One Culture

Here’s something interesting. The Royal Society is putting on a weekend festival of arts and science with the objective of promoting the idea that there is just one culture, not two. The dates are October 1st/2nd and the location is the Royal Society’s offices on The Mall in London. China Miéville and Ian Stewart are appearing on the Sunday. For further details see the festival website.

Colin Harvey Funeral Arrangements

I have had email from Gareth letting me know that Colin’s funeral will take place on Friday week, August 26th. If anyone is interested in attending please email me privately. For everyone else, the family has asked that no flowers be sent, and that instead donations can be made to Above & Beyond, the local health charity that Colin was involved with.

As per updates to my earlier post, Dindy Robinson at Swimming Kangaroo has offered to pass on messages to Colin’s family.

SF & Gender on Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 will be broadcasting a two-part documentary, “Cat Women Of The Moon”, on gender in science fiction. They are hosted by Sarah Hall (author of the Tiptree-winning The Carhullan Army) and will feature interviews with Iain M. Banks, China Miéville and Nicola Griffith. A press release about the first episode (Aug. 30th, 11:30am), is available here. Hall’s website says the second episode will air at the same time on Sept. 6th. I expect both episodes to be available via the usual podcasting service, but I can’t be certain.

The press release notes:

In many novels the exploration of sexuality is unconventional and experimental. Some societies have more than one sex; in others, people can change sex at will. In other science fiction worlds, people form relationships with aliens or they might have sex with artificial life forms.

I confess to being somewhat nervous about this. I’ve not heard anything about it from Roz, so I’m assuming she wasn’t asked for comment, which probably means there is no input from trans people. I’m sure China and Nicola would be good if asked, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a certain amount of ignorance and prejudice on display.

Update: Just in case anyone gets the wrong end of the stick, I’m expecting problems from feminists and BBC arts pundits, not from Iain, who I know fairly well but have never talked to about trans issues.

Update 2: Nicola posts about the programmes here and mentions Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin as also being interviewed.

Many thanks to DH for the heads up on this one.

Bristol F&SF Group – Colin Harvey Memorial

The Bristol F&SF Group meets once a month on a Monday evening. The next meeting will be this coming Monday (22nd) at the Shakespeare Tavern on Prince Street. I am reminded from the Facebook Group that Colin was planning to run a promotion to see if he could sell the one more print copy of Dark Spires that we needed to shift to break even on the project. Instead we will be raising a glass in his memory.

If you live in or near Bristol, or just happen to be in the area, we’d be delighted to see you. The meetings are scheduled to start at 8:00pm but people sometimes turn up early to get food. Let me know if you have any questions about getting there.

R.I.P. Colin Harvey

I got a phone call yesterday morning from Jo Hall letting me know that Colin Harvey had suffered a massive stroke. We’ve all been keeping our hopes up here in the West Country, but sadly Colin passed away in the night. He will leave a very big hole in the local community.

Colin is best know for the two novels, Winter Song and Damage Time that he published through Angry Robot. He was one of the first people to be published by the company. You can read Marco’s obituary, and comments from other Angry Robot authors, here.

Locally, however, Colin is at least as well known for the work that he did for others. He was one of the driving forces behind the founding of BristolCon. He was always encouraging other writers, and I know he’ll be particularly missed by Gareth L. Powell. Gareth has a novel, The Recollection, out with Solaris this month — his first from a major publisher — and Colin’s absence from the launch event at Forbidden Planet Bristol on the 25th is going to be very obvious to us all.

Colin’s favourite way of encouraging and helping other writers was to edit anthologies. As well as Dark Spires, he did a couple with Swimming Kanagaroo, and was working on one for Aeon. This sort of thing doesn’t make a lot of money, but it does make a lot of people very happy. I’ll always be grateful to Colin for providing me with a fine book to get Wizard’s Tower started, and there will be many writers who will be remembering him for getting their stories into print.

I’ve not yet spoken to Colin’s wife, Kate, over this. Gareth has been our main point of contact. In his brief announcement of Colin’s death, he suggests that any condolences be sent via Colin’s agent, John Berlyne, at Zeno. I know John very well and I’ll be dropping him a note as soon as I have published this post to see what can be done.

Update: John (who has been on his way to Reno) emailed back to say that Zeno only subcontracted UK work on rights and he’s had no contact with Colin’s family. My apologies to John for any embarrassment I may have caused. I shall try to find someone else who can act as a conduit for condolences.

