Hello again. How is everyone? Here it has been another day of feeling low-grade sick but perfectly well enough to do things. It has been a quiet time on the day job, and therefore I have devoted my time to Wizard’s Tower. I have at long last found the time to build a proper accounting system. (One that I hope Kevin could take over should anything terrible happen to me.) We’ve sold a shit load of books over the years.
Oh, and I have see the cover for Unjust Cause, the new Tate Hallaway novel. No reveal just yet, but suffice it to say that Lyda and I are absolutely delighted.
Today has also been a day for organisations to email me and talk about their plans for coping with the crisis. It is encouraging to see everyone from stores to financial institutions to travel companies are at least thinking about the situation and trying to do their bit.
However, it is small companies that I’m most worried about. They are much more vulnerable to economic shocks, and they are the least likely to be helped by our mendacious government. Wizard’s Tower will be fine because we have no employees or premises, but there must be loads of organisations out there hurting badly. It is difficult to know who to help first. If you need books, and who doesn’t, then please try to buy them from a local, independent store. My good friends at Mr. B’s are one option. I had a package from them today and will be spending more money with them soon.
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about symptoms, I recommend this post over at the Long Now Foundation. It backs up what I said yesterday about us not really understaing the virus very well yet. The fast-and-stealthy scenario that suggests the virus is a) much more infectious, and b) much less deadly than we think does fit a lot of the facts.
In the meantime there’s some potentially good news from Japan about a possible treatment that will help people survive if they do get a bad case.
Today has been a day for more stuff being cancelled. Both Ã…con (May) and Cymera (June) will no longer take place this year. There’s no word of a decision as yet on Finncon (July) or Worldcon (August).
The spectacularly malevolent British government continues its efforts to have the world’s worst response to the crisis. One of the major drivers of social inequality in this country is the move into buy-to-let by the wealthy. What this means is that even moderately rich people have one or more extra properties that they own and rent out. You can get a lot more income in rent than you have to pay out in a mortgage, even after paying a rental management company to do most of the work. A side effect of this is that it has become extremely difficult for young people to get a start on the property ladder. People who own rental properties will mostly have voted solidly for the Tories, and Johnson is paying them back by giving them protection while forcing renters to get into debt. It is straight up class warfare, not an attempt to manage the crisis.
Fortunately, though my work for The Diversity Trust has totally dried up, I still have plenty of work from my energy economics consultancy. I won’t have a problem paying the rent, and could even buy food if that was possible. (I don’t know, I haven’t been to Tesco since Friday, but my Twitter stream is full of photos of empty supermarket shelves and people complaining that they can’t get deliveries.)
Tesco, incidently, have just emailed to explain the various measures that they are taking to deal with the crisis. Good to see them taking steps to prevent panic buying.
And talking of work, there’s Wizard’s Tower to be taken care of as well. Which means that these little babies have arrived. I have sent a set off to Juliet for approval, so it won’t be long before they are available for sale.
And then the hardcovers. Honestly people, just wait until you see the hardcovers.
Today I thought I would talk a bit about symptoms, because I’m confused. I have been sick for almost 2 weeks now. The last time I went out for work was the 5th. I did a brief shopping trip on the 7th. Aside from that I have been self-isolating. I have not had any flu-like symptoms, but I did gradually develop a cough which has stubbornly refused to go away. Are these virus symptoms? Who knows?
The problem is that this is a very new virus and we don’t know a lot about it. What we do know is that people are reporting very different symptoms. Some of the rich people reporting that they have tested positive say they have no symptoms at all. Other people have reported very servere flu-like symptoms that required hospitalisation. So is this something that many people will just be carriers for? Or is it something that can hang around in your body for days before things start to get serious? Is that why the self-isolation period has been extended to 14 days in the UK?
The really annoying thing for me is that during the day I generally feel fine save for the occasional cough. Today I logged a 7-hour day on the day job. But after a few hours sleep I wake up feeling dreadful. It takes me an hour or so in the morning to get going. It is all very weird.
Doubtless a whole lot of clever medical people are working on this, and they are certainly getting plenty of data. We will know a lot more soon. In the meantime I think all that we can do is assume that we know nothing. I’m sorry if that’s scary. Please remember that the vast majority of younger people will survive this, even if old folks like me don’t. But if you can keep to yourself then I think you should do so, until we know more about what is safe.
