At last some justice for Ian Tomlinson

Ian Tomlinson, Policing
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Finally, after more than two years, Ian Tomlinson has gotten some justice:

The police officer who attacked Ian Tomlinson at the G20 protests in London in 2009 could be prosecuted for manslaughter after an inquest jury ruled that the newspaper seller was unlawfully killed.

Returning their verdict after three hours of deliberation, jurors said Tomlinson died of internal bleeding in the abdomen after being struck with a baton and pushed to the ground by a police officer.

For legal reasons, the verdict did not name the officer, Metropolitan police constable Simon Harwood.

However, the jury said that “excessive and unreasonable” force was used when he struck the newspaper vendor who “posed no threat”.

The director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, immediately said he would “review” his decision last July not year not to prosecute Harwood.

There were shouts of “yes” from Tomlinson’s family when the jury confirmed their belief that the 47-year-old father of nine was unlawfully killed.

The family’s lawyer, Jules Carey, said : “Today’s decision is a huge relief to Mr Tomlinson’s family. To many, today’s verdict will seem like a statement of the blindingly obvious. However, this fails to take account of the significant and many obstacles faced by the family over the last two years to get to this decision.”

If Simon Harwood is prosecuted and convicted of manslaughter, it will be a welcome but rare outcome. Too often, as we’ve seen with Jean Charles de Menezes, the police authorities, including the Crown Prosecution Service, prefer protecting their own over allowing justice to be done.

John C. Wright comments on that Superman news

Comix, science fiction, wingnuts
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James Nicoll, delighting in the pain of his readers again, brings us John C. Wright’s considered response to the news that Superman is giving up his American citizenship:

No, to avoid the legal implications, I suggest we, the comicbook-loving community, merely appear at the offices of DC comics, and stage a riot, have the level of violence spiral out of control, drag the editors and owners bodily out of the building, and hang them from lampposts, and laugh and tell Monty Python jokes while their legs kick, dancing with spasms, in the air, inches from the ground. Then we can scratch their car paint with keys.

I agree, this might cast a pall over the comicbook-loving community, and folk may look down upon us as barbaric—which is why we should all dress in headscarves and Bedouin robes for the bloody event, whereupon the news media and all righthinking people will take great care to present our side of the story in the most sympathetic possible light, and any one who points out, truthfully, that our barbaric act of vigilante multiple murder over an issue of trivial comicbook geekdom nerdification was, well, barbaric, any such feckless abecedarian naif can be silenced and ostracized by being called a racist.

John C. Wright, for those who not know him, is a science fiction writer and a self confessed Christian Randoid whose writing has been noted for being fond of having underage school girls getting tied up and spanked and liking it. The response above is typical of him; yet he thinks of himself as a rational man. Which is also why he can be an Ayn Rand fan and a Catholic. We might think these beliefs conflict, but we lack his innate rationality.

That Osama killing

US foreign policy, War on Terror
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Slightly suspicious, isn’t it? Suddenly, after a decade of failure Osama Bin Laden is found conveniently in a compound in Pakistan, an American special forces team is flown in and manage to subdue Osama after a brief firefight, then executed him, dumping his body in the sea on their way back. It all seems tailor made for conspiracy theorists.

Which shouldn’t distract from the main question: why not take him alive and let him stand trial for his crimes? The stupider sort of American may believe this is justice, but it remains a revenge killing that shows how of little value America’s supposed ideals are when things get tough. This looks like a triumph for America but instead it is an act of fear — a truly strong country would find the strength to put its enemies on trial.

UPDATE: come to think of it, having Osama executed in this way makes Khadaffi’s accusations of NATO trying to kill him and his family that more plausible.

Joanna Russ 1937-2011

science fiction
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Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines of a generation ago and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The Son of the Sheik; do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrsh and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses.

Rejoice, little book!

For on that day, we will be free.

The quote Patrick Nielsen Hayden opens his in memoriam post for Joanna Russ with. It’s a quote that has been going through my head as well, ever since I read The Female Man last month. It was only then that I realised how important and how good a science fiction writer Russ had been. Most of her best work had been written long before I was old enough to read science fiction and once I was reading sf, she already had had to give up writing altogether because of medical problems… Not to make it al about me, me, me but there is something sad about only appreciating a writer just weeks before she dies.

Joanna Russ’ importance to modern science fiction is hard to overstate: The Female Man is not quite the first explicitly feminist science fiction novel, but it was the breakout one. It emphatically challenged the boys club atmosphere of science fiction and while the dream in the quote above hasn’t quite been fulfilled yet, thanks to Russ and the people she inspired one way or another, science fiction has become a lot less sexist than it would’ve been otherwise. After The Female Man it was no longer necessary for female science fiction writers to become “one of the boys” to be taken seriously.

But there’s more to Russ than just the one novel: The Adventures of Alyx, an early series of short stories and one novel about a Bronze Age girl kidnapped into the far future and making a living as a survival expert. Alyx is a precursor and role model to all later female sf heroes, from Ripley to Tank Girl to Buffy. Then there’s We Who Are About To…, a novel about a group of stranded colonists and the refusal of the one woman amongst them to play along in the others’ games about restarting civilisation: “Civilization’s doing fine,” I said. “We just don’t happen to be where it is.” There are her other novels and short stories, at least one of which, “When it Changed“, a companion story to The Female Man, is available online.

And then there’s her non-fiction, which contained the same feminist concerns that animated her fiction, the most well known being How to Suppress Women’s Writing, a collection of essays exploring just how female writers are shoved behind the curtain by the male guardians of the literary canon. Some of her non-fiction is available here.

Add it all together and you know why Joanna Russ was such an important writer; unfortunately she was also a writer easy to ignore, almost invisible if you don’t search her out on your own. Her influence is everywhere in modern science fiction, but that just makes it harder to see. Her enforced silence in the last two decades exacerbated this, which she talks about in this interview with Samuel Delany at Wiscon 30. This obscurity should not blind us to the woman we’ve lost this week: Joanna Russ was one of the giants of science fiction and we’re that much the poorer for her loss.