Update 2: Condolences can be passed on via Dindy Robinson at Swimming Kangaroo (see comment below).

I have also been in touch with Bob Nielson at Aeon. I’ll do a proper business post later, but now is not the time.

It is usual in obituaries to talk about the life of the deceased. I didn’t know Colin well enough to do that. But I was fortunate enough to interview him for Salon Futura last year. If you never met Colin, and would like to know more, you can see him talk about his career and writing here.

NPR Poll – Results In

The results of that NPR poll of the top 100 SF&F books/series are now in. You can find them here. There are 15 books by women in the list, so 15%. Is that good? I suspect not. After all, this is an SF&F poll, and fantasy is supposed to be “women’s books”, except when it involves lots of hacking and slaying, of course. A total of 60,000 people voted. There’s no indication of the gender split in voters. (As I recall they didn’t ask.)

Still, there are two SF books by women in the top 25. They are by those well known women SF writers, Mary Shelley and Margaret Atwood.

Travel Fund: Thank You!

Lavie Tidhar reports that the World SF Travel Fund is now fully funded for the $6,000 we asked for. Huzzah! And thank you all very much.

In the meantime, the fund raising period is not over. There are still 21 days to go. You can still donate money, and still get ebooks from our sponsors in return. Lavie has increased the goal to $9000, and if we hit that we’ll be funded for 2013 as well. The place to donate is here.

Update: I have checked with Lavie and because we reached the $6,000 goal all our money is guaranteed. That will be true even if we don’t make $9,000. So Charles Tan is definitely going to World Fantasy in San Diego, and someone else will definitely go to Toronto next year.

Book Review: Shadow Man

One of the books that I talked about a lot in the gender panel at Eurocon was Shadow Man by Melissa Scott. Given that I was so impressed, and in the spirit of talking about science fiction by women, I thought that I should write a review. Here it is.

Update: By the way, if you are interested in doing your bit for intersex people in our world, as opposed to in imaginary ones, there’s a petition on Change.org that’s trying to get the UN to take notice of the problem. (Hat tip to Jane Fae Ozimek.)

Also, Maya Posch, the intersex person that Jane Fae blogged about, is an avid fantasy reader and writes computer games for a living, so definitely one of us. Community support, if you please.

Russ Pledge Action Time

Over at the NPR website they are running a poll for the “top-100 list of the best science fiction and fantasy ever written”. They started out asking for suggestions, and then got a panel of experts to whittle those down to a long list. Those experts were John Clute, Farah Mendlesohn and Gary K. Wolfe so, while there are a few times where I thought “what were you thinking!”, it is a pretty good list. Of course it is by no means 50:50, but lots of fine women writers are mentioned.

NPR now wants everyone to list their top 10 from the long list. You can vote here. Let’s see if we can manage to make the final top ten not entirely male, eh?

Introducing Linda Nagata

What were people saying about lack of women SF writers? Well, I’ve just added one to the store. I’m very proud to stock all four volumes of Linda Nagata’s Nanotech Succession:

The Bohr Maker won the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

For those of you who hate trilogies, don’t worry, this is an interconnected series of stand-alone novels, not one book cut into pieces.

Also new in the store are Skye Object 3270a, a YA science fiction novel, and The Dread Hammer, a fantasy comedy written by Linda’s alter-ego, Trey Shiels.

Science Fiction in India

Yes, there is some, don’t be silly. However, this post is not specifically about fiction, it is about a book of essays. Science Fiction in India is a collection of academic papers that were presented at a conference in Varanasi in 2008. Academic works are often horribly expensive, but this one is available on the Kindle for just $6.99 (potentially plus taxes). So if you are interested in knowing what academics in India are writing about SF, this is a very good way to start. The book’s editor, Arvind Mishra, has more information on his blog.

We Have A Solution

To that problem of women writers being unable to sell science fiction in the UK. It turns out to be quite easy. All you have to do is sell the book to a mainstream publisher (presumably coming up with some sort of flimsy excuse as to why the book is “not science fiction”). You might not get too many sales to fans for a while, but the book will be so fresh and different that it may well get nominated for the Booker Prize.

(Hat tip to Sarah Hall for showing the way.)

Diversity Is Hard

As is inevitable, I have come under a certain amount of criticism for my attempts to avoid any further personal attacks on the subject of gender balance. There are people out there who are convinced that we can only make progress by identifying the bad guys and making an example of them.

