Neil Giuliano, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, says in a statement: “GLAAD has reached out to Amazon.com and they indicate this was an error, so we expect to start seeing evidence of its correction immediately, and any loss of visibility of gay-themed books as a result of this error will be made right by Amazon … When people learn about the lives of gay and transgender people and the common ground we share, the culture changes and advances. It is so important that stories about the lives of our community are available, and that companies like Amazon promote these titles in an equal fashion.â€
Which sounds like excellent news. Hopefully things will be back to normal in a day or two.
The AmazonFail story was still rumbling along when I got up this morning. Explanations of what happened are starting to edge into conspiracy theory territory, and other people I’m sure are saying that any bookstore has a right to offer only the books it wants to offer.
Well that’s true, and it would be true for Amazon had they not become so phenomenally successful that people have stopped seeing them as a bookstore and have started to see them as the bookstore. So before people start clamoring for attacks on any web site that still has Amazon links (because you know, someone, somewhere is going to do so) let’s consider what alternatives we might have. After all, as Alethea Kontis wisely said on Twitter last night:
You don’t have to buy books from Amazon, but please don’t stop buying books.
The option I’m currently most interested in is IndieBound. This is an association of independent bookstores. It appears to be US-only at the moment, but that’s where most of my sales come from anyway. They have an affiliate scheme, just like Amazon, although I’m guessing that they only sell books. The scheme appears to be keyed off ISBN numbers, but I think Amazon uses ISBNs for their ASIN numbers in the book part of their store so a change-over might not be too difficult. Does anyone out there have any experience of using their scheme?
Because I’m a fairly organized programmer-type person, most of the Amazon links on this site go through the same code. I have disabled them all. There will be a few hard-coded links I have missed, and doing Emerald City is harder, but I will start to make progress on that too.
Can someone out there who has some artistic talent make an Amazonfail logo that people who have removed links in protest can place on their sites? Thanks!
Something very strange is happening in Amazon land. It appears that someone at the online bookseller had decided to strip the sales rankings from any book that includes gay or lesbian romance on the grounds that this is “adult content” (i.e. pornographic). The alarm was first raise by some gay writers (see here) whose books had been affected, but I’ve just seen a tweet from Neil pointing me to this list of affected books which includes classics such as Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and The Well of Loneliness.
This is clearly not a move against books with explicit erotic content. This is defining any mention of gay relationships as disgusting and pornographic. I am very disappointed in Amazon.
Update: John Coulthart reports (via Twitter) that academic books with LGBT content have also been hit. I immediately went to look for Queer Universes and I can’t see it listed at all. I’ve been checking some of my friends. All of Nicola Griffith’s books appear to have been hit. Christopher Barzak’s have not. Kelley Eskridge is also untouched.
While I was having lunch today I was watching the end of a one-day cricket match in which South Africa were roundly thrashing Australia. The game was pretty much over when I tuned in, but I stuck around to listen because the current commentary team was billed as Greg Blewett and Claire Cowan. Blewett, of course, I knew. He had a fine career with Australia, but who was this South African woman? Indeed, not only did we have a woman in the commentary box (which must be causing MCC members to have heart attacks), but she was clearly very knowledgeable about the game, even venturing to give Punter some advice on his batting technique.
Thanks to CricInfo I now know that Ms. Cowan opened the batting for the South African ladies team in a couple of tests back in 2003. It wasn’t a stellar playing career, but she seems to have successfully talked her way into the commentary box. And she’s doing a real job as well, not just reporting “human interest” stories from the sidelines, which appears to be the “woman’s role” in most sports broadcasting.
So well done Claire, and well done South Africa. That and Claire Taylor being the first woman to be honored as one of Wisden’s Players of the Year. I await news that an earthquake has struck the Members’ Room at Lords.
Today’s Guardian Book Blog once again takes up the challenge of what to do about male literacy. Apparently research has once again shown that hardly any men read books. (Although, as Farah once had in her email sig, “if men don’t read and women don’t read SF, who on Earth is buying it?”)
