Author: Cheryl

The Tales of Einarinn Roll-Out Begins

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments


It has been a while in coming, but thanks to my being stuck at home all day I am delighted to report that the new paper versions of Juliet McKenna’s Tales of Einarinn series are finally coming on stream.

As part of the process, Juliet went through and copy-edited all five books. All of the fixes have gone into the ebooks as well, and those new versions should be available from the major stores now. If you bought the books direct, you can certainly download new versions from the bookstore now.

As part of that process, Ben Baldwin has kindly re-done the cover designs for all of the books, though we are still using the original, iconic Geoff Taylor artwork.

Please note that the omnibus ebook has not yet been updated. That’s still on my list of things to do.

But the main reason for this post is to tell you that as of tomorrow you can order paperbacks. Amazon says that they have them already, but officially the publication date is tomorrow.

On the other hand, you may want to wait a few days. Why? Because the hardcovers are coming, and they are gorgeous. I can’t wait to show them to you.

Juliet and I will look at putting together a deal to get signed sets. That might be a little complex in the current situation, but we’ll do our best.

More news later this week, I hope. It had better be this week anyway, because next week there will be news about the new Tate Hallaway novel.

Conventions Go Virtual

~ Cheryl

The global pandemic is affecting a lot of the ways in which we live our lives, and science fiction conventions are no exception. Many events, including this year’s Eastercon, have been cancelled, but others are going virtual. On Sunday SFWA announced plans for their annual Nebula Conference to be an entirely online event. And yesterday CoNZealand said that Worldcon too would be a virtual event.

This is good for me. I’d been expecting to have to miss Worldcon this year because of visa issues. Now I can play a full part in it (assuming I can stay awake theough the night). It is also good for SFSFC. Kevin was due to chair next year’s Westercon, and had selected a site in Tonopah, Nevada which is dirt cheap but 200 miles from the nearest airport. We’d been planning a lot of online content for those people who couldn’t make it. Lots of people had derided the idea, but the pandemic has made things that were previously viewed as radical and impossible into things that are necessary and not as hard as people said.

First thoughts, of course, should be for Kelly, Norm and their team who have been working incredibly hard for 10 years on bringing Worldcon to New Zealand. I was there at the covention in Wellington in 2010 when the bid was first officially discussed. This will have been incredibly hard for them, and hugely disappointing. But in the long term I think this will be good for conventions, because it will open them up to lots of people who previously had no chance of attending.

I’ll have more to say about this in Salon Futura next week.

Coronavirus – Day #11

~ Cheryl

My cheese order arrived safely today, so I shall be eating well for the next few days.

I also had a bit of a cooking experiment. I have no mince, but I’d seen various people talking about using chickpeas instead. It wasn’t entirely a vegetarian meal because I had some pancetta I’d bought specifically for making bolognese, but it was mostly veg, and mostly storecupboard. Fresh onion and garlic, obviously. Anyway, I was pleased with the results.

Also I found a bottle of this stuff in the cupboard. It needed using up, and it worked fine with vanilla ice cream.

Because I needed to crack a bottle of red wine for the bolognese, I tried having a glass of it with the meal. As I rather expected, wine and a thick head do not go well together. On the other hand, the wine also triggered an intense coughing fit which was scary at the time, but brought up some of the muck in my wind pipe. I can breath a bit easier now. Who would have thought?

Today’s other excitement was the launch of Disney+. There is so much good stuff on there. And so much good stuff for kids as well, which I suspect will be a boon to many households. I am holding off watching the Mandolin Man thing because I figure there will be a lot of demand. Besides, there’s plenty of other things I want to watch. Is The Inhumans really as bad as everyone says?

Also, when are we getting Frozen II? It is on Sky.

Coronavirus – Day #10

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

One of the things I have been trying to do while I am self-isolated is find ways to support local small businesses. There’s not much in town. The shops are either chains, or too small to have websites. But there are places that I can support.

We’ll start with books. I get most of my books from Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, and have been ordering from them. You might also consider Books on Hill in Clevedon, and The Portal Bookshop in York, both of which are owned by lovely people.

Also, order while you can. California has banned bookstores from doing mail order, as well as ordering them to shut their doors.

And then there’s food. The supermarkets are completely overwhelmed, but some small food shops are selling online. I was delighted to be able to place an order with The Fine Cheese Company in Bath. Not only does that help the store, it also helps the small, artisan cheese-makers whose goods they stock. And it is really good cheese, which is all you need, right?

