Outer Alliance Podcast #15: Steampunk December (Part 2) December 30, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, Outer Alliance Podcast , 11commentsIt’s the last OA Podcast episode for 2011!
We’re wrapping up the year with the second half of our Steampunk Extravaganza. Conni Covington and Natania Barron join me to talk about ConTemporal (a steampunk convention that’s happening in June of 2012 in North Carolina), Natania’s new book, Pilgrim of the Sky (a steampunk interdimensional travel adventure with a bisexual protagonist), and what steampunk is all about.
After the interviews, I read an excerpt of A Spell of Passion Or Fear by T.C. Mill (a gay steampunk romance in a dystopian Greek city, the Kalliopolis). This book is forthcoming, and we’ll update you as soon as we have more information on how you can order it.
Lots of good conversation and exploration of steampunk as a genre, as an aesthetic, and as a mirror of our current society in this podcast. And! We’d love to hear your take, too! If you have any thoughts, please share them in the comments. As an added bonus, each commenter will be automatically entered into a drawing to win one of two signed copies of Natania’s Pilgrim of the Sky.
To enter, all you have to do is comment on this post anytime through the 16th of January. We’ll be drawing the two winning names on the 17th. You don’t have to be a podcast listener to win, and any comment will get you a chance (one per person, regardless of how many comments you leave). You don’t have to have any deep thoughts about steampunk in order to win, though we’d be happy to see them if you do have some!
You can subscribe to the podcast RSS feed here or use this link to subscribe with iTunes. You can also hit play on the embedded player in this post and listen to the podcast on the web, or visit the individual episode page to download this episode as an MP3 without subscribing.
Notes:
Stuff I wanted to call to everyone’s attention
*The conversation about H.P. Lovecraft, which Nnedi Okorafor started, and which I posted about earlier in the month. I’d love to see more responses to this topic. If you have one, please share it!
*Catherine Lundoff’s collection of recommended QUILTBAG books first published in 2011–well worth a look, and also a great place to share your favorites.
Steampunk Stuff
*ConTemporal, the steampunk convention set on an airship which travels through space and time, which will be docking for the weekend of June 21st-24th 2012 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
*Studio Foglio, ConTemporal’s comics guests of honor.
*Cherie Priest, ConTemporal’s literary guest of honor (whose novel, Boneshaker, is one of Natania’s steampunk recommended reads).
*Sara Harvey and JoSelle Vanderhooft, literary guests at ConTemporal who have written and edited awesome steampunk stories with QUILTBAG content.
*Clay Griffin and Susan Griffith and John Claude Bemis, literary guests at ConTemporal who have written steampunk trilogies about vampires and American tall tales.
*Steampunk, edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer, another recommendation from Natania
*“Just Glue Some Gears On It (And Call It Steampunk)” is a Barbershop Quartet and rap video criticizing the trendiness of steampunk from a steampunk purist’s perspective.
*Natania’s Pilgrim of the Sky launch party is happening on the 28th of January in Durham, North Carolina.
Assorted Other Stuff
*Jennie Breeden, a comics guest at ConTemporal, who also takes a leafblower to kilt-wearers at Dragon*Con.
*Conni recommends Germline by T.C. McCarthy, even though it has nothing to do with steampunk or QUILTBAG themes. She just really liked it.
*Conni also recommends Broken and Fly Into Fire by Susan Jane Bigelow, noting that the main character of Fly Into Fire is a transwoman, but her being trans is not the main point of the story.
*The Society for Creative Anachronism (or SCA) is made up of people who are interested in historical accuracy in their medieval costumes and reenactments.
*John Henry is the American folk hero who raced a steam powered hammer and won.
*Natania mentioned The Biltmore Estate as a Victorian era anomaly for having state of the art indoor plumbing with pull chain toilets back when it was first built.
Recommendations for 2011′s Best QUILTBAG Fiction December 23, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : Uncategorized , add a commentIt’s the end of the year, and Catherine Lundoff has been collecting recommendations for QUILTBAG fiction over on her blog. The neat thing about this list is that it’s not a competitive awards list. The only requirement was that a reader loved each work enough to recommend it.
I’m always happy to see great collections of QUILTBAG recommendations, so I wanted to open things up to everyone reading this. Did you have any particular favorites in 2011? What were they, and why did you love them?
