Author: Catherine (Page 26 of 54)

Equality and Marriage

October 9, 2016 / Catherine / 1 Comment

I’ve never been told that there is something wrong with me because I love my husband. When we got engaged, everyone was excited for us.

I’ve never had to pretend to colleagues that my husband was just my flatmate. I have his photo as my screensaver.

I’ve never had to think about whether it’s safe to hold my husband’s hand in public. Sometimes, we even skip down the path near our house. It’s obnoxiously cute.

I’ve never had researchers study people like me in order to be sure that we aren’t somehow harming our children. Though I do get asked pretty often if we are going to have kids soon.

I’ve never had to be afraid that if I were sick, my husband would not be allowed to visit me in hospital. He can even pick up prescriptions for me.

I’ve never had to worry that if I died, my family might contest my will and my husband could be left with nothing. Even if I don’t write my will, the government knows he is my next of kin.

I’ve never been madly in love and simultaneously desperate to tell my friends about my new relationship – and terrified that if I do, they will no longer be my friends. Even though my taste in men has been questionable at times.

I’ve never had people ask me personal questions about exactly what I do with my husband and how it ‘works’. Most people over the age of five know that this is intrusive, and also none of their business.

I’ve never had anyone tell me that they can ‘cure’ my love for my husband.

I’ve never had an elected politician tell me that wanting to marry my husband is the same as wanting to have sex with a dog.

I’ve never been told that I need to repent of loving my husband, or that God hates me, or that bushfires are God’s punishment for tolerating people like me.

I’ve never had to ask the entire population of Australia if I could get married to the person I loved.

I’ve never been told that if I am depressed and anxious about all this, it’s because I’m disordered, rather than because it is utterly stressful and dehumanising to be treated this way.

*****

The Marriage Equality plebiscite is expensive. It’s cruel and degrading. It’s going to hurt LGBTQI people and their families. And it’s not even binding, which means that in addition to being unkind and costly, it is also pointless.

It’s also un-Christian – we are called to love one another, not judge those who simply want to have their loving, consensual relationships recognised by the state.

Marriage equality is not a threat to my marriage. It’s not a threat to my religion. It’s not going to harm children.

It’s just going to make life a little bit safer, a little bit easier, a little bit happier for the 5% (give or take) of Australians who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender, genderqueer, or intersex.

Which is what equality is about.

I’ve baked a lot of wedding cakes for my straight friends over the last ten years. I hope that in the next ten, I’ll get to bake just as many wedding cakes for my gay friends. I’d rather be baking for my friends than writing letters to politicians on their behalf.

But the time for baking isn’t here yet. No, right now we are decidedly in the season of letter writing. The Greens have promised to block the plebiscite (and all idealism aside, they have nothing to lose by doing so); Labor have said they will do so, but are a bit more vulnerable to polls. And the Liberal party has its supporters of Marriage Equality too. I’ll try to draft some letters in the next day or so and put them here, in case anyone wants to borrow them. If you’ve already written, and want to share what you wrote, please feel free to do so in the comments – I think a lot of people find it easier to get started when they can see what arguments other people have made.

May we reach the baking season soon!

Persuasion and the art of listening

August 31, 2016 / Catherine / 4 Comments

My father sent me an interesting article by Zaria Gorvett of the BBC discussing the ways in which society is becoming more polarised, and pointing out that talking to like-minded friends about a subject actually tends to make people more polarised on that subject and less open to new information. It’s interesting, because this occurs even when people are deliberately having these conversations to try to add nuance to their opinions – and because apparently it turns out that the more information people acquire, the more polarised they tend to be.

(I wonder if this last bit is because the more information you have, the more confident you are that you have the full and true picture, for which there can be only one possible explanation?)

I went to three presentations in the last three days and while the subject matter was wildly different, I found myself noticing some common threads between the presentations and this article. This post is my attempt to tease some of this out and make sense of it. (A quick disclaimer: these are my notes on the presentations I went to – the things that stayed with me may not have been the key messages that the presenters were trying to get across, and it’s entirely possible that I’m not representing them entirely accurately! If you are one of the presenters and are reading this, and I have managed to misquote or mischaracterise what you said, please comment, and I will fix it forthwith!)

