Normally this would be a Lazy Sunday post, but as I actually did a book review yesterday, and today is a holiday, we’ll fudge it just a little. Here’s some miscellanea:

#32: Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healey

This is a really good book. It’s YA fantasy that takes place in New Zealand and centers around New Zealand’s native mythology. Healely went out of her way to make the cast diverse and inclusive — including characters of color and characters with non-hetero sexualities — and she also went out of her way to be respectful of the mythology she used. (Well, okay, that shouldn’t be going out of her way, that should just be How Things Are Done, but sadly, that often isn’t true. Either way, she wrote a really interesting blog post about working with cultural consultants.)

Since this is YA fantasy, of course, you may be expecting a link to a full review over at Active Voice… and there is one, but I didn’t write it. It just seemed silly for me to write a whole review of a book when I could basically sum it up as, what Jess said.

Link Dump

I’ve had some of these links saved for ages, so… uh, apologies for the out of date conversations? All still interesting, though!

Yoko Ono: A Feminist Analysis

And realizing that Yoko wasn’t to blame for the Beatles breakup makes you ask a question. Why does the myth persist?

I had come to believe that most Beatles historians and true, educated fans had wised up enough to see the Yoko charade for what it is. So imagine my disappointment when proven wrong. Earlier this year, I finished Bob Spitz’s biography The Beatles, which is arguably the most comprehensive Beatles biography in existence. The book starts out amazingly, but about halfway through inexplicably begins to decline rapidly in the number of details provided once the Beatles become famous. That was annoying. But far more so was the unabashed, unapologetic and shameful smearing of Yoko Ono — made even worse by its presentation as fact when so clearly Spitz’s personal opinion. And this opinion is indicative, I think, of the opinion of most Yoko haters ….

So who is the main purveyor of the Yoko myths? Can we pin it on historians like Bob Spitz? Certainly, they hold part of the blame and need to be called out on it. But no, I blame someone else entirely for the bulk of the treatment and misogynistic cultural perceptions of Yoko Ono, as did John. In the first/next part of this series, they are the people who I’m going to discuss. And their names are Paul, George and Ringo.

Indeed. It was heartbreaking for me to realize, as I went through my Beatles Phase, that they were actually kind of dicks, and definitely abusers. Trying to reconcile that with my emotional investment in them, and their historical significance… well, I still struggle with that. It sucks to realize that people you idolize aren’t perfect, and can be outright nasty.

Anyway, all the Yoko hate out there started to bother me a few years ago, and it took awhile for me to twig to why. This pretty much sums it up — plus the cultural narrative that women ruin and destroy (see also: Eve, Pandora). Definitely worth a read.

The War on Critical Thinking and Evolving Social Mores

Talk about out of date. Apparently last October, some jackass wrote an essay about how scifi is being feminized and that’s ruining the genre and also the world! Because science! You see, if girl cooties get into genre fiction, no boys will want to be scientists, and then there will be no scientists. If only the BSG remake hasn’t made Starbuck a woman!

Need I say that the Smart Bitches takedown is great?

Why I’m Team Katniss

The thing is, I can’t get past the feeling that focusing on the love triangle somehow dismisses the central point of the series. Sure, it’s a very commercial, mainstream series that is clearly meant to be a page-turning, engrossing experience. But it’s also about war, violence, mortality, and inequality. I’m a fan of The Hunger Games because of the way the books deal with these issues in such a readable yet thought-provoking (and gut-wrenching) way.

I’ve been trying for ages to put my finger on why “team” terminology bothers me when it comes to YA fiction. I don’t care, like, at all about Twilight, but that actually is a romance, but for series like Hunger Games and or Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties, both series in which I’ve seen this (and I’m sure there are more), it’s really bothered me. I know romances are compelling and even necessary for some readers (I enjoy them but don’t find them necessary to enjoy a story, personally) but to me that feels reductive. These stories aren’t about which guy the heroine ends up with. In life-or-death adventures, it really bothers me that the narrative around girls is romance, no matter how much ass they kick.

Basically, Malinda Lo says that. But way more eloquently. Totally worth a read.

Contest! That I’m entering!

The last time I entered a contest by linking from here, I won! So what the heck, I’ll try it again for the giveaway of an ARC I really want to get my hands on:

Part fugitive, part hero, fifteen-year-old Nya is barely staying ahead of the Duke of Baseer’s trackers. Wanted for a crime she didn’t mean to commit, she risks capture to protect every Taker she can find, determined to prevent the Duke from using them in his fiendish experiments. But resolve isn’t enough to protect any of them, and Nya soon realizes that the only way to keep them all out of the Duke’s clutches is to flee Geveg. Unfortunately, the Duke’s best tracker has other ideas.

