Skip to content
- We Need Diverse Books Authors Take on Publishing, Reader Prejudice – Flavorwire – A few weeks later We Need Diverse Books, the social media movement that has grown into a well-regarded nonprofit in a matter of months, was born. The founders had already started planning their campaign when, not for the last time, an incident of industry racism gave them momentum. In April, BookCon — a subsidiary of New York-based publishing mega-conference BookExpo — announced a panel of superstar children’s authors that consisted of all white men, while the overall conference lineup was all white people, aside from Grumpy Cat.
- GUEST POST: Elizabeth Bear on “Strong Female Characters” « Intellectus Speculativus – Specifically, my problem is that the idea that a female lead must be a “strong female character” leads to a whole complex of other problems. So here’s an inexhaustive survey of some of them, and some suggestions on how to avoid the traps.
- Conventional Wisdom by Arthur Drooker – Cool Hunting – This time, people are the focus of his lens for "Conventional Wisdom." Drooker plans on attending conventions across the United States to capture the inner-workings of dedicated, passionate and sometimes surprising, communities, all in service to his next proposed book. We're excited to share exclusive sneak peeks from his explorations, as the "Conventional Wisdom" trek unfolds.
- Borderlands Books : Used&New Science Fiction, Fantasy&Horror – In November, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly passed a measure that will increase the minimum wage within the city to $15 per hour by 2018. Although all of us at Borderlands support the concept of a living wage in principal and we believe that it's possible that the new law will be good for San Francisco — Borderlands Books as it exists is not a financially viable business if subject to that minimum wage. Consequently we will be closing our doors no later than March 31st.
- Locus Online – posts from Locus Magazine » 2014 Locus Recommended Reading List – This Recommended Reading List, published in Locus Magazine’s February 2015 issue, is a consensus by Locus editors and reviewers — Liza Groen Trombi, Gary K. Wolfe, Jonathan Strahan, Faren Miller, Russell Letson, Graham Sleight, Adrienne Martini, Carolyn Cushman, Tim Pratt, Karen Burnham, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Paul Kincaid, and others — with inputs from outside reviewers, other professional critics, other lists, etc. Short fiction selections are based on material from Jonathan Strahan, Gardner Dozois, Rich Horton, Lois Tilton, Ellen Datlow, Alisa Krasnostein, and Paula Guran with some assistance from Karen Burnham, Nisi Shawl, and Mark Kelly.
- Seanan’s Tumblr | Do you get royalties on used books, or are they… – Let’s return to the used book ecosystem for a moment. When you buy a used book from my local Half-Price Books, no, I don’t get royalties. But the store pays its rent. People are employed. The lights stay on. People who need money can sell their books to the store to be sold to other people looking for a little joy. A used book is joy magnified. It is something paid forward into the world. A pirated book is a dead end.
- The Millions : A Year in Reading: 2014 –
- Best Books of 2014 : NPR –
- Emic, Etic, and the depiction of Otherness in SFF | Safe – SFF writers depict aliens and fairies in loving detail, giving them whole histories and complex societies and yet casually dismiss the Others in their midst with stereotypes, tired tropes that do not stand up to even casual scrutiny. This recursive, ouroboros-type, self-perpetuating mythology makes it obvious that the writer has been watching TV as research.
- Top Ten Tips for Being a Vigilante On a Budget – My friends and I got into a discussion on vigilantes this past weekend, or, more specifically, what it would be like to be Batman on a budget. It was fun throwing ridiculous ideas into the air but I started to really think about it.
- Dawson’s Heights, East Dulwich: ‘an example of the almost-lost art of romantic townscape’ | Municipal Dreams – Kate Macintosh designed Dawson’s Heights back in the Sixties when she was just 26 years old. If she weren’t very much alive and kicking – and still fighting the cause of high quality social housing – I’d call it a worthy memorial. It remains much more than that in any case. Beloved by architectural groupies and a striking presence on the local skyline, most importantly it has provided a decent home to many.
- The Wire – Drexciya: Fear Of A Wet Planet –
- DWP orders man to work without pay for company that let him go | Society | The Guardian – A man who was let go at the end of a temporary job has been ordered by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to work for the same firm for six months without pay.
- Dear Griff Rhys Jones: if you don’t like tax, why not move to the Central African Republic? – Fleet Street Fox – Mirror Online – You’d have to be a complete idiot to leave a country where many of the citizens give you lots of cash and you live in great comfort, writes Fleet Street Fox
- shapeless, I’ve had a lot of people ask why I’m retracing… –
- Miles Davis Albums From Worst To Best – Stereogum – Ranking a catalog the size of Miles Davis’ is an impossible task. There are so many lavish boxed sets, live releases, compilations issued during his hermit period, etc., that in order to make this article at all manageable, major cuts had to be made before it could even be begun. So here’s how this is going to work: I chose studio albums only. But to truly understand Davis’ catalog, there are a bunch of essential live releases, including Live-Evil, In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall, Dark Magus, Agharta, Pangaea, and The Bootleg Series Vol. 1: Live In Europe 1967. So consider the 30 albums below a starting point. There’s so much more.
