open vein, write story

For those of you who have not heard, anthology editor Jonathan Strahan recently announced his final TOC for the upcoming Eclipse Two anthology, published by Night Shade Books. Now, you might have thought that given the brou-ha-ha surrounding the cover of Eclipse One, those associated with the project would now be very sensitive to gender issues and disinclined to repeat the spectacle. Well, apparently not.

The TOC is (as far as I can tell) entirely made up of white men, with one white woman. I’m with ktempest: I find this sort of thing wholly unacceptable. And no, I refuse to look at some sort of long-term trend to confirm bias when it comes to an anthology. Anthologies are books, meant to be consumed as single projects. It’s not like a magazine, with subscribers, a regular production schedule and an expectation of future issues.

I’m re-posting here what I just wrote in the comments section of the original SF Signal announcement:

Jonathan,

So, you have created an anthology of white men and one white woman. The publisher’s copy for Eclipse One reads:

“Set to become a major event on the science fiction and fantasy calendar,Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy gathers together new science fiction and fantasy stories by the best writers working today.”

This is a general interest anthology. It’s being promoted as some sort of compilation of exciting new talent. And yet, that talent is as race and gender limited as anything that would have been published 30 or 40 years ago. I bet those editors thought they were gender/color blind, too. 13 white men and 1 white woman represent the best writers working today?

Honestly, when the women dropped out, did it occur to you to cast a wider net and ask more women for stories? To open a few more slots from the open call or extend it? To recruit a few of the dramatically underrepresented pool of writers of color (especially female writers of color), very few of whom ever seem to break through to the relative mainstream of our genre?

No one is saying you should accept a story by a woman or a writer of color just because you need to fill a quota. But a solicited anthology is only as good as the writers whose stories you solicit, and judging by this TOC (no matter what unfortunate first-round dropouts you had), you need to broaden your list. Any editor of a magazine or anthology not only considers the internal quality of each story but ALSO their relationship with each other. I hear all the time that a story might get rejected not because it was bad, but because, say, Peter S. Beagle beat you to the unicorn story slot. If you have a preponderance of AI stories, you might reject one you would otherwise have accepted. This type of “not just the quality of the story, but the quality of the market” balancing is an accepted and, indeed, *expected* part of the job of the editor. When Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling put out their fairy tale anthologies, no one wanted to read six sleeping beauty re-tellings, no matter how good they might individually be.

So HOW is it any different to consider another “not just the story quality” valence when weighing the effect of the balance of an anthology? How is it “affirmative action” or “quotas” or any of those other bogeymen to look at your TOC and think, “gee, I seem to have stuffed this with a lot of white guys. My readership might not like that anymore than an anthology with 7 romantic zombie stories, so let me try to balance things a little.”

There are so many excellent women and writers of color working in the field today that I find it astonishing that (when the first round of women dropped out) you could not have solicited several other excellent stories from them to help round out your anthology in all the ways people clearly care about.

Because I’m with Stephanie: I’ve seen enough of these all-male anthologies to last my lifetime.

I’d really appreciate thoughts/comments about this. This sort of thing frustrates me so much I never quite know what to do, but interaction is always good.

And if you know exactly what I’m going to talk about already, I’m either your friend or need to become so immediately!

I spent about six hours last night re-reading choice bits of the end of The Ringed Castle (’I reserve the right,’ said Lymond, ‘to change the metre.’) and Checkmate (’Don’t be surprised: your sire loved me also?’) and have come away with an even deeper appreciation of just how seriously. fucking. good. Dorothy Dunnett was.

In a hundred years, if we haven’t destroyed ourselves in some nuclear apocalypse or global warming induced natural disaster, the Lymond chronicles will still be read by generations of precocious readers and writers of certain romantic sensibility. And a fraction of them will go on to a lifetime of admiration and informed, coy, clever emulation. The fact that I can read a book now and predict with what seems (anecdotally, at least) to be an uncanny degree of accuracy if the author has read the Lymond chronicles speaks to just how much of a nerve those books hit with people. And what I mean is, they change lives.

Sometimes I think of Lymond as the literary version of the Velvet Underground…not many people bought the record, but everyone who did started a band.

I have some vague ideas about how to turn this secret cabal of Lymond-lovers into a more public (and surely fascinating) discussion at a con, but I first need to figure out how many of them are going to be traipsing around Calgary come November.

In the meantime, as an all-too-brief illustration of the many, many layers of meaning that Dunnett was capable of infusing into every word, I give you this from Checkmate:

[WARNING: SPOILER AHEAD!!]