Other than that, isolation is trucking along as expected. I ate the last of the fresh tomatoes today and will miss them, but I have other fresh fruit left. I also used the last of the fresh meat making a curry that will last until the weekend. I have a haggis in the fridge. That’s good until early April. Other than that I shall be pescatarian for a while. I’ll be intersted to see how that turns out.
It was a beautiful day here today. After a couple of days staying at home I would have loved to go for a walk. However, isolation is isolation. Of course all I have is a cough, and some of you might think it would be OK for me to go out with a mask, but such things are hard to get here. Pharmacies didn’t routinely stock them to start with, and now you can’t get one anywhere. In any case, our health service doesn’t trust people to use masks correctly, or to remember not to touch people. Their advice is that if you have any symptoms at all then you should stay at home for at least 7 days. So that is what I am doing.
And today that stay-at-home period has been extended to 14 days.
All of which is causing people to wonder how long this is going to last. When I went shopping last Friday I figured I needed food up until the end of April. That now looks like an underestimate.
The big issue today, however, is the rest of the government’s idiotic announcement. Most countries around the world have been ordering big gatherings not to take place, and ordering venues to close. Heck the Irish government has ordered pubs to close, just a few days before St. Patrick’s Day. That’s a measure of how seriously they are taking the need to prevent infection. Here our government has just advised people not to attend large gatherings.
The key difference here is “advised” rather than “ordered”. If an event or venue is ordered to close by government then it can claim on insurance. If all that happens is that the punters don’t turn up because they have been advised not to go, then there is a problem. Right now all sorts of businesses around the UK, from theatres and concert halls, to pub and restaurants are facing ruin because their custom will plummet and there is nothing that they can do about it.
To bring it closer to home, consider a science fiction convention. Swecon, which I was due to attend, was cancelled on government orders. That means that they did not have to pay for the venue. CostumeCon 38 in Montreal was cancelled on government orders the day before it was due to start. Kevin, who is on the board on CanSMOF, had been quietly worring to me about it all last week. But the government intervention saved them from a financial disaster. In the UK I expect Eastercon to have almost no attendance. Hilton are fully refunding hotel bookings, but because the event hasn’t been banned they won’t refund the function space rental, because they can’t claim on their insurance. The convention may also be on the hook for failing to deliver enough hotel bookings, such targets normally being part of convention hotel contracts.
There are still a couple of weeks to go before the con, so it is possible that someone will step in and save them. But Bozo is way out of his depth, and Cummins, who pulls his strings, is actively malevolent, so I don’t expect anything to change.
Anyway, time to worry about how far into May I can last without leaving home. And sadly that probably means no Ã…con for me. The rest of Europe may be coming out of the crisis by then, but I can’t see the UK doing so.
So far so good. Aside from not going out, today has been a pretty normal Sunday. I did some housework (cleaned the fridge!), did some reading and writing, and got caught up on Formula E. I’m slightly bemused by all of the people on Twitter wondering what they are going to do when they are stuck at home.
The other thing that I did today was go over a draft of a new will. That’s not because I’m expecting to die imminently. It occurred to me a few weeks back that I really should make provision in the will for Wizard’s Tower. The lawyers sent me a draft, and it has taken me a couple of weeks to get around to reading it.
This being Britain, Land of Transphobia, the anti-trans brigade are going off on social media about how it is important to know your “biological sex” when going to the doctor. But of course by “biological sex” they mean chromosomes, which have very little effect once you have been born. Interestingly mortality among men is higher than among women, and that’s despite women doing a lot more of the healthcare. An article in The Lancet suggested a number of gendered explanations for the difference, including men being more likley to smoke, and women being less likely to have to go into an office or other workplace in order to keep their job. Being a life-long non-smoker, and a self-employed work-from-home person, I have a more feminine social profile.
But who knows? I’ve had pneumonia in the past. That might make me more vulnerable. Worrying over percentages like this is pointless. My life has got less busy all of a sudden, and while I will miss the foreign trips I am determined to enjoy the additional relaxation time. Back to reading, I think.
