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.

• There are two stages to the Hugo voting process: nominating (to create the short lists) and the final ballot (to pick the winners);
• If you had a membership in the Montréal Worldcon you can nominate this year (but you can’t vote in the final ballot);
• If you don’t have a membership from Montréal you need to buy at least a Supporting Membership for Melbourne, by January 31st in order to nominate this year;
• If you miss than January 31st deadline you can still buy a Supporting Membership in time to vote in the final ballot (we don’t know the deadline for this yet);
• Regardless of when you buy it, that Supporting Membership will be good for nominating rights next year in Reno.

Yeah, it is still complicated, but the ability to buy a membership in time to vote in the final ballot, and then get nominating rights for the following year, is quite useful if you are short of money. Here’s why.

That $50 is still a substantial amount of money, but you should get something in return. For the past couple of years Worldcons have produced what they call a “Hugo Voter Packet”. That’s a collection of nominated material in ebook format. Last year it was solidly good value, including 6 whole novels and over 20 short stories, plus a bunch of other material. What’s more all of the material was DRM-free – you didn’t need fancy ebook reader to access it.

The problem with the Voter Packet is that you don’t know what will be in it until after the nominee lists are announced. You might not want the books in it (though if you are going to vote in the final ballot you ought to look at them), and not all publishers agree to participate. Last year, for example, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem was not in the packet. But remember that if you are a member of one year’s Worldcon then you have nominating rights for the next one. So if you are really concerned about the value of the Voter Packet, wait until the contents are announced, buy it if you like it, and then use those nominating rights the following year.

However, if you can nominate this year it would help a lot, because it is in the nominating stage that women lose out. Most male fans these days are not openly sexist. Faced with a list of nominees containing men and women, most of them will attempt to judge fairly. As a result, women who get onto the final ballot do much better (last year women won four of fifteen categories outright and featured in winning teams in three others, which is by no means half, but much better than their share of nominations might have suggested). The problem is that many men are still subconsciously sexist. If you ask a man to list his five favorite writers, the chances are he will list five men without even realizing what he has done. That’s a big reason why it is mostly men who get on the ballot, and why we need more women to nominate.

So if you are going to nominate, you need a Supporting Membership in Aussiecon 4, and you need to buy it by Jan. 31st (because the Australians need time to process your membership before the nominating deadline). You can buy that membership here.

So much for your Worldcon membership, but are there any hidden costs?

Well it depends, but if you are currently thinking “I can’t possibly afford all of those books” please stop now, because you may be guilty of another of the biggest reasons why women don’t get nominated – we are too modest.

I spend a lot of time encouraging people to vote in the Hugos, and one of the most common excuses I get (after the cost) are things along the lines of “I haven’t read everything” and “I’m not qualified to vote”. These almost always come from women. Most men don’t care. If a male fan wants to vote for his favorite writer then he probably will. He doesn’t agonize over whether he should have read 50 other books to check that his favorite author really is his favorite; he doesn’t ask himself whether he knows enough about writing science fiction to be able to judge what is the best; he just votes. We don’t. We disqualify ourselves. We need to stop doing that.

Besides, this whole “I haven’t read everything” argument is a nonsense. The Hugos are open to all work published in the year of eligibility, regardless of where it was published, or what language it was published in. The vast majority of the voters can’t even read more than half of the eligible work because they don’t understand Chinese, or Russian, or Urdu, or Japanese, or Spanish, or Arabic, or any of the other languages in which science fiction and fantasy literature is published. So reading “everything” is impossible. You just have to look at what you have read and seen, and judge whether you think any of it is good enough to be nominated.

Don’t worry if you don’t have views in every category either. If you haven’t read any novellas in the past year, leave that section blank. If you only saw three movies and they were all crap, leave that section blank. If your only purpose in voting is to nominate Tempest Bradford for Best Fan Writer because you think she’s awesome, that’s OK. Believe me, there have in the past been people whose ballots have contained only one nomination, for themselves.

