The Shirley Jackson Award shortlist is up! This is especially exciting this year because it features two Australians (a pretty rare event, I think?). Even better, they’re not competing with each other!

Margo Lanagan is up for Short Fiction with “Bajazzle” from her wonderful collection Cracklescape, and Kaaron Warren is up for Novella with the deeply troubling, upsetting and horrific “Sky” from her dark and creepy collection Through Splintered Walls. Both these collections are Twelve Planets!

Congratulations to everyone on the Shirley Jackson list – was pleased to see Robert Shearman there with his new book Remember Why You Fear Me, and Kelly Link with the wonderful story “Two Houses” which I heard her read at Continuum last year.

Speaking of Kaaron Warren’s Through Splintered Walls, if you’re anywhere near Rockingham WA today, go and check out the exhibition of paper art made from the ‘printer error’ batch of those books – Lee Battersby let a few sneak peeks out over Facebook and the work looks spectacular!

In other news, the new Board of Directors of the SFWA has been announced:
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There’s a new Verity up – looking at Journey To The Centre of the TARDIS! Some great discussion. The nice thing about being part of this podcast is that I get to listen to it like an ordinary person on the weeks I don’t participate.

Cheryl Morgan writes about the future of gender and trans characters in science fiction at Autostraddle, paying particular note to the way that many of the most innovative and experimental stories about how gender changes/attitudes might happen in the future don’t actually reflect the experience of trans people now. (I’ve been guilty of this myself as a writer in the past so it’s a topic I’m quite keen to pass on to people)

Charles Tan responds to Julia Rios who asked people to create their personal SF/curriculum – very cool post! Try it yourself…

This story of a street photographer who captured all manner of amazing images of the 20th century really caught my attention this week – Vivian Maier worked as a nanny in New York City for most of her life, secretly photographing the characters of her city, but never showing her work. Now the treasure trove has been found…

A discussion on being paid to write – and the expectation (becoming more prevalent in these days of ebooks) that writers will provide their work for free – came up on Tumblr between Cassandra Clare, Holly Black and Sarah Rees Brennan – though unfortunately, Tumblr being what it is, it isn’t always obvious which of them is saying what in the posts. Luckily the three of them basically agree!

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A few months ago, I was asked to curate a reprint short story over at Strange Horizons, which was a great honour and a lot of fun. I wanted to choose something personally significant, and Australian, and couldn’t do better than “My Lady Tongue” by Lucy Sussex, one of the first feminist science fiction stories that I ever read. Luckily when I re-read it to check, the suck fairy had not visited at all – and I think if read in historical context you can see what an important and awesome piece it is.

Read my introduction to “My Lady Tongue” here.

Read the story itself: My Lady Tongue, by Lucy Sussex (1988)

And oh look, it’s a podcast too!

There have also been a couple of books announced recently that I’m very excited about.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I am appearing in Speculative Fiction 2012, an anthology of online reviews, essays & commentary. This is a super exciting project, just the sort of book that SHOULD exist, and I was delighted that my Supergirl essay was picked up for it. It’s up on Amazon now!

This collection contains over fifty of the year’s best online essays and reviews, from Tansy Rayner Roberts on Supergirl to Lavie Tidhar on China Miéville to Aishwarya Subramanian on My Little Pony to Joe Abercrombie on, er, himself. It is a diverse collection of some of last year’s best and most interesting writing. We fully expect – and hope – it will cause discussion, debate and a bit of a ruckus.

The book also contains a foreword from Mur Lafferty, an introduction from this year’s editors (Justin Landon and myself) and an afterword from the 2012 editors, Ana Grilo and Thea James of The Booksmugglers.

All proceeds from sales of this book are donated to Room to Read, supporting literacy and gender equality in education around the world.

I’m also super bouncy that I just got a review copy of Queers Dig Time Lords, which will be coming out in early June. This, the latest of the pop culture series of essay collections from Mad Norwegian Press, is edited by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damien Thomas – and features so many great writers and friends of mine!

Check out the Table of Contents:

