It’s been a long week. I’ve been besieged at home with feverish children (my own, not a random assortment) and didn’t realise quite how stir crazy I was until I got a chance to run away for 15 minutes to the supermarket at lunch time. BLISSFUL FREEDOM!
But between my Melbourne trip and then being behind on everything because of the Melbourne trip thing, I haven’t managed to do one of these for a long time! Here we go…
This lovely guest post by Rainbow Rowell at Tor.com talks about how hard it was to be a teenage geek (and especially a geek girl) before the internet made it easy to find like-minded communities. I’m definitely going to be checking out Rainbow’s new novel Fangirl which looks like a lot of fun!
Thoraiya Dyer writes wonderfully about the inspiration she found in Mara of the Acoma and how this led her to search for Japanese-influenced fantasy and fiction. (I remember being so confused about the depiction of Mara on the cover of Daughter of the Empire – why on earth was she blonde? The whole white-washing issue never occurred to me)
Aliette De Bodard shares A Few Thoughts on Other Cultures and Diversity in SFF.
Gina Torres isn’t Wonder Woman, and doesn’t think she’s ever likely to get the part, but she kinda loves how many people on the internet want it to be a thing.
Fablecroft have announced a new ebook coming out in a few months: Focus 2012, which aims to reprint all of the award winning Australian spec fic of last year. A brilliant idea!
A fascinating look at how cities are designed differently when you listen to what women need from their living spaces.
This one’s a little out of date now, but another classy rant from Foz Meadows pointing out someone saying something dumb about gender and science fiction on the internet. This is a good one.
Speaking of gender, Kate Elliott had some thoughtful tweets about “the gender problem” in SF.
See how quickly one bad school experience can undo years of good work as a parent in encouraging your daughters towards programming as a career with “To my daughter’s high school programming teacher.”