Kitchen Table Activism: How to Host a Letter-Writing Party

August 15, 2016 / Catherine / 2 Comments

I’m in the fortunate position of knowing a lot of people who are deeply upset about what has been happening on Nauru, and would like to do something about it. And many of these people are already doing great things – going to protests, working with refugee support services of various kinds, ringing MPs, and so forth. (Incidentally, if you are not tied to a 9-5 job, there are some amazing non-violent actions taking place across Australia this week – the list can be found here.)

But one thing that I’ve been hearing a lot recently is that if you want to show politicians that you are serious, actual paper letters are the way to go. Now, I write a fair number of letters, and I feel as though most of the relevant ministers have a pretty good idea how I feel about asylum seekers by now. (Or perhaps not – but I do start to wonder at what point one makes it onto the crank list. Shorten, for one, must be pretty tired of me by now, and I’m sure I’m just one more reason Kelvin Thomson feels happy to have retired.). It’s hard to think of new ways to say the same thing, and it can be rather demoralising to make the attempt.

So on Sunday, I invited a handful of friends around for a Tea and Letters Party. The plan was simple: I provided the location, writing (and printing) supplies, stamps, envelopes, and rather copious amounts of baked goods (because once I start baking I find it hard to stop), and then we sat around the kitchen table for a few hours, writing letters over afternoon tea.

There were a few things about this party that I thought worked very well. Over the course of the afternoon, people read out bits of letters, asked for advice, and discussed how particular politicians might be approached. I found this useful on two levels – first, it was good for pooling information, and second, it was extremely helpful to see how other people phrased things, or how they approached particular letters. I tend to err on the side of writing far too much, and so seeing the ways that other people condensed their letters into only a few sentences was really useful. On the other hand, I tend to try to ask for quite specific actions (repeal that secrecy act!), which others hadn’t necessarily thought of. While we all wrote quite different letters in quite different styles, we definitely benefited from borrowing ideas, approaches and even phrases from each other.

Another thing which worked quite well, though it wasn’t something I’d planned for, was that of the nine people present, two actually didn’t write any letters. My husband was largely on printer duty, as well as being in charge of tea and doors and things like that (I’m great at baking, but I never remember that people might want to drink something other than water). Another friend of ours came intending to write letters, but realised after half an hour or so that he was too enraged by the whole situation to write anything that wasn’t so bitingly sarcastic as to be counterproductive. He moved onto research duty, and became our looker-upper, responsible for answering questions such as ‘what was that act of Parliament called that said doctors weren’t allowed to talk about what was happening on Nauru?’ or ‘who are the Victorian Senators again?’. He also did a lot of addressing of envelopes, and the final run to the postbox at the end of the day. This was actually pretty useful, sufficiently so that I might plan to have an official looker-upper next time I host something like this. But I do want to mention these roles as worth bearing in mind if you have people who would like to contribute but for one reason or another do not want to write letters themselves.

I think the tea and cake and social aspect helped, too. It’s a little bit of incentive, and honestly, I think it’s helpful, if one is writing letters about terrible things, to have the company of like-minded people, as a reminder that really, one is not alone in being upset about this.

There were other things that I think could have worked better. The first – which in retrospect is quite amusing but was a little distressing at the time – is that by turning letter-writing into a social occasion I managed to create a situation in which I was almost incapable of writing anything at all, due to the noise and conversation and interruptions! After a while, I decided to view my role as facilitating letter-writing for others, rather than writing lots of letters myself, and that helped. In future, I think I will draft at least a couple of letters ahead of time. Once I actually had a few reasonable paragraphs that I could modify or recycle for other letters, I was able to write quite a bit, but I achieved almost nothing in the first two hours.

