Coronavirus – Day #170

~ Cheryl

Today I had an adventure. For a couple of medical reasons I needed to travel into Bristol, so I went on a train for the first time in 6 months.

Leaving Trowbridge at around 10:00, my two-car train was pretty much empty. However, coming back around 15:00 a three-car train was much busier. That’s in part due to schools and colleges being back in business. People wore masks on the train because it is a legal requirement. They don’t seem to wear masks anywhere much else.

I’d like to be able to report that Bristol is still there, but it was enveloped in cloud for much of my visit and I didn’t feel like getting my fur wet by exploring.

Coronavirus – Day #168

~ Cheryl

Today’s excitement was that the car wouldn’t start. That’s no huge surprise. The battery loses charge at a ridiculous rate and if I can’t take it for long runs regularly this will happen. Every so often I need to spend time sorting it out.

However, today I needed to get some stuff from town, so I walked. That gave me a good view of how the town is adapting the pandemic life.

There were quite a lot of people about. Hardly anyone wore a mask outside, which wasn’t hugely worrying as most people kept their distance. Both of the main shopping malls had signs up saying that masks were obligatory, but a lot of people ignored this. Most of the culprits among shoppers were young people. However, hardly any shop staff were wearing masks, so how they expect the public to comply is a mystery.

Out in the world, the number of new virus cases continues to rise. The 7-day rolling average is now over 1300. In contrast, the number of deaths continues to fall. It is very odd. The daily death count has been below 50 since late June, but the number of new cases per day has more than doubled since the start of July, rising steadily all the time. There are a whole heap of theories as to why this might be the case, including a change in the age profile of people testing positive, improvements in how the NHS deals with patients, people being healthier in the summer, and even the 45 theory — too many tests.

The latter needs a bit of explanation. The UK has been very slow in making testing available, but the number of people getting tested has increased steadily, and the biggest rises have come from tests conducted outside of hospital. One of the ways that COVID-19 spreads so quickly is that many people who are infected are asymptotic and don’t realise that they are carriers. Initially almost all of the people who tested positive were in hopspital and already sick. Now most of the people testing positive are outside of hospital and may be quite healthy, or even asymptotic.

Who knows, really? We are still guessing a lot. There’s a whole lot more we need to learn about this virus.

New Salon Futura

~ Cheryl

The August issue of Salon Futura went live yesterday. Here’s what is reviewed in the issue:

  • Unconquerable Sun by Kate Elliott
  • Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
  • Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
  • The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson
  • Selkie Summer by Ken MacLeod
  • Supergirl: Season 5

In addition there are reports on Worldcon and NASFiC. I have chosen to concentrate on the virtual aspects of the conventions because that seems important.

The Smithsonian Discovers Kush

~ Cheryl

Every so often White Media discovers ancient Black civilisations. (Don’t worry, Black folks, they will forget you again soon.) Today it is the turn of The Smithsonian Magazine, which has allowed a Sudanese-American journalist to tell the story of the African kingdoms to the south of Egypt. The tale includes Taharqa and Amanirenas, whom I have probably talked quite a bit about here already. It also includes an interesting piece of queer history.

In the New Testament the Acts of the Apostles includes a story about how St. Philip met a foreign dignatory on the road south of Jerusalem. The man was a treasury official from the court of the Kandake of Meroë, probably Queen Amantitere given the dates. This fellow, named as Simeon Bachos by the 2nd Century writer, St. Irenaeus, had an interest in Jewish religion, and had been to Jerusalem to learn more. He had obtained a copy of the Book of Isaiah which he was reading on his way home. He asked Philip for help interpreting the words of the prophet, and by the time the Apostle had finished Simeon was eager to convert to Christianity.

One obvious point here is that as a foreigner it seems unlikely that Simeon would have been welcome to worship at the Temple in Jerusalem. The Jewish elders of the time were a stuffy lot. The New Testament also describes him as a eunuch, which would also have counted against him. Philip may have been reminded of the time, reported in Matthew 19:12, when Jesus spoke of how eunuchs were welcome in the Kingdom of Heaven.

But what exactly does “eunuch” mean in this context. Jesus describes three types. There are those who are made eunuchs by others. Simeon might have been an ex-slave who won his freedom thanks to his skill at accountancy. There are those who make themselves eunuchs for religious purposes, such as the Roman transfeminine priestesses of Cybele, but this seems an unlikely explanation given our man’s interest in Judaic religion. Finally there are those who were deemed “natural eunuchs”; that is, men who have no desire to have sex with women. This has lead some people to claim our African accountant as the first gay Christian.