Outsiders in SF Panel on Video December 19, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : events, links , add a commentOn October 24th, The Center for Fiction hosted a panel about outsiders in SF. It was a great conversation between Carlos Hernandez, Andrea Hairston, Samuel R. Delany, Steve Berman, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Ellen Kushner. I was lucky enough to be there at the time, and now you can experience it, too! The Center for Fiction has put a video of the panel on YouTube in three parts.
Thanks to Charles Tan for letting me know this video existed!
Conversations About Bigotry, Literature, and the World Fantasy Award December 16, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : links, news , 3commentsOne of the things I state and re-state to anyone who will listen is that this whole idea of celebrating and supporting QUILTBAG civil rights, and fair representation of QUILTBAG writers and characters in speculative fiction, is not in competition with other rights movements. Yes, I feel so strongly about that that I had to use the emphasis tag. In fact, I’m going to repeat it on its own, in bold:
This whole idea of celebrating and supporting QUILTBAG civil rights, and fair representation of QUILTBAG writers and characters in speculative fiction, is not in competition with other rights movements.
There’s this thing called intersectionality, which basically suggests that all oppressed groups intersect in some way, and if we’re working toward fairness and equality for one group of people, really, we need to be working toward fairness and equality for all people. We’re all in this together. This is one reason why I think the conversation Nnedi Okorafor recently started is really important.
Nnedi is a woman of color, and her World Fantasy Award winning novel, Who Fears Death, is set in a future Africa with a protagonist who is a woman of color. Given that, it’s pretty understandable that Nnedi might feel uncomfortable with the World Fantasy Award’s form: a bust of H.P. Lovecraft. Her post is worth reading in its entirety, but in the interest of continuing the discussion with context, here’s some of the heart of it:
This is something people of color, women, minorities must deal with more than most when striving to be the greatest that they can be in the arts: The fact that many of The Elders we honor and need to learn from hate or hated us.
…
If Lovecraft’s likeness and name are to be used in connection to the World Fantasy Award, I think there should be some discourse about what it means to honor a talented racist.
Now, Lovecraft wasn’t just a racist. He was also a misogynist, and probably a homophobe as well. Sarah Monette talked a little bit about this in the 13th episode of the OA Podcast (on misogyny, around the 17:28 mark, she said, “I mean, Lovecraft has two female characters with names, and one of them is an inbred, passive receptacle for a monster, and the other one is a monster herself.”). And yet, Lovecraft is a giant influence on many modern fantasy and horror writers with much more progressive ideals. His work, his style, and his meshing of things both beautiful and dreadful, have seeped into modern American culture so much that Cthulhu, a tentacled horror, is widely recognized and reinterpreted in text, film, visual art, game, and plush toy forms (to name a few). A quick check on Amazon shows 683 items tagged with Cthulhu, and 515 tagged with Lovecraft. Like Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, the Cthulhu mythos has permeated pop culture enough that there are likely a lot of people who enjoy the references without ever having consumed the original source material, much less considered the author’s politics.
But many of the modern writers who cite Lovecraft as an influence have indeed considered those politics, and their work often engages in dialogue with them. Elizabeth Bear’s 2009 Hugo winning “Shoggoths in Bloom” (with an African American protagonist, who considers Lovecraft’s shoggoths in the context of slavery and the oppression of minority groups) is one example, and Sarah Monette’s The Bone Key (which explores issues of gender and sexuality with several named female characters and a gay male protagonist) is another.
Does any of this change that Lovecraft was a racist, or that his published and celebrated works include a lot of horribly racist content? No. Some argue that he seems to have had a change of heart at the end of his life–there’s a letter from 1936 in which he wrote, “The liberals at whom I used to laugh were the ones who were right—for they were living in the present while I had been living in the past.” Of course, the context of that statement is economics and not racism, but it does imply that he was human, and had the capacity to change and grow, which is somewhat reassuring. It doesn’t undo the horrible things he wrote, though. And while I can’t deny that his work was compelling and remains widely influential, I have to say, I’m not sure why we need a bust of his head commemorating one of the more progressive awards out there (past winners include China Miéville, Ellen Kushner, and Margo Lanagan, among others).