Nya finds herself trapped in the last place she ever wanted to be, forced to trust the last people she ever thought she could. More is at stake than just the people of Geveg, and the closer she gets to uncovering the Duke’s plan, the more she discovers how critical she is to his victory. To save Geveg, she just might have to save Baseer — if she doesn’t destroy it first.

Buy it online at: Barnes & Noble   Amazon     Or These Fine Retailers.

(In case you are wondering, I loved the first book and highly recommend it.)

Okay, y’all. That’s all I’ve got. Happy Labor Day.

A few weeks ago, my very smart friend Jen mentioned on Twitter that she was reading Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. My reactions, in order, were, “Awesome!” and, “Really?” Because (aside from superhero stories) Jen is not much for my beloved scifi/fantasy genres. So while I’d classify The Hunger Games as “book that you should read regardless of genre,” it wasn’t something I’d have recommended to her.

We had the following exchange:

Me: Ooooh. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts, though I probably wouldn’t have recced it to you.
Jen: I love dystopias! And I loved the movie of Battle Royale. So I think I will like this.
Me: How did I not know that about you??? (I guess I think dystopia = scifi = not so much your interest?)
Jen: I don’t see dystopia as sci-fi; if anything, it’s the reverse of historical fiction, which I also love.
Me: That is really interesting! I tend to think of it as just a sf subgenre, but I can see why you don’t.

Interesting thought, filed away for “things to think about later,” though I never really did. Until I ran across this post on io9 in Google Reader. I clicked over because that was the first time I’d seen a cover or title for the final book in Wasserman’s Skinned series — which I will definitely buy in hardcover as soon as it comes out — and the actual post turned out to be a question of whether or not YA has moved on from scifi.

My initial reaction is, um, no, especially not given the fantastic success of The Hunger Games and Catching Fire, as well as Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy, and a handful of others. But the post posits that the argument for YA not being big on scifi right now is based on not counting dystopias like the ones I just mentioned as science fiction. Interesting, especially because almost all of the YA scifi I can think of — at least published recently — is very near-future, is dystopian, or both.

Innnnnnteresting. So if you have thoughts, please throw them out in the comments! Do you consider dystopian novels part of a larger science fiction genre, or are they their own beast? Does it depend on the story? (Any recs? Because I need a longer reading list…)

So, speaking of what is big in YA, an interesting link: Girls Just Wanna Have Fangs:

Twilight is more than a teen dream. It’s a massive cultural force. Yet the very girliness that has made it such a success has resulted in its being marginalized and mocked. Of course, you won’t find many critics lining up to defend Dan Brown or Tom Clancy, either; mass-market success rarely coincides with literary acclaim. But male escapist fantasies — which, as anyone who has seen Die Hard or read those Tom Clancy novels can confirm, are not unilaterally sophisticated, complex, or forward-thinking — tend to be greeted with shrugs, not sneers. The Twilight backlash is vehement, and it is just as much about the fans as it is about the books. Specifically, it’s about the fact that those fans are young women.



I’m no fan of Twilight, but that’s not really what the article is about. It isn’t a question of whether Twilight is good or bad, it’s about why Twilight fans are greeted with sneers and disdain. Hint: because girls like it. And quality and content of the novels aside, that’s not an okay reason to dismiss them.

And continuing in that vein, tween stars. Jen (the same Jen as above) passed on a link she realized would be relevant to my interests: Smells Like an Ethnically Divided Teen Star System

The editor who chose to display the photos in this manner might argue it was simply artful to play up contrasts. And it’s not to argue that the “ethnic” stars have particularly dark skin (this is Hollywood, after all), just that they are racialized as not exactly white, and the positioning next to “whiter” stars makes this assertion stronger. Moreover, the juxtaposition eerily echoes the way in which leaked gossip in 2008 characterized Selena Gomez and Hannah Montana actress and singer Miley Cyrus (the arguably All-American daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus) as unfriendly rivals and ultimately positioned Gomez and purported BFF Demi Lovato, another Disney actress and singer also of half-Mexican heritage, in a separate camp from their more EuroAmerican counterparts at Disney. Is the conglomerate thinking of teen celebrity promotion in relation to ethnic blocs?

Interesting stuff. There’s also a good point in the comments; most of the ethnically ambiguous actors you see on Nick and Disney and even the CW are female; with the exception of Taylor Lautner and his Amazing Abs, the young, male heartthrob ideal remains pretty freaking white. I can think of a few other Disney kids who are ethnically ambiguous, and a few who are non-ambiguously African-American — but they aren’t kids who are being set up to follow the Zac Efron mold, either, which makes me think Lautner is an exception that proves the rule.

