We have yet another controversy rocking the queer specfic community this week. It’s one I have reservations talking about, but I know it’s deeply important to a lot of our membership that the OA addresses it, and I do understand and support that sentiment, so here I am.

Three years ago, Tor published a collection of novellas, which included one by Orson Scott Card. He retold Hamlet. I didn’t hear about it at the time. By then I’d already stopped buying books by Card, or submitting work to his publication, because I knew that our fundamental values were at odds. He’s publicly said many times things that indicate that he doesn’t support LGBTQI rights, and believes a lot of things I find offensive and damaging. Now, my personal response to that has been to ignore him. He has the right to say what he wishes, because we both live in a time and place where freedom of speech is a protected right. I have the right to speak out against him if I choose, but to date I’ve always felt that exercising that right would give his damaging viewpoint more attention, and I didn’t really want to do that.

People talk about honest reviews being good, and I agree. People have said that negative reviews can help boost sales, and I agree with that, too. I’ve bought books before because I read a review that made me sure I’d like them even though the reviewer didn’t. More than anything, reviews give books attention. I wouldn’t have known about this book if it hadn’t been for a review. I’m guessing a lot of other people wouldn’t have either. I worry that the fervor over it will lead to results other than what the protesters would hope. I know that I’m potentially fueling that unwanted attention by adding my voice to the conversation, and that unsettles me.

I’ve said before that it’s important not to attack people personally. I don’t wish to do that, and I won’t be doing that today. I’ve also said that it’s important to speak out against injustice, and important to educate people when we can. It is my hope that I will accomplish these things, and also that this post will serve as a part of an extended open dialogue with the specfic community at large.

Now, the review in question was in response to a reprint of Card’s Hamlet retelling, not the original Tor collection. The standalone novella came out this Spring from Subterranean Press. I was especially dismayed to hear that news, and to hear, in the first cries of outrage, people calling for a boycott of Subterranean. That particular press has often published great books and stories with queer content, and by queer authors. I’ve bought some of them, and always felt good about supporting an open-minded small press with really nice production values. Seriously, if you’ve ever bought a book from them, you’ll know that they use highest quality materials. Their art is usually great, and every time I receive one of their books, I feel a sense of tactile joy, because they understand about texture at Subterranean. Their books are a pleasure to hold.

When this all erupted in a flurry of passionate e-mails on the OA google group, I said that if I boycotted every publisher who ever put out something I found offensive, I’d severely limit my reading choices. Others asked why people hadn’t called for a boycott of Tor. Still others pointed out that this was a troubling reprint because it was specifically chosen by a small press, and we ought to demand to know Bill Schafer’s reasoning. Along with boycotting, demands for various other concessions floated about, but none seemed to unite everyone in agreement.

Then someone pointed out that it was in fact possible that Bill Schafer and others hadn’t realized how and why this story was offensive. People who have the privilege of not being targeted by these damaging tropes are often unaware of them. Indeed, Bill Schafer’s response to the whole thing indicates that this might have been the case for him. He asks for people to share their thoughts, and says that he’s listening. If all of this results in a publisher learning a little more about how and why works he publishes might actively hurt people, then I suppose it’s worth the risk of giving attention to an author I’d rather ignore. Here is a collection of accounts by OA members of their experiences with this particular controversy, followed by some recommendations of queer-positive Shakespeare stories.

Rose Fox summed up the whole sordid saga in a concise and comprehensive manner over on the Genreville blog.

[T]his is the thing about offensiveness grenades: they may look entirely inert for so long that you forget they’re dangerous, but sooner or later, they explode.

On the google group, Rose added the following:

I am really sad and disappointed that Subterranean Press and Tor Books, which publish many books by queer and trans authors and with queer themes, also published a novella that vilifies queer people and equates us with child molesters. I call on those publishers–and on all SF/F publishers, imprints, and magazines both large and small–to refrain from publishing books and stories that vilify any group of people in such a fashion.

Cheryl Morgan said much the same thing to me, and explained why this particular reprint is so upsetting:

There is, I think, a difference between publishing the story as part of a retrospective of Card’s work, which can put it in context, and publishing it has a high-priced collectors’ edition, which suggests it is something special and of extra value.

