You can check out the new Galactic Suburbia episode on our website or at iTunes. You’ll notice we were really subtle about the Hugo nomination, because we didn’t want to be tacky.

In which this Hugo nominated podcast is Hugo nominated and discusses the Hugo nominations while being Hugo nominated. Also, the internet is full of things. Some of those things discuss gender, feminism and equality, some have wide ranging implications for the future of SF awards, and some of them are nominated for Hugos.

HUUUUUUUUUGO SHORTLIST

Hunger Games Hunger Games Hunger Games

Build up to make a hit
The reviews are in:
Topless Robot
Forbes
Our Alisa

But in the real world, the character Katniss Everdeen faces an even greater challenge: Proving that pop culture will embrace a heroine capable of holding her own with the big boys.
It’s a battle fought on two fronts. First, The Hunger Games must bring in the kind of box office numbers that prove to Hollywood that a film led by a young female heroine who’s not cast as a sex symbol can bring in audiences. And second, for Katniss to truly triumph, she must embody the type of female heroine — smart, tough, compassionate — that has been sorely lacking in the popular culture landscape for so very long.

The Clarke Award Shortlist:
Christopher Priest’s original post
Cat Valente responds:
“Because let’s be honest, I couldn’t get away with it. If I posted that shit? I’d never hear the end of what a bitch I am.”
And further she responds

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1. The First Man of Rome (and sequels) by Colleen McCullough
A gift from my Aunt and Uncle, a massive hardback that had some very adult scenes considering I was probably in my early teens. Inspired a lifelong obsession with Rome, the women in Roman history, and Julius Caesar. Certainly led to me choosing Ancient Civilisations at college, which led to my eventual PhD in Classics. All your fault, McCullough!

2. Shapechangers, by Jennifer Roberson
The first fantasy series I read because I was actively looking for fantasy fiction, rather than because I needed to read David Eddings so I could join in the conversation with my friends at school. I still remember being so inspired by this series that, after everyone had gone home after my fourteenth birthday party, I lay down on a pile of mattresses and started writing my own first real novel.

3. The Madigal, by Beverley McDonald
A paperback found in the book section of Myer, the first time I realised that Australians could write fantasy and get it published by an Australian publisher (I think Pan Macmillan)? Heady, brain-altering revelations, in a pre-Voyager world. I started thinking that my secret dream might be closer than I thought.

4. The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
Just as I was getting completely overwhelmed by a glut of fantasy reading, and starting to suspect that my favourite genre wasn’t quite as shiny as I thought, here came Mr Pratchett to blow my mind with the idea that you could write fantasy that was funny and subversive and commented on the genre itself. The next fantasy novel I would start writing was one which turned the cliches of my earlier manuscripts on their head, and also the one that would get me published for the first time…

5. Up the Duff, by Kaz Cooke
The older I get, the less likely I am to find books that have an enormous, life-changing effect on me, but this was the one that made me feel sane about being pregnant, and at the time that felt like a pretty major achievement.

Has one book (or many) ever changed your life significantly?

Agnes, fan art by Vic Hill

Even though Maskerade made me cranky that Magrat’s marriage had written her out of the narrative of the Lancre witches, it’s hard not to be delighted about Agnes “Perdita” Nitt. She’s a fantastic character, one of Pratchett’s most interesting and nuanced portrayals of a younger female protagonist.

Agnes is fat. And while Pratchett’s comic touch is very much in evidence, he brings such empathy to his depiction of Agnes that, even when fat jokes are being made, she herself is never treated like a joke. This is an incredibly rare thing in fantasy fiction, where fat women are rarely seen (unless they are villains or jolly service industry professionals) and young fat women are most definitely an endangered species.

There are so many things to like about Agnes and the portrayal of her character this book. For a start, we don’t get the cliched emphasis on how she eats, or an ingrained narrative assumption that she is the size she is purely through over-eating or laziness. I also liked very much that while the reader is often confronted with the quite awful social ramifications of being a fat girl, it’s never entirely clear cut how much the various perceptions surrounding Agnes reflect reality.

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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!

Thud, by Terry Pratchett
Snuff, by Terry Pratchett
(spoilers for both abound below)

I know I read Thud when it came out. But this was the early days of motherhood when my memory retention was out the window, and the days of re-reading were gone forever… I know I read this book, but I’m pretty sure it was a speedy, uninvolved reading. It had to be. Because there is no other excuse for me not realising before now that this is SO GOOD.

For a start, this is the best Angua novel since Feet of Clay – and I think it might actually be better, in the attention given to her character. I like that she and Carrot have been allowed now to settle into a comfortable relationship without any stupid plotty dramas being thrown in to artificially shake it up. I also like that her main plotline for this novel revolves around a relationship/wary dislike/friendship with another female character.

But Sybil also gets to shine in this book, despite her new motherhood which can often cause a female character to disappear into the background, or lose all characteristics apart from those to do with her child (as, for instance, happens to Magrat in the Witches novels).

Then there’s Cheery, who doesn’t get a subplot or even a subplotlet to herself, but remains awesome, cute and gets to play with the other girls.

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Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett (audiobook read by Stephen Briggs)

Deriders of the Bechdel Test tend to gravitate immediately towards what I like to call The Shawshank Redemption Clause. They cite as many works as possible which are completely awesome, and have no ladies in them, as evidence that the test is stupid.

Me, I see that as evidence that their faces are stupid. And that they have entirely missed the point of the Bechdel Test.

