Books

Wonder Woman at the Merril

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I have been lucky enough to be in Toronto when they had an author event on at the Merril Collection. This was Jill Lepore on tour with her new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. Naturally I went along. The event was packed, though aside from a few Merril staff there was no one I recognized. Lepore, it turns out, is an excellent speaker, and I’m sure I am going to enjoy reading her book. I should note that she is an historian, not a comics expert, and her main interest is in the life of William Marston, the man who created Wonder Woman. But he did have a very interesting life, and his work has a prominent place in the history of feminism.

Most of what Lepore had to say was about the early 20th Century. Marston died in 1947. However, Lepore did talk a bit about the late 60s and early 70s when Wonder Woman was adopted as an icon by parts the feminist movement of the time. This was of particular interest to me because I had been looking at what was happening in the comic at the time — specifically the horrendously homophobic #185. That issue makes much more sense when you know that Diana was being used by prominent feminists to promote their cause.

Nothing changes, of course. That issue of Wonder Woman was a key part of the talk on LGBT superheroes that I was giving last year. Another key element was the character of Alysia Yeoh, Barbara Gordon’s trans woman friend. Gail Simone deftly had Babs and Alysia sharing a house together before revealing that Alysia was trans, and then showed clearly that this was not an issue in any way. Gail has since left, and only a few issues later the new (all male) creative team has made a point of establishing that Barbara is horrified by trans people. I am so unsurprised.

Update: I see that Cameron Stewart has posted an apology about that Batgirl issue, which is progress. Also my apologies to Babs Tarr whose name didn’t come up when I looked up the creative team online. Thanks to @ariadnesisland for the tip-off.

Meanwhile, In Toronto

~ Cheryl

I am here. I won’t be online much, partly because I am busy, and partly because the roaming charges are horrendous. I have put my phone in airplane mode so that the apps on it can’t rack up massive bills without me doing anything.

There is snow. Lots of it. It started late last night and continued through most of today. Right now it is quite pretty. Tomorrow it will be EVIL. I hope they grit better than London.

I have dropped off a few copies of Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion at Bakka Phoenix books, so if you are in Toronto and would like a copy please do drop by before they sell out. I have come away with a bunch of new books by other people, including The Three Body Problem, which I am very much looking forward to.

This evening I am off to the Merril Collection to see Jill Lepore talk about her book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman.

I may get a cab.

Le Guin Loves Finland

~ Cheryl

Today’s tweet stream wasn’t all rage-inducing. There were some very nice things too. Top of the list was this blog post by Ursula K. Le Guin in which she praises her Finnish publisher for getting the appearance of characters right on a book cover. Of course we all know that the Finns are wonderful, but it is lovely to have Ms. Le Guin on board too.

Do you need any more reasons to vote for Helsinki in 2017?

Launching the Nunslinger

~ Cheryl

Today I headed into Bristol for a launch event at Forbidden Planet. It was for Nunsligner by Stark Holborn. Stark is a pen name of a local writer, and Nunslinger is a rather unusual book. To start with it is a Western. Also it is written as a collection of 12 longish short stories, with an overarching story arc. Westerns about nuns are by no means unknown, but Stark thinks this might be the first one in which the nun is actually serious about her faith, as opposed to it being something that gets abandoned very quickly under the pressure of life in the Wild West. I understand that the individual stories were released as ebooks as Stark was writing them. That’s an interesting pressure to put yourself under.

I haven’t had time to read the book yet, but judging from the extract we heard at the launch I am expecting it to be very good. Stark will be reading at BristolCon Fringe in February and as long as the date doesn’t clash with my having to be in Manchester for LGBT History Month I’ll be there and hope to podcast it.

While I was in store I picked up the latest Bryan Talbot graphic novel, Grandville Noel. I read most of it on the train home and finished it quickly thereafter. Bryan is on fine form, and the book contains some interesting information on the history of the Grandville world. Highly recommended.

North by Southwest – Final Week

~ Cheryl

My pals at the North Bristol Writers Group are into the final week of their crowdfunding campaign for the North by Southwest anthology. They need less than £200 to get fully funded, so do please consider backing the campaign. There will be stories by Roz Clarke, Kevlin Henney, Ian Milllsted, Pete Sutton, Justin Newland and Desiree Fischer, all of whom you may have heard on BristolCon Fringe podcasts. There will be art by Claire Hutt. And in particular there will be a new steam-powered programmable war elephants story by John Hawkes-Reed.

