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An image from Rudy Rucker's free webzine, FLURB

Rudy Rucker’s free webzine, FLURB, just came out with issue #7. One of my fav writers, Richard Kadrey, has a great story in this issue, “Trembling Blue Stars”:

You look very handsome for a corpse.”

Rucker collaborated with John Shirley on “All Hangy.” Brian Garrison contributes five poems.  And CharlieAnders gives us “The History of the Internet”:

It started with a girl named Tammy who said she knew where Xaxa and I could score some acid.

And everything is nicely glazed with Rucker’s images. Check it out!

On Joanna Russ

On Joanna Russ, a new book of essays on the great lesbian-feminist science fiction writer and to which I am a contributor, has just received a great review in The Village Voice:

Mendlesohn brings 17 writers (including eight men) to her critical enterprise, which picks up where Jeanne Cortiel’s 1999 Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction leaves off. The essayists all believe that Russ’s career trajectory has much to teach next-generation feminists. And all approach Russ’s seven novels, three nonfiction collections, and three short-story collections impressed by how each book bristles with epistemological invention. Her fiction twists the most shopworn genre conventions—like time travel, sword-and-sorcery, or all-female planets—into scenarios that intentionally subvert stereotypical expectations. Comparing these texts against copious amounts of analytical opinion from her various interviews, letters, book reviews, and pedagogic essays, Mendlesohn’s team constructs a fascinating picture of this pioneering “scholar/practitioner” as visionary cultural critic.

It's... a book!

Sometime in 2002, I responded with a proposal to a call for papers on Joanna Russ from British science fiction scholar Farah Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn accepted the proposal on the condition that I not write about The Female Man, Russ’s most famous novel – and pretty much the only thing of Russ’s anyone reads anymore.That was fine with me, and I proceeded to write a paper that touches on pretty much everything but The Female Man.

It was a long road, full of switch backs and revisions, but On Joanna Russ has finally been published Wesleyen University Press. Edited by Mendelsohn, contributors include Samuel R. Delaney (it’s too bad he and Russ never conceived a child), Tess Williams, Gary Wolfe, myself and a host of others.

My essay, the last one in the book, is called “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ.” In a nutshell, I try to show that narrative is a space of gendered topology; in other words, that fiction is a landscape of cocks and cunts. Russ certainly resisted that landscape. Her writing is a macrophage ravaging the immune system of mainstream science fiction. I tried to take a snapshot of the action (a highly academic one) to capture the lesions, superations and oozings of consciousness through space that I found in her work.

Thank goddess I had Delaney’s great essay to guide me. After the book is available, I’ll post the essay.

As its first event of 2009, Borderland Books in San Francisco is hosting Nisi Shawl on Jan. 3. Nisi will be reading from her book of stories, Filter House. Here’s the reading details, including directions to Borderlands. Nisi has been a prolific contributor to Puck over the past six months–just by reading through these posts you can get a glimpse of the range of her interests.

When Nisi read at Book People in Moscow, Idaho recently, a young woman interning as a reporter for Yin Radio (based at KRFP FM in Moscow) recorded her reading. You can now hear that reading via an MP3 on Yin Radio’s site. Nisi read all of “Bird Day” and part of “Wallamelon.” The 53-minute program also includes Kim Barnes reading from her new novel, A Place Called Home, as well as a piece on Coco Umiker, a food science grad student at WSU (one of my public relations interns wrote about her major professor here) who is a partner in a winery down the hill in Lewiston, Idaho.

Nisi Shawl’s Filter House has just been named one of the “best books of the year” by Publishers Weekly:

Shawl’s exquisitely rendered debut collection weaves threads of folklore, religion, family and the search for a cohesive self through a panorama of race, magic and the body.

Yes. Here’s my review of Filter House. Here’s an article in the WSU student newspaper about Nisi’s reading at BookPeople of Moscow.

The WSU student newspaper, The Daily Evergreen, has a nice feature on Nisi’s reading tomorrow at BookPeople in Moscow. Reporter Brandon Seiler interviewed Nisi, me, and BookPeople owner Bob Greene.

Feminist science fiction.

Without mention of an author such as Nisi Shawl, these words have about as much to do with each other as three balls dropped from a bingo machine. Her work is helping pioneer the capacities of the sci-fi genre beyond the cliches from questioning the most rigid social norms.

Defying any branch of mainstream storytelling, Shawl said her ratio of female to male protagonists is nearly nine to one and the women are rarely preoccupied with locking down a love interest. Yet, Shawl said she doesn’t feel particularly aware of trying to write feminist literature.

