Nonviolent and Feminist Science Fiction
It’s no surprise to anyone that Twitter facilitates bad conduct, but this is an absolutely fascinating article on how its structural forces steer fraught interactions into absolute train wrecks. What do to about it is always a challenge, but being aware of the dynamics at play is a start.
https://www.wired.com/story/social-media-harassment-platforms/
It’s been a long five years, but my first novel Pledging Season is now available for pre-order! It will be available on April 26, 2022. Print copies will eventually be up on Amazon (Amazon doesn’t permit print pre-orders) and are currently available on Barnes and Noble (which does). The ebook can additionally be found on Kobo and will be available through libraries on OverDrive after release. If you like iBooks, it can be found through the app as well.
Pre-order at the links below!
As I wend my way through edits, my first book has acquired a new title, Pledging Season, and will be getting a professional cover in January. I am super excited!
“Ms. M you hella fake!” Madai, one of my students, keeps informing me. I frown in confusion and ask what she means. “You know,” she tells me, “you gotta be real with us.”
I don’t know. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I forget about it, actually, until I hear the same word from one of my colleagues. “We’re being fake,” he says. “We need to be real.” Be real? I still have no idea what that means.
It’s not until I’m driving Sammy, another student, up to Berkeley to meet Geoffrey Canada that someone explains it to me in a way I understand. We’re talking about the different ways we talk to people as we pass a beat up old car. It’s rusting out and has broken headlights, and were it not for duct tape, it would dissolve into pieces on the road.
Continue reading “Being Nice and Being Real”Here’s an interesting article. Under stress, human beings can have a flight or fight response, but they can also become more compassionate and more likely to make sacrifices for the well-being of others.
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_to_transform_stress_courage_connection
Sometimes someone else’s essay is so awesome that there’s nothing left for me to do but link to it. I love those essays. Especially when I’m on a deadline. Below is the iconic cartoon about the mental load of household work. It’s always worth a revisit.
Wow, that didn’t take at all longer than I thought it would. Nope. I have not in any way, shape, or form encountered the phenomenon that literally everyone who is not a first-time author warns about. About that length of time it takes to make revisions… I would like to blame caring for a three-year-old during indefinite quarantine, but that honestly only added a month or two.
At any rate, completely ripping apart the first draft, adding a second point of view, substantially revising the themes, and actually… you know… doing some series planing is now done. Next up is shipping it off to editors. At which point I, with my new found humility, estimate that revisions will take a very long time. I’m still hoping to have pre-order links up this year. Now that I have also looked into the lead time needed to market a book, I have a tough time seeing this coming out before 2021. However, I promise it will make it into print eventually!
How many of us can imagine ourselves responding the way the owner of a family restaurant in Minneapolis did when his restaurant burned to the ground during the riots triggered by George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the police? “Let my building burn,” he said. “Justice needs to be served. Put those officers in jail.” His daughter, telling the story in the Washington Post, adds, “If this is what it takes to get justice, then it will have been worth it.”
Continue reading “Who Pays for Justice?”As a sci-fi author, I wrote a world of characters who disagree with each other about what gender is, but all think that our gender binary is illogical. This drives some real world cisgender people wild. “But isn’t dividing into men vs. women natural?” they argue. “Humans only have two reproductive roles. Defining gender based on who has a penis versus who has a vagina just makes sense!” (Pointing out the existence of intersex people makes a remarkably small dent in this logic. Instead, intersex people get shuffled off as a minor exception to an otherwise logical system grounded in the fundamental facts of reproductive biology.) Many trans activists and theorists have countered this argument far more eloquently than I. However, I would like to take a moment to respond to this argument purely from within the experience of a cisgender straight person. Even the cis people most wedded to conventional divisions of gender fail to take those professed beliefs seriously. From the standpoint of its own professed logic, the gender binary is incoherent.
Continue reading “The Biology (or Lack Thereof) of Gender”