Well, who am I to disagree? But this new study by a (multi-gender) research team at the University of Toronto may give pause for thought. What they did was create an experiment in which they would try to reduce the level of prejudice held by their subjects. The subjects were divided into three groups. One group was instructed not to be prejudiced; one group was given information explaining the benefits of being less prejudiced; and the control group was not given any special instructions.

The attitudes of the subjects were measured before and after the study. Those who had been given positive motivation to be less prejudiced did respond to the message. But those who were instructed to be less prejudiced came out of the study with more prejudiced attitudes than when they went in.

Obviously this is just one study, but it is worth bearing in mind. If you tell people they are doing something wrong, they tend to get defensive, and eventually angry. If you encourage them to do things differently, they are more likely to respond. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

I make no comment on the ad that Google served up to go with that article.

Diversity is hard in other ways as well. If you pick isolated examples you really don’t know what has gone into creating the final gender balance. I get accused of being anti-woman too, and I’m sure I will do again, because it is really difficult at times to be balanced.

A case in point. For reasons that may become clear in a few weeks, I have been looking at what new books are being released by UK publishers later this year. I’ve used the Locus Forthcoming Books List as my guide. You can spot the UK-published books easily as the publisher names are highlighted in green. Take a look at the data for Sept-Dec of this year.

I counted UK-published 42 books. Of those, 9 were by women. Here they are: Rae Carson, Kate Elliott, Kristen Painter, NK Jemisin, Leigh Kennedy, Aliette de Bodard, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Janny Wurts, Amanda Downum.

Notice anything? Not one of those women is British. Not one. Aliette is French. All of the others are American.

So if I were, say, reviewing new UK-published books by British writers, and someone looked at the books I covered for the tail end of this year, they are quite likely to conclude that I was ignoring women and have a go at me over it.

I have no idea why there is such a dearth of books by British women. Maybe it is a statistical anomaly — there were two in August. Maybe they are being published by companies that don’t supply data to the Locus list. But when you see a list, don’t immediately assume that the lack of women is due to prejudice on the part of the person putting it together.

Anthologies: Some Data

On Saturday I mentioned that I had been sent some data about gender splits in anthologies. I have since been taking a close look at it and want to present some of the data. I am doing this:

  1. Because I think it is better to be talking about lots of data than about individual books;
  2. Because I’m a bit tired of being told there’s no evidence for gender bias; and
  3. Because I think talking about this might help UK publishers sell more books.

Before we start I’d like to get a few things very clear.

Firstly, this discussion is, and from my point of view always has been, about gender stereotyping: SF for boys; fantasy for girls (unless it involves a lot of hacking and slaying). The data we have is therefore solely for science fiction anthologies. Anyone who comes back with something like, “well you are ignoring all these paranormal romance anthologies”, or even brings up books like Dark Spires which are mixed-genre, is just trolling, nothing more.

Second, there are all sorts of possibilities for data error. What I think we have here is data on all pure-SF anthologies published in the UK and USA from 2006 to 2010 inclusive. But there may be some books missing. And I haven’t had a chance to check the numbers. And there are all sorts of potential disputes about what “science fiction” actually means. There may be some gender confusion if lesser-known writers have ambiguous names. Nationality confusion is also possible. I have caught and corrected a few such mistakes myself, but there could be more. I’d assume a healthy amount of error on these numbers.

Finally I am not publishing the raw data. There are two main reasons for this:

  • I don’t want people using it as an excuse for yet more witch hunting, so no names; and
  • I don’t want discussion to get bogged down in endless nit-pickery about whether a specific book is “science fiction” or not.

Having said that, if someone out there has the time and ability to check the data and gather more, I’d be delighted to hand this over.

The starting point is that we have 56 books in total, 17 of which were published in the UK and the other 39 in the USA. All of the UK books are from smaller presses, because the big, multi-national London publishers don’t do anthologies here, but a substantial proportion of the US ones are from DAW, and other New York imprints feature as well.

The most obvious breakdown is by the gender of the editor. Here are the numbers:

Gender of Editor % of Stories by Women
Male 23%
Female 44%
Mixed 37%

This should perhaps not surprise us. Our basic thesis is that men are socially conditioned to prefer fiction by men, while women are more balanced in their tastes. But also women editors are more likely to have friends who are women writers, and that may play a part.

What we don’t know, of course, is how well these books sold. If there is any real justification for male-dominated books it should be that they sell better. I have no proof of that one way or another (and if someone does have data, please come forward). But at least we can see that some publishers are prepared to let women do science fiction. Ten of the books were female-edited, and a further three are by a mixed-gender team.