No one would ever deny that it’s possible to create a masterpiece that has no women in it. However… there are few true masterpieces in the world, and there are very few stories in the world that are so VERY good that having more than one interesting female character in them is something that wouldn’t improve the narrative.

I had this in my head upon revisiting Night Watch, because I remembered very clearly that a) this is primarily a story about men and b) this is one of my favourite Discworld novels of all time. And I say this as someone who is meh about Small Gods and Reaper Man, two of the most celebrated of the Discworld novels, precisely because the overwhelming focus on male characters and point of view left those books, in my opinion, lacking something.

Mostly, I was scared that my focus on female characters would spoil this book. It’s not like it would be the first thing that my developing feminist perspective has utterly ruined for me.

But it turned out okay. Because (spoilers, sweetie!) Night Watch is still awesome. It’s mostly a male narrative, AND it’s awesome.

(But, as it happens, it passes the Bechdel Test. Just.)

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I always think of Connie Willis at Christmas time. One of my favourite of her books is a collection of short fiction, Miracle and Other Christmas Stories, many of which were written for Asimov’s December issues over a decade or so. The title story feels like quintessential Willis short stories, because it is a romantic comedy with speculative elements, and includes references classic pop culture of some kind. In this case, it is a debate between which Christmas film is superior, Miracle on 42nd Street (the original) or It’s a Wonderful Life. At the time I first read this story, I hadn’t seen either film. They occasionally screen in Australia, more often now than when I was growing up, but they’re not as pervasive as they apparently are in the US at this time of year!

I went out and watched both movies, as I usually do when Connie Willis structures a story around a piece of Classic Hollywood. They’re both very good movies. But neither of them, for me, has a patch on the personal resonance of, say, Bernard and the Genie, which I adore beyond all reason, or even the resonance of “Miracle” itself.

It’s all personal, though. Christmas cultural texts come from our childhood, from happy moments in our lives, or they just happen like lightning – like anything else that becomes a new, instant favourite. But really, I didn’t start thinking about Christmas texts until I read “Miracle.” So it’s rather meta that, at Christmas time, I start getting the urge to re-read that story.

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The new episode of Galactic Suburbia is up, go download it, stream it, or do whatever it is you crazy kids do with podcasts these days!

In which we save the Tasmanian Devils, take on the Classics, review cars, discover that toy fandom exists, plan to read LOTS of Australian women writers, and Wonder Woman still doesn’t have pants.

News

Coffeeandink on The Erasure of women writers in SF and Fantasy

Mur Lafferty – My Problem With Classics

Open letter to publishers: book bloggers are not your bitches

Kate Gordon’s Devil Auction – help to save the Tasmanian Devils! (kitten pictures with TEETH)

Australian Women Writers Challenge
Sign up now

Jason Nahrung posted a list of the books he plans to read for the challenge – let us know what yours are!

In association with this, Tansy produced a list of award-winning SF/Fantasy books by Australian women.

Please keep sending in your suggestions for a Galactic Suburbia Award – we hope to have a plan for this by our 50th episode and are loving reading the tweets and emails so far.

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Jingo (some spoilers)
The Fifth Elephant (ALL THE SPOILERS)

Both Jingo and The Fifth Elephant missed their mark entirely with me, when I first read them on first release. Which meant that on my recent reread, I at least had fairly low expectations for them.

Jingo on the whole fared much better than the first time around, at least as far as a Vimes and City Watch novel is concerned. The prose is clever and tight, and there are many crunchy themes surrounding war, patriotism, etc. It’s one of those Discworld books that transcends the comedy to have a deeper philosophical meaning, plus as many Leonardo Da Vinci jokes as any sane person would ever want in one place.

However, the thing it doesn’t have is much in the way of… you guessed it, women.

Sybil appears in a few scenes, and is largely reduced to the role of nagging wife. I do love the bit where she chides Vimes for treating her as if she is nagging him and points out how unfair it is, but that’s Sybil for you, grasping any attempt to be awesome, in the face of difficult circumstance. She very much there to point out how awkwardly Vimes is assimilating into the upper classes, and in some cases how well he is assimilating, and to wave a few warning flags that his current workaholic lifestyle is unsustainable. This at least will be followed up in later books.

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Howie needs a Hat

Hurry over to Podbean or iTunes now to get the new episode! Or just sit back, relax and read the show notes.

News

World Fantasy Awards!

Realms of Fantasy sinks for the third time

Graham Joyce calls BFS Extraordinary General meeting December 9th –

Authors kickstarting their own projects:
Matt Forbeck – 12 novels in 12 months.
Laura Anne Gilman’s novella
CE Murphy’s novella
(mentions also of self publishing projects of Tracy & Laura Hickman, and Liz Williams)
Catherynne Valente’s Omikuji project looking for subscribers in order to keep the project going.
And Tobias Buckell talks about how just because you’re self publishing doesn’t mean you have to be a …

What Culture Have we Consumed?

Alisa: Power and Majesty by Tansy Rayner Roberts, The Courier’s New Bicycle by Kim Westwood

Alex: the Stone Key and The Sending, Isobelle Carmody; I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett; end of Life on Mars S2; This is Not a Game, Walter Jon Williams; Distress, Greg Egan

Tansy: Ally Condie, Matched; Lisa Goldstein, The Uncertain Places; Gail Simone, Secret Six: Six Degrees of Devastation; Geek Tragedy, Nev Fountain

Feedback: well overdue!

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!