Favourite political SF novel?

Amanda Marcotte:

io9 asked me to contribute a recommendation for what sci-fi book you should read before the election. I was unduly tickled to be the token female in a question about science fiction. On one hand, I’m not like a huge sci-fi geek or anything. On the other hand, I wrote my honors thesis one million years ago about the place of The Handmaid’s Tale in the pantheon of sci-fi, and so I have a soft spot for the genre. It was sort of my first inkling that feminism could be expanded in creative ways. Of course, as the token feminist, I had to pick The Handmaid’s Tale.

This is 6 Science Fiction Classics To Help You Choose The Next President: And besides The Handmaid’s Tale, chosen by Marcotte, the five boy pundits picked: “Franchise” by Isaac Asimov, Wall-E, Angel season four, Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge, The Merchants’ War, Frederik Pohl.

Now obviously: we’re just feminists, we write about non-political issues that affect women and children (and also even more non-political things like gay marriage) so none of us would have got picked to recommend a “sci-fi classic” to this list….

So which (up to six) political SF novels would you recommend to someone the month before an election? Or any time, really.

Call for Submissions: 22nd Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans

Where: Space Westerns: Sideshow (Announcement)
When: November 2nd
How Long Until Submissions Close: Until October 28th
Who: Nathen E. Lilly submissions2018[AT]spacewesterns[DOT]com or the submission form
What: Women in Space Westerns

The 22nd Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction will be hosted on the SpaceWesterns.com Sideshow. Our specific topic suggestion: Women in Space Westerns. Send submissions (blogged between May 3rd, 2008 and October 28th, 2008) to Nathan E. Lilly. Additional submission information is available on the submissions page.

What is a Space Western? A simple definition: Western genre themes in Outer-space. Often, if the protagonist of the story could accurately be described as a Space Cowboy, then you’ve got a Space Western. A more serious definition is fiction that explores the effect that the frontiers of outer-space have on the human condition.

Space Westerns in film and television include (but are not limited to): Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Captain Video and the Video Rangers, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Alien, Galaxy Rangers, Sabre rider and the Star Sheriffs, Marshal Bravestar, Space Hunter, Earth 2, Babylon 5, Farscape, Trigun, Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, Firefly/Serenity, Coyote Ragtime Show, Gun X Sword. Additional works in various other formats can be found at the (Nearly) Complete List of Space Westerns. If you have any questions about why a specific work was included, please feel free to contact me.

Female characters in Space Westerns include (but are not limited to): Wilma Deering, Dale Arden, Nurse Chapel, Lt. Uhura, Yeoman Rand, Princess Leia, Queen Amidala, Ellen Ripley, Lt. Athena, Medtech Cassiopeia, Serina, Cassiopeia, Devon Adaire, D’lenn, Faye Valentine, Radical Ed, Zoe Washburne, Inarra Sera, Kaylee Frye, River Tam, Wendy Garrett, Laura Roslin, Lt. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, Lt. Sharon “Boomer” Valerii, Six.

Women writers of Space Westerns include (but are not limited to): C.L. Moore, Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, and Jane Espenson.

The long hiatus is my own fault. I’ve made a sudden move across the ocean and am still settling down. Forgive the five-month break between issues. –R.

What happens to TV shows that pass the Bechdel Test?

Apologies, first of all : this is a post that isn’t about science-fiction or SF fandom or SF writers. It’s about a 1980s cop show/crime drama. And there are clips from it on YouTube under the cut. I promise, I’ll never do anything like this again.

This cop show ran for seven seasons, 125 episodes, 4 made-for-TV movies. Twice the network that ran the show canceled it because it was “unpopular”, and twice a massive grassroots fan campaign brought it back. Every year the series was on the air, one of the two leads won an Emmy for best lead character in a TV Drama series. The last season was broadcast nearly 20 years ago. The company that owns it is bringing out other, less successful series on DVD… but not this one. This one got a single DVD set (part of the first season) released two or three years ago, without any publicity - I’m a long-term fan of the show, have been since it was first broadcast, and I had no idea this DVD was now available.

