Science Fiction

Time Out Of Mind – Sir Arthur Clip

~ Cheryl

I’ve talked before about the BBC2 series, Time Out Of Mind, which was made in 1979 and featured several science fiction writers. I’m lucky enough to have digitized video recordings of the programmes (thank you, Arnold Akien!). The final episode, filmed at the 1979 Worldcon in Brighton, has been made available on YouTube and has not yet attracted the attention of any lawyers, so I’m thinking of doing the same with the rest.

While I’m getting the material uploaded, here is a teaser from the first episode in the series. It features Sir Arthur C. Clarke and in the clip he is holding a press conference in a hotel room. Look out for a young journalist there with his camera. You may recognize him, despite the fact that he’s not wearing his now-customary black clothing.

Update: Neil says it can’t be him because he wasn’t there. So know I want to know who it is, and why he has stolen Neil’s hair.

China Comes To Clarkesworld – #WITMonth

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The new issue of Clarkesworld is now online. It includes “Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy”, a story by Chinese writer, Xia Jia, whose work I highlighted recently. Also in this issue is “Patterns of a Murmuration, in Billions of Data Points”, a story by Jy Yang, who is from Singapore. The big news, however, is in Neil’s editorial:

I am pleased to announce that Clarkesworld has entered into an agreement with Storycom International Culture Communication Co., Ltd. to showcase a short story originally published in Chinese in every issue. Each month, an all-star team of professionals intricately familiar with Chinese short fiction will be recommending stories for this special feature and I’ll select which ones get translated and published in each issue.

That team will include Liu Cixin, one of China’s best known science fiction writers, and Ken Liu, who should need no introduction to people here.

Neil told me about this at Worldcon, and I have been itching to tell you about it ever since. As per the editorial, there will be a Kickstarter starting soon to fund the translations. It is an amazing project, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing a regular supply of the best Chinese fiction being translated into English.

Big Donation for Eaton Collection

~ Cheryl

A local paper in Riverside reports a major donation of $3.5m to the Eaton Collection. The money comes from the estate of a long-time fan, Jay Kay Klein, who died in 2012. This is apparently the largest donation ever made to the UC Riverside Library, and hopefully it will help secure the future of the Eaton, which is one of the world’s largest repositories of material relating to science fiction and fantasy. Of course there is still the issue, reported a few weeks ago, of the new Library Administration being unconvinced of the value of the Eaton. I’m hoping that the donation causes them to have a change of mind.

New Book on Posthuman Life

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

My friend David Roden, who is a Professor of Philosophy specializing in transhumanist thought, has published a new book called Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human. You can read more about it here. Being an academic book, it is fairly expensive, and there’s no sign of an ebook edition. It does look very interesting, though. I mean, how can you resist an academic book, one of whose chapters is titled “Weird Tales”?

The Trans Stuff at Worldcon

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today there was an academic program section that included a paper on trans characters in science fiction. It was given by Paul Ballard, and I went along to see what he had to say. I was completely floored when he opened up by recommending that people read this. It is a bit outdated now. I need to do a new version.

Paul works with a trans youth group in Kent so he knows his stuff. Like me, Paul is concerned that trans people are being misrepresented in fiction because of a desire by cis writers to use them for entertainment, or to make political points. He made an interesting point that for a character in a novel to count as trans that character should have a specific will to change in some way; it was not enough to have forced change, or change that is entirely natural of the character. I need to think a bit about this, in particular with reference to people who see themselves more as gender-fluid, but it could be a useful distinction.

Mention of characters that shift genders naturally brings us naturally to The Left Hand of Darkness. Paul noted that the Gethenians really aren’t trans people in a Terran sense. I noted, as I often do in such discussions, that it can be read as a book about Trans Panic; that is the discomfort (and sometimes murderous rage) that cis people can develop when confronted by a trans person whom they thoughts was cis. Also giving a paper in the session was Jason Bourget, whom I had previously met when we were on a trans issues panel together in Montréal. Jason is a Le Guin scholar (and presented a good paper on gender in The Dispossessed). He noted the debate over the fact that Le Guin had used male pronouns for the Gethenians, and said that the Trans Panic reading only works when male pronouns are used. If female pronouns had been used, Genly would need to be gender-swapped to female (and probably made a Radical Feminist) for the same reading to work.

By the way, trying to read a paper which talks about trans people and transhumanism, which are two very different things, is very difficult. We need new terminology.

