Women of Vision, edited by Denise Du Pont and published by St. Martin’s Press in 1988, is a collection of interviews with then-contemporary women writers of science fiction and fantasy, including such folks as Ursula K. Le Guin, Alice Sheldon, Suzy McKee Charnas, Joan D. Vinge and Pamela Sargent. It is a slim volume; each interview runs approximately ten to fifteen pages, and there are twelve all together.

The interviews are guided by a large set of questions that Du Pont condenses and summarizes in her introduction:

“Why do you write? What were the obstacles (or benefits) you encountered as a woman writer? Why do you write in the genre(s) you have chosen?” I would also add to the introduction a question that was clearly asked and makes an appearance in every woman’s interview, for better or worse: what role does feminism play in your fiction?

[Read on]

The next installment of the Symphony of Science, #13, has gone live! It’s called “The Greatest Show on Earth,” and is a song about evolution, DNA, and natural selection – among other things. It features Bill Nye, Richard Dawkins, and David Attenborough for vocals. The video for this one is especially neat, taking its footage from nature documentaries; I love all of the strange and wonderful birds included.

(Past posts on this music video series here.)

There’s nothing quite like stumbling upon something cool that had previously slipped under my radar — like a present from the past, really — and this time around, the discovery was the program Science Fiction Conversations. The show was hosted by Nisi Shawl and Eileen Gunn, produced and directed by Vonda N. McIntyre, and recorded at SCAN-TV in Seattle, Washington. I don’t recall where I heard it mentioned or if I read about it in an article or a book; either way, I was intrigued by the thought of a show about women writers discussing SF with each other.

Luckily for me, and for you, there are three episodes available to watch on Google Videos: one interviewing Eileen Gunn herself upon the release of her short story collection Stable Strategies and Others, one with Ursula K. Le Guin, and one with Hiromi Goto. Each runs around 30 minutes, though the interview with Goto is a bit longer.

[Watch below the cut]

Yesterday we discussed the first half of Extra(ordinary) People, Joanna Russ’s 1984 collection of short fiction. I left off at the end of one of my favorite stories, the very genderqueer tale “The Mystery of the Young Gentleman,” and the potential reading of it as a story, not just about the performativity of gender, but about passing and survival in normative, often dangerous society. Where we continue...:

The frame tale then says that no, the telepathic minority died out without affecting the outside world much at all—but a utopia was established eventually. That leads us to the next story of performativity and gender, “Bodies.”

[Read on.]

This is the first of the “Reading Joanna Russ” posts that will be a two-parter. The first part will be up today, the second tomorrow.

The next book in Russ’s oeuvre is the collection of short fiction Extra(ordinary) People, originally published in 1984 by St. Martin’s Press with a reprint following in 1985 by The Women’s Press. It has since gone out of print and remained so, like her other short fiction collections. Extra(ordinary) People contains only five stories, the majority of which are novelette to novella length, including the Hugo-winning (in 1983) “Souls.” Three of the stories are reprints, all published in the early ’80s, and two are new to the collection. There’s also an overlying frame narrative strung between the lot.

The book opens with an epigram from Alice Sheldon: “’I began thinking of you as pnongl. People’ – [said the alien] ’it’s dreadful, you think a place is just wild and then there’re people—’” It’s a strange sentiment to open the book with, one I admit I haven’t quite parsed completely in relation to the stories contained within, which are for the most part concerned with identities as masks, or masks as identities, or some variation on the nature of performativity. It seems to have something pointed to say about perception and Othering, the unexpected incursion of real people into a landscape that “should” be without them; in relation to that, the issues of performativity, society, and the perception of identity in the book are destabilized somewhat.

[Read on.]

There have been several iterations of Neil Gaiman’s iconic graphic novel series, The Sandman, from the original single issue run to the collected trades to the luxurious Absolute editions—and now, though Gaiman had initially intimated that he would prefer it not to happen while he was still around, there will be a truly delightful, extensive, intimate set of annotated editions, if the first volume is any indication. The annotations are handled by Leslie S. Klinger of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and The New Annotated Dracula renown; Klinger is also a friend of Gaiman’s and a fellow associate in the Baker Street Irregulars.

The first hardcover volume contains issues #1-20, reproduced in black and white, with extensive annotations on a page-by-page, panel-by-panel basis, including quoted sections from Gaiman’s scripts, historical references, DC Universe references, and linguistic notes, among other things. The introductions, by both Gaiman and Klinger, are revelatory of the intent and emotion behind the project, each explaining why it’s happening now, and what went into getting it done. It’s a handsome, big book—a bit difficult to curl up with, but beautiful.

[Read on]

Stubby the Rocket commented on the new, official Prometheus trailer when it was released, and noted the typographical hearkening to the initial Alien trailer. Clearly, Tor.com weren’t the only ones who noticed, as this fan-made “trailer” for Alien shows – set to the style and music of the new Prometheus trailer, using footage from the 1979 film, the juxtapositions between the new film and the classic are eerie. Seriously, watch the above.

