Category: SF Links

House of Links

The Linkarets

  1. Ballard
  2. I have finally watched the finale of Battlestar Galactica, and my basic reaction is: oh dear. It’s most frustrating because I don’t think it would have been hard to make it good; see, for instance, Abigail Nussbaum on the need for the ending to have the courage of its convictions. Other links:
  3. Awards news
    • This year’s Tiptree Award winners are Nisi Shawl, for Filter House, and Patrick Ness, for The Knife of Never Letting Go; I’ve not read the former yet, but I’m pleased by the latter, which I think is not only a good winner of the award, but also pleasingly Tiptree-ish in the ferocity of its execution
    • The ballot for the Shirley Jackson Awards
    • Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else, which I rather liked (but not everybody is so keen) is on the shortlist for this year’s Orange Prize
  4. Reviews
  5. Miscellany

The Links of Ages

Post-bank-holiday-catch-up-edition:

Link Across The Sky

Journey into Links

Forgive me, for I have sinned: it has been a long, long time since my last linkdump.

Reasons to care about Racefail

So Tom left a comment on our open thread yesterday:

You should have a mission statement, or some kind of definition of what TC is for. Since you don’t have one, i can’t wave it in your face as evidence that coverage of Failgate 2099 is outside your bailiwick. Curse you!

I don’t know why i’m so exercised about this. Obviously, i hate black people, but it’s also that it seems like diverting any more eyeballs or brain cells to a phenomenon which has already consumed so many of them for absolutely no positive result seems futile.

As this implies, Tom is aware that Liz and I have been mulling over how and what to post here about the evolving situation. For those who don’t know, what is being called Racefail has been rolling along for two months now, mostly but far from exclusively on livejournal. It has been, at various times, a discussion about race and culture as explored in science fiction and fantasy, a discussion about racial and cultural diversity in fandom, and a discussion about the terms on which discussions of race and culture as explored in science fiction and fantasy should take place within fandom; and it has included numerous exchanges on, primarily, the latter of those topics that couldn’t be described as anything so polite as a discussion. Well-known writers and editors have behaved in ways that hundreds of fans have found beyond the pale. One livejournaller, rydra_wong, has been providing regular round-ups of relevant links; again, there are hundreds, so what I link in this post is only going to scratch the surface of the scope and extent of what’s been said. But there’s a summary of what I think of as phases one and two of Racefail here (and a Guardian blog on roughly the same period here), and similarly for phases two and three here, which should give you the broad outline of what’s been happening.

I’ve phrased all of the above in neutral terms, but of course I’m not neutral. By and large, I count myself with the hundreds of fans who are disappointed and/or offended by the behaviour of professionals they previously respected. Charles Stross, for example, has suggested that the whole situation is the result of trolling. He subsequently retracted the suggestion, thankfully. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has made much the same suggestion and, so far as I am aware, not retracted it. Kathryn Cramer has made accusations of libel and defamation against the authors of posts such as this and this, which point out earlier bad behaviour on her part. None of this is acceptable. Roz Kaveney has a good post on why Cramer’s actions, in particular, are unacceptable here. On a personal level, I have sometimes been uncomfortable with the tactics with and terms in which these actions have in turn been criticised. In addition, two people have reported receiving abusive emails, and one has reported her employer receiving calls which attacked her as homophobic and racist. These, obviously, are also unacceptable. But to the extent that there are sides, the scales are clearly weighted more in one direction than the other. Put it this way: if I could retract my Hugo nomination for NYRSF at this point, I would; I am also not sure that I want to write for NYRSF again in the future.

What I do want is for the science fiction and fantasy field, and for science fiction and fantasy fandom, to be welcoming to and accepting of diversity in all its aspects; and in the meantime for both the field and fandom to be more aware of their limitations and shortcomings in this area, and less defensive when discussing issues relevant to this topic.

Saying all of this out loud strikes me as justification enough for posting here; but there are other reasons, too. One is the issue of relevance. Racefail has been happening at the intersection of multiple sf-related communities — which fact, I don’t doubt, has contributed to some of the frustration and miscommunication — and it’s true that the majority of participants have been US-based. But I’ve now bumped up against the idea that essentially it’s none of British fandom’s business a couple of times. In the comments to one (friendslocked) post yesterday, I found myself arguing against the perceptions that Racefail involved only a small subset of fans, or that it was a debate within a clique, or that it’s not as though there are people clamouring at the gates of UK fandom and feeling not included. (To be fair, in the same discussion there was also the perception, or more accurately the despair, that fandom was tearing itself slowly and painfully to pieces.) I think all of these perceptions are mistaken; I think this discussion is an elephant in the room relevant to all fans, writers, and readers of science fiction. You only have to look at the submissions for this year’s Clarke Award to see that British sf publishing isn’t the most diverse field in the world. You only have to look around you at an Eastercon. You only have to read a post like this, from one UK-based fan involved in the discussion:

Congratulations, SF/F. If I had ever wanted to be an author, an editor, or in any way take part in the larger SF/F community, that desire would be dead by now. You know what would be ‘nice’? If more white people found the silence of so many PoC in SF/F more uncomfortable than hearing their criticism.

