Fantastika – Page 40 – Wis[s]e Words

The Dark Griffin — K. J. Taylor

Published on June 15, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Dark Griffin

The Dark Griffin
K. J. Taylor
369 pages
published in 2009

One of the things I’ve been trying to do more of these past five years or so has been to try out more new to me authors. K. J. Taylor is one of these authors, an Australian fantasy writer whose Black Griffin looked interesting when I was browsing the Amsterdam library shelves. I had no choice but to like a writer who said of herself: “a lot of fantasy authors take their inspiration from Tolkien. I take mine from G. R. R. Martin and Finnish metal”. A bit of research online discovered that she isn’t even thirty years old, published her first book at twenty in 2006 and has had seven books published since. Which makes her on a par with Elizabeth Bear with regards to productivity (and here I have trouble writing a blogpost sometimes…)

The Dark Griffin is the first in a fantasy trilogy, which in turn was followed by another trilogy. You may suspect therefore that this is pretty much a setup book and you may be right. What this is, is an origin story, both of the titular dark griffin (literally, as the book starts with his birth) and his ride, Arren Cardockson. As the story starts Arren is the only Northerner griffin rider in the city of Eagleholm, of far humbler origins than his fellow griffineers. His parents are freedmen, ex-slaves, while all other griffin riders are aristocrats. Nevertheless and despite the occassional tension, he feels well supported by the city’s elite. Even more so when lord Rannagon, one of the leaders of the griffiners and master of law, suggest a way for Arren to get out of his money problems.

I’m sorry Mario, your harasser is in another castle

Published on June 14, 2014Leave a comment

Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!

Following on from this post, if we do want to change as fandom, want to make cons safe, what should we be doing? For a start of course cons need to do what Readercon and then Wiscon failed to do: not allow a known harasser back next year. Cons need not just a consistent, thought out policy against harassment, they also need to make it known to concom, volunteers and members alike and make sure that any incidents and harassers are known to next year’s concom and volunteers as well.

The key point to remember is that if a con doesn’t prevent know harassers from attending, it means excluding or even endangering their victims; while it may be harsh on a harasser to be ejected and banned, it’s much harsher to subject victims to potential new harassment. The other thing to remember is that for every victim of a harasser that comes forward, there are usually more who don’t for various reasons, especially in a climate where until very recently harassment wasn’t taken seriously.

But there’s a larger problem. Even if every con has its harassment policy and bans harassers, it of course won’t help much if they can just amble along to the next con to menace fresh victims. That’s the silo problem, where each con knows who their problem cases are, but the cons aren’t sharing that information. There therefore need to be some way to share information. You can’t rely on informal networks, as Deirdre Saoirse Moen’s comment on the previous post shows, because there will always be people and cons left out of it.

So there needs to be more formal ways of cons to inform each other about harassers, as well as its own members, volunteers and concom. This doesn’t necessarily mean making this information public, but there are back channels for con “professionals” where this sort of exchange could happen. We need to get this in place sooner rather than later, to avoid harassers just choosing new cons to trawl.

Conspiracy of silence: fandom and Marion Zimmer Bradley

Published on June 11, 20143 Comments

Last year, in a post about that year’s harassment scandal at Wiscon Natalie Luhrs wrote:

I’ve also seen a handful of posts about how, at science fiction conventions, women will work together to let each other know who the serial harassers and creepers are. I find this extremely interesting because I have never been warned about anyone at any of the conventions I’ve attended.

Which I had to think about when reading about the revelations of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s (sexual) abuse of her daughter. It had been public knowledge since at least 2000 that MZB had enabled her husband, Walter Breen’s abuse, who would ultimately be convicted of it, but that she herself was abusive was news to me and a lot of other science fiction fans. The question is, as Agent Mimi put it why didn’t we know earlier, when all the evidence had been there. Why indeed did it take until MZB was dead for her covering for convicted abuser Walter Breen to become public knowledge and not just whispered amongst in the know fans. Why in fact was Breen allowed to remain in fandom, being able to groom new victims?

