News

Drink Tank loves us! Download their Hugo shortlist commentary here.

Mondy loves us too! He makes us go awww.

James Tiptree Jr finally in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and about time too.

Talking to Alistair Reynolds: he defends the idea that science fiction has a limited number of plots

Locus Award Finalists

Clarke Award

Women in (Japanese) Comics: Cheryl Morgan reports; Anime News Network

Some kickstarter stuff:
Feminist Historical Anthology from Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

Scalzi on Amanda Palmer and how she worked hard for 10 years to get her “overnight success”

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alisa: We Wuz Pushed by Brit Mandelo
Alex: Castles Made of Sand, Gwyneth Jones; Captain America; The Avengers; Confusion of Princes, Garth Nix
Tansy: A Confusion of Princes, Garth Nix; The Avengers; Earth 2 & World’s Finest; Ishtar

Tansy’s Note: “I do not mourn the boob window” is a classic line that should be long remembered and oft repeated – but Cheryl Morgan said it first! I only steal from the best…

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!

Alisa muses on the last five years here, and also talks about how she can find positive female role models in trashy reality TV shows.

Speaking of role models, I wrote a Friday Hoyden post for Hoyden About Town, about: who else? Joanna Russ!

Kirstyn McDermott talks about the false equivalence of male and female representation on book covers, as beautifully illustrated by Jim C Hines.

Ben Peek heralds the new Ditmar ballot as ammunition in his ongoing secret rivalry against Bill Wright. Best Ditmar response so far!

Thoraiya Dyer, who has been holding out against social media for a long time, has decided to run a blog calling attention to the women making fan art in the SF community, in the hopes of bringing some diversity to next year’s Hugo ballot. It’s a work in progress, but such an important idea, keep an eye on it!

Cheryl Morgan talks about Tor going DRM-free with its ebooks.

Lynne Murray on Body Impolitic talks about the power of words, and the idea that everyday magic, for good and ill, can be performed on people through insults, jokes and compliments. People are not friends if they are bringing you down with what they say to you!

Grant Watson wants you to write or make art for his fanzine!

M.K. Hobson talks about how to run a spiritually successful Kickstarter.

Next time you hear people talking about how boys don’t want to or aren’t capable of identifying with a female character in an action series, point them at this response to the Legend of Korra series. Turns out boys like female heroes just FINE.

Smart Bitches Trashy Books critiques the media portrayal of the Romantic Times conference and how news reports can be truthful without being accurate. Reminds me a lot of media portrayal of SF cons!

Ancient Rome theme park to be built near modern Rome. I WANT THIS THING TO EXIST!!!

I was delighted that so many people knew that this great Batwoman/Batgirl comic was something I desperately needed to read. Now you do too!

Episode 36: Spoilerific Book Club: Joanna Russ Featuring: “How To Suppress Women’s Writing,” by Joanna Russ; “The Female Man,” by Joanna Russ and “When it Changed,” by Joanna Russ

Episode 47: 24 November 2011 In which we bid farewell to the queen of dragons, squee about 48 years of Doctor Who, dissect the negative associations with “girly” fandoms such as Twilight, and find some new favourites in our reading pile.

Or if you’re feeling adventurous, you can check out our entire 2011 catalogue of episodes! Thanks to our silent producer for gathering those links.

Sure they do. Except in the many, many, tiny little ways that they don’t. Some of those ways seem small, like tiny nicks in the glass of a car window, the sort of thing you can overlook on its own. But when it’s nick after nick, dent after dent, hole after hole… once your awareness has been opened to it, it feels like the window is cracking open, from edge to edge. You can’t not see it. It’s everywhere.

Elizabeth L Huede, the powerhouse behind the gone-viral-or-what Australian Women Writers 2012 Reading challenge, blogged recently about how disappointing it is that the list of books chosen for the National Year of Reading project – one from each state, books chosen to represent ‘our story’ as Australians – consists of seven out of eight male authored works.

Elizabeth parses some of the ways in which this could have happened, noting that the longlist used for reference was also grossly weighted towards male authors, but also musing on how it is that male books are so heavily prioritised when the people choosing the long list – librarians and publishers – are both female heavy professions. Also, readers got to vote on the books – and reading is in itself identified as being a more popular pastime among women than men. So this isn’t just about men thinking books by men are more important and universal and meaningful than books by women. This is about women thinking exactly the same thing.

The comments are good, btw. There, I point out something I have noticed in the past as far as this sort of list goes – it wasn’t constructed as a balanced shortlist, it was constructed as eight single titles, each chosen by different people. When you’re narrowing down the choice to ONE, you never think about gender (well, most people wouldn’t) – the natural assumption is that it’s a 50-50 chance, because a single winner can only represent one gender. So it never feels like a decision influenced by gender. It’s only when the pattern is laid out – 7/8 ‘winners’ per state being male, for instance, or the shocking statistics of the Miles Franklin literary award, named after a woman and rarely won by one, that the question of gender bias looks to be an obvious one.

