I’ve had the best fun ever being a juror for the James Tiptree Jr. Award this past year, and it’s very exciting that now the news is out, we get to share our picks with everyone! We had such a wealth of material to read for this, which makes me feel very happy about the current state of the genre. Interrogating gender issues may not be something every SF or fantasy book does, but it feels like there’s a hell of a lot more out there than there used to be. (my groaning bookshelves attest to this)

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2011 Tiptree Award is Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston (Aqueduct Press, 2011). Hairston had already agreed to serve as a juror for the 2012 award. By a first-ever coincidence, she is also one of the Guests of Honor at this year’s WisCon, where the Tiptree Award is traditionally celebrated.

The James Tiptree Jr. Award is presented annually to a work of science fiction or fantasy that explores and expands gender roles. The award seeks out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. It is intended to reward those writers who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

The Tiptree Award winner will be honored during Memorial Day weekend at WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin. Andrea Hairston will receive $1000 in prize money, a specially-commissioned piece of original artwork, and (as always) chocolate.

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winner. The 2011 jurors were Lynne Thomas (chair), Karen Meisner, James Nicoll, Nisi Shawl, and Tansy Rayner Roberts.

Redwood and Wildfire was a favorite of the jurors from the moment they read it. They reported: “This vivid and emotionally satisfying novel encompasses the life of Redwood, a hoodoo woman, as she migrates from rural Georgia to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. While Redwood’s romance with Aidan Wildfire is central to the novel, female friendship is also a major theme, without deferring to the romance. Hairston incorporates romantic love into a constellation, rather than portraying it as a solo shining star. Her characters invoke a sky where it can shine; they live and love without losing themselves in cultural expectations, prejudices and stereotypes, all within a lovingly sketched historical frame.

“Intersections of race, class, and gender encompass these characters’ entire lives. They struggle with external and internal forces around questions of gender roles, love, identity, and sexuality. This challenge drives how they move through the world and how it sees them. The characters in Redwood and Wildfire deftly negotiate freedom and integrity in a society where it’s difficult to hold true to these things.”

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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!

This book has just gone straight to the top of the list of books I hope my daughters will steal from my shelves a year or two before I would have thought they were ready for them.

Imagine a gang of bewildered teen beauty queens, stranded on a desert island after a plane crash, forced to use their pageant skills as survival skills, and learning layer by layer to discard the crap that western society places on the shoulders of young women.

Imagine a high camp satire peopled with the cheerleaders from Glee and Bring it On, the female casts of Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You, not to mention a few of those Whip It roller derby girls, with a script that doesn’t just sneak the occasional feminist zinger in with the boys-are-hot banter, but is actually all about how women are awesome, even the dumb ones and the pretty ones and the bitchy ones and the ones who have been raised by our culture to hate other women, and themselves.

But… it’s funny. Really funny. Bray has a stiletto-sharp pen which she uses to stab viciously at so many problematic aspects of western society that affect teenagers – at reality TV, and sex, and romantic pressures, and sexism, and the “beauty” industry, and unrealistic expectations, and the media. There are two non-white characters (one African-American, one Indian) who honestly don’t know how to deal with each other at first because they’re both so used to being the only brown girl in a sea of privileged white girls, and it feels like becoming friends is the most subversive thing they can possibly do; there’s a trans character whose story arc makes me ridiculously happy; there’s a tough as nails lesbian and a deaf girl who has to deal with questioning sexuality as well as her disability. There’s a girl whose most important possession is her purity ring, and there’s one who came along to bring all the others down… oh, and there’s one with an in flight tray stuck permanently in her forehead.

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I woke up this morning to find Twitter a’twitter about the latest awards debacle. I hope this story puts things into perspective for those people for whom an ‘awards scandal’ means a result they personally wouldn’t have voted for.

The National Book Awards (in the US) have covered themselves in the very opposite of glory this week, when a misheard phone conversation (WTF, seriously) led to the wrong book being included in their five book shortlist for young people’s literature. This book, Lauren Myracle’s SHINE, deals with serious issues to do with gay hate crimes, and is highly regarded by many, but it was Franny Billingsley’s CHIME that had been intended for the huge, career-changing honour.

The embarrassing situation was not helped by the vacillations of those behind the award, who began by insisting all six books were worthy, and later backflipped, asking Myracle to withdraw her own book for consideration “to preserve the integrity of the award and the judges’ work.”

I feel so bad for her! It goes to show how one moment of incompetence can completely ruin someone else’s week, and how insensitivity can only compound the hurt and humiliation.

Libba Bray’s insider rant has been quite rightly linked to all around the traps, and I think she says it best.

The LA Times talks about the important themes dealt with in Myracle’s book as well as the awards debacle.

Nicola Griffith reports the story with an added helping of angry author perspective.

Tobias Buckell talks about why he bought Lauren’s book today.

At Myracle’s request, the National Book Awards have made a $5000 donation in her name to the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

Some thoughts raised by the recent episode of The Coode Street Podcast, featuring Locus editor/debut novelist Amelia Beamer:

Amelia’s first zomromcom novel The Loving Dead sounds all kinds of awesome and if I hadn’t already pre-ordered it, I would be doing so on the strength of this podcast! The discussion of Kelly Link’s influence on how zombie stories can be told was also really interesting. Also the most recent zombie contingency plan I read was in a Glee fanfic. They get around!

