — I got sort of a double helping of astonishment, because I was astonished that I’d won in the first place, and then in the second place that I was the first black to win. I mean, in a way it’s great. It’s like I’m Arthur Ashe or Thurgood Marshall or something. But in another way, come on. Isn’t it kind of late in the recorded history of the world for someone to be the first black anything? Or, no, I guess not. Maybe Barack Obama is a better comparison. First black U.S. President, just this year.

Still, it bothered me that I would be the first black Tiptree recipient. I did a lot of investigation into that. I thought for sure Nalo Hopkinson must have won. Her work explores gender in all sorts of cool ways. But I looked it up, and nope. Her novel Midnight Robber made the Short List in 2000, along with her fabulous short story “The Glass Bottle Trick.” And “Once on the Shores of the Stream Senegambia” by Pamela Mordecai, published in an anthology Nalo edited, made the Short List that same year. Nalo’s first novel, Brown Girl In the Ring, made the Short List in 1998. Which was also the year Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents appeared there.

Other black women’s work has been noticed by Tiptree juries: Nnedi Okorafor’s Shadow Speaker was on the Tiptree Honor List for 2007; Mindscape by Andrea Hairston was on there for 2006; Writing the Other made the Long List for 2005. So, recently there have been many black honorees. But Filter House is the first out-and-out winner.

our abortion-free future (in SF) (bibliography)

laura is angry and thinks of SF.

Feminist SF and social SF more broadly offer us the opportunity to consider what the brave new “pro-life” future might look like.

A few stories to consider reading, with links to more information on Abortion in SF on the FSFwiki:
* Misconceiver by Lucy Ferriss
* The Rising of the Moon by Flynn Connolly
* “Miscarriage of Justice” by Robert J. Howe

And of course, the unforgettable “Morality Meat” by Raccoona Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.).

Also consider stories on birth control in SF; for instance, Bruce Sterling’s “Are You For 86?”.

These are just a few of the ones listed in the wiki, and I’m sure there are plenty more — I’d love to hear of them.

What is a writer’s job?

Reality is fractal. Art is communication. (Yes, there is the LeGuin Theory that the art of minerals and plants is non-communicative, but as we’re all animals on this bus, we understand and we create communicative art.)

Elizabeth Bear wrote a blog post recently on What my job is not in which she outlined some ideas about how she sees her job as an artist. I responded to this at a more personal level on my journal, but then I started to think about what I do as an artist, which is writing stories. (And sometimes taking photographs. But I could stop taking photographs. I am unable to stop writing stories.) I do not usually think of myself as an artist (as one always says), but:

My job as an artist is to communicate to you what I perceive: or, turned round, the role of an artist is to create something that can be communicated out of their perceptions of reality. Art is selectively fractal.

Where this fits into the Great Discussion of 2009 – the original RaceFail, the new MammothFail, and who knows where by 2010? – is this:

A writer, creating a story, is not attempting to replicate reality: all sorts of decisions get made, consciously and unconsciously, about where the story will be fractal and where it will not and to what degree each part of the story will be fractal:

- “The office opened at nine. The first meeting started at nine-fifteen. There was usually tea, coffee, and an assortment of breakfast pastries available, but not that morning. After a gruelling stint of three external meetings back-to-back, everyone was more than ready for lunch.”

- “The ceiling of my room is stained with damp in one corner: it’s right over my bed. My cat was purring by my ear. I could hear the rain against the window. I knew I had to get up and get dressed, but I didn’t want to go to work, though I knew I had to.”

- “The morning was cold, and the air filled with a delicate low-lying mist: the stone paving underfoot was wet. On this kind of day, the stones, the air, even the struggling box hedges around the narrow sour-dirt gardens, seemed to glow with light: she walked through a luminous city. Not even the damp and steaming bus could sour her mood.”

