For World Book Day I have something a bit special for you. I read a lot of fantasy debuts (Crawford award, remember?), but I have rarely seen one as sophisticated and assured as this one. It is, in many ways, a very traditional epic fantasy, but it is definitely not stale and hackneyed, despite the number of familiar notes that it hits.
Of course it does one thing that is absolutely guaranteed to get me excited. What can that be? Read the review to find out.
I do love the thing that Tor.com is doing with novellas. I adored The Black God’s Drums. P Djèlà Clark and his editor, Diana M Pho, will be on my Hugo ballot as a result. But that’s last year. This year we have The Haunting of Tram Car 015 which is delightful in a whole new way. It has trams, and djinn, and suffragettes, and strange Armenian candy. What’s not to like? The review is here.
I began today’s show with some extracts from Marlon James’ Tolkien Lecture. You can listen to the whole thing here.
The second segment was an interview with Chloe Tingle of No More Taboo, the period poverty charity. We talked about how Bristol is leading the way in tackling period poverty, about a course that Chloe will be running in Bristol next week, and about how a film about periods won an Oscar. If you want to go on the course, booking details are here.
In segment 3 I was joined in the studio by Harry Silverlock of the Palace International Film Festival, queer film festival which originated in Poland (in an actual mediaeval palace) and is coming to Bristol next week. It sounds like a really great event. I’m particuarly pleased with how diverse the selection of films is.
Finally I was joined by Lisa Whitehouse who has an International Women’s Day event on Saturday to promote. It is going to be at Hannah Moore Infants School on Saturday but there’s an issue with the Facebook presence right now so I can’t link to it. The most important think is that Lisa assures me it is trans-inclusive, unlike certain other IWD events I could mention.
You can listen to the whole show here.
The music today was largely devoted to remembering the great Jackie Shane who died peacefully in her sleep last month aged 78. It is good to know that some trans women of color can live long lives. Here’s the full playlist:
Bonus time: two for the price of one. As I was reviewing Gareth L Powell’s Fleet of Knives I figured I should go back and do Embers of War as well. It’s not like you can read book 2 of a trilogy without reading book 1 anyway.
So if you want to know more about what the publishers are hailing as being in the same league as Al Reynolds, Iain M Banks and Peter F Hamilton, go here for the review.
Or, you know, just look at these fine examples of space opera book covers.
I’m trying to make a conscious attempt to catch up on the enormous amount of audio I have stacked up waiting to be published. There are interviews I did at Worldcon in Helsinki that I ran on the radio but still haven’t put online. But before I get to those there are some slightly more up to date pieces that I should run before they become completely stale.
I’m starting with an interview that I did at FantasyCon at the end of last year. Tade Thompson is one of my favorite people to interview because he always has plenty to say, and is always in good humor even when he’s having a rant. This interview covers the success of Rosewater, the scariness of The Murders of Molly Southborne, and what it is like for black writers to live in a post-Black Panther world.
I spent Tuesday night in Oxford attending this year’s JRR Tolkien Memorial Lecture on Fantasy Fiction. This year’s guest lecturer was Marlon James, whose Black Leopard, Red Wolf I reviewed here. Along the way I got to catch up with many friends including Olivette Otele, Stephanie Saulter, and of course Juliet McKenna. (Green Man 2 is progressing well; thank you for asking.)
I was hoping to get an interview with Marlon for Ujima, but sadly his schedule was too packed. However, I did get to chat with him briefly. We talked mostly about the X-Men. If anyone at Marvel is reading this, you need to get him to write for you. Seanan, Nnedi, please put in a good word for him.
The lovely folks at Pembroke have now posted the video of the lecture, so you can get to enjoy Marlon as well. I hope you find him as erduite and entertaining as I did.
My final LGBT History Month event of 2019 was one that I was not speaking at. It was organised by my good friends Jana Funke and Jen Grove from the University of Exeter to celebrate the launch of their new book, Sculpture, Sexuality and History. It is a niche interest, but it does overlap with the history of robots as fictional entities. I need to read it for a talk I am giving later this year.
As part of the festivities, Jana & Jen invited three graduates students to give a seminar. They provided three great papers.