Why do you suppose that was? Jennifer Kesler (BetaCandy) at the Hathor Legacy notes: writers for TV and film are instructed what will and will not be popular by the teachers in the writing schools, by the buyers of the industry - and this series could not have been popular by those rules, no matter how many people actually liked it.

Because both the leads were women. I’m talking about Cagney and Lacey. Christine Cagney and Marybeth Lacey were tough New York cops who talked to each other about their work, their relationship with each other, about their situation as the first two (the only two) women detectives in their precinct, about their career - also of course about Cagney’s boyfriends and her father, Lacey’s husband and her sons: but each and every episode of that series passed the Bechdel Test.

So, according to MGM/Fox, it just couldn’t be popular. The thousands of fans who wrote to protest the cancellation - each time - who were they? They couldn’t be real. The success was a fluke. No one could want to buy the DVDs. Who would want to watch a series in which each and every episode two women talked to each other about something other than a man? Two women who were attractive, sure (I’ve been a little in love with both of them in entirely different ways since I first watched the series), but not dolled up/sexualised objects: they dress up when it’s appropriate, but when they’re at work they wear clothes a woman can move in, and they move like active, fit women.

There are cheap bootleg copies of the whole series available. Besides the poor quality, those DVDs won’t bring any residuals to Tyne Daly or Sharon Gless or any of the other fine actors in Cagney and Lacey (including Loretta Swit and Meg Foster who played Christine Cagney in the pilot and the first six episodes, respectively). MGM/Fox are convinced that a series that passes the Bechdel Test can’t be popular.

You want to tell them - and the rest of the film/TV industry - that they’re dead wrong about that? Click here. Sign the petition. Tell your friends. We’ve got a year to let them know.

Jennifer Kesler of the Hathor Legacy has more about this, and contact details for MGM/Fox, here.

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The Canon (by Natalie Angier)

I’m in the middle of reading The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier (feminist scientific journalist extraordinaire). It’s really great. Her style is convivial and vivacious and informal. Unavoidably, perhaps, a lot of the language that she uses to come off so vividly is couched in U.S.-centric and culturally-specific allusions. Like, for instance, knowing the name of a product-placement character in the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, or “we” finding “another Saudi Arabia”. And very many turns of phrase rest on a sense of humour that treads a very thin line by dropping straight-faced absurdities around literal scientific references — which is great if you’re in the know enough to get it, but dangerously susceptible to misinterpretation if you miss a joke.

But I totally dig her construction of the book. The way she introduces and interlinks scientific concepts, how she progresses from one idea to another and how she illustrates them is wonderfully enlightening and structured. I’m partway through the chapter on physics, at the moment, and in two pages she’s begun to lay out the mechanism of the second law of thermodynamics without even touching the beautiful words “entropy increases”. With ice cream cones and coffee cups. And Humpty Dumpty. And the solid bases of information about elementary particles that she’s already covered.

Quick, whip out your bio/logic programming bars

Infoquake hooked me with its cyberspacey dot com product manager drama, its fast-moving plot, and its silly descriptions of “biologic code” & futuristic programming. Since I have worked in Silicon Valley environments for years, this book is total crack. Also I have a fond spot for any book that takes William Gibson’s way of writing cyberspace as angular geometric shapes and updates this by rounding off the corners and having *blobby shapes*. Radical!

I have to give you a taste of the Cheez Whiz prose. Here is a scene where the barbaric, throwback White guy programmer from Hawai’i, one of the world’s few mavericks who are Unconnected and strictly limit the biologic code in their bodies, shows the Best Programmer in the World how it’s done.

“Watch this,” commanded Quell. And then he plunged his bare hands straight into the middle of the holograph.
Horvil gasped as connection strands rose like snakes charmed from a basket and wiggled thei way to the Islander’s fingers. Soon, Quell had amassed a bundle of data fibers in each hand, which he proceeded to weave in and out of the code blocks with astonishing alacrity. The connections looked just as well seated as if they had been stuck there with a pricey set of programming bars.
“I didn’t even know you could do it that way,” said Horvil. He thought of the clunky silver slabs roosted against his side and felt a rush of inferiority.
“How do you think people made code before bio/logic programming bars?” replied Quell. . . . “With their bare hands, that’s how. On the Islands, we remember such things.”