Well, here we are, living in our very own science fictional dystopia. All of my near future travel plans have been cancelled (thankfully with no loss of money). That means no Swecon convention in Stockholm, and no Moving Trans History Forward conference in Canada. It also means no holiday with Kevin. Most of my forthcoming meetings and training gigs have also been cancelled, and I expect the rest of those in March to follow suit quickly. I also expect Eastercon to be cancelled, and I have very little else booked until the last week of April. I also have plenty of work that I can be doing at home, and enough savings to survive a few months. Having a very small home with very low rent has its advantages.
So I am well set up to self-isolate and not risk helping spread the virus. I have had a mild cold all week, but nothing like flu symptoms. Nevertheless I have been keeping to myself as much as possible so as not to worry people. From now on I stay at home. It will be an interesting experience, and I thought I should document it. If nothing else it will be useful research fodder for anyone writing dystopian fiction in the future.
Obviously I will run out of fresh food (meat, fruit & veg) in a week or so. But I do have enough dried, tinned and frozen food to last much longer. I also have a large bottle of vitamin pills that I bought when Hard Brexit was a worry. And of course I have plenty of coffee, tea and whisky.
I don’t expect to be missing the social contact. Most of my friends live far away and we communiate mostly via email and social media. If I need other voices, I have plenty of things I want to watch on Netflix and Amazon Prime. Disney+ launches here in just over a week.
What does concern me is staying fit. My home is very small so there’s not a lot of room to exercise. Time to put the Wii back into action, I think.
My other concern is what sort of world I will emerge into when this is all over. Unlike most world governments, the people in Westminister are currently planning on letting the virus run riot through the population. Indeed, they are encouraging this. The theory seems to be that healthy, productive citizens will contract the virus, recover, and become immune, whereas the elderly and infirm will die off leaving the population fitter and healthier as a result. That’s the sort of nightmare nonsense I expect to find in a Charlie Stross novel, not in real life.
It is not a case of hoping no one that you know dies. It is a question of wondering which of your friends and relatives will die.
So it is all a bit up in the air. We do indeed live in Interesting Times. Stay healthy, people. Here’s hoping that once we have got through this people will see the likes of Trump and Johnson for the amoral opportunist charlatans that they are.
So, there you all are twiddling your thumbs and wondering what to do as the long days of self-isolation stretch ahead of you. Yes, you should be reading books, but hopefully you have time to do something quickly for me.
As you may be aware, governments in the UK have been consulting on changes to the Gender Recongition Act. This is because the current system for obtaining a revised birth certificate (and with it a new legal gender) and a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC) is so complex, difficult and expensive that most trans people don’t bother. Changing your ID such as passports and driving licences is much easier, and who ever looks at a birth certificate anyway? But government officials are concerned that many people have ID in one gender yet are legally a different gender, and they want to change that by making it easier for trans folks to make the legal change.
There were a couple of consultations last year, one in Scotland and one in England & Wales. The Scottish one showed 60% of respondents in favour of a change. Westminster has refused to publish the results of their consultation and the new government apparently has no intention of going ahead with the process, but the Scots have published a bill and opened a consultation on that. The consultation closes on Tuesday (17th).
You might wonder what this has to do with you, as most of you are not Scottish. Well, the Scottish government is welcoming input from all around the world, and you can bet that the anti-trans extremists will be doing their best to flood the consultation with responses favouring their view. Trans people in Scotland have been subjected to weeks of relentless and hostile media coverage, and risk losing their civil rights altogether if this consultation produces a negative result. (Transphobes within Westminster are already calling openly for the repeal of trans people’s civil rights.)
The good news is that the consultation is very easy to fill in. There are just five questions. There’s also a fair amount of background information to digest, but I’ll try to summarise things briefly here.
1. All that this affects is the birth certificate. That has almost no effect on day-to-day life. It governs what gender you can get married in, and what gender you are recorded as when you die, but very little else.
2. Scotland will requre a Statutory Declaration to change your legal gender. A false declaration counts as perjury, which is a serious crime with stiff penalties. It will not be possible to change your legal gender on a whim, or easily change back afterwards.
3. Similar systems are already in place in Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, Norway and several other countries outside of Europe.
4. If you have any concerns regarding the safety of women as a result of these changes, please read this article from The Scotsman which summarises the responses of women’s servces in Scotland to the initial consultation (spoiler, they were all supportive of the changes).