- “The number 42 bus was late. The rain wasn’t heavy, but unceasing: Bahiyaa’s khimār was wet by the time she got on the bus, and dripped unpleasantly. She sat down in the nearest empty seat, and a white man promptly sat down next to her, breathing hard through his mouth. She pulled out her notes for the UWT meeting: she wouldn’t have time to review them in the office at this rate.”

- “That morning the office had run out of coffee, so I went into my first meeting of the day without it, praying that despite the rain, Susan would make time go out and buy at least a jar of instant before the second meeting was due to start. Gracie drank tea, so she didn’t care.”

Every writer knows how to do this: it’s pretty much the definition of being a writer, that you are able to take your perception of a set of events: a person goes to work on a rainy morning, and communicate that perception in multiple different ways – that you are consciously aware that there are selections to be made in communicating the infinite fractality of reality to your readers. That’s my job as an artist, as a writer, to make those decisions.
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He who runs may Wrede

I’m going to write a book set in a very alternate mid-1800s U.S.-equivalent-with-magic.

The current plan is to have the primary difference be that the various male attempts to colonize the Americas were unsuccessful; thus, no men of any sort in the Americas: a continent inhabited entirely by women, who conceive using magic. Up to that point, I expect differences in Europe, Africa, and Asia will be due mainly to this world having magic, and I expect to wiggle things so that things are moderately close to Real Life history. The absence of men in the Americas is obviously going to have a significant impact on the way things develop during the exploration and colonization period, and I’m still feeling my way through how I’m going to finagle that to get to where I want.

Which is, basically: A North America in which the threat of men was replaced by the threat of un-extinct megafauna, both magical and non-magical in nature (mammoths, wooly rhinocerouses, terror birds, dire wolves, dragons [what else would prey on mammoths and wooly rhinos? - the Rockies are a favorite nesting ground for dragons]. As LeGuin writes in her essay on telling stories, the motivation for a mammoth hunt was never the meat, it was the story: and men were always the ones who went off on the hunt. So they all got eaten.

I know the “feel” I’m after; now I need to work out some plausible backstory to get me there.

The current plan is to beef up the nastiness and smartness of some of the megafauna, to the point that when the male hunters tried to hunt them, they got trampled or eaten or something. And then maybe one of the megafauna species got a taste for men, and stated hunting men specifically – so there were only women left, and rather than lose their sons, they just conceived daughters. Then when the European invaders began to arrive, the megafauna selectively ate the men, so the Americas have always been a continent of women only.

I’m currently assuming there may be African slaves, possibly even more (since there won’t be any men to have already done a certain amount of prepping land for human occupation, nor to be exploited later). I’m speculating that South America (which is outside the scope of the story I’m doing, and therefore wide open for changes) will look very different. The Spanish invasions were all men only, and no men survived. I’m not sure they’d have been as forward about claiming territory and establishing colonies when no man ever came back from the Americas. Which means there’s room for all sorts of other nations (including maybe some that weren’t quite so into seafaring, like the Ottoman Empire) to have New World colonies, which is in turn going to change things back home in Europe…

The plan is for it to be a “settling the frontier” book, only without men (because I really hate both the older men-as-noble-pioneers viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, and the modern men-as-savages viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it’ll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna.)

I definitely have to do something about the men who came to the US with the earlier migrations, but since they come from both directions (trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic), I think I need to kill the men off after they arrive.

I’m not fond of the disease-or-parasite solution; it raises too many other questions (like why it didn’t spread the other way across the Bering Straits and depopulate Asia and eventually Africa and Europe — we’re talking around 20,000 years here, remember). All the men being eaten on arrival is a nice, effective, tidy solution without much in the way of additional complications.

Another way to kill men after arrival is starvation or hypothermia or poisonous plants that look like edible Old World plants, but I don’t think that’d be reliable enough to kill off all the men in any migratory group. Men are more vulnerable to starvation and hypothermia than women, but this is something early hunter-gatherers coped with all the time, and it’s too easy for one man to be left out of eating something and survive a poisoned meal, at which point the secret is out and people start checking before they eat anything native. I need something active. With big teeth.

