Hard to believe we’ve made it to 50 episodes. Of course the alternative is that we stop talking, and that would never happen! Sadly we didn’t eat cake, but we did namecheck Joanna Russ at least once, so that’s almost the same thing, right?

You may eat cake while you listen to it, if you want to. If you do, you know we want to hear about it!

Check out EPISODE 50 now!

In which we leap happily back and forth (with occasional ranting) over those fine lines between feminist critique and anti-female assumptions, plus share our bumper collection of holiday culture consumed. Happy New Year from the Galactic Suburbia crew!

NEWS AND LINKS

Hugo nominations open and we’re gonna have our say

Aqueduct Press to publish Brit Mandelo’s thesis, “WE WUZ PUSHED: On Joanna Russ & Radical Truth-telling”!

Islamic superhero comic turned animated series The 99 to screen in Australia (ABC3)

Amanda Palmer’s wedding post

Great piece on how the very idea of ‘Mary Sue’ is sexist, ties into this episode’s theme about the criticism of female characters.

The wealth of powerful girl heroes in today’s YA

WHAT CULTURE HAVE WE CONSUMED?

Alisa: Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal; The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (with cover art by Kathleen Jennings); The Vampire Diaries; Primeval; The 99; Planetary; Homeland and Boxcutters.

Alex: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon, Julie Phillips; Changing Planes, Ursula le Guin; Perchance to Dream, Lisa Mantchev; Twilight Robbery, Frances Hardinge; Chronicles of Chrestomanci vol 1, Diana Wynne Jones. DOA and Going Postal

Tansy: The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman; Beauty Queens, Libba Bray; Snuff by Terry Pratchett, Going Postal (TV) – Batman (animated) & My First Batman Book by David Katz, David Tennant & Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing (DIGITAL THEATRE DOWNLOAD AWW YEAH).

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

I have been gathering a pile of interesting links for blog posts all week, many of them linking to each other and building upon each other in a fascinating conversation about writing, reviewing and gender.

Reviewing and Writing as Women’s Work

Nicola Griffiths on how the gendered gaze affects our perceptions of how “hard” or “soft” science fiction actually is (and how sexual it is).

Madeleine Robins on the insidious, internalised cultural pressures of “nice girls don’t brag or draw attention to themselves” and how that works against promoting your own books as an author.

Sherwood Smith on the gender imbalance in SF reviewing and how Important Books tend to be those on Manly Subjects of Manliness and yet books about/by women mysteriously turn out to be Not Important, and isn’t that an odd coincidence? Also, how important it is to realise that if your literary tastes differ from the accepted standards of what is Good, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s something wrong with you. In closing, in response to Madeleine Robins’ post, she also points out that the mythical women who don’t push themselves forward enough (and are therefore responsible for people not realising women can write good books) tend to be highly criticised by society when they actually do push themselves forward. Yes, still.

Owlectomy on how a gendered perspective of a novel’s subject can absolutely mess with your instincts about whether it is worthy of an award, and it can screw with you even if you are a woman and a feminist. Her description of the Joanna Russ Fairy is epic and must become a staple of critical language:

And the Joanna Russ fairy said, “If you think that family and love and grief are not inherently important topics, you might as well put some zombies in your Pride and Prejudice and be done with it.”

Juliet McKenna on how insidious Default/Lazy Sexism can be, and how easily people slip into the idea that fantasy is a genre for and about men.

Timmi Duchamp at Aqueduct on reviewing as a woman, reviewing marginal and mainstream work, and why we need more diverse critical voices.

Miscellaneous but Still Awesome

A powerful essay by Farah Mendlesohn about the work of Diana Wynne Jones, her literary influence, and why she was so terribly important as a writer. (not all that unrelated to the previous section, now I come to think of it)

Nisi Shawl on Race, Still - essential reading for anyone in the genre. And yep, this one’s not all that unrelated either.

Diana Peterfreund announces that Errant, the medieval-awesome-women-with-unicorns novelette that was one of my favourite pieces of short fiction last year, is available as an e-book. If you didn’t get hold of the antho it was originally in (Kiss Me Deadly) then I can recommend this one very highly.

Image found thanks to Ragnell – I have seen this fantastic cosplay group around the web all over the place but this is the first time I saw so many of them in one image. It may well be the awesomest thing I have seen in many months.

There have been so many marvellous, heartfelt posts about the passing of Diana Wynne Jones, who was not only a wonderful children’s author and, by all accounts, an extraordinary person, but also one of the most influential fantasists of our time.

