Science Fiction

Man Trouble

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

While I was out and about in Bristol yesterday, my Twitter feed was buzzing with comment from outraged women. There were two main issues.

The first one is that Dave Truesdale has gone and put his foot in his mouth again. The regularity with which he does this is such that a generous interpretation would assume that he understands outrage marketing and was deliberately trolling female writers and fans in search of traffic for his website. Sadly I’m not convinced that Truesdale is that bright. When he says that he’s not seen even a smidgeon of racism or sexism in science fiction, what he probably means is that he views the supposed intellectual and moral superiority of the white male as a scientific fact, and that therefore stating it cannot be seen as discrimination.

Of course this is the sort of attitude that leads to Men’s Rights Activism and claims of “reverse racism” when it comes up against how the rest of the world sees things.

Anyway, the day did produce one superb blog post: this one in which Amal El-Mohtar recruits famous female SF writers from the past to make her case for her.

While women readers and writers of science fiction around the world were dealing with an actual case of sexism, the white feminist media cabal in the UK (otherwise known as the Lobster & Bolly Set) were up in arms over what they believe to be a far more dangerous threat to feminism: trans women.

Yes, it has been penis panic time again. Our TERF friends appear convinced that all trans women have secret penises with which they will mercilessly abuse any non-trans women that they can find. Now it is certainly true that not all trans women have surgery. Some can’t afford it, some have good medical reasons for not risking it, many are simply on their way through transition, and some have their own reasons for not opting for it. But for the TERFs it is a case of once-a-penis-always-a-penis. So I guess I have a political penis: it might not exist in reality, but for TERF political purposes it is just as real as any man’s pride & joy, if not more so.

Pressed on this, the TERFs are likely to claim that anyone raised as male (even if only for the few brief years needed for them to learn to talk) will have been culturally conditioned for masculinity, and will forever more exhibit behavior that is ineluctably masculine (yes, I did choose that word deliberately). However, even if they were to find a trans woman who looked and behaved in a way they deemed entirely female, they would simply claim that this person had successfully “deceived” them by hiding their “true” nature.

So there you have it. As far as your typical British media feminist is concerned, my supposed political penis is far more threatening to them than anything that Dave Truesdale, or even Elliot Rodger, could come up with. It is good to know that they are keeping their eye on the really important issues while the rest of us are busy with trivial stuff like campaigning on behalf of women writers.

I’d like to see some of them come to Finncon and demand that I be forced to use the men’s sauna.

Meanwhile, because at least one of them is undoubtedly screaming BUT SCIENCE! at this point, here’s an actual science article titled, “What your science teacher told you about sex chromosomes is wrong”. Odd that the same bad-science excuses used by men to justify sexism are used by TERFs to justify their hatred of trans women, isn’t it.

Update: via CN Lester on Twitter here is an excellent overview of how different types of animals decide what sex they are. Hint: it is hardly ever anything to do with chromosomes.

Jay Lake 1964-2014

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Jay Lake


As I’ve said many times before, I’m crap at writing obituaries. That goes double for Jay because I have this stuff in my eyes that is preventing me from focusing on the screen and keyboard. Jay was a friend.

I’ve been spending some time looking for a photo to use with this post. Amazingly I didn’t have a good one. So I have chosen the above photo from Locus because it shows Jay at his larger-than-life best, and wearing one of his trade-mark Hawaiian shirts.

Jay will be remembered for many things, in particular for a significant amount of very fine fiction. However, I hope that he will also be remembered for the tradition of the Campbell Tiara (which he created with Elizabeth Bear). Jay was happy to talk about gender identity issues long before it was fashionable to do so, for which I will always be grateful.

He will, of course, also be remembered for the ferocity with which he fought his illness. If people could survive cancer simply on the basis of their determination not to be beaten by it, Jay would still be with us. In addition to fighting on his own behalf, Jay did everything in his power to ensure that his own struggle would also benefit those who came after him. Because that’s the sort of person he was.