Whatever the explanation, as a eunuch Simeon would have been regarded as neither male nor female by the cultural traditions of his time. Even if he didn’t identify as queer in some way himself, he would have been seen as such by others.

To the best of my knowledge, the people of Meroë were still following Egyptian religion at the time. It would be interesting to know what the Kandake thought of Simeon’s conversion. But there has been a thriving Christian church in Ethiopia since at least 333 CE, so presumably our man made some converts among his people.

There is a painting of the baptism in the Amgueddfa Cymru, the National Museum of Wales. I believe that it is part of the LGBT history tour that Dan Vo put together for the Museum. I know Dan and I talked about it as a possible inclusion, but I missed my Guide training session thanks to COVID.

Coronavirus – Day #164

~ Cheryl

I finally managed to get a physiotherapy appointment yesterday (albeit remote) and have some good advice on managing my back strain. Life is somewhat easier as a result. The short version is never believe medical advice that you read online. With any luck I will be properly mobile again in a week or so.

Meanwhile I am getting some reading done, that being about all I am good for right now.

It looks like my optimism about COVID-19 cases in the UK was misplaced. Yesterday there were over 1500 new cases, and today the government website is mysteriously unavailable, which suggests that someone is trying to massage the data before making it public.

Academic Survey on Trans History

~ Cheryl

A young friend of mine is conducting some research on people’s knowledge of trans lives in the Roman world as part of a Masters thesis at the University of Durham. You don’t need any knowledge of trans history to participate. The point is to find out what people know. If you fancy helping out, you can find the survey here.

Supporting LGBTQ+ Refugees

~ Cheryl

The lovely people at Pride Without Borders in Bristol have a fundraiser going at the moment. Theirs is an absolutely essential service. The treatment of refugees and asylum seekers by the government in this country is abhorent, and queer people are treated worse that most.

I have had the pleasure of meeting the members of the Pride Without Borders support group on a couple of occasions. They cope with really awful circumstances, and malicious harassment by the authorities, with amazing good grace. If you have a few pounds to spare, please help them out. You can donate here. And my friend Lowie has an article about the work that Pride Without Borders does on Bristol 24/7.

Coronavirus – Day #161

~ Cheryl

Things have been quiet around here, partly because I’ve been busy and partly as I’ve been unwell. No COVID-19, I hasten to add. A lower back strain, which is very inconvenient when there’s no one else living with you.

I very much enjoyed NASFiC. I’ll stick a report in the next Salon Futura.

Elsewhere the rise in COVID-19 cases in the UK appears to have stalled. This is very good. I have seen it suggested that the reason we haven’t gone into a full-blown second wave, as some parts of Europe have done, is because we don’t trust our government, so when they say “go back to work” we ignore them. It may also be because our foul weather means that we don’t have as much of a cafe culture as Europe, and because our economy is largely service-industry based which is easier to do from home.

Virtual NASFiC Lives!

~ Cheryl

The NASFiC, or North American Science Fiction Convention, is a WSFS-affiliated event that happens only in years when WorldCon is outside of North America. This year Worldcon was in New Zealand. Of course only the New Zealanders got to go, but a NASFiC had already been selected. No one can go to that physically either, but the lovely folks in Columbus, Ohio are running a virtual con anyway.

It is free to attend, though they are accepting donations. You can sign up here.

The con started this afternoon my time. I’ve already watched one panel (on historical fiction) which was great. And of course I am spending a lot of time hanging out on Discord, where we have a table for Westercon 74 in (very) sunny Tonopah, Nevada.

Everything has been thrown together in a bit of a rush, so I am well impressed that things appear to be going very well. I have two confirmed panels as follows (times are US East Coast, so 5 hours behind the UK and 3 hours ahead of California):

Roots in Two Places: Writing from a Dual Culture Experience

Saturday 2:00 PM Olentangy Room

Alma Alexander, Cheryl Morgan, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Vikram Paralkar

Our panelists, all with roots in two or more separate cultures — look at the ways having dual culture and language has guided their worldbuilding and storytelling.

