Things of mine on the internet

Two things of note recently:

1. Finn Clark reviewed Queers Dig Time Lords. Now, this is from a review copy — Queers Dig Time Lords will be available for sale on June 4th. Clark says,

“I’m reminded of Howard Hawks’s definition of a good movie: “Three great scenes, no bad ones.” This book has no bad articles [ ... ] and several outstanding ones.”

That’s a lovely review, thank you.

2. Apex Magazine published an essay of mine, Kicking Ass, Taking Names, Bubblegum Optional. It explains my love of the Tough Female Hero, regardless of how terrible, complicated, or problematic the film she is in may be.

“So, back to Alice and her halter top and nudity. Could I wish that not every female action hero be scantily clad? I could. I do. But I refuse to agree that the clothes a woman wears — even a character in a film, dressed by corporate filmmakers — somehow makes her less of a fucking badass.

Go on. Try telling Alice that you are judging her based on her clothes. Let me get some popcorn first.”

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Queers Dig Time Lords TOC!

Y’all, I really cannot tell you how much I have been eagerly waiting to tell you the Queers Dig Time Lords Table of Contents.

And here it is:

Table of Contents
Introduction, by John Barrowman and Carole E. Barrowman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Editors’ Foreword, by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas. . . . . 10
The Monster Queer is Camp, by Paul Magrs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Time, Space, Love, by Emily Asher-Perrin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Seven Ways of Looking at Captain Jack,
by Mary Anne Mohanraj and Jed Hartman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Born Again Whovian, by David Llewellyn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Queer Doctor vs. Straight Trek?, by Paul F. Cockburn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Sub Texts: The Doctor and the Master’s Firsts and Lasts,
by Amal El-Mohtar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Nice TARDIS, by Jason Tucker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
The Incredibly True Adventures of an Intellectual Fan Dyke,
by Sarah J. Groenewegen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Bi, Bye, by Tanya Huff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
In Praise of Mature Women, or Why Donna Noble and River Song
Totally Need to Call Me, by Jennifer Pelland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
We’re Here, We’re Queer, Rate Us on iTunes, by Erik Stadnik. . . . . . 96
Secrets and Lies, by Scot Clarke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Long Time Companions, by Melissa Scott. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Jack Harkness’s Lessons on Memory and Hope
for Cranky, Old Queers, by Racheline Maltese. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
My Straight Best Friend, by Nigel Fairs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
A Kiss from Romana: Lesbian Subtext in The Stones of Blood,
by Julia Rios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Bothersome Otherness, by Martin Warren. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
PVC Made Me a Gay, by Gary Russell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Torchwood, Camp, and Queer Subjectivity, by Brit Mandelo. . . . . . . 156
The Doctor: A Strange Love, Or: How I Learned to Stop Hating
and Love the Who, by Hal Duncan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
A Man is the Sum of His Memories, by Neil Chester . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
Spoilers: A Letter to Myself, Age 16, by Kaia Landelius. . . . . . . . . . . 186
The Heterosexual Agenda, by John Richards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193
Hey, Mickey, You’re So Fine, by Naamen Gobert Tihaun. . . . . . . . . 202
Mutants, Monsters, Mutts, and Mentiads,
by Cody Quijano-Schell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
Same Old Me, Different Face: Transition, Regeneration,
and Change, by Susan Jane Bigelow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
The Girl Who Waited (for the Guidance Counselor
to Get to His Point), by Rachel Swirsky. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

Look at that. It’s fantastic.

I can’t tell you which essays are my favorites. It might unfairly prejudice you one way or another. But I can say that in Chicks Dig Comics, every reviewer had different favorites. The strength of these books is the diversity of point of view. It’s in the way that a broader fannish experience is represented, a more nuanced and threaded fannish voice is heard.

Queers Dig Time Lords is available for pre-order at all the usual places and suspects. Order it, read it, and find the recognition and representation we have worked to create.

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Mystery writers have it hard

I read Ruth Rendall’s From Doon With Death, the first of the Inspector Wexford novels, this week. And I guessed the killer about halfway through the book.

I never guess the killer. Ever.

The book is a good one, with interesting characters and tight plotting. I enjoyed it. But it was set in … what, the late 1950s? And what amounts to a disturbing and unsuspected psychological twist for the time has moved from “unusual and disturbing,” through “expected and horrible,” and into “gosh I’m glad we’ve moved on as a culture from thinking that way about people.”

The shocking plot twist of the novel is now passe.

It’s still a good book; Rendall is a good author and she makes the book live on a number of levels, not merely plot. But I was thinking back to the first time I’d encountered this plot twist, in a not-very-good movie when I was in high school. At that point such a twist was no longer a twist, and other forms of shock were employed by the movie in question.