Well maybe booze and chocolate. The lovely folks at Independent Spirit do not have mail order, which is just as well for me. One of the ways in which I can tell that I am actually still sick is that I have no appetite for alcohol. But you can buy chocolate online from Hotel Chocolat, and delivery is free on orders over £20.

BSFA Awards News

~ Cheryl

As most of you will have heard by now, this year’s Eastercon has finally been cancelled. That must be a huge relief to the organisers who were potentially on the hook for the cost of the event if it hadn’t been possible for the hotel to claim on insurance for the cancellation. It is a risky business running a convention in the UK, because creating a corporate shield is much harder than it is in the USA.

However, this now raises the question of what happens with the BSFA Awards. Thankfully the folks at the BSFA are well on top of things. It is now possible to vote online, as long as you are a BSFA member or had an Eastercon membership. Full details here. Don’t forget to vote for Juliet. (What, biased, me?)

Coronavirus – Day #9

~ Cheryl

It was a beautiful spring day here today again so I decided to venture outside. I’m getting worried that all of the dry air from central heating isn’t doing me any good. And I need some exercise.

There were a lot of people out. Mostly they were walking dogs or small children, but there were also the inevitable joggers. The majority seemed to have no great interest in social distancing.

There were shops open. That included the convenience store just around the corner, and the small Co-Op about 5-10 minutes walk away. The latter had food and was very quiet so I popped in and got a few things. There wasn’t much fresh, but I did get milk, bread, tomatoes and mushrooms. That should help me through another couple of weeks at home.

I’d spent the morning going through the food cupboards. Inevitably I found a few things well past their sell-by date. That included a lot of half-used bottles of various chili sauces. I suspect they will kill most things, except viruses.

For dinner tonight I tried a new toy. I found this top-end mini-blender going half-price on Amazon and ordered one. I got to try it out this evening. I put in some banana yoghurt, some frozen blackberries and raspberries, and some fruits of the forest juice. The end result was delicious. At some point I plan to try it with mango yoghurt, tinned peaches and orange juice, which I suspect will also work well.

Finally a bunch of British writers have been providing ebook stories, podcasts and so on for free to give folks stuck at home something to read or listen to. The BSFA has a page linking free SF&F stories. I’ll try to get something out from Wizard’s Tower this week. Alternatively, if you are into long reads, Galley Beggar now has an ebook store and you can get Ducks, Newburyport for only £2.50, which of course I have done.

A Taste of the Wild

~ Cheryl

Red Deer Stag

In early April Kevin and I were due to take a vacation on Vancouver Island off the west coast of Canada. Obviously that won’t happen now, but I’ve mostly been able to have today off and I took the opportunity to catch up with the BBC’s 2017 wildlife series, Wild Ireland: The Edge of the World. Like Vancouver Island, Western Ireland exists on the north-eastern edge of a great ocean, and it too has a wonderful assortment of wildlife. This two-episode series has the usual focus on mating and murder, but it also has some absolutely stunning photography. There are gannets, puffins, dolphins, red deer, pine martens, basking sharks and much more. It is well worth a look.

The thing that really struck me, however, was a story. Years ago a group of men from the Blasket Islands were on their way home in their curraghs when they heard an unearthly sound coming up through the bottoms of their boats. One of the men was a musician, and that night he made a song that, as best as he was able, captured the sounds he had heard. It is called Port na bPúcaí (the song of the pookas) and it became a very popular slow air. Here it is:

For a long time this was assumed to be nothing more than a fairly tale, but now we have had the opportunity to study such music we know exactly what magnificent creatures made it, and what a good job that ancient Irishman made of reproducing their song.

Humpback whale

Coronavirus – Day #8

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Today I got a message through the door from some people down the street. They are looking to put together a little community support group. I gather this sort of thing is happening all over the country, which is heartwarming. Unfortunately I’m not much use in such things. Firstly, as I may have the virus, I should not be socialising. And second, my first thought on seeing it was that if I got to know the rest of the people in the street then pretty soon they’d all know that I was trans and I’d have to find somewhere new to live.

I’m continuing to get “helpful” messages from all sorts of corporations. I use scare quotes because today I got messages from two different delivery companies. Both said they were introducing new procedures to avoid contact and that I should go to their website to enter my preferences. In both cases the website is not set up to enable you to do that.