If you only read one of these, let it be the very personal and emotional tribute from Diana’s friend Neil Gaiman, one of the people called to her beside at the end. He speaks about the person he has lost as well as her work, the two things integrating seamlessly, and it is as fine a eulogy as anyone could hope for.

Emma Bull has also posted about her personal memories of Diana, with a marvellous portrait of her character and the adventures she had.

Then we have a huge collection of posts by people who did not know Diana except through her books, each trying to capture the loss they feel and just what was so important about Diana Wynne Jones and her writing.

Sarah Monette talks about DWJ’s characters as outsiders with particular reference to Witch Week, about dark themes and abuse with particular reference to Charmed Life, and about the vivid humanity evident in her books.

Natalie, one of the digital editors at Voyager Books brought new insight (for me) with her post about DWJ’s use of embarrassment as an obstacle and challenge for so many of her characters, and how the true definition of a hero is someone who is prepared to risk embarrassment to speak out.

Bothersome Words talked about her childhood memories of particular DWJ discoveries and favourite moments, and the importance of properly appreciating Fire and Hemlock.

Lili Wilkinson recounts her own discoveries of each book, and the dark times in which DWJ books were scarce, balanced with the joyous time of Mass Reprints – and, of course, about Fire and Hemlock.

A brief but elegant elegy from Shana at Torque Control refers to A Tough Guide to Fantasyland (the book I have MOST gifted to people, especially fantasy writers) and Diana’s sharp, ‘skewering’ sense of humour.

Speaking of a Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Jim Hines shares an anecdote about how that book’s highly sarcastic description of ‘stew’ as the universal meal pushed (shamed!) him to create far interesting gastronomic choices for his goblins, and to stretch beyond the easy choices.

Chris Moriarty wrote about the ten life lessons she took from Diana Wynne Jones’ novels.

Many readers wrote and blogged letters to Diana Wynne Jones, as was suggested last year when she ceased chemotherapy, so that she could actually hear how important she was to us before she died. This one, reposted by Maggie Steifvater, is touching and beautiful and shows how important writers are as inspirations and role models and heroes.

Diana Wynne Jones was absolutely my hero, and I have really enjoyed reading so many testaments to the fact that she was a hero to so many writers, and readers: those who knew and loved her, and those who were deeply affected by her words, her books, her characters and her plots.

If I’ve missed a good post about Diana and/or her work, please let me know in the comments!

EDIT: An in-depth, evocative obituary by Farah Mendelsohn.

Nearly a year ago, when it became known that Diana Wynne Jones had ceased treatment for her cancer, I wrote this letter about what her works meant to me. It looks like a thin collection of words now, not nearly enough, but I am not in a particular mind to try to expand upon it.

Instead, inspired by Celia, I’m sharing a picture of the eclectic, well-rumpled Diana Wynne Jones books that have a permanent place on my bookshelves, taking up a fair chunk of precious real estate in my library. This is where they belong.

What I love most is that I can see at a glance the archaeology of my DWJ reading history. The first books of hers I collected were madly random, and either second hand or plucked from obscure corners of bookshops. Mostly I couldn’t find them at all, and had to read them from the library instead. Then came the rather marvellous post-Potter era in which her books were suddenly released in their entirety, in colourful, attractive covers. Then, after the Diana Wynne Jones Renaissance, which I imagine was at least partly fuelled by people like me who desperately plugged every hole in their collection by buying these books by the handful, as well as new and eager post-Potter readers, there are the New Era Diana Wynne Jones books, beginning with the Merlin Conspiracy, which came out in larger, trade and even hardback editions.

Books. They are so pretty, and they tell a story. Diana Wynne Jones will continue to be read, and reread, in this household for many years to come.

* * *

EDIT: Looking at this, it so is NOT my complete collection, damn it. Where is Archer’s Goon and Tough Guide to Fantasyland? Now I’m going to have to tidy my library again.

Apologies for those who couldn’t access this blog over the weekend – we had a domain name crisis, all sorted now.

Funnily enough, my thoughts have been very much on narrative endings, lately. How they work, how you drag all the threads together, how to make it satisfying, all that stuff. My head has been filled with the end of this book for six months now, and it still keeps pulling surprises on me. All I can hope at this point is that my characters don’t gang up on me and murder me in my sleep. I would not put it past them!