The ebook is only a fiver, and remember, after January 1st it won’t be possible for EU-based companies to use crowdfunding with digital rewards because of the cost of VAT compliance. Get this while you can.

Ancillary Justice at Mr. B’s

~ Cheryl

Yesterday evening I attended a meeting of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club run by Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. The book under discussion was Ann Leckie’s multi-award-winning Ancillary Justice. I had recommended it to the group months ago, but they chose to go with another of my choice’s — Sheri S. Tepper’s Grass — instead. Now, with all of those awards behind it, Ancillary Justice was back on the menu.

I’m delighted to report that everyone at the group was pleased that they had read the book. Some, inevitably, had had difficulty getting into it. The lack of information about characters’ gender is hard to get used to if you have grown up in a society that uses gendered pronouns. Most people who read the book, including me, start out by trying to guess what gender the characters are. Eventually most people relax into the story and stop doing that. The few bad reviews that the book has had appear to be have mostly been written by people who were unable to do that.

One thing that did interest me is that a few of the group, presumably quite subconsciously, constantly referred to the characters as “he”, despite everyone in the book being referred to as “she”. These people were all women. It just goes to show how deeply ingrained the default-to-masculine idea is.

The only major complaint raised was about The Gun (you’ll know what that means if you have read the book, and I’ll try not to give too much spoiler if you haven’t). Basically The Gun is a piece of alien technology so advanced that no one in the Radsch (the human space empire) can understand how it works. Most of us were OK with that, but for one person who likes his SF neatly explained it was an unwelcome intrusion of magical technology.

Ancillary Sword is now available, and I think most of the group are going to buy it and read it. However, before then we have the January meeting coming up, and the chosen book for that is Mythago Wood. I’m really looking forward to reading it again. And we’ll all be buying the brand new 30th anniversary edition, complete with Neil Gaiman’s new introduction.

William Gibson at Toppings

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday evening I headed into Bath to see William Gibson at Toppings. It was a very interesting evening, and I’m certainly looking forward to reading The Peripheral. Unfortunately it is also Locus Recommended Reading List season, and as anything by Bill is going to be on the list by default I really need to think diversity and read other books first.

Still, some of you will be interested to know what The Peripheral is like, so here as a few comments. The most important thing to note is that, unlike the Blue Ant series, this book is set in the future. The real future, not an unevenly distributed present. It includes smart phone systems that are embedded in the body, and distributed rather than being a single lump of tech. The other thing I got from the reading is that it is going to be quite funny. Here are a couple of quotes:

You’re a publicist, she’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.

She smiled, displaying teeth whose placement might well have been decided by a committee.

Bill is still clearly very much interested in PR, but he appears to be taking a lighter and more sarcastic view of the whole thing, at least from the bits of the book I heard.

There was also a Q&A session. I asked him a follow-on question from the Start the Week show he did on Tuesday. He talked about how he expected that people from around the time of The Peripheral will look back on our era with as much disgust as we look back on the Victorians. Asking him what about us might seem so disgusting in the wake of the Ferguson verdict was, of course, a no-brainer, but I asked him anyway and he gave exactly the sort of answer I was hoping for. He said that, given much of what disgusts us about the Victorians are things they were very proud of, what will disgust future humanity about our era won’t just be things like destroying the environment, it will also be some of the things that we do that we think are wonderful.

On the subject of social media, Bill said he expected it to fade away as we become more connected, presumably because we’ll always be able to check in on what each other is doing, rather than needing a platform to do so. I’m less convinced about that, because the whole point of things like Facebook is to create a walled garden that users think is the entire internet. That people buy into this, despite the far greater risks, suggests that we’ll always be prey to such marketing ploys.

Another really interesting answer he gave was in response to a question about AIs. This is what he said:

Our idea of artificial intelligence may turn out to be like the flying cars of the 1940s

Science fiction authors, please take note.

Finally, Bill was asked if The Peripheral was going to be the first book of a trilogy. He said he hoped not, and in particular he hoped that it would not become one of those works of art whose value was diminished by its sequels. Yes, he was talking about The Matrix. Sorry Lana.

