(1) SAG AWARDS. Genre productions were virtually absent from the 2016 Screen Actors Guild Awards except in the stunt work categories.
FILM:
Stunt Ensemble in a Motion Picture: “Mad Max”
TELEVISION:
Stunt Ensemble in a Comedy or Drama Series: “Game of Thrones”
(2) GUARDIANS SEQUEL. “’Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’: James Gunn Says He’s Cast the Villains and Star Lord’s Father” at Collider.
James Gunn is killing it on social media. The Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 director has made himself unusually accessible to fans, especially considering he’s at the helm of a massive franchise for a studio known for its secrecy. But Gunn can pull it off because he’s managed to find the fine line between satisfying fan curiosity without actually giving anything away.
https://twitter.com/JamesGunn/status/693089062928932868
(3) FLIPPING BATMEN. Adam-Troy Castro has a very funny idea for “Making Batman Say, ‘Uhhhhhh, What?’”.
You know what would be really, really grotesque?
Switching Batmen and their Gotham Cities.
Imagine plopping Adam West’s Batman down in the dark and corrupt Gotham of, among other creators, Frank Miller, where half the cops are on the take and all the villains are not just colorful lunatics but mass murderers; imagine him fighting, for instance, the Joker of Scott Snyder’s DEATH OF THE FAMILY, or the one played by Heath Ledger.
Conversely, imagine the grim and militaristic Batman of ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN in the Gotham of Lorenzo Semple Jr., where all the crimes are whimsical and campy and Commissioner Gordon has all the competence of a turtle lying on his back.
This would lead to some fun scenes.
FRANK MILLER BATMAN: “There’s nothing about you I can’t fix, Joker…with my hands…”
CESAR ROMERO JOKER (Disconcerted): “Umm, what?”
or
ADAM WEST BATMAN: “I’m just an ally of this fine city’s fine, upstanding police force!”
BURT WARD ROBIN: “Gosh, Batman! You’re right!”
JIM GORDON: (Disconcerted) “Ummm, what?”
And Castro continues…
(4) LE GUIN DOCUMENTARY SEEKS FUNDING. Worlds of UKL is doing fundraising for a prospective documentary about Ursula K. Le Guin.
Jayn, who sent the link, mischieviously swears, “I have no connection with the production beyond also thinking that Le Guin deserves a documentary about her (and possibly also a Nobel Prize for Literature and the throne of an Empress.)” Well, who doesn’t agree with that?
Director Arwen Curry wrote on Facebook about a Kickstarter appeal that begins soon.
As I announced a while back, the NEH recently awarded Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin a major production grant. We’re so excited to finish filming and get into the edit room. But the NEH won’t release the funding until we raise the rest of the budget. On January 31, we will do a “soft launch” of a Kickstarter campaign, inviting friends and family to help support this important film. We hope to have a respectable sum when the press announces the campaign to the public on February 1. Can you help now by reaching out to your reading groups, your Facebook pages, and your best geek pals and asking them to ‘like” Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin? Thank you!
(5) STOKER BUST. Neil Gaiman is supporting Bryan Moore’s campaign to have a bust of Bram Stoker created in time for World Dracula Day.
As we previously reported, noted sculptor Bryan Moore has launched a Kickstarter Campaign to help fund his latest project, a gorgeous bronze bust of DRACULA author Bram Stoker, a project formed in collusion with the Dublin Writer’s Museum and geared to tie into World Dracula Day on May 26th, 2016.
And now, author and dark visionary Neil Gaiman, the man behind such works as SANDMAN, CORALINE and AMERICAN GODS is among the project’s most famous backers.
“We’re incredibly grateful for Mr. Gaiman’s kindness and generosity” says Moore, the sculptor who has successfully crowdfunded efforts to place busts of H.P. Lovecraft at the Providence Athenaeum Library in Rhode Island and Edgar Allan Poe in Massachusetts at the Boston Public Library
With 10 days left, The Bram Stoker Bronze Bust Project has raised $7,270 of its $30,000 goal.
(6) WOMEN HORROR WRITERS. A few days ago I linked to Nina Allan’s “Where Are We Going? Some Reflections on British Horror, Present and Future” at Strange Horizons, about another British horror anthology predominantly filled with male writers.