I will miss him dreadfully. So will many other members of our community.

Destruction Completed

~ Cheryl

Lightspeed #49


I have a small part in the splendid publication. Please don’t let that put you off. If you didn’t support the Kickstarter campaign, you can now purchase Women Destroy Science Fiction here.

Contributors include: Seanan McGuire, N. K. Jemisin, Mary Robinette Kowal, Pat Murphy, Maureen McHugh, Charlie Jane Anders, Maria Dahvana Headley , Amal El-Mohtar, Stina Leicht, Nisi Shawl and many others.

Today On Ujima: Bristol & Slavery, plus Talking Books

~ Cheryl

Today’s show began with good and bad news. The good stuff included Nalo Hopkinson winning the Andre Norton Award for Best YA Novel of 2013 at last weekend’s Nebula Awards ceremony. It also included the really good news that Ahad & Anum Rizvi, the two young Pakistanis whose plight I highlighted last week, have been released from detention and will be having their applications for asylum reconsidered.

The bad news was that today’s programming has been dedicated to our of our regular presenters, DJ Flora, who died from cancer yesterday. She was younger than me. Because she presented a late-night show I hardly ever saw her, but many of the staff at the station were very upset about it. There’s an official tribute to her on the Ujima website.

However, the show must go on, and the first hour today was devoted to discussion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and Bristol’s role therein. My main guest in the studio was Dr. Olivette Otele from Bath Spa University who is a well known expert in the history of slavery. Alongside her we welcomed three young people from Cotham School who were with us on a work experience placement. I’m really pleased with how it went. And thanks to Olivette we had some great music. I played Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”, Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit” (one of the most disturbing songs I know) and Louis Armstrong’s “Go Down Moses”. It was great to see the kids’ faces light up with recognition when they heard Satchmo’s voice.

The fourth piece of music was Violin Concerto #9 by Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, played by the Orchestre de Chambre, Bernard Thomas. Saint-Georges is an amazing fellow who really ought to be better known. Those of you setting books in revolutionary France should take note. I also want to see books about Nanny Maroon, one of the other amazing people that Olivette introduced us to.

The discussion includes an appeal to George Ferguson to get Bristol to do more to acknowledge, apologize for, and memorialize the city’s role in the slave trade. You can learn more about the history of Bristol’s involvement in the trade from the M-Shed website.

You can listen to the first hour of the show via Ujima’s Listen Again feature here.

I note that this was the first time I call recall having someone text the studio to tell us how much they were enjoying the show.

The second hour was given over to fiction. I had Jo Hall in the studio to promote her new novel, The Art of Forgetting: Nomad, which is being launched at Forbidden Planet, Bristol on Saturday. That was followed by an interview with Karen Lord that I had recorded during Ã…con. I still have the much longer interview that Karen and I did as part of the convention program. I’m hoping to get that edited and on Salon Futura soon.

Jo got music appropriate for epic fantasy. Bat for Lashes was a no-brainer (I played “Horses of the Sun”, because I had played “Horse and I” a few weeks ago and didn’t want to repeat). The other song I chose was “Killer on the Rampage” by Eddy Grant, because I was teasing Jo about the number of people she killed off in the book. (Really, George would be proud. Whole towns massacred.) Jo’s soundtrack for the new book, which we mentioned in the show, is available here.

Karen had asked for jazz, which I was very happy to provide. I’m sorry we didn’t have time to play either track in full. The two tracks were: “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” by the Cannoball Adderley Quintet; and “Stolen Moments” by Oliver Nelson.

Any discussion of SF&F on the show is liable to get into name-dropping of people we know. Jo enthused about Joe Abercrombie. I invoked Juliet McKenna when we got on the question of discoverability of women writers. And Kate Elliott needs to listen to the Karen Lord interview.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

Next week most of the show is being run by Jackie and Judeline, but I will have half an hour with Kevlin Henney talking about flash fiction. Kevlin won the flash competition run by Crimefest last weekend, which pleased me greatly.