It’s hard for writers to stay current, to keep their cultural references timeless or culture-specific. Science fiction writers talk about this all the time, about how science fiction is always science fiction of the time in which it is written, not the time in which it is set. I hadn’t really considered that mystery writers have similar problems. I suppose I ought to have, but I hadn’t.

If you have not read Ruth Rendall’s work, From Doon With Death is a good place to start. It’s iconic, it’s well-written, it’s short and to-the-point and strong. I recommend it.

And I’m glad that plot twist is no longer quite in fashion.

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April 11 2013

1. It’s snowed here. I am displeased.

2. The puppies are still adorable. I compared them, on Twitter, to being a bit like the radio earpiece from Harrison Bergeron. By which I meant that, while the puppies are awake, they need something about every forty-five seconds. Attention, outside, intervention to keep them from eating electrical cords, food. It’s … very hard to do anything else, while they are awake.

3. In the wake of watching the movie John Carter, I re-read some Edgar Rice Burroughs books. I think I read those books at exactly the right age to love them. They are highly problematic, by which I mean drenched in racism and misogyny. But they wormed into my head, and I still enjoy them, though I skip over the offensive parts now.

4. My current favorite dinner:

Take a large ceramic dish with a lid. Snap a bunch of asparagus into it. Add 4-8 plum tomatoes. Add 4-6 whole mushrooms. Drizzle with olive oil. Sprinkle with black pepper. Roast, covered, in the oven at 450 F for 35 minutes. Eat as soon as it’s cool enough to not burn you.

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Superman: An Unauthorized Biography, by Glen Weldon

Superman: An Unauthorized Biography, by Glen Weldon.

I try very hard to not be the person who says “normally, I don’t like this thing, but I like your version of this thing.” I mean, if I don’t like that thing, why am I reading/watching it? And if I do like your version, what have you done that is so different (wrong? terrible? missing the point?) that I like your version? It’s meant to be a compliment, of course, but it doesn’t necessarily come across as such.

Yet I feel I need to say something very close to that statement when discussing Glen Weldon’s history of Superman. Because the thing Mr. Weldon has done is make me care about Superman. He has translated, explained, and represented Superman to a life-long comics fan who has just never cared for the big guy before.

In short, I have never cared one way or the other about Superman. And what Glen Weldon has done in this book — that is different from other people talking about Superman — is describe Superman’s history so lovingly, so thoroughly, with such humor and passion and joy, that I have come to appreciate Superman.

Superman: An Unauthorized Biography is not a history of the making of Superman properties, though it touches on that. Nor is it a history of the Superman canon, though that canon is a large part of the book. What Weldon has written is exactly what it says on the tin — a biography of a fictional character, delving first into the canon, then looking at creators, back and forth. We learn not only what Superman was, what he was doing, during decades past, we learn why he was those things and what the people creating him meant.

This book is sociology, history, and biography. Moreover, it has that quality that makes all the good histories great. Weldon loves this subject, that much is clear. But more than that, he want you to understand what there is to love. Too many specialists bludgeon the reader with information, hoping to drown any objections in a deluge of fact. Weldon deftly stays away from that trap. He tells you just enough, and no more.

If you have any interest in Superman, obviously you should read this book. But I also encourage you to read it if you do not have an interest in Superman, and have always wondered what the big deal is. Weldon’s Superman: An Unauthorized Biography explains it to you. And while you may not love Superman at the end, you will understand.

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How do I cast a Hugo Award vote?

So, the Hugo Award nominations have been announced! Fantastic! Look at all those great nominees! I like some of those works, and I know you do, too — so, who votes for them? How? How are the Hugo winners picked?

Hugo Awards are voted on by members of the current year’s Worldcon. This year, Worldcon is LoneStarCon 3.

Attending and supporting members of LoneStarCon 3 can vote for the Hugos.

You do not have to ATTEND Worldcon to vote. You merely have to buy a membership.

Attending membership is $200.00 Supporting membership — which gives you Hugo voting rights — is $60.00

If you buy a membership, you receive the Hugo Voter Packet. The voter packet contains digital copies of the written works nominated. Thus you may read the nominations and cast informed votes.

For your $60.00 supporting membership, then, you get five novels, a bunch of shorter works, the related works, voting rights for this year and nominating rights for next year. It’s not a terrible arrangement.

If you can buy a supporting membership, I urge you to do so. The present we create today becomes history, it becomes precedent for tomorrow’s futures. The votes you cast this year and the works you nominate for 2014 make the world just a little bit bigger, the door a little bit wider, for everyone who comes after you.

Buy a supporting membership. Vote for the works you believe to be genuinely the best in their category. Speak, let your voice be heard. Tell the future what it is that we as fans love. Tell the future that you can see it coming, and are glad.

