I seem to have forgotten how to blog. Massive things have been happening – it’s been a hectic fortnight full of editing, guest appearances online, writing, reading all the regency romance novels (yes really), plotting crowdfunding projects, internet snark and oh yes, my youngest daughter starting school.
This post by E. Catherine Tobler, The Women We Don’t See, is about SFF reading habits, especially when people forget to read women, and I meant to write a comment on that post citing some of our immensely positive responses from male listeners to Galactic Suburbia who now go out of their way to track and actively change their reading gender balance, but now it’s two weeks later and possibly the moment is gone. Great post, though.
Marianne De Pierres and I turned up on the Skiffy and Fanty podcast, talking about Australian SFF as part of their World SF Tour. We haven’t chatted for ages, so it was lovely! We did our best to cram as much of our knowledge about the current scene as well as the historical context, though Shaun managed to stump us both by citing some pulp fiction facts that were news to us!
I also appeared on the latest episode of Verity! talking about Time Lords as villains, and in the latest SF Signal MindMeld, talking about when side characters take over a story.
This one’s an old post, but relevant to the last episode of Galactic Suburbia, in which I tentatively suggested that the entire religious system in Marie Brennan’s A History of Dragons was based on Judaism. I was right!
Women Destroyed Science Fiction this week, with the all-female special issue of Lightspeed not only funding at Kickstarter, but reaching the stretch goals that allowed women to destroy fantasy and horror at the same time. (I want to submit to these but all the short fiction I’ve been writing lately has been destroying history instead)
A rather lovely feature of the Women Destroy Science Fiction campaign has been a series of short essays by women, highlights including: Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff talks about losing Asimov subscribers for making them feel things, Juliette Wade on soft sciences and hard science fiction, and Cheryl Morgan on being A Science Fictional Woman.
A nice little piece about Frenemies as a romance fiction trope was sparked off by listening to Lynne talking about it on Verity.
Jenny Crusie is one of the best when it comes to analysing pop culture for story structure, and she tapped into something very relevant to my interests with What Do We Do With A Problem Like Laurel Lance? For those not snarking their way through Season 2 of Arrow, what we have here is the Lana Lang effect – when a female character is established as The True Love Interest in an ensemble show without any serious thought of what makes an effective romantic foil, and thus is abandoned by the writers to look sad and pretty for most of the episodes, so they can concentrate on writing characters they (and the audience) like better. (It doesn’t help when a large amount of your audience has quite specific expectations of what a character partly based on Black Canary is going to be like, AKA awesome, and all they’re getting is sad and pretty)
My friend Iz and I have in fact solved the Laurel Lance problem ourselves by Googling a range of obscure DC supervillainesses in order to find the best one she can become. But it’s nice that Jenny Crusie had a go at it too.
The BBC has announced that all their comedy panel shows recorded from now on will have women in them. It’s an interesting piece that also shows why some female performers are reluctant to enter that space, and why the only half dozen women who do get regular invites are pretty much over the whole thing. There are comparisons to be made here with panel parity in SF conventions, I am sure. If we look hard enough.
A major supernatural TV drama is being made by the BBC & Foxtel in Kettering, Tasmania, written by local female scriptwriter Victoria Madden. This is pretty awesome, not only for the creative jobs it will provide and inspire, but because you know, Tasmania looks amazing on film. Check out our scenery!
This adorable comic depicts how hard it is for a girl born with pink hair to avoid becoming part of a wistful anime series.
Katherine Kerr guests at Jim C Hines’ blog, talking about the appeal of ‘boys books’ for girls. Laurel Snyder, meanwhile, talks about why boys should read girl books too.
Ginger Haze made a comic about going into comic stores while being female, and made everyone sad.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve spent a large part of this week reading responses to the SFWA Petition Debacle, so I thought I’d round up some of the more interesting links.
The whole affair has led to some really interesting discussion and debate about, among other things: censorship, the First Amendment, what Free Speech actually means, the many consequences of Free Speech, editorial responsibility, what people want in an industry journal, all the useful stuff SFWA does and how they could improve, sexism, racism, hurtful language, why you shouldn’t sign a petition unless you agree with everything it says, why you shouldn’t include sexist diatribes and comparisons to slavery in anything you write but especially formal petitions, and some uncomfortable prodding around the generational divides in SFF (not just SFWA), and why it’s not okay to dismiss people because of their age. Oh, and if you use Free Speech as an excuse to say hateful things, people are going to hold it against you. It’s a thing that people do.
I think it was also pretty comprehensively raised that just because people whose fiction you like have signed a legal document doesn’t mean they did so in an informed manner, but maybe that’s just what I took away from the scenario… but what do I know, I’m just the current (temporary, acting) editor of the SFWA Bulletin.
The main thrust of the story can be found here at Radish Reviews, with particular interest happening in the comments as Robert Silverberg (among others) turns up.
The Daily Dot provides some fairly neutral coverage and lots of links.
CC Finlay, one of my fellow members of the SFWA Bulletin Task Force, got in early with a very important statement about how editing and censorship are not the same thing.
And of course, the statement from our President, Steven Gould, about the SFWA’s position on censorship and the false premise upon which the petition was based.
Context is important. The reason that this fairly minor dispute blew up so thoroughly is because many of the people involved are still very angry about what happened last year – those who feel there was a great deal of inappropriate content in the SFWA Bulletin as well as those who feel the writers and editor of the Bulletin were treated badly. Rachael Acks writes passionately about why sexism and belittling behaviour is not acceptable in an industry journal for a professional organisation.
Her comparison to online moderation policies is a really important point, I feel. It’s easier than ever before to publish whatever the hell you want to say in a variety of places, and online moderation has had to adapt and become more thorough and restrictive in order to ensure individual and diverse voices are not drowned out by the crap, the insults, the derailments and the threats. For those not totally immersed in today’s online culture, this idea of moderating to aid communication seems weirdly counter-intuitive, and even oppressive. For others, the value of moderation seems so obvious that it’s not even worth debating. This is a much more serious “generational” divide in our culture than anything that has to do with anyone’s date of birth.
SL Huang (who also maintains the surprisingly useful and neutral ‘SFWA timeline’) also wrote a good piece “Can We Please Not Rewrite History, Folks” about why it’s not okay to characterise one side of last year’s Bulletin controversy as “some chaps said one thing about lady editors and the internet punched them in the face.”
Silvia Moreno-Garcia puts a lid on the often-cited example that cheesecake art is acceptable in SF because of beefcake art in romance fiction. Yeah, romance covers are pretty much doing away with that tradition, and do you know where they never put beefcake art? on their industry journal!
John Scalzi, who is not of course making comment on this particular issue because he promised not to comment on SFWA matters for a whole year after stepping down as former president, happened to blog about Ten Things About Petitions and Freedom of Speech. Convenient timing, really.
A lot of the discussion also happened in more ‘informal’ public venues such as across Twitter and Facebook. I’m not going to attempt to link to any of it, except for this charming bit of comic relief: When in Doubt, Honey Badgers