The anthology’s editor Mark Morris posted a response on Facebook. He begins with this argument:
Keeping with this morning’s theme of British horror, there’s an interesting article here on the state of British horror by Nina Allen, in which she raises, yet again, the subject of gender parity. With regard to THE 2ND SPECTRAL BOOK OF HORROR STORIES, I’d like to say this:
First of all, it’s not a ‘Best Of…’ anthology, as she claims, but an anthology of original horror fiction.
Secondly, she criticises the book – and by implication my editorship of it – by pointing out that of its nineteen stories only three are by women.
I’ll answer this observation by stating what I’ve stated several times before – for me, the most important thing when editing an anthology is to get the *best stories possible* for it. I don’t care whether those stories are by men or by women. I’m not driven by having to fulfil particular quotas as regards sex, race, level of fame or anything else. All I’m interested in is selecting the very best stories out of all the ones that are sent to me. And if the twenty best stories (in my opinion) were all written by men one year, or were all written by women, then those are the ones I would select. (And would no doubt be damned for it).
(7) TODAY IN HISTORY
- January 30, 1933 — The Lone Ranger debuts on Detroit radio.
- January 30, 1991 — Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs premieres.
(8) NO DAY IN HISTORY, EVER. At Ancient Origins, which thrives on such things, an architect has presented a radical new theory about Stonehenge.
Could the prehistoric Stonehenge megaliths once have been the support for a wooden, two-storey roundhouse, a venue for feasting, speakers and musicians? That’s the theory of an English landscape architect who designed a small model of what she has in mind and is looking for money to build a 1:10 scale model of the structure.
Sarah Ewbank says the fact she is not an archaeologist has freed her from preconceived notions and allowed her to approach the matter in a fresh way.
(8) TODAY’S CHEERY SCIENTIFIC THEORY. More sound and therefore more depressing is Scientific American’s report about emerging evidence for a transmissible Alzheimer’s theory.
For the second time in four months, researchers have reported autopsy results that suggest Alzheimer’s disease might occasionally be transmitted to people during certain medical treatments—although scientists say that neither set of findings is conclusive.
The latest autopsies, described in the Swiss Medical Weekly on January 26, were conducted on the brains of seven people who died of the rare, brain-wasting Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). Decades before their deaths, the individuals had all received surgical grafts of dura mater—the membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord. These grafts had been prepared from human cadavers and were contaminated with the prion protein that causes CJD.
…Neither study implies that Alzheimer’s disease could ever be transmitted through normal contact with caretakers or family members, the scientists emphasize. And no one uses cadaver-derived preparations in the clinic anymore. Synthetic growth hormone is used for growth disorders, and synthetic membranes are used for patching up in brain surgery.
(9) A FEW BRICKS MORE. “Beautiful LEGO: Wild!, a New Book Exploring Natural Brick Wonders” at This Colossal has a gallery of photos.
LEGO-based artist, author, and curator Mike Doyle (previously here and here) has collected another impressive set of LEGO masterpieces in his lastest book Beautiful LEGO: Wild! by No Starch Press, a book that explores natural wonders from undersea landscapes to a family of sea otters produced from over 3,500 LEGO pieces. Unlike Doyle’s last book which featured sculptures depicting sci-fi horrors and ghoulish nightmares, this book collects the works of several dozen artists who capture natural scenes from our planet’s Animal Kingdom and beyond.
One of Doyle’s own pieces that appears in the book is a new piece titled Appalachian Mountaintop Removal (2015), a work composed of more than 10,000 pieces that directly references the act outlined in its title. Mountaintop removal is a form of coal mining affecting the Appalachian Mountains that levels mountains, poisons aquifers, and damages surrounding wildlife indefinitely. You can learn how to help the destruction of these natural resources as well as view more of Doyle’s massive lego sculptures on his blog here.
(10) GRRM ON HUGO NOMINATIONS. George R.R. Martin encourages people to nominate for the Hugos at Not A Blog.
What you nominate is, of course, entirely up to you.
But please, NOMINATE. I have been beating that same drum for a decade, and this year it behooves me to beat it even louder. Nominate the stuff that you enjoyed best last year. Let your own individual voice be heard.
Yes, I have recommended some stuff I liked, in older posts below. And I will be doing more of same in the near future. But remember, that’s just me saying, “hey, I liked this, you might like it too, take a look.” No one should ever nominate anything just because someone else tells them to.
(11) VOX DAY ON HUGO NOMINATIONS. On the other hand, Vox Day told Vox Popoli readers when they can expect his Rabid Puppy list.
