Apparently 2011 is the Year of Women in SF. Is that not a brilliant thing? Having stirred up much discussion on the subject of SF Mistressworks (a phrase so lovely that I want to type it over and over) Ian Sales launched a reading meme of 91 titles.

I have read 8.

Wow, that’s actually really depressing. I consider myself pretty well read when it comes to the SF/Fantasy genre and women, and yet, and yet… I actually almost deleted the whole meme because what’s the point, right?

But there is a point. A really good one. I don’t have to read every book on this list – I don’t even want to! But there are several on here I have been meaning to read, in some cases for years now. As someone who is actively interested in educating herself about the history of women writers in the field, there are no excuses!

It’s certainly a very pointed sign that I have no right to be remotely smug about how well read I am in the field! I’m going to have to pull my socks up.

I take some comfort in the fact that I have read works by at least 35 writers on this list of Mistressworks, even if not the books specifically picked out for the meme. But I can do better with that, too.

Onwards and upwards!

(more…)

Day 01 – A book series you wish had gone on longer OR a book series you wish would just freaking end already (or both!)

I love the Stephanie Plum books. I love everything about them – I love the flawed and (mostly) unapologetic heroine, I love the quirky and colourful supporting characters, I love the two tall, dark & sexy men in her life, and I love her deeply awesome Grandma Mazur with her funeral obsession and her sawn off shotgun. I love the fact that she can’t keep a car for more than three days without it exploding.

I read once that Evanovich said basically that Steph would always be in her early 30′s and Grandma would never die, which I was quite happy about, because these books do make me feel safe and cuddly.

But, you know, but.

We’re sixteen books in now, and while Finger-licking Fifteen managed to feel fresh and entertaining to me, Sizzling Sixteen failed to launch. We’ve reached serious stasis time. I have been turning it over in my head, trying to figure out why this one out of sixteen freaking volumes is the one that made me go meh. I still read it at a breakneck pace, I still enjoyed the experience. The lack of change is starting to wear on me a bit – for every hint of moving forward there are two steps back, and ultimately the books are chasing their own tail.

In particular, the romantic elements are starting to irritate me. It was obvious from the start that Morelli, the slightly more tamed bad boy, was completely the perfect guy for Stephanie. Ranger, the badder boy who is completely untamed, was a wistful fantasy. (naturally I ship her with Ranger – I always go against canon) The trouble is, Steph and Morelli just fit too well together, so Evanovich has had to employ all kinds of complex machinations to keep them apart. I can buy Stephanie’s fear of commitment, and quite like the fact that he’s the one who wants to settle down and she doesn’t, but it has dragged on so long now that the whole thing is getting tiresome. The books have been following a pattern of getting them back together regularly and then splitting them up again off screen due to random domestic fights. It makes both of them a lot less likeable, and seems to be entirely set up to allow Stephanie to run off with Ranger for sexy interludes, mostly guilt free. Not that I object to the Ranger interludes, it just is starting to feel like all the characters are in orbit, waiting for the last book to arrive so they can all get some closure.

There was a lot of talk recently about how Janet Evanovich has left St Martin’s Press after they refused to pay 50 million dollars as an advance on her next four books. Most people I have seen reacting to this seem to think that Evanovich (or more likely, her agent) was asking far too much. I would respectfully suggest that those people have probably not realised quite how huge Janet Evanovich is. She has not only produced sixteen straight-to-bestseller-lists Stephanie Plum books at the rate of one per year since 1994, but all of those books are still in print, and still selling. Financially, I don’t see why she wouldn’t be worth it, especially (and I mean ESPECIALLY) if it was a retirement plan – not just for Evanovich, but definitely for Stephanie Plum.