Question 1 asks, “Do you have any comments on the proposal that applicants must live in their acquired gender for at least 3 months before applying for a GRC?” Simply saying No would indicate that you have no concerns, but a message saying that you support the changes would be helpful.
Question 2 asks, “Do you have any comments on the proposal that applicants must go through a period of reflection for at least 3 months before obtaining a GRC?” Personally I think this is rather silly, but equally it can’t do much harm. If you don’t want to go into the arguments you can safely answer No here.
Question 3 asks, “Should the minimum age at which a person can apply for legal gender recognition be reduced from 18 to 16?” Under current NHS guidelines you can begin medical transition (by taking hormones) at 16, so of course 16-year-olds should be able to change their legal gender along with everything else they will be changing.
Question 4 asks, “Do you have any other comments on the provisions of the draft Bill?” At this point it would be very helpful to ask the Scottish Government to do something for non-binary people. I have worked a lot with organisations from hospitals to domestic violence refuges, and for all of them the lack of any legal recognition of non-binary gender makes it very hard for them to make appropriate allowances for non-binary people.
Question 5 asks, “Do you have any comments on the draft Impact Assessments?” If you are a woman, this would be a good place to say that you do not think that your rights or safety are in any way threatened by the existence of trans people (which is basically the conclusion that the Scottish Government came to).
Some alternative advice, along with discussion of the issues, is available from Mermaids.
There is no guarantee that the bill will go forward if the consultation delivers a positive result. The anti-trans lobby has plenty of money and powerful friends. But if the consultation delivers a negative result then trans rights in the whole of the UK will in serious danger of being repealed.
The 2020 JRR Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature will be given by Rebecca F. Kuang. It will take place as usual at the Pichette Auditorium, Pembroke College and the date is Tuesday 28th April. You can reserve a (free) place here.
As I’m sure most of you know, Kuang’s debut novel, The Poppy War, won the Crawford and Compton Cook Awards, and was a finalist for a whole bunch of others including the Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards.
Further details of the event can be found here. I hope to see some of you there.
The lovely people from Cosmic Shed have published a podcast recording of the panel on Women in Science Fiction that I was part of recently. The other panelists are Kate Macdonald, Emma Geen and Liz Williams. Our thanks to Cosmic Shed, and of course again to Foyles Bristol, The Bristol Women’s Literature Festival, and the Bristol Festival of Ideas.
You can listen to the podcast here, or through the podbean app.
I’m not going to list all of the books I mentioned as the podcast is very clear, but there are a few things that I couldn’t remember or didn’t explain fully.
The essay by Suzette Hayden Elgin that I mentioned is The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-defence and it is available from Amazon and other sellers.
I guess I should remind you that Salon Futura is eligible for the Best Fanzine category in the Hugos. Not that I need another Hugo, but I do want you all to vote in the Fanzine category. If I do get on the ballot I suspect it will increase interest in the category.
Today’s radio show sat on the cusp between the end of LGBT History Month and the arrival of International Women’s Day. (International Men’s Day is on November 19th, thank you for asking.) I began the show by looking backward and running an interview with my friend and sometime colleague, Dan Vo, that I had recorded in Cardiff over the weekend. Dan is a professional Queerator, that is, someone whose job it is to go around museums and find queer stuff in their collections that they can use to be more LGBT inclusive.
In the second slot I welcomed Rebecca from Watershed who is part of their cinema team. In particular she has been helping put together their International Women’s Day programme which features the Feminista Short Film Festival. There are also some great women-centered feature films coming up. Rebecca is also involved in QueerVision, the Watershed’s regular celebration of queer cinema. There’s a short film festival coming up for that and she’s looking for submissions.
Slot three should have been a feature on drink spiking featuring Andy Bennett from Avon & Somerset Police, but some sort of operational emergency claimed his time and I had to fill in with the chat and extra music. Hopefully we can do that piece another time.
Finally I welcomed Sian and Laura from the Bristol Festival of Women’s Literature. They have loads of great talent lined up for this year’s event, including the very wonderful Juliet Jacques talking about memoir writing. You can find more details of the programme here.