As the day job hasn’t been chasing me today, I’ve been able to spend another day on Wizard’s Tower work. I’ve done most of the work on layouts for the new Tate Hallaway book, Unjust Cause, so that will be coming your way some time in April.

I have also been doing some testing with Zoom. Going into Bristol for a radio show is not a good idea, so I’m hoping to do some interviews remotely and put together a pre-record show. The plan for the April 1st show is to talk to a bunch of people from different countries around the world about how people are dealing with the pandemic where they live. So if you have always wanted to be on the show, this is your chance. Let me know.

Today’s cooking was proper store-cupboard stuff. Tuna, tomatoes, and some spices makes a great pasta sauce. Serve with conchiglie, obiously.

Coronavirus – Day #7

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

Today I went out. In the car. My car has dodgy electrics and, if left to her own devices, will develop a flat battery in a week or two. So I have to run her regularly. As long as I stay in the car I am still self-isolating. It was good to get out.

Interestingly the roads around here did not look deserted. There were cars on the road, and people walking around town. My local Tesco looked quite busy, which suggests that they may have food.

I think I am finally beginning to understand this virus thing. This article by a GP was a big help.

As was a Twitter thread by a professor from Yale that, annoyingly, I can no longer find.

Here’s where I think we are:

1. The virus is massively contagious, at least in part because no one has any immunity, but also because most countries have been way too slow to respond.

2. The vast majority of people who contract it will survive. I now suspect over 99% because I think we are massively undercounting the number of people who have it.

3. Typical symptoms are an infection of the upper respiratory tract which leads to a dry cough.

4. It only gets bad if the infection migrates to the lungs and you get pneumonia and need to be on a ventilator.

5. The biggest danger is that large numbers of people need hospitalisation at the same time, because of the rapid rate of infection, and that health services are overwhelmed. This is why slowing the rate of infection is so important.

6. People with a mild case of the virus will take days, maybe even weeks, to recover. That’s partly because this is a new thing that our bodies are struggling to find antibodies for, and partly because we don’t have medication to help (or the capacity to provide it to so many people in such a short time).

7. But people are recovering. We don’t as yet know whether those people are immune, and if so how long that lasts, but as the stock of recovered people grows we should be able to start getting the global economy back on its feet.

8. Our ability to understand and cope with all this is critically dependent on testing so that we know who has the virus and who has recovered from it. The UK government is still reluctant to spend money on testing.

I certainly have the respiratory infection and cough, but nothing else. A lot of the problem with the cough is that a badly inflamed respiratory system is easily irritated, and that leads to coughing, which is a further irritant. Hydrating more seems to help. I have also found that sucking a Fisherman’s Friend is a good way to calm things down so that I can get back to sleep.

On the food front I am now out of most fresh fruit and veg, but I have canned and frozen so I’m not worried. I also have the ability to make yoghurt so I am going to experiment with smoothies. I ate the last of the curry tonight, so will be going onto fish and pasta for a while before the haggis. It is nice to have time to cook.

But I am also very bored of being sick. I should be exercising more, but any sort of physical exertion is a bad idea right now.

Coronavirus – Day #6

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Hello again. How is everyone? Here it has been another day of feeling low-grade sick but perfectly well enough to do things. It has been a quiet time on the day job, and therefore I have devoted my time to Wizard’s Tower. I have at long last found the time to build a proper accounting system. (One that I hope Kevin could take over should anything terrible happen to me.) We’ve sold a shit load of books over the years.

Oh, and I have see the cover for Unjust Cause, the new Tate Hallaway novel. No reveal just yet, but suffice it to say that Lyda and I are absolutely delighted.

Today has also been a day for organisations to email me and talk about their plans for coping with the crisis. It is encouraging to see everyone from stores to financial institutions to travel companies are at least thinking about the situation and trying to do their bit.

However, it is small companies that I’m most worried about. They are much more vulnerable to economic shocks, and they are the least likely to be helped by our mendacious government. Wizard’s Tower will be fine because we have no employees or premises, but there must be loads of organisations out there hurting badly. It is difficult to know who to help first. If you need books, and who doesn’t, then please try to buy them from a local, independent store. My good friends at Mr. B’s are one option. I had a package from them today and will be spending more money with them soon.

Coronavirus – Day #5

~ Cheryl

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about symptoms, I recommend this post over at the Long Now Foundation. It backs up what I said yesterday about us not really understaing the virus very well yet. The fast-and-stealthy scenario that suggests the virus is a) much more infectious, and b) much less deadly than we think does fit a lot of the facts.

