Swan Tower

10:57 am - any sociologists out there?

Apparently I'm developing this thing for arguing with mind-melds.

In this instance, SF Signal is taking on gender imbalance in spec fic publishing. Lots of food for thought in there, but I'm at the point where my single overwhelming thought is this:

Is there, anywhere out there, a sociologist with both the necessary interest in genre fiction and the necessary methodological rigor to get us some actual data?

Because until somebody does that study, we're arguing from evidence that is 98% anecdotes and gut feeling. Some magazines (Strange Horizons, Fantasy) openly discuss the gender breakdown of their submissions and publications; Broad Universe has scraped data from issue runs of some more. But where's the data for novels? First novels, bestseller novels, big contracts, broken down by (admittedly fuzzy) categories of sub-genre, maybe even weighted for type of narrative if our hypothetical sociologist is good enough. Reviews, awards, hardcover versus trade paper versus mmpb publication. In a dream world we'd know the submission stats, too -- but good luck getting those. Even without them, it would be a start.

It makes me regret my exit from academia, but truth is, I could never do this study. You really need a sociologist, not an anthropologist; this is not participant-observation work.

Some things we do know: that the people who say "I just buy/read good work, regardless of who wrote it" are naive. It's well-established, in fields ranging from biology to symphony orchestras, that the perceived gender of individuals affects their reception: the percentage of women in orchestras went up after musicians began auditioning behind a curtain, with a carpet laid down so high-heeled shoes wouldn't click on the floor. Swap the names on journal articles, and readers will rate higher the one they think is written by a man. Very few editors or readers out there are actively hating on women writers; the real problem is the inactive prejudice.

But we need data before we can get to the deeper questions of "why," let alone "what do we do about it?" The relative absence of women in science fiction (as opposed to fantasy) no doubt arises from many factors, ranging from fewer women with the educational background to write hard SF, to less free time on their hands for the writing of it, to a reluctance to submit to markets they perceive as unfriendly to them, to editorial bias, to reader bias, and so around the merry-go-round. The relative presence of women in the current paranormal romance/urban fantasy borderland arises from a different set of factors. I don't think anecdotes and gut feeling are without their use, but we might get farther if we had actual concrete information.

11:20 am - three links

Useful niche search engines

Fighting Fantasy books with new titles photoshopped on -- I think my favorite is the manticore, but there are many good ones.

Live Long and Marry -- an LJ community gearing up to raise money to protect gay marriage in California. Currently people are listing items for auction; bidding opens July 1st. Looks like there are a hundred entries, some of them offering multiple items; use the tags to search for what you might like. You can get crafty items, critiques of your work, original art, slashtastic PWP mashups of your favorite characters . . . anything that might appeal to genre folks, it's probably there by now. Or if you want to offer something yourself, that's great, too! Full info on offering and bidding is here.

11:41 am - another book-release post

First things first: having found my head rolling around on the floor and screwed it back on to my shoulders, I'm ready to announce the winner of the MNC release contest! By the high-tech randomization method of rolling a die -- what? I'm a gamer -- the copy of Paradox #12 goes to archangl23. Send me your address at marie dot brennanATgmail dot com, and I'll send you the magazine!

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Second: there's a new interview with me, this time over at the urban fantasy community "Fangs, Fur, and Fey." We mostly talk about Midnight Never Come, but also about urban fantasy more broadly.

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Two more reviews in . . .

Karen at SF Signal gives it three stars, calling it "An excellent story full of political machinations and historical accuracy." I'll note in passing that I'm pleased by how my prose seems to be coming across; I'm sure there are people who will find it off-puttingly archaic, but for the most part I appear to have hit the target I aimed at -- namely, to suggest the period without being impenetrable.

(Now, can I keep doing that?)

Robert Thompson at Fantasy Book Critic also liked it. Pull-quote: "a seductive blend of historical fiction, court intrigue, fantasy, mystery and romance."