The Rabid Puppy List of Recommendations That Is Most Certainly Not a Slate, Much Less a Direct Order From the Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil will be posted in February.
(12) PREMATURE VICTORY PARADE. Meanwhile, Randy Henderson may have been up late scrying his crystal balls, judging by his post “Important Update: All the Awards I’m Going to Win in 2016!”
It’s award nomination time! AND THANK GAWD, I don’t need to ask you fine folks to nominate or vote for me or anything, because I already know all the awards I’m going to win this year. The people behind the people behind the scenes have told me I’m a shoe-in. So here’s the list. Don’t be jealous.
2016 Hugo for Best Novel Idea about Use of a Hugo: “Condom demonstration prop in sexual education class for cyborgs“, submitted by Randy Henderson, author of Finn Fancy Necromancy…
And after that, he plans on winning every other award in the field….
[Thanks to Will R., Jayn, James H. Burns, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day ULTRAGOTHA.]
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Xenical?
Has the unfortunate effect of producing an unpleasant oily stool which is liable to inadvertently slip out with accompanying embarrassing noisome wind.
I’m finding it hard to resist the temptation to use this as a Scroll title.
(8-1) (yes, there’s two 8’s, but we cling to Fifth): Am glad I’m not the only one who immediately thought of Spinal Tap.
@Vasha: Good for the “Omenana” editor. This other guy obviously didn’t go out of his way to encourage women and overcome institutional/legacy/systemic sexism. It takes recruitment; that’s the reason the NFL has the “Rooney rule”.
(11) Teddy’s dupes still don’t realize that they were, so I expect they won’t disavow any connection. It’ll be all JCW and people even more mediocre again, plus Teddy himself. I’m surprised he didn’t write/edit/draw/podcast/zine something in every category last year so he could nominate himself for everything and thus need fewer dupes overall.
The Sads have a real opportunity here to break the linkage with him. Don’t put anything on their slate that he has on his. I bet they’d do better — after all, Weisskopf and Butcher didn’t win, but they did get fairly evaluated and their names aren’t mud. Sads might even win a category this time. There’s got to be some non-SJW (or completely politically neutral) fiction that’s competently written that they could nominate. A nice space opera with a SWM capitalist hero that has good spelling, grammar, and plotting, maybe?
@Mark-kitteh: But getting into TV/movie writing is even harder than books (Speaking as someone who has friends in both). So while it’s a lovely dream, it’s just that.
@Charon: Acquired! Also, good luck with that GIANT furry signifier of your SJW-ness. What a handsome fuzzy beastie. I am not woman enough for that; I’ve never had a cat who topped 18 lbs. or had that much floof.
Finding myself drawn toward Xanad’oh!, but the slanty letters won’t come across in limited fora like Twitter, so may I offer XanaD’OH! as a way of representing it?
For Benford’s 75th, perhaps In The Pixel Of The Scroll?
I like the apostrophe though – italics can be limited…
Ah, and the sexist bastards at Angouleme FIBD are douchebags in other ways too!
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2016/01/angouleme-organizers-criticized-for-presenting-fake-awards/
It makes our Puppy problems look mild in comparison.
Might as well finish the Galactic Centre series with:
Furious Hive
Scrolling Bright Eternity
@stevie
Thanks for the Bloodchild amazon rec, sounds interesting.
Mark, Kendall, Camestros, PhilRM and Lurkertype – thanks for the encouragement! It’s hard to deny any SJW affiliations when you have a gigantic mutant cat, although prior to him I had the ultimate in SJW pets: a rabbit. I miss that little guy every day.
After Xanadu came Xanadont. Xanax is a palindrome, which makes it more worthy already. And then there’s Exlax. of course. Explanatos sounds sort of interesting in a pompous way. Explanetos is more SF. And now all I can think of is Mentos, so… I’m done here.
I don’t have my ID number yet, but am not ready to nominate yet, anyway, because… So much reading to do!
I’m also Ship B. I mean, Group B. I read the crap that was shoveled onto the ballot last year, which is why I now lean toward the Exlax Gambit. I’m not even that morally opposed to slates, to be honest. As an individual voter, I would certainly not follow a slate myself. I mean, who do I think better knows my voting taste, me or some stranger? I get very cranky when other people try to do my deciding for me. Prickly! Independent! But I am morally opposed to bullies and, well, purveyors of crap, so… I’m Group B.