Or this, from another UK-based fan:

I’m done with them and I’m pretty much done with SF/F fandom, their professional writers, their supporters and their toxic environment. As [info]shewhohashope said to me yesterday: Some people will never move on from this, so we need to move on from them. I’m moving on from this and I’m moving on from anyone like this.

This is not what I want.

But I also need an answer to Tom’s implicit question: what positives have come out of this discussion? Here are some posts or actions worth the time it takes to read them and think about them.

  • “I Didn’t Dream of Dragons” by Deepa D; one of the earliest contributions to the discussion and still one of the best, about one Indian reader’s experience with science fiction and fantasy.
  • “A Tale of Layers“, by one writer of colour about her experience breaking into the field, and her reactions to Racefail (and an update).
  • “This hurts us all“, by Oyceter, about silence and advocacy.
  • “The only neat thing to do“, by Rose Fox, about speaking up
  • Perhaps most excitingly for me, Verb_noire, a small press being established to “celebrate the works of talented, underrepresented authors and deliver them to a readership that demands more.” You can donate to help with startup costs here, and read their submission guidelines here.
  • A roundup of recommended reading lists, including a link to the writers of colour 50 book challenge, as well as potential efforts for outreach at Anticipation; more in this vein at a community established to focus and support conversations about cultural appropriation, racial diversity and multiculturalism in SFF fiction and fandom.

(And I should hope that I’ve never given anyone any reason to think otherwise, but I suppose it can’t hurt to say: Vector welcomes submissions from fans and critics of colour, and/or about sf and fantasy work by writers of colour; and the same goes for the Strange Horizons reviews department and submissions of reviews.)

UPDATE: Since this post is still getting a fair bit of traffic, a few more links.

FURTHER UPDATE: Another round of discussion, about a different book and related issues, with the originating post here.

Ten Things I Want From The Locus Blog

Martin draws my attention to this post by Liza Groen Trombi at the recently-launched Locus Roundtable blog, and this quote in particular:

While most have welcomed the blog and the launch discussion, we have clearly annoyed a few people by not conforming to their ideas of what we ought to be doing. I’m sure this blog will be many things in its time, and all in all I’m very pleased to have it up and running.

I’m among those to have found the “2008 in review” discussion much less time-worthy than I would have expected, though I would describe myself as more frustrated than annoyed; a Locus blog should be a good, interesting and useful thing, but what we’ve had so far has been those things only in brief flashes. But what do I think they should be doing? Well:

  1. Not moderating comments. There has already been some discussion on this point, but at present the fact that every comment is moderated, and that it takes hours for said comments to be approved and appear on the blog, makes something of a mockery of the idea of actual discussion, and is thus rather a disincentive to commenting at all.
  2. Showing complete posts on the blog home page. I can’t be the only one who finds the current brief snippets and “read more” view irritating; I’ve already come to your blog, don’t make me click through to a separate page for every post, please. (If there’s a good reason to hide something — spoilers, for instance — then fine, but I see no reason to make it standard.) On the upside, the full text is syndicated, so I can read it all as long as I don’t actually visit the blog … but of course, that’s another way of driving me away from engaging in discussion.
  3. Discussing specific works of sf. As Jeff VanderMeer pointed out, the paucity of such discussion was (bizarrely, given the people involved) a problem with many of the 2008-in-review posts. But more generally, this is surely something Locus is very strong at, and while I appreciate that most of the contributors’ thoughts about books will be channelled into reviews for the print magazine, I’ve never yet written a review that manages to say everything there is to say about a good book (particularly when writing in a word-limited context). (Actually, there’s something else I’m not clear on: now that the blog exists, will the posting of sample reviews from the print magazine cease and desist? I think it would be nice if it continued.)
  4. Demonstrating awareness of a world beyond Locus. God bless Graham, who is so far the only person to link to anything of substance beyond the Locusosphere, and even linked here! (Paul Witcover did manage some Amazon links, I suppose.) The rest of the posts seem to exist in a sort of splendid isolation, though.
  5. Interacting with said world. This is, surely, part of what blogs are for. Lord knows I’m not always the best at this myself — I frequently find myself contemplating a post in response to something elsewhere, only to find myself without time to write the damn thing, and reduced to lumping it into a link round-up — but it would seem more worthwhile to go over to the Roundtable and post a comment and wait for said comment to appear if there was an indication that they had any interest in listening to what other people are saying.
  6. Providing critical commentary — the history, theory and practice of sf (and fantasy) criticism. This is what they’ve done best so far, up to and including Graham’s post about advocacy and recognition in sf. More please.
  7. Providing publishing commentary. This should be another area a Locus blog could excel in, in part on the news front (I’m sure I’m not the only person to make a beeline for the “books sold” and “books delivered” listings in each issue), but more relevantly for the Roundtable, I would have thought, in terms of commentary — Locus has a unique perspective on the sf market.
  8. Providing other commentary relevant or of interest to the sf community. Which is, basically, code for allowing the bloggers elbow room to talk about whatever catches their fancy.
  9. Failing all of the above, setting up an “about” page wouldn’t be a bad idea. At the moment, there’s just a link from the Locus home-page, with no explanation of what the Roundtable is or what it exists to do; so it’s perhaps not surprising that people have formed opinions about what it should be doing. A line somewhere along the lines of “The staff of Locus discuss X, Y and Z” would do it.
  10. Last but not least, they should be posting pictures of the Locus cat. If there is one. Because, as is well known, no blog is complete without cat-pictures.