***

Also, two interesting news developments about the Elizabethan period. First, it seems that archaeologists have found a fabulously well-preserved shipwreck from the period. (Is that the fault of my characters? You decide!) And Slate has a piece on a controversial decision to excise a poem called "The Lover's Complaint" from the Shakespearean canon, and to add a new one --

( To the Queen )

If you come across any interesting Elizabethan news, do pass it along. It amuses me to read it through a lens of fiction.

***

And progress goes apace on AAL. Mush!

01:31 pm - this month on SF Novelists

I neglected to link to this before because I was out of town on the day it went live, but I have my usual monthly post up at SF Novelists. This time it's "The Writer at Play," wherein I lay out why I think role-playing games have made me a better writer. Feel free to head over there and contribute your own experiences in the comments!

06:09 pm - bitch, please.

Mildly curious, I followed this link to an article about culling down one's book collection. It appears to part of a series wherein the writer chronicles the process of organizing her life. Okay, let's go.

She is, by her own admission, a "total bibliophile." Apparently her parents crammed 1,100 books into their apartment!

. . . er, okay, if you don't have a lot of space (and they had four rooms in New York), then I suppose that's a lot. The writer? Her book collection -- the combined possessions of herself and her husband -- "peaked at 600."

Please.

By the end of the article, they're down to 200. Our fiction collection consists of more books than her parents had at their incredible height. According to LibaryThing, we own more urban fantasy than this woman now has in her entire collection.

I'm not out to play a game of one-upsmanship; I'm sure there are people reading this who think our 2,260 books are a paltry few. But I just had to roll my eyes at the presentation of 600 as a huge pile of books that must be cut down for the salvation of one's household. I don't think the WaPo knows what a real bibliophile is.

12:35 pm - thinky thoughts on magic

superversive has a lengthy and thought-provoking post up, asking why we hanker for magic. It's many things in passing, including a deconstruction of ceremonial magic and a literary analysis of several founding fathers of fantasy, but for me, the two most interesting bits are further in.

First is the summary of Steven D. Greydanus' "seven hedges" which "serve to divide the magic of fantasy from the magic of curses and occult powers." I find these fascinating, honestly, because they seem to arise out of a set of concerns that, well, don't concern me. Greydanus (and superversive) are writing in the context of Catholic theology, and more broadly Christian theology; it's the same context Tolkien was writing in, and he, too, had to address those concerns. What does it mean to write about magic when you believe magic is either real and bad (because then you are circumventing God) or fake and bad (because then you are wasting your time on a delusion)?

And I find that I'm not concerned with that question. Maybe I should be, and it's a failure on my part to ponder the deeper implications of fantasy. I read the summary of the seven hedges, and found myself irritated by them. Why should I limit magic to non-human, already-trained wizardly supporting characters in another world where magic is entirely known, and lard the tale with cautionary road signs? I don't think superversive thinks I should, but it might be that Greydanus does. (I didn't have the enthusiasm to read his piece myself.) But those restrictions are predicated on a certain assumption of the connection between magic-in-fiction and magic-in-life, and while I haven't thought through all my feelings on that matter, off the cuff, I'm fairly sure my feelings are not his.

Anyway, that's one thing I'm chewing on. The other is the excellent Old English proverb superversive quotes: Man deþ swa he byþ þonne he mot swa he wile. "A man does what he is when he can do what he wants." Magic as a means of dipping human will in myth . . . that's a mode of thought I can get behind. Looking at my own writing, I can see how some of the magic-facilitated turning points in my stories are expressive of the characters' inner selves, more directly than mundane action could show. (In fact, I'm tempted to write an essay explicating some examples of that, but it would be spoilery as hell -- especially since one is drawn from Midnight Never Come.)

So. Thinky thoughts on magic. Go forth and think!

01:32 pm - three links, and some thoughts

It is apparently Feminism Day in the internets. (I know why, actually -- it's a particular stage of ripples from an earlier much-discussed incident -- but I'm not going to try to trace the lineage; I'm just here to provide the links.)