And now, because it is a lazy Sunday, I think I will take a nap. (Translation: I have no idea how to conclude this blog post.)

I keep trying to write an entry here about writing, but then getting too self-conscious about it. Maybe someday. In the mean time, when not able to come up with interesting content of my own, why not link to some other people’s content instead?

When I go through my Google Reader these days, I tend to go through interesting links using Read It Later, a FF add-on that I love. But unfortunately, this means I don’t have a way to tag posts with where they were linked from anymore, and so I don’t have credits for these. Suffice to say, they were all linked by awesome people.

Vague theme: feminism! Mostly but not entirely in sf/f!

And she’s cute, too!

So I opened up the email, and sure enough, it started off with a compliment about the usefulness of a particular article that I’d written. Great. Warm fuzzies abound. Unfortunately, the warm fuzzies vacated the premises in the next paragraph, in which the (male) writer concluded with the sentiment that it was nice to read such good articles written by “a cutie”.

I think I may have said something very rude at that point. It certainly left me feeling uncomfortable and a little creeped-out.

The problem I have with this isn’t just in the assumption that it’s OK for a total stranger (who I’ve never even seen in person) to comment on my appearance. It’s in the implication that the technical merit of my writing isn’t the important part here — that what’s important is how physically attractive I am. (And in particular with the form of words used, not just “cute”, but “a cutie”, which is a very neat way to suggest that everything important about a person can be encapsulated in their appearance.)

Yeah. It’s happened to me, too, and I don’t know what to say. Generally, women are socialized to want to be cute, to be recognized for that; but it’s so, so, so frustrating when that’s absolutely not what you want.

Off With Her Head? Why Fantasy Hates Good Queens

A few weeks ago we had a ball discussing the Top Ten Evil Queens of fantasy. But something occurred to me as I was doing my research: While I had no trouble finding evil queens, the only ones I could find that were depicted as being “good” were physically compromised in some way. (And I’m not talking about princesses here — I mean women in real seats of power.) The question this raises for me is, does power corrupt or are powerful women seen as dangerous in fantasy? Let’s take a look at the way good queens are hobbled to find out.

This makes me want to write a fantasy novel about a kick-ass queen immediately.

Are We Letting Boys Be Book Bigots?

We need to teach them to take an interest in all sorts of stories, not just the ones that feature kids like them. This means exposing them to a lot of different stuff. We should, of course, encourage kids to find themselves in books. That’s a wonderful and powerful thing. But we should help them find people who are different, too, so they learn to value other ways of being in the world. If we don’t support books, movies, TV programs and music that show these other ways of being, then we are contributing to the problem.

This is a debate I keep running in to: Will boys only read books about boys? I love this article for doing a take-down of why that’s an attitude that has got to go. Of course everyone wants kids generally to read more, and it seems like boys read less than girls; but focusing books more on boys and what’s culturally considered boy-themed stories is really not the answer.

Speaking of boys, girls, and characters…

Ladies, Please (Carry On Being Awesome)

I certainly have seen girl characters who were too perfect: who were beloved by all, beautiful (though they always thought their mouth was too wide or possibly their bosom too generous), and eventually elected queen of the universe. (Sometimes literally.)

Let us think of the Question of Harry Potter. I do not mean to bag on the character of Harry Potter: I am very fond of him.

But I think people would be less fond of him if he was Harriet Potter. If he was a girl, and she’d had a sad childhood but risen above it, and she’d found fast friends, and been naturally talented at her school’s only important sport, and saved the day at least seven times. If she’d had most of the boys in the series fancy her, and mention made of boys following her around admiring her. If the only talent she didn’t have was dismissed by her guy friend who did have it. If she was often told by people of her numerous awesome qualities, and was in fact Chosen by Fate to be awesome.

Well, then she’d be just like Harry Potter, but a girl. But I don’t think people would like her as much.

Indeed!

And finally…

now that we’ve got that clear, and you know that i’m not here…

One of the first things I ever did in the course of this dialogue was to reject the knee-jerk judgment of the Spock/Uhura relationship as a sexist reduction of Uhura to The Girlfriend role, some sort of sad step backwards from her empowered position in TOS as a professional woman with no need for a romance. …

However, the Just A Girlfriend nugget and the assertion that she is made less by her romantic involvement with Spock continues unabated, so I figured I’d give full voice to what I hadn’t before.

Simply put: Nyota Uhura is not a white girl.

