I loved this article at the Mary Sue about women in history who have held the titles traditionally belonging to men. So many interesting women – some of whom I’d never heard of before! The uses of ‘king’ by women particularly interested me because that was something I was trying to do with Velody in the Creature Court books – when there has no one but men holding the title of ‘king’ for as long as people can remember, you keep using the damn word even if there’s a woman doing it now.
Also at the Mary Sue, I loved this depiction of women’s work in World War II, one of my favourite eras/topics of social history.
I also really appreciated receiving this link, about the choice of teaching texts in high schools, and how books by and about women are being left out. Remember this one when the “oh noes all these books for girls are excluding boy readers” discussion gets rolled out again.
I think I actually swooned at this one – Ben Browder to guest star in Doctor Who – in a Wild West episode. SWOONED, I tell you! (now we just need Claudia Black to come in as Benny Summerfield and the world will be a perfect place)
This is one I meant to bring to the table at our recent recording of Galactic Suburbia (should be up tonight) but forgot: craft is at the top of the cultural activities performed by Australians, but our peak funding body for cultural activities has just defunded Craft Australia. (I didn’t even know there was a Craft Australia!) There’s plenty of gender & class privilege to unpack here, as there usually is when the line between craft and art is drawn.
This one’s for Jonathan, Gary & Mondy, who have been speculating a lot lately about what are the best books published in 2011 so far, that they should be paying attention to.
These are mine. It’s entirely personal, of course, and based what I’ve actually read (as opposed to the towering To Read pile that will one day cause me major injury) but given that I haven’t done nearly enough this year of reviewing the books I love, I think it’s worth doing.
ADULT FICTION
Jo Walton Among Others
A wonderful, wonderful book about the reading habits of young girls, with subtle magic and a fabulous theme of iconic SF books. At some point I hope I will write that essay I want to, about my lifelong relationship with Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin and how that book trained me to get the most out of this one despite the fact that I’ve never read Delaney, Zelazny or more than two novels by Heinlein.
I am loving the Tumblr “A Doctor World” which remixes the odd, philosophical phrases of the art-tragicomic-musing-on-the-universe comic strip A Softer World with images from Doctor Who. These range from funny and romantic to sad and uncomfortable – wonderful stuff.
An inspiring interview with Hope Powell, England football coach and all-around awesome woman. I was fascinated by honest descriptions of what it was like to be a West Indian girl who loved football in Britain in the 1970′s, and how she made it to the top of her field despite how marginalised women’s football still is.
Tehani and Random Alex are doing a chronological read-along series of posts about Bujold’s Vorkosigan saga – Tehani, like me, is a diehard Bujold fan, and Alex is reading the books (and loving them) for the very first time. I’m excited to follow along! Two posts up so far, Cordelia’s Honor and The Warrior’s Apprentice. NOBODY SPOIL ALEX.
The SF MindMeld, which hasn’t had a brilliant record at addressing gender parity in the past but I believe has been working to improve, reiterates Griffith’s idea of the Russ Pledge and asks What’s The Importance of the Russ Pledge Today? Sadly, while most of the official respondents have the right idea and some interesting things to say, there are many commenters who seem offended at the very concept of giving women writers a fair go.
“Why I won’t be taking the Joanna Russ pledge” by Athena Andreadis. Powerful, important post – I think she is somewhat unfair in her characterisation of the pledge and its usefulness but hard to argue with “I have been implementing it for the last forty-plus years.”
A cool piece about the equal male-female balance on the writing team of TV show Community and how it worked out really well for them, though starting as an experiment imposed upon them. While there’s a little bit of ‘wow, we included women writers and they didn’t suck, and actually it meant we had a team that had a wider range of views!’ and I think there is some belittling of the idea that a good racial mix among writers would be just as important, it still feels like a step in the right direction.
“Thinking too hard” about The Hunger Games, why the concept of the first book worked so well, and the subversive message it gives to teens, which goes beyond “be yourself” all the way to “if you have to pretend not to be yourself to anyone, chances are they are out to kill you.”
“we proudly declare that we stream your ebooks — you don’t have to download them. You can of course download your Booki.sh books for offline access on most devices — you just can’t read them in anything other than Booki.sh.”
SPUNC Response: “Digital publishing presents us with a massive opportunity that has heretofore been unavailable. Namely this: that a publisher can have a book distributed wherever they want, at the click of a button”.
Weird Tales revamp
Launching new website; editor-in-chief Ann VanderMeer and publisher John Betancourt have raised the pay rate to 5 cents per word; and implemented a new submissions portal for potential contributors. In addition to the announcement late last year of the all female editorial team, for the first time in 88 years of Ann VanderMeer, Paula Guran and Mary Robinette Kowal.
Feedback
Sean, Thoraiya, Niall
Pet Subject
The place of religion in science fiction.
Modern religions, made up religions, machine religions… or no religions? What place can/does/should religion play in sf?
Jo Walton on religion in SF!