If you detect a subtext in my list to the effect that I think they should be writing a blog that’s a bit more like Torque Control, well, there’s probably an element of truth in that; I try to maintain the sort of blog I want to read, after all. But it also boils down to this: a Locus blog, it seems to me, should be the first online stop for intelligent commentary on sf literature and related topics and at present, unfortunately, I don’t think it is. Fingers crossed for the future, though.

In Link Waters

Well, here I am at Montreal airport, waiting for my flight home. Time for some overdue links:

And now it’s time to board the plane, so time for me to sign off.

Unwritten

Things I would totally write posts about if I weren’t spending all my time either playing Final Fantasy XII or keeping up with commitments elsewhere, a partial list:

1. Survivors. Watched the final episode last night; I’ve seen the odd post about the series, but did anyone else watch it through to the end? I was much more impressed than not, I have to say. I’m not keen on the Secret Conspiracy, which makes me wary of the second series, since it looks set to play a greater part in the story than it has done so far; and sometimes the plots are a mite predictable. But sometimes they’re not, and I think all the central characters are well-realised. And I’m a sucker for community- and society-building stories, anyway.

2. The return of Battlestar Galactica. While I empathize with reactions like Abigail’s, in that I invariably find that reading what the people making Galactica have to say about it diminishes my enjoyment, if I ignore what they’re saying I can still find much to appreciate. In the first episode of season four round two, for instance, I didn’t much care for the manner in which the reval that ended the episode was handled — clumsy, I thought — but I do like the reveal itself. I like that, this time, it has a greater weight for the previously-revealed cylons than for the humans; I like that the the relationship it references becomes a model for the whole human-cylon relationship (particularly given what we appeared to learn elsewhere in the episode about the relationship between the populations of the twelve colonies and the skinjob cylons). I’m glad that it doesn’t invalidate major character development. And I also find it satisfying, in a perverse way, that I found it initially disappointing, and only found things to appreciate on reflection, because it seems to me that disappointment was an effective way of mirroring the series characters’ disappointment at the end of the previous episode in the audience. I don’t believe for a second that the makers intended that effect — I can’t have that much faith in TV showrunners — but I think it’s there nonetheless.

3. Further adventures in Theory. I’ve still got comments on the previous threads I should respond to, and indeed it’s not like I’ve read much more of the book yet (see above re: Final Fantasy and other commitments). But at the moment I am wrestling with Structuralism. As related, I am not convinced by some of the arguments for the creational power of language (I don’t think we divide the spectrum into individual colours entirely arbitrarily, purely as a matter of language; I think we divide it up the way we do because certain physical phenomena filters light into particular bands of wavelengths, and it is useful to have words for those bands), and I find some of the examples of structralist criticism given to get a bit, er, abstract. But at the same time I am sympathetic to the idea of a mode of criticism that is about relating texts to larger structures — not surprisingly, since I buy into Damien Broderick’s concept of the sf megatext (at least as I understand it from reading discussions of the concept), even if it does take me away from the text I start with.

4. Reading, and particularly reading of shortlists, as social behaviour; although on this one I’m not sure I have anything to add, so much as I want to point it out as a concise statement of something I am often conscious of. The urge to write reviews, in this model, is something of a totalitarian impulse, an urge to make, or at least persuade, people to talk about what you’re interested in talking about. (So is there an extent to which I approve of the BSFA novel shortlist because it consists largely of things I’ve already read? Maybe.)

The Best of 2008, Redux

Following on from Liz’s two lists of her best 2008 reads, here are some more for you to peruse.

And on related notes:

(Of course, you may be wondering what my books of the year are. Unfortunately, I acquired Final Fantasy XII over Christmas, and have now been well and truly sucked in, which means that blogging is falling by the wayside a little. Plus, there’s a whole bunch of 2008 titles I haven’t read yet, and want to get to before the Hugo nomination deadline at the end of February. So, no lists from me at the moment, I’m afraid.)