Marina Dayachenko – #WITMonth

~ Cheryl

Marina Dayachenko, together with her husband, Sergey, form Russia’s powerhouse fantasy fiction duo, though they are actually Ukrainian by birth and also write in their native tongue. They have won a host of awards in Russia, and were voted Best Writers at the 2005 Eurocon. I’m currently looking at Vita Nostra, which Aliette has been enthusing about, and which also has a rave blurb from Lev Grossman. Another of their novels, The Scar, was picked up by Tor in 2012.

Today on Ujima – Space Pirates!

~ Cheryl

Today I’m delighted to have Huw Powell (Gareth’s younger brother) in the studio to talk about his book, Spacejackers. There will be thrills, adventure, piracy! As scurvy a bunch of knaves as ever set foot in a radio studio.

Also on the show I have a massage therapist. I could probably do with taking him to Worldcon with me, because you sure need a massage after one of those.

I’m not 100% sure what’s on for the second hour. If we don’t have anyone in the studio, we might just talk a little about media harassment and the spurious “balance” arguments used by the BBC and others to justify broadcasting hate speech.

Xia Jia – #WITMonth

~ Cheryl

As with just about every other country in the world, most of the SF&F writers that we are beginning to hear of from China are male. There are some very good ones, but there must be women too. The only one I am familiar with is Xia Jia, who has this story in Clarkesworld.

China seems to be opening up a lot with regard to its science fiction community. That’s in no small part due to the fabulous translation work being done by Ken Liu, but others are helping out too. I’m looking forward to seeing my friend Regina from Shanghai at Worldcon. I must remember to ask about other women writers.

Update: Via Twitter John Chu and Ken Liu have pointed me at Cheng Jingbo, Hao Jingfang and Tang Fei.

Update 2: Via Facebook Regina adds Zhao Haihong, Chi Hui & Chen Qian. She notes that both Tang Fei and Zhao Haihong will be at Worldcon.

A World SF Resource

~ Cheryl

Via Europa SF I have made contact with Professor Arielle Saiber of Bowdoin College who will be teaching a course on World SF next year. As part of the preparation for the course, she has put together a website listing resources such as anthologies, blogs and so on that provide information about the wealth of science fiction being produced outside of the USA and UK. I have suggested a few things to her, but I’m sure there is more that can be added. You can find the site here. Those of you who are not (like me) desperately rushing around either getting to, or getting ready to go to, London, please take a look and see if you can help flesh it out.

Perceptions of Sub-Genre

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been seeing a few comments lately about how books by women don’t get seen as belonging to certain sub-genres even though they appear to fit the criteria. N.K. Jemisin was asking yesterday why her latest series is not seen as Grimdark, given the amount of slaughter that goes on. And here Vandana Singh (who teaches theoretical physics) talks about her relationship with Hard SF.

Obviously that’s her personal take on the issue, and I pretty much agree with all of it, but I’d like to add a couple of my personal observations.

Firstly I suspect that many people have come to identify Hard SF with the “written with wooden dialog, cardboard characters, stereotypes of gender, race and sexuality, and ‘as you know, Bob’ infodumps” stereotype that Vandana mentions. Women tend not to write stories like that. They are far too interested in people. And consequently, when they do write Hard SF, it doesn’t get recognized as such because it doesn’t conform to the stereotype, even though the science itself might be brilliant.

In addition I suspect that women writers of Hard SF are held to a much higher standard than male writers in the same sub-genre. Let me explain by means of a personal anecdote. Before I transitioned, if I came across a programming problem I could not solve I was quite happy using support services, online forums and so on. After transition I quickly realized that using such things was a waste of time, because nothing I said would be believed or taken seriously. That wasn’t because I had suddenly become a bad programmer, it was because I now had a female name. As a result of that, my ability to do technology would always be called into question by most males that I encountered.

I suspect that the same is true of women trying to write Hard SF. Historically, boys have been brought up to believe that they are much better at science and technology than girls, and that’s an easy story to maintain if you segregate them in all-boy schools. (Don’t try to pretend to me that this doesn’t happen. I was raised a boy, remember?) If someone brought up in that environment encounters a woman who is good at science or tech, he’ll feel that his masculinity is threatened if he can’t somehow prove her wrong. And that means questioning the “hardness” of SF by women.

By the way, this can work the other way around to some extent. I spent a lot of time studying fashion as a kid because I knew I was missing out on girlhood and wanted to plug the gap. These days I occasionally meet women who seem threatened by the possibility that I might do femme better than them. Or at least regard me as some sort of performing animal that can do things that should not come naturally to it. Gender expectations are a total pain.

