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?

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.

—
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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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 »

In anticipation of Anticipation

I registered at the Palais des Congress for the 67th World SF Convention yesterday, and have been looking through the programme to check where I am supposed to be at any given time, and where I want to be in the intervals of being where I’m supposed to be.

I plan to write up the panels I’m on, and possibly some of the panels I’m not on. I’d like to meet up with other feministsfers at the con.

The first panel I wouldn’t miss for the world, though, isn’t one I’m on: I proposed it to Anticipation after I’d posted on my journal about the Werewolves of Brigadoon, and they took my idea: the panelists are George R. R. Martin, Kari Sperring, and Peadar O’Guillin, whose name I am spelling wrong because I cannot remember the HTML for accents. (Sorry.) It’s one of the 90-minute panels, P-512BF, in the “Human Culture” strand, about the appropriation of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales as lands of “Celtic fantasy”.

Following that, the panel I’m tempted not to miss is the 2pm “Introduction to WSFS Business Meeting”, which promises that each and every member of Anticipation has an equal say (and democratic vote) in how the WSFS functions: the rules of the Worldcon, the Hugos, etc…

…well. It did occur to me, browsing the programme on the Metro last night, that we (and by ‘we’ I mean, well, me) could propose a change to the Hugo rules: for one year, everyone proposed for a Hugo shortlist must be a woman. I know exactly how the (mostly male) SF fans likely to be present at the WSFS business meeting will react to this: indeed, we could probably write their dialogue without ever actually going to the meeting. After all, if no man, no matter how good his work, can be considered for a Hugo, doesn’t that downgrade the quality of the award? Isn’t it meant to honour the writers that Fandom thinks are the best? Doesn’t that mean considering all writers? Hm, yes, quite so.

Still. An apple that would be interesting to throw, and watch the wasps flurry at it, yes? After all, given the number of excellent women writers who have been ignored by the Hugo shortlists since the awards were instigated, how would it be unreasonable if, for just one year, all the fans who do Hugo nominee-ing were required to ignore all the doubtless-excellent men writers and seek out the excellent women writing in SF?

Yes, I know. I’m being an unreasonable and dodgy feminist. But there you go.

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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.

I see you shiver with… Montreal?

I’m definitely committed to the Worldcon, 6th-10th August, in Montreal.

This will be my first (and probably my last) Worldcon in North America. I’ve heard they run big over there. I’m looking forward to this especially, because I’ve been to Montreal a couple of times before and I love it. Also, one of my best friends lives there and I’m hoping I can get to visit with her, once I’m done with post-Worldcon crashing.

Who else is going? Can we have a FeministSF meetup?

I will not die for your amusement

Last Friday I was sitting in a cinema with a bunch of friends and friends of friends, waiting for The Watchmen to begin.

And then the trailer for Lesbian Vampire Killers came on. And in the space of a minute or two, I was reminded that to most of the straight people in this auditorium, I’m just a target. Not a real person. A straight man with an axe planning to kill lesbians is kinda funny, isn’t he? All jolly good fun.

I want this film to bomb and die at the box office. I want it more than I can tell you. I want it to be a massive, multi-million loss. I want the makers to quit. I can’t avoid the damn posters, I can’t avoid the damn trailer: but I can at least want never to see a sequel in the trailers, on the posters, on the Internet, in the film reviews.

Trying to protest it: hell, what’s the point? Pickets, protesting, letters, public anger: I already know what most of the straight people buying tickets to have fun watching lesbians being killed will say: Lighten up. It’s just a joke.

None of the lesbians who saw the poster said that. We shrugged at each other resignedly. It’s the kind of thing that happens. The boys throw stones in jest: we die in earnest. The dominant narrative about what lesbians are, what we do, why we exist: to titilate and amuse straight men. By dying, if we can’t do it any other way.

The only slash panel I got to at Redemption, the dominant narrative had even got there: two people on the panel, one of them a straight man, who began the discussion by saying he didn’t know much about slash but he wanted to know where the femslash was.

And for some reason still unclear to me, the audience of slash fans, any of whom were better qualified to sit on the panel than this ass: we told him.

…five minutes into The Watchmen, the only two lesbians had been brutally murdered.

The conversation continues

I was going to call this One Minute Past Midnight And The Conversation Goes On Without You, but I was too tired too late for that to be timely. Justine Larbalestier, whose books just went on my oh, I must look out for that reading list, writes about online-versus-offline-behaviour.