I’ve always been fascinated by endings, and very critical of those that don’t work, or that finish too early or too late. Diana Wynne Jones, whose books I love so much I could make a quilt of them to snuggle under on cold, sad days, always seems to me a little too hasty to finish, as if she stopped just half a chapter short of perfection. I allow this because it makes me less likely to stab forks into my arms in utter jealousy at how good she is. Then there’s the Eddings duo and their lengthy, drawn out farewells which rival Tolkien for sheer self-indulgence (I’m pretty sure the end of the Elenium starts about a third of the way into the final book).

Then there are the perfect endings, the ones that make you feel calm and good (or awful, but in a good way) like “frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” and Janet writing Thomas a poem, and “Placet” (by both Sayers and Willis).

I love writing endings, normally. There’s a beautiful bumbly tumbly pace to them, like running downhill very fast. That moment when everything slots into place and you know all the scenes you have to write, and it’s just a matter of typing, and isn’t it a good thing you have those mad typing skills that almost keep up with your brain at moments like this?

This one is proving harder than most, probably because I have more POV characters than I’ve ever handled before, and no I can’t kill them all off just to make the throughline simpler, and then there’s all the pressure I’m putting on myself to pay off all the promise of book 1 & book 2… I really hope writing endings isn’t like flying in planes or taking exams, which is to say something which seemed easy peasy when I was seventeen and gets harder and harder the older I get.

It’s certainly less fun than heading for ‘THE END’ used to be, but that could be because of the inevitability of certain events which are not all fluff and happiness, so instead of romping downhill crying tally ho! I am more sort of sidling up a cliffface with a guilty look on my face as I dispense justice and injustice with pinpoint accuracy amongst my characters.

The end must be in sight, cos new books are leaping into the queue in the hopes I will pay attention to them next. Yes, I said plural. Anything less would be far too easy…

Day 18 – Favorite beginning scene in a book

Soooo many good beginnings. Here are four favourites:

“The trouble started the day Howard came home from school to find the Goon sitting in the kitchen.” (Archer’s Goon, Diana Wynne Jones)

DWJ kicks arse at openings. In this one, the first novel of hers that I knowingly read and the one that set me on an addiction that would continue for more than a decade, the first chapter sets up the situation: Howard and his sister Awful come home to find a ‘goon’ in their kitchen. He has come from someone called Archer, and he is demanding payment of ‘two thousand’ from their Dad. By the end of the chapter we have learned that the payment is two thousand words, not pounds, and that Archer farms power. It will take the whole book to discover exactly what all those things mean.

“When the girl came rushing up the steps, I decided she was wearing far too many clothes. It was late summer. Rome frizzled like a pancake on a griddle-plate. People unlaced their shoes but had to keep them on; not even an elephant could cross the streets unshod. People flopped on stools in shadowed doorways, bare knees apart, naked to the waist – and in the backstreets of the Aventine Sector where I lived, that was just the women. I was standing in the Forum. She was running. She looked overdressed and dangerously hot, but sunstroke or suffocation had not yet finished her off. She was shining and sticky as a glazed pastry plait, and when she hurtled up the steps of the Temple of Saturn straight towards me, I made no attempt to move aside. She missed me, just. Some men are born lucjy; others are called Didius Falco.”
(The Silver Pigs, Lindsey Davis)

A Philip Marlowe style detective in the mean streets of Ancient Rome. Lindsey Davis had me at hello. But this paragraph beautifully introduces the dry, self-deprecating voice of Falco the informer, and the powerful character of the city of Rome, which (soft-shoeing on the subject of slavery aside) she conveys quite beautifully.

“The world is full of little towns that people want to leave, and scarcely know why.”
(Growing Rich, Fay Weldon)

I only love two Fay Weldon novels, and I came to both of them from excellent TV productions – the other is Big Women, which has a more convoluted opening but rather beautifully uses as it’s theme the iconic phrase ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’. Growing Rich introduces its three protagonists by page 2: three sixteen-year-old girls, Carmen the leader, Laura the pretty one and Annie who was quite desperate. They long to escape from their small town of Fenedge, East Anglia, and the Devil has already overheard their complaints while speeding by in his shiny black car. This is basically, now I come to think of it, The Witches of Eastwick with teenage girls, and none of the characters are entirely likeable, but it’s a book that has always had a powerful hold over me.

“I’m standing on the door of the Less is More club, thinking about my fingernails.”
(Fabulous Nobodies, Lee Tullock)

Long before Ab Fab or Gossip Girl, Reality Nirvana Tuttle (Really for short) trained me to adore shallow characters who were obsessed with artifice and fashion, as long as they did it with humour. This book, full of frocks named after famous divas, best friends who think they are Audrey Hepburn, clubs and magazines and nail polish, was one of my favourites and total comfort reads for many years. Unlike Tam Lin, I’m a little afraid to actually reread it now, in case I learn something about myself that I don’t want to know.