The second was that I really should, I think, have started by printing out some possible talking points, or even examples of good letters that I’d seen. Several people asked if I had anything like that, and I didn’t – and I think it would have given us a starting point, and helped us get going in those first few hours. So that’s something I’ve learned for next time. I also should have printed out a list of politicians’ postal addresses before starting – I had them on my iPad, but it wasn’t as useful. Fortunately, that was a fairly easy problem to fix.

The third was that occasionally everything got really noisy, and it made it hard to concentrate. I think next time, I’ll try to set up a bit of a break-out room for people who want to chat more (about letters, or about other things, because this is a social event as well as a political one, it’s not a homework session), and be more active about chivvying people into it if need be!

But for a first attempt, organised on 24 hours notice, it was a pretty good effort. We had a total of nine people, including me and our two non-writers, though a couple of them could only stay long enough to write one or two letters, and by the end of the afternoon we had written and posted twenty-seven letters to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton and his opposite number, Shayne Neumann, our various local MPs and a wide selection of Victorian Senators. This may not sound particularly efficient, but for at least one person in the room, it was the first time he had written a letter to an MP, and he would not have done so now without this impetus. So that’s three or four letters that certainly would not have happened without our afternoon tea – and I think 27 letters from 7 different people is a lot more valuable than fifty letters from one person in terms of showing politicians that the community feels strongly about an issue.

And I can’t stress enough how simple this was to organise. Really, if you have friends, and live reasonably close to a post office, and can drop past the supermarket to buy some tea bags and some Tim Tams, you are more than halfway there. I’ll definitely be doing this again.

Check-list for a Letter Writing Party

A reasonably sized table, or other writing surfaces
Pens
A4 paper (preferably the kind that can go through a printer)
Envelopes
Stamps
A printer (optional, but helpful – many people prefer to write on their laptops)
Wifi access so that people can look up things (you may want to appoint an official Looker Upper)
Tea and Coffee (don’t forget milk and sugar – I always do!)
Cake or biscuits or both (you can bake, or ask someone else to bake, or you can buy Tim Tams and a punnet of strawberries at the supermarket and everyone will still be happy)
A printed list of postal addresses for your target politicians (you can find a list of the Senators here, and can download a list of MPs here)
A few talking points, or sample letters, for inspiration

I like smallish groups and inviting people to my house, but this is probably something that you could run with a larger community group, if your community felt strongly about something. Though the noise levels might become prohibitive, so that’s something to think about. Also – and this is probably obvious, but still – pick a topic for the day. I think one of the most valuable parts of this Tea and Letters party was hearing what other people had written, and that only really works if you are largely writing about the same thing.

I’d also recommend trying to keep it reasonably fun – yes, you want to get stuff done, and it’s important, but you also don’t want to make everyone feel as though this is a chore. In fact, half the point of this is to make letter-writing less of a chore. I suspect I err on the side of being a petty dictator, so this reminder is for me as much as for anyone else who wants to hold a Tea and Letters party.

Finally – and I know I said this already, but it bears repeating – if you are hosting a party like this, please, please, go easy on yourself and don’t feel bad if you, personally don’t write as many letters as you meant to write. You are hosting, and answering questions, and helping people find things, and sorting out tea, and cutting cake, and making sure people can find the bathroom, and helping with whatever else they need, in order to create a space in which other people can write the letters that need to be written. You are empowering other people to write letters! It’s OK if you don’t get around to writing many (or even any) yourself. Besides, I bet if you are hosting this, you’ve written plenty of letters in the past. It’s someone else’s turn!

Nauru

August 11, 2016 / Catherine / 10 Comments

I didn’t read Amnesty’s report on Nauru last week. I knew it was bad, and I signed yet another petition, but I didn’t read the report because some things, once seen, can’t be unseen. My imagination is vivid and I am prone to nightmares – I don’t need more fuel.

I haven’t read the full Nauru files, either. In fact, I spent yesterday consciously avoiding reading anything about them at all. I know they will hurt to read. I know they will detail endless abuses, ignored and even encouraged by a system in which there is no transparency, only secrecy, with deterrence and stopping people drowning at sea being held up as the cardinal virtues, the only solution, the moral response before which all other moral imperatives must bow.

