Oh SFWA, No

Feminism, geekdom, science fiction
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Kameron Hurley is not amused by the ongoing sexism problems in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America or the idea that criticism of this is censorship:

So. I get it. The world used to agree with you. You used to be able to say things like, “I really like those lady writers in this industry, especially in swimsuits!” and your fellow writers, editors, agents, and other assorted colleagues would all wink and grin and agree with you, and Asimov would go around pinching women’s asses, and it was so cool!

The problems arose with the SFWA’s quarterly magazine, in the regular column written by Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick. E. Catherine Tobler has a good summing up in her open lettre to the SFWA:

It began with issue #200 of the Bulletin—all right, #199 if we want to get technical. It began with the Resnick and Malzberg Dialogues, a long-time feature of the publication. It began when two men sat down to have a dialogue about editors and writers of the female gender.
[…]
I found a dialogue that seemed more focused on how these “lady editors” and “lady writers” looked in bathing suits, and that they were “beauty pageant beautiful” or a “knock out.” I am certain no condescension was intended with the use of “lady,” but as the dialogues went on, I felt the word carried a certain tone—perhaps that was a fiction of my own making. As I listened to these two men talk about lady editors and writers they had known, I grew uneasy. Something wasn’t right.
[…]
The editorial staff (headed by a woman) vowed to improve, to seek more membership input. Issue #201 was little better—it included an article, written by another man, that told women to emulate Barbie, to “maintain our quiet dignity as a woman should.”
[…]
Issue #202 brought with it a “rebuttal” from Malzberg and Resnick, in which they used the words “censorship,” and “suppression,” and “ban.” In which they said those who complained about their article were anonymous to them, that the SFWA forum had become “the arena for difference.” Was it members who objected to “apparent sexism,” or was it a larger, darker, more hostile and threatening thing that wanted to suppress their dialogues?
[…]
In all the complaints that were voiced, there was never a call for censorship. There was never a call for suppression. There was a call for respect.

As the controversy grew, the SFWA has announced a task force to look at these problems:

In response to this and previous feedback from members about recent issues of the Bulletin, I have authorized the formation of a task force to look at the Bulletin and to determine how the publication needs to proceed from this point in order to be a valuable and useful part of the SFWA member experience.

Furthermore, the SFWA’s outgoing president, John Scalzi (of this parish) has unreservedly apologised for these problems in an open lettre to the membership:

That begins with recognizing the problem. And here is the problem: SFWA, through the last few issues of the Bulletin, has offended many of our own members.

As president of the organization, I apologize to those members.

If you want to read more, much more about all this Jim Hines has a link roundup. For those curious about the article that kicked all this off, Radish Reviews has excerpts and scans of it (scroll down).

I love living in the future

Science
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Scientists are building a internet based simulation of a nematode worm:

OpenWorm is an attempt to build a complete cellular-level simulation of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Of the 959 cells in the hermaphrodite, 302 are neurons and 95 are muscle cells. The simulation will model electrical activity in all the muscles and neurons. An integrated soft-body physics simulation will also model body movement and physical forces within the worm and from its environment.

Best part: anybody can access this simulation through your browser. (Via.)

Books read May

books and books review, posts interesting only to me
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Still not reading enough, just not in the mood most of the time. And when I did read, the only thing I wanted to read was science fiction.

Hammered, Scardown, Worldwired — Elizabeth Bear
This is Elizabeth Bear’s debut trilogy of novels, which starts out as streetlevel cyberpunk but quickly evolves from that. Each novel in the series ups the stakes and opens up the stage in which the story takes place through the sort of conceptual breakthrough science fiction does best. Apart from this, Bear is also very good at creating believable, realistic characters including the main protagonist Jenny Casey, a disabled middle age war veteran with a cyborg left arm and eye.

Dragondrums — Anne McCaffrey
Third in the Harpers Hall trilogy. An entertaining read but nothing more than that.

Remnant Population — Elizabeth Moon
Moon usually writes well done mil-sf or fantasy, but this is more ambitious. A failing human colony is recalled, but Ofelia, who has grown old there, does not want to leave. When the ships have left she’s the only remaining human on the planet, but then it turns out there is indigenous sentient life…

Womentoread Wednesday 01: Joanna Russ

Feminism, science fiction
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Every Wednesday, I try and showcase a female writer who is special to me for one reason or another, in an attempt to focus more attention on female sf and fantasy writers. I will limit this to writers I’ve actually read multiple books of, if only to have an excuse to link to old reviews on my booklog. To kickstart the series, what better author to start with than Joanna Russ?

Joanna Russ after all was the first prominent feminist science fiction writer, the first to explicitely examine gender relations in her fiction and keep it up as a main theme in many of her stories. In the process she also took aim at some of science fiction’s founding myths. For example, in We Who Are About to… , where she took the old concept of a crashed space ship on an unexplored planet and the brave survivors attempting to restart civilisation there and let her heroine steadfastly refuse to take part in it.

At the same time Russ was also active in reclaiming some of the lost history of women writers, most famously in her 1983 book, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which looked at how female authors had been written out of literary history:

“She didn’t write it. But if it’s clear she did the deed… She wrote it, bit she shouldn’t have. (It’s political, sexual, masculine, feminist.) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women!) She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. (“Jane Eyre. Poor dear. That’s all she ever…”) She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art. (It’s a thriller, a romance, a children’s book. It’s sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning. Branwell Brontë. Her own “masculine side”.) Sje wrote it, but she’s an anomaly. (Woolf. With Leonard’s help…) She wrote it BUT…”

Unfortunately Russ herself suffered from some of the same neglect. Most of her science fiction work was written at the start of her career, in the late sixties and seventies. Various chronic health problems kept her from writing more and many of her books fell out of print. She kept up her non-fiction writing for longer, but the science fiction field is terrible at keeping abreast with what’s happening elsewhere. Nevertheless for those who do come across her, for those who find feminism important, she was and is an important writer, somebody widely taught in university classes on feminism and science fiction.

Of her works I’ve so far read three: Picnic on Paradise, The Female Man and We Who Are About to… . Of these three, the first is an enjoyable adventure story with an interesting heroine, the second is a stone cold classic and the last is an impressively bitter polemic.

Picnic on Paradise:

Picnic on Paradise is an old fashioned adventure sf story, with a plot a Keith Laumer or a Lloyd Biggle could’ve used, but with a far greater focus on the group dynamics between Alyx and her fellow refugees. Which makes this somewhat more interesting then if it had only focused on external conflicts. Each of the characters feels real, is recognisable without being stereotyped, which makes the interplay between them interesting.

the Female Man:

The Female Man is a tough book, but not a hard book to read. Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer and everything in here sparkles; at times you can only sit there open mouthed with awe. It’s a tough book because of the raw anger Russ has put in it.

We Who Are About to…

We Who Are About To… is arguably Joanna Russ’ most famous and controversial novel after The Female Man. That novel became famous because of its outspoken feminism, still rare in science fiction at the time; if we’re honest, still somewhat rare today. We Who Are About To… comitted a greater sin however, by attacking the optimistic, can do attitude of classic science fiction, the belief that any adversity can be overcome by man’s unique fighting spirit. It’s not just that the protagonist doesn’t win in the end; even Asimov the arch-optimist had written “Founding Father” ten years earlier, a story in which four astronauts fight but fail to terraform a planet before it kills them. No, the real problem is that she rejects the choice out of hand and choses not to fight, not even to try.