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Day 17 – Favorite story or collection of stories (short stories, novellas, novelettes, etc.)

I think I have to go for Kelly Link’s beautiful stories in the collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners, though I have to give a shout out for the recent paperback collection Pretty Monsters, which I bought despite having copies of all the stories inside! No one writes stories like Kelly Link.

I also deeply adore Kim Newman’s Diogenes Club stories, which are collected in two volumes so far.

In my teens the most important anthologies to me were the Sword and Sorceress collections, which showed me that there was a world of fantasy fiction that was all about female characters. I used to lap these up, and discovered many awesome authors thanks to them.

Probably the short story collection which has stayed with me the longest is one called Dragons and Warrior Daughters, which I loved so much I even painted a copy of the dragon from the cover on my bedroom wall. Among other things, it introduced me to Diana Wynne Jones’ fantastic “Dragon Reserve, Home Eight” which I read at exactly the right age for discovering Diana Wynne Jones, and yet didn’t actually discover her until my twenties. Later, reading a collection of her short stories, I was stunned to discover that one was by her.

Black Juice, by Margo Lanagan, is a collection that means a lot to me, not only because I read it for the first time in manuscript form, but because it has some of the most powerful and lyrical stories in it which redefine what fantasy is – and of course it has Singing My Sister Down, which I don’t dare re-read now that I have children. I remember discussing how amazing it was in the group, and being mildly surprised that, while I knew it was brilliant, the other women in the group had such a visceral, horrified “I love it but never want to read it again” response to the text. They were all mothers.

I liked Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, but didn’t love it. It was so heavily male-centred that it felt empty to be. And then I was drawn to the gorgeous grey cloth-covered hardback of her short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, and bought it without even thinking about it. The stories in this collection are amazing – beautiful and lyrical, and all contribute to the worldbuilding of her faery-contaminated version of history. It’s a book I would buy multiple copies of, in order to give away as presents.

The short story collection I’m most excited about this year (and it has lots of healthy competition) is Karen Joy Fowler’s What I Didn’t See and Other Stories, coming out imminently from Small Beer Press.

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Day 09 – Best scene ever

Anna Louise Genoese writes beautifully about the type of scene she likes best. I have been able to come up with a handful of best beloved scenes or moments in books that come to mind, but I wasn’t sure if I could spot a pattern until I typed them all out.

*Sophie (and the reader) realising that Howl knew her secret all along
(Howl’s Moving Castle)
*a discussion on witch cliches ends when a house falls on Granny Weatherwax’s head
(Witches Abroad)
*Cordelia producing the traitor’s head from a shopping bag.
(Barrayar)
*Robin cracking up with laughter when he sees Laurence Olivier in blackface as Othello – one more clue that makes far more sense when Janet learns the truth about him and Nick
(Tam Lin)
*Beauty demanding “Bring me back my Beast”
(Beauty)
*Darcy’s terrible, unexpected proposal to Elizabeth, and her shocked response
(Pride and Prejudice)
*Nick learns the truth about his past
(The Demon’s Lexicon)
*Howard seeing words written on the wall of the spaceship, revealing a startling truth
(Archer’s Goon)

So there we have it. I love the scenes of surprise and revelation. I love sudden shocks, I love characters acting suddenly out of character or beyond expectations. I adore to be tricked, if it’s done well. And I love it when clues are disguised as something else, so that the rereading experience is so very sweet.

Which, quite possibly, explains why my favourite scene of all time is actually:

*The Shrieking Shack. Harry, Ron, Hermione and Remus Lupin face off with notorious killer Sirius Black, but he is far more interested in facing off with Ron’s pet rat… everything they previously believed falls apart, piece by piece, to be replaced by a new version of history, and nothing will ever be the same again. (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)

For all JK Rowling’s faults as a writer, that scene is magnificent in what it does, what it sets up, what it says and what it leaves unsaid, not to mention the heady combination of revelation, visual effect and raw emotion. It is not really surprising that she was never able to top it.

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Day 04 – Your favorite book or series ever

There were a bunch of books/series that I would regularly reread every two years or so; I last read the lot of them when I was pregnant with Raeli, and suffering from what I called booksickness – that was, an inability to read anything new. Those included pretty much the complete works of Tamora Pierce, Connie Willis and Diana Wynne Jones, the Vorkosigan novels, Tam Lin by Pamela Dean and Absolute Nobodies by Lee Tulloch. For my twenties, at least, these were the books that I returned to over and over, enjoying new layers every time.