Now, referring back to earlier discussions, is the situation worse in the UK than in the US? Here are the numbers.

Country of Publication % of Stories by Women
USA 30%
UK 23%

An important thing to note here is that only one of the UK-published books is female-edited. One is mixed; the others are all edited by men. As a result, we should expect a worse performance than the US.

So, question to UK publishers: would you be willing to publish more science fiction anthologies edited by women? Because I think that would help.

The final split that we can do is by nationality of the editor. Here “other” means either that the editor was neither British nor American, or that there was an editorial team of mixed nationality.

Nationality of Editor % of Stories by Women
US 33%
UK 16%
Other 27%

Oh dear. That’s starting to look like a significant difference. That’s because the figures for UK publishers were buoyed up by above average numbers from non-British and female editors, while the one British editor working for a US publisher has below average numbers.

I did promise not to focus on personalities here, but I do want to interject with one significant piece of data. Anthologies edited by Ian Whates have above average numbers for a British editor. I think that demonstrates the dangers of looking at individual books, and bears out the supportive comments made about Whates by women writers.

So, what does all this mean? Before everyone goes rushing off yelling about how British men are all disgusting, chauvinist pigs, let’s consider why the UK might have got into this situation.

Firstly, of course, the fact that all but one of the British editors are men doesn’t do the UK’s chances much good. The American numbers would not look so good if they didn’t have a lot of women involved. If more women did anthologies over here we’d probably see a significant improvement, though of course someone has to be willing to publish them.

In addition, as we’ve noted before, the big London publishers are rather reluctant to publish science fiction novels by women. Given that is the case, it may well be that the percentage of women in the UK writing science fiction is a lot lower than it is in the USA. After all, who makes a living out of short fiction?

Ah, but why don’t the UK editors get stories from foreign women, then? Therein, I think, lies the problem. One of the bits of data that we can’t capture here is whether the anthologies were created through open submission, or through invitation. You might think that an open submission anthology would have more men, as the editor would be deluged with stories from pushy males, whereas invitation allows you to pick your gender balance. But it all depends on who you know. If you don’t have a relationship with a writer, it will be harder to get a story out of them.

Some editors are prepared to go to open submission. My friend Colin Harvey is doing that for his latest project. But I suspect that many of the books we are looking at here, particularly the UK ones, are invitation only. In an interview from last year, Carmelo Rafala, an American of Sicilian extraction publishing in the UK, said:

As a small press we simply don’t have time to read through mountains of submissions or deal with someone who decides to hurl abuse at us because we just can’t understand his genius.

I feel his pain.

Now, suppose you live in the UK, where women SF novelists are few and far between. If you don’t travel abroad to conventions, if most of the writers you know are middle-aged British men, guess what the majority of contributors to your anthologies are likely to be?

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. I know we don’t have sales figures, but given the fact that many publishers seem willing to publish anthologies with women editors, and significant numbers (sometimes more than 50%) of women contributors, it seems likely that girl cooties are not an immediate cause of financial disaster.

Furthermore, with the advent of e-books, international trade in books has become much easier. There is no reason why an independent British publisher can’t get access to the huge American market. Indeed, some of the companies involved in this study already have their paper books distributed in the USA. But if you do that with a book that looks like boys own club material then those shouty feminists across the pond are going to be on your back double quick and your prospects of big sales will be damaged.

I absolutely understand the issue with personal contacts. If you can’t afford to travel it makes things hard. But contacts can be made. I know loads of great women writers outside of the UK. So does Farah. British authors who travel a lot to the US may also be able to help. Reach out. Try to find new sources of stories.

The results may surprise you.

The Encyclopedia: It Lives!

Some wonderful news arrived in my email inbox while I was writing that last post. It was a press release from Gollancz committing them to publication of the third edition of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. As you probably know, this will be an online edition, with the text being available free to all. (There may well be enhanced aspects of the encyclopedia that are available for a modest subscription, but the press release clearly says “text available free”.)

I’m sure that this will be a great relief to my good friends John Clute and Dave Langford, who have been laboring mightily over this for many years. Considerable credit is due to Graham Sleight who took on the business management end of the enterprise, and to John and Pamela Lifton-Zoline who provided invaluable support.

The job isn’t done yet. At the official launch later this year the “beta edition” will contain over 3 million words, but it won’t be complete. Further entries will be added through 2012. And then of course there will be the ongoing task of updating the entries. Sisyphus, I suspect, has it easy in comparison.