Tomorrow on Ujima

~ Cheryl

The first hour of tomorrow’s Women’s Outlook will see me interviewing Dr. Olivette Otele, an expert on the history of the slave trade. It should be a fascinating interview. If you have any specific issues you’d like me to raise with Olivette while I have her in the studio, please let me know. I can’t guarantee to have time for everything, but if something interesting comes up I’ll try to fit it in.

The second hour will be all books. Jo Hall will be in to talk about her latest novel, the Art of Forgetting: Nomad, which launches at Forbidden Planet on Saturday. After that I’ll be playing an interview with Karen Lord that I recorded at Ã…con.

You can listen live from Noon tomorrow via the Ujima website. I’ll post links to the Listen Again service when I get home.

The Rise of British Superhero Fiction

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Fringe went very well last night. The podcasts will be up early in June. In the meantime I note that something interesting appears to be happening. Last month Jonathan L. Howard read a story from his Goon Squad series, featuring a Manchester-based superhero team. Last night Cavan Scott read from an as yet unfinished novel about a superhero team called Omega Squadron. The section that Cavan read featured two of the team in battle in Cabot Circus, a shopping mall in Bristol that boasts a number of high-end stores such as Harvey Nichols.

This struck me as rather significant. I’ve been hearing for years that superheroes are an intrinsically American genre that just doesn’t work in the UK. Now suddenly two teams have come along at once, as if they were London buses. And of course not long ago we had Samit Basu’s magnificent Turbulence, featuring Indian superheroes.

So what has changed? Do we suddenly want a part of the Hollywood action? Or has British culture simply just warmed to the idea of crime fighters in spandex? Whatever the reason, I’m rather pleased. And I hope that Cavan’s novel finds a publisher.

Magic Murder in The Guardian

~ Cheryl

Thanks to David Barnett, the Murder Most Magical event has got a nice preview in The Guardian. I guess it is online only, but it is nice to be able to get some good PR for the event. The article does contain a few quotes by me, but it also has Paul Cornell whose contributions are very sharp. My main priority was to get a wide variety of people mentioned. You can find the article here.

Several of the issues that David raises will doubtless get covered in the discussion tomorrow night. I have a few more up my sleeve to toss in as well. And yes, I do plan to record it.

Get Your Weird Finns Here

~ Cheryl

One of the things being given out at the convention is a small but very professional-looking magazine called The Finnish Weird. It has an introduction from Johanna Sinisalo, fiction by Tiina Raevaara & Jenny Kangasvuo, and a host of non-fiction articles. While paper editions were available here, and will be around at Worldcon in London, you can read it as an epub or pdf by going here and getting a free download.

It is all in English.

So yeah, free fiction, international writers from a non-Anglo culture, almost all of them women. Go get it.

Tolkien Lecture 2014

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

2014 Tolkien Lecture


Sadly I can’t make this one, because I will be in Finland. It looks like it will be a great event. Also it is free, though you do need to sign up. The official press release follows.

(Oxford, April 9, 2014) Pembroke College have invited award-winning author Adam Roberts to deliver the 2nd Annual Pembroke Lecture on Fantasy Literature in Honour of JRR Tolkien. This lecture in the series designed to explore the history and current state of fantasy literature will take place on May 2nd at 7 pm, it was jointly announced today by Robert O’Shea, President of the Pembroke College Middle Common Room (MCR), and Kendall Murphy, Annual Fund Officer for Pembroke College. Professor Roberts will also participate in a free signing and wine reception following the lecture.

The series is intended to memorialize Tolkien, who was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke for twenty years; he wrote The Hobbit and much of The Lord of the Rings during his time at the college. The lectures are sponsored through a grant from the Pembroke Annual Fund.

‘The Tolkien Lecture was a great success in its first year, with attendees drawn from the university and the community’, said O’Shea. ‘We are pleased to have Professor Roberts as a lecturer this year, given his reputation not only as a science fiction author but as a critic who knows Tolkien well. We feel that Professor Roberts will continue the high standard established in the series’ first year’.