“It’s not a conscious or preachy thing, gravity is a part of my work too,” she said.

Nisi reads at BookPeople Saturday the 4th starting at 11 a.m.

Nisi reads from her new story collection, Filter House, and answers questions about African Americans in speculative fiction, Filter House, and Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction at BookPeople in Moscow, Idaho, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Copies of Filter House and Writing the Other will be available for sale, with a signing session following the reading. BookPeople is at 521 S. Main St., Moscow, ID, 83843.

Also, Nisi and I may play one of my songs together at her reading. She’s got a great singing voice and I’ve written an SF carpe diem love song we like to do.

This is a brown-bag affair, so hit the farmer’s market to score some lunch to munch while Nisi reads to you. Bring questions and ideas, too, on anything about writing, life, the universe and everything, as we’re hoping for a lively postprandial discussion.

My review of Filter House is here. Nisi’s Science Fiction Writers of America page is here.

Filter House, said writer and critic Samuel R. Delany, “is just amazing. What a pleasure and privilege it was to read it!”

The eminent novelist and critic Ursula K. Le Guin wrote of Filter House: “From the exotic, baroque complexities of ‘At the Huts of Ajala’ to the stark, folktale purity of ‘The Beads of Ku,’ these fourteen superbly written stories will weave around you a ring of dark, dark magic.”
Matt Ruff, author of Set This House In Order and Bad Monkeys calls Filter House “A travelling story-bazaar, offering treasures and curios from diverse lands of wonder.”

Karen Joy Fowler declares, “Sometimes enigmatic, often surprising, always marvelous. This lovely collection will take you, like a magic carpet, to some strange and wonderful places.”

Eileen Gunn, author of Stable Strategies, concurs that these are “Remarkably involving stories that pull you along a path of wonder, word by word, in worlds where everything is a bit different.”

some notes from an article I wrote on the Visual Reasoning wiki

Engine Summer by John Crowley

Engine Summer is set in post-apocalyptic distant future, hundreds of years, at least, after a series of anthropogenic catastrophes, known collectively as the Storm, have reduced human populations to a fraction of their former billions. The teller of Engine Summer is Rush (as in reed), a member of the Little Belaire community, all of whom are “truth speakers.” Truth speakers attempt to communicate in such a way that “they mean what they say, and say what they mean.” One of the ways they do this is by telling lots of stories. As a boy, Rush — Rush that Speaks is his full name — spends time with a “gossip,” a wise woman, named Painted Red.

Storytelling allows for the creation of communal meaning; but by what cognitive means is that accomplished? In as much as Crowley’s novel is a meditation on this question, he seems to argue that the means is through perception. For instance, the young Rush is being counseled by Painted Red while they are both in a heightened state of consciousness thanks to the use of a “rose-colored substance” dabbed on the lips:

What I did notice was that Painted Red’s questions, and then my answers, began to take on bodies somehow. When she talked about something, it wasn’t only being talked about but called into being. When she asked about my mother, my mother was there, or I was with her, on the roofs where the beehives are, and she was telling me to put my ear against the hive and hear the low constant murmur of the wintering bees inside. When Painted Red asked my about my dreams, I seemed to dream them all over again, to fly again and cry out in terror and vertigo when I fell. I never stopped knowing that Painted Red was beside me talking, or that I was answering; but — it was the rose-colored stuff that did, of course, but I wasn’t aware even of that — though I knew that I hadn’t left her side and that her hand was still on mine, still I went journeying up and down my life. (359; references, unfortunately, to an oddball 3-in-1 edition.) Read the rest of this entry »

Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear

review by Brian Charles Clark

Earth is dead, reduced to rocks and dust by a horde of marauding alien machine intelligences. A few thousand Earthlings have been saved by the Benefactors, themselves machine intelligences who have helped the survivors re-establish themselves on Mars. That story was told in Greg Bear’s 1987 novel, The Forge of God.

Now, in Anvil of Stars, the sequel to Forge, three hundred years have gone by, and the Benefactors have outfitted 80 or so Earth children with a Ship of the Law capable of exacting revenge on the killer machines that destroyed their home. Three hundred years have gone by in a literal blink of the eye, as the children have been asleep, traveling at 99 percent of the speed of light. They begin training for what lies ahead of them: the willful destruction of an entire solar system full of intelligent beings.

This tightly plotted novel stands alone as a highly imaginative consideration of genocide. Enacting the Law of revenge is one thing; making sure you’ve got the true perpetrators of Earth’s destruction is another. Hundreds of years have passed—what if the killer machines and their makers have changed their ways? Read the rest of this entry »