The trophy for the National Diversity Award won by Ujima Radio has now made it back to Bristol. While I was in the studios yesterday I took the opportunity to get a photo with it (thanks Melody!).
Of course I only played a very small part in winning the award. There are many other areas in which Ujima has championed diversity, but I have been assured that I was mentioned on our submission to the jury and I’m very pleased that Ujima saw fit to promote its being trans inclusive.
Yesterday’s post about the numbers of women writers being translated was a bit depressing, but we can make progress on this. I was reminded (thanks Sue and Christina) that there are exciting projects underway in Spain, including this one: Spanish Women of Wonder. It is an anthology of science fiction stories by Spanish-speaking women that is already published to great acclaim in Spanish and is hoping to get an English language version. The authors in the book include Angélica Gorodischer, and there will be an introduction by Ann VanderMeer. So, why not get on over to Kickstarter and get involved.
That’s a recording of Lev Grossman’s lecture as presented in Oxford earlier this month. It is a little over half an hour long, so if you don’t have time to watch it all you can read my thoughts on it below. It is worth the time, though. It watched it on my big HD TV and it looks great. Thanks to the folks at Pembroke College for making it available. However, it doesn’t include the Q&A session, and some of what I have to say below refers to points raised during that, so you may want to read this anyway.
Grossman’s topic was how fantasy has changed since the time of Tolkien and Lewis. He noted that the Inklings saw their work as discovery rather than creation. The Fantastic was out there, waiting to for someone to grasp it and present it to a modern audience. He characterized them as palaeontologists patiently wiping the dirt off newly discovered story fragments and trying to guess what great legend they were part of.
In addition the work of the Inklings was forged in the fierce furnace of the early 20th Century, a time of rapid and very obvious social and technological change.
In contrast, Grossman grew up in a world in which fantasy was everywhere. Kids played Dungeons & Dragons, and bookstores were full of many-volume “trilogies”. Fantasy had become fat, and had apparently sworn an oath that neither it nor its devotees would ever be hungry again.
Grossman characterized Inkling fantasy as a longing for longing. It worked because what was longed for was perpetually just out of reach. With time, our world has discovered that this is the perfect Capitalist product. No matter how much you buy, you can never get enough. Modern fantasy, however, has moved far beyond longing. Once you have gorged yourself on something to the point of nausea, what can you long for? Fantasy has become a requiem for longing.
I do wish that M. John Harrison had been in the audience. I would give a lot to sit and listen while he and Grossman discussed Viriconium, and more particularly The Course of the Heart, which is the perfect book about longing for longing (and therefore my favorite fantasy novel).
Grossman went on to talk about his vision for modern fantasy. He bemoaned the fact that it is no longer wild. Thanks to D&D, it now has rules, based on physics. You can teach it in schools. In his view, the duty of modern fantasy is to bring about Ragnarok. The camera, he said, is no longer following Lucy, it is following Susan, and she’s angry.
In response to a question he said that he wanted to do for fantasy what Watchmen had done for superheroes. He was writing second order fantasy; fantasy about fantasy.
So now I understand The Magicians so much better.
But do I agree with him? Do I think that the magic has really gone away?
Actually, no.
Let’s come back to those palaeontologists. When I was a kid, dinosaurs were still a bit magical. They were still cold-blooded for a start, so people didn’t really understand them very well. Nowadays they are in every museum. David Attenborough recreates them in CGI. We don’t actually have Jurassic Park, but we pretend that we do, and the dinos in it look real enough.
Fiction, too, can fossilize. Gary K. Wolfe talks very intelligently about the process in his book, Evaporating Genres. Fat fantasy is absolutely a fossilized version of what Tolkien discovered. It is a dead skeleton of real fantasy, put on display with scientific explanations of how it works. It is not magical.
But that doesn’t mean that fantasy itself has been destroyed, any more than dinosaurs have been destroyed by being fossilized. Until such time as Jurassic Park becomes real, true dinosaurs will always have existed, and will forever be just beyond our reach. They will still be magical.