Running SF/F Organizations

Sunday 12:00 PM Scioto Room

Cheryl Morgan, Eileen Gunn, Mary Anne Mohanraj, and Sumana Harihareswara

Creators, directors, publishers, and nonprofit leaders discuss the trials and victories of running magazines, publishing companies, and other SF/F businesses and organizations. They discuss logistics, strategy, budgets, and the effects of gender and race on their experiences as leaders. And they share what they wish they’d known ten years ago.

There may be a second panel on Sunday. I’m still waiting to hear back on that one.

HFRN 2021, Also Virtual

~ Cheryl

Another academic conference that I’m a regular at (and now a Trustee of) is the annual meeting of the Historical Fiction Research Network. The conference is normally in February, and that’s now definitely uncertain as far as in-person events goes, so we are going virtual. Hopefully that means we’ll be able to pull in people from all around the world (though in fairness a bunch of lovely Aussies are regulars and we had two Russians last year).

Anyway, in keeping with the times, our theme for 2021 is depictions of catastrophe. It was the end of the world, or at least it seemed like it at the time. From the Great Flood in Gilgamesh to the Heat Death of the Universe, humans have always imagined disasters. There’s so much to talk about. Here’s the Call for Papers, and the link to buy memberships.

HFRN 2021- Online
Theme: Remembering Catastrophe

Please submit papers to the Paper Proposal Form:
Deadline 30th September.

We welcome paper proposals from Archaeology, Architecture, Literature, Media, Art History, Cartography, Geography, History, Musicology, Reception Studies, Linguistics, Museum Studies, Media Studies, Politics, Re-enactment, Larping, Gaming, Transformative Works, Gender, Race, Queer studies and others.

We welcome paper proposals across historical periods, with ambitious, high-quality, inter-disciplinary approaches and new methodologies that will support research into larger trends and which will lead to more theoretically informed understandings of the mode across historical periods, cultures and languages.

This year we are using a form. Please submit papers to the Paper Proposal Form.

Deadline, 30th September.
Tickets from Helm: £40/£15

Outing the Past Goes Virtual

~ Cheryl

Outing the Past is an annual academic conference on the subject of queer history. Normally I attend, but this year it got scheduled for September 12th, and I had already accepted an invitation to go to Augsberg in Germany for a science fiction conference organised by the wonderful Sabrina Mittermeier. Of course that isn’t going to happen now. Sabrina and her colleagues have already put some of the proposed events online, including my chat with Sabrina and Maria Turtschaninoff. You can find that and several other events, on the covention’s YouTube channel. (And let me tell you that I’m seriously chuffed to be on the same programme as the Chancellor of the Klingon Empire.)

So what about Outing the Past. Obviously it is going virtual too, and that means you can all join in the fun. There will be a special one-day event on September 12th called Completing the Past. It will be all about LGBT+ History and Creative Production. There are a lot of great speakers lined up, and in particular I would like to draw your attention to the panel titled, “Heritage at home: Connecting and engaging with the LGBT+ past through creative production.” That will be hosted by Dan Vo, and it will feature a bunch of guests talking about works of art that open a door on the LGBT+ past. I can’t tell you any more about it than that now, but you know that if Dan is involved then it is goign to be awesome, right?

Coronavirus – Day #155

~ Cheryl

Life is trucking along here. Something very exciting happened today, but I’m afraid it isn’t something I can talk about. Suffice it to say that I broke out a tub of Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough to celebrate.

Meanwhile something interesting has happened with the COVID-19 data. Back on August 14th we were up to over 1400 new cases in the day. It looks like we were about to take off into a major new outbreak. But it didn’t happen. The weekend was part of that, but we’ve had a couple of days at around 1000, and today we are down to 800. It is a bit early to tell, but it looks like local lockdowns are working. Fingers crossed.

Of course Bozo and his pals have taken the opportunity of a pandemic to launch a major reorganisation of the health service in England, because of course this is a good time to do that. Sigh.

Meet Saint Wilgefortis

~ Cheryl

In Castle Park in the centre of Bristol there is a small, bombed out church called St. Mary Le Port. The current building is Norman dating from work in the 11th century, but archaeologists have discovered a Saxon site beneath so it is presumably much older. Because it is a useful landmark in the park, the church has effectively been a gathering point for the Bristol Pride March for a few years, and before that Pride itself took place around the church in Castle Park.

Via an article in today’s Bristol 24/7 I discovered that the church contains a chapel to Saint Wilgefortis.