Kill me now, I’m laughing too hard! This scene is really great if you read it aloud.

The thing that made me want to throw the book across the room was the really dumb product launch scene. Here’s the setup. Natch (aka Gary Stu) is the supergenius CEO badboy and libertarian wet dream. His startup company is about to launch MultiReal, the ultimate disruptive technology, and as the World (Solar System?) Government wants to crack down, he has to launch it by Tuesday. Did you hear me! Tuesday! My god, that’s impossible! or is it

Horvil had already pushed aside the injury to his pride for the more pressing issue of an intellectual challenge. Using the tip of his finger, he was busy sketching lengthy equations on a virtual slate. The engineer ended up with a very large and unwieldy number at the bottom. “Totally impossible,” he said.
“What?” asked Natch.
“This is going to take a lot of grunt work, Natch. A lot. If this MultiReal program is as complex as Margaret says it is, it’s bound to have thousands of nodes we’ll need to hook up. Tens of thousands, maybe. Even if you and me and Quell and Ben work on this nonstop, we couldn’t get it done until” — Horvil scribbled his way through a maze of algebra — “December nineteenth.”
“You see?” cried Jara. “There’s no way we can do all this by Tuesday. No way.
The fiefcorp master flashed her the barest hint of a suggestive look, which Jara could feel right between the shoulder blades. Natch extended his finger towards Benyamin. “You’ve managed assembly-line coders,” he said. “Do you know a shop that can pull this off at the last minute?” The young man looked wide-eyed at his cousin, inhaled deeply, then nodded. “Good, then it’s settled.”

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE! Number one I don’t care what sort of hand-waving hooha you are up to with your swirling hologram globs, you are not fast talking your way out of The Mythical Man-Month by hiring some “assembly line coders”. Ahahahah! My suspension of disbelief broke completely. I pictured a thousand CEOs reading this book on airplanes and getting the idea into their heads even more firmly that acting like a hard assed Alpha Male and outsourcing to remote teams will magically move up their launch dates.

I would also point out the hilariousness of the guy who scribbles a maze of algebra to figure out… what? How long it will take them to finish a project? Algebra? Really? That project-management quadratic equation really is a brain-cracker!

Algebra!

Now we come to the worst problem of the book, you’ve been waiting for it, right? The really dumb sexism. Jara is a bio/logic programmer and an “analyst” but somehow also the marketing chick and accomplisher of shit work for the team. She’s super great at what she does, in theory, but she’s constantly undermined by self doubt and by Natch’s sexual manipulation of her, which is set up right in the beginning of the book with a long chapter from her point of view. She sees Natch as a complete jerk and keeps trying to quit her job, but then he runs SexualHarassment 2.69 code on her and she tries to counter it with ColdShower 4.0. Basiclally he shoots her a sultry little bad boy smirk backed up by his “biologic” and she can’t help but DO WHAT HE SAYS because.. because he’s hot? Or something? Inexplicable! He did it in the scene I just quoted and apparently he aimed his sexay at the middle of her back. Right. Cause that’s where I always get a sexy little tingle when my boss comes on to me while putting me down. Yup, right between the shoulder blades.

My other point about Jara is that, though she started out with decent potential as a cynical, tough, smart character, every other sentence about her is laden with her girly self-doubt. She cocks her head. She cries out in puzzlement. During the scene above she “snaps with a swagger she doesn’t feel.” She contemplates her helplessness. She sighs that through his clever plotting, her boss has “enslaved” her. She panics, whines, exclaims that she doesn’t understand, or feels her “mental gears” grind to a halt.

The other female character of the book, Margaret Surina, is a boddhatsiva, which is something like being Bill Gates and a hereditary monarch of a giant powerful family Clan or “Creed” which I suppose people join and can leave at will. (Maybe semi-libertarians are prolific breeders, or maybe there are bio/logic baby incubators; no one explains the Clans.) So while on the surface she’s super powerful, she is always shown disempowered, uncertain, helpless, cursing, wondering. Not in a head-cocking, petite, perky yet sullen disempowerment like Jara; it is the noble, shining helplessness of a princess in her tower. And while she in theory did 20 years of programming work on MultiReal, we only see her henchman, or lover, Quell, the big white hawai’ian guy, doing the programming at his fancy workbench.