An event of particuar interest to me is the launch party at Spike Island on the 27th as it is being run in conjunction with the wonderful people from Comma Press who are publishing Europa 28, an anthology of writing about the future of Europe by women from all over the continent. It is political essays rather than SF, but these days the one quickly shades into the other. And of course much of the content is translated.
If you missed the show live it will be available through our Listen Again service for a few weeks. Go here to listen.
The playlist for the show was as follows:
Duffy – Rockferry
Tracy Chapman – She’s Got Her Ticket
Selecter – On My Radio
Rihanna – Only Girl in the World
Janet Kay – Silly Games
The Weather Girls – Its Raining Men
Bat for Lashes – Horse and I
Thelma Houston – Don’t Leave Me This Way
Janelle Monáe (feat. Grimes) – Pynk
Aretha Franklin – Until You Come Back
Sian and Laura, this is the famous Monica Sjöö painting that was one of the inspirations for Janelle Monáe’s video for Pynk.
Because I’m going to be in Canada with Kevin for the first part of April, my next show will not be until April 15th.
I hadn’t been planning to attend Eastercon this year. However, with The Green Man’s Foe being up for a BSFA Award it seemed entirely appropriate that I should be there with copies to sell. You’ll therefore be able to find me in the Dealers’ Room. And if all goes well there will be something rather special Juliet-related available.
I warn you in advance that I will not be very awake. I will be fresh off a plane from Western Canada and in the middle of jet lag recovery. I may hide in my room quite a bit.
So that’s one extra convention on the calendar for this year. I also have one fewer. For complicated reasons I will be unable to attend Worldcon in Wellington. I am very disappointed about this as I have been looking forward to this particular Worldcon for 10 years, but my life gets complicated by things outside of my control. I would like to stress that this is not the fault of the ConZealand committee, who have been incrediably helpful, nor are the particular conditions affecting me likely to prevent anyone else from attending. Have fun in NZ, folks. I will miss you all.
No, not the Goddess. Not even Diana Prince. I am, of course, talking about Diana Wynne Jones.
Last year an academic conference about Diana’s work was held in Bristol. My friends Farah Mendlesohn and Cathy Butler were the main movers behind the event. An ebook of papers from the conference has since been published. You can get a copy here.
If you buy it, you are buying direct from the publisher, i.e. the conference. Everyone who provided content and helped create the book has given their labour for free, so all of the money from sales goes back into the project. The plan is to use revenue from book sales to finance another conference. Just 25 copies of the £10 will generate enough income for a deposit on the venue.
It would be great if other academic conferences worked like that, instead of getting tied in to the scam of academic publishing.
Update: Farah tells me that some independent professionals were involved in creating the book, and were paid for their services, But I understand that those costs have now been covered. So all future revenue will go towards the next conference.
I am a very proud publisher today. Getting The Green Man’s Heir on the short list for the Bristish Fantasy Awards was a pleasant suprise, but something I thought had a chance of happening. Getting The Green Man’s Foe on the short list for this year’s British Science Fiction Association Awards is veering into “beyond wildest dreams” territory. I mean, just look at the company the book is keeping:
Emma Newman – Atlas Alone (Gollancz)
Gareth L Powell – Fleet of Knives (Titan Books)
Adrian Tchaikovsky – Children of Ruin (Tor)
Tade Thompson – The Rosewater Insurrection (Orbit)
Juliet E McKenna – The Green Man’s Foe (Wizard’s Tower Press)
All of the other books on that list are on the Locus Recommended Reading List. That is pretty special company to be keeping.
Congratulations are also due to Ben Baldwin for the cover, and to Toby Selwyn who edited the book.
So I guess I might have to be at Eastercon after all, though I will be very jet lagged because I’ll be fresh off a plane from British Columbia.
In the meantime, if you want a copy of The Green Man’s Foe, there are links here. If you are buying the ebook, Juliet gets most money if you buy direct from Wizard’s Tower. You’ll also be able to get copies from me in person at Foyles, Bristol later this month, and at Swecon in March.
LGBT History Month is now well underway. In Bristol we began with an event at Aerospace Bristol, a brand new museum built to house a Concorde, and a wealth of other relics of Bristol’s proud aerospace tradition.