Breen after all was first convicted in 1954, yet could carry out his grooming almost unhindered at sf cons until the late nineties. And when the 1964 Worldcon did ban him, a large part of fandom got very upset at them for doing so. In the years and decades since, those who knew about Breen and MZB kept schtum and if you weren’t in the know, you didn’t get to know until Stephen Goldin put up the court documents.

But even after this, fandom hasn’t been open, hasn’t been willing to draw lessons from this horrible history, still by and large thinks it’s better to leave molestors in peace than to risk excluding people, is willing to stay silent. What MZB and Breen did and why they did it in fandom is the logical result of a culture that tolerated Asimov’s butt pinching, Randall Garrett’s propositioning or Harlan Ellison groping Connie Willis.

There’s a culture of harassment in fandom, mostly of women by men, which fandom has known about and tolerated (or evne actively encouraged) for decades, where those women lucky enough to have the connections were warned against those know to be harassers (everybody knew Jim Frenkel was one of them, but nobody was willing or felt able to say so out loud until Elise Matthesen did so. Because of that culture of silence, those who do get harassed, often those without the network, new to fandom or for some reason an outsider, feel they’re the only ones to have suffered and are less likely to report it, justifiably thinking that they won’t be taken seriously if they do report being harassed by somebody famous.

The “new” revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s own actiosn therefore should serve as a wakeup call to fandom, not only to take harassment seriously, develop policies about it, but also to be honest and open about its (our) own history, acknowledge that we do have a problem providing safe spaces for everybody and that we need to change that.

Peacekeeper — Laura E. Reeves

Published on June 9, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Peacekeeper

Peacekeeper
Laura E. Reeves
324 pages
published in 2008

Peacekeeper is the sort of novel you pick up knowing full well it’s probably not going to be very good, but hopefully will be entertaining. It helps, if like me, you have a bit of a weakness for military science fiction and are willing to lower your standards. Once you’ve voluntarily read David Weber’s Honor Harrington series the chances are you’ll read most anything. And, to be honest, Peacekeeper wasn’t that bad. Very much the first novel in a trilogy, but decently paced and competently written. I’m not sure I’ll go out of my way to read the sequels, but wouldn’t pass them up either If I came across them.

Ariane Kedros is the pilot of the scout ship Aether’s Touch, which she runs together with her employer Matt Journey. She’s also a reserve major int he military of the Consortium of Autonomous Worlds, which has just fought a brutal war with the Terran Expansion League, until strong hints from the Minoans — the aliens who had uplifted humanity into space and faster than light travel — put both parties at the negotiating table. Though nobody but Ariane’s superior, colonel Owen Edonus of the Directorate of intelligence, knows, in the eyes of the Terrans she’s also a war criminal, having piloted the ship that destroyed an entire solar system using temporal distortian weapons. As part of the peace treaty both sides will have to stand down and destroy said weapons and colonel Edonus has tapped Ariane to be part of the team that will escort a Terran inspection team at one of the CAW’s facilities. He of course has a hidden motive for this: somebody is killing off the people involved in the mission that made Ariane a war criminal and she’s put out as bait…

Blood Price — Tanya Huff

Published on May 30, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Blood Price

Blood Price
Tanya Huff
272 pages
published in 1991

Tanya Huff has quickly has become one of my favourite authors, ever since I first read Valor’s Choice two years ago. Which is why when the local secondhand bookstore turned out to have her entire Blood… urban fantasy series, I bought them all. Urban fantasy is a subgenre I can take or leave, but Huff is one of those writers of who I’ll read anything she writes. So far her novels have always been at least entertaining; Blood Price is no exception.

Vicky “Victory” Nelson is, retired from the Toronto police for health reasons, now turned private eye, is taking the subway home one night when she hears a terrible scream coming from the other platform and sees a man slumbed to the floor, dead. Taking a gamble as a train arrives, she sprints over the track to the other side to see that he’s had his throat ripped out and a shadowy figure disappearing down the underground. What Vicky witnessed is the first in what would become known as the Toronto vampire murders, as in quick succession several more people are killed this way, throat slashed and drained of blood. Though interested in the murders out of old police instincts, Vicky knows it’s not her problem anymore, not until the lover of the first victim hires her to find the vampire, as the police “insist on looking for a man”.