(Via the previous article)

I really appreciated this. I grew up on TOS, and definitely super enjoyed (but didn’t 100% love) the reboot movie. ¹ But I definitely grew up on the narrative about Uhura as a career woman, and how that was totally progressive and awesome, and it never occurred to me to look at why she was depicted that way (let alone to question its awesomeness).

My eyes: opened. Always a good things.

I’ve got the apartment to myself this weekend. My plans for this lazy Sunday include watching baseball — I am SO GLAD baseball season is back, I can’t even express it — and working on The Novel.

I haven’t written much about what I’m writing, because there are about a million blogs by aspiring authors that are probably much more interesting and informative than mine would be. I only mention it now because I’m finally switching gears on this project: that is to say, after almost a year of writing in fits and starts (and one major computer death that took 15,000 words with it), I’ve finished the rough draft and am now starting the revision process. And since when I write I plow straight through without revising at all as I go (or even, for that matter, rereading to make sure I’m keeping things consistent), that’s quite a daunting process.

But enough about that. Since reading and writing is what’s on my mind, have some related links.

Amazon Follies

On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book “The Filly.” There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books? Is it just a major glitch in the system?

Of course, it turns out, it is not a glitch. Amazon has decided to exclude “adult” material from appearing in searches and on its best seller list, and automatically considers all books featuring GLBT characters and themes adult. I rarely shop at Amazon anyway; I definitely won’t be at all until this is remedied.

See also: Amazon Rank.

Straight Talk on Race: Challenging the Stereotypes in Kids’ Books

I trudged back and forth between cultures, relying heavily on stories for insight into the secrets and nuances of North American life. But exactly what did those stories communicate about my place as a brown-skinned foreigner? And, in that mostly white suburb where I went to school, why can’t I remember any educators who were bold enough to raise the issue?

The best-case scenario is that my teachers were consciously giving me freedom to experience the pleasure of reading without adult interference. But would it have diminished my enjoyment if an educator had raised questions about race in The Chronicles of Narnia or The Secret Garden, for example? Looking back, I don’t think so. Especially if that educator had appreciated these stories as much as I did.

Interesting and informative stuff about how to discuss race in school reading assignments, ranging from common stereotypes and tropes to cover art and beauty standards. (Via Justine.)

Gender in the Publishing World

I have to say that I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of boys who read Alex and really enjoy it. We are told often that boys will not read a book with a female protagonist, and I actually had a boy the other day look at me in shock when I mentioned Alex was a girl. This boy had already read the book, in which I say often that Alex is a girl, and yet I suppose because it isn’t about the fact that she is a girl, that she isn’t particularly “girly”, whatever that is, he actually forgot he was reading about the opposite gender and saw her more as an “everyman” (everywoman?) kind of character. Something, I must be honest, that was indeed one of my goals with the book, so I am immensely pleased. But at the same time, does this mean that if I write a “girly” protagonist I will lose the boys who so enjoyed my other books simply on that fact alone?

Adrienne Kress (whose first book, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, got five cupcakes over at Active Voice) writes not just about her book, but also about the question of women writing in general, women working in publishing, and — of somewhat personal interest to me — about being a funny female writer. Good stuff, good discussion.

Fantasy in Asia

Fantasy in Asia is as natural as mermaids swimming and fairies flying. That is to say, the mythology of Asia lends itself organically to the world of fantasy. Long before Tolkien invented a hobbit, a monkey king jumped its way through the pages of one of the four classic novels of China, Journey to the West, while Scheherazade wove her thousand and one tales to her Persian king in the Arabian Nights. Classic Asian tales have spawned a vast array of stories, books and movies that weave in fantastic elements that are quintessentially eastern. To hear of Aladdin and his magic lamp, is to be swept away into a world of djinns and sorcerers that somehow has been garbled up and translated to a western audience as a frenetic blue genie voiced by Robin Williams in a Disney movie, or immortalized by Barbara Eden in the classic TV hit I Dream of Jeanie. Meanwhile the Monkey King is a superstar in China who has never successfully made the transition outside of Asia.

In my last post, I linked to a couple of essays on non-Western-centric fantasy, and this is another great one. Ellen Oh looks at some of the Asian myths that haven’t ever caught on outside Asia, and the invisibility of fantasy novels that do use them — unless they’re suitably westernized, of course.