It really is OK too. The voting system is designed to cope with that sort of thing. In fact the more people who participate, the better the system copes with the partial knowledge of the voters. Popular vote awards rely on the wisdom of crowds, but a crowd can only be wise if it contains a large number of people with diverse views.

So, you are going to vote, but there is an economic cost, because books and magazines and movie tickets all cost money, right? Well yes they do, but you may still be able to vote in several categories without any additional expense.

If you are reading this then you must have a computer and a web browser. That means you can vote in the Best Professional Artist category, because all you need to do is check out their web sites and see what they have created recently. Indeed, I beg you to do so, because Professional Artist is one of the most male-dominated categories in the whole set of awards. It has only been won by a woman once, way back in 1971, and then it was Diane Dillon sharing the award with her husband, Leo. The last woman to be nominated was Rowena Morrill in 1986. And it isn’t like women can’t draw. What about Kinuko Craft? Julie Bell? Anne Sudworth? Melanie Delon? I’m sure you can think of others.

Do you have a TV? Then you have probably seen shows you could nominate in the Short Form dramatic presentation category. You may even have seen some of last year’s blockbuster movies.

Fanzines are mostly available online for free. Check out efanzines.com. Quite a few are edited or co-edited by women. You may also find some great women fan artists and writers. Check blogs too, as they are good sources of fan writing and art. You must know of a few women bloggers… (Not me though, I think I’ve won enough fan Hugos.) And here’s a hint: this year’s Worldcon is in Australia, and the Ditmar Award for Best Fanzine last year was won by AS if!, edited by Alisa Krasnostein.

You can also find a lot of great short fiction online for free. Web sites tend not to publish novellas and novelettes, but short stories by big names writers abound. Just check out some of the top-rated online fiction magazines such as Strange Horizons and Clarkesworld. Many of those magazines are also eligible in the Semiprozine category (including Clarkesworld, for which I happen to be the non-fiction editor). And if Locus wins again, the award goes to Lisa Groen Trombi.

Talking of magazines, the editor categories really ought to be dominated by women (and not just by Ellen Datlow, wonderful though she is). Here are some professional magazines that are edited by women:

* Asimov’s – Sheila Williams
* Weird Tales – Ann VanderMeer
* Realms of Fantasy – Shawna McCarthy
* Strange Horizons – Susan Marie Groppi
* Fantasy Magazine – Cat Rambo

The Editor (Short Form) category is also open to anthologists such as Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Delia Sherman, Kelly Link and Sharyn November.

As for Editor (Long Form), guys like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, David Hartwell and Lou Anders might get all of the attention, but the publishing industry is chock full of fine women book editors. Here are a few, together with their employers and people they edit.

* Beth Meacham (Tor: Ken Scholes)
* Ginjer Buchanan (Ace: Charlaine Harris, Charlie Stross)
* Jennifer Brehl (Eos/HarperCollins/Morrow: Robin Hobb, Sherri Tepper)
* Jo Fletcher (Gollancz: Mary Gentle, M. John Harrison)
* Betsy Mitchell (Del Rey: Naomi Novik)
* Teresa Nielsen Hayden (Tor: Robert Charles Wilson, Harry Turtledove)
* Paula Guran (Juno: specialist in urban fantasy and paranormal romance)
* Anne Groell (Bantam: Elizabeth Bear, Ellen Kushner, Kelley Armstrong)
* Susan Allison (Ace)
* Liz Gorinsky (Tor: Cherie Priest)
* Toni Weisskopf (Baen)
* Betsy Wollheim (DAW)
* Timmi Duchamp (Aqueduct)
* Deborah Layne (Wheatland)

I also want to make a special plea for Juliet Ulman. She was the editor for Catherynne Valente’s superb Palimpsest (and the Tiptree winning Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden), but was let go by Bantam in the big financial panic last year. Since then she has set up her own freelance editing company, Paper Tyger, and has worked on some really fine books for small presses such as Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (Night Shade) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife (Tachyon). That’s a heck of an achievement in difficult times. She deserves a nomination.

