The fact that this isn’t the first time I have given this title to a Friday links post goes to show that it’s not too hard to make sure your superheroines are fully dressed, people! Not if an artist actually cares about the integrity of the character as well as the curve of their panty line.
As far as publishing goes, the big Nightshade Deal and the authors caught in the crossfire is everywhere today. Kudos to Tobias Buckell for summing up the situation and most of the current posts, so I don’t have to do it. Suffice to say, it’s a pretty crappy situation for most people involved.
Connected to this, I was quite sad to see today that Jonathan Strahan’s excellent magazine Eclipse Online (published on the Nightshade website) is closing for pretty obvious reasons. It was a great project which highlighted some very interesting stories and gave a great showcase to the artwork of Australian Kathleen Jennings, who illustrated every piece.
Then, um yes. Also this week in publishing, an April Fools Joke turned into a PR disaster for Locus by being both offensive and not funny. The “joke” was pulled down almost immediately (basically once the editorial staff of the magazine saw it) but it was preserved of course, this being the internet. Liza and the Locus team did exactly the right thing in taking the piece down and apologising (in many cases personally which took a lot of individual tweets) to those who were upset by it. Most importantly, they didn’t do this in response to complaints, they did it on the grounds of good taste. The actual writer of the piece did not see it that way, taking to the internet to complain about “Wiscon’s Feminist Failfandom,” apparently not realising that the internet and the SF community has moved on and you don’t have to be of the Wiscon inner circle to spot a racist, misogynist failure of humour when you see one.
Sean the Blogonaut (who is also, confusingly, Sean the Bookonaut) has a grand plan to provide something to replace the old ASIF – and so is launching Australian Spec Fic Review Weekly, a Paper.li publication which will collate reviews of Australian SF from various sources. So if you have reviews, interviews or podcasts looking at Australian SF, just tweet about it using the hashtag #ausfrev and Sean will do the rest.
Oh, technology. You make us all feel old.
Liz Bourke outlines her plans for the Sleeps With Monsters column at Tor.com this year, including focus on a handful of female epic fantasy writers who deserve far more attention than they get from the geek media in general, and an Australian/NZ special month later in the year. This column has rapidly become my favourite thing about Tor.com, though I also have a soft spot for Alyx Dellamonica’s Buffy reviews.
There’s a new Verity podcast up this week, reviewing the new new Doctor Who episode The Bells of St John – we’re recording weekly during the New Episodes part of the year which is a bit scary. I’m not in this one but it’s very good, especially the exciting revelation from Kat which made me squee. I also did a ridiculously long My Two Cents post to make up for my non-appearance.
The Clarke Award shortlist was revealed – this is SF novels that British people care about – and everyone was a bit alarmed about there being no women on it, despite the fact that most British publishers have been pretty neglectful of offering actual contracts to their local female SF writers for some time now. Liz Williams, a self-declared feminist and one of the judges of the award, took to the Guardian to talk about “the regrettable fact that the best books were by men.” She also took the opportunity to put the boot into the British publishers of SF for not, you know, PUBLISHING MORE WOMEN WRITING SF THERE ARE QUITE A LOT OF THEM THIS IS EMBARRASSING YOU GUYS.
Angry Robot countered by offering a special deal to readers so they could check out some of the awesome Science Fiction by women that they publish – which is pretty awesome and I can recommend many of those titles, especially the Warren, Beukes & Anderton (none of whom are, um, British authors but there you go).
Over on Clarkesworld, Daniel Abraham talks about “Literatures of Despair” which ties in with the grimdark fantasy conversation that has been doing the rounds lately. Meanwhile, Sophie McDougall’s excellent post The Rape of James Bond looked at the double standard when it comes to depicting rape in fiction – even in situations where real life m/m rape statistics are incredibly high, ie. in war zones, prison and when being tortured. Jenny’s Library produced a most excellent linkspam post collating much of the Grimdark conversation.
Justine Larbalestier talks about what she has learned about publishing and herself over the last decade of being A Published Author.
Ben Payne’s post on the pressure to consume hit home for me.
The New York Times was called out for writing an obituary for rocket scientist Yvonne Brill which emphasised her homemaking skills and motherhood in the lead of the article, with an awkward segue from there into the fact that, hey, she was also a rocket scientist. While many did point out that this may well be what the scientist in question and her family wanted, it led to an important discussion about how male and female work is discussed differently, even after death.
Oh, and after several days of people noticing for the first time (apparently) that Doctor Who is pretty bad as far as gender parity of authors goes (not only in its scripts but in tie in materials too says the person who would be EXCELLENT at writing spin off novels, just saying) the BBC also realised that they were sucking a bit at including female experts in their news reports. Deciding to do something constructive about this problem instead of pretending it wasn’t there (I KNOW, RIGHT?) they have set up a database of women experts on stuff.
To end on another happy publishing note (there still are some in this scary world of ours), Fablecroft have reprinted for the Kindle Canterbury 2100, a rather marvellous and ambitious anthology edited by my good friend Dirk Flinthart. The premise was to recreate the effect of The Canterbury Tales by creating a social history document based on the stories told to each other by a group of fictional travellers – only of course in this instance the social history document chronicles a time period that hasn’t happened yet! It’s a bit of a who’s who of Australian short story writers, and is a splendid read. Heartily recommended.