Saint who, you may well ask? Well, she is apparently the patron saint of Unhappily Married Women. Her legend is that her father arranged for her to marry someone she did not like, so she prayed that she might be made repulsive so that he would reject her. The next morning when she woke up she had a full beard. That put paid to the marriage, but her angry father had her crucified as a punishment.

Wikipedia (yes, I know) lists a whole bunch of names by which Wilgefortis was known around Europe. She seems to have been particularly popular in Northern Europe, but she has found her way as far afield as Panama and Argentina.

These days historians tend to assume that the legend is entirely made up. After all, teenage girls don’t normally sprout a full beard overnight. However, there are a range of biological variations that can lead to people assigned female at birth growing beards. That can range from Polycystic Ovary Syndrome all the way to 5-ARD, an intersex variation that also leads to the young person growing a penis. It is entirely possible that young Wilgefortis knew that she was developing facial hair and had been hiding it from her parents, but decided to come clean about it in the hope of getting out of the marriage.

Just as fascinating is the fact that the worship of Wilgefortis involved the image of her being crucified, which led to some very androgynous iconography. My friends who study gender in the Middle Ages are all over this sort of thing, but Christian theology is a minefield I try to avoid playing in because you need a lot of basic knowledge before it is wise to say anything.

What I can say, however, is that the existence of a chapel to Wilgefortis in the very church that has such a close connection to Bristol Pride is a delightful piece of serendipity. I have no doubt that the local chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence will take this to heart.

eARCs of The Green Man’s Silence

~ Cheryl

I put a note about these being available on Twitter last week, but only one person has taken me up on the offer so I suspect that people haven’t noticed the announcement. Hence a blog post.

I have eARC’s of The Green Man’s Silence available in ePub, Kindle and PDF formats. If you would like one, please let me know.

Coronavirus – Day #153

~ Cheryl

Thanks to the magic of virtual conventions I will be doing my first programme items at a US convention in a very long time. I have a couple of (provisional) panels at this year’s NASFiC. I’ll give more details when the schedule is ready to go live.

Back in the UK, the government continues to dig itself itself deeper and deeper holes. A few days ago I reported the fiasco of large number of estimated exam grades being lowered thanks to a mysterious algorithm that appeared to favour young people who attended private schools, or lived in well-to-do neighbourhoods. Well, the outcry has been so intense that the government has had to back down and will be going back to using the estimated grades produced by the schools.

But that’s not the end of the saga. To start with universities will be in a difficult situation because many of them have already turned down applicants whose grades were lowered by the algorithm, and accepted those whose grades were raised. What do they do now?

One thing they could do is just take more students, but the government had introduced caps on the number of students each university could take, with fines if they went over the cap. And one of the effects of using the estimated grades will be that there are more qualified students.

It might seem that the obvious thing to so would be to remove the caps, except that they are there for a purpose. They were intended to prevent the universities with good reputations from inflating their student numbers at the expense of the less well-known establishments. Without the caps, higher education would be a bit like Mortal Engines with the big universities gobbling up the students from the smaller ones and leaving the latter to starve.

So the smart thing to do would not have been to remove the caps, but to just raise the levels pro rata across all universities, right? So what did the government do?

They scrapped the caps.

But never fear, dear reader. Our glorious leader, Brave Bozo, is ready and willing to take decisive action! He has… (drum roll)

Gone on holiday.

I mean, it is not as if the country needs governing, is it?

Introducing FutureCon

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

While we might all be stuck at home wishing that we could sit in a bar with our friends, one of the benefits of the new virtual world in which we find ourselves is that travel is instantaneous and free. This means that we can have conventions that are genuinely global, and very cheap or free to attend.

Into this space comes FutureCon. It is being organised primarily by folks in Brazil, but with a lot of help from Francesco Verso in Italy, and also a bunch more people around the world. It will take place from September 17th-20th, and will be free to all on YouTube. All of the programming will be in English. Confirmed guests include Ann Vandermeer, Aliette de Bodard, Chen Qiufan, Ian McDonald, Lavie Tidhar and Nisi Shawl. But more importantly there will be speakers from over 20 different countries including Argentina, Croatia, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey & Uganda.

Oh, and there will be me, talking about translations, obviously. Also Wizard’s Tower author, Aleksandar Žiljak, will be joining in from Croatia. Both he and I will be talking about the new collection that we will be launching at the Eurocon in October.

This is a brand new thing, and I’m very excited about it. Hopefully it will grow over the years and will help forge a truly international SF&F community.