It’s a lazy Sunday here. I’m sick — doing okay now, but I’ve been through a whole box of tissues since Friday — and lying around trying to convince my cat she wants to snuggle. (She doesn’t.) I was mildly productive, in that I upgraded my version of WordPress. Which worked as it was supposed to (huzzah!) with a minor side effect that now a lot of my posts contain wacky, non-English characters. Nrrrg. So I’m going through and fixing those, but in the mean time, have some links for your lazy Sunday reading pleasure:

Why Strong Female Characters are Bad for Women

Yeah, the trouble is, although these characters were marginally better than the original Damsels in Distress, they still ended up having to be saved in the final act by the male hero. There would usually be a scene (or three) where the “Strong Female Character” would be trapped by the villain and put into sexy clothing, I guess as a punishment of some sort. And even when she was being strong, she was always doing it in the sexiest way possible. She’d never, say, get a black eye or a broken nose in a fight. Her ability to fix cars (a powerful, masculine trait) would basically allow her to get sexy grease all over her slippery body. Her ability to shoot a gun was so the film’s advertisers could put her on a poster wearing a skimpy outfit with a big gun between her legs. All in all, the “strength” of her character was just to make her a better prize for the hero at the end – and for the horny male audience throughout.

(Via Pen-Elayne)

Gee, I wonder why this article is of interest to me? (New category, but it seemed necessary.)

Related:

Stupidity Is the Great Unfavorable

Simply saying that a heroine is smart doesn’t mean that she isn’t dumb as a stump. We readers have to be SHOWN through her actions and behavior that she actually has an IQ higher than a lumberjack’s leavings. If she makes a boneheaded mistake, she has to acknowledge it, not ignore it, deny it or, god forbid, be praised for it. If she owns her bad behavior, it actually raises her favorables. So lead her into the dark alley, allow her to be saved and then have her acknowledge its a stupid thing and then agree to stay home the next time that some type of combat is taking place or until she learns how to wield a gun or sword or lightsaber.

(Via Jennifer Kesler of The Hathor Legacy)

This article makes a really good point — making a female character perfect (or trying to) doesn’t make her likable. Characters don’t need to be perfect, they need to be interesting, and they need to actually face consequences for their actions. That’s actually part of why I like Casey from Greek so much — she’s not an especially nice, wonderful person. Sometimes she’s actively horrible. But she (mostly) has to deal with the fallout from being horrible, and I’d rather watch an interesting person screw up and deal than a perfect person be…perfect.

Rant: Zombie Feminism

Ever since Dr. Frankenstein reanimated a woman to serve as his monster’s bride and she said no, the zombie woman has been a weird figure for female resistance to control. Zombie feminism is an uneasy subgenre, daring to use freakish gore and death slapstick to pose questions about what it might take for women to become unrapeable. Or for men to see women the way women see themselves.

(Via Erika)

Not a lot to say about this one — horror and zombies are not really my thing. I didn’t know zombie feminism was even, you know, a thing.

The “retarded” renaissance

“When kids see the movie and then use that word to tease someone — or call someone ‘Simple Jack’ — they’re not making fun of Hollywood,” says Alex Plank, founder of WrongPlanet.net, a prominent online forum for people with autism and other neurological differences, and a member organization of the “Tropic Thunder” protest coalition. Or, in the words of one blogger whose son has Down syndrome, “When we award tacit acceptance to a term such as ‘retard’ or ‘retarded’ in casual conversation — or worse, when millions of people watch a movie that also awards that tacit acceptance — it most certainly will gain even more acceptance,” she wrote last month. “My son will be going back to school in a couple of weeks. And all around him — I guarantee it — kids will be telling other kids not to go ‘full retard.’ And everyone will think it’s OK to say ‘retard,’ or that this or that is ‘retarded.’ And my son will walk through the halls, and more people will think of Nick as a ‘retard’ than did a few months ago. Nick deserves better than that.”

(Via Chaos Theory)

I’m someone who believes that language is important. I grew up with the very strong message in my school that the word “retarded” was just wrong — absolutely off-limits. I slipped into using it on occasion post-college sometime; I think, as the article points out, there is a lot of online snark that embraces the word. And I don’t think it should be normalized. Like all language, I don’t think it should be banned or censored — but I don’t think it should be normalized. Just because you can use a word doesn’t mean you ought to, and as I think the words we use can and do effect people around us, I choose not to use it.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

(Via The Swivet)

I don’t entirely agree with this article*, but it raises some good points — and some things I’ve personally struggled with. Brandeis is not Ivy League, but desperately wishes it was; so on the one hand, I’ve got an elite education, and on the other hand, I’m from a very rural, economically depressed farm town. The two come into conflict a lot. And I do think it’s important to not get academia tunnel vision — something I know I’ve had at various points — because there is a lot of the world where academic excellence is entirely unimportant, and its very, very easy to get so secure in the academic world that you lose track of everything else.

* And you can probably guess, I’m not a fan of the phrase “Ivy retardation.”