Wis[s]e Words

Women to Read Wednesday 03: Tricia Sullivan

Published on July 3, 2013Leave a comment

Yeah, so I’d forgotten I was doing this and it was only thanks to a Tricia Sullivan post calling out the lack of support from blokes for female writers that I remembered about it. I could make excuses but I won’t. It clearly wasn’t important enough to me to keep in mind. Nevertheless I do think this is important enough to restart, one of the ways in which I can make my own little contribution to making science fiction/fantasy slightly more equal.

Because, as Tricia Sullivan notes, it clearly isn’t at the moment. Taking her as an example, we have a critically acclaimed writer, who has won the 1999 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Dreaming In Smoke and who was nominated again in 2004 for Maul, yet she doesn’t have a book contract at the moment, having to write her next novel on spec. This is hardly an unique situation for a female writer, especially an UK based one, to find herself in and things aren’t made any easier by the slow collapse of science fiction publishing in the last few years. As there’s less room for science fiction in publishers schedules, the unfair advantages of the old boys’ networks matter more and it’s a minor disaster that a talented and interesting writer like Sullivan is passed over for yet another mediocre male mil-sf writer.

Since 1995, Tricia Sullivan has written seven novels, most of which are now out of print it looks like. I’ve read two of them, her latest one, 2010’s Lightborn and 2005’s Double Vision. Both are novels in which the normality of the world as we know it has been upset one way or another, with the protagonist in each having to deal with the challenges the new reality brings with it.

Lightborn:

What Tricia Sullivan has done with Lightborn is create a concretised metaphor for growing up, that long drawn out moment when you’re a child on the edge of becoming an adult, looking out over the abyss to the incomprehensible horrors of adulthood. Both Roksana and Xavier are young teenagers, forced by circumstances to become more mature, but also kept from being fully adult. It’s no coincidence that all adults in the novel are unreliable or downright dysfunctional, Shined or not Shined; they have to make their own decisions and every time they want to trust an adult, it turns out to be a mistake. Yet Sullivan doesn’t glorify childhood: her heroes do have to grow up, make compromises, without being overtly dramatic about it.

Double Vision:

As a science fiction reader you’re obviously biased towards the strange, the potential hallucination to be real, even if there’s a long tradition to use this against the reader. In Double Vision you start off with the default assumption that what Cookie experiences is real, only for Sullivan to sow doubt in your mind as certain inconsistencies become clearer. For example, if the scouting she does in the Grid is so important, why is it that her boss is only interested in which brands she heard mentioned by the soldiers? What is she really used for?

Books Read June

Published on July 2, 2013Leave a comment

Again only six books read, all science fiction novels of one kind or another:

Hunting Party — Elizabeth Moon
Heris Serrano has just left the Regular Space Service for reasons and is now reduced to being the captain of the luxury space yacht of Lady Cecelia, who has been saddled with ferrying some of her own wayward family members to one of the Family’s private planets, for fox hunting season. Stuff happpens and foxes turn out not to be the only things being hunted…

Five-Twelfths of Heaven — Melissa Scott
In a far future where space ships are run on alchemical principles, havbing to seek out Purgatory inbetween Heaven and Hell to travel from system to system, one woman pilot fights for her freedom.

Sporting Chance — Elizabeth Moon
The sequel to Hunting Party, dealing with the fallout of the revelations of the previous story, which Lady Cecelia and Heris Serrano have to resolve. Another fun read, slightly better than it needed to be.

Inversions — Iain M. Banks
Read in remembrance of the passing of Iain M. Banks. This was his one true fantasy novel, though there are some “subtle” hints that this may in fact be set somewhere within the Culture series.

Adrift on the Sea of Rains — Ian Sales
In an alternate world where the Apollo project lasted much longer and was militarised, a handful of US astronauts are stranded on the Moon when World War III broke out in the early eighties. Now they need to get home.

God’s War — Kameron Hurley
I’m not quite sure yet what I think about Hurley’s debut novel. It’s been criticised for its pseudo-Islamic setting and I’m not quite comfortable with it myself, but there are hints of greatness in it nevertheless. An interesting debut.

Fandom really should clean our act up

Published on June 29, 2013Leave a comment

So sick and tired of this shit happening in my fandom:

3. Moments later, another guy, a fellow writer, hugs me tenderly from behind, though I do not know him. When I turn, startled, to protest, he says “You have the greatest smile. It just makes me want to hug you.” I’m doomed to avoiding him for the rest of the con, because he’s always wherever I am, charging at me with open arms, hugging me in elevators and moving at me to hug basically just wherever I go. It’s gross. He becomes known to my swiftly formed girl posse as The Hugger in the Hat. And when I say hugger, I mean full body contact with erect bits against my thigh. I don’t report him. I’m new to the scene. I feel awkward. I’m used to being harassed in the world. This is bad, but it’s not insane in terms of how much wrong attention I get from creeps in cities. So, I don’t report.

