Well that was a good day. I sold lots of books, and caught up with a bunch of old friends, many of whom I’d not seen since before the pandemic. Last year’s Eastercon felt a bit small and strained. This year feels like a proper convention again. Progress, I hope.
Also there were a bunch of good award winners, from some very strong fields. Most importantly, Aliette won the short fiction, so Asmodeus will not feel that he has to murder us.
So, yes, I am at Eastercon. I also have a dealer table. This may come as a surprise to many. It certainly was to me. Here’s the story.
As you may remember, a few weeks back my car broke down. As I had no idea when I might get it back, and no other means of getting books to the con, I had to decide what to do about the dealer table. Farah told me that she had a waiting list for places and she needed to know as soon as possible. So, reluctantly, I relinquished the booking.
The plan had been to take a few books with me on the train, and I posted about that here. That was seen by Catherine Sharp who these days also lives in South Wales. She was due to be down my way last weekend, and she offered to ferry some books for me. I gratefully gave her a couple of boxes containing a selection of paperbacks.
On Tuesday I finally got the car back. It seemed to be running fine, but I had no time to give it a shake-down as I had a lot to do between then and the con. I was happy to still be traveling by train. In any case I had bought my ticket.
Yesterday morning I figured I should check the Transport for Wales website, because other people on the Eastercon Discord were reporting last-minute train issues. And lo, the train that Roz Clarke and I were planning to catch had been cancelled. This is the Heart of Wales line. There are only about 4 trains a day. It was either drive, or wait to the next day.
So I drove, and aside from the M42 it was a good trip. The car ran fine, and Roz & I arrived earier than we would have done had we caught the train.
This morning, after my first panel, I was looking round the Dealers’ Room and buying too many books. I found Farah who had said she might have some room on the SF Foundation table. It turned out she didn’t, but she did have a table that was unexpectedly free. I grabbed it. Catherine arrived with the books in the afternoon, and now I have a table set up to do business tomorrow.
Publishing it is not as easy as it seems.
Today I am heading to Birmingham for Eastercon, but that won’t be the end of my April travels. When I get back I have one day to get turned around and then I am off to Luxembourg where I will be a guest at Luxcon. I am very grateful to Jean Beurlet and the rest of the crew for the invitation. I’ll be traveling by train all the way, which means I should get a lot of reading done.
Social media this week is full of discussion of a letter written by the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) to the Minister for Women & Equalities, Kemi Badenoch. For those of you unfamiliar with UK politics, one of the things that the current Tory government has done is fill “equalities” posts with people directly opposed to equality. Badenoch is an Evangelical Christian and Climate Change Sceptic. The Board of the EHRC has been filled with people who are openly transphobic. Nonsense is to be expected.
The first thing worth noting is that this letter has no legal force. Neither has there (yet) been any move to act on it. However, both Sunak and Starmer have muttered openly about “safeguarding woman’s rights”, which is a code pharse for removing the rights of trans people. If you feel minded to do so, and are a UK citizen, there is an old petition here that is suddenly getting a lot of traction and is worth signing. Sending a warning shot across the bows of Westminster is often quite effective.
Should they decide to move forward with this, the government will spin it as not removing any trans rights, but rather protecting the rights of women. The effect will be very different. The letter proposes amending the Equality Act to make it “clear” that “sex” means “biological sex” (whatever that means). The stated purpose of this will be to make it possible for any “single-sex” service to exclude anyone not of the correct “biological sex”. However, it has long been a claim of the anti-trans movement that allowing a trans woman into a supposed woman-only space is discrimination on the grounds of sex. If this change is made, we can expect to see a wave of prosecutions under the Equality Act where services have treated a trans woman as a woman, and are being sued for discrimination as a result. This will affect spaces such as toilets, changing rooms and sports clubs as well as rape crisis and domestic violence centres. Bizarrely the letter also references book clubs as an example of the sort of place that needs to be sex segregated.
Note that these new regulations are intended to apply to all trans people, regardless of their medical and current legal status. Somone like myself, who has been through a full surgical gender reassignment process and has a Gender Recognition Certificate, would still be regarded as “biologically male” under these proposals.