- A Report on Damage Done by One Individual Under Several Names | Laura J. Mixon – Friends, the tl;dr of this very long, comprehensive, analytical report is that up-and-coming John W. Campbell nominee Benjanun Sriduangkaew (who is also rage-blogger Requires Hate, who is also several other internet personalities including Winterfox, pyrofennec, acrackedmoon, and others) (oh yes, the list goes on), is VERY BAD NEWS.
- Cat Trap – Trends Addict – it's a cat trap Billy — and you're already caught!
- Women Rise in Sci Fi (Again) – The Atlantic – Like the fighters she wrote about, Hurley says that female science-fiction writers are often forgotten. “It’s always Asimov and Hineline,” she says. “You don’t hear about Russ or LeGuin. And there are very particular ways that people talk about it. One of those is by saying ‘well she did it, but it wasn’t really science fiction,’ or ‘her husband has a big impact.’”
- 179 RR Accountability and Diversity with Meagan Waller – DevChat.tv – a treasure trove of insights and info about unconscious biases , diversity, employment, culture, tech, and more.
- BBC News – Cat Watch 2014: What’s it like being a cat? –
- The Radical Ellen Willis | Dissent Magazine – Maybe we’re oblivious, or maybe just stretched thin, but not enough people are talking about this. The late cultural critic Ellen Willis did—and years before the worst of it hit. With a clarity of thought and the kind of fury that pangs and never scabs over, she diagnosed, snarled, and illuminated what she considered a central plague of her day: the way our economy limits our creative expressions. As she put it in her essay “Intellectual Work in the Culture of Austerity”: “On the crudest level, the lives of American intellectuals and artists are defined by one basic problem: how to reconcile intellectual or creative autonomy with making a living.”
- Black and Blue. – Free Online Library – The violence perpetrated by the P.G. cops is a curious development. Usually, police brutality is framed as a racial issue: Rodney King suffering at the hands of a racist white Los Angeles Police Department or more recently, an unarmed Timothy Thomas, gunned down by a white Cincinnati cop. But in more and more communities, the police doing the brutalizing are African Americans, supervised by African-American police chiefs, and answerable to African-American mayors and city councils. In the case of P.G. County, the brutality is cast against the backdrop of black America's power base, the largest concentration of the black middle class in the country.
- kankedort: On Diversity: Two Sadnesses and a Refusal – don't refuse the issues. I accept them fully. But I refuse the sense of scarcity and shrinkage. I refuse a world this small. I refuse to believe that there are only so many seats at the table, that I have to fight for scraps against all other possible representatives of diversity. You guys, I refuse this EVEN IF IT'S TRUE. Daniel José Older and Saladin Ahmed, who were mentioned in the Nation piece, are my friends. I'm thrilled for them. Is it possible to recognize that there is a problem with women of color being ignored, and still be thrilled for them? I intend to believe the answer is yes.
- Marooned Off Vesta: Confusion and understanding: one post about The Stone Boatmen – Though I try always to extend sympathy at least, it is difficult for me to approach any new work of sf with anything other than suspicion. But very early on in my first reading of Sarah Tolmie's The Stone Boatmen — I am no longer able to say when or where, exactly — I decided to trust: to have faith in the work, and in Tolmie's ability and above all responsibility in pursuit of it. Or — can this really be characterized as a decision? Perhaps better to say that I found myself trusting her, that something palpable but not quite locatable in or between her words made such trust not only possible but natural, even unavoidable. Tolmie does not betray this trust.
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds – The Daily Beast – Fixating on a woman from afar and then refusing to give up when she acts like she’s not interested is, generally, something that ends badly for everyone involved. But it’s a narrative that nerds and nerd media kept repeating.
- #GameOverGate (with images, tweets) · strictmachine · Storify – Zoe Quinn blows #GamerGate wide open.
- Timothy Snyder’s Lies | Jacobin – In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Hitler and Stalin are one and the same. And the partisans — Jewish fighters included — only encouraged German crimes.
- Whirling Nerdish: Asthma and THE MIRROR EMPIRE – I’m particularly interested in how Hurley handles this character because all my life, I was told by movies and TV that people with asthma were nerds. They were geeks, dweebs, losers. Pathetic little wastes that fly into a wheezing, gasping fit when things get difficult while, meanwhile, the HERO goes and kicks the bad guys ass and handles his shit.
- A few disjointed thoughts on other cultures and diversity in SFF – Aliette de Bodard – Researching another culture is freaking hard work, PLEASE do not undertake it lightly (and when I say “freaking hard work”, I don’t mean a few days on Wikipedia, or even a few days of reading secondary sources at the library). And PLEASE do not think you’ll be exempt of prejudice/dominant culture perceptions/etc. No one is.
- Public Domain Super Heroes – Public Domain Super Heroes is a collaborative website about comic book, comic strip, film, literary, pulp, mythological, television, animation, folk stories, etc… Characters in the public domain fitting in genres such as the masked vigilante, caped crusader, villains, scientists, magicians, robots, jungle lord, and their supporting characters.
- Pioneer winners — Butler: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom – “There certainly seems to be something of a boom. To a certain extent these things are always artefacts―there’s no objective criteria by which one can judge ‘boom-ness’ (boomitude? boomosity?―so the fact that everyone’s talking about it is to a certain extent definitional of the fact that something’s going on”