There are still writers out there who want to give us a glimpse of real magic. They are few and far between, because it is so much easier just to stick up a few fossilized fantasy skeletons and claim that they are alive. But, if you seek out these writers, you can still be enchanted by their words.
One writer I think does it rather well is Liz Hand. Now I happened to sit next to her at dinner after the lecture, and she said to me that she understands where Grossman is coming from. Given that she’s working down the fantasy mines, and finding them running dry, I need to respect that. But at the same time if you listen to her on Coode Street talking about Wylding Hall you’ll hear her talking about techniques inherited from Arthur Machen that fantasy writers use to produce the sort of effect I’m talking about.
The question is not whether you can still do that, it is whether what you write in that way has any meaning in the 21st Century.
Does fat fantasy need to be destroyed? Quite possibly it does. At one point Grossman described our world as a broken world that looks whole. He was contrasting it with the world post-WWI, which was very obviously broken. We live in a world that is run on story. Politics, the media, marketing, are all about narrative; about pulling the wool over our eyes. We live to be told stories, almost all of which are lies. The question is, what should we do about it?
Grossman, I think, wants to break the stories and throw the pieces in our faces. Harrison, in contrast, wants to teach us that living for stories is pointless, and we should turn away from them. I think Mike has the better argument, but I’d love to see the point debated.
I have one final and unconnected point. Juliet McKenna asked Grossman what he thought of Grimdark. He made the very reasonable point that there should be room in fantasy for all sorts of writing, but he found Grimdark a rather nihilistic art form. It was, he said, an exercise in finding out how much meaning you can leach from the world and still have a story. He once tried to write a Grimdark novel, and had to give up because he couldn’t make it work. I think that means that somewhere, far off, and out of the corner of his eye, he can still see Elfland.
Because I have better things to do with my life than respond to people who won’t take no for an answer, I have a new review policy. Basically, if you ask me for a review then you won’t get one.
The Lord Mayor of Bristol, the Rt. Hon. Councillor Alastair Watson raises the transgender flag outside City Hall to mark the Trans Day of Remembrance.
This is the first ever civic event in Bristol organized for trans people. The event was organized by the Rainbow Group, the City Council’s LGBT staff network.
I’m in the picture because I was doing audio recording for Shout Out Radio. The video was taken by Michelle Hine.
Also in shot is the Lady Mayoress, Mrs. Sarah Watson. In the background in the orange coat is Danielle Radice, the Leader of the Green Party on Bristol City Council.
One of the things I did yesterday while I was in Bristol was write an article about TDOR, and how Bristol compares to other cities as far as trans rights goes. That went live today in Bristol 24/7 as part of their coverage of the day. You can read the whole thing here. I may have somewhat put the boot in to celebrity media feminists.
Today’s Women’s Outlook started quietly enough. In the studio for the first half hour was Jo Keeling who, amongst other things, is the founder of Ernest Journal, a magazine dedicated to a slow and considered lifestyle, and made in a way consistent with that lifestyle. You’ve seen me talk about slow food here before, and this is a publishing version thereof. Unsurprisingly, Jo and I bonded very quickly.
After that things got much more serious. I was joined in the studio by Simon Nelson, the Equality Officer of the City Council. We discussed the Trans Day of Remembrance, and how the City Council can do more for its trans citizens. I’m hoping that a lot of good will come out of what Simon and I started today.
You can find the first hour of the show on Listen Again here.
That was me done for the day, but Paulette then took over and the second hour was given over to two guests from the Terrence Higgins Trust to talk about HIV. Paulette and Judeline bravely volunteered to get tested to prove that it is a) painless and b) very quick. I’m pleased to report that they are both free of HIV.
You can listen to the second hour of the show here.
This week’s show has been a bit of a nightmare behind the scenes, as sometimes happens with live radio. I’d like to apologize particularly to Mike Allwood of BCP Expo who in the end didn’t make it onto the show. If you are in Bristol, Mike’s event is well worth checking out. Jo Hall will be there selling her books and mine.
I discovered from Twitter this morning that the latest edition of the Guardian Books Podcast features Ann Leckie. Naturally I had a listen, and I think it is well worth your time too.