To government will claim that trans people can still change their gender using the Gender Recognition Act. However, because sex will have been defined as meaning biological sex, that change of gender will have no effect in law. The government will also claim that trans people are still protected by the Equality Act. They will be correct in saying that a company can still not fire someone for being trans, but that company will be legally obliged to treat trans employees as persons of their “biological sex”. It would not surprise me to see law suits complaining that allowing a trans woman to use female pronouns at work amounted to discrimination against cis women.
The letter talks airily about checks and balances, and about how these changes will be better for some and worse for others. Significantly it talks about trans women losing rights, and trans men gaining rights. But the rights that trans men would gain would be rights to be treated as women, which is the last thing that most trans men I know want. This is entirely in keeping with the anti-trans belief that trans men do not exist, and anyone claiming to be one is an innocent lesbian who has been duped by the Evil Trans Lobby.
Let’s now think about how this would work in practice. The anti-trans movement likes to claim that they can “always tell” who is trans, but they definitely cannot. Neither can anyone who runs a service that includes toilets or changing rooms. The only way that companies will be able to protect themselves is by requiring ID. There will be even more harassment of women whose appearance is not gender-conforming. And the government will have to revoke the existing passports and driving licences of trans people, issuing new ones with the sex marker being that they were assigned at birth. Goodness only knows how they will deal with foreign visitors who are trans.
There’s also this question of “biological sex”. What does it mean? The government probably thinks that’s just the sex you were assigned at birth. But the anti-trans lobby has been insistent that biological checks are necessary. For example, they insist that Caster Semenya is a “man”, despite her having been assigned female at birth and having lived all her life as a woman. Apparently she has higher than average levels of testosterone and that’s sufficient to disqualify her from womanhood.
The trouble is that we don’t routinely test for chromosomes or testosterone levels. No one has any idea how many women out there have a Y chromosome and androgen insensitivity. Given that there has been at least one well-documented case of a woman with a Y chromosome who gave birth to a healthy child, there’s no way we can know without testing. So what happens in the future if a woman has some routine checks by a doctor and it turns out she has a Y chromosome? Will she be legally required to live as a man from then on?
Given that the anti-trans lobby is very keen on genital surgery for intersex children who have ambiguous genitalia, this would not surprise me.
So that’s the world that these proposed changes would usher in. And all on the basis that a small number of fanatics have decided that they don’t want to live in a world that also contains trans people.
The 2023 J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature will be given by the very wonderful Maria Dahvana Headley. It is on Tuesday May 16th, and as usual will take place at Pembroke College in Oxford. I’m planning on being there. If you would like to go too, tickets and further details are available here.
If you spend time on social media you will doubtless have seen that Juliet McKenna’s Green Man books are regularly on sale at Amazon UK. The Green Man’s Gift was £0.99 throughout March, and The Green Man’s Challenge will be £0.99 throughout April.
Juliet and I are very happy about this. The books sell in huge numbers when they are on sale, and other books in the series get a boost in sales as a result. The less good thing is that Amazon only does this in the UK store, which doesn’t seem fair to folks in the rest of the world, or people who don’t like to buy on Amazon. So we try to match prices in other stores. That’s not as easy as it sounds.
The first problem is that, while Amazon UK does tell us in advance about the sale, they don’t guarantee it. The only way we can be sure that a sale will happen is waiting for it to start. Once it does, I can adjust prices elsewhere.
Amazon does not provide a means of scheduling a sale. I have to manually adjust prices in other regions, and remember to put them back up again at the end of the sale.
B&N and Kobo do allow you to schedule a sale, but it takes them time to process the request so their sales are generally a day late starting.
Although Amazon UK drops the price to 99p, I am not allowed to set prices elsewhere lower then $2.99 or €2.69. There are no such restrictions on B&N or Kobo, so everyone outside of the UK should shop at one of those if they can. But, because people are so conditioned to buying from Amazon, they usually pay the higher price.
