So I was watching my birthday present, and I noticed something I’d never noticed before and that even the almighty Lurker’s Guide doesn’t seem to have noticed.
Spoilers ho. You have been warned.
In Day of the Dead, Zooty warns Sheridan about the Keepers. You try and tell me he doesn’t. “Why? Because it told me to.”
Damn, Neil Gaiman is too clever for his own good.
Last week was something of a Week. One of those weeks that feels a week and a half long, you know what I’m saying? But worthwhile, all of it.
Les Carr is a gentleman and an amazingly good sport. Some time ago, he emailed me asking about the distance of Madison from Chicago, and setting some dates for a possible visit. Which I promptly double-booked with a System repository meeting in Baraboo. Go me.
Les not only took my husband and me and my colleague Kristin Eschenfelder out to dinner Tuesday night, he drove out with me to Baraboo and contributed significantly to the meeting. (Props also to the other meeting participants for welcoming Les; they didn’t have to, and I appreciate it a lot.) I had a great time (despite the weather), put a couple of cogent edits into Roach Motel based on dinner conversation, and very much look forward to running into Les again. Next year, in Atlanta!
There’s probably some sociology somewhere on the genesis and growth of communities of practice. I can say that Les completely gets that repo-rats (sorry, Les, I know you hate that term) don’t have one and need one badly. With him, me, the REPOMAN folks, and one or two others on the case, maybe something will actually grow this time. (And, Les? I officially forgive you for your name being on this piece of ill-considered ideological smoke-blowing, and I’m sorry for eviscerating it in Roach Motel. Well, no, I’m actually not sorry, but… you know how it is.)
Roach Motel has been hacked on, given a kiss, and sent back to the editors. It’s imperfect. There’s a lot I didn’t say that I probably should have, and some things I beat on that probably didn’t deserve it. So it goes, and I must say I’m relieved to have it gone. Good riddance. Next time I’ll write something cheerful.
I spent most of my Saturday at a Free Culture event sponsored by the library. How cool is it that going to these things is really part of my job? It was a fantastic day, well-planned by people who weren’t me, and I’m honored to have met Nelson Pavlosky and Gavin Baker. I also, you will be glad to know, behaved myself with perfect propriety in front of an ACS editor (which takes fortitude!) and helped get the repository message out to people who hadn’t heard it.
The most valuable part of a valuable day was the after-party, in which Gavin and Nelson passed on immense amounts of wisdom about starting a campus Free Culture group. I know one of the students on the steering committee, and I plan to put as much time and effort into the new chapter as they’ll let me.
One of the things that a community of practice does is restore resolve and enthusiasm when they flag. I feel much better about what I do than I did a week ago today, and here’s my chance to say how much I appreciate the people who came to Madison and helped me feel that way.
I wish I lived on Anarres. Authority control there is easy-peasy.
(Of course, as egoistic and propertarian as I am, they’d shove my butt into—whatever the insane asylum was called, I forget—within days if not hours.)
I am extraordinarily fond of Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment. It is, in fact, one of my favorite books.
I’d love to see it made into a movie. It’d be a cracking good ’un, except…
… I just cannot imagine who on earth could play Sergeant Jackrum.
Since I’ve had several people ask… no, I’m not at Wiscon, and I never have been, despite the length of time I’ve lived in Madison. It’s not out of the question that I will someday go, but in all honesty, it’s not high on my must-do list.
I am a feminist and a geek, I grant you; I would seem to be Wiscon’s ideal demographic. And I quite gave up on other SF/F cons after the Harlan Ellison debacle; they’re by geek guys, for geek guys, and I refuse to give that style of social atmosphere credence any more, nor is it my responsibility (or, frankly, desire) to reform it.
But Wiscon is for the serious feminist geeks, the ones who engage with the intersection of feminism (as well as other -isms) and geekdom on a daily basis. Me, I’m just an idle eye-roller. I read some of the right blogs and work on being attuned to representation issues and occasionally try to mess with others’ heads when that seems like a fruitful thing to do…
… and that’s it. I’m just a dilettante. Wiscon isn’t for me. That’s just not my crowd. It’s not like they’re having any trouble with attendance, either; Wiscon sells out months in advance. So I’d only be taking up space that could go to someone who’s better at all this than I am—which, admittedly, isn’t hard.