Rebecca Mellor talked about secret collections of “erotic” objects at museums, and how a museum makes the decision to class something as erotic. Interestingly the decision can often depend far more on who donated the object than on what it looks like.
Mara Gold’s talk was about how Western lesbians from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries used references to Sappho and Ancient Greek culture in general as code for their sexuality. I learned a lot. I had no idea that Hope Mirlees and Sylvia Townsend Warner were lesbians. And there’s another person who deserves a whole blog post of her own.
Finally we had Georgina Barker who talked about the Russian poet, Elena Shvarts, whose Sappho-influenced work scandalised mid-20th Century USSR. That’s less of interest to me, but Georgina and I spent quite a bit of time chatting about Scythians, who also fall into the Russia-Classics crossover.
On getting home I found email inviting me to view a colloquium on Diversifying Classics at the College of Charleston. South Carolina is perhaps not the place that would immediately spring to mind when considering progressive views of the Classics, but it turns out that it is an excellent event. The whole thing is available on Farcebook.
Rebecca Futo Kennedy talked about how the idea of “Western Civilisation” was invented by white people in the 19th Century. This is particularly ironic because at the time both Greeks and Italians tended to get views as “black”.
Arum Park talked about the need for women and people of color to revisit translations of ancient works. The white male bias that the likes of Emily Wilson and Maria Dahvana Headly have identied in translations of The Odyssey and Beowulf respectively are starting to look like the tip of a very large iceberg.
Nandini Pandey talked about the multicultural nature of the Roman Empire and what we can learn from how Rome went about encouraging multiculturalism. I think she let Polemo and the Physionomists off a little lightly on the origins of racism, but other than that she too was great. Romans and Greeks, of course, were Mediterranean people and thus compared themselves to those lighter skinned than themselves as well as those darker. They tended to assume that they were a perfect mixture of the two extremes. A good example is Vitruvius who was an architect. He wrote about how climate affected both building requirements and the people who lived in different parts of the world. According to him (Book 6, Chapter 1) people from hot climates tend to be smart but cowardly, while those from cold climates tend to be stupid and brave.
The final talk by Jim Newhard is also good, but it primarily of interest to people who work in Classics departments.
And finally, while I was watching Dr. Pandey’s talk my Twitter feed threw up links to New Classicists, a very interesting new journal run by post-grad students at Kings, London.
It is great to see Classics doing all of this stuff. Much of it is, of course, prompted by the likes of Steve Bannon and Boris Johnson using the ancient world to prop up their white surpremacist ideas, but it needs doing anyway. Also the more we can learn about the ancient world beyond the narrow confines of Greece and Rome the better. The Roman Empire’s trading links were extensive and all of the cultures that they met, conquered or traded with deserve study too.
As Twitter followers will be aware, I spent a couple of days in Manchester last week attending the Historical Fiction Research Network Annual Conference. This is a brief report of what went down.
First of all, what is HFRN? Well, it is a network for people interested in historical fiction. It welcomes authors, historians, and academics who study historical fiction. I think I kind of qualify on all three.
HFRN is currently run by Farah Mendlesohn, which means it is ferociously efficient, and also very friendly to people with special access needs, and special dietary needs. Kudos this year is also due to Jerome de Groot who secured Manchester Central Library as the venue. It is a spectacular building, and perfectly located right on St. Peter’s Square. Given that this year is the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre, which took place in that very square, the venue was entirely appropriate, as was the conference’s focus on themes of resistance and rebellion.
Attendees came in a wide range of countries. There were Americans, Australians and people from all over Europe. I got in on the Thursday night and spent the evening chatting to a couple of academics from Stockholm.
Friday began with a keynote speech from Josie Gill of Bristol University. Josie has been engaged in a project called Literary Archaeology that brought together archaeologists and creative writers to explore the lived enviromnent of African slaves in the West Indies. Some of the writers involved included my friend Edson Burton, and the brilliant poet, Vanessa Kisuule.