The programme for this year’s Eastercon is now live. You can find my schedule here. And for those of you who don’t want to click through, here’s the list:
Friday, 7 April 2023 12:00 – SF In Antiquity
The strange and wonderful SFnal origins of the genre from bronze men in Greek myth to telescope viewings of men on the moon
Gladstone-Churchill Room, with: Clare Goodall, Chris McCartney, Marcus Rowland, The Fossil
Friday, 7 April 2023 16:30 – No Simple Binaries
Characters and settings who’ve just said ‘no’ to gender binaries. From Martha Wells’ Murderbot to Ursula LeGuin’s Gethenians and Mary Gentle’s Ortheans; a look at the history and future of non-binary characters (and where the human non-binary characters are)
Gladstone-Churchill Room, with Sandra Bond, Juliet Kemp, Mike Brooks, Edmund Schluessel
Sunday, 9 April 2023 12:00 – Non-European Middle Ages
Eurocentric lore has been a goldmine for fantasy and historical fiction writers. But what was the rest of the world doing?
Balmoral (ex-Earls) Room, with David Stokes (Guardbridge Books), Oghenechovwe Ekpeki, Stew Hotston, Gillian Polack
Sunday, 9 April 2023 15:00 – Who, Why and What do we Award?
The role of awards in fandom ecology and SFF economy
Salisbury-Wellington Room, with Niall Harrison, Nick Hubble, Nicholas Whyte, Gareth Worthington
Monday, 10 April 2023 12:00 – Travelling Fans
Fans travel a long way to go to conventions, especially Worldcons. International exchanges help build fan communities, but how important are they in the virtual modern world? And how environmentally sustainable?
Sandringham (ex-Dukes) Room, with Carolina Gómez Lagerlöf, Marcin Alqua Klak, Angeli Primlani, Suzanne Tompkins
In addition to those, and not yet on the convention website, I believe that I’m also involved in this:
Saturday, 8 April 2023 16:30 – Book Launch: Roz Kaveney’s Rhapsody of Blood Volume 5
Roz Kaveney’s extraordinary Rhapsody of Blood series reaches volume five, released in April 2023. Join us to celebrate the launch.
Pavilion Room, with Roz Kaveney
Also, please remember that, due to a lack of a working car, I won’t have a table in the Dealers’ Room. If you want a book from Wizard’s Tower, please let me know in advance so that I know to bring it with me.
I spent most of today in Swansea. I got a bit of shopping done, including picking up a copy of the new Kate Heartfield book, The Valkyrie. But the main reason for going was to pick up a set of hearing aids. I can still hear fairly well most of the time, but if I need to pick out speech from a lot of background noise — for example if I am in a pub or a noisy restaurant — then I’m useless. Conventions are another problem location, especially somewhere like the dealers’ room. So if I want to get through Eastercon without seeming very rude, I need help.
I am utterly amazed at what a difference the hearing aids make. They cost an eye-watering amount of money, but the science involved is phenomenal. This evening I managed to watch the latest episode of Picard without needing headphones, which is a huge improvement. I will be interested to see what sort of differnece they make over the coming weeks when I have a lot of travel happening.
Yes, this is a bit gruesome. It is about Romans, what did you expect?
As regular readers probably know, the cult of the goddess, Cybele, was something of a safe space for trans women in the Roman Empire. Anyone assigned male at birth and wanting to live as a woman could join the cult as a gallus, and get genital surgery in the process (generally just removal of the testicles which was simpler and safer than taking everything). You lost a huge amount legal rights and social prestige, but trans people have always made those trade-offs.
Cybele, being a goddess of the wild places with connections to the Greek Gaia, and also with connections stretching back to Inanna and Ishtar, was very much associated with spring. There were a whole lot of celebrations around this time of year, including what amounted to a massive pride parade through Romne. But today, March 24th, was the Day of Blood — the day on which new recruits to the cult got their surgery. And thanks to dear old Claudius it became a public holiday. So we should all celebrate.
Personally I have got a nice piece of venison from my favourite butcher, and will have a glass or two of red wine. Your mileage may vary.