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Karen Joy Fowler writes novels the way Kelly Link writes short stories – painstaking, elaborate, funny, with surprisingly modern sensibilities alongside beautiful language. (the kicker of course is that Karen Joy Fowler also writes short stories like this, but that’s not the point of this review) I’ve read several of Fowler’s novels now, including the hugely successful The Jane Austen Book Club (really must get around to seeing the movie), my favourite being The Sweetheart Season, about the American female baseball league during the war.
Fowler’s novels are eclectic, but each clings fiercely to its themes and subject matter, making for a very satisfying reading experience.
The Case of the Imaginary Detective (published as Wit’s End in some countries, a far better title) wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I knew it was a book in which Fowler interrogated the detective fiction genre, and had even read summaries of the plot, but somehow in my head it was set in the 1930′s or 1940′s, like Jo Walton’s Farthing… but what I got instead was something more akin to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition!
Rima is a wounded soul, having lost her mother, brother and most recently, her father. Needing somewhere to assemble her thoughts, she is staying with her godmother Addison, a famous crime novelist who has not produced a new book in more than two years. The house is full – of dollhouses set up for each of Addison’s literary crime scenes, of dogs, of secrets, of memories of Rima’s father, who may or may not have had an affair with Addison, and most notably of Maxwell Lane, the fictional detective.
Episode 3 is available for download/live play here, or subscribe to us through iTunes. I’m posting the show notes here as well as some versions of Firefox struggle to load them on the GS page… Galactic Suburbia Episode 3 – 2 April
This one was recommended to me as ‘domestic fantasy,’ which was intriguing from the start. Also, it was Jo Walton. Say no more. Jo Walton has this amazing knack of writing novels that feel like they would have been written a century ago, if our current genre traditions existed then.
What I wasn’t expecting was a marvellous, complex narrative that entirely messed with my head. Walton uses omniscient narration beautifully, weaving in and out of her characters’ heads, shifting perspective exactly when it needs to be shifted. The narrative is non-linear in many ways, not least because Taveth, the most important of the protagonists, has the ability to see people’s pasts and futures, and views the world through a Doctor Manhattan style haze. Part of the story indeed is the discussion of how to tell the story, between the few people left to tell it, and the narrative makes it clear that this telling is imperfect and unreliable, filtered through the eyes of those who missed much of what was going on. We shift from time period to time period, like flitting through the collective memories of the household, back and forth, until a coherent picture forms. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to read it all over again when you’re done, just to see how she did it.
After yesterday, I’ve been thinking about how many fantasy novels are truly standalone. Girlie Jones declared on Twitter that she doesn’t read fantasy because she’s not interested in waiting for volumes to be written. It’s a fair cop – if the concept of a journey through an elaborate magical world doesn’t grab you from the outset, it’s hard to find a half-decent gateway drug to introduce you to the genre.
Fantasy certainly lends itself to extended series, either of the to-be-continued type or the ‘many standalone novels set in the same world/based around the same character’ type. One of the pleasures of fantasy is the exploration of a world and the ongoing consequences of changes to that world – but that isn’t all that fantasy has to offer and sometimes there is a deep pleasure in a short burst of magical fiction. It’s also a great way to lure a new reader into the genre. I suspect that his many and varied standalone novels are a big part of why Neil Gaiman, for example, has such a broad fanbase.
Standalone novels are, if you are not Neil Gaiman, mostly a luxury for fantasy writers. They turn up at the very beginning of their careers, in many cases, or sidle in from time to time. The accepted wisdom is that standalones simply don’t sell as well as trilogies or series books, even when by the same author.
I wanted to assemble a list of fantasy books I love that are not only standalone, but continue to be so – they don’t share their world or characters with other books. There are no sequels, sideways or direct. @crankynick pointed out on Twitter that I had set myself a hard task because “it’s a rare writer that doesn’t go back to the well if a book takes off.” This is a cynical but let’s face it, not untrue view of how the publishing world works.
By only including pure solo standalone novels in my list, that means I am excluding many great fantasy novels which share a world or character with one or some other of their author’s works, even though they stand perfectly well on their own: such novels as The Hobbit, Valiant, The Curse of Chalion, Anansi Boys. Even Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell can be excluded on these grounds, I think, as The Ladies of Grace Adieu is very much a sequel and companion volume, while not actually a novel. Thanks to Tehani and Nicole I also learned that Threshold, Sara Douglass’ lovely novel of maths, magic and glassworking is now linked to some of her other novels and no longer counts as a standalone in that pure sense. Damn it! There goes another of my best examples.
So: THE LIST (my top 10 super-solo-unsequelled-standalone fantasy novels) presented below…
I'm a writer, a mum, a doll merchant, and in my spare time (ha!) like to cut up fabric and sew it back together in an amusing fashion. I have a PhD in Classics that comes in handy surprisingly often.
I live with my partner and our two daughters in Hobart, Tasmania, and I am one of the three voices of the Hugo-nominated Galactic Suburbia podcast. Check out my current releases, the Creature Court trilogy. Come and find me on Twitter!
Aliette DeBodard talks about female protagonists in historical fantasy, and Kate Elliott responds by talking about female protagonists in fantasy-inspired-by-history. Between the two of them and the comments section there is some great, crunchy discussion.
