Hello sf/f feministas. I tweaked the header background image and the “body” background of the blog. Do you like it? A bit loud or busy for you? Better than that default theme water drop, though.
To crop and resize the images, I used a small, easy program called Skitch. Graphic Converter or Photoshop are good for doing things like that, but I like Skitch for its simplicity.
Here is a WordPress CSS guide which will walk you through the process of understanding background images in the blog’s main body. There is another great tutorial for changing your header image in WordPress.
Coming up, what would you like me to post on? Anything in particular? I’m certainly taking requests. Here’s what I have planned:
* Marrion Zimmer Bradley – The Shattered Chain
* Sydney J. Van Scyoc
* The Female Man by Joanna Russ
* The Warrior Who Carried Life – Geoff Ryman
* Motherlines
* The Furies – Suzy McKee Charnas
* some Coyote Jones novels by Suzette Haden Elgin
* something by Pamela Sargent
* something by Elizabeth Lynn
Quick note: I just deleted a number of user accounts created at this blog. The user accounts were either from *.ru, a known freemail service, or had some highly improbably and non-SF-y name / userid — AND did not respond to a separate email inquiry — AND had never made postings here.
I know that sometimes a real person who is not filled with evil spam intentions might fall into these criteria and if that was the case here and your account got deleted — I’m sorry. You’re welcome to re-register — please send me an email or respond to the other one. Count yourself another victim in the spamwars.
We’re messing with the back end and templates and blog design and all that. Expect more changes and fixes and fancy things over the next few days!
If you would like to contribute some images, that would be swell. Ideally we’d have lots of different header images for the banner at the top of the page. We have one already that we’ll try out soon.
You might notice the buttons at the bottom of each post – visible on the individual post pages. They’re for social bookmarking sites like reddit, digg, sk*rt, del.icio.us, twitter, and facebook. Please digg and tweet and share our posts all you like!
Many of you have done us the honor of coming over to our blog and disagreeing with us on various issues. Mostly this is very welcome. When everyone agrees, then the comment thread peters out pretty quickly, and bloggers like myself are left staring sadly at the “1 comment” link on that post we worked so hard on and feeling like nobody loves us.* So please. Feel free to come on down and explain how our thoughts on Earth Logic are wrong, wrong, wrong, because we haven’t taken into account the history of those themes which Laurie Marks began to develop in the highly underrated Dancing Jack.
However. What some of you feel compelled to do is to come over and tell us how science fiction is just mindless entertainment and it isn’t meant to be thought about deeply; or that if we really cared about feminism or sexism we wouldn’t be wasting our time talking about science fiction, we’d be volunteering in Afghanistan; or that if we really cared about science fiction we’d ignore all the sexism we see in it and wouldn’t go dragging feminism into it all the time. Basically, that we are Doing It Wrong.
To you sentients and gentlebeings, I would like to point out that this is exactly the kind of impulse that has undoubtedly led to your making yourselves unwelcome at social events and gatherings throughout your sad and lonely lives. Look, I think the Super Bowl is a giant, pointless waste of time. I even say so. Frequently. I just did, for example. What I do not do is, I do not go over to a Super Bowl party, to which I have been invited because my host is a generous person, where people are gathered to try to enjoy the Super Bowl in sociable company, and at which my host has thoughtfully put out snacks to enhance my Super Bowl viewing experience, and announce that the Super Bowl is a giant, pointless waste of time, and I don’t know what everyone is even doing there. I mean, what the hell would I be expecting to happen? People to jump up and smack their foreheads and become Enlightened? Oh my god Vito, I’m so glad you’re here! If you hadn’t come by I might have wasted another precious and irreplaceable afternoon of my finite lifespan! I gotta go read Proust right now!
No wait guys, I brought copies of Remembrance of Things Past just in case! Proust for everybody! Let’s talk about Remembrance and how Alison Bechdel used it and Ulysses as a lens to analyze her father and her relationship with him, and whether you think it’s significant that she employed the work of two male writers who had significant and sometimes difficult nonsexual relationships with women! Thank God I finally got you to turn off that stupid Super Bowl!
Yeah, no. Similarly, you’re not gonna convince us to put down the internet and go run guns for the RAWA, or start a local chapter of the David Brin fanclub, or take in the latest Vin Diesel movie, or whatever it is you say we should be doing instead of feminist blogging about science fiction. (Some of us might go take in the latest Vin Diesel movie, but they probably would have done that anyway.) (Some of us might also already be running guns for the RAWA, but I can’t know about that for legal reasons.)