I don’t want to hear any “Thought Police” criticism of the idea of eliminating all the men. What is fiction for, politics? I just want to tell the story of Little House on the Prairie with mammoths and magic and no men. My only difficulty is working out plausible placenames.

—

No, I won’t write the stupid book.

—

Credit where credit is due to Afrai and to Liz Henry, who both linked me to the original Tor Mammothfail discussion and set the idea for this going in my head, and to posts by Telesilla and Elynross, who linked me to such a rich vein of material with which to work.

MammothFail ‘09

This is just a quick pointer to RaceFail or MammothFail ‘09, which is a discussion of Patricia Wrede’s recent alternate history of North America in which there were no Native Americans, that I think started with Lois McMaster Bujold’s comments to Jo Walton’s review of Thirteenth Child on tor.com.

Epic thread on fiction-theory in which Bujold doesn’t actually apologize and is at first piling fail upon fail, but then thanks everyone for their comments and explanations , says she is horrified at having offended so many people, was ignorant, and must go off to think:

I am horrified that so many very good readers’ feelings are hurt, and deeply sorry for it, but since I haven’t yet figured out how to open my mouth without doing yet more damage, I think it much better that I just shut up and listen for a good long time.

The Racefail Bingo card — which is brilliant — was just brought to my attention last night. I have far too many counters down on the squares already, and it’s not a game I wish to win. I do not think I would enjoy the prize.

bests, Lois.

I thought unusualmusic summed up a lot of people’s reactions very well in hers: (first quoting Bujold’s comment in italics, then answering)

The other and more hopeful point is that never before have so many Readers of Color existed to *have* the conversation, or been able to communicate with each other to do so. When I went to my first midwestern convention in 1968, there was exactly one black fan, male; it’s only in late years that I’ve had cause to wonder how brave he must have been to venture in.

Lady, I’ll thank you to refrain from making such damn fool assumptions on the basis of your very limited experience. My father was reading scifi in the 1940s and I grew up devouring his collection of scifi from the 50s, 60s, 70, and 80s. And those books he did have were only a fraction of the tons he once had and gave away during a move.I read books that were so goddamn old that they were brown and some of their pages were flaking. The books were goddamned coming apart, he’s had them so long and he only stopped reading them in the 90’s when he said that the new crop of books were boring. And he’s from the goddamn Third World. Yes, I know its astonishing, but they actually sell books there. Different genres of books, even! As for the rest of your reply, all I’ll say is that I read many of the results of white people explicitly or implicitly clearing the earth/universe of non-whites so that they could have their fun. I didn’t like it then, and I sure as hell am not going to accept that fuckitude now.

I have certainly noticed many works of SF in which futures or alternate histories just kind of kill off all of Africa presumably because it was just too inconvenient to have to learn anything about it in order to write something interesting. I stay on the watch for it… Oh what a coincidence, another future where Africa just happens to be totally gone… *eyeroll*

naraht has a very good link list if you want to look at what’s been said so far in the extended discussions.

I haven’t been able to keep up with it, or comment much, being very swamped with work and Life at the moment, but I wanted to make sure FSF readers know about all the posts that continue to critique fandom, sf publishing, cons, and the culture in general for disappearing people of color in its stories, and disappearing fans of color as Bujold did in her commentary on Wrede’s book.

Meanwhile, in the RaceWin09 category, delux_vivens asks for a PoC fandom roll call on LJ’s deadbrowalking community, and is answered in over 6 pages of responses from fans of color.

Star Trek doesn’t update the gender roles

I saw Star Trek this weekend, and overall enjoyed it. The special effects and characterizations were all engaging. This post contains spoilers!

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Caprica disappoints on the gender & race front

The Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, came out recently on DVD. I just watched it over this past weekend.

