science fiction

Gabriel’s Ghost — Linnea Sinclair

Published on May 4, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Gabriel's Ghost

Gabriel’s Ghost
Linnea Sinclair
447 pages
published in 2005

I’d never heard of Linnea Sinclair before I picked Gabriel’s Ghost up in a secondhand bookstore, but the cover and plot looked interesting. Also, I’m still trying to read more female authors. Googling Sinclair made clear she’s a science fiction romance writer and indeed Gabriel’s Ghost won the 2006 Romance Writers of America’s RITA award for Best Paranormal Romance. Neither this nor the title however means there’s anything paranormal about this novel. Rather, it’s a science fiction adventure story with a somewhat greater emphasis on the romance between the two main characters than usual, which does have some consequences for the rest of the plot.

Gabriel’s Ghost starts imperial fleet captain Chasidah Bergren banished to the prison planet Moabar for crime she didn’t commit. Barely arrived, she had to kill a guard who tried to rape her and only then the real danger began, as the next person she met turned out to be somebody from her past, somebody she thought long dead. Gabriel Sullivan is a rogue and a smuggler she had clashed with repeatedly when she was still a frigate captain, until he died a few years ago. Now he’s back and offering her escape, if she helps him with one little job…

It’s only sexism when it happens to you

Published on May 3, 2013Leave a comment

Science fiction writer Patty Jansen ran into a spot of sexism the other day when she tried to sell a hard sf novel to an unnamed publisher, only to be told that women writers don’t sell. She blogged about and something about she introduced it struck me as wrong:

I also get weary of people blaming their lack of success too easily on external factors. Having success is a matter of luck and talent–but mostly luck, and persistence–before being a function of anything else. I believe that quietly chipping away and engaging with the community is more valuable than agitating out loud, because I don’t believe there is anything to be gained by being accusatory to people you should try to engage in discussion instead.

In short, I really dislike playing the gender card, but when someone chucks a whole packet of cards in my face, it becomes harder to ignore.

It’s annoying that she felt the need to distance herself from those other women who use sexism as an excuse for their own failings. It shouldn’t be necessary and it comes across as if sexism is only real now it happened to her. You hope now that she has had this experience, Jansen will be a bit more charitable when hearing other women’s experiences.

Dragonsong — Anne McCaffrey

Published on April 20, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Dragonsong

Dragonsong
Anne McCaffrey
192 pages
published in 1976

Dragonsong is the first novel in the Harper Hall trilogy of novels that Ann McCaffrey wrote in 1976-1978 as a continuation of the original Pern novels, Dragonflight and Dragonquest, weaving in and out of the main series. The heroine of the series, Menolly, would also show up in the later Dragonriders books, e.g in The White Dragon as a supporting character, occassionally hinting at her adventures in her own series. I hadn’t actually read this particular subseries before, as I never came across them until recently. All I knew was that the Harper Hall books had been consciously written for a young adult audience, unlike the original Pern books.

And reading Dragonsong that impression turned out to be right. This is as close to the platonic ideal of a certain kind of adolescent power fantasy as I’ve ever read. It’s even better than Harry Potter in this regard. You have the young heroine, on the verge of becoming an adult, with a special talent that’s not only unappreciated by her family, but actively suppressed and forbidden from practising it. She of course runs away from home, only to find people who do appreciate her and to find out she’s capable of more than not just her family, but she herself thought she was capable of. That’s the daydream of almost every misunderstood teenager at one point or another.

I see what you did there

Published on April 16, 2013Leave a comment

From an otherwise slightly rambling Adam Roberts Guardian article about the two souls of science fiction:

o say that SF has more imaginative and discursive wiggle-room than “realist” art is, while true, also to say that SF has the potential to be a more heterogeneous and inclusive conceptual space. This is something that’s understood by the genre’s greatest writers: Ursula K Le Guin, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr, Margaret Atwood, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Cadigan, Justina Robson.

Not actually that bad a list of writers to get your teeth in, to be honest…

She said I’d need a blaster and I’d need a freezer gun

Published on April 13, 2013Leave a comment

Nicked from James. A folk song written in 1952 by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, parodying Golden Age science fiction, kept alive in filk, then reworked as a straight forward folk song by what’s basically a folk supergroup.

I hadn’t heard it before, even though James had linked to it two years ago, but it’s a great song, sung by Eliza Carthy with just the right kind of wistful melancholy undertone to it.

If you want to know where all the clips are from, the creator put a list on their Livejournal.