Kathryn Allan – Accessing the Future

~ Cheryl

Yesterday I recorded an interview with Kathryn Allan, who is co-editing the Accessing the Future anthology with Djibril al-Ayad of The Future Fire. The anthology will focus on themes of disability in science fiction. We also talk about how Kathryn came to be the current recipient of the Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship (and a quick shout out here to Margaret McBride who is indeed awesome as Kathryn says).

The sound quality is slightly ropey at my end, which is probably because I forget to cover up the big, flat screens around here with something soft. I really do need a home studio. However, we seem to have avoided picking up the person using a powered trimmer next door throughout much of the recording, which is a big relief.

Disability activism is an area that I’m not very familiar with, so if I have inadvertently used inappropriate language please accept my apologies in advance (and do suggest how I could do better). Apologies also for keeping bringing the discussion back to trans issues, but that’s what I know and hopefully it does make it clear how intersectional all this stuff is.

When you have had a listen, please go and back the anthology project.

Update: Who forgot the embed link. *headsmack*

Vintage Visions

~ Cheryl

Yesterday I got a book in the mail. It doesn’t happen often these days, but one publisher I am always happy to hear from is Wesleyan, who produce some marvelous academic books about science fiction.

This week#s loot was a book called Vintage Visions, and subtitled (because academic books always have subtitles) Essays on Early Science Fiction. It has been put together by Arthur B. Evans who is an expert in the work of Jules Verne, but the book covers a wide range of different topics. The essays are all reprints, and some are not that new, but they all sound interesting. Andrea Bell has an essay about a Chilean novel dating from 1878; Rachel Haywood Ferreira surveys the roots of Latin American SF; and a piece by Susan Gubar about C.L. Moore that was a pioneering work in the study of feminist science fiction from 1980. Crunchy.

Introducing Uncanny

~ Cheryl

I’m a couple of days late to this, so I’m sure that you will have seen this from many, many other people by now. However, it bears repeating, because having good quality SF&F magazines out there is a very good thing. I have a great deal of faith in the ability of Lynne M. Thomas, Michael Damian Thomas and their staff to put together an excellent publication. I’ve backed it. You may want to as well. You can find the Kickstarter campaign for Uncanny here, and the magazine’s website here.

The Australian Spec Fic Snapshot

~ Cheryl

Every few years our Australian friends get into a frenzy of interviewing, aiming to highlight as many of their fine writers as possible. It is a fine tradition started by Ben Peek and known as the The Australian Spec Fic Snapshot. Some information on this year’s edition can be found here.

Probably the best way to follow the whole thing is via the #2014Snapshot hashtag on Twitter. That will give you links to everything posted thus far. And there is a lot. This year they have even gone so far as to interview someone who only lived in Australia for two years. The results of that should be online some time tomorrow.

Finncon, Day 0

~ Cheryl

Bear & Scott: “We’re very sorry, thanks to a mechanical problem we missed our connection in Iceland and we’ll be a few hours late.”

Finns: “Yeah, no worries. We remember when an airline lost Joe Haldeman. We coped with that. It will be OK.”

In other news, I think I have now done all of the necessary prep for my panels at Finncon. I have also eaten blueberry & cardamon ice cream, and tried a local coffee stout. The former was spectacular, the latter nice but not up to Wildebeest standard.

Tomorrow I’ll be off to Jyväskylä for the start of the Finfar academic convention. I read the papers on the flight over. There’s the usual mix of quality, as you might expect from students. If you’d like to get a taste of the sort of thing Finnish academics produce you can take a look at Fafnir, the Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research.

New Dimension 6

~ Cheryl

Issue #2 of the free Australian speculative fiction magazine, Dimension 6, is now available. You can download it as a DRM-free epub or mobi, from the publisher’s website. This issue contains stories from Dirk Strasser, Alan Baxter and Robert N Stephenson.

Ã…con 7 – The Post-Colonial SF Panel

~ Cheryl

Here is the first of my podcasts from Ã…con 7. It is a panel about post-colonial SF. The panelists are: Karen Lord, Sari Polvinen, Juha Tupasela & me.

I noted while editing it that I totally derailed Sari’s question about classic SF that counted as post-colonial, for which my apologies.

Tech services at Ã…con are provided by Jonas Wissting to whom I am indebted for this recording.

A History of Arabic SF

~ Cheryl

It is written in Italian, which probably makes it difficult for most of my readers, but there is an English-language interview with the author, Ada Barbaro, over at the Arab Lit blog. We really do need a Europe-wide academic SF conference. I’d love to meet Ms. Barbaro. She is on Twitter.

All of which reminds me that Somewhere!, the sequel to Ibraheem Abbas & Yaser Bahjatt’s novel, HJWN, is now available on Amazon.