I didn’t read them because I have read so much already, and written so much already, and the only thing that ever seems to change is that I lose more of my faith in humanity. I have signed petitions and I have written letters, and it doesn’t matter, because the Government isn’t listening, and the opposition is afraid to look weak. (The Greens may care, but they have no leverage, and I don’t think that One Nation is my natural ally in this particular battle.) I did, finally, read this report, but I could not bring myself to click on all the links.

I didn’t want to know the details.

Of course, I – like most Australians – can make that choice. I can choose not to read these articles and files – to prioritise my own mental health over knowing absolutely everything that I can know over how my country is abusing vulnerable people. And, incidentally, there is nothing wrong with making that choice. I think there is a point where reading too much horror is so overwhelming that it actively saps the energy we could be using to act to counter the horror. I can choose, for that matter, to ignore the whole situation.

The people on Nauru – men, women and children – don’t have this choice. The violence, the abuse, the fear, is a constant for them at all times, and they have no hope for a future in which they will be able to escape this abuse. Their choices are to remain and endure, or to return to the countries they fled, in fear of their lives. (And let’s not pretend that these people are not genuine asylum seekers. Though, frankly, at this point, it doesn’t matter whether they are or not – nothing can justify abusing people and denying them medical care, let alone the indefinite detention of children in unsafe circumstances.)

Honestly, I’m no expert on any of this. I don’t know, really, what a sustainable immigration program looks like, or how much we can afford to spend resettling people in Australia. I do know that we are paying a huge amount of money to imprison people on Nauru or to resettle them in Cambodia, while refusing New Zealand’s offer to re-settle people there (because God forbid that we actually allow the people we have been systematically abusing to settle somewhere that they might be safe from harm). I am fairly sure we could process asylum seekers more cheaply and more humanely in Australia, and I am not the only one who believes this.

I freely admit that I don’t know the best long-term strategy.

But the situation on Nauru and Manus Island and Christmas Island is one we have created ourselves as a country. We are turning scared, desperate people into scared, desperate, traumatised people, and sometimes into scared, desperate, dead people. This is absolutely immoral.

To me, the only moral response now is to close the camps and bring everyone in them to Australia. We have deliberately damaged people, and we owe them restitution, regardless of their status. No exceptions.

We can afford this – we’re talking something in the realm of 1,500 people, less than 0.01% of the Australian population. Even if we put them all straight onto unemployment and provide them with access to psychological and medical help and case managers, it’s still going to cost less per person than we are spending on Nauru. We don’t even have to worry about what message we are sending to people smugglers – this isn’t a long-term policy change (much as I might like it to be!), this is making restitution to a specific group of people because we stuffed up. We aren’t going to do the same for everyone who comes here.

Going forward, we need to come up with a better strategy for helping asylum seekers. There is so much war now, in Syria, and South Sudan, and elsewhere, that the flow of refugees is not going to stop any time soon. Australia needs to join with countries throughout the world to figure out a compassionate and practical response to this situation. It’s a global problem, and it needs a global solution.

But Nauru? That’s local. We did that ourselves, and it’s our responsibility to fix it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Things you can do Continue reading

Turkey

July 17, 2016 / Catherine / 5 Comments

Am I going to have to do one of these every day? I can’t keep up. I’ve spent the last twenty-four hours thinking about Turkey and then at church this morning South Sudan featured heavily in the prayers. I hardly dare look it up. Obviously, nothing good is going on there.

I haven’t been to Turkey, and I know shamefully little about its internal politics and history, except where the latter has intersected with European countries I’ve studied. But I do live near the part of Sydney Road that is sometimes referred to as ‘Little Turkey’, for its high Turkish population. This first came to my attention in 2002, when Turkey did unexpectedly well in the world cup. We were in the tram home from some event, and suddenly the tram stopped, because Sydney Road was full of people, dancing and tooting horns and enthusiastically waving Turkish flags. And that was only the top 16.

Every week, as Turkey continued to progress towards their eventual third place, the excitement grew more intense, the shouting got louder, the flags grew larger and more prominent. We live a good 500 metres or more from Sydney Road, and we could still hear the cheering whenever they won (immediately followed, as is traditional, by the crazed driving and exuberant tooting of car horns up and down our street).