‘The Pembroke Annual Fund connects our alumni to current students and allows them to work together to make an immediate impact on college life’, said Murphy. ‘The Pembroke Tolkien Lecture is precisely the sort of project the Annual Fund was designed to support, thanks to its resonance within and beyond the Pembroke community’.

Adam Roberts is Professor of Nineteenth-century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published fourteen science fiction novels, the most recent of which are Jack Glass (Gollancz 2012), which won the BSFA and Campbell awards for best SF novel of the year; and Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (Gollancz 2014; with Mahendra Singh). With his academic hat on, he has published articles and books on a range of topics including Tolkien. The Riddles of the Hobbit (Palgrave 2013) is the most recent.

Both the lecture and the signing reception are free and open to the public, but online registration is required to ensure a place for the lecture. Please go to pembrokemcr.com/Tolkien for more information.

Vale, Lucius Shepard

~ Cheryl

As reported in various places, Lucius Shepard died today. I’ve said many times before that I am crap at writing obituaries, but I can reprint the following review of Shepard’s short collection, Two Trains Running. The original appeared in Emerald City #106, dated June 2004.

Riding the Rails

Lucius Shepard is, I think, a very brave man. There are a lot of dubious things that journalists have to do in order to get stories. I’m not entirely sure I’d want to be in Iraq right now. But I think I would rather be there than do what Shepard did. He was contracted by a magazine to do a story on an organization called the FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America). Talk to certain law enforcement officers and you will be told that this is a well-organized clandestine operation specializing in drug running with close links to the mafia. In actuality they turned out to be more like a dissolute and geographically dispersed biker gang, with neither the money nor the ability to stay sober for short periods that are required to own and maintain a bike. Two things are clear, however. Firstly, in order to gain their confidence and get them to talk to him, Shepard had to be prepared to get as drunk and stoned as the hoboes themselves. And secondly, at any moment one of them was liable to have turned nasty and tried to kill him.

Still, a story is a story, and Shepard duly produced his. What is more, being a writer as well as a journalist, he also produced two more stories, of the fictional type. The whole collection is now available in a single volume from Golden Gryphon called Two Trains Running. And very good it is too.

The non-fiction piece is a fascinating study of a little-known part of American life. Particularly bizarre is the police officer from Spokane who is convinced that the FTRA is the biggest conspiracy since the Rosicrucians and Mafia decided to hook up with Fu Manchu. Having been to Spokane (and briefly to its even less pleasant neighbor, Boise), I can understand this. There are parts of America that would breath a huge sigh of relief if there was a military coup because at last they would be able to get to grips with the fiendish commie subversives in their midst. But the hoboes are fascinating too, particularly the way that they invent new identities for themselves when they begin to ride the rails, as if to protect the core of their being from the person that they must become in order to survive.

As for the fiction, “Over Yonder”, by far the longer piece, won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for the best short fiction of 2002 I am at a loss to know how it didn’t even appear on the Hugo nomination long list. The other piece, “Jailbait”, is much shorter and unpublished. Both of them are fantasy, of a sort, but of course there’s not an elf in sight. Shepard is a great writer. What more can I say?

Two Trains Running – Lucius Shepard – Golden Gryphon – hardcover

SF & Astronomy, A Boy Thing, Apparently

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

I have email from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific announcing that they have updated their list of science fiction that contains good information about astronomy and related issues. This is a good thing, I thought. We should be educating readers as well as entertaining then. Then I went and looked at the list.

COCKFOREST ALERT!!!