Anyway, congratulations to John, Dave, Graham and everyone else involved. I can’t wait to have the text my fingertips.

Um, fantasy edition next boys…

Further Thoughts

Thinking about this gender debate it the shower this morning, it occurred to me that what irritates me about the whole process is how effectively it is derailed. First of all some women make what they hope is a reasoned argument, backed by facts, with suggestions for how we can move forward. Then a bunch of men spot the discussion and think, “ooh, a fight, let’s pile in!” They get aggressive, they get personal, and they try to wind people up. Finally the people who get targeted by these attacks fight back, complain about how unfair this all is, but put the blame on the issue, not on the way it has been distorted.

I’m sure this has all been said by Joanna Russ.

But there is always hope, and in response to all those people complaining about positive discrimination, quotas and the like I offer this article from today’s Observer. It is about something called the 30% Club, which seeks to significantly improve the proportion of women serving on the boards of major UK companies. It is backed by, amongst other people, the (male) bosses of Centrica (energy company), the Royal Bank of Scotland, John Lewis (major retailer) and Ernst & Young; and by the (Tory) government.

If they can do this, and recognize it is valuable to them to do so, can we not we manage something similar?

Here We Go Again

My teh intrawebs have been busy this morning. The gender balance thing has fairly exploded over the past few days, and not in a good way.

Personally I expected this, pretty much from the point where the SF Signal Mind Meld got involved. That can be a very entertaining forum at times, but when asked to discuss anything serious it tends to quickly degenerate into “don’t read the comments” territory. Since then most of what has gone on has been a male dominance game, with men on both sides yelling at each other and women mostly taking a back seat, looking on in despair.

The trouble is that posts that ask aggressive questions such as “is science fiction sexist?” or “are you a misogynist?” invite an equally aggressive and entrenched response, and so on in an ever-widening spiral of animosity. And eventually someone says something really outrageous, and it becomes a battle of his friends against everyone else, with the original issue being forgotten in the rush to arms.

Before going into the specific issue at hand, let me say that I think anthology bashing is not terribly helpful. Looking at a single anthology, you have no idea where the real problem lies. It could be the editor, it could be the publisher, it could be the submissions, you can’t tell. Also, just as an individual’s reading and voting habits are more likely to be a product of cultural conditioning than of conscious sexism, so an individual editor is more likely to choose stories based on cultural conditioning than a deliberate intention to exclude a particular group of writers. The objective of pointing out gender imbalances (or any other sort of imbalance) should be to encourage people to examine their cultural conditioning, not to decide who we are going to burn at the stake.

Rather than single out individual books or people, it is better to try to take an overall look at the field. That way, hopefully, you can show that you are examining a social issue, not attacking a particular person. I’ve been sent some interesting data about the gender balance in science fiction anthologies, which appears to back up the suggestion that there is a cultural difference between the UK and US. However, there’s probably not much point in publishing it right now as I’ll only be accused of making it up and being anti-British. We can come back to it when people have calmed down.

Even then, however, it is important to understand the conditions in which people are operating. The US is a much bigger market, and it is easier to make a success of a book that might be seen as going against cultural norms. The really big companies tend not to do anthologies, but I’d be prepared to bet that the level of sales that the likes of Prime, Tachyon, Small Beer, Night Shade and Pyr get for such books is way above what any UK-based small press can expect.

If you are running a small press (which is something I happen to do) you need to make a choice as to whether you are doing it for love, and hope that your projects break even, or you are doing it to make a living. In the latter case, if you believe that you are operating in a market where most male readers won’t buy science fiction by women — and, let’s face it, that’s what the big publishers in London are telling us — then you would be daft to publish much SF by women. You have to take a conscious decision to risk sales if you want to diversify your content.

Obviously I’m sad if someone isn’t prepared to take such risks. For me one the delights of small presses is that they are often prepared to risk profits in search of integrity of various sorts. I’m not going to criticize someone for doing what they need to do in order to keep a business afloat, though I’d prefer to see some direct evidence that this is necessary, rather than people relying on received wisdom along the lines of “green covers don’t sell”. It may be that what you have been told isn’t true at all.

What I will criticize people for is making excuses, or trying to brush the issue off, and I’m afraid that’s the way Ian Whates now notorious post came over to me. While giving lip service to the issue, he repeatedly cited women in fantasy anthologies as evidence for his lack of bias, when the debate has been largely about women being pushed out of science fiction into fantasy. He cherry-picked data such as Lauren Beukes’s Clarke win to try to show that there is not much of problem, and then had the cheek to accuse other people of cherry-picking data. As someone who has tried to present proper data, I’m seriously insulted by that.

