Wis[s]e Words

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.

Blog fodder for June 7th through June 10th

Published on June 10, 2014Leave a comment

Blog fodder for June 7th through June 10th:

Son of Blade « The Hooded Utilitarian – Seibles told my class that he saw the character as an “emblem of alienation,” a metaphor for what it feels like to be black in the U.S., to feel “both American and not.”
Revealed: Asian slave labour producing prawns for supermarkets in US, UK | Global development | theguardian.com – A six-month investigation has established that large numbers of men bought and sold like animals and held against their will on fishing boats off Thailand are integral to the production of prawns (commonly called shrimp in the US) sold in leading supermarkets around the world, including the top four global retailers: Walmart, Carrefour, Costco and Tesco.
Some Wonderful Kind of Noise: Star Wars: Star Wars first impressions – What watching Star Wars for the first time feels like in 2014.
Alternate Visions: Some Musings on Diversity in SF | Antariksh Yatra – The best speculative fiction, like travel, does that to you – it takes you to strange places, from which vantage point you can no longer take your home for granted. It renders the familiar strange, and the strange becomes, for the duration of the story, the norm. The reversal of the gaze, the journey in the shoes of the Other, is one of the great promises of speculative fiction. Much of the time it doesn’t deliver, however. Much of the time you get to go to other worlds with your feet firmly encased in your own shoes, carrying around your perspectives and prejudices as though you had never left home.
War of the worlds: who owns the political soul of science fiction? | Books | The Guardian – Myriad militaristic SF books and films suggest the most interesting thing to do with the alien is style it as an invading monster and empty thousands of rounds of ammunition into it. But the best SF understands that there are more interesting things to do with the alien than that. How we treat the other is the great ethical question of our age, and SF, at its best, is the best way to explore that question.
Netherlands Armed Forces Order of Battle 1985 –

“Rik’s dead! The People’s poet is dead”

Published on June 9, 2014Leave a comment

But how can the people’s poet be dead when we still have his ~~poems~~ comedy?

Perhaps the best bit from Bottom:

The partnership between Rik Mayall and Ade Edmunson made their comedy:

Sandra’s favourite Rik Mayall scene:

Indestructable. Indestructable. Indestructable. Indestructable.

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…

Haarlem comics con 03: Amanda Majoor

Published on June 8, 2014Leave a comment

Amanda Majoor (left) sketching, with moral support

If you’re very lucky at a con you can discover a major new talent you never would’ve come across otherwise, somebody like Amanda Majoor. A graduate from the Zwolle artschool, she did her thesis on the intersections between comics and music (see below). Unfortunately it hasn’t been published yet, but from what I could see of it leafing through it, it should be interesting. Amanda’s main comics project, which she ultimately would like to publish as a graphic novel, follows on from this interest in music and comics and would be about the socalled “Swingjugend” in forties Hamburg.

Swing und Comics. This needs to be properly published.

(Short historical recap as I understand it. Swingjugend were young German jazz/swing fans, which was of course verboten in the Third Reich; Hamburg was always one of the most leftwing cities in Germany and not very known to be Nazi loving. Enough scope for a graphic novel, I think.)

panel from the Swingjugend project

Currently Amanda’s busy doing research and tryouts for this project, but she also does other work on the side, like a comic and interview for the FML website. She blogs at Swing und Bratwurst and has an art portfolio at Flickr.

Her artwork has an understated elegance I like a lot, as I do the “retro” forties styling. It’s also interesting to see her muted use of colour and greyscales. It fits the slightly melancholic mood of her artwork. Of course I asked her for a sketch as well and below is what I got.

sketch by Amanda Majoor