Although I’ve had my complaints about Battlestar Galactica not being as genderblind as it claims to be, I found it to be considerably more feminist than most contemporary mainstream science fiction. Whereas Battlestar Galactica tries to reimagine the gender roles in the space opera genre, the feminist elements of BSG were mostly gone in Caprica. Caprica tries to be a legal/detective/ganster drama within a science fiction setting, but it perpectuates all of the same old genre stereotypes: all of the gangsters, politicians, detectives, and lawyers are men, and most of them are white.

The plot largely revolves around two fathers (a lawyer and scientist) trying to technologically resurrect their daughters, who were both killed by a monotheistic suicide bomber. While attempting to resurrect lost family is a compelling motive for the creation of the cylons, I wondered why the show has to star two fathers. The lawyer, William Adama’s father, is understandable as it is within the continuity of what Battlestar Galactica established as Adama family history. But does Dr. Graystone, the other lead, have to be a man? His wife is also a doctor, but she does not do much throughout the Caprica pilot but mourn. I’d be much more interested in her role in the creation of the cylons.

Despite not doing anything new in regards to gender, I’ll keep watching Caprica because the posthuman themes are pretty cool. Can a human being be copied? The character Zoe Graystone has potential to be pretty interesting as the first cylon. I’m undecided if I was impressed or unconvinced that a teenager would be the first person to figure out how to create a sentient, digital copy of herself.

The casting of Caprica also seems diverse but stereotyped at the same time. The Joseph and William Adama are played by Latino actors, but the only black character I noticed was Daniel Graystone’s body guard. One of the teenagers was played by an apparently middle eastern actor. I was pleased by the diverse casting until that character turned out to be a suicide bomber.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine — Same Old Story

This post contains some spoilers for the movie, but they’re not surprising spoilers (as you’ll see) nor are they much more than is revealed in the trailer.

One day I am going to become a famous novelist and Marvel Comics is going to come knocking on my door and beg me to write a graphic novel for them. I will agree, but only if I am allowed to write something with Wolverine in it. They will say yes, and I will get to writing, and somewhere within my story I will bring in a love interest for Wolverine, and she will love him better than any woman ever has before and he will love her better than he has loved any other woman. It will be an epic romance with fighting and mutant goodness.

Before you say: “ABW, that sounds like a Mary Sue fantasy to me,” please be aware that I will have no other goal in writing this story beyond making sure that this Wolverine love interest is still alive by the end of the book.

I am not very familiar with X-Men continuity in the comics, though I know some of it. I’ve seen every X-Men movie and, until recently, saw every animated incarnation. One thing I have not failed to notice is how the women Wolverine loves tend to die violent deaths, usually as a punishment to him. Really, the only safe thing you can do if Wolverine loves you is to run into the arms of another less compelling man and consign yourself to life with a tool (hi Jean, I am totally dogging you out, but at least you are alive!).

This trope is not unfamiliar to most of you. How many times have we lamented over a female character’s death that only served to further the emotional growth of the lead male(s)? Trope, cliche, point, set, match.

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Protein folding science game

This is just damn cool. You can download a game called “FoldIt“. You compete to manipulate models of protein molecules in various ways, and the results may end up being useful.

. . . knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

A feminist reading of Anathem

Here are some observations on gender and sexism in Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I noticed his attempt to have female characters who weren’t full of fail. Yet I was constantly jolted out of my enjoyment of this great, great book by what I think is unnecessary sexism. I’m going to write this without referring back to the book (in part because I read it on the iPhone Kindle app, and I didn’t start bookmarking Annoying Sexist Moments until part of the way through, and can’t easily search for words or phrases.)

It has many female characters who have power in the Saecular world and the Mathic world. They even have conversations with each other and not always about men. Woo, passes the Bechdel test.

Sort of.

So, most of what the women do that is powerful or that shows them in a thought process or a conversation occurs offstage; off the page.