The podcast actually starts with an interview with astrobiologist, Caleb Scharf, who has written a book about the place of life in the universe, and his view on the never-ending debate as to whether we humans are something special, or just one of thousands of examples of the variety of intelligent life.
Ann gets the second 15 minutes of the podcast. Some of that is spent reading from Ancillary Sword, but there’s enough interview to be of interest. The host, Richard Lea, has clearly done his research, because he manages to skewer Resnick & Malzberg (though not by name). Who knew that SFWA’s little internal disputes had become so famous?
Quite what American listeners will make of Lea describing Breq as something of a “Commie”, I don’t know. Americans and Guardian journalists have very different understanding of the meaning of “Communist”.
For my part I was pleased to hear some discussion of Breq’s love of music. I am, after all, moderating a panel on music in fiction at BristolCon on Saturday. Now I have an excuse to mention Ann. Yay!
You can listen to the podcast, and download the mp3, here.
I should really have done this blog post last week, but I had lots of things to write about and got sidetracked. Anyway, as you may remember, the Women Destroy Science Fiction crowdfunding campaign was so successful that they managed to fund anthologies of fantasy and horror as well. Those magazines are now available, and you can find them at the links below:
And we will continue doing stuff like this until people stop pretending that our favorite genres are a boys-only club.
This afternoon I decided to take the car out for a run. After all, I have it for a week. I might as well make use of it. Inevitably, I went down to Glastonbury, because what’s a neo-pagan girl to do when she’s in need of spiritual renewal? As it turned out, I did more communing with Liz Williams than communing with the spirit world. However, someone must have noticed, because when I asked Liz for books on a particular subject it turned out that she had just what I needed for a story I am writing.
One of the sacred pigeons pooped on the bonnet of my car. You kind of expect that. It is payment.
Along the way I noticed that south of Frome there is a place called Marston Bigot. Really, there is. Google it. It is even in the Domesday Book. So I wondered, is that where that Daily Malice woman lives?
When you are nursing someone who has cancer one of the last things you want to hear is that a good friend of yours has just succumbed to the disease. I did dedicate this week’s Women’s Outlook show to Graham, but I feel like I should say more. So I am going to re-post a review from Emerald City (#113, January 2005) of the fabulous (and deeply feminist) The Limits of Enchantment. That’s partly because it is a great book, and partly because much of the subject matter is very appropriate for me right now.
The new Graham Joyce novel, The Limits of Enchantment, is to some extent a follow-on from The Facts of Life. In that book there is mention of how, in the middle of the 20th Century, professional midwives with years of experience but no professional qualifications were being hounded out of work by the new, official, government health service. In modern, technological Britain, old witch women were no longer to be allowed to practice their arts. Especially when those arts also included abortion advice. It was, after all, well known that young women who became pregnant outside wedlock were mentally disturbed and should be put in asylums, not given abortions.
So, enter old Mammy Cullen, resident wise woman of a small village near Leicester. Mammy has successfully delivered well over 100 babies, including some that looked quite dead on their arrival into this world. The women of the village mostly think she is wonderful. The men regard her with some suspicion but are cautious because it is known that whenever a girl comes to Mammy to get an abortion part of the price is the name of the man responsible. Mammy can’t write, but she has a very good memory.
The local authorities have already outlawed amateur midwifery. If Mammy is caught helping deliver a baby then she can be put in jail. But she doesn’t mind over much. She is old, and will doubtless not be long for this world. It is her adopted daughter, Fern, that is the problem. Fern certainly has the talent to be a good midwife. She has assisted at many births. And she has Sight. But she doesn’t altogether believe in the Old Ways. Her main interest in the Moon is that President Kennedy said he was going to send men there, not in its magical powers. Ah well, at least she isn’t going stupid over mop-topped pop stars and wearing mini skirts like the rest of the village girls.
I stared hard at these words on my notepad and I couldn’t see any extra value in them. Any at all. Vertex presentation? We say: head first. I counted the syllables. That’s three times as long to say the same thing. Why had I come to college to learn words that added no more than a lot of extra noise to the sum of my knowledge?