Even when they lost in the semi-final, there was excitement – this was still their best result ever, and when they beat South Korea in the play-off for third, I remember watching players from both teams hugging each other – neither team had ever progressed so far before.

This, then, is my experience of Turkey.

I don’t know if it was my imagination, but when I walked down Sydney Road yesterday, it seemed rather subdued. From the little that I have read, it’s hard to see any way that this civil war can possibly end well.

And already we are looking at the next piece of awfulness – though, now that I have started reading, it seems that the mess in South Sudan started nearly a week ago. I just hadn’t heard about it yet because it hasn’t featured heavily in the news, and I didn’t know to look.

… I don’t think I can write about every single awful thing that happens, every country that is experiencing tragedy or chaos at the moment. There aren’t enough hours in the day, and there is only so much staring into the darkness that one can do and maintain one’s sanity. There’s a certain compulsion that says, wait, you wrote about France, why aren’t you writing about these other countries, countries in Africa or the Middle East or Asia. How is that fair? And it’s not fair – none of it’s fair. It’s not fair that it’s happening, for that matter. I think it’s natural to care more, and write more, about the countries to which one has a personal connection of some kind, but does that make it right? I don’t think so. I only know that I, personally, have only so many resources that I can give to this.

For today, I’m going to stick to praying for peace – and maybe baking for people. That’s all I’ve got right now. Baked goods, and love. I’m all out of words.

Nice

July 15, 2016 / Catherine / 4 Comments

Is there anything left to say?

I am shocked. Horrified. Deeply, deeply upset. Angry. Overwhelmed. Helpless.

What do we even do in the face of this sort of attack?

France is not my homeland, and I haven’t even been to Nice, so I don’t know why this particular attack is hitting me so hard. Perhaps it is because it comes on the heels of so many other attacks recently. Perhaps it is because it is the third attack on France in the last eighteen months. Perhaps it is because I hate seeing my French friends and colleagues so subdued (they are not, by nature, a subdued bunch). As one of them said today, “I know the world is peppered with a whole lot more atrocities that are just not as televised and that’s quite unfair in itself, but I do feel like it’d be nice if these people would leave France alone for a bit.”

Yeah, that. All of that.

Hugo watching 2016: Best Dramatic Presentation

July 13, 2016 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Part 1:

OK, this one is fun, because I don’t actually watch any of these shows in real life. I have seen some Dr Who – because I live with Andrew, mostly, but also voluntarily – but I actually have very little idea what any of the other series are about.

So I’m going to judge these on whether they stand alone as a story in their own right, and whether they make me want to watch more of the series.

Grimm: “Headache” written by Jim Kouf and David Greenwalt, directed by Jim Kouf – Oh lord. So, I guessed the plot and whodunnit in the first five minutes, and it was all downhill from there. After a while, I just started counting instances of violence against women, because I was finding the whole thing excessively boring and annoying, and watching it through an Angry Feminist hermaneutic at least gave it some sort of purpose. Sort of. Seriously, the women in this were just awful – when they weren’t victims, they were randomly evil or very clearly the weakest link. Also, I really feel that the ‘possessed by Jack the Ripper’ is a plot idea that can be retired now. Not least because it seems to be an excuse for killing off more women, but mostly because it’s boring and everyone else has done it already. I am not remotely surprised to learn that this was a Puppy pick. Andrew tells me that there are some decent episodes in this show, but agrees that this isn’t one of them. No Award for me – I lost interest after about ten minutes and just counted (female) corpses.