It is a very big list. I haven’t counted them. I did count the works by, or partly by, women (but not including those where the women are editors). That was a lot easier, though I may still have missed some due to initials, pseudonyms, etc. We have:

  • The Cassiopeia Affair, by Chloe Zerwick & Harrison Brown
  • “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death”, by James Tiptree Jr.
  • The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin
  • “Amnesty”, by Octavia Butler
  • “The Fermi Paradox is Our Business Model”, by Charlie Jane Anders
  • “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi”, by Pat Cadigan
  • “Schwarzschild Radius”, by Connie Willis

Is that all, really? Does nothing that Catherine Asaro or Joan Slonczewski has written qualify? Then again, Peter Watts isn’t on the list for good alien lifeforms, so maybe they just need to read a bit more widely. Can we help them out, please?

Update: I’ve been informed that Alex Brett, author of Cold Dark Matter, is also female. However, we are still only at about 3%.

Here Comes The Insect Invasion

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Today John Scalzi and Mary Robinette Kowal have been having a bit of fun with the fact that younger (which I think means under the age of 70) members of SFWA have been described as a “‘vocal minority’ of insects”. With a little bit of help from Ursula Vernon, who drew the recruiting posters, they have launched an insect army.

Oh no, an Ant Invasion! There’s only one thing that SFWA needs now. Some music for a future age.

You may not like it now but you will
The future will not stand still

Cheers Adam, that was perfect.

A Brief Note On SFWA

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Yeah, there was another huge blow-up online yesterday. It happens. And yet again it was caused by someone who is a former member of SFWA. Please bear that in mind.

These online embarrassments are not an indication that people should leave / not join SFWA. Nor, except in the minds of controversy-obsessed journalists, are they evidence that science fiction and fantasy are still a boys-only club. What they are is evidence that SFWA, and the SF&F community, are changing, and that the conservatives are unhappy about it.

That’s not something to be embarrassed about, it is something to celebrate.

The Destruction That Will Not Stop

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Certain things on the Internet just will not stop. SFWA drama is apparently one of them. Yesterday I learned that I am one of a mysterious and dangerous faction known as “the Young”. I am also, apparently, an evil ageist who is horribly oppressing older writers, many of whom are, I suspect, quite a bit younger than I am. Next I expect to get told to “act my age”, by which those lecturing me will mean, “stop listening to other people, get grumpy, and help get those darn kids off our lawns.” I am such a bad old bitch.

But that was yesterday. This morning I awoke to the news that the Women Destroy Science Fiction Kickstarter blew through the 1000% funded barrier on its final day.

It did occur to me when I saw that news that the funding target for destroying all three genres (science fiction, fantasy and horror) had been just $35,000. As Lightspeed now had over $53,000, I wondered what they were going to do with all of the extra money. It didn’t take long to find part of the answer. Waiting for me in my inbox was an email to backers announcing the fourth special issue. Gentle beings, I am delighted to bring you news of:

Queers Destroy Science Fiction

Public Service Announcement: The US Government has declared a 50 mile exclusion zone around Dave Truesdale’s head. Citizens are warned that there is a high risk of dangerous explosions. Please do not approach, especially if you are prone to signing petitions without thinking.

Of course there are three other special editions to produce first, so John Joseph Adams and his team have sensibly scheduled this one for 2015. But that gives plenty of time to work on it and make it truly spectacular. I get the impression that there may be a new fundraising campaign too. I do hope that they ask me to write something for them again.

I also very much hope that there will be an Afrofuturist special issue in the near future as well. Being a very bad person, I want to call it Aliens Destroy Science Fiction, but I suspect that some people might not get the joke.

In Which I Destroy Science Fiction

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Women destroy science fictionWell, I try anyway. I suspect that I destroyed it for Dave Truesdale many years ago, but that’s another story.

As you probably all know by now, Lightspeed has a Kickstarter campaign going that was initially intended to fund a special issue called Women Destroy Science Fiction, but has so far exceeded its goals that it will now also fund Women Destroy Horror, and is close to also funding Women Destroy Fantasy. I had a really good story idea for the science fiction one, but I just don’t have the time to work on it. Also I suspect that the competition is intense. So you can imagine how pleased I was to be asked to write one of the personal essays that they have been using to promote the campaign. That is now online, and you can read it here.