And of course there are ways to deal with this. Like the Stella Prize, for instance. Like the Australian Women Writers Reading 2012 Challenge. Like having these conversations. All necessary things.

We need to change the way we look at literature and art. We need to change the way we read it, and teach it. You can’t declare that equality exists and therefore parity doesn’t matter. I’ve seen too many lists that promote the outdated idea that to be Important or Universal or even that completely pure and unbiased and rational philosophical ideal of GOOD, they have to be written by men. I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it in comics, or movies, or television, or kids toys, or football, or anything else I consider important. Hell, I don’t even buy it in politics.

So no, I won’t take it lying down when it comes to books. Because books are important. And ‘our story’ has a far more complex, diverse and interesting meaning than the National Year of Reading is managing to convey so far.

No gender bias in that list of books, huh? Really. I wonder how they can be so sure. Because the universe that the list exists in is pretty riddled with gender bias, and if you don’t actively build defenses against it, you end up with the same story, over and over again.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

She didn’t write it. She wrote it, but she shouldn’t have. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. She wrote it, but only one of it. She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art. She wrote it, but she had help. She wrote it, but she was an anomaly.

She wrote it, BUT…
Joanna Russ, the original cover blurb of How to Suppress Women Writing

Why has the world not yet rendered that quote utterly irrelevant???

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!

News
The Locus Awards
Prometheus Award winners
Sturgeon and Campbell Awards
Shirley Jackson Awards

Recent announcement – Gollancz announces the SF Gateway, huge project to digitise & make available thousands of SF classics as ebooks.

Linda Nagata on ‘What’s in a Name’ and her career trajectory as a female writer of hard SF
Chris Moriarty on labels in the women & SF conversation
Women and the chilly climate at Scientific American

Liz Williams at the Guardian on the way science fiction reflects human belief

Alastair Reynolds to write Doctor Who novel: Tansy and Alex’s obsessions in one package!

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alisa: Maureen Johnson on www.whyy.org/podcast; Twin Peaks; Mercy (not genre but interesting feminism);
Alex: sooo much Bujold (3rd, 4th and 5th omnibi, and Memory); lots of books, because of holidays! But particularly Heartless, Gail Carriger; Blackout, Connie Willis; Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, NK Jemisin… also Harry Potter 7 and Transformers 3.
Tansy: The Demon’s Surrender, The Holy Terror & Robophobia (Big Finish), Subterranean’s YA Issue

Pet Subject: Feedback from our Joanna Russ episode

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!

How To Suppress Women’s Writing, by Joanna Russ

The Female Man, by Joanna Russ

“When it Changed,” by Joanna Russ

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia @ gmail.com – we’d love to hear your stories of discovering and rediscovering Joanna Russ.

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!

Meanwhile, thanks to a combination of the ‘women’s football’ RSS feed from the Guardian and the presence of at least 4 Arsenal players, I’ve been paying a lot more attention to the England team, which is amusing to me because when the England men’s team plays anything I normally spend most of my time muttering at them with very narrowed eyes. I kind of love the video diaries the team have been releasing, if only to listen to their cute accents, though sadly they didn’t win their match either. (1-1)

Moving aside from sport now, here’s an extra plug for Marianne de Pierres’ new project, cowpunk webcomic Peacemaker. Check out the first issue now for a measly 99¢ – much though I disapprove of people pricing whole novels at 99¢, I think it’s exciting for shorter pieces, and as an Australian it’s rather nice to actually get the 99¢ price for once (yes, iTunes with your $1.19, I’m looking at you, you know what the Australian dollar is actually worth, right?). I believe later issues will be priced higher, so now’s your chance to find out if you like Peacemaker!

Speaking of awesome Australian women (and fictional heroes) here’s a great interview with Anna Torv from Fringe.

I have been so impressed with Torv’s performance throughout the third season of Fringe, playing two versions of the same character, and managing to make both utterly compelling rather than falling into the Spock’s beard style of parallel world characterisation. Speaking of Spock’s beard, the episode which required Torv to channel Leonard Nimoy for a whole episode was amazing. Kudos to the show for the subtle and powerful writing, too. Having loved Fringe in spite of itself in season one, and gone through such excitement when season two was so very good from beginning to end, I’m somewhat beside myself that Fringe is now some of the most exciting and interesting SF TV in years, and mark it as a coup that my honey now watches it with me. It’s gone from a show I considered a guilty pleasure to one that so many of my friends respect, like and get excited by. So hooray for the excellent cast, whoa for the spectacular final episode, and woohoo for season 4 on the horizon. I’m glad to hear that Torv’s performance is being heralded (finally!) but I really really hope John Noble gets the Emmy or the GG – his Walter Bishop has always been exceptional to watch, and it feels like every time the rest of the cast rise to his challenge, he just gets better.