So, no, I’m not at Wiscon. I wave happily at those who are, though.
I don’t actually read David and Leigh Eddings. They’re in my personal category of pulp epic fantasy so clumsy and derivative that I don’t even find it fun as a light read.
But I do want to call out the odd circumstance of Mr. Eddings at last admitting that Ms. Eddings co-wrote just about everything published under his name. (I’m making the entry in The Book a joint entry. I hope I’m not the first, and I’d just better not be the last.)
The fact of the co-writing is not odd. The fact of the co-writing’s lengthy concealment isn’t odd either. Concealment of female contributions happens all the time—not just in genre fiction, not just in fiction, not just in writing, but all the time.
But acknowledging it? Setting the record straight? That’s vanishingly rare. And welcome. Bravo, Mr. Eddings.
My Chanukah present from David was the third season of Babylon 5, which I have happily been wolfing down in large chunks. (“And they made a very agreeable thump!”)
Tonight we were rescreening “Passing Through Gethsemane,” in which a character searches for information about himself. (This is me, avoiding mega-spoilers.) “Four hours,” the computer says, after the character inputs his query (by voice, of course; this is the twenty-third century).
“Google works a lot faster than that,” David remarked.
“Well,” I said, “I figure it’s a metasearch problem. Computer has to send the query out to all the different [subject] databases on all the different planets and colonies… there must be some heinous latency involved, never mind the communications lag.”
My name is Dorothea, and I am a shrieking-geek librarian.
Via world plus dog:
“Below is a Science Fiction Book Club list most significant SF novels between 1953-2006. The meme part of this works like so: Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put a star next to the ones you love.â€
1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien *
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov*
3. Dune, Frank Herbert (Hate, loathe, abominate this series. Hate. HATE. Stylistically abysmal, and jaw-droppingly sexist.)
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin* (but Tehanu will always be my favorite of that series)
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke (Clarke’s long fiction behaves like L-tryptophan on me. Dunno why.)
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. * (An uncomfortable book, but a beautiful one. Skip the posthumous sequel; it’s garbage.)
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish (I really did read the whole thing, yes. Gets weird and sorta pointless toward the end.)
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett (Love much Pratchett. Very much do not love this one. Rincewind is a creep.)
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany (A grad-school book of the grad-schooliest sort. I have no stomach for grad-school books any longer. With Delany, I stick to the short stuff, which is excellent.)
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson (Guh. Horrible. So bad I won’t read any other Donaldson.)
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin*
31. Little, Big, John Crowley[?]
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny (Enh. The problems of repellent little ubermenschen forced to mix with the hoi polloi do not thrill me. I don’t like Amber either.)
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith* (Ah, lovely language!)
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke (I did finish this one. Just barely.)
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys (The novella is better than its expansion into a novel.)
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien (Doesn’t get a star only because parts of it aren’t all that lovable. It’s got some rattling good stories, though.)
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester* (I wish I didn’t love this book sometimes, because ol’ Alfie was an unreconstructed misogynist. But I still love this book.)
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer (They’re all dead. I don’t care.)
And a similar meme surrounding female sf/f writers (via):
The meme is this: go down the list and bold those writers whose work you know you’ve read, and list the most memorable or significant-to-you work(s) by that writer that you’ve read (or put “all” if the writer’s that good!). Italicize those writers whose work you’ve tried to start reading, but have bogged down, stopped, or not gotten to it for whatever reason. Strike through those writers whose work you’ve read and just can’t stand.
If there’s a writer missing whose work is SF/F and significant to you, then add her in the appropriate alphabetical location!
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, of course)
Leigh Brackett (I don’t find her stuff memorable, though my husband absolutely loves it. Pulp in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein.)
Marian Zimmer Bradley (World plus dog has read Mists of Avalon, but I actually remember Bradley best for the stories collected in the Lythande collection, one of the earlier and better contributions to the rapidly-devolved-into-garbage Thieves’ World series.)
Lois McMaster Bujold (I can read the Miles Vorkosigan stuff, but I’m not rabidly fangirly about it. The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls I get rabidly fangirly about. Hope the next book in the series is better than The Hallowed Hunt, however, because that one was rather a waste.)
