In Which I Am Dim-Witted As Usual

So Charles Coleman Finlay is calling for a hundred women to submit stories to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction on August 18th, to redress a perceived gender imbalance there. And, yes, people have already pointed out that it is a bit odd for a man who's regularly published in F&SF to be spearheading the protest about the fact that a class of people to whom he doesn't belong does not get published there all that much. (It's surprising to some people, but I went to Vassar, so I'm well acquainted with male-feminist Stockholm Syndrome.)

This is all a follow-up to the SFWA survey of short fiction in 2002, which found that the percentage of stories by women in the major magazines is, and has consistently been, less than would be expected from the percentage of women in fandom, the percentage of women in SFWA, and the percentages of major awards going to women. My preferred explanation -- that women are mostly too smart to write very much for the peanuts that the big skiffy magazines pay these days -- is pretty flippant, but may be partially true. (Women do not seem to have any trouble as a class getting novels published, for example.)

Unless I missed something, there's no obvious reason for this activism to focus on F&SF. But I'm exceptionally cynical, so I'll try to reconstruct the thinking of the Feminist SF Overmind:

Hm. Analog is the worst offender against women, and has the highest circulation, but Analog only publishes stories that True Feminists don't want to write or read anyway. So there's no point attacking them.

Asimov's has a somewhat better ratio, but it's still not what we want. Oops! Now it's edited by a woman. Can't pick on a woman.

F&SF is the third biggest magazine, has a lower percentage of stories by women than Asimov's, and it's edited entirely by men. They must be sexist!

(Any similarly to any human being's thought processes is highly unlikely.)

That's more-or-less a joke, but the laser-like focus on F&SF in the current iteration of this debate (at Finlay's LiveJournal, and spilling out other places) is quite noticeable, and strange. I would expect a flurry of market reports and comparisons, to see which SFF outlets are the most women-friendly (and -hostile), and perhaps plans to create or support 'zines edited by women. But, instead, the debate seems to be entirely about the personal tastes and idiosyncrasies of Gordon Van Gelder and John Joseph Adams. The debate itself is vaguely interesting to me (in a watching-other-people-fight kind of way), but I generally find that wanna-be writers take themselves about 300% too seriously.

I do wonder, in my usual contrary fashion, what effect the flooders expect to have. Let's work out the possible scenarios, shall we?

Are GVG and JJA more likely to:

1. Say, "Gosh! We have a giant pile of stories by women! We previously thought all of this stuff had girl cooties, but now we love it! We'll buy all of these stories, and fill up the next seven issues of the magazine with only girls!!!"
2. Read a lot of very similar stories and reject them that much faster, just to work the pile down.
3. Feel guilty about the whole issue, and desperately search for a few stories that they think are mostly OK, and buy those -- half to encourage women to keep contributing and half to get the Secret Feminist Cabal to go bother Stan Schmidt for a while.

Or, in typical Mars vs. Venus fashion, am I looking for a man-explanation, when the woman-explanation is that this will make all of the submitters feel better about themselves, and that's all that matters? I'm confused.

Quote of the Week

"I have an intense desire to return to the womb. Anybody's."
--Woody Allen

Justine Larbalestier Toys With Our Affections

Yesterday, Justine Larbalestier announced that the single greatest title of all time -- Magic! Magic! Magic! Oi! Oi! Oi! -- would not actually be appearing on her upcoming book. Instead something called Magic’s Child would finish up her debut YA trilogy. And my heart was broken.

Today, she says that Magic! Magic! Magic! Oi! Oi! Oi! was never going to be the real title, and that it’s been her working title before. But, more importantly, she opens the door to an actual Magic! Magic! Magic! Oi! Oi! Oi! appearing one of these days. And, if we're all really good, it might even have the mangosteen cricket fairy in it, too. (So now I'll just sit here and wait.)

Literary Heirs Cause Trouble Week

Since no one else has linked these two stories (as far as I've seen), I guess it's my duty.

Compare and contrast:

• Stephen James Joyce impedes serious scholarship of his grandfather's work.
• Blake Smyle and Thomas Steinbeck gain control of the copyright on ten John Steinbeck works.

Besides the fact that Joyce is a jerk, and Smyle and Steinbeck aren't (or, at least, they haven't been reported to be), is there any real reason why one of these stories is being played as good for literature and the other as bad? (I really want to know, because my instinct is exactly the same way.)

Incoming Books This Week

I actually got two WFA packages yesterday, nearly two weeks after the deadline. One was a new book from Del Rey (who seems to have just put me on the regular publicity list, so I guess it's not really WFA-related at this point), and the other was a 2005 collection from some other publisher. I may actually read the latter. (The former, I already have read. But having my own copy is very nice.)