For example, Ala and Tulia are described as having intense conversations all the time. But those conversations are not represented other than through Erasmus’ description of the rest of the Concent making fun of them and being annoyed by their long explanations to each other. Erasmus, Jesry, Lio, and Arsibalt as well as Orolo and Jad all have long conversations with each other that are represented “on camera”. Their relationships with each other are foregrounded.

So while it is good that Ala and Tulia’s trivialized conversations and off-the-page activities end up to be similar in result to the boys’ conversations — that result is a surprise and how they got it is a mystery.

Summary of the rest of this post with the spoilers out

- men and women’s conversations don’t happen much either, men just talk to men
- female characters’ strengths undermined by claims of instinct, by rape culture, by objectification
- condescension of male characters to female
- hideously pointless untrue-ringing romance plots
- fat girl remarked on as weirdly confident as if she thought she were a thin pretty girl
- Professions and class status assumed to be for men. “The truckers and their wives” etc.
- If it’s all about the menz, it’s just a coincidence OR IS IT?
- Umm the fertility stuff and I won’t spoil anything but, *eyeroll*

I shouldn’t have to say this, but I will: I love the book, I think it’s fabulous, I wallowed in it and couldn’t stop reading it. I want to be a monk and have a cord and a bolt and sphere and hang around winding clocks, gardening my hills of corn and tomatoes, and talking about philosophy and math, epistemology and multiple universes, all day long. I would even sing stupid songs based on mathematical theorems. So I mean this as a loving critique. Also, I am *AWARE* that Stephenson wrote a book with a kick ass heroine, you are… the 8 millionth person to tell me that; I read the book 15 years ago, barely remember mildly liking it, didn’t think the heroine was all that, AND I’m talking about this book not that book. Disclaimer over!

- – - – WARNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- – - AFTER HERE THERE BE SPOILERS – - -

Erasmus’ relationship with Ala also has a curiously off-camera aspect. He writes her letters, he feels some feelings, but they don’t have any substantial conversations. The closest they get to one is Ala yelling at Erasmus that he’s self centered and doesn’t get anything that goes on in her mind and that he thinks of her like a doll he is dressing up. (Which seems rather true.) Cord and Yel’s conversations aren’t shown either The “relating” parts of their relationship don’t happen where we can see them.

I ended up feeling like Stephenson had made special effort to include women in the book, but the book is still about men’s relationships to each other. It rings false to write a book that includes a bunch of women without actually showing the women’s conversations and relationships. It’s just WEIRD.

The strong female characters are undermined in various ways; by casual insistence on sexual objectification, rape culture, heteronormativity, body size and image, gender inequalities in the larger society and in the Math, by romantic relationships, and by the condescension of male characters. Erasmus constantly evaluates the sexual attractiveness of the young women around him and gets crushes on all of them, even his own sister; fine, he’s a teenager, but in combination with the other ways of undermining of the female characters’ agency, it is annoying.

Cord, a totally great character, gets pointlessly paired with the geology Mountain Man dude, another fine character but it is remarkable that she spends about 2 minutes in the book without having a boyfriend. Even worse, the boyfriend promises her brother that he’ll protect her. Okay. Was that necessary? Her competent actions and her high intelligence are frequently described in ways that make them sound like the result of instinct, a common way that women’s brains and skill is devalued. This is not true every time she does something, but it happened several times. Cord’s job as an engineer is apparently unusual in the Saecular world, as she mentions being the only woman in her workplace and having difficulties because of it. (Again – I liked this character a lot – and her vests and tools and her impatience with Erasmus, but there are such problems!)

Many of the profession/jobs or descriptions of class status overtly express sexism, either Arbrean sexism or Stephenson’s. For example burghers “and their wives” are mentioned. Truckers “and their wives”. And so on – there are more examples.