Octavia Butler (Her shorter stuff, mostly. Butler makes me squirm, so getting through her books is hard, but it’s worth it!)
Suzy McKee Charnas
C.J. Cherryh
Jo Clayton
Diane Duane (Wrote a couple readable Star Trek novels, which sounds like damning with faint praise but isn’t, because novelizations are straitjacketed writing.)
Suzette Haden Elgin (Enh.)
Carol Emshwiller (Carmen Dog)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Barbara Hambly (Liked the sensible use of linguistics and the academic mindset in the first Darwath trilogy. Unfortunately, she turned it into a soap opera after that, and I completely lost interest.)
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Nalo Hopkinson (Oo! Amazing! Loved Midnight Robber and the collection The Skin Folk.)
Diana Wynne Jones
Nancy Kress (The Beggars series, though I think it eventually went off the rails.)
Kathryn Kurtz (Not after Poughkeepsie.)
Ellen Kushner (Wow, her stuff is so polished. Swordspoint is my favorite. Didn’t care for Thomas the Rhymer, though.)
Mercedes Lackey
Tanith Lee (Another very polished writer. I like the Tales of the Flat Earth series, though I can’t get into her horror or YA stuff.)
Madeline L’Engle (Enh after the age of fifteen or so.)
Ursula K. LeGuin (All! Except for The Other Wind, which felt rushed and a copout, I’ve never read a LeGuin I didn’t love, and I reread her books more than anyone else’s.)
Doris Lessing
R.A. MacAvoy
Anne McCaffrey (Enh, and swiftly downhill from there. The Harper Hall trilogy is okay YA stuff.)
Maureen McHugh (Liked China Mountain Zhang, but it didn’t oomph me into reading more of her work. Probably too grad-schoolish.)
Vonda McIntyre
Patricia McKillip (I really wanted to like the Riddlemaster of Hed books. The worldbuilding is awesome—but she doesn’t do anything with it! Frustrating.)
Robin McKinley
Judith Merril (Read her more famous short works, but I don’t think that counts.)
C.L. Moore (Jirel of Joiry, of course, and “Vintage Season.” The Northwest Smith stories are okay in moderation, but don’t try to read them all at once, because they’re rather repetitive in plot and theme. At least read “Shambleau,” though.)
Andre Norton
Marge Piercy
Anne Rice
J.K. Rowling (When the fanfic is better-plotted and better-written than the canon…)
Joanna Russ (I know, I know, bad feminist.)
Melissa Scott (Burning Bright, because of its treatment of RPGing.)
Mary Shelley (Not in years.)
Starhawk
Sheri S. Tepper (Extremely unsubtle. Extremely. So much so that I have trouble recommending her even when her views dovetail with mine—which they don’t, always.)
James Tiptree Jr. (I am a BAD feminist. BAD. I did like “The Women Men Don’t See,” though.)
Joan D. Vinge (Enh. Living proof that women writers don’t necessarily write good female protagonists.)
Kate Wilhelm (I left a round tuit around here somewhere…)
Connie Willis (The Domesday Book is just as good as everybody says it is.)
Monique Wittig
Virginia Woolf (Okay, okay, I’ll turn over my feminist card peacefully; there’s no need to get upset about it.)
Authors I would add off the top of my head: Phyllis Gottlieb, Kij Johnson, Pat Wrede, Caroline Stevermer, Pamela Sargent, Elizabeth Moon, Pat Cadigan, Midori Snyder.
(No major spoilers for Discworld books in this post. Extremely minor ones if you don’t know about Cheery Littlebottom and Carrot Ironfoundersson.)
I used to hate the Discworld character Cheery Littlebottom. She annoyed the daylights out of me: a character who didn’t have to behave like a girl who nonetheless wanted to. Dresses, makeup, the whole silly act. Why on earth would anyone…?
Finally I got it. I got what Pratchett was driving at. And it’s so beautifully subversive and clever that I just have to share.
Cheery is a dwarf. Pratchett’s dwarves are a takeoff on the famous note in Tolkien about dwarf women being rare, bearded, and almost impossible to distinguish from male dwarves. Dwarf biological gender in Discworld is so difficult to distinguish in normal interaction that even the dwarves usually aren’t sure who’s which.