Elizabeth Schechter posted about her personal reaction on her blog:

To be honest, right now, I’m more at the stage of sputter…sputter… whiskey  tango FOXTROT???

And my reaction isn’t because Card wrote this. Anyone who is following along and playing Homophobic Bingo: the Home Game just maxed out their score. This is no surprise.

The surprise is that Subterranean Press published it.

River Willow Fagan posted an extremely brave and heartfelt open letter to Bill Schafer, explaining how and why this kind of thing damages people:

One of the most painful aspects of being a queer survivor has been the doubts: what if all those hateful voices were right?  What if I am attracted to men because my father abused me?  What if I really am sick, what if my soul really is twisted and broken like all those conservative Christians say?

Sunny Moraine called for people to demand better stories, and posited that small-mindedness leads to bad writing:

I think that it’s important to recognize that art can be really offensive and still have a huge amount of value. But I also think that believing stupid, hateful things – more often than not – makes you a bad artist. As it cripples and stunts your mind and heart and spirit, it cripples and stunts the things that your mind and heart and spirit produce.

Brandon Bell, talking of the demands for more good queer stories, noted:

I’m certainly happy to see queer-themed Shakespearean works at Fantastique Unfettered.

Angela Korra’ti expressed a hope that people would not buy the book now that it has received more attention, and offfered a few alternatives for people who want good queer retellings of old stories:

So to all of you who never knew about this work, I’m a bit sorry to have brought it to your attention, and can only hope you will continue to not only not buy it, but will specifically not buy it because bigotry is not okay. To those of you who already knew about it and elected not to buy it on that basis, I thank you.

To counter its existence, I’d like to commend to your attention the Lethe Press anthology Time Well Bent, in which Catherine Lundoff has a story in which Shakespeare isn’t queer, but his sister Judith is–and so is his friend Kit Marlowe. Hayden Thorne has Arabesque, a dark m/m adaptation of Snow White. And I’ve mentioned this one already, but it’s worth mentioning again in a post whose theme is “adaptations of classic stories”: i.e., Ash by Malinda Lo.

Several people recommended Elizabeth Bear’s Spectrum Award winning Stratford Man duology. Warren Rochelle, one of the judges for the award, shared his thoughts about the books alongside some quotes from the official Spectrum Award writeup:

Ink and Steel and Hell and Earth, the two volumes in Elizabeth Bear’s duology, “were far and away the work most deserving of our award for the year.” I was quite taken by this universe in which Shakespeare and his rival and teacher and sometime lover, Marlowe, move back and forth between the worlds of Elizabethan England and Faerie and even Hell, a universe in which “the worlds of a great writer can shape the world as a form of magic … {Y]ou’ll find yourself believing that this magic of words is more than a fantasy story.”  All three worlds are masterfully done and I was more than willing to suspend disbelief.  I was caught up in the ongoing crises, crises “that only a handful of individuals, including Shakespeare, can overcome . . . Both Shakespeare and Marlowe . . . must face their own demons, their own mortality, and their own desires if they are find immortality for their own work, and the two kingdoms they come to love.”

And, finally, Hal Duncan offered his own playfully modernized screenplay retelling of As You Like it, free of charge. You can read his explanation of how it came to be, and the first scene in this blog entry, and you can download the whole thing at this site.

That wraps things up for this harrowing monster of a blog post. As I said earlier, I hope that it will be a part of an extended open dialogue. I’d love to hear more from anyone who wants to share their thoughts about this, and I’m especially interested in ideas about how we can use this situation to make our community better and stronger. Please leave a comment here, talk to us on the google group, or email me directly at julia@juliarios.com.

First, Outer Alliance member Angela Korra’ti is leading a Drollerie Press Blog Tour for the month of April, all about fools and tricksters. One of the  other contributors is Angelia Sparrow, too, so it’s awash in OA goodness.

Second, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Sexual assault affects people of all orientations, and it’s all too common. If you’re interested in learning more, or helping educate others about this, check out some of the resources at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s SAAM site.