There is another annoying bit where Erasmus is describing his history with Ala to his sister Cord, who then exclaims super knowingly about it all as if she knows exactly what is happening and the male characters then joke about how women have a strange telepathic connection. Um…. dumb? Why did there have to be a “girls are weiiiiirrrrd” moment? Was this meant to be a big representative moment of How Women Really Are? Like the description of Ala and Tulia’s constant communication habits, talking to each other so much the boys describe them as the “Two Backed Creature” – (which i read as a tasteless out of character sexual joke on ‘beast with two backs’ about these two teenage girls’ friendship) (Which was also especially stupid since the guys constantly talk to each other too, as does everyone there, since Dialogue is part of the *point of being in the Math*)

In Tredgarth, Tris, in the kitchen with Erasmus and several others, speaks up interestingly with observations of the conversation happening at the dinner parties. Erasmus describes her then as being “podgy” and as being confident and acting as if she were a much more attractive girl. Despite being raised in a vaguely egalitarian philosophers’ school cut off from mainstream society for the last 10 years of his life, he completely accepts that an average looking “podgy” girl should behave in a particular manner not attracting of attention, and a pretty, thin girl would and should be more assertive and will be more privileged and furthermore that this is natural and deserved. Perhaps it was meant to remind the reader again that Erasmus is kind of a jerky teenage boy.

I understand that Arbre is not a perfect utopian world (duh) and it has sexism in it and so why not show it. Fine… But in a world where people are sitting around thinking about philosophy they could not possibly fail to remark on gender and power relationships and since everything is non normative in the maths there must be something going on there. Like, it was someone’s idea to Collect women as well and they seem to be powerful in the hierarchy.

I note that the women don’t seem to have birth control. Instead something is “put in the food” for the men in the Maths to make them infertile. Birth control is never mentioned in the Saecular world. I’m just saying… try and name me some examples of SF by women that don’t mention reproductive control being important for women? It’s jarring and feels unrealistic.

I enjoyed all the bits that felt influenced by Gene Wolfe… And am still reading the notes and proofs and diagrams and links to philosophical computing papers…. all very cool. But speaking of Wolfe. What’s the deal with science fiction monks? Would anyone care to compile a list of sf monasteries? Thoughts on the relation of science/academia to monastic homosocial culture?

The idea behind “Sconic thought” was kind of good – it was from the scones that a woman (whose name I have forgotten) used to bake for her Salons on empiricism that ran for many decades; she wrote lots of books, but her name was only mentioned once – instead the school of thought is named after her baking. I thought this was mildly amusing and a nice hat tip to the many women of intellectual and literary salons yet it was annoying for her name to be left out of the name of the school of thought. I might remember her name, then.

There were some interesting female characters at the symposiums at Tredgardth. The Lorite one was funny and informative and assertive though her role seemed not to be to think and critique or do anything but to report when ideas are mentioned, basically, “someone’s already thought of that.” There was also a Saecular politician who was powerful & witty. She is kind of wrapped up later as a package with her brother and powerful family. But I appreciated all the female characters in the dinner party scenes. I just wanted more from them, and more of them elsewhere in the book. As with Ala’s brilliant skills as a general, women’s genius only seems to happen when Stephenson’s camera isn’t recording. They can be competent, brave, witty… but not geniuses who have inspiring relationships with others.

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”.

The meta observations on non-sexism by Erasmus during the car journey were extremely annoying. It read to me like an in joke – that perhaps Stephenson had asked friends for feedback and someone said “Hey, how come 12 people just went off to do the main storyline, and 11 of them are men and one is Erasmus’ sister?” In character, Erasmus ponders the question and he concludes that maybe women just are less attracted to doing what they are doing (disobeying orders and going to look for ex-Fraa Orolo instead of going to Tredgardth.) This came off like an annoying little poke at possible feminist criticism of the scene as well as criticism of the book as a whole.

Then… the magical fertility and marriage chapter at the end. Why, why, why?