In the meantime there’s some potentially good news from Japan about a possible treatment that will help people survive if they do get a bad case.

Today has been a day for more stuff being cancelled. Both Ã…con (May) and Cymera (June) will no longer take place this year. There’s no word of a decision as yet on Finncon (July) or Worldcon (August).

The spectacularly malevolent British government continues its efforts to have the world’s worst response to the crisis. One of the major drivers of social inequality in this country is the move into buy-to-let by the wealthy. What this means is that even moderately rich people have one or more extra properties that they own and rent out. You can get a lot more income in rent than you have to pay out in a mortgage, even after paying a rental management company to do most of the work. A side effect of this is that it has become extremely difficult for young people to get a start on the property ladder. People who own rental properties will mostly have voted solidly for the Tories, and Johnson is paying them back by giving them protection while forcing renters to get into debt. It is straight up class warfare, not an attempt to manage the crisis.

Fortunately, though my work for The Diversity Trust has totally dried up, I still have plenty of work from my energy economics consultancy. I won’t have a problem paying the rent, and could even buy food if that was possible. (I don’t know, I haven’t been to Tesco since Friday, but my Twitter stream is full of photos of empty supermarket shelves and people complaining that they can’t get deliveries.)

Tesco, incidently, have just emailed to explain the various measures that they are taking to deal with the crisis. Good to see them taking steps to prevent panic buying.

And talking of work, there’s Wizard’s Tower to be taken care of as well. Which means that these little babies have arrived. I have sent a set off to Juliet for approval, so it won’t be long before they are available for sale.

And then the hardcovers. Honestly people, just wait until you see the hardcovers.

Coronavirus – Day #4

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

Today I thought I would talk a bit about symptoms, because I’m confused. I have been sick for almost 2 weeks now. The last time I went out for work was the 5th. I did a brief shopping trip on the 7th. Aside from that I have been self-isolating. I have not had any flu-like symptoms, but I did gradually develop a cough which has stubbornly refused to go away. Are these virus symptoms? Who knows?

The problem is that this is a very new virus and we don’t know a lot about it. What we do know is that people are reporting very different symptoms. Some of the rich people reporting that they have tested positive say they have no symptoms at all. Other people have reported very servere flu-like symptoms that required hospitalisation. So is this something that many people will just be carriers for? Or is it something that can hang around in your body for days before things start to get serious? Is that why the self-isolation period has been extended to 14 days in the UK?

The really annoying thing for me is that during the day I generally feel fine save for the occasional cough. Today I logged a 7-hour day on the day job. But after a few hours sleep I wake up feeling dreadful. It takes me an hour or so in the morning to get going. It is all very weird.

Doubtless a whole lot of clever medical people are working on this, and they are certainly getting plenty of data. We will know a lot more soon. In the meantime I think all that we can do is assume that we know nothing. I’m sorry if that’s scary. Please remember that the vast majority of younger people will survive this, even if old folks like me don’t. But if you can keep to yourself then I think you should do so, until we know more about what is safe.

Other than that, isolation is trucking along as expected. I ate the last of the fresh tomatoes today and will miss them, but I have other fresh fruit left. I also used the last of the fresh meat making a curry that will last until the weekend. I have a haggis in the fridge. That’s good until early April. Other than that I shall be pescatarian for a while. I’ll be intersted to see how that turns out.

Coronavirus – Day #3

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

It was a beautiful day here today. After a couple of days staying at home I would have loved to go for a walk. However, isolation is isolation. Of course all I have is a cough, and some of you might think it would be OK for me to go out with a mask, but such things are hard to get here. Pharmacies didn’t routinely stock them to start with, and now you can’t get one anywhere. In any case, our health service doesn’t trust people to use masks correctly, or to remember not to touch people. Their advice is that if you have any symptoms at all then you should stay at home for at least 7 days. So that is what I am doing.

And today that stay-at-home period has been extended to 14 days.

All of which is causing people to wonder how long this is going to last. When I went shopping last Friday I figured I needed food up until the end of April. That now looks like an underestimate.

The big issue today, however, is the rest of the government’s idiotic announcement. Most countries around the world have been ordering big gatherings not to take place, and ordering venues to close. Heck the Irish government has ordered pubs to close, just a few days before St. Patrick’s Day. That’s a measure of how seriously they are taking the need to prevent infection. Here our government has just advised people not to attend large gatherings.

