As noted on Tor.com. And did you know that “I’ve always been fascinated that the first president of that first US fan group—indeed, the world’s first fan group—was a black guy, Warren Fitzgerald, and that they held their early meetings at his home in Harlem. I’m amazed this doesn’t seem to be widely known.” One […]
There’s a lot of wisdom in the old saws that readers should not meet the writers of their favourite books nor writers respond to criticism, as has been proven once again by what started as an enthusiastic review on the Tor website when Jo Walton shared why she like Patricia Wrede’s Thirteenth Child. The trouble […]
If you read this blog regularly you’ll probably be aware by now of Racefail 2009, the ongoing discussion/flamewar about cultural appropriation and racism, systemic and otherwise in the science fiction/fandom community. This discussion, long overdue, has been generating a lot of heat and little light (most of the latter can be found through the excellent […]
So yesterday I posted about Greg Egan’s somewhat dumb and insulting comparison of “geek” and “nerd” to certain incredibly offensive racial insults. What made it even worse was that he made this comparison in the context of responding to Adam Roberts’ review of his latest novel, Incandenscence. Well, Egan popped up in James Nicoll’s post […]
As you may have encountered if you’re following online science fiction fandom, for months now there has been an increasingly poisonous but important discussion about race, cultural apropriation and science fction going on in various sf blogs, mostly on Livejournal. Science fiction/fandom prides itself on being open and inclusive, but in reality has huge blindspots […]