Working in the Dollhouse

Dollhouse requires a lot of work to enjoy. So far, it hasn’t required more work than I’m willing to give it, but then, viewing and responding to popular culture is my actual job. I read The Angry Black Woman’s response to the challenge that feminists who dislike Dollhouse aren’t getting the “subtlety” of it, and she got me thinking about how much work I’m putting into enjoying it. I was particularly struck by her point that you can “get” that the show is aiming for subtle horror and not buy it.

Fact is, I don’t think Dollhouse is succeeding at what it aims at yet. Grace over at Heroine Content is cautiously optimistic in her review. She notes the amount of ass-kickery the female Dolls engage in and points out the various ways character development twists and turns to suggest that the Dolls have the potential to surprise us, should the show continue. I’m of a similar wait-and-see opinion. I’m giving the show time because I like Whedon and Dushku and I’d like to see what they come up with when the network backs off a bit. That doesn’t mean what they come up with will be any good. It just means I have a somewhat positive impression of their track record and am willing to give them some time to find their way. Viewers don’t owe Dollhouse that time. It’s a gift. And calling viewers who invoke their right not to view “clueless” is presumptuous, rude and, in my opinion, absolutely ridiculous.

Case in point: Gianduja Kiss has created a fanvid for the show to the tune of “It Depends on What You Pay”. It was linked to on Feminist SF before, but I embedded it here too because it makes my point so well. The vid has a trigger-warning attached as the contrast of the Dolls’ assignments, mostly sexual, sometimes violent, with a cheery sounding song about rape is disturbing, to say the least. The vid is only triggering, however, if you get the horror of the show’s premise and work to make the connection between the words of the song and the scenes before you. And it is work. I’m saying this as a film scholar. The rape scenes on Dollhouse are rarely shot as rapes. They’re party scenes, sport fucks, “lurve-making”. The horror is intellectual, not yet on screen — at least not often. This isn’t about subtlety for me, it’s about a lackluster use of the medium. The shots are too glammy. The editing doesn’t make you question what’s going on.

The fanvid has to impose the horror of what’s going on explicitly through the song because outside of the context of the show’s premise, there is nothing in most of these shots to encourage the viewer to read the scene in front of them as anything other than what it seems. There are a few violent scenes, of course, but most of the “sex scenes” are shot no differently from how they would be shot on the now defunct Las Vegas.

More often than not, we get a Dolls’ eye view of events. That’s a choice that the producers are making, and it’s not the one that’s going to make most feminists go “ooh, subtlety.” It’s going to make most of us go I don’t have time for this. I can do the intellectual work and provide the subtlety, but I’m doing the work. It’s hardly ever on screen, even in coded form. The irony of Dollhouse, at least for me, is that as viewers we’re being asked to work there too.

As you may be able to tell, I think the biggest weak point in the series is not the premise, which doesn’t seem to be as triggering for me as it is for others, it’s the execution. I’m not 100% sold on the casting. I have a difficult time really buying into the actors playing Victor and Boyd. They don’t have the range of the female cast. I’m also bored by the technical aspects of the show. There’re so many things the producers could be doing in terms of shot design and editing to make the horror of the show visceral and ever-present. Look at the way the early seasons of 24 maximize tension through split screen and that damned running clock, or the way cinematography increases the gut-clenching realism of Battlestar Galactica’s space battles by selective invocation of a hand-held documentary feel.

Whedon’s strengths are writing and characterization, but Dollhouse can’t succeed based on those alone. The premise is too convoluted. This is the first Whedon show that needs to make full use of the visual medium in order to work. Buffy was witty, Angel was angsty, Firefly (love it or hate it) was pulp. Dollhouse changes from episode to episode. Even its characters change — personalities, looks, loyalties. The continuing narrative thread is human trafficking. But in order for that narrative thread to resonate even when it’s not the explicit theme of that week’s story, the camera has to serve as the narrator. IT has to do the work. It has to make us feel what the Dolls can’t. It has to make us remember what they don’t. It has to tempt us and disturb us, to capture aspects of performance that the glossy fast-cutting versions we’ve been seeing of the Dolls’ assignments elide.