And now, finally, to books. Yes, they can be expensive. Also they are sometimes very good. If you are interested in feminism and science fiction then you really ought to be considering getting Farah Mendlesohn’s On Joanna Russ (Wesleyan) and Helen Merrick’s The Secret Feminist Cabal (Aqueduct), both of which are eligible for Best Related Work. (Apologies to Robin Reid, but there’s no way I’m paying $200 for her Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy).

With novels there’s often a feeling that new books are only available in hardcover and are really expensive. But guess what, it is normally the guys who get the hardcover treatment. Women writers tend to get relegated to the trade paperbacks and mass market paperbacks. Almost all of the urban fantasy and paranormal romance, for example, comes out in mass market paperback and is therefore a third of the price of a hardcover. A good bet might be Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue, which has got a lot of attention in the blogosphere and will only cost you $8. Catherynne Valente’s Palimpsest and Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree at both trade paperbacks, but are only $11 on Amazon and available for less second hand.

Oh, and some novels do get published free online. Cory Doctorow does it all the time. You may want to check out Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making.

If all else fails you can of course try your local library, or borrow books from friends, but there are many ways you can see work that is eligible for the Hugos for free. It is not all about expensive books.

For ideas as to what books to look for, and other things to nominate, check out the Feminist SF Wiki. You can also find recommended works (by people of all genders) on my Science Fiction Awards Watch web site. There’s more information about artists and editors at the SF Artists Wiki and SF Editors Wiki, both run by my friend Anne KG Murphy.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free and All Ages

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

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

Rosie quickly offers an example of a time one of Jason’s intoxicated lovers passed out during sex, and earlier episodes have featured Jason having sex with drunk women as well as blowing off those who care for him. But what I appreciate about this scene is that a jock, someone we’d expect to be an aggressor, is the one declaring that folks can’t give consent when they’re wasted or possessed. I don’t think men deserve gold stars for not being rapists, but it will take men challenging other men on unacceptable behavior.

I look forward to seeing where True Blood goes with tomorrow’s season two finale. I just started watching the show a few weeks ago, and I quickly caught up to the current episodes. As an activist, I’m intrigued by the premise of vampires “coming out of the coffin” after the invention of a synthetic blood. Some vampires want to “mainstream” and be accepted into human society, while others see humans as mere food. Accordingly, there are human allies supporting the rights of vampires and a Christian right trying to destroy the undead. True Blood is by no means exclusively a progressive show (for example, female characters are much more likely to die violently than male characters), but the questions of allies and assimilation (as well as lovable side characters and vampires who text message and play Wii) will keep me watching.

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.”

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…

Back a month or so ago, they had contacted some acafen: Shaggirl and Doctor Science. These acafen pointed out to them some key problems in their plan, not least that the title of their book is going to be Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About The Brain, and many slash fans will find the use of “netporn” to describe what they write … dubious. (Update: also, from their literary agent’s website, the book deal is already made and the book will be published in 2010, which suggests that their claim to be doing “research” is wholly dubious: they would have had to have already written up their conclusions, not setting out to gather fresh data, if they plan to publish next year.)

The neuroscientists pay enough attention at least to know that they’d better not mention the title of their book from now on. They PM’d the maintainers of Kink_Bingo, Eruthros and Thingswithwings. Eruthros posts about how that went here. Their final rejoinder to the fresh neuroscientists:

It is obvious that we disagree on first principles. We do not believe, as you believe, in the existence of a “unified fabric of human desire” – a term you use several times, and that we assume isn’t yet another unfortunately awkward and hasty choice of phrase. We believe that the attempt to scientifically create something called a unified fabric of human desire is a creepy, undesirable, potentially harmful project. Directly harmful to people like us – fangirls, kinky people, queer people. We believe that othering is inevitable in your project, not because of some made-up “primal stage,” but because of the manner in which you conduct your investigation, the assumptions you have already made about the terms and subjects you are discussing, and the manner in which your particular branch of science is conducted generally.