Unfortunately Mammy waits too long. An unfortunate incident in the village leaves her in hospital, an institution dominated by her enemies: doctors and freemasons. It is a prison from which Mammy will not escape. Fern is left to cope on her own. Her only allies are her worldly friend, Judith, the hippies who live on the farm up the road, and a village lad called Arthur whose main interest in Fern appears to be getting her into bed.
Compared to The Facts of Life, The Limits of Enchantment is a much less edgy book. It is hard to beat the Second World War for dramatic horror. But The Limits of Enchantment is rather more angry. There are times which it descends into situation comedy, which is very British of it, but for much of its length it rails against the injustice imposed on well-meaning, ordinary people by those in authority: the nobility, the medical establishment, social workers, the police and so on. In many ways it is a book that is just as applicable today, except you could use gays instead of independent women and Blacks or Muslims in place of pagans and hippies.
The hare told me that we had moved into the time of Man and that was not a good thing, even for men and women. It complained bitterly of the leverets killed in the blades of combine harvesters. It asked me if I knew how many combine harvesters there were in the country, and when I shook my head it specified an exact figure. The corn bleeds, it said pointedly, we bleed.
Gollancz clearly think a lot of this book. My review copy has the now famous Isabelle Allende blurb for The Facts of Life on the cover. On the back cover it proudly says, “The Limits of Enchantment will be submitted for the Booker Prize.” And you know I think it might get somewhere. To start with Graham Joyce is a wonderful author and this is a very readable and entertaining book. Also it doesn’t read like a fantasy. Most of the “magic” that happens can be rationalized if you work hard enough at it and are pig-headed enough to not want any of it to be “true”.
But it is fantasy nonetheless. Like The Lord of the Rings it is an elegy for a lost time in which life was simpler and closer to nature than it is now. Unlike The Lord of the Rings, Joyce accepts that time moves on, and that magic can be found in other ways and in other places. Fern does not fade and go into the West. She picks herself up, adapts, and gets on with doing what needs to be done. In her own way she will become part of the nascent Feminist movement. And when she is old like Mammy she will doubtless shake her head at Grrl Power and wonder what the youth of today is coming to. But along the way the Moon will have traveled with her, for all that it has been trampled on by male feet. And while much of the Green and Pleasant Land has been overrun by the pressures of over-population, there are still places where the hares box in the dawn light of March. The Goddess is not dead yet, and Graham Joyce is doing his bit to keep Her memory alive.
Via the Forbidden Planet International blog I have discovered that there will soon be English translations of Atomas, a French superhero comic from the 1940s. Based on the few sample pages they posted, it looks fabulous. The plot is suitably cheesy in that 1940s way, and the art is magnificent.
To see more, go here.
Here is a clip from episode 4 of Time Out of Mind. This one features Anne McCaffrey. She talks about how she got into writing science fiction, and does a fairly mild feminist rant. There is also a brief appearance by a large, chrome phallic symbol.
I’ll start posting the full episodes next week and see what happens. Fingers crossed no one will object.
Yesterday I was tweeting with Crystal Huff about the number of different countries we had met people from over the past two weeks. I thought it might be useful to give an impression of just how international the SF&F community that gathered in London and Dublin was. Here, in no particular order, is my country list:
I’ve probably missed a few. I know that Crystal had Singapore on her list.
There are many reasons why we got such a good spread. Eurocon is normally fairly international. London is a fabulous tourist destination. UK Border people, while utterly foul to anyone wanting to live here, especially if they are some combination of brown skinned and/or queer, are well aware that the country is hugely dependent on tourist revenue. I don’t think we’ll get anything this good again for a while. However, I have high hopes for Helsinki and Dublin.
As part of her quest to find the best fiction set in Bristol, Joanna Papageorgiou has set Colinthology against Mark Wright’s Heartman. I’m not in the least surprised that Heartman won. It’s not like TV companies have been beating a path to my door or anything. However, I was really pleased that Joanna took time out to read Colinthology and write thoughtfully about it. You can find her comments on the two books here.
