A local paper in Riverside reports a major donation of $3.5m to the Eaton Collection. The money comes from the estate of a long-time fan, Jay Kay Klein, who died in 2012. This is apparently the largest donation ever made to the UC Riverside Library, and hopefully it will help secure the future of the Eaton, which is one of the world’s largest repositories of material relating to science fiction and fantasy. Of course there is still the issue, reported a few weeks ago, of the new Library Administration being unconvinced of the value of the Eaton. I’m hoping that the donation causes them to have a change of mind.
Science Fiction
New Book on Posthuman Life
My friend David Roden, who is a Professor of Philosophy specializing in transhumanist thought, has published a new book called Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. You can read more about it here. Being an academic book, it is fairly expensive, and there’s no sign of an ebook edition. It does look very interesting, though. I mean, how can you resist an academic book, one of whose chapters is titled “Weird Tales”?
The Trans Stuff at Worldcon
Today there was an academic program section that included a paper on trans characters in science fiction. It was given by Paul Ballard, and I went along to see what he had to say. I was completely floored when he opened up by recommending that people read this. It is a bit outdated now. I need to do a new version.
Paul works with a trans youth group in Kent so he knows his stuff. Like me, Paul is concerned that trans people are being misrepresented in fiction because of a desire by cis writers to use them for entertainment, or to make political points. He made an interesting point that for a character in a novel to count as trans that character should have a specific will to change in some way; it was not enough to have forced change, or change that is entirely natural of the character. I need to think a bit about this, in particular with reference to people who see themselves more as gender-fluid, but it could be a useful distinction.
Mention of characters that shift genders naturally brings us naturally to The Left Hand of Darkness. Paul noted that the Gethenians really aren’t trans people in a Terran sense. I noted, as I often do in such discussions, that it can be read as a book about Trans Panic; that is the discomfort (and sometimes murderous rage) that cis people can develop when confronted by a trans person whom they thoughts was cis. Also giving a paper in the session was Jason Bourget, whom I had previously met when we were on a trans issues panel together in Montréal. Jason is a Le Guin scholar (and presented a good paper on gender in The Dispossessed). He noted the debate over the fact that Le Guin had used male pronouns for the Gethenians, and said that the Trans Panic reading only works when male pronouns are used. If female pronouns had been used, Genly would need to be gender-swapped to female (and probably made a Radical Feminist) for the same reading to work.
By the way, trying to read a paper which talks about trans people and transhumanism, which are two very different things, is very difficult. We need new terminology.
Marina Dayachenko – #WITMonth
Marina Dayachenko, together with her husband, Sergey, form Russia’s powerhouse fantasy fiction duo, though they are actually Ukrainian by birth and also write in their native tongue. They have won a host of awards in Russia, and were voted Best Writers at the 2005 Eurocon. I’m currently looking at Vita Nostra, which Aliette has been enthusing about, and which also has a rave blurb from Lev Grossman. Another of their novels, The Scar, was picked up by Tor in 2012.
Today on Ujima – Space Pirates!
Today I’m delighted to have Huw Powell (Gareth’s younger brother) in the studio to talk about his book, Spacejackers. There will be thrills, adventure, piracy! As scurvy a bunch of knaves as ever set foot in a radio studio.
Also on the show I have a massage therapist. I could probably do with taking him to Worldcon with me, because you sure need a massage after one of those.
I’m not 100% sure what’s on for the second hour. If we don’t have anyone in the studio, we might just talk a little about media harassment and the spurious “balance” arguments used by the BBC and others to justify broadcasting hate speech.
Xia Jia – #WITMonth
As with just about every other country in the world, most of the SF&F writers that we are beginning to hear of from China are male. There are some very good ones, but there must be women too. The only one I am familiar with is Xia Jia, who has this story in Clarkesworld.
China seems to be opening up a lot with regard to its science fiction community. That’s in no small part due to the fabulous translation work being done by Ken Liu, but others are helping out too. I’m looking forward to seeing my friend Regina from Shanghai at Worldcon. I must remember to ask about other women writers.
