Queer characters in sf

LGBT, science fiction
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Nicola Griffith has a new novel out, Hild and is getting a bit fed up with people asking about her heroine’s sexuality:

Interviewers and reviewers have already asked me: So why is Hild a lesbian?

I say: First, she’s bisexual. Second, why the fuck not?

I am tired of having to have a reason for characters being queer. When my first agent told me that my proposal for Slow River was “not a selling outline,” I asked her to explain. She said, “Well, why does Lore [the protagonist] have to have a girlfriend?” I said, “Because she’s a dyke.” And fired her.

Nicola Griffith is right that it should be normal for some characters to be queer, that there doesn’t have to be a reason for them to be and that more science fiction/fantasy writers should be unafraid to use queer characters if they want to. What I’m more worried about is whether the average science fiction writer is up to writing queer characters without it coming over as exploitative or overtly preachy.

But more queer characters, yes please.

Damn

Music, video
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Lou Reed has died.

I got into the Velvet Underground late and the first time I heard Heroin was at work about a decade ago, on headphones while I was concentrating on doing something fiddly and hearing it that way made me physically nauseous.

Fukitor, transgression and willful misunderstandings

Art & Criticism, Comix
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Right. I talked about Jason Karns’ Fukitor before, one of a new breed of independent comics that wallows in the dumb sexism, violence and racism of an earlier generation of comics; a 21st century Gun Fury, if that comic had gotten loving writeups in The Comics Journal. Charles Reece took exception to what I wrote, saying that he wasn’t “the least bit symathetic, for example, to Matthew Wisse’s [sic] view on transgression”, reducing my argument to:

In another words, something is transgressive (and “daring”) only when it violates another’s expectations, not his own committed leftism. Transgression is pissing off some imagined conservative, never the leftist who wants to understand why the other hates us so.

Which really missed the point. It’s not that Karns violates my own “committed leftism”, it’s that nothing he has done is actually all that dangerous; his work is about as trangressive as a Rambo movie, only with more gore and tits. If you use racist, ooga boga stereotypes “ironically”, you better use them to dish stronger fare than “American ninjas versus terrorists”.

To be honest, a lot of people confuse the use of racism, misogyny, torture or sexual violence with transgression, but popular culture is already drenched in these, so how could it be transgressive? All Karns has done is make it more blatant and gory. That really isn’t enough to make it interesting.

And again, it isn’t brave to indulge in the same racism that you can get anywhere already, just by smearing a thin layer of irony on top of it, nor is it cool to pat yourself on the back for enjoying this sort of thing because you are sure you can enjoy ironically and all the racism isn’t real; even though Karns said it was.

NSA tapped 2 million dutch phone calls in one month

Autoritarianism, Civil liberties, Imperialism, War on Terror
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So it turns out the NSA managed to intercept and tap some two million Dutch phone calls in just a month. Does this come as a surprise to anyone? Our own government is already far too keen to listen in to us and is obliging telecom companies and internet providers to keep traffic data for at least six months. The Americans were supposedly doing this as part of the War on Terror, but it seems politicians, civil servants and various commercial bigwigs were also tapped. Again, not suprising that once a capability to this is in place, it will be used for other purposes.

What’s more, does anybody actually think the NSA has stopped tapping phone calls here? Or believe the Dutch government is all that keen on getting them to stop? Our secret services and police are thick as thieves with the yanks anyway; they don’t care, they just care it came out.