What can I say? I’m easy to please, at this point I’m happy no one has been slapped in the face yet, raped, mindwiped, or told off to serve everyone some mugs of steaming klah coffee nitro and it’s almost a relief just to have supposedly-competent female characters in a world supposedly without any sexism just happen to be described in ways and put into situations that undermine and demean them. Good job David Louis Edelman.

Okay back to the book, I’m near the end, and someone just patted his pants pocket to feel the reassuring heft of his bio/logic programming bars. I can’t look away!

Omikuji and Senseless Violence

The last few months I’ve been enjoying Catherynne M. Valente’s Omikuji, a monthly snail mail short story & letter. It’s exciting to get real mail in a real envelope, sealed with red wax and stamped with a scrolly capital “C”. This month’s story is “How To Build a Ladder to the Sun in Six Simple Steps”. I particularly liked the bits about the Mechanical Counterpressure Stocking, and the poety bits about the sun and the small patch of earth under her bed suitable for beginning construction of the ladder.

For the tip of your ladder to blaze and crumble as you reach out, stretching your fingertips into the vacuum, your blood leaping to close the last distance. For the crush of a loop of fire catching you around the waist like a loving arm, pulling you in close, so close, closer than a child suckling at a great ruby breast. You can’t know what you will say as your heart atomizes to gold.

Last night I read Random Acts of Senseless Violence, in which a spoiled yet tough 12 year old rich white girl from Manhattan, Lola, starts a diary in a near future of riots and ruin, covering a year of her life as the U.S. situation deteriorates. Lola’s family slides into desperate poverty. Over the course of the book as Lola joins a gang and figures out how to survive in poverty and the rules of the street, her language changes in some interesting ways. By the last few pages of the book I felt sure the writer was deliberately pushing language far beyond a middle class comfort level on purpose to be extra perturbing; that was interesting. While you would be correct to be suspicious of this set up and the race and class issues that come up (sounds very special white snowflake doesn’t it? but it’s not!) I liked the way the story handled race & class & gender, and queerness, very much. It oh so much more than passes the Bechdel test - it is beautifully about girls’ relationships and the conversations rang very true to me. As the country deteriorates Lola comments on it more and more coldly, kind of like “They shot the new president again…” as she learns how to lasso a rat and bash a rapist’s head in and pick pockets on the subway and what to do in a riot and how the Boss Man who works your father to death is a bastard who should rot in hell, what to do when your scatty but sweet mom overdoses, how to back up your gang sisters in a fight — and about love & survival. I started the book in the evening and read past midnight to finish it; in the morning I was still upset. “Enjoy”! — if you like that sort of thing. I do.

Space General Lydia van Dyke

Oh, wow, a tough starship captain named General Lydia van Dyke. I’ve got to watch this show!

From the English version of its fan site:

Fans in many countries still remember the series:
- The starship diving into the ocean landing in submarine Base 104
- Disputes between Commander Cliff McLane and his ‘watchdog’ Tamara Jagellovsk
- Acrobatic dances and the uncommon music
- Crazy robots and mad scientists
- The mysterious frogs, the supernova, telenose and the invasion …

The “Starlight Casino” is an officers mess, located in the deep sea.
You can watch the fishes through large windows, wonder about acrobates mimic dancers or
simply drink another whisky.

I cheated; according to the episode guide, the above clip is from Episode 2. And the main Captain in the series is not van Dyke, it’s Cliff McLane. There are likely some interesting gender politics in the show, between McLane and the Galactic Security Officer assigned to his ship, Tamara Jagellovsk. Anyone have access to the episodes?

(Thanks to dammed-colonial and lasergirl for the link!)

