-Wisconsin repeals its Equal Pay Act, under the grounds that “men are more money-conscious than women”, and the main breadwinners of families (nah, single mothers never happened, and families with two working parents are just a fallacy). WTF. Cat Valente comments, mostly on how the heck we got here, and how we shouldn’t assume we’re safe away from the US (while I do agree with her, I believe in Europe people are more likely to get our rights denied for practising Islam and being vaguely Arab-looking. The US has gone women-phobic, in my neck of the woods it’s more like xenophobic).

-In the same vein, a rather terrifying post by Libby Anne on the erosion of pregnant women’s rights in the US. Do avoid the comments if you want to keep your blood pressure down, because they’re a morass of dumb people telling women that their noblest goal is to give their lives for their fetuses (seriously. Not even the Catholic Church is that regressive, and God knows I have issues with their handling of abortion and gender equality).

-On Eastercon: I love the con, I had a great time personally, but… you might want to take a look at this blogpost by Alex Dally McFarlane on some less awesome stuff that went on there. I don’t agree with everything, and I do think it’s important to point out that it’s been a con with many many degrees of awesomeness (not aware of everything, but the incident about gender equality on panels and how it was swiftly dealt with are a particular example of how stuff was efficiently and strongly dealt with). And again, I personally haven’t experienced anything I’d classify as offensive, but I had the privilege of being able to stick to my rather large comfort circle(s). I remain confident those are issues we’re working on as a genre, and that things can only get better (I’m quite sure cons used to be much less gender-equal than they are now, for instance–this is an area where we’ve definitely made progress). And the whole discussion has given me ideas for future panels at Bradford!

-Charles A. Tan on the fallacy of World SF, languages, cultural domination within the field

-Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life” is up at Apex–it’s a wonderful story of alienation and immigration, and what it means to be a foreigner in one’s own country

-Saladin Ahmed’s post on Game of Thrones. Read the comments at your own risks.

So… don’t really have much to say, other than that the con was awesome: Heathrow remains one of my favourite locations because despite the weirdness of the con hotel, it’s *very* easily accessible from where I live (I’m already looking at Bradford next year in mounting dread). I had con crud pretty much as I walked into the hotel–my BA flight having kindly cranked up the air conditioning and worsened a pre-existing cold–and I spent the entire con trying not to run out of voice (the con bar was particularly bad for this, as it had ambiant music that made me speak louder just to be heard).

Organisation was great; I met lots of people old and new, hung around until impossible hours, and mostly wish I’d had more time to actually see everyone whom I wanted to see.
The non-Anglophone panel was great, though, as Rochita points out, it would have been nice to have an extra half-hour in which to move beyond the false problem of translation (which is admittedly difficult, but no more from English to another language than from another language to English), and tackle the power differential and the effects of globalisation (especially as I roped Rochita in, and she could attest to personal experience of growing up in a country vastly overwhelmed by US culture). My panel on Youth and Youthfulness in SF was great (Tom Pollock being one of the best moderators I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing), and we tackled lots of interesting problems on that. Highlight of the weekend probably goes to a panel I wasn’t on, though: “The Nature of Heroism” featured Tricia Sullivan, David Anthony Durham, Genevieve Valentine, George RR Martin and Joe Abercrombie, and Tricia raised some very pointed and valid questions about the “men’s club” nature of heroism and our excessive preoccupation with violence in epic fantasy. You can watch the whole thing here, and it’s definitely worth a look.

They also announced the Hugo nominees while I was at Eastercon (but stuck in a signing): there are lots and lots of friend on that list, and many congrats go to them all (I’m especially impressed that a lot of people are on the ballot twice in different categories). To single out just two of them, though: it will come as no surprise that Ken Liu’s short fiction is nominated both for Best Short Story and Best Novella (and I will be very miffed if he doesn’t take at least one of those trophies); and many congrats also go to Nancy Fulda, whose short story “Movement” is a Villa Diodati success story (not often that stuff we critique ends up on the ballot for the Hugos and the Nebulas!).

(I do have a few other links about stuff that went on… less well, shall we say, but I’m keeping them for tomorrow’s link roundup. There were many awesome things about this year’s con, and this is the post for them).

So… bags packed. Chocolate taken with me. Eastercon app downloaded. Leftover food (xá xíu) handed over to the H for his bánh mì tomorrow.

My plane leaves at 8:00, which gets me up at 5:15am. Arg. I’ll be off for some sleep then…

A reminder that my schedule can be found here; and the author herself can be found in the bar or in the dealers’ room. I will be rooming with the awesome Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, and hope to see many of you there!

(with thanks to Brian Dolton, for sparking this one off)

The above is something that I’ve often heard quoted when speaking of “writing the Other” [1]. And I’ve been struggling with it ever since I heard it; because it rings fishy to me. And yet there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it; and indeed, much that is right. Of course we’re all human beings. We’re born and we live and we age and we die. We love and we care and we hate and we fear. We have parents and grandparents and some sort of family; and a non-insignificant bunch of us will have friends and children and partners. There’s a whole spectrum of experiences and emotions that we share on what, for want of a better word, I think of as the human continuum. And, given that a few centuries ago people of a different colour or gender or creed were thought of as no better than beasts, I’m certainly not going to complain at the impulse to declare us all part of the same species.