Interestingly Josie’s talk reminded me a lot of the issues involved in doing trans history. Some slaves did leave behind narratives, but their freedom to write about their lives was generally heavily constrained by the fact that they could only be published by white-run publishers, and for a white audience. Their output therefore tended to be tailored to the white gaze, in much the same way that trans memoirs have been tailored to the cis gaze. One of the goals of the project was to try to free slave narratives from those strictures.
Later that morning I got to chair a panel that included a paper by Jonathon Ball, a young man from New South Wales whose research is on the use of historical fiction in LGBT activism. As you can imagine, this was right up my street. My apologies to Jonathon and the rest of the audience if I somewhat monopolised discussion.
Also on Friday I heard a paper by two friends from Latrobe University in Melbourne. Catherine Padmore and Kelly Gardiner were talking about fictionalised biographies written by Australian writers. One of those was Half Wild, a book about the life of the Australian trans man, Harry Crawford, written by Pip Smith.
Given the current atmosphere surrounding trans issues, and the obvious opportunities for mischief-making (Crawford was convicted of murdering his wife) I feared the worst. However, it sounds from what Catherine and Kelly tell me that Smith has done a decent job. I will be interested to hear what any trans men who have read the book think of it.
I gave my paper on Saturday morning. It was a new version of my steampunk talk, updated to include the brilliant P Djeli Clark. The slides are available on Academia.edu.
In the same session was a paper by Nic Clear from Newcastle University about Le Corbusier as a science fiction writer. I know next to nothing about architecture, but the idea that avant garde city designers are in fact writing science fiction makes a lot of sense to me.
Possibly my favorite paper of the weekend was Blair Apgar talking about the amazing Matilda di Canossa. This woman lived in Tuscany in the 11th Century. She ruled her own lands, had her own army, and was instrumental in forcing the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, to submit to the authority of Pope Gregory VII.
Matilda’s story was largely forgotten in later centuries, as often happens with women rulers. However, Pope Urban VIII grew up in the region of Italy that Matilda once ruled and was apparently taken with the local legend of the woman ruler. He had Matilda’s body kidnapped and taken to Rome where he had her re-buried in St. Peter’s Basilica. There’s a large statue by Bernini on her tomb.
I confess to having bunked off for much of Saturday afternoon to watch rugby. It was so worth it! Victories over the English are always welcome, but more so when they are unexpected.
Next year’s conference will be held in Salzburg. We are moving to Europe because of the uncertainly surrounding Brexit and in particular the difficulty that foreign academics find in getting visas to come to the UK. That will only get worse, probably much worse, after we leave the EU.
I’m having a sick day today, having acquired a slight cold. All I had out in the world today were a couple of meetings, both of which can do without me, and both of whose attendees will doubtless be grateful not to be given any germs. The upside of this is that I have been able to read and write.
So firstly you are getting a review of the new Charlie Jane Anders novel, The City in the Middle of the Night. It is a fascinating book that I expect to see people writing political analyses of in the near future. You can find that review here.
I have also finished the new Gareth L Powell novel, Fleet of Knives. That will be harder to review because it is the middle volume of a triology, but I’ll get onto that next.
Twitter followers will know that I have also read the new Guy Gavriel Kay book, A Brightness Long Ago. I have written a review of that, but I’m sitting on it for a while as the book isn’t due out until May.
And currently I am reading The Haunting of Tram Car 015 by one of my favorite new writers, P. Djèlà Clark. I need to have read that one before giving a paper on decolonising steampunk later this week.
This year’s invitations to do talks for LGBT History Month included one from Queen’s University, Belfast. I’d never been to Belfast before, and had a friend who teaches at the University who was able to put me up for the night (thanks Danielle!) so I said yes. It turned out that the cheapest way to get there was to fly to Dublin and head north from there, hence this little travel adventure.
Thursday started badly with heavy fog over Darkest Somerset. When I got to Bristol airport flights appeared to be coming and going OK, but mine wasn’t. I think the problem was that the likes of a 757 were OK, but the little turbo prop that Aer Lingus was using for my flight was too small to risk it.