New Writing

~ Cheryl

Last night (UK time) a new ebook appeared on the Twelfth Planet Press website. It is the Galactic Suburbia Scrapbook, which advertises itself as containing, “some of the highlights of 4 years and 100 episodes of Alex, Alisa and Tansy speaking to you from the Galactic Suburbs!” This is entirely true, however, it also contains various guest articles and pieces of feedback received by the show, and one of the guest articles is by me. The title of the article is, “Curse You, Tansy, I Bought Another One”, which probably gives you a good idea of what it is all about.

Naturally the book contains lots of other content, all of which is fabulous, so you can safely ignore the two pages of mine in it. All proceeds from the book go towards keeping Galactic Suburbia on air, which is a very fine cause. You can buy it here.

Also, my latest column for Bristol 24/7 has just gone live. It is about trolls. The boring kind, not the nice Nordic creatures.

Available Now – Roz’s Resurrections

~ Cheryl

Resurrections - Roz Kaveney


It is a fairly depressing day online: people’s parents dying, cats dying and so on. To cheer myself up I thought I’d post some nice book covers. This is one for a book you can get now, because it was launched on Wednesday. It is Resurrections, the third volume in Roz Kaveney’s Rhapsody of Blood series. I’m reading the book at the moment. Roz is a very, very naughty National Treasure. Then again, us Trans girls are all going to burn in Hell for All Eternity anyway, so we might as well have a bit of fun before we go.

Oh, and Roz, I think the world needs more details on centaur sex…

A Brush With Celebrity

~ Cheryl

The Bath event was for a biography with Gareth Thomas, who is one of the UK’s most famous gay men. Obviously he’s not in the same league as Elton John and Ian McKellen, but for reasons that should become obvious he has a huge impact.

Gareth’s story is pretty much the same as any other LGBT person’s. It involves being lonely and desperate as a kid, being afraid to tell your friends and family the truth, and being afraid of what will happen if they find out. It involves suicide attempts. And eventually there is a coming out tale. What make’s Gareth’s story unique is that he had been captain of the Welsh national rugby team, and was still playing professionally when he came out to the public.

Well so what? Probably only my Kiwi friends an understand what this meant in Wales. For the rest of you, imagine if it has been Brett Farve (USA), Wayne Gretsky (Canada) or Adam Gilchrist (Australia). Thomas isn’t an actor or a pop star — the sort of career that gay men are supposed to have. He’s not an ice dancer, or even into something fairly non-contact like baseball. Yes, he was a top sportsman, but he was also an acknowledged leader, a national icon, and a player in a sport that is well known for the physical contact and bravery required of its players.

I could see the effect of that at work last night. We often talk about how out LGBT folks should stand up and be counted so as to be an example to others. I try to do that myself, but I’m not convinced that it makes much difference to the world. I rather suspect that a lot of people think it is just more shameless self-promotion on my part. It is also true that I’m too old, too ugly and too weird (science fiction, ewwww!) to be of any use in the mainstream media. For Gareth Thomas it is a very different matter. There wasn’t a huge crowd (though this was apparently his second event in Bath that day), but afterwards just about everyone who came to get his book signed wanted to talk to him about how much he had meant to them. I imagine that he gets that everywhere he goes. That’s amazing.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading the book. Also, having heard Gareth tell his story, I am even more proud of those teammate such as Stephen Jones and Martyn Williams who stood by him so loyally through a very difficult time. Welsh rugby: it is awesome.

Historical Fantasy at Foyles

~ Cheryl

La Belle Dame San Merci - Sir Frank Dicksee

After the radio show I managed to find Juliet in time for us to have lunch and see a bit of Bristol before the event. Juliet asked to see an art gallery, so I took her up Park Street to the City Museum and introduced her to the work of the Bristol School, in particular Rolinda Sharples. That gallery is something that Mary Robinette Kowal needs to visit, and it is full of contemporary paintings of people in 18th Century clothing.

The Bristol School stuff is OK, and does have a couple of over-the-top apocalyptic pieces reminiscent of John Martin (and which may pre-date him, I need to check). However, the stand-out piece in the collection is one of my favorite bits of Pre-Raphaelite art, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, by Sir Frank Dicksee. As this post is mainly about historical fantasy, I have chosen that to illustrate it. (Doesn’t look a bit like Nyx, though.)