Update: Via Twitter John Chu and Ken Liu have pointed me at Cheng Jingbo, Hao Jingfang and Tang Fei.
Update 2: Via Facebook Regina adds Zhao Haihong, Chi Hui & Chen Qian. She notes that both Tang Fei and Zhao Haihong will be at Worldcon.
A World SF Resource
Via Europa SF I have made contact with Professor Arielle Saiber of Bowdoin College who will be teaching a course on World SF next year. As part of the preparation for the course, she has put together a website listing resources such as anthologies, blogs and so on that provide information about the wealth of science fiction being produced outside of the USA and UK. I have suggested a few things to her, but I’m sure there is more that can be added. You can find the site here. Those of you who are not (like me) desperately rushing around either getting to, or getting ready to go to, London, please take a look and see if you can help flesh it out.
Perceptions of Sub-Genre
I’ve been seeing a few comments lately about how books by women don’t get seen as belonging to certain sub-genres even though they appear to fit the criteria. N.K. Jemisin was asking yesterday why her latest series is not seen as Grimdark, given the amount of slaughter that goes on. And here Vandana Singh (who teaches theoretical physics) talks about her relationship with Hard SF.
Obviously that’s her personal take on the issue, and I pretty much agree with all of it, but I’d like to add a couple of my personal observations.
Firstly I suspect that many people have come to identify Hard SF with the “written with wooden dialog, cardboard characters, stereotypes of gender, race and sexuality, and ‘as you know, Bob’ infodumps” stereotype that Vandana mentions. Women tend not to write stories like that. They are far too interested in people. And consequently, when they do write Hard SF, it doesn’t get recognized as such because it doesn’t conform to the stereotype, even though the science itself might be brilliant.
In addition I suspect that women writers of Hard SF are held to a much higher standard than male writers in the same sub-genre. Let me explain by means of a personal anecdote. Before I transitioned, if I came across a programming problem I could not solve I was quite happy using support services, online forums and so on. After transition I quickly realized that using such things was a waste of time, because nothing I said would be believed or taken seriously. That wasn’t because I had suddenly become a bad programmer, it was because I now had a female name. As a result of that, my ability to do technology would always be called into question by most males that I encountered.
I suspect that the same is true of women trying to write Hard SF. Historically, boys have been brought up to believe that they are much better at science and technology than girls, and that’s an easy story to maintain if you segregate them in all-boy schools. (Don’t try to pretend to me that this doesn’t happen. I was raised a boy, remember?) If someone brought up in that environment encounters a woman who is good at science or tech, he’ll feel that his masculinity is threatened if he can’t somehow prove her wrong. And that means questioning the “hardness” of SF by women.
By the way, this can work the other way around to some extent. I spent a lot of time studying fashion as a kid because I knew I was missing out on girlhood and wanted to plug the gap. These days I occasionally meet women who seem threatened by the possibility that I might do femme better than them. Or at least regard me as some sort of performing animal that can do things that should not come naturally to it. Gender expectations are a total pain.
Rumblings at Riverside
Over the weekend some of my friends who work at UC Riverside have been posting messages questioning the safety and future of the Eaton Collection. This is a hugely valuable resource for people who study science fiction and fantasy literature, but apparently the administration at the university library is unimpressed with it and appears to be trying to shut it down. Nalo Hopkinson has more details.
Kathryn Allan – Accessing the Future
Yesterday I recorded an interview with Kathryn Allan, who is co-editing the Accessing the Future anthology with Djibril al-Ayad of The Future Fire. The anthology will focus on themes of disability in science fiction. We also talk about how Kathryn came to be the current recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship (and a quick shout out here to Margaret McBride who is indeed awesome as Kathryn says).
The sound quality is slightly ropey at my end, which is probably because I forget to cover up the big, flat screens around here with something soft. I really do need a home studio. However, we seem to have avoided picking up the person using a powered trimmer next door throughout much of the recording, which is a big relief.