I got re-booked on a later flight, but there was no time to fulfil my plan of going into Dublin and catching the train to Belfast. Instead I booked myself on an express bus from Dublin airport to Belfast. Thanks to Jon Turney for the travel advice. I normally travel very badly on buses, but this one was motorway pretty much all the way to Belfast. I actually ended up feeling much more sick on the short hop from plane to terminal at Dublin because we had a shuttle bus driver who thought he was in a rally.
The other reason I survived the bus trip was that I slept most of the way. I woke up when we got to Ulster and started making stops. We arrived in Belfast just before 17:00 and looking at the traffic I figured we’d be stuck, but there is a secret bus-only route that takes you right into the city centre. I’m impressed, Belfast.
By the way, that did mean that I was asleep when we crossed the border. There was no passport check at any point on the journey. That ease of travel will probably go away post-Brexit.
Having made it to Belfast on time, I did my talk. Huge thanks to the lovely students in the Queens LGBT+ group. We also had a great meal at a local Nepalese restaurant. There seems to be plenty of good eating in Belfast.
On Friday morning I was able to check out the trains. I caught a commuter service from where I was staying into the city, then the Enterprise down to Dublin.
It is worth noting that the main station for Belfast city is Great Victoria Street. However, the Enterprise leaves from Lanyon Place which is smaller and in a commercial/industrial district. The bus station is next to the Great Victoria Street station.
It is also worth noting that the train is much more expensive than the bus. I paid £30 for a Belfast-Dublin ticket on the train, and €8 for a Dublin-Belfast single on the bus. Of course I my case I can work on the train. On a bus I can only sleep or be sick. So the extra cost is worth it. Also the train has free wifi and a food & drink service, which the bus does not. The journey time is about 2 hours on the train. It is also 2 hours from Dublin airport to Belfast, because the airport is north of Dublin right on the motorway. If you get the bus from central Dublin you need to add at least an extra half hour to get out of the city.
There were no passport checks on the train either. I knew when I crossed the border because my phone told me that I had switched from a UK service to a (free) roaming provider. The free roaming will go way after Brexit too.
The other way that you can tell whether you are in Ulster or the Republic is the signage. In the Republic it is all dual-language. In Ulster it is defiantly English-only.
Having got to Dublin I spent an hour or two wandering around taking photos of things of interest close to the convention center where Worldcon will take place in August. I tweeted the photos, and you can find the thread here.
I also got into a lengthy conversation with a lovely Croatian woman who was working at the Tourist Information Office in Dublin. She gave me a lot of advice about places to visit (most importantly whiskey distilleries). But I’m saving that up for another post.
Thankfully my trip home was a lot smoother than the outward leg.
It seems like a long time since I did one of these things. I got out of the habit while I was on the Tiptree jury because I wasn’t allowed to review any submissions. Hopefully I can get back into the habit again. Certainly I have a lot of great books that I want to tell you about.
Reviewing Black Leopard, Red Wolf was a little complicated because there’s so much I would love to ask Marlon James about the book. There’s not a lot of information about African culture available online. I’m hoping to get a word or two with him when he gives the Tolkien Lecture in Oxford next week, but as the book appears to have been released a couple of weeks early in ebook I figured I should get something out there.
Anyway, there may be a follow-up once I know more. In the meantime, the book is out there, and it is a lot of fun (unless you are a homophobic white surpemacist, in which case what are you doing reading my blog?). For the review, click here.
The above book is due out tomorrow, though you can pre-order it now from you know who. I’m writing about it now because tomorrow I’m traveling to Belfast via Dublin to give a talk at Queens University.
The book is an anthology of queer love stories, and it is being published on Valentine’s Day because queer people deserve love too. (Why yes, I did get a card. Thank you for asking.) The editor is Farah Mendlesohn. One of the stories is by me.
This is something of a departure for me, because it is a love story between two women. I haven’t written one of those before. However, not much else has changed. The story is set in the ancient world on the island of the goddess, Calypso, where Odysseus spent many years on his way home from Troy. I should note that, because this is the ancient world, many of the characters are bisexual, so I hesitate to call this a lesbian romance. It is what it is. I hope some of you get to enjoy it.