The latest volume in Wizard’s Tower’s reprinting of the Outremer series by Chaz Brenchley is now available. With A Dark Way to Glory we are now half way through the series. I’m really pleased that I can make these books widely available again, and also with the wonderful new covers that Ben Baldwin is doing for them. I can’t wait to have the full set to look at together.
If you’d like a copy of the book, purchase links are available through the Wizard’s Tower website. I’ll have the paperback available through the company store soon, and the hardcovers will follow when they arrive from the printer. And if you can order them through your favorite local bookshop, please do so.
One of the things you can’t miss if you drive around here is that the Welsh Botanical Gardens are nearby. The road signs are very prominent. Last weekend I got to pay them a visit, and was well impressed.
Those of you who know me will be aware that I am not a gardener. Plants tend to keel over and die if they so much as see me coming. But the Welsh Botanical Gardens are much more than that. They are located in the grounds of the former Middleton Hall (now demolished), a stately home built with proceeds from the East India Company. The Middleton brothers, who originally built the mansion, all died on voyages to and from India, and the estate was purchased by one William Paxton, who had made a ridiculous fortune from being Master of the Mint in Bengal. Thankfully the estate is now owned by the nation, and is doing its best to admit to its colonial legacy.
The point about building a Botanical Gardens on the site of a country estate is that you have ridiculous amounts of space. So yes, there are ornamental gardens. There are also tree collections. In the back of the picture you can seen the dome of the giant greenhouse that has plants from as far away as Australia and Chile. And there is still ridiculous amounts of space. There are lots of walks, many of them around the landscaped lakes and rivers that were built for the estate. Some of these are wooded, and are now inhabited by faeries and, recently arrived, a Gruffalo. Others are out in the open and have magnificent views over the Tywi Valley. There’s a bird of prey centre too. And a rock garden containing rocks from the many different geologies of Wales. A bunch of Presceli blue stones have been carved with Celtic symbols and set in a ring, as is right and proper.
I can see myself spending a lot of time at this place. That will be primarily for the walks and views, but also communing with raptors.
At the beginning of April they will have a food and craft festival. I am hoping for interesting cheeses.
Our friends in the Southern Hemisphere are heading into winter today, but here in the Northern Hemisphere spring has sprung. Fertility goddesses everwhere are emerging from their underworld sojurns and brining new life to the world.
In Mesopotamia that means it is time for the Festival of Inanna/Ishtar (the two names are pronounced differently in Sumerian and Akkadian, but they use the same cuneiform signs). According to the Sumerian version of the legend, She has just been rescued from the underworld by a couple of gay boys who so impressed the Queen of the Dead with their singing and dancing that she offered to grant them any boon they asked for.
We have a contemporary source for the sort of thing that went on in Sumerian cities during the festival. Here it is.
The people of Sumer parade before you.
The young men comb their hair before you.
They decorate the napes of their necks with coloured scarfs.
The women adorn their right side with men’s clothing.
The men adorn their left side with women’s clothing.
The ascending kurgarra priests raise their swords before you.
If you are thinking that sounds a bit like a Pride parade, well, yes.
I’m wearing jeans. Back when I transitioned, the gender clinics used to class that as “dressing like a man” and therefore evidence of your lack of commitment to femininity. That will have to do for the cross-dressing.
If I had a working car, I would have driven up to my favourite butcher in Llandeilo and got some venison for a celebratory meal. However, the car is now with the car doctor and won’t be back for several days as the faulty part needs to be sent off to Fiat to be re-calibrated.
However, there is another festival day coming up soon. The Romans had so many gods that it was hard to fit all of the spring stuff onto the right days. Also, by Roman times, the connection between the goddess of sex and the goddess of queers had been severed so they needed two festivals. More on that later in the week.
I’m trying to post here a bit more regularly. The announcement of this year’s Lammy finalists is a good excuse.
I’m absolutely delighted to see Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo on the list for LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction. Spear isn’t there, but maybe it wasn’t submitted, or maybe Nicola thinks she has won enough Lammys.
I’m also delighted to see Wrath Goddess Sing, Maya Deane in the list for Transgender Fiction.