And a few other things added themselves to my groaning to-be-read stacks:

• Rocket Science by Jay Lake (it was a birthday present)
• Visionary in Residence by Bruce Sterling (found it on the discard shelves at work)
• Non Sequitur's Sunday Color Treasury by Wiley Miller (also from the discard shelves)

Just a few weeks more, and we'll be voting for WFA nominees...and then I can quickly read some things so I can vote for the Hugos!

Movie Log: Ghostbusters, Fast Times at Ridgemont High

World Fantasy is stealing nearly all of my "free" time these days, so I don't have the opportunity to give my whole attention to a movie. Instead, I've been watching comedies that I haven't seen in ages while I fold laundry, check blog updates, and other minor things that only need half a brain. These were the ones I saw last week, on Wednesday and Friday.

I'd thought vaguely about getting Ghostbusters to watch with the boys, but thought I should see it myself again first, and that was a good thing. It's rated PG, but that's an early-80s PG, which bears little resemblance to the rating today. There's more sex and innuendo than you could probably get away with in a PG-13 movie these days, and a little bit of cursing, too. So I'm not going to be watching it with them any time soon. I had half-forgotten how quotable this movie is, as well -- not just the famous lines about crossing the streams, sleeping above the covers, or telling someone you're a god, but nearly all of Bill Murray's lines and a lot of the rest of the script. It's just one of the great loose, shaggy comedies, and everyone in it is perfectly cast and plays their parts just right.

Fast Times is another movie with piles of people perfectly cast, though it has much less plot than Ghostbusters. It's a massively nostalgic movie for me, since it came out just before I went into high school myself, and so defined a lot of my expectations and ideals for that part of my life (though, of course, no one's life is ever much like the movie-fed preconceptions). Again, it's a movie I can't see anyone making now -- it's about loose sex, abortions, drugs and masturbation, and there's hardly an "adult" in it, let alone a role model. But I'm glad I grew up at a time when it could still be made.

Dr. Arthur Hoyte, You Are Cordially Invited To Piss Off

I used to like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, since they seemed to be reasonable people who believed in the scientific method and reasonableness and all that jazz. But they're out of my will now.

Along with a Dr. Arthur Hoyte, who as a retired doctor apparently now has far too much time on his hands, they are suing KFC (the former Kentucky Fried Chicken) for frying their birds in partially hydrogenated oil. Their claim seems to be that, since healthier methods of cooking are available, then using less healthy methods should be forbidden. Dr. Hoyte and the CSPI are seeking class-action status and are "asking for a variety of economic damages."

Of course, there are much healthier kinds of food than fried chicken, so presumably this would be only the first step. If this suit succeeds, it would only be a matter of time before someone (there's always a someone willing to sue, in the US) sues McDonalds for serving beef, since there are healthier foods than beef. I shudder to think of the suit against Krispy Kreme. And there could be no end to those suits, until a judge either requires us all to eat only pureed tofu, or a much smarter judge throws the whole thing out of court with contempt.

CSPI, this is not what you should be doing with your time. This will not increase the stature or respect of science in the public's eye. (Rather the opposite, actually.) You don't want to look like Rush Limbaugh's caricature of a liberal -- and you're very close to that now.

And, Dr. Hoyt? Educating people is a good thing. Trying to sue their favorite foods out of existence is a bad one. If time hangs this heavy on your hands, you either need to get back into that surgery, or play more golf.

What Neil Gaiman Hath Wrought

Having a popular blogger link to you -- even if he doesn't make a big deal about it -- does interesting things to the traffic patterns. I'll try to remember to post a graph like this at the end of the month, when the spike will be nicely positioned in the middle. (The smaller bump on the 6th is probably from when I posted the "Great Novels of the 1990s" query to begin with, and the ramp-down back at the beginning of the graph was the end of the First Fantabulous Antick Musings Contest.)

It looks like most of the new folks came in, hit the "Great Novels of the 1990s?" post, and wandered back out. But, if there's anyone who stuck around, please feel free to introduce yourselves, and you're welcome to sit on the comfy couch. I'm not nearly as grumpy as the Asimov's folks think I am.

Itzkoff Rides Again!

He's back....

The second "Across the Universe" column appeared in the New York Times Book Review this weekend. The good news is that Dave Itzkoff got a whole page to write about SF. The bad news is that he used up all of that space on Nebula Awards Showcase 2006, a nice book to be sure but essentially a very delayed "Best Stories of 2004" anthology. One could have wished for reviews of some current novels, perhaps.