Queers Dig Time Lords
Table of Contents
Introduction, by John and Carole E. Barrowman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Editors’ Foreword, by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas. . . . . 10
The Monster Queer is Camp, by Paul Magrs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Time, Space, Love, by Emily Asher-Perrin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Seven Ways of Looking at Captain Jack,
by Mary Anne Mohanraj and Jed Hartman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Born Again Whovian, by David Llewellyn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Queer Doctor vs. Straight Trek?, by Paul Cockburn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Sub Texts: The Doctor and the Master’s Firsts and Lasts,
by Amal El-Mohtar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Nice TARDIS, by Jason Tucker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
The Incredibly True Adventures of an Intellectual Fan Dyke,
by Sarah J. Groenewegen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Bi, Bye, by Tanya Huff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
In Praise of Mature Women, or Why Donna Noble and River Song
Totally Need to Call Me, by Jennifer Pelland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
We’re Here, We’re Queer, Rate Us on iTunes, by Erik Stadnik. . . . . . 96
Secrets and Lies, by Scot Clarke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Long Time Companions, by Melissa Scott. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Jack Harkness’s Lessons on Memory and Hope
for Cranky, Old Queers, by Racheline Maltese. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
My Straight Best Friend, by Nigel Fairs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
A Kiss from Romana: Lesbian Subtext in The Stones of Blood,
by Julia Rios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Bothersome Otherness, by Martin Warren. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
PVC Made Me a Gay, by Gary Russell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Torchwood, Camp, and Queer Subjectivity, by Brit Mandelo. . . . . . . 156
The Doctor: A Strange Love, Or: How I Learned to Stop Hating
and Love the Who, by Hal Duncan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
A Man is the Sum of His Memories, by Neil Chester . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
Spoilers: A Letter to Myself, Age 16, by Kaia Landelius. . . . . . . . . . . 186
The Heterosexual Agenda, by John Richards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Hey, Mickey, You’re So Fine, by Naamen Gobert Tihaun. . . . . . . . . 202
Mutants, Monsters, Mutts, and Mentiads,
by Cody Quijano-Schell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Same Old Me, Different Face: Transition, Regeneration,
and Change, by Susan Jane Bigelow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
The Girl Who Waited (for the Guidance Counselor
to Get to His Point), by Rachel Swirsky. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

One of my favourite things about these books are the essay titles.

For me growing up, Doctor Who was a big amorphous pile of everything. Trial of a Time Lord, the Key to Time, the Target novelisation of The Myth Makers, Spearhead from Space, An Unearthly Child and even those Peter Cushing movies were part of this big spinning vortex of Everything Who. There was no forward or backward, no serious attempt at chronological order, and little sense of cohesion. I watched either on VHS tapes, on that perfect ABC time slot between 5:30 and 6:30 pm (a timeslot that also included at various times, The Goodies, Bananaman, Roger Ramjet and Danger Mouse BEST TIME SLOT EVER), and in many cases on VHS tapes recorded from that perfect ABC time slot or exchanged with friends.

But in 1987 (or let’s face it, some time within two years of 1987) everything changed. I was nine or ten, and we were ushered to a living room belonging to a representative of the vaguely-organised Doctor Who fan community in Hobart to watch a New Episode.

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Conflux crept up on me, as conventions you’re not planning to go to tend to. And so it was that I sat down with my computer yesterday after a long day to find a Twitter party going on – and lo, I won some awards!

The best coverage of the ceremony is here, by Sean the Blogonaut – another member of the community who wasn’t actually present! But he has assembled tweets and images via Storify to try to capture something of what looked like a very fun evening.

I was very honoured to receive the Ditmar for Best Fan Writer, and the William Atheling for my “Historically Authenticated Sexism” piece of criticism.

Also the nice thing about a small community like ours is that the chances of me knowing & being friends with all the winners are very high. So I am delighted to congratulate Russell, Margo, Nick, Kirstyn & Mondy, Kathleen (twice), David, Thoraiya, Kaaron (twice) and Margo again. Hooray to all!

Big thanks to Tehani who accepted my trophies on behalf. They look lovely and I am excited about getting my hands on them. Congrats also to Deb – it sounds like she did a fantastic job of hosting the awards, which was a big ask after Kirstyn & Mondy did so well last year. I think the lesson we can take for this is that the Australian SF community is totally better than the Oscars.

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Thanks to the Mary Sue I found this – Little Girls Are Better at Designing Superheroes than You, a Tumblr which takes examples of super cute superhero cosplay done by real little girls, and turns them into sketch designs for the superheroes themselves. What we get, refreshingly, is superheroes that are designed to be people, rather than sex objects. Hooray!

Who’s Afraid of a Pixie Cut? Bitch Magazine takes on the policing of celebrity hair, and particularly the way that a beautiful woman choosing a short haircut can create panic, suspicion and even suggestions of mental illness.

Strange Horizons looks at the breakdown of reviews, reviewers and gender in the SF community last year. They then updated to include a few more review sources. The commentary from i09 is also worth reading.

Peter M Ball tells you that you do not back up your work enough. He also gives some great advice on Going Into Business as a writer, over on David McDonald’s blog.

Speaking of writing advice, Tobias Buckell has some clever things to say about Rewriting and Reinvention.

The Australian Women Writers site – which has made for brilliant reading this year, I am loving the monthly updates about reviews – reports on the inaugural Stella Prize night.

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David is coming to New Who for the first time, having loved Classic Who as a kid. Tehani is a recent convert, and ploughed through Series 1 to 6 (so far) in just a few weeks after becoming addicted thanks to Matt Smith – she’s rewatching to keep up with David! Tansy is the expert in the “Doctor Who in Conversation” team, with a history in Doctor Who fandom that goes WAY back, and a passion for Doctor Who that inspires us all. We are working our way through New Who, using season openers and closers, and Hugo shortlisted episodes, and sometimes a couple of extra episodes we love as our blogging points. Just for fun!

Thanks to everyone who nominated us for the William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism or Review, we are chuffed and delighted and might even be inspired to run through these a bit faster than we have been doing. No promises, obviously!

“Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead” – Season 4, episodes 9 & 10

The Doctor – David Tennant
Donna Noble – Catherine Tate
River Song – Alex Kingston

TEHANI:

We skip ahead again to the first Hugo nomination for the fourth season (there were only two Doctor Who episodes shortlisted that year – well, three, but this counts as a single nomination). This is interesting to me, as the fourth season – Donna’s season – is definitely one of my favourites. More competition in that year?

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So, things are not okay right now. It’s not something I’m going to be talking about in detail (please don’t ask), and this isn’t any kind of cry for help. The support networks are all in place, etc. I just kind of want to acknowledge here that everything sucks right now rather than putting up another peppy post that pretends otherwise. In the future, when everything is okay again, I want to be able to look back on my blog and see at least a hint of reality in between the weekly Doctor Who posts (be glad I’m a few weeks ahead on writing these) and the Friday links.

I also want to acknowledge it because – well, if you’re not an immediate member of my family, and you need or expect anything of me over the next couple of weeks, then chances are incredibly high that I’m going to let you down, cancel plans and commitments at the last minute, forget an important detail, leave emails unanswered, and generally drop the ball. All the balls. I hate being that person, but right now it’s a miracle that I’m (mostly) driving in straight lines, and not leaving essential personal possessions at every SINGLE place I visit in a given day.

If you do need something from me, or are waiting on something, then don’t be afraid to ask/remind me of it! At the very least I should be able to give you some sort of revised timetable on when it might be possible. Or that might be one of the emails I manage to not answer for several weeks. But it’s the thought that counts, right?

QUITE ENOUGH OF THAT SORT OF THING.

There have also been a couple of nice shiny announcements that have managed to gleam brightly enough through the clouds that I have noticed them. And, you know. If you don’t acknowledge the wins, what’s the point of anything?

My story “What Books Survive” from the Fablecroft anthology Epilogue has been picked up for the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy & Horror, which is lovely. I won’t post the TOC here as it seems to have been published pretty much everywhere, but it really never gets old to be picked for something like this and I am very proud to share a table of contents with so many wonderful friends and colleagues in the Australian spec fic community.

I’m also quietly pleased to have someone notice “What Books Survive” as it was a ridiculously hard story to write and it joins several others I have been working on which will hopefully at some point be a collection of stories about books, predictive futures of publishing, and ruined childhoods in general. Narrelle Harris (@daggyvamp) read it recently and tweeted: “I just read What Books Survive by @tansyrr and it made me so sad.” Yep, bringing the joy, people, that’s what I do.

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This is a tricky year for me to write about, largely because I wrote everything I have to say about The Trial of a Time Lord season of Doctor Who in my essay for Chicks Unravel Time, and I don’t want to repeat myself.

Since I wrote that piece, however, I have had my head turned a little bit inside out about Doctor Who and the 1980’s, thanks to reading the new (upcoming) book The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Turner, by Richard Marson.

I was hesitant about reading the book, especially because that word ‘scandalous’ sounded a lot to me like ‘muck-raking,’ and I figured that having listened to John Nathan-Turner’s own memoirs read in his own voice (available super cheap from Big Finish) I didn’t really need to read anything else about his life.

But I received a review copy. And… whoa. What a book. It’s very much an in-depth look at what it was like trying to make TV at the BBC in the 1980’s, and the work culture of that era, a time when it was still acceptable to start drinking down the pub at lunchtime and not stop, even as the cameras were rolling, where there was no language yet to express concerns about workplace sexual harassment, and… well. All that stuff.

You can learn more about the book by listening to the Radio Free Skaro interview with its author, Richard Marson, who talks a lot about the context of the project.

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Alex & Tansy discuss the Stella, the Shadows, behaving badly on the internet, criticising criticism of the Hugo criticism, and whether the suck fairy has visited Farscape, the Star Wars Thrawn trilogy, or The Mists of Avalon.

You can download the episode here, or at iTunes.

News

The Stella Prize announced its winner last night at a glittery ceremony. Carrie Tiffany won the $50,000 prize for her second novel Mateship with Birds and promptly gave back $10,000 to be awarded to her fellow shortlistees. Classy!

Australian Shadows Award – and the skulls go to…

Seanan McGuire talks about perceptions about self-promotion and the Hugos
We also wanted to draw attention to the post Seanan linked to, “Language Myth #6 – Women Talk Too Much.” Particularly this quote by Dale Spender:

“The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.”

Hugh Howey – The Bitch from Worldcon post

In response: Tobias Buckell – Don’t Punch Down

Chronos Awards – for SF & Fantasy professional & fan works coming out of the state of Victoria.

Eisner Award shortlists – nice to see Saga & Hawkeye nominated, but Tansy particularly wants to draw people’s attention to the categories for comics & graphic novels aimed at children.

Mind Meld – favourite women writers in genre

(Also – books you savour vs books you devour)

Culture Consumed

ALEX: Farscape season 1; Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command, Timothy Zahn; Rapture, by Kameron Hurley; Sky is Calling, The Impossible Girl (Kickstarted album)

TANSY: Game of Thrones Season 2; Swordspoint the audiobook, The Mists of Avalon, Coode Street Podcast episode 140 featuring Nalo Hopkinson.

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