Elsewhere, in this comment, Whates said:

At the end of the day, it’s the quality of the story I look at as an editor, and gender is very much a secondary consideration. If the story is a good or even a great one, I’ll snap it up whether written by a man or a woman.

And yet here we have Charlie Stross and Jennifer Pelland claiming that Whates’s anthologies were invitation only, and that he generally didn’t invite women to contribute unless nagged into it by others. Those two things don’t add up, and I’m not at all comfortable with someone suggesting that women writers are no good when he apparently hasn’t given them a chance to compete. Since then, various women writers have come forward and said that they were invited by Whates, but for various reasons were unable to deliver. If that is the case, a less inflammatory response would have been to suggest that perhaps women writers have more pressures on their time, thereby preventing them from submitting as often as men, rather than suggest that they are no good. (This is a very common feminist response to allegations of, “it’s all the wimmin’s fault for not trying!”)

In short, there are ways of presenting these arguments that suggest you understand the problems, and there are ways of doing it that suggest you are trying to brush the issue under the table. Whates, unfortunately, came over as the latter.

At the root of all this we find ideas about correct gendered behavior. Men are put in the blue corner where they are expected to like cars, football and science fiction; women are put in the pink corner and expected to like babies, cooking and fantasy. You can imagine why this makes me very nervous. As female-identified persons go, I am apparently fairly girly. At least several cis-women I know have told me that I am more girly than they are. But this is no real help, because once you are out as a trans person people’s expectations of your gender performance tend to go crazy. If I’m too girly them I’m overdoing it, and if I’m not girly enough then I’m clearly not “really” female. Either way, I am a social embarrassment; people don’t want to employ me or do business with me. This stuff matters.

It is not just trans people who have problems with gender expectations either. Here’s a story from yesterday’s Guardian about a woman who has quit her job at Harrod’s because she’s uncomfortable with their “dress” code that requires female staff to wear full face make-up at all times, and keep it properly maintained throughout the day. I can understand that if she was actually selling make-up, but she worked in the music and video department.

Challenging entrenched ideas like this is not easy. It requires bravery and commitment, and a willingness to risk both profit and social standing. But most of all it requires people to recognize that there is a problem, and be willing to do something about it. If you yell at them and tell them they are bad people, the chances are that they will get defensive and try to claim they have done nothing wrong, and that “OMG YOUS WIMMINS ARE OPPRESHING ME QUOTAS GULAGS MEN REDUCED TO NEKKID CASTRATED SLAVES WOMEN PLAYING FOOTBALL CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER THE END OF THE WORLD!!!1!” (N.K. Jemisin in comments on the SF Signal post).

Is it possible that we could have less chest-thumping and finger-pointing on the one hand, and less bingo card excuses on the other? I hope so. I rather doubt it.

End of the World Party

Every so often I post news here of various existential threats to civilization, Earth, the universe and so on. Mainly I do this because Kendall appreciates it so much, but hopefully other people find them entertaining too.

If you are someone who likes such things, you may like to check out Charlie Stross’s blog. He has asked his readers to come up with new ideas for destroying the world. There are over 300 comments thus far. You can scare yourselves here.

A Meeting At The Bank

Nothing to worry about folks. My finances might not be on great shape, but I’m not in debt. No, the reason I spent the evening at my bank is that they were running a networking evening for local small businesses. Seriously. I was impressed.

Of course I didn’t expect to meet anyone who would be of interest to me. I mean, how many other energy economics companies are there likely to be in a small Wiltshire town? Or science fiction people?

Which, of course, is how I ended up spending much of the evening chatting to Jim Burns. 🙂

But there were other interesting people there too. I spent some time chatting to the ladies from the hair and beauty salon I use (and promising to make an appointment because my hair really needs seeing to). I also met Bry from Westbury, who makes cupcakes. He had samples. I can recommend his wares. Yum.

Me At SFWA

So last week the nice people who run the SFWA website contacted me and asked if they could publish one of my blog posts about the women SF writers controversy. I told them I’d much rather write something new, taking into account some of the other material I’ve seen recently, and over the weekend I did so. The results can be found here.

I am looking forward to lots of comments telling me what an evil, man-hating monster I am, and lots more telling me that I have no right to speak for women.

And before anyone gets really angry, no, I did not get paid for that.