Minor points:

• He seems to think SFWA is a "literary society." Dave, if you're out there: SFWA is the union for SF/Fantasy writers, more or less. The World Science Fiction Society is a literary society; maybe that's what you were thinking of.
• He mentions reading Steph Swainston's acclaimed The Year of Our War, thus showing me up for saying he didn't read current stuff. I do shed a tear, though, when I think how much his fellow bus-riders must have pointed and laughed when they saw him reading it.
• He responds to Matthew Cheney, one of his online critics, in a very ill-advised move. Cheney has already said this, but Itzkoff needs to remember that he is the SF reviewer for a major metropolitan daily, while we are scruffy, ill-favored brutes taking pot-shots at things because it amuses us. Admitting we even exist is the wrong strategy.
  
• He hasn't learned the secret that "Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America" condenses down to the one-F'ed SFWA, but that is very non-obvious.
• I'd bet a large sum of money that the previous SF reviewer for the Times, Gerald Jonas, never expressed his love for the work of Anne McCaffrey in public. Itzkoff may turn out to be just the right kind of middle-brow for this job. (There! I knew I could say something nice about him.)
• I have nothing snarky to say about his take on Benjamin Rosenbaum's "Embracing-the-New," possibly because I no longer clearly remember that story.

But what I mostly want to talk about is how one word of this review tripped me up -- one word, in the ninth line, which sent me headlong and left me to wonder if Itzkoff understands SF at all. (And that's really what you expected from me anyway, right?)

That word is "surreal," and it's how Itzkoff describes Christopher Rowe's "The Voluntary State," a novella about a minor-league Singularity in the US south only a decade or two hence. Now, this could be just a poor word choice, but it looks like Itzkoff has taken the very specific, very SFnal extrapolations of "The Voluntary State" for mere local color -- as being bizarre images chosen simply for their imagistic power. That he leads into his discussion of "The Voluntary State" by declaring he wants to give it an award for "striking literary imagery" also causes me to believe he's merely reacting to the surface of the story. Itzkoff, in fact, rapidly runs away from any literal reading of events in "The Voluntary State" and retreats to the more mainstream-friendly realm of metaphor. The metaphors he reads out of this story -- and out of the entire collection -- are the usual Baby-Boomer nostalgia trip; in fact, he makes SF itself his own private metaphor for his own lost youth here. That's all right for him, but what does it have to do with the stories?

To backtrack slightly, "The Voluntary State" is not surrealist at all; it aims to depict a real, plausible near-future, albeit one filled with strange and unsettling entities and artifacts. All of the oddities of the story are purposeful -- not just artistically purposeful, but purposeful within the context of the story's invented world. It's not quite clear whether Itzkoff has missed this, but he certainly seems to be calling attention away from it. He doesn't mention the Singularity, the mission of the story's heroes to thwart this new local god, or any of the actual SFnal meat of the story, so it's hard to say whether or not he even noticed it to begin with.

He also seems to have heard about Judith Berman's now-famous essay "Science Fiction Without the Future," but not to have actually read it and to be misreading Berman's essential point. (In fact, there's a case to be made that Itzkoff is yet another SF-reading Boomer who is obsessed with his own mortality and the "lost promise" of Golden Age SF -- another instance of the problem, rather than the solution.)

I think Itzkoff needs a crash course in the ways SF concretizes metaphors. He's good on the metaphors themselves, but he has a tendency to read everything as metaphor, and to thus miss the actual, surface-level SFnal speculation going on. Perhaps we can work him up a care package of Chip Delany essays?

Recently Read: Another War by Simon Morden

This is a novella-published-as-a-book, and I probably shouldn't be talking about it. It's from Telos Publishing in the UK, but it has a US price on it, so it's probably obtainable on this side of the pond with a little effort.

I might talk more about it later once the Cone of Secrecy lifts, but, for now, I'll just say that it's the best damn soldiers-and-Lovecraftian-horrors story since Charlie Stross's "A Colder War." Quite nifty indeed; Papa Hornswoggler approves.

New Jersey Cats -- You Gotta Problem With That?

Yet another reason I wouldn't want to live anywhere but Joisey: we've got the toughest cats in the world.

Today is Loving Day

Claire Light's blog gave me the story: Loving Day celebrates the US Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia (handed down June 12, 1967), which overturned all "antimiscegenation" laws in the US. It's a bit shocking to realize that not even forty years ago, marrying someone of another race was illegal many places in this country.

My aunt was married to a man of a different race a few years later, in New York state. I believe the laws had already been changed there before the Loving verdict, but I could be wrong. So, in memory of that marriage (and of my uncle Ray, who I barely knew) and especially in celebration of my cousin Rachael (and her own marriage), a happy Loving Day to you all.