First up, something most of my personal friends understand, but worth spreading as a public service: "A Straight Geek Male's Guide to Interaction with Females." It's the basics, nothing more, but it never hurts to remind people of them.

Second: the L.A. Times on, well, one of the fastest ways to piss me off royally, aka Men Who Explain Things. You know, the patronizing jackasses who presume they know more about Topic X than you do, even when they don't. Bonus rage points for the fact that, while some of them sometimes do it to other men, it is frequently directed at women. (Includes a fabulous anecdote of the best shut-down possible. Alas, it is not often possible -- but it must have been satisfying when it happened.)

Third: a lengthy post from synecdochic on "Don't Be That Guy." Very long, but useful not just in identifying the male behaviors that put women off, but offering suggestions for how "allies" (other guys who notice the problem) can help out. I'm sure somewhere in the three pages and counting of comments, multiple somebodies have pointed out that the suggestions do often involve a man speaking on a woman's behalf because she won't be listened to, but -- as I believe the poster acknowledges -- sometimes that's regrettably necessary. Ultimately no woman should ever need a man to step in and speak for her, but if him doing so gets us a step closer to that day, I won't discourage it.

. . . but you know, it's odd. Many of the experiences that last post talks about, I just, well, haven't experienced. Not often, anyway. And I can't help but ponder the confluence of factors that makes that so.

Partly, no doubt, it's causal factors. I'm not curvy and I don't tend to dress in anything remotely resembling a revealing fashion (LARPS notwithstanding), ergo I'm not as likely to have the "my eyes are up HERE" problem. I associate mostly with guys who are legitimately Good Guys, and therefore unlikely to patronize or dismiss me. (Half of them are better feminists than I am.) Etc.

Some of it, though, has to be perceptual. In other words, I do encounter such things, but I don't notice them. I've said before that I must have run into more than two or three sexist teachers in my educational career, but I guess I just steamrollered over the others without noticing. Because on the one hand I can't think of more, but on the other, I can't find much evidence in my life of sexist assumptions and behavior holding me back. I'm having a hard time articulating what I mean by that; I don't mean I'm immune. Situations where I was hampered externally, sure, those no doubt have happened. But I have rarely felt inferior, inadequate, what have you, as a result of my gender. I actually believe it's true when I say that I went from Great At Math to Sucking At Math, not because I felt like I couldn't do it, but because I didn't feel like doing it. And sure, my loss of interest partially coincided with one of the identifiably sexist teachers -- but only partially. I never felt incapable. (Nor was I, if I managed to pass AP Calculus by doing all the homework the night before the test.)

At cons? I suppose many of the writers I hang out with there are women. If I tally up a mental list of the people I anticipate seeing when I go, it's definitely skewed female. Then again, this is more likely to be a problem of interaction with strangers or new acquaintances than with established friends. But if there have been room parties/dinners/whatever where a guy was checking me out or behaving like he had a right to something from me or dismissing my words, I just . . . haven't noticed. And have not, so far as I can tell, let it affect me.

And you know, I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, yay me! I can haz self-esteem. On the other, maybe I'm missing out on opportunities to push for change, to make a difference, to call people on their bullshit instead of ignoring it. (Or maybe it is undermining me after all. You can be oppressed without noticing your oppression.) How much can I trust my own perception? How much good do I do in a broader sense by shrugging this stuff off?

I don't particularly know. But at the very least, chewing on these questions is good for me.

10:17 am

It's the 16th, and that means I'm posting over at SF Novelists, this time about my decision to leave grad school.

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Also, I did find another review of Midnight Never Come recently. That's right, folks, I've been Klausnered.

I knew it was coming sooner or later. What fascinates me is that her review reads kind of as if she cribbed it from the Publishers Weekly review. (Only less grammatical.) The resemblance isn't overwhelming, but the structure of the two is very similar.

What's that you say? You want me to link to it? I'm not going to, for the simple reason that, while it's hardly the most spoiler-ridden review Harriet Klausner has produced, it does say a few things I'd rather it didn't. Take my word for it: she doesn't say anything in particular that you haven't heard elsewhere, with better grammar.