Because of where we were, the event focused on LGBT people in engineering, and in aviation in particular. That made it a bit hard to find cis women to speak, but trans women were delightfully abundant. The main speakers were:
Caroline Paige (ex-RAF)
Finn Mckay (UWE)
Rob Hurley (Airbus)
Christina Riley (construction industry)
We also had a panel of young people from the Alphabets youth group, and Drag Queen Story Time.
I have seen Caz Paige perform a couple of times before. Despite the fact that I know her story pretty well by now, she manages to tell it differently each time. For us she put in extra aircraft. I’m in awe of how much driving she puts in during LGBTHM. She’s far more in demand than I am. I bet she misses having a helicopter instead of a car. The photo above is of Caz and myself with a well known celebrity aircraft.
The event was sponsored by The Diversity Trust and was staged with help from OutStories Bristol and South Gloucestershire Council. The OutStories Bristol exhibition is in the Concorde Hanger and will be available to museum visitors until the 24th. Most of the work was done by Claire & Amy from the museum’s outreach team. I’m pleased to say that it all went very well.
Of course it could not be a properly queer event without cake. Thanks to Ian Boulton for providing something very appropriate.
I’m sure that no one is unduly surprised that Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth won this year’s Crawford Award. Well, apart from the silly people who insist that because it is set in the future and has spaceships it can’t be fantasy, even though it is a story about sword fighting and necromancy.
As you may know, I am part of the group of people that the IAFA Awards Committee consults with regarding the Crawford. We are not exactly a jury, and the makeup of the group varies from year to year depending on who is available. It is a huge honour to take part, and my thanks are due especially to Gary K Wolfe who administers the whole thing.
It was a special joy to have Mimi Mondal as part of the group this year. She has a very different perspective to offer, and got us reading books we would not otherwise have heard of.
There are more details about the award at Locus. Commiserations are due to Alix E Harrow whose The Ten Thousand Doors of January put up a very valiant fight. We don’t often specifically name a runner up.
Anyway, congratulations Tamsyn. I’m very much looking forward to the sequel, and to seeing Gideon on the Hugo ballot in Wellington.
I was live on Ujima again today. It was a bit of a scramble getting the show together and huge thanks to those guests who came on board yesterday. Also huge thanks to my old pal Valentin who used to run the desk for Paulette back in the day when I was a trainee presenter. As Ben was on holiday this week, Valentin stepped in to help out. Ben messaged me to say he was listening to the show online, which is incredible devotion to duty, and probably means that we had a listener in Kenya this week.
The first hour of the show was devoted to LGBT History Month events in Bristol. First up I was joined by Claire from Aerospace Bristol. They, in conjunction with The Diversity Trust, OutStories Bristol, and South Gloucestershire Council are putting on an event specifically aimed at engineers, and the aerospace industry in particular. The headline speaker is the wonderful Caroline Paige, and I’m particularly looking forward to the panel with the young people from Alphabets who will be discussing what they want from employers in the future. That event is on Saturday. I will be there with both my DT and OSB hats on. Full details are available here.
Next I welcomed back Karen from M Shed, along with Zoltán from Freedom Youth. I’m not curating the M Shed event this year. We’ve turned the whole thing over to the young people, and they have done an amazing job of putting together a programme. You can find details of their event here. It is on Saturday 22nd, and sadly I will be in Salzburg that weekend, but I hope some of you will go along and let me know how it turned out.
We also mentioned two other great events coming up in Bristol this month. The leading civil rights lawyer, Johnathan Cooper, will be at Bristol University Law School on the evening of the 19th to talk about, “Policing Desire: LGBT+ Persecution in the UK, 1970 to 2000”. Tickets are available (for free) here. Also there is the Black Queerness event that we covered in last month’s show. That’s on at the RWA. It is officially sold out, but there’s a wait list that you can get onto here.
The second half of the show began with my being joined by Coral Manton from Bath Spa University. Coral describes herself as a “creative technologist”, which basically means that she gets to do fun things with computers all day and gets paid for it. One of her projects is Women Reclaiming AI, which looks to do something about the sexist bias in electronic personal assistants.
We all know that most of these things (Alexa, Siri, etc.) come with female-coded voices, and that’s because the companies who make them decided (probably after some market research) that customers wanted a subordinate and submissive identity for their personal assistant. (Interestingly SatNavs work the other way: male drivers won’t take instructions from a female-coded voice.) Because these software constructs are maninly created by men, the personalities that they have are not based on real women, but on what men want their female assistants to be like.
