• Left in a comment on the last linkpost by reader Hellison – cheers! Don’t miss this photo post on the posture of women in comics/on genre fiction book covers, which follows on really well from the last few things we’ve linked on the topic.
• Over in the US, Buck Angel says “Buy girlscout cookies”. And who is anyone to argue? Well, yeah.
• Here’s a post on three mothers in fiction – particularly like the section on Adrian Mole’s mum.
• “Why does Link no longer even want to tolerate the presence of the chick it is The Legend of?”: Cat Valente has a quick catchup with her games console and has Things To Say.

Vik's Christmas Grotto

Vik sez:

“Well, I like DVDs, obviously! Also, books and comics and random toys. These are not all from this year, and they’re not all presents. I tend to get clothes for Christmas! But anyway, in no particular order:

• Agora: Hypatia writes new mathematical theorems while Alexandria burns. I love Rachel Weisz, and although this film makes me cry a lot, I think it’s ace.
• Pride and Prejudice: one of my all time favorite books, and this BBC adaptation is the best by far. The new version has all the original colours put back in, which destroyed my impression of Regency England as cloaked in pastels.
• Senna: even if you’re not a fan of F1, I defy anyone to watch this film and not be massively affected by it.
• The 49ers (Alan Moore): this is my favourite Alan Moore graphic novel. It’s sort of steampunky, I guess, with cute boy!kissing and prejudice and war and awesome female characters.
• Air(G Willow Wilson): why is this not more well known? Flight attendant Blythe is afraid of flying, but this doesn’t stop her from a magic realism tour of lands that don’t exist. Bonus: positive depictions of Islam, Amelia Earhart being awesome beyond words, and things not being quite they seem. A bit like a cross between Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie in graphic novel format.
• Fables (Bill Willingham): If you’re not reading Fables, you need to start. All fairy tales are real, and they’re living in modern-day New York, waging a war against an enemy known only as the Adversary in their homelands. Snow White is far and away my favourite character, and her relationship with (the big, bad) Bigby Wolf is lovely.
• La Reine Margot: my go-to favourite film. The Massacre of Paris, Marguerite de Valois, Catherine de Medici, what more could you ask for? This is a really lush production of a rather Dynasty-esque Dumas novel, complete with incest, buckets of blood and lots of poisonings.
• Burlesque and the Art of the Teese (Dita von Teese): lovely coffee table book with lush pictures of Dita. The book is actually split in two: one half is burlesque-focused, and covers the history of burlesque and burlesque outfits through the ages, and other half is focused on fetish-inspired outfits.
• The Women Incendiaries (Edith Thomas): a recent gift for Yule, this is a history of the female revolutionaries during the French Revolution.
• Auto Repair for Dummies (Deanna Sclar): well, obviously. A bit too American in its language, but a decent primer, I think.
• Female Agents: Gah, this film. I don’t know why it was marketed as Female Agents rather than the original Les Femmes de l’ombre. Either way, this is the story of female agents, spies and covert operatives in France during WWII. It’s gorgeous and sexy and scary, but don’t expect everyone to live happily ever after.
• Marie Antoinette: on the other end of the spectrum, this is complete fluff. This Sofia Coppola film is light and frilly, like a giant French fancy. It’s based on the book by Antonia Fraser, and focuses on Marie Antoinette’s life up until she flees Versailles. It therefore stops before the horrible execution business happens, and you are also not subjected to Marie Antoinette’s days in captivity. Instead, you get dresses, frills, cakes, parties, and elaborate hairdos. There is nothing sad or upsetting about this film and I love it like I love cotton candy.
• Deathless (Catherynne M Valente): Communism! Fairy tales! The original warrior princess! WIN. (Possibly not as easy to grab via a physical bookstore, but order it for a new year surprise?)
• My Little Pony: I blame Sarah Cook for this.
• Compass: Also Sarah Cook’s fault. She has equipped me with this to assist with navigating my way back, should I ever get lost in strange and exotic foreign locales.
• Hot Wheels: no explanation required.”

In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”

That’s from the New Yorker obituary for JD Salinger. Reading it, I had much the same reaction as Cat Valente, who said:

“Jim and the Ghost” from ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ (public domain image from Wikipedia).

“Really? Every reader? Every condition? Even though none of those books are about, by, or can manage to conceal for long their contempt for women, and the extent to which one is about non-whites is at best left wincingly unexamined? … The defining characteristic for writing about spoiled rich white people is that it WILL NEVER speak to every reader in every condition. And Huck Finn may have been poor on paper but he exhibits the snotty certainty of his own awesomeness and freedom to do whatever he likes without significant punishment that surely speaks to the spoiled rich white bro demographic.”


She wonders what the flaw was in Slaughterhouse Five or Little Women that Huckleberry Finn didn’t also contain.

And her comments coincide with a furore over a new edition of Huckleberry Finn in which the publishers have decided that Twain’s many hundreds of uses of ‘the N word’ are too hot to print in the modern market. So they’re taking them out, replacing it with ‘Slave’ and deleting all uses of the term ‘Injun’ as well.

Mixed reactions to this online; even quite liberal commenters find that seeing the N-word written down is Not Okay today (to the point that I’m not going to put it here because I don’t want to bring that to this site.) Others are outraged, such as Emma Caulfield (who played ‘Anya’ in Buffy), who says on her twitter:

“UNDERSTAND this. Mark Twain wrote HF to show the absurdity of racism. He was one of the most profound forward thinkers of any time.”