@Kip W:
Works for me, man.
The Xanascroll Gambit
My current plan is to make one out of every two books I read a 2015 SFF title until either Hugo nomination season is done or I run out of ones I want to read. In keeping with that, today’s read was —
Indexing: Reflections, by Seanan McGuire
When I first came across the works of Seanan McGuire, I wasn’t very taken with them. I read the first October Daye book and had no idea what the fuss was all about. Similarly, I read the first Incryptid book and it did absolutely nothing for me. Sparrow Hill Road, however, I quite liked; I’m a sucker for a good nonlinear narrative, and in the likely event a sequel comes out I’ll pick it up. Still, I wasn’t rating McGuire as a must-read author. Then I picked up Indexing.
OK, I’ll admit this is very much my personal taste, but for some reason this fairy-tale / Men-In-Black combo slotted into some weird space in my neurons like cocaine. I LOVED it. It is exactly my cup of tea, especially the get-it-done special agent Snow White and the amazing rage-fueled Wicked Stepsister. A storyline that reaches into the ur-space of narrative origins wasn’t so much the icing on the cake as a whole ‘nother cake.
The sequel keeps it going, exploring different places in the territory and revealing a lot more about one of my favorite characters. High marks from me.
I won’t be nominating this one for a Hugo, I think, because while it appeals dramatically to my personal tastes, if I take a step back I don’t think it’s as objectively well-written as a number of other books I’m considering. Not necessarily major stuff, but, for example, too much depends on one of the characters making a remarkably bad decision — and I’ve read enough mind-blowing books so far this year that this matters. I will, however, be snapping up any further sequels as soon as they come out, if there are any.
(On a note completely unrelated to my rating of the book, my copy was remarkably badly bound, basically falling apart while I was reading it. Bleah.)
Crikey, Charon D. That is one heck of a moggie. Well, either that or you are only 3′ tall. Did you feed him dog food by mistake?
We had a 19lb Maine Coon-ish cat that I thought was remarkably large.
X-lax gambit FTW!
Castoralia thinks stuffing the nominations with crap is a smooth move.
IGMC
Cadbury.
@Nigel He’s a big one, isn’t he? I’m slightly taller than average, and he’s a freakishly big 30+ pound Ragdoll (a purebred that I got from rescue). His name is Kahuna and he’s got his own photo section on my blog (click my name for the link).
@lurkertype – RE: Angouleme FIBD
Wow. That’s one hell of a dick move.
XanaD’OH! Gambit works for me. Mockery without anything of the toilet to it.
lurkertype: Ah, and the sexist bastards at Angouleme FIBD are douchebags in other ways too!
I’m just… stunned, that anyone could think presenting fake awards to real competitors and then saying “Whoops! It was all a joke!” would be funny.
nickpheas: Speaking of puppy picks: the best story of theirs I read last year was Tuesday’s with Molokosh the Destroyer, luckily disqualified for not actually coming out in 2014. Anyone paying enough attention to the stalking horses to know if it’s getting traction there? Has it’s author published anything else? It really was streets ahead of anything they actually got onto the shortlist.
Mark: Tuesdays seems to be a SP4 frontrunner. It’s a good story, and as you say was a highlight among lackluster competition, but doesn’t make “great” for me.
Chris S: I liked “Tuesday with the destroyer…” – not sure it’s hugo winning and it’s a take off of the Tuesday with Morrie books, but it was pretty effective story telling.
I thought it was a competently-done story — one of the better ones on the Puppy slate — but it wasn’t anywhere near my bar for “Hugo-level-quality”.
The author is one of BT’s Mormon Writers of the Future buddies, and was fully on board with being part of the Sad Puppies slate.
“The festival published a rather defensive response to the controversy, saying that Gaitet had been tasked with bringing “freedom, impertinence, and humor [to the ceremony], in keeping with the independent spirit of most comics creators.” And the festival’s executive director, Franck Bondoux, blamed Twitter, saying that all the great awards ceremonies have jokes and “The problem is the dictatorship of the tweet.””
Just, wow.
The problem is Twitter.
Not their dick move.
But rather the people discussing it.
Way NOT to apologize, guys.
Recently read: The Private Eye, written by Brian K. Vaughan, drawn by Marcos Martín and Muntsa Vicente. Panel Syndicate, March/June 2015 (both completed and collected in 2015).