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I will never understand how it is that perfectly reasonable, intelligent, precocious and curious children can grow up into timid, hidebound, ideologically paranoid adults who feel the need to police every errant word that might pass their precious babies’ dewy eyes. And by this I mean: by what reasonable standard can an eleven year old child not be allowed to understand what the word “scrotum” means (especially in reference to a dog’s genitals, and in the most clinical manner possible)? Why is it that sexually curious (and possibly active) fifteen and sixteen year olds shouldn’t be able to read about teenage homosexual relationships (Boy Meets Boy)? What on earth are we trying to “save” these children from? Reading, at the risk of pointing out the obvious, is an act of discovery, one that in some way uncovers some heretofore unknown aspect of our world. Writing is humanity’s best method of conveying all sorts of knowledge, including the bewildering complexity of our human interactions. And reading is perhaps any person’s best chance of entering another person’s head, and really experiencing the world from their perspective. So, to me, it seems like it should be a crime for some wrong-headed adult to restrict any child capable of understanding the material from reading anything they wish to. Yes, I am opposed to censorship of any kind because I at least remember the joy of reading as a young teenager. I know that if my parents had decided to vet my choices before I was allowed to enjoy them, many of my fondest reading experiences would never have happened. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to read the Alanna series when I was twelve because she gets her period and falls in love with a much older man.

By book four, in fact, the Alanna series is rather singular among YA fantasy novels, which tend to be dramatically more conservative than their “realistic fiction” YA shelf mates. Judy Blume was telling young girls about their periods and (possibly ill-advised) sex with boys while YA fantasy authors were cleaning up after dragons and vain wizards. Now, I adore Patricia C. Wrede and Diana Wynne Jones (ask anyone), but at a certain point in my youth I had to wonder: where on earth was the sex? The periods? The sexual uncertainty? Why was it that these issues never seemed to make it into YA fantasy, but were staples of many realistic YA novels? And I think the reason goes straight back to these self-imposed gatekeepers of Young People’s Pristine Minds: librarians, parents and editors. For some reason, fantasy was always seen as skewing younger than more realistic YA, and thus much less adult content was tolerated. (I wrote an essay for Beatrice about the amorphous distinctions between YA and adult fantasy, but those distinctions of qualitative focus are, I think, a little separate from the sex, etc. I’m discussing here.)

But this is all ridiculous. Tweens and teens are perfectly capable of understanding and appreciating the subject matter of Boy Meets Boy or The Higher Power of Lucky. I treasured every morsel of truly adult content I gleaned form my reading in middle and high school. Every serious (not titillating) explanation of a sexual act or interaction was to me a valuable window into a world I wanted to know more about. And when I see adults struggling to board up these windows for kids far more isolated than I ever was, I get furious. Not every child is willing to rebel. Some willingly go along with their parents’ or librarian’s well-meaning (I suppose) damming of their intellectual outlets.

And even when the parents and librarians don’t censor, I sometimes feel like there is far too much self-censorship on the part of authors and editors, especially in fantasy. I mean, why is it that twenty years after Alanna had some decently explicit sex with Jonathon and George do we still see so little in YA fantasy? Why do we have to turn to realistic YA for some decent homosexual relationships? Why are we so afraid of “polluting” young minds with information that we all know, and could benefit ourselves from exploring further? What amazing condescension to these people we were, not so very long ago.

Yes, teenagers know about sex. Yes, they’d like to read about it. Yes, they know what prostitutes are, what drugs are, what death is, what war is, what disease is…THEY ALL KNOW. It isn’t some big fucking secret. Authors should write what they feel compelled to write, without the pinpricks of self-censorship, about subjects they feel are interesting to the people they want to reach, and that audience should in turn be able to read whatever the fuck they want. Does something make you feel uncomfortable? Then stop reading it. Or, even better, keep going. But for god’s sake, don’t you dare tell me or anyone else, no matter how young or impressionable you think they are, what you think they should read.

(More from the land of the Shift. This turned into a bit of a short story. Unfortunately, I’m not close to good enough at photoshop to illustrate it.)

Her name had been Greta, and she had been raised in Cheruk Syndicate in the days when Fox Speaker ruled the city. Her parents were Fallen—Goyles, as the less devout called them—but she was born healthy and entirely human. Fox Speaker took her on as his lover when she grew old enough, and taught her the ways of the ayahuasca, the peyote, the blue mushrooms which still grew on dung if you dared to brave the Shift. What spirits she touched shook her with their anger, their need for vengeance over what humans had done to their earth.

“How can we appease them?” she’d asked Fox Speaker, young and terrified and trusting.

And he had shown her.

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(The Shift began its life as a proposal for a SF television show, but I’m now in the process of turning it into a graphic novel script. The world is post-apocalyptic and sprawling, and I’m going to post various bits of things I write about both the world and the characters from the series. This helps with my creative process, and even better if I can interest other people in the project. At some point, I hope to find someone willing to work with me on sketching the characters and certain key locations.)