More importantly, we’re probably also not going to do what it is you really want us to do, which is get all defensive, and start justifying our existence, and getting into long flamewars with you, and basically abandoning all our other conversations to make it about you, you, you.
Because that would be boring. So your comment will probably get ignored, disemvowelled, or just deleted. And then you will be left staring at a comments page on which all evidence that you ever even existed has disappeared, without a trace, into the electronic aether. Probably with a single emo tear rolling down your bravely set face.
This doesn’t have to be your life, man. There is hope out there for you. You, too, can be part of an actual internet conversation. Just say no to existential angst. Quit trolling us.
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* When I say bloggers like myself, I mean only those bloggers who are like myself. Possibly this only means me. Many of my fellow bloggers here are not at all like myself, and I am sure they merely smile satisfiedly on the rare occasions that their posts gather no comments, secure in the knowledge that it only means they just pwned the internet so hard that it had to go off for a quick lie down and couldn’t respond.
Hi. I’m The Other New Blogger, so I guess it’s my turn. My name is Shannan Palma. I’m a writer, as I think Liz mentioned, and my first published short story, “Yours for Only $19.99!”, will be out April 1 in Misspelled, a DAW anthology edited by Julie Czerneda. The story’s a kind of comic YA fantasy and you should all run out and buy the book right away. There. That’s my plug. Probably not terribly effective since the anthology isn’t out yet, but oh well. I’m currently writing Big Queer Space Epic With No Name – yeah, that’s a working title. It’s a novel and it’s pretty much the only fiction writing I’ll be doing for the foreseeable future, but that’s a matter you can read more about on Foul Papers (my regular blog).
I’m also a filmmaker, and I’m getting ready to start a big ol’ feminist project of fraktastic coolness proportions with a good friend of mine, but it’s not quite ready to announce yet, so I’ll have to tell you about that later.
My final career hat is academic. I’m a fourth year PhD student in Women’s Studies. My dissertation is on fairy tales as contemporary myths about gender in U.S. pop culture, and in general I consider myself a mythologist and a film scholar. My research makes me happy, which is a good thing to say about your day job, I suppose. The only difficulty I’ve found with having three career-esque passions instead of just one is that it makes you a bit scattered on your best days. Hence many apologies if I occasionally seem to leave out a connecting sentence or switch gears mid-thought. I proofread, but sometimes things make sense to me that don’t to anyone else.
I’ll take my lead from Tycho and tell you that my love affair with SF began sometime before I was ten, when I picked up a Star Trek book from one of my grandmother’s Piles o’Books and fell in love with Dr. McCoy. I remember sitting down and watching the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation not long after. Star Trek was sacred family time in my house. No one talked except during the commercials. My SF love is thus a three-generation family tradition, and it’s the only one I’ve really kept, so it’s precious to me.
On the subject of what I might post on now that I’m here –
As an anti-racist feminist theorist, I tend to look closely at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, dis/ability, etc., in works of representation. As a writer, myself, I try to differentiate between criticism of the cultural work that I see a book or story doing and attribution of specific intention to the writer behind that piece of fiction. I don’t think anybody who grows up in a racist, sexist society gets to opt out of participation in (and responsibility for) the systems of privilege and oppression that shape our lives just because we acknowledge that they’re there, or set out to resist them. And sometimes we’re so focused on radicalizing over here that we get seriously and stupidly stereotypical over there. Them’s the brainwashing breaks. So I try very hard for ethical, compassionate critique, and where I falter I try harder next time. Some of my favorite writers include Emma Bull, Laurie J. Marks, Lois McMaster Bujold, Patricia McKillip, Octavia Butler, Neil Gaiman, Guy Gavriel Kay, Julie Czerneda (yeah, that made the publishing bit twice the thrill), Terry Pratchett, Jacqueline Carey, and a bunch more that I can’t think of at the moment.
The above caveats are reserved for work (and workers) I feel some sort of professional empathy with; that said, I am very snarky by nature, and when it comes to tv I am less ethical or compassionate and more rip-roaring, foul language-shouting pissed-off.
Thus my book critiques tend to be less frequent and more carefully nuanced, usually more along the line of recommendations than actual reviews, and I’m most prone to riffing and / or ranting about television series and films. I watch so much tv that I could fill up this entire post with titles and still not be done, and I have Opinions on pretty much all of it. This is aided by the fact that, now that I do pop culture stuff for a living, I tend to gravitate towards the more seriously craptastic a/v in my off-time. I’m a huge fan of the SciFi Channel’s B-quality Saturday programming, and I’m addicted to ITV’s quite horrible Primeval series. There’s some great swear-inducing gender and race stuff in craptastic tv and bad movies, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of those “reflections” with you as well.
