Daniel José Older – Wis[s]e Words

Daniel José Older continues his campaign to replace Lovecraft with Butler for the World Fantasy Award:

“Why Butler?” people asked me when the petition went up, and I remembered how entrenched we all get in our own corners within the genre. Butler’s prose soars where Lovecraft’s stumbles. Her characters live and breathe, confront complexities of power and privilege amid fantastical, terrifying dreamscapes steeped in history and nuance. My SFF community is mostly black and brown, and Butler inspired many of us to start writing in the first place. These folks congregate more often than not in online communities like the Nerds of Color, Black Girl Nerds and the Fan Bros, because outside of ComicCon, SFF cons have historically not been safe spaces for women and people of color. These are the online communities that signed the petition in the thousands, which is what transformed it from being just another attempt at dethroning Lovecraft as the face of one of fantasy’s highest awards (there have been several) to a global conversation with coverage in Salon, the Guardian, NPR and countless blogs.

I still think Older is wrong to diss Lovecraft’s writing talent. It distracts from the real argument and puts hackles up that don’t need to. But what I am coming round to is the idea of replacing Lovecraft with Butler, even if her work isn’t quite the first thing you think of as fantasy. It doesn’t matter that she isn’t the perfect fit for the World Fantasy Award; it’s the symbolism of replacing of replacing a dead white racist man with a dead black woman. It’s not enough just to make the WFA over into a neutral award like the Nebulas because that would still leave most of the major sf awards named after dead white men and even dead white racist men, as is the case with the two Campbell awards. Putting Butler forward as the face of one of the major fantastika awards would send a signal that science fiction and fantasy have changed, are trying to shed their racist history.

The Argument That Saved Paris by Ian Buruma | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books – This much is known: Nordling did meet von Choltitz several times, mainly to arrange the release of French political prisoners, and to negotiate a truce (threatened by the Communist resistance as much as by German zealots). We also know that von Choltitz, however aristocratic in his comportment, had been a very ruthless character, responsible for the destruction of the center of Rotterdam in May 1940. Worse that that, in 1942 his regiment flattened Sevastopol, and von Choltitz faithfully carried out orders to “liquidate” the Jewish population. He was a perfect illustration of the complicity on the eastern front of German army officers with the Nazi genocide, a shameful fact that has only recently been acknowledged in Germany.
Intocht Sint Nicolaaas in Amsterdam in 1935 – YouTube –
Killer whales living with bottlenose dolphins demonstrate cross-species vocal learning – Now, University of San Diego graduate student Whitney Musser and Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute senior research scientist Dr. Ann Bowles have found that killer whales (Orcinus orca) can engage in cross-species vocal learning: when socialized with bottlenose dolphins, they shifted the types of sounds they made to more closely match their social partners. The results, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, suggest that vocal imitation may facilitate social interactions in cetaceans. Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-killer-whales-bottlenose-dolphins-cross-species.html#jCp
Dust – Lightspeed Magazine – Very late at night, when the buzz of drill dozers has died out, I can hear her breathing. I know that sounds crazy. I don’t care.
SSLv3 goes to the dogs; POODLE kills off protocol – Over the past week, rumours were circulating about a new vulnerability in SSLv3. No details were widely available until today and now we have POODLE, the 'Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption' attack. The attack, specifically against the SSLv3 protocol, allows an attacker to obtain the plaintext of certain parts of an SSL connection, such as the cookie. Similar to BEAST, but more practical to carry out, POODLE could well signal the end of SSLv3 support.
Tricia Sullivan and Shadowboxer – Imgur –

Articles with the Tag Daniel José Older

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