We were spared further traffic chaos, and both Helen Hollick and Jack Wolf turned up at the store on time. Helen was resplendent in a pirate costume to advertise her current series of books. We had an excellent discussion. It hardly needed me there to moderate it. There was a decent crowd too. You never quite know with these things, but I think Foyles will have been pleased. We were delighted to see a bunch of the local steampunk group turn up in costume.

Juliet has written a blog post about the discussion here, and there’s no point in my re-hashing that. I did record it, but I haven’t listened to the recording yet and even if it is OK I have no idea when I’ll get the time to edit it. The other thing I took away from the event is that I really need to read Lucienne’s book, To The Fair Land, if only to see what she has made of that strange Terra Australis. I wonder if her characters find that large island where all of the inhabitants have two heads? (That’s an Australian joke, for which Tansy will probably kill me.)

I wish I had been able to hang around and talk to people, but I had an hour to get to an event in Bath, so I headed out immediately the panel was over. Thanks again to all for a great evening.

Yesterday on Ujima – Historical Fantasy Preview

~ Cheryl

I wasn’t in the studio for long yesterday. I just had a half hour slot previewing the Historical Fantasy event we would be doing in Foyles that evening. I had been expecting Juliet McKenna to join me, but an accident near Swindon blocked her access onto the M4 and left her parked and fuming for an hour or so. Thankfully Luciennce Boyce and I were able to have a good discussion, which mostly didn’t overlap with what we said in the evening.

The rest of the show was given over to an interview with the head of the Bristol Green party, Councilor Daniella Radice. I need to listen to that myself. I couldn’t stick around for too long as I had to go and find Juliet.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here, and the second hour here.

Game of History Reminder

~ Cheryl

A Game of History
As noted last week, tomorrow evening I will be chairing an event at Foyles in Bristol. It will feature Juliet E. McKenna, Lucienne Boyce, Helen Hollick and Jack Wolf. I hope to see some of you there.

Also, Juliet and Lucienne will be joining me on Ujima Radio’s Women’s Outlook show at noon to discuss the panel and their work.

It should be a great day. I’m certainly looking forward to it.

The Future is Luxurious, and French

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Well here is an exciting thing.

The Comité Colbert is a trade association of French luxury goods manufacturers founded in 1954. Members produce all sorts of things from fashion to champagne to furniture. Also, crucially, some of them publish books. Naturally they exist to encourage people to buy fine French merchandise.

Given all of the doom, gloom and austerity around at the moment, these good people decided that the world needed a bit of cheering up. So they commissioned a bunch of French science fiction writers to imagine a utopia (set in 2074) in which everyone would be able to partake of a little French luxury.

The result is an anthology called Dreaming 2074. And because this is, after all, a marketing exercise, the Comité Colbert has paid to have the book translated into English, and is making the ebook edition available for free. You can download it here.

So basically you lucky people are getting seven stories by top French science fiction writers translated into English for free. Well, six writers actually. One of the stories is a musical interlude present in the book only as a QR code. Anyway, go snap them up. The Table of Contents is as follows:

  • Porphyrian Tree (Xavier Mauméjean)
  • Amber Queen (Olivier Paquet)
  • Facets (Samantha Bailly)
  • Future Mirages (Roque Rivas) (Musical illustration)
  • Diamond Anniversary (Jean-Claude Dunyach)
  • A Corner of Her Mind (Anne Fakhouri)
  • The Chimeras’ Gift (Joëlle Wintrebert)

Giant Squid Book

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Last week I got tempted by a very big book. This one. Yes, I know, it is Lovecraft. But if you want to deconstruct Lovecraft you have to know a bit about what he wrote, and this book looks invaluable from that point of view.

Also it is ridiculously good value at only £25.

Of course I have dipped into it. You know that thing when you have written a story around an actual sequence of historical events, and then some new research revels that a key date you had was wrong, and it blows a hole in your plot… Yeah, that.