Theodora Goss (another World Fantasy Award winner) has also posted about this, and (in addition to a brilliantly specific example of how she reads Lovecraft with a critical eye, and what she sees in his work despite the unpleasantness) she offers a suggestion for a new award form, which sounds pretty great to me:
I think the award should be different each year, and it should be designed by a contemporary fantasy artist. Imagine winning an award designed by Shaun Tan or Charles Vess or Omar Rayyan! That would also recognize the wonderful work being done in fantasy art, which is such an important part of book publication in this “genre” (a word I use for convenience, since I don’t think fantasy is a genre).
What does it mean to honor a talented racist? I don’t have a good answer. I think it’s good to recognize and respond to the sources which help shape our work. I think it’s good to remember and examine both their strengths and their flaws so that we can continue improving, evolving, and growing as artists and as humans. But it does trouble me to have this symbol on an award. Partly, I think it’s that when we choose to commemorate someone with a bust like that, we’re implicitly approving of everything about them, whether we intend to or not. And partly, it’s a broader issue for me. The World Fantasy Award is not about one person. It’s not an award for the work most like Lovecraft’s, it’s an award for the best fantasy works of any given year. Fantasy covers a lot of ground, and not all of it is tinged with the Lovecraftian influence. Why narrow the form of the award down to honoring one person? The Hugos and the Nebulas manage to do all right without being busts of anyone’s heads, after all.
What are your thoughts? How do you feel about Lovecraft, the World Fantasy Award, and Nnedi’s call for discourse? Have you seen other posts in this conversation which particularly moved you? Have you written one of your own? I think it’s a very good thing to talk about, and I would really love to hear from others.
Outer Alliance Podcast #14: Steampunk December (part 1) December 10, 2011
Posted by juliarios in : interviews, links, news, Outer Alliance Podcast , 1 comment so farThis month on the Outer Alliance Podcast, we’re celebrating Steampunk! The subject is big enough that we’re splitting it into two episodes. This first one is all about SteamPowered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories. Zen Cho, Shveta Thakrar, and Patty Templeton join me to discuss their stories and read short excerpts.
Although this episode has an explicit tag, most of it is fine for everyone to consume. If you are concerned about exposing your delicate ears to a bit of salty language, however, you should avoid listening to the very last excerpt (from Patty Templeton’s story).
You can subscribe to the podcast RSS feed here or use this link to subscribe with iTunes. You can also hit play on the embedded player in this post and listen to the podcast on the web, or visit the individual episode page to download this episode as an MP3 without subscribing.
Notes:
Awards!
*The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards writeup is here. The OA sends hearty congratulations to all!
*Elisa Rolle’s Rainbow Awards list is here. So many OA members to congratulate! Excellent job all around! Particular congratulations to JoSelle Vanderhooft and Catherine Lundoff, Cecilia Tan, Lauren Burka, Lee Thomas, Lee Benoit, and Kyell Gold!
Zen Cho’s Links
*Zen’s blog, which has links to all her stories.
*Eileen Chang‘s stories were part of the inspiration for Zen’s story in SteamPowered II.
*Malaysian and Singaporean writers: Jaymee Goh, Stephanie Lai, Fadzlishah Johanabas, Ika Koeck, Alfian Sa’at, Eeleen Lee, Joyce Chng.
*Ken Liu and Aliette de Bodard are not Malaysian or Singaporean, but Zen recommends their work, too.
Shveta Thakrar’s Links
*Shveta’s blog.
*“Lavanya and Deepika” is Shveta’s retelling of “The Beautiful Twin and the Ugly Twin” in Demeter’s Spicebox.
*Shveta recommends the Hindu myth comic books from Amar Chitra Katha.
Patty Templeton’s Links
*Patty Templeton’s blog.
*The Foxfire Books seek to preserve and celebrate the culture of Southern Appalachia.
*Naked Girls Reading is a group of women who like to read in the nude (yes, this page does contain pictures of naked women). They also give out a Literary Honors Award, which Patty won in 2010.
More About SteamPowered II
*Jaymee Goh interviewed every contributor for this volume on her blog. See the collected interviews here.
*The Skiffy and Fanty Show (a podcast co-hosted by OA member, Shaun Duke) had an LGBTQ themed episode with SteamPowered editor, JoSelle Vanderhooft this month.