…largely because Tansy is busy editing a book with one hand, and typing space melodrama about Musketeers with the other. But I have linkses! Some of them have been waiting patiently for far too long.
Natalie Luhrs collected her tweets (including the conversational additions of others) about speaking out and community support, which are well worth reading.
While the media goes into meltdown about the possibility that Harrison Ford’s leg injury might mean Han Solo won’t be in enough of the next Star Wars movie (really, can we not just have Leia doing the same things he was going to do?), I wanted to point to this lovely interview with Carrie Fisher about being a bit melted, and other things. What she has to say about Leia as a character is pretty cool and brings me back to – why AREN’T they just giving Han Solo’s scenes to her, again?
Kari Sperring wrote two really important posts: Living as a Woman in a Science Fictional Future, and the follow up, Collateral Damage. The first is about the narrow types of femininity we usually see in SF (and the joy of finding examples of a woman like yourself in the fiction you love) and the second is a much angrier, fierce and personal piece about how the older women in science fiction (especially the writers) get left behind while their male counterparts only increase their profile and prestige.
What it comes to is this: most women who are now over about 40 have been told their whole lives to be good, to keep their heads down, to keep on working away quietly and to wait their turn. And now, within sff, at the point when their male contemporaries are celebrated, these same women are being told, No, it’s too late for you, you don’t matter enough; that space is needed. Get out of the way.
Bitch Magazine did a lovely review of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, relevant not just because there have been two recent updates (Squee!) and the DVD is out, but also because they have written a Lizzie Bennet novel. Reader, I bought it. (yes, I know that’s a Jane Eyre misquote, the point stands)
Jason Heller talks about nostalgia and the Dragonlance novels.
Whatever happened to Toby Froud, the baby from the Labyrinth? Surprise surprise, he grew up surrounded by goblins and is now an artist and filmmaker in his own right.
Hijinks Ensue managed to capture pretty much what I thought when I heard the Turing Test had been beaten by a computer pretending to be a teenage boy…
Very good article about how sexist it is to present The Fault in Our Stars as the heroic saviour of YA fiction – when the genre has been consistently successful for many years now, thanks in substantial part to the brilliant work of many, many bestselling female authors.