Then there are the books of my childhood: the ocean of Enid Blytons, the boatfuls of Swallows and Amazons, the Edward Eagers and Beverly Clearys.

Then there’s Terry Pratchett, and I’m sure I could write many, many words to express how much his books meant to me fifteen years ago, and what they mean to me now.

But I’m not going to talk about any of them. Ha!

The series that comes to mind are the Masters of Rome books by Colleen McCullough. It’s hard to think of a set of books that have influenced my life more. Sure, Enid Blyton taught me that you could grow up to be a writer, and Terry Pratchett taught me the meaning of meta-fantasy, but Colleen McCullough started me on my love affair with Rome: the city, the history, the symbol. And I’ve never stopped.

I was given the first book in this series as a teenager (possibly a TOUCH too young for it) by a well-meaning relative. I fell in love with it – a dense family saga with the weight of Roman history pressing all around it, plus plenty of sex, violence and grotesquerie. It’s a series just packed with sensible women and damaged men and, oh yes, it’s the reason I took up Ancient Civilisations at college, the reason I kept taking those Classics subjects at university (oops, was that a major?) and the reason I spent a good seven years of my life working towards a PhD.

These books are huge. You might think you’ve seen big books, if you are a fantasy reader, but I advise you to look again. Every time a new book in the series was released, I would read back all the others, laboriously (okay, sometimes I skipped the battle scenes). I have the most recent sitting on my to read shelf after a year and a half, though I was so desperate to read it I purchased it within 24 hours of finding out it existed – it’s still sitting there because my brain keeps insisting I need to read all the others first and honestly, I don’t have three months to spare.

The First Man in Rome gave me the sisters Julia and Julilla, one a sensible matrona-to-be, and the other a spoiled, self-destructive brat. It introduced Marius, a great leader I didn’t care one sestertius about, and the wilfully horrible, poisonous and utterly wonderful Sulla (Avon to Marius’ Blake) whom I adored with a terrible passion.

The Grass Crown gave me lots more Sulla madness and political machinations, but most particularly it gave me Aurelia, sensible young patrician bride, and the elaborate domestic set up she arranges with her dowry, so that she was the landlady of an insula in a poor area by the time she had her son, young Gaius Julius Caesar. Yes, I named my firstborn daughter after her.

Fortune’s Favourites, ostensibly about the fall of Sulla, is the novel that made me fall inexorably in love with Julius Caesar. There was no going back.

Caesar’s Women, perhaps my favourite of the series, gave me tons more Aurelia action, but also brought the horribly unpleasant and yet compelling Servilia into the limelight. It also introduced me to the women’s ritual religion, a topic that I became so interested in, it ultimately served as my Honours topic. [this one was released 1996, the year I started university - after this, my knowledge of and interest in studying Classics informed my reading of the novels rather than the other way around]

While I very much enjoyed Caesar and The October Horse, they had rather more military action than family politics, which was of less interest to me – I had a habit by then of skimming until I got to scenes with women in them – but then along came the brilliantly twisted Octavian, and I was completely in McCullough’s hands all over again.

I still don’t know if I’m going to pick up Antony and Cleopatra any time soon. I am fascinated to do so, but also a little scared. Mostly I’m scared because I’m used to letting McCullough define a historical character for me – her Sulla, Julia, Aurelia, Caesar and Servilia are all ‘canon’ as far as I’m concerned, but this book has Livia in it. And no one can write Livia well enough to please me. She’s MINE.

Yeah, okay. I’m going to read it soon. Any day now. Really, I promise.

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Episode 8, our Special Feedback Episode is now available to download from the Galactic Suburbia site! You should be able to get it from iTunes shortly too.

News we discussed:

Lambda Awards LGBT SF/Fantasy/Horror winner:
Palimpsest, by Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam/Spectra Books)

Valente also signing on as Apex editor

Theodore Sturgeon Award shortlist

Tansy’s new book release and launch of Power and Majesty tomorrow, June 3 2010

Sad news about Diana Wynne Jones who has ceased chemotherapy to treat her cancer

Feedback from:
Jay Daze in Vancouver Island, Canada
Thoraiya Dyer in Newcastle, Australia
Celia in Brisbane, Australia
Tehani Wessely in Perth, Australia
Helen Merrick in Perth, Australia
Grant Watson in Perth Melbourne, Australia

Please send feedback to galacticsuburbia@gmail.com and we will try to address it in future special feedback episodes.