Supernatural: “Just My Imagination” written by Jenny Klein, directed by Richard Speight Jr. This was good fun, if a little higher in blood/bodycount than I prefer my media (this is why I rarely watch TV). The story was nicely self-contained, the dialogue was whimsical, and I enjoyed the story, and the interactions between the characters. Astonishingly, this one is also a puppy pick – I can’t imagine why, because it was definitely all about the feelings and the heartwarmingness, and even the villain was quite sympathetic. I expect this to do well on my ballot.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: “The Cutie Map” Parts 1 and 2 written by Scott Sonneborn, M.A. Larson, and Meghan McCarthy, directed by Jayson Thiessen and Jim Miller. This is the other Puppy pick, and honestly, it was a real disappointment. A lot of our friends are into My Little Pony, and I haven’t seen any previous episodes, so I was hoping for something fun. Alas, it’s pretty unsubtle and trying to do a bit of a 1984 thing. I’m pretty sure the Puppies put it on the ballot because they think the Evil SJWs are just like the pony who is trying to make all the other ponies march in lockstep and be identically mediocre.

That’s enough TV for one evening, I think. My brain is trying to do Chuck Tingle / My Little Pony crossovers (I’m pretty sure the Ponies want everyone to know that love is REAL), and this is a sure sign that I need to go to bed. And try not to think about Chuck Tingle or My Little Pony, ew.

Next up will be the two non-puppy choices, Doctor Who: “Heaven Sent” written by Steven Moffat, directed by Rachel Talalay and Jessica Jones: “AKA Smile” written by Scott Reynolds, Melissa Rosenberg, and Jamie King, directed by Michael Rymer.

I’m honestly not sure if I’m going to be able to do the rest of the Hugo ballot. I’m finding this process unutterably depressing – I’ve never spent quite so much concentrated time reading and watching things that I really don’t like, except possibly in Year 12 English, and even that was over the space of a year. So far, while there have been several *good* stories in the mix, the only ones I’ve actively enjoyed were the Cat Pictures one and Penric, and parts of Supernatural and File 770. This is not a good hit rate.

I think I need to read something fun as a palate cleanser. And finish writing about my sentient sewer balls, since my shoulder is rather better. And then I’ll think about whether I am really morally obliged to read the rest of the puppy picks on the ballot, or whether I can just skip those and read the things I think I might enjoy.

Part 2:

Jessica Jones: “AKA Smile” written by Scott Reynolds, Melissa Rosenberg, and Jamie King, directed by Michael Rymer. This was pretty good, and is competing for first place on my ballot with Supernatural at this point. I really loved the nurse and Patsy – and quite liked Jessica, but I really found the normal people who were just coping with all the weird more interesting. Nice dialogue. Stood alone quite well – I had no idea of the premise of this show going in, and it still worked. More bloodthirsty than I prefer, but that seems to be the case with everything on this ballot except My Little Pony. The main issues I had with this episode were the ridiculous soliloquy by the villain, which bounced me right out of the story into a fit of absolute irritation at the cliché of ‘I’ll make her love me, and then reject her.’ Seriously, couldn’t he have a more interesting motivation / revenge fantasy than that. And there were a few sections which I felt were rather slow and didn’t seem to advance much of anything. Probably not an issue in the context of the whole series, but it did throw off the pacing when viewed as a standalone.

Doctor Who: “Heaven Sent” written by Steven Moffat, directed by Rachel Talalay. Meh. It works as a standalone, and Capaldi does an excellent job of carrying the entire episode alone. He should get credit for that. And I quite liked the puzzle, though the bit about the hybrid was obvious from the first time it was mentioned. The bird part took me longer, and that was clever. But oh lord, it felt like it was never going to end – and while this was partly the point, I really got very bored and had to start singing little songs to keep myself entertained. I’d have enjoyed this as a short story, I think. I’m not sure if the problem is that I just don’t much like Dr Who, even when played by Peter Capaldi, or if I’m just too shallow for this sort of slow-moving entertainment, or if I’m maybe jaded by the entire business. Thinking about it, I’ve found every single episode in this category slow-moving in places, so perhaps the problem is simply that I don’t really like watching TV all that much and tend to lose interest?

My final ballot is going to be

1. Supernatural
2. Jessica Jones
3. Doctor Who
4. No Award – the other two were just not for me.

I might swap 1 and 2. I might not.