And it’s not doing any of that.

Tiptree Award Winners

Some of you may have been wondering where I’ve been all this time.  The answer: off judging the Tiptree award!  A year of reading and reading and reading… and then reading. In the end, the jury chose two books:

• Filter House by Nisi Shawl (short story collection)
• The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (novel)

There were a lot of great books and stories to consider this year, many of which made the Tiptree Honor List:

• Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing
• Jenny Davidson, The Explosionist
• Gregory Frost, Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet: A Shadowbridge Novel
• Alison Goodman, Two Pearls of Wisdom, published in the United States as Eon: Dragoneye Reborn, also Eon: Rise of the Dragoneye in the United Kingdom
• John Kessel, “Pride and Prometheus” (in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 2008) (also winner of the Nebula for best novelette)
• Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels
• Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia
• John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In, original Swedish title Låt den rätte komma in, first published in English as Let Me In, Translated by Ebba Segerberg
• Paul Park, A Princess of Roumania, The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, The Hidden World
• Ekaterina Sedia, The Alchemy of Stone
• Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy
• Ysabeau S. Wilce, Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room)

Which of these books have you read? And if you’ve not yet read the winners, you definitely should!

Dollhouse summed up in a three-minute vid

Gianduja Kiss has created a brilliant fanvid for Dollhouse. It’s called “It Depends On What You Pay” and it addresses the crucial problem of the show’s cavalier use of rape.

You can see it here.

Amazon suppresses GLBT titles

Amazon, the multinational online book (& other media) seller, has begun implementing a new policy change which has the effect of suppressing hundreds of GLBT-themed titles under misleading and injurious pretexts.

The sales ranks of an increasingly large number of titles dealing with homosexuality have been stripped from their listings, in order to exclude them from best seller lists, which makes it impossible to track their popularity on Amazon now, and also affects internal search results, which are tied into the popularity of the books, effectively suppressing the presence of these titles on Amazon’s online inventory by making them much more difficult to find, although the Amazon listings for some titles may still appear — for now — at or near the top of Google search results.

The pretext for this suppression is the exclusion of “adult” content, implying sexual content, from best-seller lists, but the reality of this is that material dealing with homosexuality is targetted regardless of its sexual content: erotica and romance novels are not the only casualties. Children’s books such as Heather Has Two Mommies, and classic gay-themed literature from E.M. Forster’s Maurice, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, to more recent novels from Sarah waters and Tiptree Award-winner Nicola Griffith, as well as informative self-help guides for teenagers, and sociology texts that are queer-friendly or feminist, are indiscriminately suppressed; whereas popular heterosexual erotica, homophobic texts, and collections of Playboy photographs are still allowed keep their sales rankings.

Here is an early report on the LJ community meta_writer, which quotes an Amazon representative answering an author’s query as to why the sales ranks for his Young Adult, gay-themed novel were no longer listed:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

The Meta Writer community has contact information for Amazon in their list of related links, and another entry contains an evolving list of suppressed titles: Amazon Censorship – Who is affected?, with many links to the titles in question. (NB: heavy loading time for that page, due to the number of titles and comments adding more.)

Many authors and readers are calling for action. The subject is being followed on Twitter, too: search under the term “#amazonfail“.

There is an online petition protesting the new policy here, but the effectiveness of online petition being disputable, contacting Amazon directly might be more effective, though some people are reporting finding it difficult to get in touch with the company.

The policy change affects not only the USA-based Amazon.com, but also Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.ca .

Here are some additional links on the subject:
Blog entry “Why Is Amazon Removing The Sales Rankings From Gay, Lesbian Books?” at Jezebel. (Heavy loading.)
CNET news article: “Amazon criticized for de-ranking ‘adult’ books”
LA Times Blog entry: Amazon de-ranks so-called adult books, including National Book Award winner(found via Ambling Along the Aqueduct)