Third, to help spread awareness and raise funds for rape crisis centers, Jim C. Hines is giving away a signed advance reader copy of his book, Red Hood’s Revenge. Jim is asking for people to donate to RAINN, or a local rape crisis center, but donations are not required in order to enter his drawing.

Support rape crisis centers and enter to win an Advance Copy of Red Hood’s Revenge, by Jim C. Hines.

That’s all for this week! The Spotlight will return next Friday with more Springtastic links, and then we’ll go back to our usual interview schedule.

Angela’s first urban fantasy novel, Faerie Blood was released in May of 2009 through Drollerie Press, and she is currently at work on the sequel, Bone Walker. Another story set in the same world (but in a different time period) came out in November, 2009 as part of the Civil War fantasy anthology, Defiance.

As a bisexual writer, Angela feels that promoting queer speculative fiction as part of a larger group is a powerful  and necessary thing. While she believes that queer SF/F is gaining more mainstream acceptance, she knows that there’s still a long road ahead.  She hopes that her contributions will help foster acceptance in and out of the genre by demonstrating that LGBTQI people are indeed people.

Angela lives with her partner in Kenmore, Washington, and works in downtown Seattle as a web page tester for Big Fish Games. She plays several instruments including the flute, piccolo, guitar, mandolin, and bouzouki, and she is particularly interested in Atlantic Canadian Folk music. In addition to blogging and holding drawings for free things on her official site,  she is on Twitter as annathepiper, and she keeps a personal journal at annathepiper.org.

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For the first Outer Alliance Pride Day, you posted a short story about a queer princess. Do you have any plans to tell more stories about her?

“The Disenchanting of Princess Cerridwen” came to life from two different directions: one, because I wanted to tell the story of a woman turned into a man, but whose true form is beloved of another woman, and so she has to fight to regain her true form. Several people close to me in my life are transgendered, and I wanted to try to capture a bit of that experience in this story. And two, the young witch that causes the havoc in the story is a very, very young version of the antagonist of a currently unpublished novel I’m trying to shop around, and the story is set much, much earlier than the novel.

I’ve worked out quite a bit of history for that world, though, and at the point in its timeline where Cerridwen and Damhnait appear, there’s definitely room for more stories to be told about them. I’m fairly certain that they wind up as influential figures, along with the young girl who’s a side character in the short story.

One of the striking things about Faerie Blood is the richness of its Seattle setting. What are some of your favorite things about Seattle? Where would you direct a first time visitor?

I’m thrilled to hear that my conveying of Seattle comes across well!

The Burke-Gilman trail is definitely one of my favorite things about the city. It winds through much of it, and if you follow it northward, it goes on around Lake Washington and hooks up with other trail networks; eventually, you can follow the trails all the way around the lake to the communities on the east side. There’s some lovely terrain to be found along those trails, and once or twice I even commuted to work along them.

The terrain of the Seattle in general, really, is something I love immensely. Seattle is called the Emerald City for a reason, and that’s because we’ve got quite a few areas of the city that are lush and green; that’s a great side benefit to all the rain we get up here. Plus, having mountains on the horizon to both the east and the west, especially the mighty Mount Rainier, makes for achingly beautiful views on clear days.

For a visitor to the city, I’d highly recommend Pike Place Market in no small part because the fish-throwing fish sellers are a longstanding market tradition. I mention the Science Fiction Museum and the Experience Music Project in the book, and they’re great places to visit, too. In general the Seattle Center is fun, especially if you’re visiting it during either Folklife or Bumbershoot, the two huge music festivals hosted there during the summer. And the Space Needle’s worth a visit just to go up to the top and see the astounding view from up there.

For the record, though, since I’ve been asked this a couple of times already: the Electric Penguin, the geek bar I mention in Faerie Blood, does not actually exist. But if I ever win the lottery, I am totally building it.

You have a background in online role playing. How did that affect your writing? Do you still consider yourself a gamer?

My gaming experience played a lot into developing my writing, yeah. The particular types of games I played on were called MUSHes, which was generally understood to stand for “Multi-User Shared Hallucination”, and the thing about them is that they were real-time, interactive games you could connect to and play out scenarios with other players. It was also all text, so the strength of the experience depended upon the strength of the players’ ability to portray their characters in writing.

