Wis[s]e Words

Trouble and Her Friends — Melissa Scott

Published on November 21, 20111 Comment

Cover of Trouble and Her Friends

Trouble and Her Friends
Melissa Scott
379 pages
published in 1994

Trouble and Her Friends is the tenth book I’ve read in my Year of Reading Women project and the first and only cyberpunk novel in the bunch. It’s a book I’ve long wanted to read, having heard nothing but praise for it over the years and seeing it compared to e.g. Pat Cadigan’s cyberpunk novels. As I started reading it, there were two minor things that disappointed me: the first was the publication date, 1994, much later than I though, the second was the tendency of the covers to flake, something it has in common with other Tor books of that period. I’d always assumed Trouble and Her Friends had been published in the mid-eighties; certainly the setting is very eighties.

This matters because it means that not only is its future dated now, but it was already obsolete when it was first published. Trouble and Her Friends‘s vision of cyberspace is essentially an eighties one, where it’s important but largely unused by regular people, divided into discrete blocks owned by huge multinationals and hidden behind ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures (Electronic)) to ward off hackers, who seem to be the only people behind corporate drones to use cyberspace. It’s obviously inspired by the BBS scenes of the eighties and indeed the main hacker hangout is called the BBS. Yet 1994 was the year the internet fully broke into the public consciousness, when it should’ve become clear that it’s the openness of the internet and interaction with other people on it that are its greatest strengths, far removed from the lonely adventures of isolated hackers battling in virtual reality with faceless corporate ICE software that most cyberpunk, including Trouble and Her Friends, offers — it’s probably no coincidence that it largely died as a subgenre in the mid nineties. What saves Trouble and Her Friends from complete obsolescence can be summed up in one word: politics.

Sandra: two weeks on.

Published on November 20, 2011Leave a comment

Neither Sandra nor I believe in an afterlife, but if her ghost is floating nearby somewhere right now she would be so pissed. Because if there’s one song guaranteed to drive her nuts it was the Wu Tang’s Gravel Pit. Just mentioning it would give her an earworm. So if ectoplasm starts to drip from the walls tonight I’ll know ghosts are real…

Meanwhile it’s been almost two weeks since she died — it’ll be exactly two weeks at 2:30 tonight. Last week was mostly a blur, this week I went back to work and “normal” life but it has been strange. Strange to not live a life revolving around hospital visits. One of the things that helped, but last week and this week has been to immerse myself in a bit of archive binging, first reading through the entire Something Positive archive while I was sitting next to Sandra’s body, then continuing with Sluggy Freelance when Something Positive had run out of archive…

I don’t want to dwell on her death; rather I would like to use my Sundays to remember Sandra with a new blog feature. So for the next few Sundays or more I’ll be writing about her and her interests.

Because I don’t want to wake up one morning and realise I’ve forgotten her.

If the Twilight series is your idea of a feminist text…

Published on November 19, 2011Leave a comment

So somebody at The Hairpin thinks she’s at Slate and writes a contrarian article that praises the Twilight series for its supposed insight into what teenage girls are “really like”. In the process she let’s out the following sneer towards the Stieg Larsson Girl Who… novels:

Lisbeth Salander, the heroine of the popular The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo series, is emotionally stunted but, damn it, she actualizes herself! She punishes the people who hurt her, she sleeps with whomever she wishes, she zips around on a motorcycle, and she’s a master computer hacker. In other words, our actualized female heroine might as well be a tiny man.

It’s a weird sort of feminist critique that sees revenge, an active sex life, computer hacking and riding a bike (!) as inherently male and a woman engaging in them as “a tiny man”. Wasn’t the whole idea of feminism that women should be able to do the same things as men, should be able to seek revenge, have sex, play with computers and even feel a throbbing engine between their legs if they want to? Sure, there has been a backlash agains the idea that this is all feminism should be, that women should turn themselves into surrogate men to be taken seriously (something Joanna Russ already addressed back in 1975), that traditionally female-coded activities are unimportant and engaging in them is unfeminist. There’s even a point to make about how male-written action girls/heroines can sometimes become men with breasts.

But.

This article isn’t the way to do that, considering it’s written to praise the Twilight series for its supposedly true to life portrayal of what it feels like to be a teenage girl, when for all intents and purposes this series actually offers a reactionary view of what womanhood should be about, viz that a girl is only fulfilled if she’s married and preggers weeks after finishing high school. No need for motorcycles, computers or revenge, though some room for properly married but somewhat creepy sex.

In short: before you can argue about the relative worth of “feminine” and “masculine” pursuits, you have to have people who agree that these are not inherent to your gender.

is this commercial racist?

Published on November 18, 2011Leave a comment

I saw this commercial for the first time on tv tonight and I thought, hang on, is this, if not quite racist, at least a bit dodgy? Beheaded male and female Black bodies and stereotypical African imagery, all very sensual to sell a brand of chocolate called Afrodisiac? When the reality of chocolate production even in 2011 still depends for a frighteningly large extent on slave labour, including child labour in cocoa production in West Africa? To be fair Kraft foods, the owner of Cote d’Or, has signed the socalled Cocoa protocol which aims to child labour in cocoa production altogether, but as the Wikipedia article says, “ten years after implementation, it is unclear if the protocol had any effect in reducing child labor”.

So yeah, it makes me a bit uncomfortable watching this.

Europe after Rome — Julia M. H. Smith

Published on November 17, 20111 Comment

Cover of Europe after Rome

Europe after Rome
Julia M. H. Smith
384 pages including index
published in 2005

To be honest I only took this book out of the library because there was little else in the way of good history books that day. Europe after Rome was a bit of a safe choice, on a subject I’d already read a lot about and if perhaps it would offer little new knowledge, I knew I would at least enjoy the refresher. I had no high hopes for this book, but sometimes gambles pay off — this was one of these cases. Because Europe after Rome is, as the subtitle makes clear, A New Cultural History of the period between 500 and 1000 CE, between the “fall” of the Roman Empire and the start of the “true” Middle Ages.

Traditionally historians have treated this period as a transitional one between this two high points of civilisation, as a story of collapse and rebound, when the seeds were laid for what would become the familiar nations of modern Europe: France, Germany, England. Europe after Rome abandons this teleological view deliberately in favour of an approach that follows three interpretative threads: the role of the Roman heritage in the formation of Early Medieval cultures/policies, the diversity of experience for these cultures — this is not a book about European culture, but about the cultures of Europe — and finally, the dynamism of these cultures, all changing a lot over this period, which Smith is careful never to imply as meaning that these were evolving towards a set goal. To help her with this approach, she takes care to look at a wide range of European experiences, both geographically by looking at a region that reaches from Spain to Scandinavia and from Italy to Hungary and by crosscutting between cultures within each chapter for her examples.