Francesco can read in many different langauges, and he said something today in a launch meeting for the event that really struck a chord. I’m paraphrasing slightly, but the gist was, “the quality of science fiction is evenly distributed around the world, but it is unevenly visible.” I hope that FutureCon can be an important step along the road to changing that.

If you would like to help, there are three things you can do. The first is to donate some money to help with their running costs. You can do that here. Second, subscribe to their YouTube channel. Apparently you need 100 subscribers to be allowed to have a custom URL, which would be useful. And finally tell all of your friends, especially friends who, for whatever reason, might not be able to attend big, international conventions.

Guesting on Coode Street

~ Cheryl

As many of you will doubtless know, Gary and Jonathan have been doing a daily series of short interviews throughout the pandemic, each one featuring someone from the SF&F community. Recently it was my turn and, as has become traditional, I spent a good deal more than my alloted 10 minutes chatting. That’s not hard with Gary, of course. We’ve known each other for years and obviously have a lot of similar interests.

What the interview did prove is that my advaned age is leading to me do that thing where I confuse people’s names. So profuse apologies to David Barnett; Paul Barnett is someone entirely different.

Anyway, I wittered on about a bunch of things including flooding, the importance of trying to pronounce people’s names correctly, doing sensitivity reading and, of course, the wonderful Juliet E McKenna. You can find the podcast here.

Coronavirus – Day #149

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

It is still warm. I still have lots of work to do. But there is cricket (albeit with a lot of rain delays).

The big news item is to do with exams. Today high school students across the country got the results of their final exams, known as A Levels. Because of the pandemic, no one could actually sit exams this year, so the government said that grades would be based on teacher reports instead. Now, however, they have decided that teacher reports are unreliable, and they have concocted a secret algorithm to “correct” the grades. To no one’s surprise, the result of this is that pupils at fee-paying schools have had their grades raised on average, while pupils at state schools, especially those in poorer areas, have had their grades reduced on average, sometimes drastically. This is what happens when the Cabinet is made up of upper class snobs.

Needless to say, this is a disaster for universities who are having to cope with large numbers of promising students failing to make the grades they needed for admission, and a bunch of posh twits whose parents can afford expensive lawyers demanding those places instead.

Meanwhile there has been an announcement that a number of classic works of fiction by women writers are to be re-issued under those women’s “real names”. While it is likely that some of the women concerned adopted male pen names in order to help their careers, some of them very obviously used their male names in everyday life, dressed in masculine clothing and generally behaved in a gender-variant way.

For a long time the anti-trans movement in the UK has solely targeted trans women. They seem to think that war has been won with the scrapping of reforms to the Gender Recognition Act and leaked promises by Liz Truss that existing trans rights will be repealed. Trans men, and butch lesbians, mostly flew under the radar, until recently when there has been a spate of attacks. We’ve had butch lesbians who are assaulted in toilets after being mistaken for trans women decribed as unavoidable collateral damage. We’ve had a Labour MP say that only people who identify as women should be allowed healthcare such as cervical screening, even though many trans men still need it. This new set of books is very clearly in the same vein. I don’t think that the people behind it care two hoots about women who genuinely adopted a male pen name just for the money. What they want to do is come down hard on anyone who dared display any degree of gender variance. The only thing they forgot was to make all of the covers pink.

Coronavirus – Day #148

~ Cheryl

It is still rather warm and muggy in the UK, but I have purchased a fan and am now able to put in a decent work day without feeling like the need for a nap every hour or so.

Talking of work, eARCs for The Green Man’s Silence are now available on request. And I’ve made good progress with the layouts for the paper versions so I should be able to get those into the distributor’s catalogue (and thence into stores) fairly soon.

While everyone in England appears to be desperate for rain, Scotland has too much of it. There was a nasty train crash up near Aberdeen today that appears to have been the result of a landslide caused by heavy rain.

In other news, the UK’s GDP in the period April-June was 20.4% lower than in January-March. That’s the biggest economic slump on record, and is on top of a 2.2% drop from the previous quarter. The fall is much worse than other major Western economies such as the USA, Germany and France. There are already signs of recovery thanks to the easing of Lockdown in June, but with the number of COVID-19 cases continuing to rise steadily again it seems unlikely that will be maintained. The really scary thing is that we are likely to already be facing a major economic disaster when Brexit finally starts to bite in January. I have never been so glad to be old, and largely dependent on foreign income.