So that’s all I can think of to say right now. I’m currently most pissed off (not to mention confused) about what’s going on with race in Torchwood, and more generally enraged and sort of amused by the gender issues in this season of Primeval. But more on that later in the week…
Oh, I’m really glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
I’m one of the new bloggers here and I take it that introductory posts are customary. Here it goes. A lot of this is biography and background, so skip to the end for a–only slightly–more succinct description of my feminist SF interests.
I’ve always been a geek, and a science fiction fan. My mother always read science fiction when I was a kid, and though we have always been drawn (mostly) very different kinds of SF, I consider her my root into science fiction (and I suppose it’s fair to say feminism as well.) For some reason, that I can’t quite recall, I got it in my head that I wanted to write pretty early, and I wrote an utterly horrible hundred-thousand word manuscript for an only slightly less horrible SF novel that I completed a few months before I turned 17.
Then all of my time evaporated into finishing high school, coming out, and going to college, and whatever else seemed really important to my 18 year old self. My writing interest turned to writing the mainstream gay teenager novel which I imagined as a sort of retelling of The Great Gatsby1. Needless to say, life intervened (thankfully) and I spent a number of years emersed in academe (though the last year has been a hiatus of sorts, I hope to return again soon.) I’m a social scientist, but I had a second major in Women’s and Gender Studies, this lens has a profound effect on my outlook.
Though I’m sure it was clear at the time, between coming out and going to school, I basically withdrew from science fiction. My college had a huge SF community (particularly for such a small school,) and I had nothing to do with it, which is sort of a shame. It was like I was trying too hard to be earnest and being into science fiction didn’t fit with that personal project.
As part of my WS coursework, I took a literature class on Sexuality and Race, where we read among other things Octavia Butler’s Kindred, and some of Samuel Delany’s Biography. It felt like coming home, and I think I wrote at least one paper that drew on something Delany wrote every semester since then. I still wasn’t writing, and I think the whole “too earnest for SF” thing was still very much an issue. A year ago, during my last semester I realized that I hadn’t read any of Delany’s fiction, and so when I ordered my books I spent a few extra dollars on a Delany book which lead to a few Tiptree books2, and I remembered reading Melissa Scott’s “Silence Leigh” trilogy twice when I was in high school, so I picked up Trouble and Her Friends, which I loved so incredibly much.
One thing led to another, and now here I am.
Somewhere in there I’ve started writing again, and of course I’m spending a lot of time catching up on all of the classics that I didn’t read as a kid, and all the books I didn’t read when I was too earnest/cool for SF when I was in school.
My writing, at the moment, deals mostly with ideas about our history and the past, particularly as it shapes cultural ideas about things like gender and sexuality. I must also confess to having a nearly unhealthy compulsion for stories about revolutionary movements, which I think comes from a similar feminist impulse.
At the moment I’m working on the edits for a novella, that I hope to be able to begin shopping around early this spring. I’m also working on a sort of experimental hypertext project that is sort of an object oriented3 novel. And I’m ramping up for the second season of a group serial for one of those revolution-themed stories that I’m so fond of serial story that I’m so fond of.
In other lives, I’m a knitter, and Morris Dancer, as if I weren’t eccentric enough as it is. I blog, perhaps too much, at my blog tychoish.com about knitting, academia, technology, writing, science fiction, and whatever else seems incredibly important to me at the moment.
For this blog I’m interested in thinking more (and more coherently) about reactions to genre trends inside and outside of SF readers/writers, which I think often parallels other discussions of interest to feminists. And I am of course interested in queer issues related to science fiction, and so I suspect that this will occupy some of my attention as well. I really look forward to being able to explore things with you.
Cheers, tycho
Let’s be serious though, Gatsby doesn’t really need much gaying up.
This was right as the Julie Phillips biography was coming out, which came to me from a couple of different angles. I’m quite interested in how individual’s identities gain social/cultural meaning in my “real life,” and I had a roommate who was interested in the literary hoax. So needless to say, I was reading a lot about Tiptree at the time.
As in the programing paradigm, not a MacGuffin quest. I blathered a bit about it on my blog, if you’re interested. You probably aren’t though. Trust me.
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