At the same time… I think the main problem I have with the above sentences is that they’re too reductive: they go straight to what they see as “the essential”, and forget that our lives are often made up of many large and small details, of a mosaic of beliefs and cultural mores which comes from the environment we’ve been raised in, the society we’ve moving in, the subcultures we’re members of, the people we frequent… Yeah, we’re all the same deep down, but, broadly speaking, life in Hồ Chí Minh City follows very different rhythms from life in Paris; and the social structure and attitudes can also be very different [2]. Similarly, of course French politics are like US politics, but for a matter of degree; but that doesn’t get across the way that those two are fundamentally un-alike, and the myriad differences that make French politics characteristics of France.

Of course there’s nothing like “French-ness”, or “Black-ness”, or “Asian-ness”–and of course you don’t want characters who are walking stereotypes (personally, if I see one more Eastern mystical master, or one more Asian family obsessed with school grades and arranged marriages, I’ll hit someone). But the reverse approach, the one that advocates that “we’re all the same deep down”, is a bit like globalisation to me: instead of being a vibrant celebration of what makes us different, globalisation tends to smooth everything into an over-arching culture (which is a mix of European/US cultural mores, to oversimplify). Or like “universal stories”, which so often tend to be the Hollywood variety (rather than, say, the Bollywood or Nollywood one, to take just two examples).

This approach assumes that everyone in every country wants the same things: which might the case if you go deep enough, but is intensely problematic if you stop, say, at tastes in food, or beauty standards, or cultural values. And, like globalisation, the “we’re all the same” approach tends to lead to characters who might feel powerfully individual, but who basically remain 21st-Century US/European people in costume with a few “exotic” [3] words thrown in: it makes a mockery of all that makes us different.

In other words, saying “everyone is the same deep down” carries the risk of being boiled down to “everyone is like me”, and that in turn can lead to thinking everyone has the same beliefs and culture as you do, aka imposing your own thought processes on others at the expense of their own.

So, yeah. We’re all the same deep down. Except for a matter of degree. But degree is a huge thing.

This isn’t my most articulate post. I’m fully aware that I’m struggling to pinpoint why I disagree with the above assumptions; and I’m not entirely sure I succeeded in putting my thoughts down on, er, blog electrons. I guess it broadly boils to a matter of balance between two ends of the same problem: characters as walking stereotypes, and characters as entirely similar to the writer or the assumed majority audience (both stemming from an incomprehension of difference, and to some extent for me, a tolerance fail). Am I making sense to you? What do you think?

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[1]I also have issues with this expression, but I’m going to stick to one problematic assertion per blog post…
[2]They can also be eerily similar in some respects; and yes, they’re going to hugely depend on who you are and where you live in both cities. But my point is that they don’t coincide 100%, or even 90%. There’s overlap, but no equivalence (yes, I’m a maths geek )
[3]“exotic” is another of those words that makes me want to hit something, just in case you have a doubt. Especially when it’s applied to food I happen to have eaten and enjoyed since childhood.

So, as you might know, I have a panel at Eastercon on TV shows we’d like to see but haven’t, and I notoriously lack imagination for that sort of thing (I mean, the only things that come to mind is something with a decent main female character who’s not a Strong Female Who Still Needs to Be Rescued by Men cliché; and a female POC Doctor Who…). But judging by all the interest when I bitch about Sherlock, I’m pretty reasonably sure that some of you have got strong ideas on this

Therefore, I’m throwing the question(s) out for collective brainstorming:

What don’t you like about current TV shows? What shows would we like to see made but probably won’t be?

Thanks in advance!

So, we’re up to “Let’s Kill Hitler” in Season 6, and there’s stuff I don’t overly like in there…

(spoilers after the cut)
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-Friday 5pm: Newcon Press Dark Currents launch

Launch of the new anthology Dark Currents, which has fiction by a number of awesome people like Tricia Sullivan, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Lavie Tidhar, Neil Williamson, Sophia McDougall, … (and my story “The Bleeding Man”). A lot of contributors will be at the launch, so here’s your chance to get that anthology signed!

-Friday 6pm: What is I?

We all think we know who and what we are, but the more science delves into the nature of ‘I’ the more ‘I’ seems to disappear. Is consciousness just a figment of our brains, and if so, where does that leave us?

-Saturday 11am: Non-Anglophone SF

What is the SF scene like outside English-speaking countries? Do they have their own thriving scene, or is it dominated by Anglophone SF from outside? Why does non-anglophone SF have such a small weight in the UK and US markets – is it down to the difficulty and cost of translations, or is there some other reason for this? Are the problems unique to SF, or present in all genres? And what can we do to change it?

-Saturday 9pm-10pm: Book Signing

I’ll have a few copies of Obsidian and Blood and probably a few other anthologies. Feel free to drop by and chat!

-Sunday 1pm: Youth and Youthfulness in SF

Science fiction, in its dominant form, is an American invention, and stereotypically has the outward-looking optimism of a young country in its DNA. How can contemporary sf reflect the best of that tradition without over-simplifying its worlds? What is the role of writing YA and writing diversity in keeping sf new?

-Monday 11am: What TV shows would we like to see?

What shows would we like to see made but probably won’t be?

-Monday 2pm: “The data deluge and the end of science”

Are our data gathering abilities outstripping our methods for analysing the results? Are our models of causal links inadequate for complex systems? Is scientific advance going to stagnate because of this, or will new tools, such as Bayesian statistics and network theory, allow continued progress?

In between panels, I’ll be in the bar, as usual

… is that, even while getting home relatively late, there’s still a good half hour of wonderful sun to enjoy while walking in a park.

*happy writer*