“Indifference doesn’t result from hostility: it derives from being so comfortably in the majority that you never have to think that a minority have different needs. Hostility enters when the majority find themselves questioned, as of right, by the minority.” -me, October 2007

In better news, Seeking Avalon announced the PoC in SF/F Carnival Special Edition: Interrogating the Text, De-Colonizing the Mind: An Intra-PoC Dialogue:

This special edition of the PoC in SF/F carnival is once again dedicated to intra-PoC dialogue. Separated by time and distance, joined by personal experience and on/offline interaction, our lives together are not always a bed of roses. In the wake of recent events, what’s next on the horizon for intra-PoC relations?

More at Seeking Avalon, with a necessary caveat: “Since People of Color (PoC) is not necessarily a universally used term, especially by fans living outside of the US, I encourage those who have other ways of defining themselves (for example, non-white, fen of pigment, chromatic) to step up and participate.” Deadline for submission: 27th March 2009 Links and questions to: ladyj dot 965 at gmail dot com.

The call is out for submissions for the first Asian Women Blog Carnival:

…there is no specific theme. I would like to highlight the diversity of Asian women and topics regarding identity in Asian majority and Asian minority cultures. Submissions can range from feminism, representation, culture, history, work, activism, beauty, health, sexuality, politics, economics, philosophy, class, education, religion, how we identify and relate to other PoC groups, personal stories etc.

Also: “Please feel free to submit your own posts or suggest good posts or links by someone else for this carnival. Submissions from from women and men of colour as well as allies are welcome. All types of work, such as essays, prose, poems, personal narratives are accepted.” Deadline for submission: 3rd April 2009. Links and questions to ciderpress.

If reading about recent events has made you feel you want to do something, besides speaking up, two charities were recommended recently in the discussion of RaceFail 09:

If you’re in the UK, Afghanaid: “has worked alongside Afghan communities for over two decades. We currently work directly with over 500,000 adults and children focusing on long term sustainable development in rural areas.” About one-fifth of their workforce in Afghanistan are women: they teach both girls and boys to read, and teach both girls and boys about their rights as children. You can make a donation here.

If you’re in the US, Books For Africa. “A simple name for an organization with a simple mission. We collect, sort, ship, and distribute books to children in Africa. Our goal: to end the book famine in Africa. Books For Africa is the world’s largest shipper of donated books to the African continent. Since 1988, Books For Africa has shipped over 20 million high-quality text and library books to 45 African countries. Millions more are needed.” You can make a donation here; if you want to donate some books, read the book donation requirements.

I mention country-specific charities because, if you live in the same country as the charity you are donating to, you can “gift aid” it (or whatever your local term is: the charity can claim the taxes you would have paid on that gift, thus increasing your donation). If people would like to suggest other appropriate charities based in other countries than the UK and the US, I’ll add them to the list.

Cease fire? Stop talking? Not now: not ever.

People of Colour…?

The twelfth PoC in SF Carnivalonline casino net is now open for festivity and reading at the Hathor Legacy. Enjoy.

(See also the Asian Women Blog Carnival, now looking for suggestions/links for its first carnival…)

Take note of the List of SF featuring women of color as protagonists, which is part of the FeministSF.wiki: if you’re registered with the wiki you can edit / add to the list.

This looks like a great carnival: I’m looking forward to reading all the links. I was also thinking about something a friend said recently Continue reading »

“Why I Won’t Be Trying For a Bechdel”

My only statement on the gender appropriation imbroglio

There has been a major Internet kerfuffle going on in the last couple of weeks over the question of gender and sexism in SF and Fantasy. Many friends of mine on both sides of the debate (and, yes, there are clearly two sides to this debate, despite the complexity of the underlying topic) have been badly hurt. I have been sitting on my hands because it appears that there is no way to enter the slapfight without getting slapped, but I am tired unto death of the ongoing vitriol and character assassination, so I am going to make one statement.

This statement is addressed to those on the “anti-sexist” side of the debate who have vehemently accused certain male writers and editors of sexism or insensitivity.
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Who writes Scottish fantasy?

While the immediate impetus to write this post came from the whole failing to play together in the City of Invention thing, I’ve had something like this in mind to write since 2005.