New Bristol Writers Anthology Crowdfunds

~ Cheryl

A bunch of my Bristol-based writer pals are currently running a crowdfunding campaign for an anthology. It features a number of people who will be familiar to you, especially if you have been to BristolCon, listened to Fringe podcasts, or read Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion. Pete Sutton is running the campaign; Jo Hall is editing the book; contributors include Pete, Roz Clarke, John Hawkes-Reed, Kevlin Henney, Ian Millsted, Justin Newland & Desiree Fischer. Some of the stories in the book have been read at Fringe events. Illustrations are provided by Claire Hutt. The book will be called North by Southwest, and you can back it here.

Halloween Sale – Monster Hunters

~ Cheryl

Monster HuntersIt is Halloween, and the world is full of Ghoulies, Ghosties, Long-legged Beasties and Things that Go Bump in the Night. What better time, therefore, to engage the services of Challoner, Murray & Balfour: Monster Hunters at Law?

And because we are a generous lot here at Wizard’s Tower (and don’t want to see you eaten by supernatural horrors), we are making this fine book by Juliet E. McKenna available at half price: just £1.49.

This offer is only available for the next 24 hours, and only through the Wizard’s Tower bookstore. Go grab it now.

News From Mr. B’s

~ Cheryl

There have been a couple of big announcements from the fabulous Bath bookseller, Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. First up, they have launched their own publishing imprint: Fox, Finch & Tepper. They’ll be doing primarily literary fiction, but I can guarantee that it will be very interesting literary fiction. I see from the website that the company has been named after three favorite literary characters. That’s a lovely idea, though I hope Mr. B will forgive me if I assume that the company is actually named after Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s 9 Tail Fox, Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch, and feminist author, Sheri S. Tepper.

The other big announcement is that their blog will shortly be featuring a weekly interview with favorite authors, the first of whom will be none other than Margaret Atwood. Look out for that on Wednesday.

I’m never likely to be a good enough writer to feature in that interview series, but as I was at a loss for something to write about today I thought I would give their standard questions a go.

1) If you were to be stuck in a lift for three hours with any character from literature, who would it be?

Easy. Iron Man. Because he could get me out of there in three minutes. Except we might take the whole three hours because Tony and I would be, er, busy.

2) What was the last book that produced an out pouring of emotion in you? A snort of laughter or tears into a handkerchief?

Resistance, by Samit Basu. Samit does really funny superhero books, though with an equally serious edge.

3) Which book do you really wish you had written?!

Light by M. John Harrison. The Course of the Heart is still my favorite MJH book, but Light is just extraordinary. Jon Courtenay Grimwood said in his Guest of Honour interview at BristolCon that it is a book that makes you want to stop writing because you know you can never do anything that good.

4) What book did you make your parents read and re read to you when you were younger?

It was a book called The Land Where the Kangaroo Lives. I used to tell my parents that I was going to live in Australia when I grew up. And guess what…

5) What one passage from any book you have read has always stuck with you and why?

That’s kind of hard, but I’m going to plump for this one from Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl, because it encapsulates trans life so well:

I began to understand why Abalyn lived the way she did, writing reviews for video games, avoiding conventional workspace. She felt safe cloistered in front of her monitor or television screen, with no prying, uninvited eyes studying her, drawing unwelcome, uninformed conclusions.

6) What is the current read on your bedside table?

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (which is entirely your fault, Mr. B.)

7) We know you are not meant to judge a book by its cover but we all do, so confess… tell us which book you read purely down to aesthetics, and did it live up to your expectations?

I glance up at my wall and see a print of John Picacio’s cover for Mark Chadbourn’s World’s End. I love the art. The book, sadly, did not thrill as much.

World's End - John Picacio

8) You meet a person who is not a reader at all but they’re prepared to give it a go with your ONE suggestion… what book do you press into their hands?

This one is really difficult. I don’t think it can be science fiction or fantasy, because some people simply can’t get on with such books, and I know nothing about my new friend’s tastes. I think it has to be a YA book, because it needs to be an easy read. Obviously I could recommend Harry Potter, because I know millions of people enjoyed it, but it fails my no fantasy rule. Besides, I didn’t think much of the first book. So I’m going to opt for a book I loved as a child and read many times: Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff. Like Nicola Griffith’s Hild, that is historical fiction that reads like fantasy, and I know lots of SF&F writers who adore it.