10:47 am - two important things

One is funny-important, the other is real-important.

Funny first: Uwe Boll has said he'll stop making movies if a million people ask him to. Last I checked, we were up to 134,679. Spread the word.

Now the real: Joss Whedon posted an impassioned essay some time back, about the "honor killing" of Du'a Khalil Aswad, and the still-pervasive problem of misogyny and violence against women. This inspired a group of people to create the anthology Nothing But Red, a set of works responding to those issues. The color pdf is $5.95, and the b&w trade paperback $15.95, with profits going toward Equality Now. Spread the word about this, too. To quote Joss: "Because it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself."

12:29 pm - two bits of fun linkery

Remarkably effective: Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity in Words of Four Letters or Less. Worth it just for the mental image of Albert Einstein saying "Feh. Read this and weep." And it manages to be a pretty lucid explanation of Relativity, though there are definitely points where you can see the author struggling to get around some ordinary word that happens to be five or six letters long. (It reminded me a bit of "Uncleftish Beholding", Poul Anderson's discussion of atomic theory in Ander-Saxon -- that is to say, English purged of all non-Germanic words. That one's way harder to process, but it's eye-opening as to how many technical words we've borrowed from Latin and Greek.)

More on the funny side: the reason why we never hear about time travelers changing history. One of those bits of parody that would have been inconceivable ten years ago, but painfully, painfully plausible now. (Via my brother, from the online magazine Abyss & Apex.)

I thought I had a third amusing link, but it seems to have gone away. Here, have a detailed explanation of what goes on in a routine autopsy instead. 'Cause that's a barrel of laughs.

10:25 am

This won't be as argumentative as the last time I linked to a Mind Meld, but there's some argumentation here.

The question posed in the Mind Meld is this: "Is science fiction antithetical to religion?"

There are some good answers behind that link. (Also some long answers.) They expose, among other things, the vagueness of that question. You can take it in the sense implied by the lines that precede it: "Two of the most highly regarded fantasy authors - Tolkien and Lewis - were also Christians, whereas the fathers of science fiction were atheists, and SF itself, it could be argued, grew out of Darwinism and other notions of deep time." In that sense, it seems to be asking whether you can write science fiction while also being religious, and the subsequent answers have comprehensively blown the "SF was founded by atheists" premise out of the water.

But there are other aspects to the question. Are the aims of science fiction incompatible with those of religion? That depends on how one views the aims of both; there are both "yes" and "no" answers at various points in the discussion. Adam Roberts almost seems to equate SF with Protestantism and fantasy with Catholicism. ??? James Wallace Harris's answer reminds me uncomfortably of the things I was ranting about in "Frazer's Goddamned Golden Bough" -- that you can create that kind of pseudo-evolutionary path for human thought. (At least he allows for the transgression of his categories, instead of assuming we outgrow the older ones.) Several people touch on fundamentalism versus other approaches to religion, and how that relates to religious thought.

Almost all of them, though, assume "religion" = "Christianity" -- or, at most, the Religions of the Book. On the one hand, this is fair; most of our genre tradition has been written by Westerners. On the other hand, if we want to talk about the compatibility or lack thereof between SF and religion, we should address the existence of other faiths. John C. Wright's the only one who really does so (in an answer that is also the longest there, since he discusses three or four novels along the way). He talks about Ursula LeGuin's Taoist influences and the Zen Buddhism in Spider Robinson's Variable Star, and speculates interestingly on our different attitudes toward Eastern and Western religion. I'd love to see more discussion of that, especially since I disagree with Wright that swapping out a Buddhist for a Catholic priest is a change of "one detail." But that kind of discussion requires a good working knowledge of Buddhist theology (or Hindu, or any other non-Book religion) that I don't pretend to have. (Heck, I wouldn't even claim my Catholic theology is up to snuff.)

Interesting stuff any way you slice it. And it successfully got my brain to work shortly after waking up, which is in its own right nearly a miracle sufficient to prove the existence of God.