The key difference here is “advised” rather than “ordered”. If an event or venue is ordered to close by government then it can claim on insurance. If all that happens is that the punters don’t turn up because they have been advised not to go, then there is a problem. Right now all sorts of businesses around the UK, from theatres and concert halls, to pub and restaurants are facing ruin because their custom will plummet and there is nothing that they can do about it.

To bring it closer to home, consider a science fiction convention. Swecon, which I was due to attend, was cancelled on government orders. That means that they did not have to pay for the venue. CostumeCon 38 in Montreal was cancelled on government orders the day before it was due to start. Kevin, who is on the board on CanSMOF, had been quietly worring to me about it all last week. But the government intervention saved them from a financial disaster. In the UK I expect Eastercon to have almost no attendance. Hilton are fully refunding hotel bookings, but because the event hasn’t been banned they won’t refund the function space rental, because they can’t claim on their insurance. The convention may also be on the hook for failing to deliver enough hotel bookings, such targets normally being part of convention hotel contracts.

There are still a couple of weeks to go before the con, so it is possible that someone will step in and save them. But Bozo is way out of his depth, and Cummins, who pulls his strings, is actively malevolent, so I don’t expect anything to change.

Anyway, time to worry about how far into May I can last without leaving home. And sadly that probably means no Ã…con for me. The rest of Europe may be coming out of the crisis by then, but I can’t see the UK doing so.

Coronavirus – Day #2

~ Cheryl

So far so good. Aside from not going out, today has been a pretty normal Sunday. I did some housework (cleaned the fridge!), did some reading and writing, and got caught up on Formula E. I’m slightly bemused by all of the people on Twitter wondering what they are going to do when they are stuck at home.

The other thing that I did today was go over a draft of a new will. That’s not because I’m expecting to die imminently. It occurred to me a few weeks back that I really should make provision in the will for Wizard’s Tower. The lawyers sent me a draft, and it has taken me a couple of weeks to get around to reading it.

Of course if I do get the virus my chances are good, but not great. Given average worldwide figures I probably have about a 1 in 30 chance of dying. That’s a damn sight more likely than winning the lottery. So I’m not being blasé about it.

This being Britain, Land of Transphobia, the anti-trans brigade are going off on social media about how it is important to know your “biological sex” when going to the doctor. But of course by “biological sex” they mean chromosomes, which have very little effect once you have been born. Interestingly mortality among men is higher than among women, and that’s despite women doing a lot more of the healthcare. An article in The Lancet suggested a number of gendered explanations for the difference, including men being more likley to smoke, and women being less likely to have to go into an office or other workplace in order to keep their job. Being a life-long non-smoker, and a self-employed work-from-home person, I have a more feminine social profile.

But who knows? I’ve had pneumonia in the past. That might make me more vulnerable. Worrying over percentages like this is pointless. My life has got less busy all of a sudden, and while I will miss the foreign trips I am determined to enjoy the additional relaxation time. Back to reading, I think.

Coronavirus – Day #1

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Well, here we are, living in our very own science fictional dystopia. All of my near future travel plans have been cancelled (thankfully with no loss of money). That means no Swecon convention in Stockholm, and no Moving Trans History Forward conference in Canada. It also means no holiday with Kevin. Most of my forthcoming meetings and training gigs have also been cancelled, and I expect the rest of those in March to follow suit quickly. I also expect Eastercon to be cancelled, and I have very little else booked until the last week of April. I also have plenty of work that I can be doing at home, and enough savings to survive a few months. Having a very small home with very low rent has its advantages.

So I am well set up to self-isolate and not risk helping spread the virus. I have had a mild cold all week, but nothing like flu symptoms. Nevertheless I have been keeping to myself as much as possible so as not to worry people. From now on I stay at home. It will be an interesting experience, and I thought I should document it. If nothing else it will be useful research fodder for anyone writing dystopian fiction in the future.

Obviously I will run out of fresh food (meat, fruit & veg) in a week or so. But I do have enough dried, tinned and frozen food to last much longer. I also have a large bottle of vitamin pills that I bought when Hard Brexit was a worry. And of course I have plenty of coffee, tea and whisky.

I don’t expect to be missing the social contact. Most of my friends live far away and we communiate mostly via email and social media. If I need other voices, I have plenty of things I want to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime. Disney+ launches here in just over a week.