At the Worldcon in Glasgow, in 2005, there was a panel on Scottish fantasy, which I attended out of interest: I’m Scottish, I enjoy fantasy.

There were four or five panellists. All but one were North American (except the one who was not a fantasy writer, and who said he thought he was probably on the panel because they’d wanted to have at least one Brit.)

Overwhelmingly, in publishing, Scottish fantasy is not written by Scots. Not even written by people who live in Scotland. (Because of Ireland’s lovely tax breaks on culturally-earned income, Irish fantasy may be written more often by people who do actually live in Ireland. But Irish fantasy and Scottish fantasy, while having a strong family resemblance, are not the same.)

Scotland is culturally strongly divided into the Lowlands and the Highlands, and splits East and West somewhat, and there is a strong modern rivalry between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and there’s a big difference between people who live inside and outside the Central Belt (which is to say Edinburgh, Glasgow, and commuting distance between them). Then there’s the big questions of what football team you support (which codes, sort of, into whether you’re Protestant, Catholic, or anti-sectarian), if you’re an incomer, and whether you’re middle-class or working-class. The patterns of immigration into Scotland over the past 150 years were strongly Irish, Italian, and Pakistani/Bangladeshi: the willingness of Scots to eat anything deep-fried includes pizza and pakora (but not Mars bars, no: sorry, that was a joke that got out of hand).

I don’t read much Scottish fantasy. It rarely if ever seems to have anything much to do with Scotland: it has to do, rather, with a North American concept of Scotland. (I can’t blame Braveheart, appalling though that is: sad to say, it was actually pretty damn popular in Scotland, crappy though the history was, for much the same nationalist reasons as we love to see the English lose at football. And rugby. And cricket. And… well, pretty much anything, really.)

I live in a country which is a real place: a nation divided on whether we want to be fully independent or a part of the United Kingdom; a nation which has always had some steaming issues of national pride over being better educated, better at this, better at that, better at the other, than our neighbours down South. I can happily read fantasy novels set in New Orleans or New York – or even Hartford, Connecticut – without worrying about how realistic they are, or if the werewolves in the novel sound like I think werewolves from Connecticut actually would sound like.

But name a Scottish werewolf “Eoghan” and have him live in a “neither precisely a manor house nor a castle” with lawns kept short by “Highland coos”, and of course there’s a “stout gray-haired Morag” who’s the family cook and goes around “young Master”ing the visiting werewolf… well, I’m just as likely to drop the book back on the shelf, figuring that this is yet another North American Scottish fantasy writer who is not writing about my country, but… hers.

I’ve written stories set in cities which I’ve never lived in. (I don’t think I’ve yet written a story set in a city I’ve never visited, but I may come to it yet.) It’s the telling detail that convinces which is the hardest part to get if you’ve never been there. A lot of Scottish fantasy ignores the Lowlands of Scotland as much as possible… not to mention the history of the past sixty or seventy years.

A lot of this happens because a lot of Scots went to North America, a hundred to two hundred years ago. And a lot of this happens because Walter Scott made Scottish storytelling fashionable… about a hundred and fifty years ago. But still: it leaves me with this odd situation – Scottish fantasy is very popular. But it’s being written in a country that’s no more mine than Brigadoon.

Playing together in the City of Invention

Fay Weldon describes it in her epistolatory novel (Letters to Alice) on reading Jane Austen: the City of Invention. It is a beautiful metaphor for the process of creative writing.

It glitters and glances with life, and gossip, and colour, and fantasy: it is brilliant, it is illuminated, by day by the sun of enthusiasm and by night by the moon of inspiration. It has its towers and pinnacles, its commanding heights and its swooning depths: it has public buildings and worthy ancient monuments, which some find boring and others magnificent. It has its central districts and its suburbs, some salubrious, some seedy, some safe, some frightening. Those who founded it, who built it, house by house, are the novelists, the writers, the poets. And it is to this city that the readers come, to admire, to marvel and explore.

To build a house in the City, you need words: and means of communicating those words. There are whole districts in the City of Invention which are shimmery places built of pixels and light, constructions which exist on the Internet alone. But still, the more secure districts, the more prestigious places to build, the ones more sure of visitors and history: these are the places of print and paper, houses built and opened by publisher. (Some say there can still be found, somewhere in the City, the hollow places where the oral tradition, the houses built of sound, still stand – invisible places, built for the ear to appreciate, not the eye to see.)
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