04:35 pm - linky

This month on SF Novelists, I speculate as to what makes writers dream of movie adaptations, in "Stars in Our Eyes."

Also, Daryl Gregory had a fantastic post yesterday about the process by which book covers happen, using the example of his own upcoming novel Pandemonium.

While I'm at it, too, I should mention that I when I posted recommending Goblin Quest by Jim Hines, I was under the mistaken impression that Goblin War, the third book of the series, was already out. It just hit the shelves recently, so now's a good time to go looking if you were thinking of picking the series up. (Maria Snyder also just put out Fire Study, the third book in the series with Poison Study, so there are follow-ups to more than one of my recommendations.)

10:32 am - She hasn't linked to it yet . . . .

. . . but has anybody been wondering what tooth_and_claw is up to lately?

She's doing a webcomic.

More information about the comic can be found here, on the LJ of one of its two writers.

04:15 pm

This is little Xerxes, god-cat and conqueror of mice and men . . . .

In other news, I think my students would like to thank the gods of the weather for gifting us with this gloriously warm and sunny day. I sat on the front porch in bare feet and a t-shirt to read their stories, and I can't rule out the possibility that their grades will reflect the circumstances.

07:43 pm - two historical bits

First of all, since everybody and their brother seems to be sending it to me right now: yes, I am aware of the online version of the 1898-99 Booth Poverty Map of London. (Apparently BoingBoing precipitated this flood?) My thanks to those of you who told me about it, but you can stop now.

(Not pissy; just a little bemused.)

Second: it's buggy as hell, but Channel 4 in Britain has put up a flash game connected to their TV show, City of Vice. Both focus on the mid-eighteenth century Bow Street Runners, created by the magistrate Henry Fielding and his brother and successor John, who were arguably London's first police force. I haven't seen the show (since it isn't out on DVD yet or anything, and I'm not the BitTorrent sort), but the first episode of the game is a fun little murder mystery. Unfortunately, the game is prone to hanging at odd points -- I discovered a lot of complaints online, when I got frozen during a particular bit -- so we'll have to see if they fix those problems.

Don't play it without a mouse, though; the bits that require coordination are apparently hell on a trackpad or any other such device.

10:52 am - V-Day musings

Normally my SF Novelists blogging day is the sixteenth, but since my topic for this month is apropos of Valentine's Day, Daryl Gregory has agreed to let me share the honors with him. So head on over and check out his sonnet and my post about love triangles in fiction.

12:26 am - If I have a daughter, I'm naming her Jael.

From Slacktivist's list of 7 biblical women's names that deserve wider usage:

2. Jael. You meet plenty of people named after Mary, the other biblical character praised as "most blessed of women," but I've never met or even heard of anyone named after Jael. Maybe it's because the name translates, literally, as "mountain goat." Or maybe it's because "bad-ass" isn't what most parents are looking for in a name for their baby girl. Jael was bad-ass. She took out Sisera, the general in charge of the invading army:

Barak came by in pursuit of Sisera, and Jael went out to meet him. "Come," she said, "I will show you the man you're looking for." So he went in with her, and there lay Sisera with the tent peg through his temple -- dead.

10:46 am - it's that time of the month . . . .

Hey, look -- I remembered to link to this on time, rather than after the fact! Go me.

This month's post at SF Novelists is me dissecting "The Use and Misuse of Prologues."

12:57 pm - Writing as Work

Hey, look! For once I'm remembering to be properly linky.

It's the sixteenth of the month, and that means I have a post up a SF Novelists again. This time, it's "Writing as Work", inspired by the WGA strike and Joss Whedon's comments on same.

05:57 pm

This?

Is exactly what I need to keep in my head as I ponder this upcoming Victorian book.

(A book which really needs an icon of its own, and also a title. And that other book over there needs a title too. Why are all the things I'm working on remaining obstinately nameless? "Victorian steampunk faerie fantasy" and "Super Sekrit Project CHS" get old pretty fast.)