Jade Syndicate doesn’t throw their trash in the wasteland. Boss Jade is the only female syndicate head—and no woman with power takes for granted what she doesn’t understand. No one understands the Shift, that charred, virus-ridden stretch between the human protective force of teeming North City and the high, old-technological walls of Delphi University. Everything that isn’t City or University is Shift. Every part of the Earth, maybe, but no one in North City knows shit about geography. Pre-virus humans glorified their civilization, forgetting that without their supermarkets and computers and customer service centers, the majority of people on earth had a roughly stone-age grasp of technology. And when a virus eats up the land and kills 85% of them? The climb up that hill suddenly looks pretty damn steep.

So she doesn’t mess with the Shift, but Jade still has to do something with the living carcasses, the mind-bleached leftovers of her Goyles. Their power comes from the Shift, and until it drives them insane, she can use it to help control her corner of the city. Jade is grateful for your service, the disposal managers like to say to the incoming loads of gibbering half-humans. The Goyles are dispatched in a nominally humane way—no warm baths and soothing music, but sharp blades and a speedy efficiency that minimizes both pain and mess. Boss Jade tolerates pain; she hates unnecessary waste. Most bodies are kept in a giant cold room deep underground, protected by three levels of University-grade technological security. On any given day, as many as sixty Goyle bodies are laid out on identical silver gurneys. Jade Researchers use scalpels and saws and pickaxes to hack through the variegated hides of scales, feathers, rock and skin to see what lies beneath. Something in the Shift, the virus, has profoundly changed these humans; turned them into Goyles. With typical pragmatism, Boss Jade reasoned that she might gain an advantage over the other syndicates if she learned what else changed when one turned Goyle. In the cold room, anatomical anomalies are catalogued, photographed and detailed. Their bodies resemble animal carcasses if you squint in a certain way that all Researchers have learned to squint. And when these blood-drained cadavers have fulfilled all possible function, they’re shipped to a meat processing plant on the outskirts of her district, providing Jade with a hefty discount on the costs of producing glue, pet food and hot dogs.

Goyle family members are not notified.

Mark Twain clearly knew his way around the literary bitchslap:

A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are–oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

~Mark Twain, on James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer

Ouch.

(And incidentally, his discussion of imprecision in language and Cooper’s prodigious lack of observational skills are pretty relevant to modern writers. Recommended reading.)

There’s a really interesting article about endogenous retroviruses and their implications as regards human evolution (in brief: invaluable shards of evolutionary history scattered throughout our genome like a Sumerian rubbish pit) in the most recent issue of the New Yorker. You should really read the whole thing, but my brain kind of snagged on one bit in particular, which I think raises some thorny intellectual and ethical questions about the nature of science, knowledge and research. This is obviously relevant to researchers and scientists, but also pertinent to folks like me, who just like to invent and extrapolate upon what those former hard-working individuals discover.

First, the article discusses the burgeoning and promising new field of paleovirology, wherein scientists of various disciplines use the reconstructed genomes of millennia-extinct viruses in order to learn more about the nature and process of evolution. It’s a novel way of learning about our prehistoric past, with serious shades of Jurassic Park. And like Jurassic Park, this new technique has serious dangers lurking just beneath the surface. Exhibit A, a group of students who used commonly-available materials and information to reconstruct a working version of the polio virus:

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…is a very good, fascinating book by a new star up-and-coming author, Ekaterina Sedia. She’s also the editor of the forthcoming urban fantasy anthology Paper Cities, which promises to be an exciting publishing event (full disclosure: the publisher of that anthology is in my writing group, and I slush for his zine, Sybil’s Garage).

But I have no connection to Prime or to Sedia, so consider the review I now have out in the latest issue of Behind the Wainscot the product of unfiltered admiration. (And it’s not just me. She even got herself a great blurb from Neil Gaiman).

And I apologize about the utter lack of bloggy content lately. I’ve given myself the ambitious goal of writing 60,000 words in 30 days, so it’s going to be spotty for a while.

So, World Fantasy. Fun. Maybe a little too much fun. Moral of the story: avoid Australian wine and hard liquor. I think we can all do without my con report. (Though: Scott Westerfeld, Doselle Young, Ekaterina Sedia and Kristen Janz are incredibly cool people. And I met Guy Gavriel Kay! And Saladin! And a bunch of other awesome people! No…must…resist…)

Better news: you can now listen to the live stream of my interview and reading with Jim Freund on Hour of the Wolf. I don’t seem to be on the TOC yet, but if you go here and search for “Hour of the Wolf” you can find the raw audio. Jim is a very gracious host and interviewer, and has edited me to make me sound much cooler than I was

And some other news, for any New Yorkers (among the three people who read my blog), I’m doing a reading in the East Village tonight at the Tompkins Square Library. Info:

6-7:30, the Tompkins Square Branch of the NYPL, 331 E. 10th Street, off of Ave B

Alaya Johnson, Racing the Dark
Kristen Kemp, Breakfast at Bloomingdale’s
Louise Plummer, Finding Daddy
Abby Sher, Kissing Snowflakes
Scott Westerfeld, Extras
Jake Wizner, Spanking Shakespeare

And, just for the sake of completeness, I’m going to Chicago on the 14th to do a reading there, also:

Women and Children First. The listing for the event is here. Wednesday, November 14th at 7:30. If any of you happen to live in the Chicago area I hope you can make it.