[The original Alien and Prometheus trailers for reference]

The inaugural installment of a series of books that will be collecting the best lesbian speculative fiction of the previous year, Heiresses of Russ 2011 is Lethe Press’s newest offering, a sister to the much-loved (at least around these parts) Wilde Stories collections. Heiresses of Russ 2011 collects the finest lesbian SF that was published in 2010 and includes such authors as N. K. Jemisin, Rachel Swirsky, Ellen Kushner, and Catherine Lundoff, among others. I was highly pleased by the table of contents and looked forward to being able to dive into the text. Plus, having a yearly anthology of queer women’s spec-fic in honor of the late, great Joanna Russ is pretty appropriate, and fills out the available spectrum of best-of books.

The guest editor for the 2011 anthology was JoSelle Vanderhooft, who has also worked on such books as Steam-Powered and Hellebore & Rue, and the co-editor was Steve Berman, the editor of the aforementioned Wilde Stories collections.

[A review]

If you’re still looking for a cool gift to give this season (or next) that’s also cheap, look no further: Cubeecraft is a free paper-craft website with an awesomely large selection of pop culture crafts. There are more than 300 doll-crafts to choose from on the site’s “Pop-Culture” section alone, and yet more in the original crafts and tie-in sections.

The paper dolls in Cubeecraft’s Pop Culture selection range from Spider Jerusalem of Transmetropolitan to Oscar from Sesame Street, from Moss of The I.T. Crowd to Fox Mulder & Dana Scully of The X-Files, and that doesn’t even begin to cover all of the options.

There’s something for every flavor of geek on your list — or, for yourself, if you want to decorate your house in papercrafts!

[My experience building one of these little guys]

A Study in Lavender, edited by Joseph DeMarco, is a 2011 anthology from Lethe Press that features a variety of queer-themed stories set in the Sherlock Holmes canon(s); some are (obviously) about Holmes and Watson’s relationship, but others deal with characters like Lestrade or focus on cases that involve queer folks. It’s a neat project featuring predominantly early-to-mid-career writers, some who regularly write queer fiction, some who write romance, and some of whom are more familiar to speculative fiction readers—Rajan Khanna, Lyn C. A. Gardner, Michael G. Cornelius, and Elka Cloke, for example.

Scholars and fans have been arguing about the implications of queerness in the Holmes canon for a long time—it’s a popular topic. Two men in an intense emotional relationship, living together, sharing spaces and finances and their lives; well. It’s suggestive, and it’s intriguing. Both of the most recent big-name interpretations of the Holmes stories—the Robert Downey, Jr. movie and the BBC’s delightful Sherlock—have played with the intensity of the relationship between Holmes and Watson, explored it and made suggestions about it.

This book seeks to do the same, but much more openly, as well as exploring the possibilities of other queer folks whose lives may have intersected that of the Great Detective.

[Read More]

Generally in this series, the books I’ve looked at have come firmly out of the speculative tradition, and have been prose fiction—no dramas, only a few books that are figured more as queer lit than as spec-fic. I think it’s high time to remedy that with a contemporary classic of gay literature that’s also pretty damned speculative—what with the angels and the exploration of heaven with God gone missing—in the form of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-prize winning play-in-two-parts, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

This is not a piece that’s going to come up on the average reader of queer SF’s radar, because it isn’t figured as SF, and it isn’t a novel. That’s a shame, because Kushner’s play (also adapted to a miniseries by HBO) is eminently readable, emotionally gripping, and thematically charged; plus, it’s flat-out speculative, no question about that. As a contemporary story, it also does what much SF does not: engages with the AIDS epidemic, the politics of the Reagan era, homophobia, religion, and racism.

[An appreciation.]

The best musical thing I’ve stumbled upon recently is a group called the Video Game Music Choir, who perform adaptations of video game themes with great technical and vocal skill. (We all know I love this kind of thing; refer back to posts on adaptations of the themes of Game of Thrones, Zelda, etcetera.) The founder and musical director is Julia Seeholzer, while the art direction and creative design comes from Daniel Jimenez—each have contributed arrangements to the project, and the group is made up of a group of Berklee College of Music students.

What makes this especially neat is that it isn’t a one-off — the Video Game Music Choir have released an album!

[More]

On Dec. 8, I announced the table of contents for Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction — an anthology edited by yours-truly, to be published by Lethe Press in 2012. The book hasn’t exactly been a secret project or anything; I’ve been working on it for a goodly chunk of 2011, soliciting stories here, holding open submissions there, and digging through queer speculative fiction everywhere I could find it. I hadn’t discussed the project in this space yet, though, mostly by virtue of the fact that it was still in-progress.

However, it seems high time to do so now. The book is put together, the table of contents is official, the massive reading binge is finished (and oh, what a reading binge it was).

So, this thing I’ve been working on.

[A short rumination of the theme of the book, plus some recommended reading.]

Released within the same year as How to Suppress Women’s Writing, The Zanzibar Cat is Joanna Russ’s first short story collection. (I’m not counting The Adventures of Alyx because it forms a mosaic narrative and is a sort of book of its own; The Zanzibar Cat is made up of unrelated, unconnected stories.) Arkham House published the collection in 1983, with a follow-up reprint by Baen in 1984. It is currently out of print. My edition is the Arkham House printing, which has some genuinely odd but kind-of-neat cover art and actually features a large picture of Russ on the back cover.