All I need now is for someone to start a petition demanding that I never be allowed to join SFWA.

Cheese Night At Mr. B’s

~ Cheryl

Last night’s reading at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights was billed as “Cheese Night”, and included a tasting provided by the nearby Paxton & Whitfield. I went for the cheese, which was excellent, but I came away charmed by the book and it’s author.

The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti is in part a tale of a young man in search of of an artisan cheese so rare and expensive that he could not afford to taste it. It is a tale of an artisan cheesemaker who became world famous and then had his product stolen from him by big business. It is a tale of a deadly feud between proud Castilian men. But from listening to Paterniti talk I suspect that the book is mainly about story telling in a village community still small and isolated enough to have a tradition of oral story-telling.

Paterniti is a journalist, and it sounds like he has done a fine job of chronicling the story of the little Spanish village of Guzmán and its world famous cheese. But he has come away from the job fascinated by process of oral story-telling. I couldn’t help, listening to him, wishing that he he had been a folklorist instead. I want to read his book for the insights I think it will have into how people told stories before they were written down. I also wanted to talk to him about books like Cat Valente’s The Orphan’s Tale, in which digression is raised to a fine art. Still, it is always good to find someone who takes pleasure in footnotes.

For those interested, the cheeses in the tasting were:

Coming Soon To The British Library

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I have a press release from the British Library detailing some of the special exhibitions that they will be running this year. The following may be of interest.

Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK (2 May – 19 August 2014)

This spring sees the opening of the UK’s biggest exhibition of British comics, featuring unseen comics, original artwork and bizarre objects exploring the form’s tumultuous history.

From newly discovered Victorian comics to iconic titles such as V for Vendetta and Batman, Comics Unmasked will explore political and social issues raised by British comics and their creators over the last century, from violence and drugs to class and sexuality.

Today we are revealing a rare and little-known comic book from our archives, The Trials of Nasty Tales, an early example of an underground work by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame. The comic relates the story of the short-lived ‘Nasty Tales’ series which stood trial for obscenity charges in the early 1970s for its graphic content, an incident which crystallised the perception of the comics industry as a vehicle of subversion and dissent.

The Trials of Nasty Tales, Watchmen and many more titles both rare and iconic will be on display in Comics Unmasked this May.

And yes, those dates do overlap Worldcon. Well planned, British Library!

Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination (3 October 2014 – 27 January 2015)

In October 2014 the British Library will stage the UK’s most comprehensive show of Gothic literature yet. Marking 250 years since the genre burst into undead life with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Terror and Wonder will explore the enduring influence it has had, not just on literature, but film, fashion, music and art ever since.

The exhibition will explore how literary greats, such as Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, broke conventions with 18th century gothic masterpieces, paving the way for some of the most imaginative minds of literature, from Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Mervyn Peake and Angela Carter.

Today we announce a newly-discovered letter written by ‘queen of gothic’ Ann Radcliffe, one of only three manuscripts in the world written in the author’s hand and the first known to exist in Britain. Surprisingly little is known about Ann Radcliffe’s life, but this letter appearing in the exhibition later this year will provide the most personal insight yet into the author.

The British Library is delighted to announce that BBC Four will broadcast a season of programmes about the gothic imagination to coincide with Terror and Wonder in Autumn 2014. Further details will be announced later in the year.

That looks like a good year to me.

ISF #5 Is Live

~ Cheryl

ISF #5The latest issue of International Speculative Fiction is now available for free download in PDF format. EPUB and MOBI editions will follow shortly (and indeed may be live by the time that you read this).

Headlining this issue is Thomas Olde Heuvelt’s Hugo-nominated story, “The Boy Who Cast No Shadow”. There is also fiction from Francesco Verso (Italy) and Manual Alves (Portugal). I particularly like the new international news roundup column. It appears that New Zealand is no longer the only country in the world to have had a Prime Minister who is also a science fiction novelist. You’ll have to read the magazine to find out what the new one is.