A one-gender society could conceivably be behaviorally indiscriminate; all members would say and do things that in gendered societies are associated with different genders. (LeGuin hints at this in some of her Earthsea tales, when male mages who have grown up in all-male Roke do “women’s work” quite naturally, because they’re used to it and don’t realize or don’t care that outside Roke work roles are gendered.) They wouldn’t care about how humans gender behavior; why should they? Nobody needs to know whether the dwarf swinging the axe or rocking the baby is male or female. Dress could also straddle the divide; why not?
But Pratchett doesn’t do that. From a human point of view, dwarf society is exclusively behaviorally male. Dwarves wear their beards proudly, swing axes and throw waybread (a riff on Tolkien’s cram, of course) at the least provocation, ponder gold and mine for it, swagger and brawl and wear lots of spiky metal and generally act in ways that code them male. The only time you see a Pratchett dwarf doing something coded feminine is when Pratchett can make a joke out of the contrast between the male presentation and the feminine social position—e.g. dwarf barmaids.
Check it out, though! Dwarf maleness isn’t what they biologically are, because a lot of dwarves are biologically female! Dwarf maleness is what they do, how they act, and it isn’t just humans who code dwarves male—it’s dwarves themselves; they call each other “he” and “him” and insist that gendered folk like humans do likewise.
Feminist scholars have a phrase for this: “gender as performance.” It’s a viciously hard thing to get people to agree happens, since folks are so invested in the idea that biology determines gender-specific behavior. But Pratchett slips performativity in like medicine in candy. It’s beautiful. My hat’s off to the guy.
Just to reinforce the point, Pratchett highlights the performativity of dwarvishness in the person of Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson. Biologically, Carrot is human; he’s six feet tall and beardless, and was born of (biologically and culturally) human parents. Culturally, he’s a dwarf; he was raised by dwarves, self-identifies as a dwarf, and is accepted by dwarves as a dwarf (though some humans do roll their eyes a bit). Dwarvishness: it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.
And along comes Cheery Littlebottom, who is a dwarf. And biologically female. And decides that she wants to perform femaleness as well as inhabiting it. Do the dwarves accept this, seeing as how they have a one-gender society that is theoretically not limited in its behavior by gender?
Do they hell. They decide that their male-normativity is so important to them that anyone who doesn’t perform maleness threatens the entire dwarvish way of being. Cheery’s behavior causes a huge furor among the dwarves. Some of them (notably, the “deep dwarves” depicted as the ultimate arbiters of what constitutes dwarvishness) consider her non-dwarf. To her credit, she keeps doing what she does, and (minor spoiler) eventually the more cosmopolitan parts of dwarf society learn to cope with their feminine outliers.
If you’re not seeing parallels with the whole Honorary Guy thing, well, what’s wrong with you? Programming cultures, geek cultures, gaming cultures, many other online cultures—they’re theoretically ungendered, but they behave male, and any behavior that codes feminine is automatically suspect—even coming from a bio-guy.
As I suggested in my honorary-guy post, any attempt to question male-normativity in one of these groups automatically codes feminine, and is considered a threat to the group identity itself. The perp gets smacked down hard, if not kicked out altogether. How else to explain why a guy got jumped on for questioning a sexist headline? A little while ago in one of my comics blogs I saw an exactly parallel scenario commented on (and I wish I could find the darn link again!). I daresay most of my readers can dredge up more examples.
Pratchett doesn’t sugarcoat Cheery, and I applaud him for it. There is no mass dwarf regendering in Discworld, though a few brave dwarves do follow Cheery’s example. There is no vanishing of dwarf prejudice. What I love most about Cheery, actually, is that she is herself far from free of prejudice, and there’s more to her than her gender-performative rebellion. She feels whole and real, insofar as a secondary fantasy character can, and she doesn’t offer any easy answers.
There aren’t any easy answers, after all. But at least Pratchett helps frame the right questions.
Sarah Monette’s librarian in the just-published story “A Light in Troy” is very much worth a look. (Pay close attention to the title.)
“The world is different in darkness,” he says—and this is a true thing, and an important one to remember in these times, and one that librarians are especially well-suited to impart.
Go. Read; it’s not long. Remember.