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The 2013 Hugo Award Nominees

This Saturday the 2013 Hugo Award nominees were announced.

Tor.com has the full list.

Here is the list.

Best Novel.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
Blackout by Mira Grant (Orbit)
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi (Tor)
Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed (DAW)

Best Novella.

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress (Tachyon Publications)
The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)
On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard (Immersion Press)
San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Stars Do Not Lie by Jay Lake (Asimov’s, Oct-Nov 2012)

Best Novelette.

“The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Postscripts: Unfit For Eden, PS Publications)
“Fade To White” by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
“The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” by Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, Solaris)
“In Sea-Salt Tears” by Seanan McGuire (Self-published)
“Rat-Catcher” by Seanan McGuire (A Fantasy Medley 2, Subterranean)

Best Short Story.

“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld, June 2012)
“Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
“Mono no Aware” by Ken Liu (The Future is Japanese, VIZ Media LLC)

Note: category has 3 nominees due to a 5% requirement under Section 3.8.5 of the WSFS constitution.

Best Related Work.

The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature Edited by Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge UP)
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Sigrid Ellis (Mad Norwegian Press)
Chicks Unravel Time: Women Journey Through Every Season of Doctor Who Edited by Deborah Stanish & L.M. Myles (Mad Norwegian Press)
I Have an Idea for a Book… The Bibliography of Martin H. Greenberg Compiled by Martin H. Greenberg, edited by John Helfers (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box)
Writing Excuses Season Seven by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler and Jordan Sanderson

Best Graphic Story.

Grandville Bête Noire written and illustrated by Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse Comics, Jonathan Cape)
Locke & Key Volume 5: Clockworks written by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
Saga, Volume One written by Brian K. Vaughn, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)
Schlock Mercenary: Random Access Memorabilia by Howard Tayler, colors by Travis Walton (Hypernode Media)
Saucer Country, Volume 1: Run written by Paul Cornell, illustrated by Ryan Kelly, Jimmy Broxton and Goran Sudžuka (Vertigo)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form).

The Avengers
The Cabin in the Woods
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Hunger Games
Looper

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form).

Doctor Who: “The Angels Take Manhattan”
Doctor Who: “Asylum of the Daleks”
Doctor Who: “The Snowmen”
Fringe: “Letters of Transit”
Game of Thrones:“Blackwater”

Best Editor (Short Form).

John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Stanley Schmidt
Jonathan Strahan
Sheila Williams

Best Editor (Long Form).

Lou Anders
Sheila Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Toni Weisskopf

Best Professional Artist.

Vincent Chong
Julie Dillon
Dan Dos Santos
Chris McGrath
John Picacio

Best Semiprozine.

Apex Magazine edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Jason Sizemore and Michael Damian Thomas
Beneath Ceaseless Skies edited by Scott H. Andrews
Clarkesworld edited by Neil Clarke, Jason Heller, Sean Wallace and Kate Baker
Lightspeed edited by John Joseph Adams and Stefan Rudnicki
Strange Horizons edited by Niall Harrison, Jed Hartman, Brit Mandelo, An Owomoyela, Julia Rios, Abigail Nussbaum, Sonya Taaffe, Dave Nagdeman and Rebecca Cross

Best Fanzine.

Banana Wings edited by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer
The Drink Tank edited by Chris Garcia and James Bacon
Elitist Book Reviews edited by Steven Diamond
Journey Planet edited by James Bacon, Chris Garcia, Emma J. King, Helen J. Montgomery and Pete Young
SF Signal edited by John DeNardo, JP Frantz, and Patrick Hester

Best Fancast.

The Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
Galactic Suburbia Podcast, Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Presenters) and Andrew Finch (Producer)
SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester, John DeNardo, and JP Frantz
SF Squeecast, Elizabeth Bear, Paul Cornell, Seanan McGuire, Lynne M. Thomas, Catherynne M. Valente (Presenters) and David McHone-Chase (Technical Producer)
StarShipSofa, Tony C. Smith

Best Fan Writer.

James Bacon
Christopher J Garcia
Mark Oshiro
Tansy Rayner Roberts
Steven H Silver

Best Fan Artist.

Galen Dara
Brad W. Foster
Spring Schoenhuth
Maurine Starkey
Steve Stiles

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Award for the best new professional science fiction or fantasy writer of 2011 or 2012, sponsored by Dell Magazines (not a Hugo Award).

Zen Cho
Max Gladstone
Mur Lafferty
Stina Leicht
Chuck Wendig

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You will note that this is a fantastic slate of people and works. You may, like me, note that you will be hard-pressed to choose within certain categories.

You may also note that my name is buried somewhere in there.

Chicks Dig Comics has been nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Related Work.