You may have seen both of those reported by Locus and other genre outlets, but what you may not have seen is that Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, by my friend Kit Heyam, is a finalist in Transgender Nonfiction. I cite this book in many of the trans history talks I give now, because it provides an excellent framework for demolishing the nonsense “we can’t call them trans because trans people hadn’t been invented” excuse.
A full list of finalists is available here.
Eastercon is happening in a few weeks time, and I had a dealer table booked there. However, my car is currently sick and definitely not up to a lot of motorway driving. The fix isn’t huge, but it is time-consuming and I have no guarantee that I’ll have a fully working car come Easter.
I’ve looked into car rental, but I’d need it for at least 6 days and there’s no way I can justify the cost.
Also Eastercon has a long waiting list for dealer tables. Farah needed to know asap whether I would be using my booked place.
So I decided to hand back the booking and plan to travel to Birmingham by train.
That doesn’t mean I can’t sell books. It just limits the quantity I can take with me. A couple of people have kindly offered to help with book transport should I need it. And of course if I do get the car back in time I can take more.
So, if you want a book from Wizard’s Tower, and want to take advantage of convention pricing, I need to know in advance so I am mostly packing books that are actually going to sell.
To make things easy, I’m keeping the convention pricing very simple. Paperbacks are £10, hardcovers are £15; except for the bigger fantasy novels (the Tales of Einarinn series, the Aldabreshin Compass series, and The Tangled Lands), which are £12 and £18. I do expect to have copies of A Dark Way to Glory available, but they haven’t been delivered yet.
If you want books, please let me know, either here, by email or by social media. Contact email addresses for Wizard’s Tower are here. Pay me at the con. I will probably be spending some time at the Science Fiction Foundation table in the Dealers’ Room, and may be on panel.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
Award season is in full swing now. The announcement of the BSFA Award winners is only a few weeks away. Hugo and World Fantasy nominating is open. And last night SFWA announced the finalists for this year’s Nebula Awards. There are some fabulous books on the list, and a number I’m now looking forward to reading. I’m particularly pleased for my Trini pal, Rhonda Garcia, who has had a pretty rough time of life recently and very much deserves a bit of happiness. You can find the full lists here.
But that’s not why I am writing this post. In the most recent issue of Salon Futura I commented on Hugo eligibility and noted that the Locus Recommended Reading List was sadly literal when it came to category boundaries. I don’t blame Locus for that, because it has always been their policy. The Hugos allow more flexibility, and I’d hoped that the Nebulas would as well. However, they have Spear by Nicola Griffith listed in the Novel category.
From one point of view I’m delighted that Spear got onto the ballot despite having to compete with novels. But I still think it has been disadvantaged. Let me explain why.
The category boundaries do not, no matter what award-haters say, exist solely to increase the number of prizes given out. They exist to try to avoid voters having to compare appples with oranges. I’m not convinced about the distinction between short stories and novelettes, but short stories, novellas and novels are quite different things.
A good way to think about it is to compare it with car classes in motor racing. If you were to send Max Verstappen or Lewis Hamilton out in a Grand Prix in a Formula 2 car, they could come last. That’s because a Formula 2 car doesn’t have the same power as a Formula 1 car. It simply cannot drive as fast. In the same way, in fiction, if you are limited in the number of words you have, then you are limited in the complexity of the story you can tell.
From a reader’s point of view, the difference between a novella and a novel is that the former generally has a single point of view and single narrative strand. Novels are much more complex. To me, Spear reads very much like a novella, though Nicola has very cleverly relied on the fact that her readers will all be familiar with the Arthurian cannon to make the story seem much bigger than it is.
As far as awards are concerned, it is probably unreasonable to expect voters to distinguish between categories based on such distinctions. A word count limit is much simpler to understand. But word counts can and do result in works potentially being put into a catgeory that doesn’t suit them. Which is why the Hugos allow some flexibility. By Hugo rules, Spear could be categorised as a novella.
