Tomorrow at Gally I'm on a panel titled "Expanding Your Horizons: SF Literature From the Pros". For reference, here's a list of some of the books I mean to pimp ( Read more... )

Feminist SF, especially feminist SF set in future utopias or dystopias, sometimes handles homosexuality well and sometimes handles it badly. I'm reading The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper, and I've just come across a bit where someone explains that they routinely cure homosexuality, which, as people knew even before the apocalypse, is ( Read more... )

( 43. PH34R MY INT3LL3CT )

An interview with a writer on Afghanistan included this observation:

"...women who live in a society that undervalues women as extremely as Afghan society does, never learn to empathise with other women, because they themselves don't place value on other women. And when they themselves are so mistreated it becomes virtually impossible for them to ( Read more... )

Just caught a mention of a discussion about whether feminist writers should write from a female POV. I can give one reason straight up, albeit a dated one. You see, I have a guilty pleasure - reading SF short stories from the late fifties / early sixties. In these stories, the female characters are often barely recognisable as human beings. You ( Read more... )

Hugely enjoying the intelligent discussion here of dressing femininely, and what that means. It's not a trivial matter, shallow questions about whether you can wear lipstick and still be a feminist. Women are judged by their appearance, are taught to obsess over their appearance, are used to sell things with their appearance; we can be fired for ( Read more... )

At long last I read James Tiptree Jr's Your Faces, O My Sisters, Your Faces Filled Of Light, and I rather wish I hadn't, and if you've also read the story you may know what I mean, and if you haven't read it you ought to ( Read more... )

I grabbed this second-hand because it's on the Feminist SF, Fantasy, and Utopia Reading List. Normally the slightest hint of palace intrigue or warring clans causes me to run a mile from any book, but I was already captured by Vinge's excellent prose before I realised what I was about ( Read more... )

Finished The Judas Rose, Suzette Haden Elgin's sequel to Native Tongue. A very sophisticated novel, which builds up a picture of the misogynist future society and how women patiently, secretly work to change it over decades. I got addicted to the book halfway through and rapidly finished it. Elgin's prose is a pleasure, and the sensation of being ( Read more... )

Speaking of things all writers should read, if you haven't already, visit the Turkey City Lexicon. I was just re-reading it when I came to this definition:

Abbess Phone HomeTakes its name from a mainstream story about a medieval cloister which was sold as SF because of the serendipitous arrival of a UFO at the end. By extension, any mainstream ( Read more... )