What does concern me is staying fit. My home is very small so there’s not a lot of room to exercise. Time to put the Wii back into action, I think.

My other concern is what sort of world I will emerge into when this is all over. Unlike most world governments, the people in Westminister are currently planning on letting the virus run riot through the population. Indeed, they are encouraging this. The theory seems to be that healthy, productive citizens will contract the virus, recover, and become immune, whereas the elderly and infirm will die off leaving the population fitter and healthier as a result. That’s the sort of nightmare nonsense I expect to find in a Charlie Stross novel, not in real life.

It is not a case of hoping no one that you know dies. It is a question of wondering which of your friends and relatives will die.

So it is all a bit up in the air. We do indeed live in Interesting Times. Stay healthy, people. Here’s hoping that once we have got through this people will see the likes of Trump and Johnson for the amoral opportunist charlatans that they are.

A Favour, Please

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

So, there you all are twiddling your thumbs and wondering what to do as the long days of self-isolation stretch ahead of you. Yes, you should be reading books, but hopefully you have time to do something quickly for me.

As you may be aware, governments in the UK have been consulting on changes to the Gender Recongition Act. This is because the current system for obtaining a revised birth certificate (and with it a new legal gender) and a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) is so complex, difficult and expensive that most trans people don’t bother. Changing your ID such as passports and driving licences is much easier, and who ever looks at a birth certificate anyway? But government officials are concerned that many people have ID in one gender yet are legally a different gender, and they want to change that by making it easier for trans folks to make the legal change.

There were a couple of consultations last year, one in Scotland and one in England & Wales. The Scottish one showed 60% of respondents in favour of a change. Westminster has refused to publish the results of their consultation and the new government apparently has no intention of going ahead with the process, but the Scots have published a bill and opened a consultation on that. The consultation closes on Tuesday (17th).

You might wonder what this has to do with you, as most of you are not Scottish. Well, the Scottish government is welcoming input from all around the world, and you can bet that the anti-trans extremists will be doing their best to flood the consultation with responses favouring their view. Trans people in Scotland have been subjected to weeks of relentless and hostile media coverage, and risk losing their civil rights altogether if this consultation produces a negative result. (Transphobes within Westminster are already calling openly for the repeal of trans people’s civil rights.)

The good news is that the consultation is very easy to fill in. There are just five questions. There’s also a fair amount of background information to digest, but I’ll try to summarise things briefly here.

1. All that this affects is the birth certificate. That has almost no effect on day-to-day life. It governs what gender you can get married in, and what gender you are recorded as when you die, but very little else.

2. Scotland will requre a Statutory Declaration to change your legal gender. A false declaration counts as perjury, which is a serious crime with stiff penalties. It will not be possible to change your legal gender on a whim, or easily change back afterwards.

3. Similar systems are already in place in Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, Norway and several other countries outside of Europe.

4. If you have any concerns regarding the safety of women as a result of these changes, please read this article from The Scotsman which summarises the responses of women’s servces in Scotland to the initial consultation (spoiler, they were all supportive of the changes).

Question 1 asks, “Do you have any comments on the proposal that applicants must live in their acquired gender for at least 3 months before applying for a GRC?” Simply saying No would indicate that you have no concerns, but a message saying that you support the changes would be helpful.

Question 2 asks, “Do you have any comments on the proposal that applicants must go through a period of reflection for at least 3 months before obtaining a GRC?” Personally I think this is rather silly, but equally it can’t do much harm. If you don’t want to go into the arguments you can safely answer No here.

Question 3 asks, “Should the minimum age at which a person can apply for legal gender recognition be reduced from 18 to 16?” Under current NHS guidelines you can begin medical transition (by taking hormones) at 16, so of course 16-year-olds should be able to change their legal gender along with everything else they will be changing.

Question 4 asks, “Do you have any other comments on the provisions of the draft Bill?” At this point it would be very helpful to ask the Scottish Government to do something for non-binary people. I have worked a lot with organisations from hospitals to domestic violence refuges, and for all of them the lack of any legal recognition of non-binary gender makes it very hard for them to make appropriate allowances for non-binary people.

Question 5 asks, “Do you have any comments on the draft Impact Assessments?” If you are a woman, this would be a good place to say that you do not think that your rights or safety are in any way threatened by the existence of trans people (which is basically the conclusion that the Scottish Government came to).

Some alternative advice, along with discussion of the issues, is available from Mermaids.

The online consultation is available here.