Sadly, with Spear now having been categorised as a novel by both Locus and SFWA, I suspect that Hugo voters will mostly consider it as such. And I suspect it will fail to make the final ballot because voters will see it as much less sophisticated than the many other fine works in that category. If they vote based on the quality of the writing (which I suspect SFWA members generally do) then there’s no question it should be a finalist, but Hugo voters tend to have a wider set of criteria on which they base their choices.
I’ve already got 12 books I’m trying to whittle down to five for my Novel nominations. I’m grumpy about having to add Spear to that list. But add it I will, because it is one of the best books of last year.
Ah well, at least next year we’ll have an honest-to-goodness Nicola Griffith novel to vote for. Menewood is coming, and you can now feast your eyes on the cover.
I am delighted to report that, following multiple adventures in the publishing business, a fine new book saw print today. It is titled, Imagining the Celtic Past in Modern Fantasy, and is part of the Perspectives in Fantasy series produced by the good folks at the University of Glasgow for Bloomsbury. This one is edited by Dimitra Fimi, who is a co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at Glasgow, and by Alistair Sims of Books on the Hill. Possibly foolishly, they agreed to accept an essay by me for inclusion in the book.
I say “possibly foolishly” because my essay has little to do with the Celtic Past. It is titled, “Celts in Spaaaaace!”, and it is about the very wonderful Keltiad books by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison. They are essentially space opera set in a far-future, Celtic-inspired civilisation, which naturally I love to pieces.
There are many other fine essays in the book as well. Topics include works by Alan Garner and Susanna Clarke. There is a full ToC on the publisher website.
This being an academic publication, it is ferociously expensive. However, I understand that an affordable paperback will be released in due course. In the meantime, you can always order a copy from your local library.
Back when I was in school we learned all sorts of strange stuff in history. One of the things that caused much mirth in the class was the fact that there was a major war between Britain and Spain called The War of Jenkins’ Ear. It was a dispute over the American colonies. In 1731 a British ship called the Rebecca, captained by one Robert Jenkins, was boarded by Spanish coastguards off the coast of Florida (then Spanish territory). Captain Jenkins was accused of smuggling, and his left ear was cut off as a warning to other British sailors. Eight years later, Parliament used this incident as a pretext to declare a war that was fought mainly in the Caribbean.
Now we have something even sillier. The Westminster government has precipitated a major constiutional crisis over the issue of Scottish devolution, and their pretext for doing so is access to women’s toilets. Perhaps it will be called the War of Ladies’ Loos.
As you are probably aware, the Scottish parliament has passed a law simplifying the process of legal gender recognition in Scotland. What they have done is by no means unusual. Many countries around the world have already passed similar legislation. Ireland did it in 2015, and none of the terrible things that anti-trans camapigners have predicted for Scotland have come to pass there. But Westminster has chosen to make this issue one over which they will activate their nuclear option of a Section 35 Order. This is a part of the Scottish Devolution Act which allows Westminster to strike down any law passed by Holyrood if that law is deemed a signifcant danger to the Union (i.e., the political union of the component countries of the UK).
Yes, you read that right. The question as to where I am allowed to pee is so important as to pose a significant danger to the Union.
Westminister had earlier threated to simply refuse to recognise any Gender Recognition Certificates (GRCs) issued by Scotland under the new law. It was pointed out to them that they already recognise certificates issued by many foreign countries under similar legislation. Their reaction to this was to say that they would withdraw recognition of GRCs issued by any country whose procedures they deemed to be insufficiently rigorous. This would include Ireland, Belgium, Norway, Portugal, Iceland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Pakistan, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. Practically speaking it would also include Australia, Canada, Mexico and the USA, where such legislation is devolved to state legislatures and it may be difficult to discern from someone’s ID where their GRC was issued.
The fact that Australia, Canada, the USA and Mexico all have different regulations for legal gender recognition in different parts of their country, without any apparent difficulty, has apparently not yet penetrated the thick skulls in Westminster.