4. What Cherie Priest says in her post on this is true. We form protective posses. Descriptions of creepers are traded like cards. Women say things such as “Do you need back up when you walk through that room?” “What color is his shirt?” “Oh, I saw The Hugger In The Hat in there – I’m getting between you and him.”

5. Conversely, when I complained about The Hugger anecdotally to men, most of them said he was just clueless and didn’t mean to creep me out, and that if I was clear that I didn’t want to be hugged, I wouldn’t be, because The Hugger was a nice guy. Don’t get me wrong. Most men are great. But I think most guys have also not been witness to a lot of this. Creepers wait til you’re with your girls, or alone. Because Creepers calculate.

Both the actual harassement Maria Dahvana Headley experienced and the dismissal/justification of it should not happen. It’s 2013, not 1973 and even in fandom, even when you are a famous science fiction writer, this sort of behaviour is beyond the pale and we should not put up with it any longer. Nobody should have to worry about how and whether to file a formal harassement report against an editor when going to a con.

For those of us who aren’t douchenozzles, nor likely to be the victim of harassement, what we should do is watch out for it and be supportive, not dismissive, of those who do suffer from it. This can be hard, but that’s no excuse not to.

Things change

Published on June 24, 2013Leave a comment

Some new horrible history I learned about today: forty years ago today In New Orleans, thirtytwo people were murdered through arson, in what was the largest mass murder of LGBT people in US history:

Just before 8:00p, the doorbell rang insistently. To answer it, you had to unlock a steel door that opened onto a flight of stairs leading down to the ground floor. Bartender Buddy Rasmussen, expecting a taxi driver, asked his friend Luther Boggs to let the man in. Perhaps Boggs, after he pulled the door open, had just enough time to smell the Ronsonol lighter fluid that the attacker of the UpStairs Lounge had sprayed on the steps. In the next instant, he found himself in unimaginable pain as the fireball exploded, pushing upward and into the bar.

It’s a horrible, upsetting piece of history, depressing even, but what is important is that it is history and things are getting better, as Joe Belknap Wall argues:

Forty years ago, when I was five, I was destined to be a victim, but things changed. We spoke up, sat in, made our points. Things changed.

Thirty years ago, when I was fifteen, I was destined to be a marginal citizen, but things changed. A disease came out of nowhere and shook the world, even as our President did nothing and said nothing, even as the population cracked jokes and shrugged it off and the preachers waved their crosses to stir up the hate, but we spoke up, stood fast, and made people see. Things changed.

[…]

Today, I am forty-five, and I am still a citizen without full protection under the law, but—

Today, I can marry in my state, and receive the protections accorded to the rest of my neighbors. If I fall victim to a crime driven by hate, it will be investigated. Few, if any, people will laugh and point and make a mockery of my basic human dignity. I am no longer required, by the dominant cultural norm, to be ashamed of who I am, and the people who once felt empowered to fuel the fires of hatred and intolerance are the ones on the run. The last of the churches built on foundations of hate are being deserted by their children, who were not raised with the old faith that had them accepting an injustice because they were told to, and the louder they get, the more they demonstrate that it’s all just a death rattle, destined to go silent as the older generations fade away, and the churches may yet turn back to the message of love.

When I feel that hot rush of rage, reflecting on what happened forty years ago today, I want to say “WE ARE COMING FOR ALL OF YOU,” but I don’t need to. The future is coming, and daylight and information wipe the world clean of those old, ugly falsehoods and make fools of those who used to get away with promulgating that fetid, soul-killing bullshit. There are miles to go on the way to a just, open, loving world, but we have come farther than ever before.

The trouble with Penny Arcade

Published on June 22, 20131 Comment

It sadly does not come as a surprise that one of the Penny Arcade boys made some ignorant, transphobic remarks. This is not the first time either of them was caught saying something dumb and hurtfull, nor the first time that they dug in first rather than apologise and acknowledging that they’d done wrong. It’s not so much that they deliberately set out to provoke or hurt people but rather that they’re somewhat more ignorant about certain hot button topics than they themselves realise, nor all that used to being contradicted. So instead of backing down, they double down on the offensiveness instead.

Why this is may be explained by their own history. Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik were your typical gaming nerds that through a combination of luck and hard work managed to make what was just another gaming webcomic into a multimillion dollar business, themselves into nerd kings. They’re in a position where they rarely have to listen to anybody else, with an audience that actively sucks up to them and they have that typical nerd mentality of thinking they know everything about anything. It’s not full on Dunning Kruger, but it does mean they have trouble recognising their own ignorance at times. Which is deadly when it comes to these kind of indentity issues. What’s troubling is that they also seem unwilling to address their ignorance, preferring to just not talk about these things instead.

In conclusion, Penny Arcade is a land of contrasts, not willfully evil but perhaps willfully stupid.