The original publication dates for the stories range from 1962 (“My Dear Emily”) to 1979 (“The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand”), with the vast majority of the stories having been published in the 1970s. Most of them come from anthologies, but there are a few magazines that crop up, like The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

[The Zanzibar Cat is, for the most part, a lighter, faster read…]

The results for the 2011 Gaylactic Spectrum Award have been announced for the winner and shortlist in the Best Novel category. The Best Short Fiction and Best Other Work categories are given every other year, whereas Best Novel is yearly; meaning 2012 will see the other two categories awarded.

This year’s winner, declared by the awards’ panel as the best LGBTQ speculative novel published in 2010, is Kathe Koja’s Under the Poppy from Small Beer Press. The press release says of the novel: “Under the Poppy breaks a lot of rules: point-of-view shifts, convoluted mysterious plots full of violence and decadence, relationships that run the gamut from accepted to beyond forbidden, and witty graphic language. In Koja’s skillful hands, the novel engages the reader from the start, provides a way to taste and smell the world through brilliantly-crafted prose, and presents a heart-wrenching romance. A mature love story that doesn’t flinch from revealing the truth about life in the demimonde, Under the Poppy is well worth the read.”

[The shortlist:]

Having just finished reading the fantastic collection 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin (ed. Karen Joy Fowler and Debbie Notkin), I’ve started thinking about the ways in which my reading habits have changed over the years — mostly because of one thing, which I’ll now confess:

I haven’t read all of Le Guin’s books. Or, even half. Not for the reasons you might suspect, though; certainly not from a lack of enthusiasm or desire. Ursula K. Le Guin is one of our best, as 80! makes a point of exploring in loving detail, and reading her is a treat beyond compare. Her prose is complex, handsome, and challenging in the best ways, her worlds are anchored so deftly in anthropological and linguistic detail that they never seem less than immediate, and her characters fill all walks of life in their worlds and ours.

If I had encountered her first as a teenager, I would have read her entire bibliography at once, gorging myself on the beauty, the stunning prose, the sensation of wonder that reliably comes on the heels of “The End.” It would have been a great month or two, and would have left me exhausted at the end. That was just how I preferred to read: find a new author, devour everything they’ve ever done that I can get my hands on.

[Not that there’s a damn thing wrong with a reading orgy...]

Somewhere Beneath Those Waves is Sarah Monette’s first general short fiction collection, published by Prime Books, who also handled her collection of Kyle Murchison Booth stories The Bone Key in 2007 (discussed here). While there is one Booth story in this collection, the rest are varied in theme and content, spanning Monette’s career publishing short fiction from the first story (“Three Letters from the Queen of Elfland”) to new tales unique to this collection, and covering all of the ground between.

The book opens with “Draco Campestris” and closes with “After the Dragon,” both stories featuring dragons inspired by the jewelry of Elise Matthesen. Bookended between these two tales are stories ranging from science fiction to classic horror to urban fantasy (with trains!), spanning an emotional gamut from the desolate to the uplifting, often united by their focus on people who have been othered or made outsiders in their society. There are several queer stories, and yet more stories that deal with women’s sexualities (queer and otherwise) and identities in a patriarchal world. Issues of gender, sexuality, class, and able-ness permeate Monette’s short fiction; trauma and recovery, too, are common themes.

[A review]

The Freedom Maze, out today from Small Beer Press and available here, is an eloquent and genuinely moving tale of real magic, stories, and the disjunction between Southern myth and Southern reality, circumscribed by time travel and complex trials of identity — racial, familial, gendered, and otherwise. The book, a young adult novel published by the Big Mouth House imprint of Kelly Link & Gavin Grant’s Small Beer Press, is set in the Louisiana of the 1960s and also of the 1860s, on the ancestral plantation land of the Fairchild family to which the main character Sophie belongs.

Sophie has been left at Oak Cottage with her Aunt Enid and her grandmother for the summer while her newly divorced mother goes to college to get her certification to be a public accountant. Her father barely writes after having left them for New York; her mother is demanding and often too sharp with her about her looks, her wits, and her un-ladylike demeanor; her grandmother is worse; only Enid seems to have any care for her. Bereft, upset after a fight with her mother, Sophie makes an ill-considered wish to have a time traveling adventure just like those in her favorite books — and the spirit who she’s been talking to obliges, sending her back one hundred years to her own family’s plantation. Except, in this past, with her darker skin, she’s taken for a bastard child and a slave, and when she tries to impose the narrative of a story-book over her transport and turn it into an adventure, things do not go as expected. There’s no easy trip home, and she has a role to play.

[A review]

The Symphony of Science project has released their next and newest music video, “Onward to the Edge.” (Posts about the rest of the Symphony collected here.) This one is about space travel and the planetary system, featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox, and Carolyn Porco for vocals. The music is relaxing, and even soothing — a fairly subdued track.