I’m still in two minds on whether I’m going to bother with the rest of the ballot. I’d sort of like to read the novels, but knowing that Seveneves is 900 pages long is pretty daunting, especially as reviews I’ve read suggest that best case scenario for me is that I will find it good, but not actually enjoyable to read. Which means I will feel obliged to finish it. And that’s a week of my life I’ll never get back. I will probably take a look at the films, since I’ve actually seen two of them already and quite liked them, so it might be nice to see the others for comparison, especially if I can find others who want to watch them with us.

Hugo reading 2016: Novellas

July 11, 2016 / Catherine / 0 Comments

OK, we are on to the novellas, and at least I’ve already read one of these and know it is good.

Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson (Dragonsteel Entertainment) – I was liking this one, even though it was set in yet another virtual reality / computer game world (I feel like half the stories so far have been like this). It was well-written, I was really enjoying the characters, the main female character was a heap of fun – and then we had the plot twist, which trashed the only female character in a way that was basically a cliché cake filled with cliché whipped cream and cliché jam, with cliché icing on top. It certainly doesn’t deserve a no award – it’s a well written and enjoyable story, but boy, that annoyed me. And it’s doubly infuriating because the author didn’t have to do that – he was clearly capable of more interesting things. Gah.

The Builders by Daniel Polansky (Tor.com) – I’m afraid I just found this one boring and far too predictable – the dialogue, in particular, I felt like I had read many times before -and I didn’t really care about any of the characters. I gave up at the 38% mark. This might be unfair, but if you can’t hold my attention for the whole book – and I really did try to give it a fair shot – you probably don’t deserve my vote on the ballot.

Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds (Tachyon) – Surprisingly, I really liked this one. I say surprisingly, because the opening scene had the heroine being tied down and tortured by the villain of the piece, and this was described (mostly in anticipation) in more detail than I, personally, needed. And then it turned into a kind of ‘last survivors after a terrible, world-ending thing’ sort of story, which is also not my style. But somehow, the focus in the end was on building and reconstructing and trying to find a way to survive as a community, and it was interestingly character-driven, and actually rather lovely and inspiring in some ways. A worthy nomination, I feel.

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor (Tor.com) – Another good story, and unexpectedly peaceful. I don’t know how to describe it without massive spoilers, but I liked it very much. I liked the main character and her sense of self, particularly.

Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum) – Look, I love Bujold’s Five Gods universe, and this is no exception. I like Penric, and I like the way he tries to treat his demon like a person, and I like Desdemona, too. Very happy to see this on the ballot.

I’m not quite sure what my final ballot order is. Probably Penric, then Binti, then Slow Bullets, then Perfect State, then No Award, but I’m just not sure. I loved Penric’s Demon, but I’m not sure that Binti isn’t the better book.

Hugo reading 2016: Fanzines

July 10, 2016 / Catherine / 0 Comments

I think this might be an area I’m not well-qualified to judge, because I really don’t know what the standard should be, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.

Castalia House Blog edited by Jeffro Johnson – they provided a wealth of things to read, mostly about gaming. Overall impression was that I was the wrong audience – I found it all fairly boring, except when it managed to be mildly annoying about gender essentialism and (I suspect) coded racism.

Superversive SF edited by Jason Rennie – Again, I’m the wrong audience. But I didn’t spot anything obviously obnoxious this time!

Tangent Online edited by Dave Truesdale – This is interesting because the sample they give us in the Hugo pack is an article where the Sad Puppies set out their agenda for this year, which is to be inclusive and make a recommendation list for the Hugos that invites input from fans of al stripes. And then it lists all the stories recommended. Which is ace, but I can’t actually see any of the stories that made it onto the ballot here, so I’m wondering what happened? Because many of those that made it onto the ballot were allegedly in the Sad Puppy final ten.

File 770 edited by Mike Glyer – The sample provided a best of, and I was pretty much sold from the point when they did a Dr Seuss version of Lord of the Rings. And Ursula Vernon’s play ‘If you were a platypus, my darling’. They also provided a 48-page newsletter. I am becoming increasingly perfunctory here. I read about 10 pages, and it’s a nice newsletter that assumes the readers all know each other and the people being talked about. I could imagine the Bujold List producing a newsletter that read like this. So that’s rather nice.

