science fiction

#womentoread

Published on May 22, 2013Leave a comment

Kari Sperring is fed up with the lack of attention to women writers in science fiction and fantasy and is doing something about it:

So, yesterday I decided to indulge in another round of that intermittent habit, poking the internet with a stick, but starting a hashtag — #womentoread — over on Twitter. I asked people to recommend sff by women. The response was astonishing: I’d hoped that some of my friends would pick it up, but… One of the very first to do so was Seanan Mcguire (Thank you, Seanan!) and it just took off.

[…]

But why now, exactly. I’ve done something like this before (last year with the fantasy by women thing). That’s part of it. I am an activist to my bones: it’s coded into me to try and do something when I see an injustice. And I know far too many really great women writers who are underrated, under-reviewed, under-recognised. I see male writers praised for doing things in books which women did before them, which women are doing as well as them — but the women are ignored and sidelined.

You can share the idea. You can write a review of a book by a woman. You can blog about a woman writer you admire. You can post a list of links to the websites of women writers you love. It doesn’t have to be ep;ic fantasy or even sff. It can be any genre. And then, please, go to twitter and tweet that link with the #womentoread hashtag. If you’re not on twitter, post the link here in the comments and I will tweet it for you.

Nina Allen took this idea and prepared a list of 101 women writers to read, which is a good start to look for new writers to try, as is James Nicoll’s list. This is not the first time of course that the lack of visibility of women in sf&f has come up; two years ago Nicola Griffith started the Russ pledge in a similar attempt to get more discussion of women sf&f writers going. Some people, like me, took her up on it but of course such grassroots attemps take time to perculate upwards. A new initiative like #womentoread may help get some more momentum behind the continuing struggle to get more attention to women.

What I want to do with this is not to set up my own list of women writers, but rather do some posts highlighting some of my favourite writers, perhaps on a weekly basis; I’m thinking Women Writers Wednesday. I’ve been trying to read more female writers in the past couple of years, but a bit more systemic attention won’t do any harm.

The Heart of Valor — Tanya Huff

Published on May 19, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of The Heart of Valor

The Heart of Valor
Tanya Huff
411 pages
published in 2007

I’m beginning to see a pattern here. The first Valor novel was a replay of every mil-sf writer’s favourite Zulu War siege, while the second took on an equally venerable plot: the “let’s investigate a mysterious derelict alien space ship” one. And now, with The Heart of Valor, the third novel in the series, Tanya Huff once again takes on an old mil-sf standby, the march upcountry across a hostile planet, though she doesn’t go for the full Anabasis. In short, it looks like Tanya Huff is working her way through the Big Book of Stock Mil-SF Plots, but I’m not complaining. The general outlines might not be original, but as with everything, it’s all in the execution.

It helps if you have a strong character to hang your story on of course, and I like gunnery sergeant Torin Kerr. She’s a hardbitten, cynical career soldier keeping an eye out for her people, weary of her superiors and their inevitable fuckups. She also somebody we met in the first book waking up from a tryst with a di’Taykan, a somewhat randy alien species who never say no to a one-night stand, a di’Taykan that later turned out to be her commanding officer. Huff lets the reader spent a lot of time in sergeant Kerr’s skull and she comes across as smarter than she presents, conscientious and slightly paranoid. The latter is probably not surprising, considering her previous adventure on a very alien spaceship.

Some reasons why science fiction needs more diversity

Published on May 14, 2013Leave a comment

Science fiction and fantasy can be incredibly whitebread at times, though it is slowly getting better. One of the things that having more writers of more diverse backgrounds brings to the genre is new and interesting perspectives, as the two examples below make clear.

First, in a review for the LA Review of Books Nalo Hopkinson made the point that the Caribbean makes a good hjumping off point for a colonional or post-colonial sf setting that would be more interesting than the usual American frontier nonsense:

To my delight, in Lord’s afterword, she claims the Caribbean as the post-colonialist convergence of cultures that it is, pointing out that it is thereby an apt jumping-off place for speculative extrapolation. Sing it, sister. It’s all too common for the rest of the world to assume that the Caribbean is a bucolic vacation playground of villages and beaches, incapable of initiating any real scientific or technological progress.

Then I also found an old post of Aaron Hawkins (RIP), who quoted Mark Dery on why science fiction is so relevant to African Americans:

African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind).

No real conclusions here, just some things that made me think.

My current to read pile

Published on May 13, 2013Leave a comment

Books to read

Recommend me some other writers to read based on these?

Hammered — Elizabeth Bear

Published on May 10, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Hammered

Hammered
Elizabeth Bear
324 pages
published in 2005

Elizabeth Bear is a newish science fiction writer who I’ve been aware off, but hadn’t read anything off until now. Hammered is her first novel, published in 2005 along with its two sequels, Scardown and Worldwired. It was well recieved, with Bear winning both the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the 2006 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Both are well deserved, as this is one of the better first novels I’ve ever read. Elizabeth Bear is in complete control throughout and it reads like the work of a much more experienced writer.

Hammered starts out in the most cyberpunk posssible way, with local gangster boss Razorface bringing a kid overdosing on an army combat drug called Hammer to Maker, Jenny Casey, a UN combat veteran of what wasn’t WWII, now left with a cyborg left arm and prosthetic left eye, to see if she can save him. Razorface has mouth full with “a triple row of stainless steel choppers”, hence his nickname, while Jenny has hers because she fixes things. Neither is fond of Hammer, a dangerous drug even when pure and the batch the kid o.d. on is anything but. Some corporation is leaking tainted drugs in their city (Hartford, Connecticut) and together they have to stop them. Meanwhile, an online multiplayer game in which the best players get a chance at piloting a virtual star ship is infiltrated by an AI, who suspects the game is more than just entertainment. It’s 2062, climate change and the wars resulting from it have wrecked the world, China and Canada are locked in a Cold War and somebody’s after Jenny Casey. It might even be her sister.