Anyway, Jean Hannah Edelstein has some concrete suggestions as to what to do about the problem:
Real change won’t occur until publishers band together and make a concentrated effort to re-masculate reading. One option, I suppose, would be to publish special gentlemen’s editions of books that are currently targeted at women, but might actually have male appeal. Female protagonists could be given male names, and romantic plots could be tweaked slightly to be more about football.
It obviously works too. Ian McDonald put football in his last novel and it got on the Hugo ballot.
I did promise you three posts, didn’t I? Well, we made it. I’m a bit late for the UK, but it is still Tuesday in California so I think I’m OK.
The third post is my first foray into writing for Flashlight Worthy Books, a web site that specializes in going book lists – short suggestions of “things you might like” organized around a theme. This one is about Classics of Steampunk, and it is dedicated to Ada Lovelace and Mary Shelley. Enjoy.
Things, as they say, are going swimmingly. I have two posts up. I may have another, but it is being posted elsewhere and I can’t guarantee it will go up today. I’ll link to it as and when it appears.
In the meantime we have been featured in The Guardian, and on the BBC news this lunchtime. If you want to see what has happened so far, there is a web site here where people have been registering links to their posts, and you can follow the Twitter activity through Tweetizen here.
When I decided to participate in Ada Lovelace Day the first thing I decided what I wanted to do was to pick someone who was not hugely famous. So despite the fact that I have a chemistry degree, there would be no Marie Curie for me. Everyone knows about her. I wasn’t going to do Ada herself either, or Grace Hopper, despite my long career in software. I was tempted to write about Dona Bailey, who wrote my all-time favorite video game, Centipede, but around the time I heard about ADL I found out about someone else that I really ought to have known about long ago, and who I thought was just perfect for me.
For Christmas I had bought Kevin a bunch of DVDs (so as he’ll have something to keep him out of mischief until I can get back to California). One boxed set was an old BBC series called The Planets. We watched several episodes together in January, and I was particularly struck by the material on the Voyager mission. There was footage of a lady astronomer talking about some of the awesome things they had seen for the first time when examining the photos that Voyager sent back. Her name was Carolyn Porco, and she made her name studying the ringlets and spokes of Saturn’s ring systems using the Voyager data. I believe I remember her saying that she was also the first person to see photographic evidence of the volcanoes on Io, though I can’t find any Internet confirmation of that.
So I thought that Ms. Porco might be an interesting person to write about, and I went and Googled her name. Much to my surprise and delight, I discovered that she is also responsible for some of my favorite NASA achievements — the pictures of Titan sent back by the Huygens and Cassini probes. In fact she’s the head of the imaging team for the whole Cassini mission. She is also on the imaging team for the New Horizons mission that is headed for Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. As far as our knowledge of the outer planets and their moons go, Carolyn Porco is The Man. Or rather, The Woman.
I can’t emphasize enough just how successful the Cassini imaging team have been. There’s a world out there that in many ways looks just like ours. It has clouds and rain and rivers and lakes — maybe even a sea; but the “water†on Titan is actually liquid methane. Science fiction is forever imaging alien worlds, but the Cassini mission, and in particular the Huygens probe that actually landed on Titan, have shown us a real one.
The more research I did about Porco, the more I discovered that she isn’t just a great scientist; she’s a great communicator as well. She is someone that people turn to when they want the mysteries of space explained to them in language that they can understand. She’s also great at conveying the wonder of science — indeed, that very sensawunda that so many of us who grew up in the Space Age have felt, and which caused us to become science fiction fans.
Obviously at this point I should give an example, so here is a YouTube video of Porco talking about the Cassini mission at TED.
The question I then asked myself was, “is she interested in science fiction?†I’d seen her mention Jules Verne a couple of times, and the more I looked, the more connections I found. Here is the web site of the Cassini imaging division — the team that Porco headed. You’ll note the clever acronym title. You may also spot that the blog is titled “Captain’s Logâ€. And if you check out the art gallery section you’ll find that that the first paragraph mentions Chesley Bonestell.