And that, I think, is that. Back to regularly scheduled programming when I feel slightly less blown out.

As someone who was a master of the fine art of B.S. in High School and college*, this book– “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read”–ought to be right up my alley. Or a manual for all sorry Columbia freshmen currently slogging their way through Lit Hum. (Buck up, guys, it gets better in second semester.)

But, actually, the whole idea makes me a little depressed. Surely reading isn’t only a social exercise? It’s the kind of attitude that made me despise Lit Hum (aside from the whole Core Curriculum being racist thing). The thought that as long as we read and were vaguely familiar with the themes of these forty or so works, we could slide by in sophisticated cocktail parties for the rest of our lives. Oh, sure, you should maybe supplement it with a cursory exploration of James Joyce or Philip Roth, but as long as you knew Thucydides and Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, no one would guess you had a weakness for Louis L’amour novels.

This is lame. Reading is an activity to enjoy, not to wield like bludgeon at social gatherings. I’ve been reading a great deal of books this month and sometimes I swear that nothing makes me happier than going into a tizzy over a book. Off the top of my head, this is what I’ve read so far in October:

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
Pretties by Scott Westerfeld
A Countess Below Stairs by Eva Ibbotson
A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson
A Song for Summer by Eva Ibbotson
Indiscretion by Jude Morgan
The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia
Firethorn by Sarah Micklem

I’m all for cultivating your B.S. muscles (especially in academic settings), but don’t lose sight of the fact that literature is designed for stimulation and wonder and–of course– pleasure. I love reading books. Most of the books I read I rarely discuss with other people. They’re personal pleasures. Though, since I’m here anyway, I had a real run of luck this month and I liked every book on that list. I recommend the Westerfeld books, Firethorn and Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotson in particular (I know I didn’t read that this month, but it’s her best adult novel). The NY Times review put this very eloquently:

At the risk of sounding like the fusty old crank everyone does impressions of in the faculty lounge, I still believe in the private ecstasy of reading. It’s one thing to jockey for social position by saying that Dostoyevsky introduced psychology into the novel, or that Chaucer had a fuller grasp of humanity than Shakespeare. It’s another thing to experience, with your full attention, Raskolnikov wandering feverishly around St. Petersburg, or the young scholar farting in the face of his romantic rival in “The Miller’s Tale.” Real reading is not just hoarding fodder for cocktail chatter, it’s crawling, phrase by phrase, through a text and finding yourself surprised or disappointed or ruined or bored with every other line. This direct connection—the voice that enters your brain and mingles with your own internal voice—is the only way books really matter, and experiencing it requires a kind of deep surprise at the words in front of you.

See, doesn’t that make you feel better? B.S. The Decameron. But read something you enjoy.

* Just one example, since I can’t resist. My sophomore year I took a class in Victorian literature, which sounded far more interesting than it actually was. A major problem was that my teacher seemed to be under the impression that no females had ever written anything of note during the entire Victorian period, despite, you know, probably the most famous poet of the age being female. But, like, whatevs. So I was editing the college paper at the time and I was not inclined to bust my ass getting to a 1pm class three days a week. Don’t say anything. When you go to sleep at 5am and have to commute in from Yonkers, 1pm requires busting ass. So I attended precisely THREE classes. One to turn in the first essay (oh, how I love essays written on poems), one to turn in the supposed “final” essay that would determine our grade, and one to receive that final essay and learn that actually we were going to have an exam. In a week. I had not bought a single book for the class. In the classes I attended, I worked on my Japanese homework. I was, to put it delicately, unprepared. And since I was so unprepared, I didn’t even bother trying to get a little less unprepared, just on general principle. So you know that nightmare where you realize you have to take an exam, but you’ve never even attended the class, let alone studied for it? Well, that actually happened to me. There were three essay questions about six different Victorian writers. The only one I had ever heard of was Robert Browning. I wrote three essays about the work of six men with whom my only familiarity was that my teacher had chosen to discuss them in class. It was the B.S. Olympics. I defy anyone to say so little of substance while appearing to say so much (the secret: allusions, allusions, allusions). Anyway, I ended up with an A- in the class. I wonder what the hell he thought of that exam. Maybe he took pity on me?