Now that I have the Wizard’s Tower bookstore open again I have been able to do something I have wanted to do for a couple of years: offer omnibus editions of some of the books we publish. The Tales of Einarinn omnibus is doing very well. This month it is the turn of Lyda Morehouse and the AngeLINK books.
Back when I was doing Emerald City, the AngeLINK books were one of my favorite discoveries. We are used to queer SF now, but back in 2002 it was much more revolutionary. How could I not love books featuring a transgender archangel?
These days the books seen scarily prophetic. The USA has been taken over by religious fundamentalists who are using the internet as a means of social control. One of the main characters is a Muslim hacker, because who else is going to save the world from the Apocalypse? Well there’s the Antichrist, of course, but whose side is she on? And what about Michael? What is more important to him: his job as commander of God’s legions, or the human woman that he loves? This series is a tremendous ride.
If you haven’t read them yet, the omnibus edition is now available as an ebook. Because we love you, it is on sale until the end of February. It is also available on Kobo, but the sale price won’t kick in until tomorrow as with Kobo you are not allowed to schedule a sale to start on the current day.
I might be able to get the book up on Google, but their site has been balky with the Enarinn book. It will not be on Amazon. Besides, Lyda gets more money if you buy direct, so please do so. If you don’t have GBP, PayPal will do the currency conversion for you.
Oh, and don’t those Bruce Jensen covers look great together? I’m so pleased that we got a new cover for Apocalypse Array so that the set was complete.
This is going to be a very busy week for book announcements. We’ll have something coming from Wizard’s Tower tomorrow, and an anthology I have a story in is being published on Thursday. Before that, however, there is this book.
As you can see, it is not by me, but I do have a short essay in it. The book covers a wide range of trans issues, including history. I get to write about transgender Romans. In a proper university text book. How cool is that?
Huge thanks should go to Ardel for including me. We met at the Moving Trans History Forward conference in Victoria, BC in 2016. As Ardel teaches in San Francisco, Kevin and I immediately bonded with them. We were all there again last year, and this year Ardel is over my side of the pond. We’ll both be on a panel about trans history at the Outing the Past academic conference at the end of March.
Anyway, enough about us. You want to know about the book. It is available now in the USA. It is very reasonably priced for an academic textbook. And you can get 30% off with the special offer mentioned here. UK people, you can probably buy from the publisher too, but postage may be an issue. The paperback won’t be available here until March 5th, but the Kindle edition is available now.
An exciting opportuity for young trans people is coming up in Bristol in March. As per the flyer above, there will be a series of workshops looking at the history of gender and science. The fabulous Jason Barker from Gendered Intelligence will be involved, as will the lovely people from the Rethinking Sexology project at Exeter University. The Wellcome Trust is providing the funding.
Given that this involves trans history, you might have guess that it could involve me in some way. You’d be right. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be doing yet, but I have definitely signed up to help on the workshop on March 16th.
More information will be forthcoming in the next few weeks. Also Jen Grove from Exeter Uni should be at the LGBT History Month event I am curating at M Shed on the 16th to promote the workshops. In the meantime there’s a schedule and an opportunity to register interest here.
I’ve tweeted about this last week, but I wanted to do a proper blog post as well. Neil Clarke, of Clarkesworld Magazine, is to be one of the recipients of the Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award at this year’s SFWA Nebula Conference. The Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award is given by SFWA for distinguished contributions to the science fiction and fantasy community, and his many years of editing Clarkesworld certainly qualifies Neil for that. Not only has he massively raised the profile of short fiction, he has also done wonderful things for SF in translation. I’m very pleased for him.
This year’s other Solstice recipient is Nisi Shawl who, as well as being a wonderful writer, has done great work through the Carl Brandon Society. I don’t know her as well as I know Neil, but she is a very worthy recipient.
The whole of today’s show on Ujima was devoted to LGBT History Month.
I began with some interviews I made at the event in Taunton on Saturday. These were with Steven from the Taunton Gay Group Alex from Somerset Libraries, who organised the event; and finally with Caroline Paige, an absolutely amazing lady who transitioned while serving as a pilot in the RAF and continued on active service after her transition. Anyone who flies helicopters in a war zone has my utmost admiration.