This is an odd one: a private eye story in a deliberately retro but kooky future. The premise is that in our very near future “the cloud burst” and made everyone’s online history totally public, ruining lives, and causing a massive turning against anything digital and connected, an obsession with privacy, and a slew of new anonymity laws. There is not only no internet but film photography, paper books, and LPs have returned. People only emerge on the street when masked, with wildly colorful costumes. So the visual landscape in these pages is a very eye-catching blend of familiar and odd. Retro fashions of coat and fedora are worn by “the Forth Estate” who have bizarrely acquired the reputation of best investigators and taken the place of police.
The story centers on a more-than-standardly mysterious man known only as P.I. who is an illicit investigator (snoops are referred to as “paparazzi”). He is caught up in an investigation with Raveena, who is investigating the murder of her sister, which is connected to a plot to resurrect the internet. It is a fast-moving and violent story, with plenty of mayhem dished out by bad guys and plenty by Raveena.
Allusions to amuse a contemporary audience are provided by P.I.’s grandfather, an octogenarian tattooed hipster whose senile mind is mostly stuck in the 2010s. His familiarity with digital tech turns out to come in handy though.
I’m not sure if I think highly of this story in spite of its readability. I just didn’t think its reflections on privacy were that profound. And the sheer implausibility of the setting, which owed more to striking visuals than to likely extrapolation, didn’t help. True, the art (more than the writing) can convey paranoia. The story combines pervasive sexual voyeurism (from the reader’s gaze and that of characters in the story) with a negativity toward kink that I hadn’t quite expected from Vaughan, given Saga‘s reputation for sexual diversity. It all comes to a rather unsatisfactory ending in my opinion.
It’s worth checking out, though, because the price is very reasonable.
I’m reading some totally-non-Hugo-eligible stuff at the moment — I recently finished Blackguards (first-rate anthology of sword & sorcery stories of the rogueish kind that I backed on Kickstarter; I think it came out in 2014?) and am now, as part of my very, very slow plan to read all of his novels in order of publication, reading H. Rider Haggard’s Jess, which looks like it’ll shape up to be competent but unmemorable Victorian romance enlivened primarily by its South African setting.
Dunno if this has come up yet, but G WIllow Wilson, the writer of Ms Marvel, talks about the whole Marvel CEO-donating-to-Trump thing that was on yesterday’s scroll.
Joe H – Blackguards came out in 2015.
At this point, the Sad Puppies have the Confederate Flag problem. No matter how many pretty coats of whitewash they put over it, they can’t hide (1) its original purpose, (2) the behavior of most of the people who fought under it, or (3) the words and behavior of a shitload of people who still identify with it. The rot goes all the way to the bone.
Yes, blind submissions would probably do a lot for gender balance in anthologies of new material. I’m not sure exactly how this would be implemented, as I’m not a writer and have never submitted a story. Is the writer’s name supposed to be on the first page? On every page? On a separate first page?
Re:blind submissions.
There are ways. I cursory search shows http://lakesidecircus.com/ and http://escapepod.org/guidelines/ use an online submission form, which presumably anonymizes the submission procedurally.
Kyra recomended
Which I note is, for today at least, available for 98p on Amazon UK Kindle
Cat Rambo — Excellent! More potential nominees, then …
Is Indexing: Reflections finished, then?
Cassy
@cassy
Yes Indexing:Reflections finished a week or two ago. I have been reading the serial releases and need to go back and reread from the beginning.
Same thing applies to “Tremontaine” over at Serial Box, though I admit I’ve kept up with reading the Indexing serial better.
Emgrasso, thanks; I didn’t want to get it while it was in progress because I wanted to read it all in one gulp….
@Vasha: “The story combines pervasive sexual voyeurism (from the reader’s gaze and that of characters in the story) with a negativity toward kink that I hadn’t quite expected from Vaughan, given Saga‘s reputation for sexual diversity.”
The ability to write from multiple perspectives on the same topic is a useful one, even when it produces work with which we disagree.
@emgrasso: “Indexing:Reflections finished a week or two ago. I have been reading the serial releases and need to go back and reread from the beginning.”
I’ve been curious about how the Kindle Serials pricing works. The completed work is $3.99, but before then, it was listed at $1.99 – was that two bucks per section as a big “read early” premium, or a “get in early and save” two bucks overall?