The gang discuss the growing divide in the scene between short and long fiction as one is increasingly published by small/independent presses and the other by mass market. While I agree with this discussion in the main, I do think it should be pointed out that the one area this seems to not be true (and is becoming less true if that makes sense) is YA. I’ve been saying for the last couple of years that some of the most interesting work in spec fic seems to be coming out of the YA field. I’ve also noticed more and more mass market short fiction collections emerging from that field – they might have trashy titles and seem to be mostly about vampires, zombies, boyfriends and prom dates, but they are also featuring some of the most respected writers in the field, such as Holly Black, Libba Bray, the Larbalesterfelds, and so on. I see these books popping up in places like the local Big W (the closest thing Australia has to a Wal-Mart, I think) and can never resist picking them up, because even though sometimes they will have a bunch of cheeseball Buffy wannabe tales in them, there is almost certain to be a couple of real gems, and even the average stories are a lot more readable to me than the contents of an average issue of F&SF.

This is particularly noteworthy, I think, considering the massmarket paperback release of Kelly Link’s YA collection, Pretty Monsters. I’ve seen it a few places and didn’t buy it because I knew I had all the stories, but since then the very existence of that book has (quite appropriately) been eating my brain, to the point that I know next time I go into town I am going to pick it up. It’s a freaking Kelly Link book, and seeing it on bookshelves in my home town instead of having to order a pretty hardback from Small Beer Press is all kinds of awesome. I regularly lend out her first two collections, and I know that this is a book I will regularly press into people’s hands. So yes, I’m going to be buying it.

I’m actually completely in the mood to reread Kelly Link’s body of work, and not just because of Gary Wolfe reminding me how awesome Magic For Beginners was.

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The lovely  editormum linked me to this poll attempting to determine the top 100 YA novels of all time. They are requesting each participant to vote for their own top 10 of YA books, in order of preference.

On the one hand, these things make me kind of cynical – on the other, lists are good. I love lists, especially the deeply subjective ones. They encourage people to read books, and I do love it when people read books.

So here we go. This was a tricky one. The list I started out with was weighted far more heavily with books I’d read in the last year or two, but then I kept remembering classics from my own childhood, that bounced out the more recent books. I am rather pleased I ended up with 50% Australian authors, too

I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
This is the queen of floaty old fashioned girls novels for me – I loved Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Jo March and Katy, but there’s something particularly wonderful and soppy about Cassandra Mortmain, her bohemian family, and the twisting dance of her sister’s (and her own) first romances, that just makes me melt inside. The movie was also weirdly perfect, even though it had Riley from Buffy in it. The casting was so good that it has imprinted now on to my memories of the book.

Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
Choosing which DWJ book to include here was tough, as I could of course fill an entire top 10 with novels by this author. But when it comes to favourite – it’s not about which has the best plot (Archer’s Goon) or the best romance (Fire & Hemlock) or the best magic (Charmed Life) or the best worldbuilding (The Merlin Conspiracy) or the deepest melancholy (Time of the Ghost) – it’s about which one you love best. Howl’s Moving Castle has all the hallmarks of a great DWJ novel – tangled plot, quirky characters, great dialogue, weird magic, bad parents, REALLY complicated plot, sweet romance – but on top of that it has Howl, and Sophie, and Howl’s hair. So it wins.

Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan
I can never stop talking about this one – it made it to my top 10 standalone fantasy novels too. I can only repeat what I said there: I don’t have an unbiased bone in my body when it comes to this literary retelling of Snow White and Rose Red with added dwarf smut, extra sexy bear men, and deep psychological trauma. I feel it’s one of the most important fantasy novels published in recent years, precisely because of its powerful themes about trauma and recovery from abuse, over-protectiveness, and indeed, the nature of fantasy itself.
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Going Bovine, Libba Bray
A deeply important, epic story of a boy dying of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, who runs away on a crazy, magical adventure to save his own life, and the world. Quite possibly one of the best road trip novels ever, this deserves to be the bible of disaffected & nihilistic teens for at least a generation, and to serve as a snapshot of weird 00s pop culture for every generation that follows.

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Going Bovine is an amazing, heartbreaking, impossible book. How do you write a comedy about a dying teenage boy? Honestly, how do you do that? How do you write a road trip adventure that might not really be happening, and yet maintain tension and drama throughout? How do you turn a garden gnome into a dignified and heroic mythic warrior?

Impossible. And yet Libba Bray has pulled it off.

I made some entirely false assumptions about this book. One of which was that it was mainstream YA – which is arguably is, and yet has so much to say about science fiction and quests and fantasy and magic, that reading it purely as ‘mainstream’ fiction is to do it a disservice.

It’s a classic story (worthy, as Kelly Link says on the back cover, of cult status) of a slacker, stoner youth who never got around to really living, and gets one last chance to have a joyous, epic adventure and figure out what life is really all about. (it’s about how reality is cruel, and most people don’t get that chance)

It’s a story about how pop culture and particularly science fiction and fantasy provides a road map for teenagers (and the rest of us) to navigate the hard, impossible, awful things that come out of nowhere.

It’s about the fantasies we construct for ourselves, and the fascinating beauty of the subconscious mind. It’s about parallel universes and physics and norse myth and angels and love and nothing being as it seems. It’s about a seventeen-year-old boy with a dwarf sidekick, trying to save the world and himself. It’s about how music matters, and science fiction matters, and how the best parts of being alive are not necessarily the simple things, or the happy things, or the easy things.

It features an unreliable narrator with a brain disease, and treats him with such carefulness and subtlety that we see all his flaws, and layers to the story that even he is not aware of.

It’s one of the most thought provoking books I’ve read in a long time.

It’s the 21st century’s answer to the Phantom Tollbooth, Alice in Wonderland, the Wizard of Oz and Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, with added jazz music, quantum physics, New Orleans and Disneyland.

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