The researchers do not pay attention to this either. On 29th August, they post the survey (I’m getting this date from the brand-new livejournal they set up for their survey.)

And some fans do start trying to reply to it. I found out this survey existed in a couple of posts on my friends-list yesterday, a signal boost with lots of links from Shoshanna, and a couple of posts from Slashpine, one of which linked to some rather unkind commentary on specific survey questions, as in How many kinds of fail in this question? Or, Are You Smarter Than A Neuroscientist?.

But quite soon after the survey is posted, a lot of fans start posting reminders and warnings to other fans that they shouldn’t take this survey because the neuroscientists appear to be (a) inethical (b) inexperienced (c) ignorant (d) hard of listening (e) stupid enough to imagine that they’re smarter than the fans they’re “researching”: it appears that while citing credentials from Boston University, they didn’t bother to do their Human Subjects Protection Training, required by Boston University before this kind of research can be carried out, and:

jonquil intends to inquire about the academic standing of this survey

Boston University to find out if these gentlemen ran the “survey” through their Institutional Review Board for research techniques on human subjects; it seems doubtful. There’s no evidence in his research vita that Dr. [Ogi] Ogas has done work based on human surveys before; his assistant, Dr. Sai Gaddam, is a new graduate with research focus on “modeling of physiologically plausible neural models of vision and memory”. I am particularly angry here because there are standards for what questions you can ask human subjects, most particularly for the security and integrity of the resulting data; a URL of fanficsurvey.appspot.com does not inspire confidence that the latter concerns were even considered.

The survey has been “temporarily shut down” (one of the posts for commenting on the questions has over 400 comments) but somehow, I don’t think it’s ever going to re-open. Or that anyone will respond if it does. (Update: metaroundup has more links.)

Intelligence does not merely measure IQ: intelligence is the ability to communicate and to make use of information. Anyone smart enough to successfully do scientific research inside fandom will be perfectly aware that fandom will likewise be researching them. Those cognitive neuroscientists with the book deal may have thought they were studying fannish lab rats… but I think they have just found out they were themselves running the maze.

DeadlyChamelon writes, 2nd September:

I called the Boston University IRB office. The direct approach works.

They’ve gotten a lot of emails regarding Dr. Ogas. He is no longer in any way affiliated with Boston University, except as a recent graduate. They have asked him to stop using his official Boston University email address in connection with this project, or his website. He is officially on his own, and this project is NOT IRB APPROVED.

That is the official status as stated by the Boston University IRB office.

The problem with this is threefold:

1. The researcher has no expertise in the area he is researching, nor has he recruited anyone to give him guidance.

2. The researcher has substantial profit motivation to produce work in this area (book contract with Penguin) which may lead to unethical conduct/a tendency to misrepresent his results.

3. The research is in no way overseen by any external body which can examine it for potential unethical conduct.

In addition to all of these, the researchers have now alienated their participant population, who are now very likely to become unreliable participants.

The only way to salvage the study at this point, I believe, would be for them to change it to an observational one.

ETA: if you want to share, please repost with attribution, that way people don’t have to click through to get the information. If people need to contact me, they’re certainly free to do so, but I’d like the discussion to spread out.

Also, all comments here are based on the information I had at the time of posting – if it turns out to be inaccurate, my deepest apologies. My statements regarding the problems with this research are based on my personal opinions, and should be taken as such.

ETA 2: I need to do other things for awhile, so I apologize if comments go unanswered. I should add that the IRB stated they contacted Dr. Ogas, and confirmed that this was indeed his project (they also gave him some basic methodological suggestions, despite the fact that he’s no longer affiliated). They claim he’s been very receptive to their suggestions. I say this just to confirm that YES THIS IS HIS PROJECT, and probably not a case of stolen identity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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