I’d been wanting to be a writer even before I got into MUSHing, but once I did start with the games, it gave me a whole lot of practice in both character development and learning how to craft a decent plotline. Several of the games I played on required you to create extensive histories with characters who had special positions or abilities, and others let you play “feature characters”, which were the characters who actually appeared in the canon material those games were using for inspiration. I played Han Solo for two and a half years on Star Wars MUSH as well as two of the characters from the Elfquest comic books on Two Moons MUSH, and this gave me a lot of practice with character continuity as I had to learn how to pick up where previous players left off–and also how to prepare a successor coming into the same roles to do the same with where I was going to leave off when handing off the characters.

It was also on a Star Wars MUSH where I started regular logging of activities of my characters and writing prose introductions to lead into every roleplay log, so as to try to establish a good running history for what I was doing. I was eventually told that this helped my logs read a lot like miniature stories, and this in turn fed into my interest in developing actual story arcs for the characters in question.

These days I’m no longer playing in any online games, partly due to lack of time, but also because I discovered that the gaming I was doing was just different enough from writing stories that I couldn’t comfortably do both at once. It was like trying to wear two clashing shades of the same color, as far as my brain was concerned. And writing my own stories won out. Also, I was strongly inspired by a good friend of mine who left MUSHing before I did to pursue her own writing career, and I pretty much looked at what she was doing and thought, “Why am I not doing that?”

I do still miss it, though! Especially given that several of the characters now appearing in my prose are heavily adapted versions of characters I used to play.

You’ve been published exclusively in e-book format so far, and that’s something that’s getting more common these days, especially in the small press world. Do you read a lot of e-books yourself? Do favor a particular type of e-reader?

Oh yes, I am devouring e-books now that I have the ability to read them. I’d been interested in doing so for a while, but it only really took off for me this year when I finally got an iPhone, and with it the ability to read e-books in all sorts of different formats. Like all voracious readers, I suffer the perennial problem of lack of shelf space, and reading in electronic form solves this problem for me nicely. There are a small number of authors that I will keep purchasing in print, just because they are the ones whose names come up when I ask myself, “So if the power went out or my iPhone got run over by a bus, whose books would I miss not having?” But going forward, I expect the majority of my book purchases will be electronic.

Right now I’m doing all my e-book reading on the iPhone, with occasional reading on my laptop. I expect to keep doing that for a while–although I have to admit that I’m severely tempted by the Nook, the first reader that’s come along that solves most of the issues I’ve had with buying a dedicated reading device up till now.

What can you tell us about upcoming projects? Will there be more things set in the same world as “The Blood of the Land” and Faerie Blood, or are you building new and different worlds for us to look forward to?

Both, actually! As mentioned above, I am writing Faerie Blood‘s first sequel as we speak, and right now the plan there is to do a three-book story arc. The short story I’ll be contributing to the anthology duo I mentioned will also be in the Faerie Blood universe, and in fact, I’m planning on writing more short pieces that will visit various places and points in time to touch upon the stories of different Warders.

Further out, it’s distinctly likely that I’ll be doing a novel to tell the origin story of Millicent Merriweather, just because I’m looking highly forward to doing a fantasy novel set in 1953 Seattle.

While all this is going on, though, I do have completely unrelated work in progress as well. The novel I’m shopping around to agents right now, Lament of the Dove, is Book 1 of an epic fantasy trilogy. Another urban fantasy I’ve completed, Queen of Souls, is unrelated to Faerie Blood despite the fact that it’s also set in the Seattle area; that’s sort of a sequel to the Hades and Persephone myth, and tells the story of what happens when Demeter tries to take matters into her own hands and rescue her daughter from Hades–by turning her into a mortal woman. Lastly, I’ve a couple of soft SF novels brewing as well.

Anyone interested is welcome to check out my page on my works in progress.

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Thanks, Angela! Join us next Friday for another Outer Alliance Spotlight, and in the meantime, check out Defiance and Faerie Blood!