For the second half of the show I was joined in the studio by two guests. Firstly there was former Bristol MP, Stephen Williams. We talked about his time as one of the few openly gay MPs, and also about our shared love of LGBT History. The blog post on LGBT+ heritage sites that he talked about is here.
Stephen will be the headline guest at our LGBT History Month Event at M Shed on Saturday Feb. 16th. The full line-up of speakers is available here.
My second guest was author Alan Robert Clark who has written a novel about Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Eddy, who was involved in a gay sex scandal. There’s a bit more about the book, Prince of Mirrors, on the OutStories Bristol website.
You can listen to the show for the next month via the Ujima Listen Again service here.
All of the music for the show was by black LGBT artists, except for the new Saara Aalto single which I played because it is a charity fundraiser for Mermaids. Here’s the playlist:
Yes, it is that time of year again: Hugo neepery time. Over the past few days I have seen several people talking about nominating Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer. There has been much confusion over categories, so I’m here to explain.
As with the clipping material that was on the final ballot for the past two years, Monáe’s music belongs in the Dramatic Presentation categories.
The dividing line between Long Form and Short Form in these categories is 90 minutes (as stated here). So Dirty Computer is definitely Short Form, no matter which version you nominate.
Which version? Ah yes, here is the difficulty. “Dirty Computer” is the title of two different things. There is Dirty Computer the album, which is composed entirely of music, and there is Dirty Computer the Emotion Picture, which is a short film about an android called Jane 57821, and which features most of the songs from the album.
One of the things about the Hugos is that Hugo Administrators very rarely make public pronouncements about eligibility. That means we have to second guess them. I’m not privy to the inside of Nicholas Whyte’s brain, but I am fairly sure that he will view these two versions as separate works. One is solely a piece of music, the other is a film with a script and actors. They are both eligible in the same category.
Now of course you could always nominate both of them. You have six slots, after all. But if you are also filling your ballot up with episodes of Supergirl and a whole lot of lesser TV series (me, biased, surely not?) then you might not have space for both.
I’m going to ask you, if you only have space for one, to nominate Dirty Computer the Emotion Picture. Why? Because I think it has wider appeal than just the album. Fans of the music will love it regardless, and those who want something more substantial than a concept album will have the movie (starring Monáe and Tessa Thompson) to consider as well.
Your ballot entry should therefore be for: Dirty Computer the Emotion Picture; Janelle Monáe, Andrew Donoho & Chuck Lightning; Wondaland.
Donoho and Lightning are the directors, Monáe wrote all of the music and, as far as I know, the script as well.
On, and if you want to watch the film before making up your mind, you can find it on YouTube. It isn’t embeddable so you’ll need to click through. And you’ll need to log in to see it because it contains naughty words and sexy stuff.
In addition to the Locus Recommending Reading List, the other thing I do a lot of reading for each year is the Crawford Award. That is for a first fantasy book. This year it has been won by RF Kuang’s widely lauded The Poppy War. That’s hardly a surprising winner, but those of us involved in the process had many spirited discussions about other books, some of which have not had so much publicity. The short list is well worth checking out as well. Here it is:
I should also add that it was an absolute pleasure to work with Mimi Mondal. I have learned so much about India and the Indian literary scene from her.
The event in Taunton on Saturday went off very well, and we are now full steam ahead into LGBT History Month. Here’s a reminder of what I’m doing this week.
On Wednesday I will have an LGBTHM special edition of my radio show. That will include interviews from Saturday (one of which is with Caroline Paige), gay author Alan Robert Clark, and former Bristol MP Stephen Williams.
Later on Wednesday I’m going to talk to civil servants, but that’s not open to the public.
On Thursday I will be at the University of Bristol (35 Berkerly Square HWB, Room 2.26) from 14:00 to 15:00 talking about Hadrian and his times. The talk is titled: “At the Court of the Rainbow Emperor: How gay, lesbian and intersex people flourished under Hadrian’s rule.” Free tickets are available here.
And on Saturday I will be at the Senedd Building in Cardiff with the Amazon Horde. I note that Wales are playing in Italy late that afternoon so some rugby-watching is likely to happen after the event.