Some shorter links now, I promise!

Forbidden Planet asks, Are you a misogynist?

Kate Beaton makes a very good (and hilarious) point about ‘strong female characters‘ through comic art.

Ben Peek writes about the small world view of speculative fiction in the 21st century.

From Meanland, the death of the book and other utopian fantasies (via @vodkanlime)

The Women of Solaris.

Two from Tor.com re-reading Joanna Russ (in order) starting with The Adventures of Alyx and Greg van Eekhout & Carrie Vaughn talk about YA, middle grade fiction and how The Kids Are All Right.

And in closing, Pixar finally have a female protagonist. The film looks awesome and I love the title so very much.

Jem’s speech, which had been lagging behind her climbing, hugging and animal impressionistic skills, has recently been coming on in leaps and bounds. She has two two-word phrases now, ‘more toast’ and ‘Doctorrrrooo’ (generally while pointing at any pictures of well dressed Englishmen). We have also discovered that ‘jam’ and ‘yum’ are indistinguishable terms. Her favourite so far is quince jelly.

The cutest thing in the universe may very well be when I ask whether the girls want cereal or toast for breakfast, Raeli says ‘both!’ and Jem echoes, ‘bofe!’ These are the things which do not last, and need to be pinned down in memory.

Also this week I have inhaled the entirety of Downton Abbey, thanks to the encouragement of @zeft as well as the rest of the internet.

It’s a simply glorious costume drama, like several years of Upstairs Downstairs distilled into seven incredibly plot-rich stories. I love the complex characters (very few out and out villains, though many of them are villains to a selected handful), the focus on domestic drama and social detail, and the gorgeous frocks. Also, Mary’s eyebrows, which are a character in their own right.

I do love the younger characters, especially the trio of daughters. but it took many of them several episodes to grow on me. It’s the older characters who really sing in this show, with lovely crunchy roles like Mr Bates the damaged valet with a secret past, and the war of queens between the Dowager Countess Violet (Maggie Smith) and the intelligent, infering Mrs Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton). Oh, and the butler. Truly the best of butlers!

I came away from it wanting to write and/or read an Edwardian house drama with magic. For now I am holding off cravings by listening to an audio drama of The Forsyte Saga, my favourite historical family saga of all time. I still love it, but can’t help feeling it would be much improved by a magic system, and possibly some manticores.

Reading-wise I have been making my way through How The Dead See, the new Pufferfish novel by David Owen. I’ve always loved this Tasmanian police procedural series, partly because of the use of so many familiar details and setting, but mostly because of the protagonist, cranky old fat DI Franz Heineken (called Pufferfish by his colleagues but never to his face except by the woman he loves). I have a deep if select love for cranky, witty, macho detective stories, with added food porn. Considering that the last Puff book was published 14 years ago, what I found most interesting about this one were the modern touches, and the details about how policework and indeed crime has changed over the years. Plus of course I was hoping to get my brain into more of a noiry crimey place for more effective Nancy Napoleon writing. Which worked just fine until I OD’d on costume drama. If Nancy ends up in a crinoline, blame @zeft!

In feminist SF news (there always has to be a bit!) Kirstyn McDermott located an online copy of “When It Changed,” the short story we’ll be reading and discussing for our next Joanna Russ special episode of Galactic Suburbia, along with The Female Man and How To Suppress Women’s Writing. It’s a fantastic story, and well worth either a read or re-read. Check it out! (and hooray for the SciFi.Com archive)

EPISODE 35

In which “best” becomes “superior,” Pottermore is Pottermeh, one of us wins all the awards, and we visit/revisit classic non-hard works of SF and Fantasy by Bujold, Willis and Pratchett (with bonus Russian fairytales by Valente).

News

Pottermore announcement made during our podcast…

Theodore Sturgeon finalists

David Gemmell Awards…

NatCon professional guests for next year are Kelly Link and Alison Goodman.

Chronos Awards

Sidewise Awards finalists

Translation Awards winners

Stoker Awards announced

Coode Street Horror Special with Stoker winners Datlow & Straub

Gender Spotting Tool – Naff.

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alisa: Connie Willis’ Passage in progress, the next 3 Twelve Planets.
Alex: so much Bujold (Cordelia’s Honor and Young Miles omnibuses… omnibi… whatever, Fly by Night, Frances Hardinge, Red Glove, Holly Black. Series 2 of V (reboot)
Tansy: Deathless, Catherynne Valente; I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett; Wyrd Sisters audiobook, Terry Pratchett/Celia Imrie.

Next Fortnight: Galactic Suburbia’s Spoilerific Book Club Presents: Joanna Russ. Reading How to Suppress Women’s Writing, The Female Man, “When It Changed.”

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!