Lee: es, blind submissions would probably do a lot for gender balance in anthologies of new material. I’m not sure exactly how this would be implemented,
Blind submissions aren’t difficult to arrange. The editor puts in the guidelines that he/she wants blind submissions, and then outlines the details. Most submissions come in with a cover letter, the author’s name and address on the first page of the story (with other information) and the author’s name, the title of the story, and the page number as the running heading. With a blind submission, the author just omits his/her name from every place in the story (and the address, etc.), and includes all contact information in the cover letter (substitute “cover email” and “attachment”). When the submission comes in, the person opening the envelopes separates the cover letter from the story, assigns a specific number to both, and files each separately, and passes the story only on to the editor. If the editor is the person who usually opens the envelopes (common at a small operation), it gets a bit trickier; he/she needs help for that initial stage, and of course you have to trust the editor to Play Fair and Not Peek. But that’s about it.
@Rev. Bob – I’ve been curious about how the Kindle Serials pricing works. The completed work is $3.99, but before then, it was listed at $1.99 – was that two bucks per section as a big “read early” premium, or a “get in early and save” two bucks overall?
I don’t actually remember what I paid, but it was a single payment upfront, with the chapters downloaded automatically every other week.
Count me in as another huge Sloane fan. Yes, I know there’s something wrong with that sentence. Anyway, I really love the Indexing serials, even though the cliffhanger format doesn’t usually work well for me.
Cheryl S.: I don’t actually remember what I paid, but it was a single payment upfront, with the chapters downloaded automatically every other week.
Well, that’s annoying. I didn’t buy it back then because I thought it was going to be $1.99 for each chapter. And now it’s $3.99.
Mary Frances: Thank you, that makes sense.
So… the combination of a statement to the effect of “We welcome submissions from female and minority authors” and a blind-submissions format would indicate pretty strongly that this editor/publisher is trying to minimize institutionalized racism/sexism. Note also that the lack of these does not necessarily indicate active bigotry, but is more likely to reflect a lack of thought on the topic, and/or the feeling that “since I know I’m not racist/sexist, it doesn’t matter”.
@JJ – Well, that’s annoying. I didn’t buy it back then because I thought it was going to be $1.99 for each chapter. And now it’s $3.99.
I can’t guarantee it beyond all doubt, but I have one transaction in August for $2.19 and nothing like that in the next few months, so, yeah, I think it was initially cheaper. Amazon could definitely do a better job of explaining the process, because I remember being concerned enough about being charged $smallsum 12 times for the first Indexing serial that I waited to buy it until the second chapter was out.
The place where blind evaluation is pretty much impossible is awards for existing publications. (Thinking of the past Clarke Award issue.) You can’t really have judges that are both familiar with the field and so utterly unfamiliar with the last year’s publications that they don’t know who wrote what.
Heather Rose Jones: The place where blind evaluation is pretty much impossible is awards for existing publications.
Um, I dunno about that. I mean, I don’t disagree, but there are probably gradations in these things. There was that one year–it must be 30 years ago now–when the editor for the annual Best American Short Stories volume insisted on reading stories blind; they weren’t blind submissions, per se, but when he got the copies, all names and places of publication had been removed. As I recall, a few new names showed up in that annual, along with the Usual Suspects–the point being, I suppose, that even if the editor recognized some of the stories from having read them previously, he didn’t recognize all of them (because no one can read everything published in a given year).
I’m not sure if it would be worth it within a field, like SF/F, but I suspect the publishers of the short story annual I’m referring to found it an interesting experience, at least . . .
@Mary Frances
In the 2015 Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy anthology, I believe I remember reading that Joe Hill made the final selections by reading blind (and ended up with a nice balance of m/f authors–9 to 11, if I counted correctly). What I wonder about that is if a widely read editor will recognize an author just by the style, whether the name is on the story or not. Neil Gaiman, for example.
@redheadedfemme: But if he said, “And That awesome one by Gaiman. What do you mean, there’s no story by Gaiman? Who was that?” And it was a totally new author? They’d probably be chuffed to have an editor make a mistake that complimentary.
(It’s also, I suppose, possible to have the rare case where an author doesn’t like the Big Name Person they’re compared to, and then it might be a problem, But while I do not aspire to write like Gaiman, but rather like myself, I’d still punch the air to learn that had happened.)