Gender changing teenager in Cycler

Cycler is fabulous! I ripped through this book in about an hour and a half. Its main protagonist is an embarrassingly Judy-Blume-ish, mildly prissy teenage girl who plots with her best friend to get the prom date of her dreams - all the time hiding her dark secret - which is that she’s sort of like a werewolf, changing gender instead of species once a month right before her period. As a boy, Jack remembers everything about Jill’s life. But Jill hypnotizes herself, with her parents’ encouragement, into forgetting everything about her life as Jack.

It’s really trashy, and it’s done just *perfectly*.

The only thing I could have happily skipped was the whole skiing thing. Okay… skiing. *yawn* I guess it adds to the exotic allure of the exotic waspy setting. (Blume-ishly alien.)

The rest of it I could totally identify with. Being kind of an idiot! Major identity issues! Struggling to suppress memories and desire, parental horribleness all around sexuality and gender identity, secret(ish) burning crushes on friends!

If only I’d had this book when I was a teenager. I’m not sure how it would have been directly helpful, but it does give a good map for the possibilities of human relationships.

Huzzah, we have moved far beyond Marvin Redpost: Is He a Girl? (A perfectly acceptable gender-switching book - if you’re about 6 years old.)

I’m left thinking a lot about Jill/Jack’s mother and father, especially the mother’s role as oppressor of Jack — as the driving force behind the oppression, suppression, of Jill’s masculinity. But that’s just me, and my reaction from my experiences as a teenager. I can see that there are quite a few other things to react strongly to in the characters and events. Anyone read it? What did you think?

I might have to post again, this time behind a cut with spoiler warning.

Nominating for Tiptree, though I’m sure someone already has…

ad targeting (str8) women scientists

I confess that I was tickled pink, as my grandmother liked to say, by this ad for “epMotion” — an automation tool for pipetting. Lyrics are at pharyngula, which is my source for the link, too.

Reactions?

Top Ten (Eleven) Obscure Works

First of I’d just like to state that this does not represent the opinions of all the bloggers on this blog and is not endorsed by all of them. All books on this poll were nominated by Feminist SF - The Blog! readers and voted on twice by those same readers.

When I started this whole thing my entire point was to come up with an alternative to an obscure Sci-Fi works list that was being linked to in quite a few places. All of the authors and characters on that list were straight white men so I decided to try to create a list that had some actual diversity. Especially since the works of marginalized authors are often not promoted as highly as other works and because of this have a higher tendency to fall through the cracks. There were various complaints of holding an open poll to find out obscure works and such and I understand those complaints. I created the list in this way because I was not arrogant enough to think I knew all the obscure works in SF. So I decided I wanted input from others and to give readers a chance to participate in the selection process as opposed to just putting up a list that I decided on all by myself. This method seemed more community orientated.

And I’m quite happy with the results. Looking at the list I know a lot of these books wouldn’t have been on it if I just came up with it on my own. I think overall it’s a very good introduction to a diverse segment of SF. So without further rambling here is the Top Eleven (there was a tie in the final count) Obscure Works of SF as decided by you! 

11. God Stalk by: P.C. Hodgell

Jame is a Kencyrath, the chosen people of the Three-Faced God, who fight the demonic being called Perimal Darkling. At the same time, she fights an internal battle for their honor because 3,000 years ago the leader of the Kencyrath betrayed his people to the Darkness for his own immortality. She also must find her ten-year older brother Tori and return to him the sword and ring of their father. If that is not enough she has to stand before the rathorns, wear the cloak of living snakes, kill one god, and resurrect another. All in a day’s work for Jame. Will Soon Be Re-released in an omnibus edition with second novel in series.

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women in science (in fiction) : awesome resource

Helen Merrick, feminist, WisCon-attendee, and SF scholar/critic extraordinaire, has developed a fabulous resource : a database of representations of female scientists in fiction — mostly SF.

She’s still taking submissions, so get over there and browse. Amazing stuff.

The alternate ending to Native Tongue

Suzette Haden Elgin resolves to write the third book of the Native Tongue trilogy - again. I love this idea! If Suzette writes it, I’ll certainly read it.