The justification for triggering Section 35 is also so flimsy as to be practically transparent. Westminster claims that the Scottish law will negatively impact the UK’s Equality Act by making it too easy for someone to obtain a GRC. However, the protections afforded to trans people under the Equality Act are independent of whether we have a GRC or not. You acquire the Protected Characteristic of Gender Transition simply by declaring publicly that you are undergoing such a process. That is, you aquire it by self-identification, in a manner much less robust than the Scottish law which requires a Statutory Declaration, with heavy penalties should you make such a declaration fraudulently.
It is also worth noting that the entire process of medical gender transition is predicated on self-identification. Once you have been accepted as a patient at a gender clinic you are required to begin living full-time in your desired gender. To facilitiate this the doctors will give you letters allowing you to change ID such as your driving licence and passport to match your new gender. A Gender Recognition Certificate only affects your birth certificate, which is explicitly not acceptable as a form of ID.
In other words, the whole thing is a storm in a teacup into which Westminster has been backed by the combined efforts of the right wing media, the religious right elements within the Conservative Party, and probably substantial donations from a certain wealthy author.
Interestingly, the Scottish law was backed by the Scottish Labour Party. The Welsh Government, which is a Labour government, has expressed support for the Scottish law. But the English Labour Party, or at least its leader, has expressed support for the Westminster line.
Goodness knows where this will end, but it appears that we are in for another year of Interesting Times in UK politics.
At least for those of us on this side of the Atlantic. There is a rational explanation for why it is celebrated at different times of the year on different continents, but I’m not going to go into that now.
Anyway, because things are ramping up here, online talks that I am doing are starting to be advertised. The first three all went live today.
First up I am doing a talk about Le Chevalier d’Éon (or perhaps La Chevalière d’Éon, and there’s a whole discussion to be had about the correct French, let alone the correct gender) for Histfest. That’s on the evening of Feb. 24th. You can book for that one here.
Next up I am doing a talk about Aleksandr Aleksandrov for Bristol’s M-Shed Museum. I’m rather pleased to be able to do a talk about someone from Ukraine, even if he did fight for the Russians (against Napoleon). That’s on the evening of Feb. 21st, and you can book here.
Finally I will be hosting another talk for M-Shed. I’m very much looking forward to this, because it features the Queen of Girls with Swords, Claire Mead, talking about the utterly irrepresible Julie d’Aubigny. That’s on the evening of Feb. 15th, and you can book here.
The M Shed talks are both free. The HistFest one has a £5 price tag. I very much hope that lots of you will sign up for the HistFest one. It’s not much more than the price of a posh coffee, and getting a good audience means that high-profile history organisations such as HistFest will have the confidence to do more talks about queer history. It is great that Bristol City Council is prepared to sponsor the M-Shed talks, but for queer history to establish itself we must show that people are prepared to pay to learn about it.
Talking of HistFest, they have a weekend event coming at at the British Library in April. I’m not on programme, because I don’t have a TV show or a book coming out. But other, much more famous, historians will be there. I’m planning to be in the audience. Dates here, and the programme will be announced before the end of the month.
On Twitter today Adam Roberts did a brief Muppets pastiche of The Silmarilion. You can find it here. While Tolkien definitely needs the Muppet treatment, I think it would be far more fun for them to do Lovecraft. It practically writes itself. Fellow mere humans, I present, The Muppet Mythos:
Staring
Female Chorus
“It’s time to start the chanting
It’s time to speak the rites
It’s time to worship Dagon in old Innsmouth Town tonight”
Male Chorus
“It’s time to wear monks’s habits
It’s time to douse the lights
It’s time to do black magic in old Innsmouth Town tonight”
Stadler
“Why do we always come here?”
Waldorf
“I guess we’ll never know”
Stadler
“We always end up tortured”
Both
“By beasts from down below”
They are dragged off by Deep Ones
Kermit
“To introduce our guest star
That’s what I’m here to do
So it really makes me happy
To introduce to you…”
Cthulhu rises from R’lyeh.
Everyone runs away screaming.
It being that time of year, my annual review post is up on the Aqueduct Press blog. It was a little late this year due to my being in Montréal for part of December, but I got there in the end. It went live on Christmas Eve, but I didn’t think there was any point in publicising it then. There are lots of other great contributions too. You can read mine here.