Ahhh, must update copies of both “Indexing” and “Tremontaine” ASAP then (sometimes the Kindle needs brute-forcing).
Blind submissions sounds like a great idea! However, I must point out that, unlike orchestral music, blindly submitted writing may contain clues regarding the artist’s gender. For example, if you get three paragraphs slobbering over the male protagonist’s girlfriend’s breasts, there’s a fair chance you’re reading a man’s writing. Lesbians, in my experience, are slightly less inclined to slobber over breasts (at least in public), even when they’re big fans. And, while I do know both gay men and straight women who appreciate the aesthetic appeal of breasts to the point of borderline slobbering at times, it’s not quite the same, somehow….
That’s a gratuitous example of course, but there may be plenty of smaller, more subtle clues. Of course, if you don’t have gender assumptions at the start, you may be less inclined to modify your opinion of the work once you’re already part-way into it, and it dawns on you that you’re reading a story by an X. Redheaddedfemme’s example seems to suggest that the technique works. And even if it’s not perfect, it’s gotta be better than nothing.
(I have to admit that I’m suddenly curious how random people might react if they read one of Tiptree’s stories blind. I’m quite familiar with how people reacted when her stories were labeled “James”, but that’s not quite the same thing.)
Xtifr: I have to admit that I’m suddenly curious how random people might react if they read one of Tiptree’s stories blind. I’m quite familiar with how people reacted when her stories were labeled “James”, but that’s not quite the same thing.
I was quite shocked that anyone could read “The Women Men Don’t See” and think that the writer was anything other than a woman. Ditto for “Houston, Houston”.
JJ: Me, too, but I already knew when I first read them, so I can’t entirely discount the possibility of bias. Even though, as you say, I would find it shocking if…
@Xtifr – For example, if you get three paragraphs slobbering over the male protagonist’s girlfriend’s breasts, there’s a fair chance you’re reading a man’s writing.
Perhaps. I’ve participated in a grants process that involved blind submissions and my recollection is that there were fewer signifiers than you might expect and the ones that were present were an unreliable indicator of the writer’s sex/gender.
Or from having read the story already.
@Xtifr:
Not that this contradicts your point at all in general, but I have known at least one lesbian I came to be uncomfortable being in conversations with, because she would talk about women the way that the worst het male offenders do. It was like she was trying to make a point of being just as sexist and objectivizing as the next man. And then of course there was that one derby gal on the French Quarter “San Fermin”/Rollerbulls pub crawl whom the topless dancer at Rick’s Cabaret had to horse-kick to get her (the derby gal) to stop pawing her (the dancer*), which led me to the realization that “Wow, gals can totally be ‘that guy’, can’t they?”
So there are exceptions. But in the main, my experience agrees with yours, that the way women who like women talk about women tends to contain a lot less slobber. (I may be biased, as I’m including myself in that subset, and I like to think well of myself.)
*Pronouns are hard.
@World Weary:
I haven’t dared yet. Would you recommend it to someone who is a fan, but who found Snuff actively painful to read?
@Harold Ostler:
In addition to what Lenora Rose said, I’d personally wonder whether the women that Mr. Morris approach decided not to submit stories to him based on how he represented himself. I mean, I can’t speak for Mr. Morris’s record in specific, but in general, my experience has been that a man who falls back on “I don’t select for gender I just read good stories” when it is suggested he has a wee titch of the pro-male bias… does tend, over the course of a single conversation, to fill out a number of other squares on the Male Privilege Doesn’t Exist And I Can’t Possibly Be Sexist bingo card.
In other words, one potential answer to your question might be, “Don’t get in the habit of saying things that are dismissive of privilege issues and women’s experience, thus giving yourself a reputation of being unpleasant for women to work with.”
JJ, Xtifr: When I first heard the song “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane”, it was the PPM version, with a female vocalist. I remember, even as a teenager, thinking that it sounded more like a song that a man would be singing. Many years later, I found out that it was in fact written by a man. So there’s something to be said for the idea that the work itself may provide clues to the gender of the writer.
OTOH, a sufficiently savvy writer might easily be able to figure out what some of those clues would look like, and include them as red herrings. And a writer of any gender who’s good enough at getting into the headspace of a writer of a different gender to fool the reader is a damn good writer.
Nicole: Heh. The first time I wrote a slash story, I had all kinds of issues with the pronouns! It gets easier with practice.