Now what I really want to see at Worldcon is a panel on colonizing the outer planets with Carolyn Porco and Paul McAuley. I wonder if we could get Porco to Montreal? I suspect her diary is booked up way in advance. Maybe Reno in 2011.
It gets better. It turns out that Porco worked closely with Carl Sagan (on the Voyager project). She got to be Jodi Foster’s science consultant for the film Contact. And most recently she has been appointed science advisor for the new Star Trek movie. When you are a rock star astronomer, you get to do these things.
When I was first looking to go to university, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with my life. There were lots of areas of science I was interested in, and nothing I was particularly set on. One of the options, as I had good math skills, was astronomy. Of course at the time there were no famous women astronomers. Patrick Moore was the public face of the profession in the UK. Somehow the idea of swaning around the Caribbean with Jacques Cousteau managed to win out in my impressionable teenage brain. Nowadays, however, it is all very different. These days a young girl with math skills and an interest in science fiction can aspire to grow up to be Carolyn Porco. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a role model. And that’s what Ada Lovelace Day is all about.
I wasn’t intending to write about a science fiction writer for Ada Lovelace Day, but when I found myself writing a review of a book all about Joanna Russ it seemed only appropriate to publish it today.
Other women science fiction writers have, of course, been more successful — Anne McCaffrey, Lois McMaster Bujold, Connie Willis, Octavia Butler, Carolyn Cherryh and Mary Shelley, to name but a few. However, if you are asking about feminist science fiction then there is one name that is head and shoulders above the rest: Joanna Russ. An excellent academic book about her work has just been published. Here is my review.
When you are in the middle of trying to persuade people to revitalize science fiction conventions, the last thing you need is something like this. The post linked to is a litany of fairly awful behavior experienced by the poster and his friends at Lunacon over the weekend. It includes things like:
It is not appropriate to assume that lesbians are there for your pleasure and entertainment; as such, do not ask them to kiss, engage in an orgy, or otherwise amuse you.
and:
It is not appropriate to inquire to a trans person you do not know as to whether they’ve “cut it off yet”
Not to mention all of the usual stuff about washing, hijacking panels and the like.
I am, however, aware that my personal experience is not necessary typical, and experiences like the one linked to cause me to wonder if it might not be atypical.
I also note that already one commenter has muttered about the problems of letting young people into conventions. -sigh-
One specific point that was brought up was about txting during panels. This caused someone to link back to my discussion on the use of technology at Worldcons. Using a full keyboard from a panel audience can be distracting because of the clatter of the keys. Similarly if you have a phone that makes beepy noises every time you press a key, you shouldn’t be using it in a panel. It will probably take a while before some people get comfortable with the ubiquity of electronic communication, and those people may be badly distracted by the use of phones even if it is silent and unobtrusive, but I think in the long term we’ll all get used to it and the technology will get even less obvious.
Overall, however, I suspect that conventions are pretty much typical of society as a whole, although perhaps with an added dose of the “I have a lengthy and turgid intellectual justification for my bad behavior” syndrome. Having abuse yelled at me by strangers in the street is a pretty common experience in the UK (probably at least once a week). Conventions, in comparison, seem fairly safe places. Though that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t challenge inappropriate behavior in our spaces when we encounter it.
In case you haven’t worked it out, ALD09 is this year’s (and hopefully the first of many) Ada Lovelace Day, dedicated to the celebration of women in technology. There will be more from me on Tuesday.
Since he took office, Mr. Obama has been quietly undoing many of the more unpleasant policies of his predecessor. There’s still doubtless a long way to go, but here’s one change that has made me happy. According to Associated Press (reported here on Yahoo) the US will now sign a UN resolution calling for an end to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The resolution was put before the UN in December last year, and the USA was the only Western nation to refuse to sign it.