Language is important, and in the same way that we try to be deliberately inclusive in the feminist arena by rejecting language which is sexist, ableist or casually tolerant of any kind of bigotry, seeing prejudices treated as acceptable on a page can influence people. This isn’t the first time the work has been censored – CBS made a tv version in 1955 which cut out all mention of slavery and cast a white actor as Jim. Niiiice try, but no.

I’m with Emma on this though: if you’re too young to realise that Huck (or Tom Sawyer) parroting the local prejudices was done deliberately to reflect badly on the society they were in, and their poor and uneducated backgrounds, then the story itself should be enough to demonstrate the inhumanity of racism.

…which isn’t to say that Twain doesn’t also play unacceptably on stereotypes of coloured people in the book for what seems like cheap comedy value at times, because he certainly does.

I think there’s a bigger opportunity here. Those three books most assuredly don’t speak to “every reader and condition” – so let’s find some that do!

Your suggestions please, for books which spoke to you directly, which touched your heart, or which you think have genuine near-universal appeal. Let’s make a new top three: the authors can be any nationality, the books originally in any language. Answers in the comment thread, go!

SF authors: Not clones. - photo by David Kitchenham, taken from morguefile.com

There’s been a lot of controversy in the world of Sci-fi books recently, over attitudes to both women and minorities.

A blogger for Apex Books called Gustavo Bondoni wrote this piece of trolling, misogynist racefail horseshit, ranting against positive discrimination and the “PC” police, etc. He was referring to those people who voiced an opinion on The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF being a mammoth book of only white male authors. No women, no minorities… all white, all men.

One of the people he’s complaining about is the glorious Catherynne M Valente, a fantasy and sci-fi author and editor, whose writing I love a whole lot. (I’ll get the recs out of the way: her World Fantasy Award nominated, Mythopoeic Award winning The Orphan’s Tales and Hugo nominated Palimpsest for starters). The small snag here being that Apex is the company she edits a magazine for, so people asked her opinions of his blogpost.

Now, there’s the old argument that if you’re pulling from the Golden Age of sci-fi, most authors WERE men. But this book isn’t only about that period, and the list of superb female SFF authors is long and mighty. CL Moore, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, Marge Piercy… (believe me, I could add 20 more names here with no effort). Much more if you include Fantasy as a genre alongside it. There are 3 female SF Grandmasters, and truly great female SF writing goes back a long way (it’s traditional to cite Mary Shelley for Frankenstein).

Besides, you shouldn’t mess with sci-fi nerds, they know math: one commenter on the Mammoth book post worked out that even if 3 out of 4 authors were white males, and the other 1 in 4 category contained *everyone* else, there was still only a 0.2% chance of all 21 stories being written by white guys. This wasn’t a case of “but it’s representative of there being genuinely no minorities in SF writing”. The chance of that being true is something like 0.2% depending on the actual ratios (you have to get up to 95% white males before it even hits 50/50).

So Bondoni wrote his deliberately baiting blogpost, trying to raise some controversy, and Cat Valente posted what she thought of it.

It turns out she’s tired and bored, but with more swearing:

I’m not saying “ignore the bully and he’ll go away.” Nope. Shred away. It’s what he wants, so he can continue to feel persecuted, and very likely keep believing that the mythical PC harpies are why he’s not a star of page and screen. It’s fun to feel persecuted – if you’re persecuted, it usually means you’re right, and at the mercy of wicked souls. It’s not actually fun to be persecuted, but if you can get that feeling while sitting at home with no one oppressing you? Profit.

He’s using us – because he knows he can’t get the internet crowds to look at him any other way, he simply calls us playground names. And that’s what the phrase PC is these days – name calling. No one who actually believes in not intentionally hurting other humans uses that phrase anymore. It’s pretty much solely used to insist that mobs of people who don’t look like the user are constantly beating down his door to force him to be nice. Poor f***ing baby. My heart bleeds for you, sweetheart.

I just wanted to give a little cheer, because I think her whole post is excellent.

Next time, Mr Bondoni, don’t pick a fight with the woman who responded to Elizabeth Moon’s astonishing anti-Muslim rant by dedicating the entire next issue of Apex magazine to only contain stories from Arab and Muslim writers. (That issue comes out soon, and I can’t wait).

Now, we could say that picking arguments over statistics and always demanding equal representation is too aggressive a behaviour, that it doesn’t help feminism or that we’d be better off just leaving losers like Bondoni alone. Cat’s point is that we’re all tired of it, we’ve all seen it before, and the arguments against positive discrimination (if that even applied here, which I don’t think it does) will keep coming from the poor oppressed traditional majority.

But when the comments to the original announcement of the ‘Mammoth book…’ themselves prove precisely why the fight isn’t over yet, I think I can find the energy to keep opposing.

Sci-fi should be a field where we can leave prejudices behind, especially those based on tradition and culture. It is the greatest genre for wiping away the assumptions that the ratio of power between genders should be the same as in the modern day, or that race or religion (or even money) have to divide people the way they do. I love sci-fi for this.

But it also contains its share of famously right-wing intolerant viewpoints, and that’s a reminder that even in this free and imaginative literary space we can’t stop pushing to improve things. I think Cat is right: hearing Bondoni’s arguments yet again is boring, and providing him with the drama he wants is pointless… but taking a stance against his views isn’t. We still hear people complaining about things being “too PC” daily, that fight is a long way from over yet.