Disability activism is an area that I’m not very familiar with, so if I have inadvertently used inappropriate language please accept my apologies in advance (and do suggest how I could do better). Apologies also for keeping bringing the discussion back to trans issues, but that’s what I know and hopefully it does make it clear how intersectional all this stuff is.
When you have had a listen, please go and back the anthology project.
Update: Who forgot the embed link. *headsmack*
Vintage Visions
Yesterday I got a book in the mail. It doesn’t happen often these days, but one publisher I am always happy to hear from is Wesleyan, who produce some marvelous academic books about science fiction.
This week#s loot was a book called Vintage Visions, and subtitled (because academic books always have subtitles) Essays on Early Science Fiction. It has been put together by Arthur B. Evans who is an expert in the work of Jules Verne, but the book covers a wide range of different topics. The essays are all reprints, and some are not that new, but they all sound interesting. Andrea Bell has an essay about a Chilean novel dating from 1878; Rachel Haywood Ferreira surveys the roots of Latin American SF; and a piece by Susan Gubar about C.L. Moore that was a pioneering work in the study of feminist science fiction from 1980. Crunchy.
Introducing Uncanny
I’m a couple of days late to this, so I’m sure that you will have seen this from many, many other people by now. However, it bears repeating, because having good quality SF&F magazines out there is a very good thing. I have a great deal of faith in the ability of Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas and their staff to put together an excellent publication. I’ve backed it. You may want to as well. You can find the Kickstarter campaign for Uncanny here, and the magazine’s website here.
That Aussie Snapshot Interview
Mine can be found here.
The Australian Spec Fic Snapshot
Every few years our Australian friends get into a frenzy of interviewing, aiming to highlight as many of their fine writers as possible. It is a fine tradition started by Ben Peek and known as the The Australian Spec Fic Snapshot. Some information on this year’s edition can be found here.
Probably the best way to follow the whole thing is via the #2014Snapshot hashtag on Twitter. That will give you links to everything posted thus far. And there is a lot. This year they have even gone so far as to interview someone who only lived in Australia for two years. The results of that should be online some time tomorrow.
Finncon, Day 0
Bear & Scott: “We’re very sorry, thanks to a mechanical problem we missed our connection in Iceland and we’ll be a few hours late.”
Finns: “Yeah, no worries. We remember when an airline lost Joe Haldeman. We coped with that. It will be OK.”
In other news, I think I have now done all of the necessary prep for my panels at Finncon. I have also eaten blueberry & cardamon ice cream, and tried a local coffee stout. The former was spectacular, the latter nice but not up to Wildebeest standard.
Tomorrow I’ll be off to Jyväskylä for the start of the Finfar academic convention. I read the papers on the flight over. There’s the usual mix of quality, as you might expect from students. If you’d like to get a taste of the sort of thing Finnish academics produce you can take a look at Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research.
New Dimension 6
Issue #2 of the free Australian speculative fiction magazine, Dimension 6, is now available. You can download it as a DRM-free epub or mobi, from the publisher’s website. This issue contains stories from Dirk Strasser, Alan Baxter and Robert N Stephenson.
Ã…con 7 – The Post-Colonial SF Panel
Here is the first of my podcasts from Ã…con 7. It is a panel about post-colonial SF. The panelists are: Karen Lord, Sari Polvinen, Juha Tupasela & me.
I noted while editing it that I totally derailed Sari’s question about classic SF that counted as post-colonial, for which my apologies.
Tech services at Ã…con are provided by Jonas Wissting to whom I am indebted for this recording.
A History of Arabic SF
It is written in Italian, which probably makes it difficult for most of my readers, but there is an English-language interview with the author, Ada Barbaro, over at the Arab Lit blog. We really do need a Europe-wide academic SF conference. I’d love to meet Ms. Barbaro. She is on Twitter.
All of which reminds me that Somewhere!, the sequel to Ibraheem Abbas & Yaser Bahjatt’s novel, HJWN, is now available on Amazon.