70 UN member countries still outlaw homosexuality, and in several it is punishable by death.
Over the last few days the British media has been obsessed with the case of a London taxi driver who has been convicted of drugging and sexually assaulting female passengers. The number of victims is quite large, and the offenses have happened over a period of many months. So the question being asked is, how did he get away with it for so long?
In investigating the issue, journalists have discovered that claims of sexual assault are rarely logged as crime reports. Offenses such as car theft get a much higher priority. Why? Well partly it is because some poor guy losing his car is much more important than some hysterical woman complaining just because someone fancied her, right? But it actually goes deeper than that.
The UK government has very aggressive targets for monitoring the effectiveness of the police. They want to make sure that crimes are solved, and offenders brought to justice. So every crime that gets logged needs to be followed up, action taken, results produced. Now put yourself in the position of a police officer. Someone comes to you claiming that she has been raped. You know very well that when it comes to court it will almost certainly be just a case of her word against his. He’ll be quietly confident, she’ll be an emotional mess; his lawyer will subtly suggest that perhaps she imagined it, perhaps she asked for it, perhaps she’s making the whole thing up to get back at him for some slight. The jury will not convict. To get a rape conviction in the UK these days you pretty much have to get a conviction for violent assault as well. So, knowing that you are pretty much bound to fail to “solve” the case to the government’s satisfaction, would you log it as a crime?
Of course women know this. They also know that if a rape case comes to court the newspapers will be all over it, and it is the woman’s reputation that will be dragged through the mud. Given police indifference, the likelihood of failure in court, and media hostility, many women don’t even bother to report being attacked.
And you know, I suspect that men know all of this too.
The last couple of days appear to have gone past in a whirl and I haven’t got nearly as much done as I had hoped, but so it goes. The important thing is that I’m mostly packed in preparation for heading off to London tomorrow. Here are a couple of things I wanted to say more about but have failed dismally to do so:
Mary Anne Mohanraj continues to be awesome on race issues over at Whatever
Sarah Monette talks intelligently about the meaning of “genre” (and clearly needs to read Rhetorics of Fantasy)
I also haven’t spent as much time at Flycon as I would have liked, and of course tomorrow I’ll be on trains. If any of you have been spending time there, I would be interested to hear what you made of it.
I’m currently reading Farah Mendlesohn’s new book, a collection of essays about the life and work of Joanna Russ. The essay I most recently read was by Helen Merrick. It is about Russ’s relationship with the science fiction community, and the fights she got into in fanzines over her feminist politics. There are some interesting parallels with the current spate of argument in the blogosphere, which I thought it might be worth sharing. My apologies to Helen and Farah for using some big quotes, but I think they are needed to make the point. And with any luck it will inspire you to buy the book. Continue reading →
I’ve started to read the Joanna Russ book, but I have decided not to say too much about it at this point because it occurs to me that I really should post the review on Ada Lovelace Day. I’m going to do another post as well, but it seems like a good day to talk about Russ. Perhaps a few of you could do so too.
By the way, Ada made The Guardian yesterday – there is an interview with Suw Charmin-Anderson on their Tech Weekly podcast.
In the meantime I just want to say how much I like Lisa Yaszek’s work. Young revolutionaries are always contemptuous of their forbears who lived in less liberal times and were not able to be as open about their activism. Russ was no exception. The rediscover of “housewife heroine” SF that Yaszek is doing (including, ironically, some early stories by Russ herself) not only gives belated recognition to some fine early women SF writers but also helps remind us that women and men are not the same, and that just because some types of female behavior have been traditionally derided and undervalued by men that doesn’t mean that they are actually without worth.
A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about homophobic and transphobic bullying in UK schools. Pink News reports that the government is to add protection for trans kids to the forthcoming Equality Bill. However, as with all these things, it will take time for the change to have effect. According to the Pink News report, gay and lesbian kids are supposed to have been legally protected in schools since 2007. The report I blogged about yesterday makes it clear that many schools are currently failing to comply with those regulations.