There is no guarantee that the bill will go forward if the consultation delivers a positive result. The anti-trans lobby has plenty of money and powerful friends. But if the consultation delivers a negative result then trans rights in the whole of the UK will in serious danger of being repealed.

Rebecca F. Kuang to give 2020 Tolkien Lecture

~ Cheryl

The 2020 JRR Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature will be given by Rebecca F. Kuang. It will take place as usual at the Pichette Auditorium, Pembroke College and the date is Tuesday 28th April. You can reserve a (free) place here.

As I’m sure most of you know, Kuang’s debut novel, The Poppy War, won the Crawford and Compton Cook Awards, and was a finalist for a whole bunch of others including the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards.

Further details of the event can be found here. I hope to see some of you there.

Women in SF: The Podcast

~ Cheryl

The lovely people from Cosmic Shed have published a podcast recording of the panel on Women in Science Fiction that I was part of recently. The other panelists are Kate Macdonald, Emma Geen and Liz Williams. Our thanks to Cosmic Shed, and of course again to Foyles Bristol, The Bristol Women’s Literature Festival, and the Bristol Festival of Ideas.

You can listen to the podcast here, or through the podbean app.

I’m not going to list all of the books I mentioned as the podcast is very clear, but there are a few things that I couldn’t remember or didn’t explain fully.

The essay by Suzette Hayden Elgin that I mentioned is The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-defence and it is available from Amazon and other sellers.

The Dutch writer I mentioned is Thomas Olde Heuvelt.

The woman biologist I was trying to remember is Joan Slonczewski. She’s American, not Canadian, for which my apologies.

And for more about French science fiction, my Small Blue Planet podcast with Mélanie Fazi & Lionel Davoust is still worth a listen.

February Salon Futura

~ Cheryl

The latest issue of Salon Futura went online at the weekend. Here’s what you can find in it:

I guess I should remind you that Salon Futura is eligible for the Best Fanzine category in the Hugos. Not that I need another Hugo, but I do want you all to vote in the Fanzine category. If I do get on the ballot I suspect it will increase interest in the category.

Today On Ujima – LGBTHM and IWD

~ Cheryl

Today’s radio show sat on the cusp between the end of LGBT History Month and the arrival of International Women’s Day. (International Men’s Day is on November 19th, thank you for asking.) I began the show by looking backward and running an interview with my friend and sometime colleague, Dan Vo, that I had recorded in Cardiff over the weekend. Dan is a professional Queerator, that is, someone whose job it is to go around museums and find queer stuff in their collections that they can use to be more LGBT inclusive.

In the second slot I welcomed Rebecca from Watershed who is part of their cinema team. In particular she has been helping put together their International Women’s Day programme which features the Feminista Short Film Festival. There are also some great women-centered feature films coming up. Rebecca is also involved in QueerVision, the Watershed’s regular celebration of queer cinema. There’s a short film festival coming up for that and she’s looking for submissions.

Slot three should have been a feature on drink spiking featuring Andy Bennett from Avon & Somerset Police, but some sort of operational emergency claimed his time and I had to fill in with the chat and extra music. Hopefully we can do that piece another time.

Finally I welcomed Sian and Laura from the Bristol Festival of Women’s Literature. They have loads of great talent lined up for this year’s event, including the very wonderful Juliet Jacques talking about memoir writing. You can find more details of the programme here.

An event of particuar interest to me is the launch party at Spike Island on the 27th as it is being run in conjunction with the wonderful people from Comma Press who are publishing Europa 28, an anthology of writing about the future of Europe by women from all over the continent. It is political essays rather than SF, but these days the one quickly shades into the other. And of course much of the content is translated.

If you missed the show live it will be available through our Listen Again service for a few weeks. Go here to listen.

The playlist for the show was as follows:

  • Duffy – Rockferry
  • Tracy Chapman – She’s Got Her Ticket
  • Selecter – On My Radio
  • Rihanna – Only Girl in the World
  • Janet Kay – Silly Games
  • The Weather Girls – Its Raining Men
  • Bat for Lashes – Horse and I
  • Thelma Houston – Don’t Leave Me This Way
  • Janelle Monáe (feat. Grimes) – Pynk
  • Aretha Franklin – Until You Come Back

Sian and Laura, this is the famous Monica Sjöö painting that was one of the inspirations for Janelle Monáe’s video for Pynk.

Because I’m going to be in Canada with Kevin for the first part of April, my next show will not be until April 15th.