Man Trouble
While I was out and about in Bristol yesterday, my Twitter feed was buzzing with comment from outraged women. There were two main issues.
The first one is that Dave Truesdale has gone and put his foot in his mouth again. The regularity with which he does this is such that a generous interpretation would assume that he understands outrage marketing and was deliberately trolling female writers and fans in search of traffic for his website. Sadly I’m not convinced that Truesdale is that bright. When he says that he’s not seen even a smidgeon of racism or sexism in science fiction, what he probably means is that he views the supposed intellectual and moral superiority of the white male as a scientific fact, and that therefore stating it cannot be seen as discrimination.
Of course this is the sort of attitude that leads to Men’s Rights Activism and claims of “reverse racism” when it comes up against how the rest of the world sees things.
Anyway, the day did produce one superb blog post: this one in which Amal El-Mohtar recruits famous female SF writers from the past to make her case for her.
While women readers and writers of science fiction around the world were dealing with an actual case of sexism, the white feminist media cabal in the UK (otherwise known as the Lobster & Bolly Set) were up in arms over what they believe to be a far more dangerous threat to feminism: trans women.
Yes, it has been penis panic time again. Our TERF friends appear convinced that all trans women have secret penises with which they will mercilessly abuse any non-trans women that they can find. Now it is certainly true that not all trans women have surgery. Some can’t afford it, some have good medical reasons for not risking it, many are simply on their way through transition, and some have their own reasons for not opting for it. But for the TERFs it is a case of once-a-penis-always-a-penis. So I guess I have a political penis: it might not exist in reality, but for TERF political purposes it is just as real as any man’s pride & joy, if not more so.
Pressed on this, the TERFs are likely to claim that anyone raised as male (even if only for the few brief years needed for them to learn to talk) will have been culturally conditioned for masculinity, and will forever more exhibit behavior that is ineluctably masculine (yes, I did choose that word deliberately). However, even if they were to find a trans woman who looked and behaved in a way they deemed entirely female, they would simply claim that this person had successfully “deceived” them by hiding their “true” nature.
So there you have it. As far as your typical British media feminist is concerned, my supposed political penis is far more threatening to them than anything that Dave Truesdale, or even Elliot Rodger, could come up with. It is good to know that they are keeping their eye on the really important issues while the rest of us are busy with trivial stuff like campaigning on behalf of women writers.
I’d like to see some of them come to Finncon and demand that I be forced to use the men’s sauna.
Meanwhile, because at least one of them is undoubtedly screaming BUT SCIENCE! at this point, here’s an actual science article titled, “What your science teacher told you about sex chromosomes is wrong”. Odd that the same bad-science excuses used by men to justify sexism are used by TERFs to justify their hatred of trans women, isn’t it.
Update: via CN Lester on Twitter here is an excellent overview of how different types of animals decide what sex they are. Hint: it is hardly ever anything to do with chromosomes.
Jay Lake 1964-2014
As I’ve said many times before, I’m crap at writing obituaries. That goes double for Jay because I have this stuff in my eyes that is preventing me from focusing on the screen and keyboard. Jay was a friend.
I’ve been spending some time looking for a photo to use with this post. Amazingly I didn’t have a good one. So I have chosen the above photo from Locus because it shows Jay at his larger-than-life best, and wearing one of his trade-mark Hawaiian shirts.
Jay will be remembered for many things, in particular for a significant amount of very fine fiction. However, I hope that he will also be remembered for the tradition of the Campbell Tiara (which he created with Elizabeth Bear). Jay was happy to talk about gender identity issues long before it was fashionable to do so, for which I will always be grateful.
He will, of course, also be remembered for the ferocity with which he fought his illness. If people could survive cancer simply on the basis of their determination not to be beaten by it, Jay would still be with us. In addition to fighting on his own behalf, Jay did everything in his power to ensure that his own struggle would also benefit those who came after him. Because that’s the sort of person he was.
I will miss him dreadfully. So will many other members of our community.