This leads us down all sorts of feminist rabbit holes. Most notably, before Coral and her colleagues could create a “real” female personality for an AI, they had to decide what it meant to be a “real” woman. Part of the process has been running workshops in which groups of women get to have input into the process of creating the AI personality.
It turns out that one of the things that they asked for was that the AI would have the right to decline to help every so often. Real women can’t drop everything and help their families whenever they are asked to do so, so artificial women shouldn’t either. That sounded good to me, though I did have visions of Hal 9000 saying, “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that”; and possibly of Portia from Madeline Ashby’s vN saying, “NO, you will obey ME!”
I could have happily have talked to Coral about this stuff for the whole two hours. Hopefully you find the discussion as interesting as I did.
My final guests were Ali & Loo from some local mental health charities, and Shani, a poet who works with them. Tomorrow is Time to Talk Day, on which people are encouraged to talk about their mental health issues. There’s a whole lot going on in Bristol tomorrow, and you can find links to it all here. I particularly love Loo’s event making pom poms to support the Sunflower Suicide Prevention Project.
The other event that I had to mention is the one coming up at Foyles in Cabot Circus on the evening of the 25th. That will be Emma Newman, Emma Geen, Liz Williams and myself in conversation with Kate Macdonald on the subject of women in science fiction. I understand that it is sold out, but there is probably a wait list. Details here.
You can listen to today’s show via the Ujima Listen Again service here.
The playlist for today’s show was:
Faint of Heart – Tegan & Sara
So Strong – Labi Siffre
Two Old Maids – The Vinyl Closet
Cream – Prince
Come Alive – Janelle Monáe
Are Friends Electric – Tubeway Army
Dock of the Bay – Otis Reading
I Need Somebody to Love Tonight – Sylvester
And in case any of you haven’t seen it, here is the wonderful video for the Tegan & Sara song. Watch carefully and you will spot Jen Richards and Angelica Ross in there as well.
Talking of Angelica, I see that there are rumours that she’ll feature in the Loki TV series. There have also been hints that Sera, one of Marvel’s current openly trans characters, will be in Thor: Love & Thunder. It is tempting to tie the two together, but what I really want to see happen is for Angelica to play Loki alongside Tom Hiddleston, because it won’t be proper Loki without some gender-flipping and it would be awful if they put Tom in drag for that.
This time last year I was telling you about this fabulous book which I had the honour to make a small contribition to. Most of the work was done by the amazing Ardel Haefele-Thomas, but part of the plan for the book was to have a whole lot of “voices from the community” contribitions. One of those was me, talking about trans Romans.
Since then the book has been quietly on sale. Ardel and I did an event at Gay’s the Word in London late last year. Then I hadn’t thought to much more about it. But this morning I awoke to the amazing news that the American Libraries Association had voted it one of their top 10 queer books of 2019. They normally pick 5 works of fiction and 5 of non-fiction. And that means that Ardel’s little book (well, rather hefty book actually) is on the same list as books by Marlon James, Tamsyn Muir, Carmen Maria Machado and Samantha Shannon.
Which is awesome!
I’m absolutely delighted for Ardel. I’ll be seeing them in Canada in April at the trans history conference. I suspect that a few other contributors will be there. There might be a little celebrating.
The lovely people at Vector asked me if I wanted to do an article looking back on the decade. This gave me the opportunity to crunch some Hugo data. The results are really quite remarkable. If you take a look here you will see why I titled the article, “The Decade That Women Won”.
I should dedicate that article to Joanna Russ. I wish that she was still alive to see it. We still have a long way to go, but the fight is not impossible.
I’m sure that no one is unduly surprised that Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth won this year’s Crawford Award. Well, apart from the silly people who insist that because it is set in the future and has spaceships it can’t be fantasy, even though it is a story about sword fighting and necromancy.
This time last year I was telling you about this fabulous book which I had the honour to make a small contribition to. Most of the work was done by the amazing Ardel Haefele-Thomas, but part of the plan for the book was to have a whole lot of “voices from the community” contribitions. One of those was me, talking about trans Romans.