I am torn, incredibly torn, between a gracious, professional response and a wildly enthusiastic profane response. Those of you who have talked to me in person may recall that my first response to excitingly good news is blank affectlessness. I have spent a great deal of time pondering the nomination with blank affect.

The nomination is a wonderful acknowledgment of the stories of the contributors to Chicks Dig Comics. Those of you who nominated the book, I thank you for noticing how fucking amazing those essays are. (I did mention enthusiastic profanity, did I not?)

The nomination is also part of a broader pattern in the Hugo nominees this year. Women. People of color. Queers. I am pleased and proud to be a part of a Hugo slate that represents in some small way the diversity of SF/F that has always been here — but is not always seen.

Fuck Yeah Hugo Nominees. My congratulations to each of you, heartfelt and sincere. Congratufuckinglations.

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Valentin & the Widow

Andrew Wheeler is producing a fiction series, Valentin & the Widow. It’s a … podcast? Audiobook? Old-style radio drama? It’s in serial form, with excellent production values, and is available on iTunes, RSS, and the Tumblr page linked to above.

Wheeler says, “I write Valentin & The Widow, a 1920s pulp adventure serial in which a feisty young English widow and her burly gay Russian valet travel around the world dismantling her late husband’s evil and oppressive secret society.” That’s so right. I’m on the first episode, and it is delightful. It is a romp of adventure and derring-do.

Moreover … moreover, Wheeler is remaining within-genre (1920s pulp adventure radio drama) and using the tropes of that genre (eugenics, racial superiority, superweapons, cultural imperialsim, fascism) in ways that are not problematic. I am liking this, and I hope he continues to make it work.

I’ve seen Valentin & the Widow recommended here are there for a while, and kept meaning to get around to it. Maybe you are doing the same thing. I urge you, strongly, to get around to it a bit faster. This is a story for people who love Peter Wimsy, Phryne Fisher, and Mary Russell. This is a story for those who love the 1920s world-wide cold war of fascist vs. socialist. This is a story for those who love the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard and just wish they weren’t quite so racist and misogynist. This is a story for people who understand that women, queers, and people of color have always been a part of history, however much the dominant narrative has erased.

It’s an audiobook. It’s a serial. It’s easy to subscribe to using typical podcatchers.

Valentin & the Widow. I highly recommend it.

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Silmarillion Twilight

Yesterday I finally got around to watching Breaking Dawn, part 2, the fifth and final movie in the Twilight saga. I was at the part where Carlisle is gathering allies when it hit me — I don’t actually want to watch or read the Twilight books. I want to watch or read the Twilight equivalent of Tolkien’s Silmarillion.

For those of you who don’t know, The Silmarillion is a collection of history, creation myth, epic poetry, and lineage charts that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote for Middle-Earth. I loved that book. I read and re-read that book about fifteen times. I used to have portions of The Lay of Beren and Luthien memorized. Yet I only ever read The Hobbit once. And I would skip about half of The Lord of the Rings every time I read it. (I would read the Rohan parts, the Gondor parts, and all Merry-and-Pippin parts. The rest I skipped.)

I find it funny but true — my feelings about Stephanie Meyer and my feelings about J.R.R. Tolkien are about the same. Nice world-building, but your plots and characterization need a LOT of work.

I want to know more about the world of Twilight. I want to know the backstory, the creation myth and history and lineages of the vampires and werewolves. I want to know what other mythical creatures may or may not exist, where they live and what they do. I want to know how the super-powers work and when they first appeared. I want Twilight Silmarillion far more than I want the story of Bella, Edward, and Jacob.

Though I would absolutely read a book about anything at all that was told entirely from Alice Cullen’s point of view.

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Fandom of Thrones

I rewatched Game of Thrones season 2 this past week in anticipation of season 3. One of the things that struck me, again, is how personal everything in the show is. These people remember and resent things that happened over twenty years ago. When I was younger I used to think these sorts of things were silly. That they were exceptions. That actual adults did not behave this way.

Then I think about my experiences in fandom.

In the fannish communities in which I have lived and participated, it’s not that people go out of the way to hold grudges. It’s merely that we all remember things. In a normal sort of way. I remember which panelists made me furious ten years ago with their wrong-headed views. And I remember it when they are making jokes at a room party now. I remember who it was that did me a solid favor in Parties fifteen years ago, and I think well of them for it still.

I know I’m not the only person who does this. I know it because there’s nothing special about me. I’m an average, run-of-the-mill human. And if I remember that you were a power-mad jackass when we were both twenty, I’m not likely to vote for you now.

A while back, local fandom had a pretty substantive schism. I was watching Theon Greyjoy talking to Bran Stark and found myself pondering how some people seem to cling to their slights and others let them go. But regardless, we all tend to remember. I am pleased that fannish arguments tend to not end in beheadings, of course. But the principles seem to be similar.

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