I don’t know what was included in that proposed 50 million deal, but what I would really REALLY have liked to see was those contracted 4 books be the last in the Stephanie Plum series. With four volumes to go and a proper end point drawn, Evanovich could have taken all those hints and bits and pieces about Stephanie’s future and actually driven the series to a crashing, brilliant conclusion, rather than just lurching from book to book, the way it currently feels now. One of the cleverest and most admirable things that JK Rowling did was to put a cap on the Harry Potter madness and to stick to it, despite the fact that she would have made so many more millions if she had cracked and decided to write “one more” or another series in the same world. I think it’s time to lay Stephanie Plum properly to rest, before too many more of the fans start wandering away from the car crash.

(more…)

I’m really pleased with this meme and the surrounding discussions for many reasons. One of the most frustrating responses I heard to the ‘Before they were Giants’ discussion, itself the latest in a long line of TOC rows, was the kneejerk “but there just aren’t as many women who are giants in the field.”

It makes me want to throw something every time someone says that, or something like it, in response to a feminist discussion. The person is usually unthinking and often well-meaning – to them it’s an obvious thing to consider. But that obviousness is precisely the problem.

Because of course there were women. And it’s time to stop and think about the fact that the majority of authors considered “giants” in the history of field are male. Is it really because their books were better? Because what they were saying was more important? Because more people were talking about them, critiquing them, being influenced by them? Are we absolutely certain that none of those things could have been affected by societal pressures other than the pure “quality” of the text?

So yes, anything that celebrates and points out the many, many women in the field who were writing and saying important things and contributing, and yet are regularly rendered invisible due to gaps in the scholarship, the faulty and male-centric memories of readers, or pure ignorance, is a good thing.

Which of the 117 authors listed on Diana Comet’s periodic table of women in science fiction have you read? Following the rules, I’ve bolded the ones I own (or have owned) books by, italicised the women I’ve read something of (short stories count), and starred those I have never heard of. You can underline people whose work you’re familiar with but who don’t fit the criteria well.

(more…)

Too many posts today (can you tell I am at down and dirty end of edits?) but  girliejones tagged me, and thus I must.

A. List seven habits/quirks/facts about yourself.
B. Tag seven people to do the same.
C. Do not tag the person who tagged you or say that you tag “whoever wants to do it”.

1. I love sports movies, fiercely and without repentance. This used to be a much more interesting/unusual/quirkier quirk before I discovered that I do in fact also love sport. Well, soccer. Well, Arsenal. But in any case, I love sports movies even if they do not feature soccer or Arsenal, so I think it still counts.

2. I braid my hair every night before I go to bed. I have been assured it is quirky. Having spent a large chunk of my life with waist-length hair I maintain it is sensible. Even though I currently have just-past-shoulder length hair.

3. The first thing I do when I get home is kick my shoes off. Even before I take the baby off, if she is in her pouch. Shoes = gone.

4. The banner on my new website features a picture of me dressed as a pineapple. Seriously. It is of course, very small.

5. Yes, my mother dressed me as a pineapple. At the time she was also responsible for a troupe of kiddie dancers re-enacting the classic Sesame Street song ‘ladybug’s picnic.’ I think the pineapple had something to do with ‘Aga Doo’ – yes, I did take dance classes in the 80′s.

6. I have spent the entire year procrastinating about calling the local dance studio to arrange ballet classes for Raeli, even though she desperately wants them and has not given up her bizarre desire to don a pink sparkly tutu. BALLET. I have now decided to suck it up and be a supportive mother, even though the thought of it makes me feel vaguely queasy. (body image issues! pink pink pink! little girls and deportment! All this and she might still be too young to get on a soccer team next year!)

7. I really should be working right now.

I will tag the following people, though I maintain that tagging is a barbaric exercise of guilt-inducing proportions and the following people should be completely free to ignore me as the wench I am (possibly I am mostly using this to see what hideous things WordPress does to LJ user html):

 aifin,  jumbled_words,  godiyeva,  looneymoth,  waqem007,  zeft.

[Edit, that is fascinating, they just vanished in WordPress but appeared in LJ. Oooo.]
[Also apparently it is not possible to edit wordpress without also editing LJ ... possibly this is of interest only to me. Okay, going to work for reals now.]