On Astroturfing

Emerald City reports that bloggers are being asked to help promote movies and other consumer products, and wonders how far it will go.

I'd just like to say, for the record, that no one has sent me anything specifically for this blog, and that all opinions expressed here are my own. (Or those of the Hornswoggler, which is not always the same thing.) Not that anyone ever suspected otherwise...

On the other hand, I love free stuff as much as the next guy, and I am based in New York City, so if anyone out there wants to let me into their movie screening or send me random things, I promise to at least try to like whatever it is. Use the e-mail addresses at the end of my profile to contact me.

Science fiction/fantasy publishers, however, should already be sending me books, under my SFBC hat, because I very well might pay you money for the use of those books. If you publish something skiffy, let me know about it.

Battening Down the Hatches

Neil Gaiman linked to me yesterday, which means there should be a surge of new folks running through here. Please be nice to them.

It'll be all I can do not to re-load the traffic meters every hour and obsessively trace outclicks. It's not that I care terribly about how many people read this, it's just that I'm the kind of geek who loves raw data.

Anyway, if you are one of the new folks who stuck your head onto the main page to see what's going on, hello. Welcome to the land of the Hornswoggler; I hope you enjoy it and maybe stay a while. This is a fairly book-centric blog, as you'll probably notice. Every week I take a look at the books I read that equivalent week some year in the recent past, and try to remember anything about them -- I call this Reading into the Past. I also tend to do month-end round-ups of what I've read, some of which I can't talk about (because I read them for the SF Book Club, or, currently, in my role as one of this year's World Fantasy Award judges). I've also been keeping track of movies that I've seen and other things of probably only minor interest.

I also pick on David Itzkoff for no good reason when I get a chance (watch this space for further updates), kick over anthills far too often, and occasionally pick on poor fan-fiction writers. But I'm really not as grumpy as I may seem. At least I think I'm not. I think I'm smart and charming and devastatingly witty, but then I also sometimes think I'm the King of Roumania and married to Emma Thompson.

Cutting Off One's Nose To Spite One's Face

So you've probably all heard the exceptionally vague news about the Asimov's brouhaha by now: Jim Grimsley sold them a story, "Wendy," which deals with predicting tendencies toward child abuse and apparently is quite squicky. The editor of Asimov's, Sheila Williams, bought the story, but the publisher (or someone else above her -- again, actual news is thin on the ground) killed it.

From what I've seen, we don't know: who exactly killed the story; why it was killed (personal squeamishness? lawerly caution? something else entirely?); if Grimsley was offered a specific "kill fee" (which is very common in situations like this, though moreso in non-fiction) or if Sheila just offered "to pay for the story anyway"; if it is common or not for this to happen (I presume not, but that's just a presumption); and just about anything else that we might want to know.

The villagers, meanwhile, are assembling in that discussion thread (on the Asimov's message board, no less -- it's a good thing I enjoy cheap irony), shaking their pitchforks and rakes and threatening to a) burn the evil Baron out of his castle, b) never ever submit any more stories to Asimov's, or c) cancel their subscriptions. A few brave souls have pointed out that deliberately killing one of the few SF magazines left (and one of the only markets in the first place for a story like this) is remarkably stupid, but the villagers seem more content to rant and cuss; if a thing is not perfect, then it must be torn down to the ground. (And some of them are now refusing to have anything to do with F&SF, simply because its editor, Gordon Van Gelder, tried to inject some words of reason.)

And, of course, this is exactly the most constructive thing they could be doing, in a world where the major SF magazines have been taking double-digit hits in circulation nearly every year of the past twenty. Yes, let's hurry the death of short SF, so all of these actual writers, wanna-be writers, have-been writers and indeterminately-being writers can be kicked in the tuchus and forced to find something else to do with their time.

I swear, there's times when I hate being in the same genre with such prima donnas. (The only people really acquitting themselves well in that discussion, in the long term, is Gordon and Matt Hughes; every other repeat visitor is one degree or another of outraged pissiness.)

Grow up, folks. It does sound like Asimov's bobbled the situation, but, on the other hand, we've only heard it from the writer's point of view (and very sketchily, at that). I, personally, don't know what the hell went on, and I don't actually much care. I'm honestly surprised every year when the circulation on the "Big Three" drops horribly yet again, and they still don't go out of business. (I don't want to see them go, but I don't see how they can avoid it much longer.) In the list of things to be worried about in SF, "the evil Short-Story Suits are stifling our freedom of expression, man!" is way, way down the list.

(I didn't get to this until now, because John Scalzi covered it, from a different angle, already. But I hadn't read the incredibly self-important Asimov's discussion thread at that point -- and, now that I have, I felt the need to rant.)