I was amused that Joanna found pubs to be a common theme of both books. I suspect that Colin and Mark would have become fast friends if they had met, and would have spent ages enthusing to each other about obscure beers.
This is reminder that if you have anything you’d like to submit for the next issue of Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, there’s a deadline coming up. Here’s the info:
CALL FOR PAPERS FAFNIR 3/2014
Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research invites authors to submit papers for the upcoming edition 3/2014.
Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research is a new, peer-reviewed academic journal which is published in electronic format four times a year. The purpose of Fafnir is to join up the Nordic field of science fiction and fantasy research and to provide a forum for discussion on current issues on the field. Fafnir is published by FINFAR Society (Suomen science fiction- ja fantasiatutkimuksen seura ry).
Now Fafnir invites authors to submit papers for its edition 3/2014. Fafnir publishes various texts ranging from peer-reviewed research articles to short overviews and book reviews in the field of science fiction and fantasy research.
The submissions must be original work, and written in English (or in Finnish or in Scandinavian languages). Manuscripts of research articles should be between 20,000 and 40,000 characters in length. The journal uses the most recent edition of the MLA Style Manual. The manuscripts of research articles will be peer-reviewed. Please note that as Fafnir is designed to be of interest to readers with varying backgrounds, essays and other texts should be as accessibly written as possible. Also, if English is not your first language, please have your article reviewed or edited by an English language editor.
The deadline for submissions is 15 June 2014.
In addition to research articles, Fafnir constantly welcomes text proposals such as essays, interviews, overviews and book reviews on any subject suited for the journal.
Please send your electronic submission (saved as RTF-file) to the following address: submissions(at)finfar.org. For further information, please contact the editors: jyrki.korpua(at)oulu.fi, hanna.roine(at)uta.fi and paivi.vaatanen(at)helsinki.fi.
This edition (3/2014) is scheduled for September 2014. The deadline for the submissions for the next edition (4/2014) is scheduled at 31 August.
I’m seeing one or two depressing things about anti-harassment policies recently. A few days ago Twitter was aflame with discussion of a story that a convention broke off its contract with a hotel in part because some of the staff objected to the con having an anti-harassment policy. I’m now sure where that was has gone, but it was very odd thing for a hotel to say.
A much more comprehensive example of the way that backlash works has been provided by this post from Michael Kelley on Publishers Weekly. It is attacking the introduction of an anti-harassment policy at conferences run by the American Library Association. If you want to fill a bingo card of concern-trolling over anti-harassment policies, you can do so with that one very easily. It has all the necessary ingredients. There’s the “it might be necessary for other conventions, but we are civilized people”. There’s the “we can’t have a policy unless we can define harassment in such a watertight manner that no one can possibly come up with a way it might go wrong”. And of course there is the underlying assumption that the whole point of anti-harassment policies is for secret cabals of feminazis to falsely accuse and persecute innocent men who are just having a “bit of fun”. All of which makes me rather glad that I’m unlikely to ever attend a convention that Mr. Kelley is likely to be at.
I’ve just posted the final podcast from the June SF in SF reading. It features a discussion moderated by Terry Bisson and featuring the three guest readers: Cliff Winnig, Heather McDougal and Cassie Alexander. There is a lot of interesting material in this. I particularly liked Heather’s discussion of the philosophical background to her novel, which comes out of Maker culture, but all three authors are very interesting, and the audience provides some good questions.
Lawrence Schimel writes:
I’ve been asked to guest-edit an issue of Eye to the Telescope, the online journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and I’ve decided to focus on translations into English of SF-nal poetry from around the world.
This sounds like an excellent opportunity. Further details are available at Lawrence’s Livejournal.
I might be swanning off to the Mediterranean, but I still managed to get an article up elsewhere today. It was done well in advance, but had to be published today because it is part of a series about authors published on their birthdays (or as near as you can get while not posting on a weekend). Tomorrow is the birthday of Alice B. Sheldon, better know to us as James Tiptree, Jr.. I have a post at For Book’s Sake to celebrate this.