Writing a novel that’s an alternative to the third book of the Native Tongue trilogy

I have to do this. Not because there’s a market for it, and not because I could publish it to popular acclaim, and not because I don’t have more than enough other work to do. But when I wrote Native Tongue III: Earthsong I did something unforgivable. I was so caught up in my “literary” processes … so caught up in making the book fit the metaphor my perceptions were trapped in … that I wrote the wrong book entirely. It should have been a book that carried on the story arc in the first two books and brought that story arc to a plausible resolution. It should not have been the book I did write, which dragged the real nonfictional world into the story arc kicking and screaming. People who read that novel [and not many people did, since they were warned not to in a heck of a hurry] felt cheated, and rightly so. I need to fix that, and the only way I know to fix it is to write — now — the book I should have written.

Would you read the alternate Volume Three?

What final books (or TV/movies) in a series could use a serious re-write?

Orson Scott Card: homophobic Humpty Dumpty

Update: In the comment thread to this post, one person responded

I’m just curious as to why we are even ceding this much space to O.S.C., to spend so much energy refuting him…? Does anyone in the community take him seriously? I don’t… further comment I do think, though, that answering to his views in this way validates them as being worthy of consideration. To me, they’re just stupid hate speech chucked into the same bin as white power propaganda - i.e., absurd and laughable.

I’ve added a political follow-up at the end of this post which explains why I think it’s worthwhile.

—
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

1. Humpty Dumpty: there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!

In Orson Scott Card’s most recent essay on same-sex marriage, he offers as a scientific hypothesis “It is not unfair to give unique preference to monogamous heterosexual relationships, if that preference and those marriages benefit all of society — including homosexuals or potential homosexuals.”

In an earlier essay, published at the beginning of June this year, Card wrote about something he still remembers his father saying to him when 9-year-old Scott brought a book on “cave men” home from school: “Whenever science and religion disagree, one or the other or both of them are wrong.”
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Final Round of Voting! - Top Ten Obscure(?) Works

So as I said the final round of voting for the Top Ten Obscure(?) Works starts today and the cut off for votes is 8/15/2008 at midnight.

I added the (?) to the title for this post only because there’s been a lot of disagreement with what the Top 24 works were and if they were truly obscure. Maybe it’s impossible to get a Top 10 of obscure works from a poll but I wanted to involve the community of readers in the selection process and not just decide what I think the top ten are and I’m not arrogant enough to think that I’ve read all good SF/F out there so I wanted community input.

I also just want to remind folks that the top 24 were nominated by readars and voted on by readers so because a lot of the commentary seemed to act like I should have removed certain works from the running or as if they were my choices.

Did I see books on the list that I thought were not obscure to me? Yes but I do think the majority of the books on the list are obscure to mainstream SF/F readers so that particular goal was accomplished. And also I did not want to pluck certain works out of the list because they weren’t obscure enough for me but then have others complain that they’d “never heard of so-and-so, so I was wrong the author/book was obscure”.

It all comes down to not being able to please everyone and I’m fine with that. You are under absolutely no pressure to vote in any way. If the shortlist or the final Top Ten offends you in some way or doesn’t seem obscure enough for you then I encourage you to make your own and I will definitely be interested to read it when it’s released. 

Now in case you missed it: The Top 24 with Cover photos

And Finally: The Final Round of Voting.
In this round you can vote for a maximum of 5 works!
If you are so inclined feel free to spread this far and wide we want as many folks as possible from a diversity of backgrounds voting.
Click Here To Vote!

Top 24 Obscure Works - Second Round of Voting Starts Monday

I apologize for the delay in getting the results up but I’ve been very busy the last couple of weeks.

We started with 105 nominees and after numerous votes I am here to present your Top 24! It was going to be you’re Top 20 here but due to a tie we have a Top 24 instead. Some might argue that some of the works are not that obscure but then we get into the problem of defining obscurity as it applies to many different folks, and there are quite a few works on the list that I consider quite obscure. 

The second poll should be up on Monday and there will be a post that goes up when that happens but for now here they are in no particular order:

TOP 24

The Garden of Iden by: Kage Baker

Stranger At The Wedding by: Barbara Hambly

The Healer’s War by: Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

A Door Into Ocean by: Joan Slonczewski

Solitaire by: Kelley Eskridge

God Stalk by: P.C. Hodgell

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