Lady Business edited by Clare, Ira, Jodie, KJ, Renay, and Susan – this is a study that purports to show that SFF books by or about cis-women win fewer awards than those by or about cis-men. Their methodology looks OK to me, as far as I can judge. Their conclusions are depressing. Is this actually a fanzine, though?

My scores:

1. File 770
2. Tangent Online, because I think they were trying
3. Lady Business – a good study, but not convinced it belongs in this category

I’m not scoring the other two, because I can’t actually tell whether they are boring or whether I am. I suspect I am. But I was still able to appreciate the three I’ve grouped above them.

Hugo reading 2016: Best related work

July 10, 2016 / Catherine / 0 Comments

Dear God, this is a pit of awful. I’m fairly sure it is close to 100% Puppy-infested.

“Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness (castaliahouse.com) – Ick. So this purports to be a five part essay on how Science Fiction Fandom, led by John Scalzi and all the evil feminists, has been covering up and enabling pedophilia for years. Some of the allegations refer to people who have, in fact been convicted of things. Others, not so much. And… the thing is, I’ve read a number of the bits which are being quoted here and they are being quoted out of context and with intent to mislead. I don’t know if there is a larger problem in fandom. If there is, this set of reports only serves to discredit it by reporting things that they must know are not true, which tends to make any true bits look false, too. I don’t see how this helps anyone. I was unable to finish this – I read three parts out of five, but once I realised that there really was stuff there that I knew to be untrue, I felt excused from reading the rest.

SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police by Vox Day (Castalia House) – I find this title highly ironic, since he appears to me to be lying from the get-go. Perhaps this is a piece of satire critiquing the entire premise? Or perhaps I should just file it under No Award and move on. It starts with a dedication to those poor, beleaguered Gamergaters who just wanted to be left alone to play their games in peace, only they got bullied by the evil SJWs. And it goes downhill from there. I’m pretty sure the author doesn’t want me to read this book, since I’m clearly out to oppress him with my unreasonable leftist demands for things like respect and equity and all that. Also, apparently, I’m anti-science. This is news to me. I would hate to accidentally oppress this author, so just to be on the safe side, I’m not going to read any further. That way his book will not be sullied. And it’s getting a No Award from me, which should warm the cockles of his heart, as it proves all his theories right, at least by his logic.

“The Story of Moira Greyland” by Moira Greyland (askthebigot.com) – Oh, this is distressing. Moira was the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen, and she was abused and molested by her parents, who thought she should be a boy, and gay. And it’s awful. And she has concluded from this that people who are gay are pro-paedophilia. To be fair, it sounds as though her parents’ views on sexuality would certainly incline one to such views. But oh, dear. So she is vocally against gay marriage because she believes it will lead to child abuse. Honestly, I don’t know what to do with this one. It’s clearly a heartfelt, sincere piece of writing, but I am not at all sure it belongs on this ballot. I feel fairly confident that I’d feel this way even without the anti-gay part, because I was feeling much this way about the piece before I realised where it was going. But putting it in No Award lumps it in with the stuff above, and that doesn’t seem fair either. I don’t know.

Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 by Marc Aramini (Castalia House) – OK, I’m beginning to think I can’t do much of anything with this category. I haven’t read any Gene Wolfe, and a collection of commentaries about him – a very lengthy, extensive collection at that – is not something I’m hugely motivated to read, nor do I think I’d be well-equipped to judge it. I did have a bit of a read, but without context, the writing wasn’t engaging enough to hold me. And the fact that it is published by Castalia House is not a recommendation.

“The First Draft of My Appendix N Book” by Jeffro Johnson (jeffro.wordpress.com) – This is actually quite fun. Johnson is reading and reviewing a lot of ‘golden age’ science fiction and fantasy that is no longer well-known, in the light of D&D games. It’s engagingly written, despite a tendency to make comments about political correctness and such that make me roll my eyes. Since it has no other competition in this bracket, I’m going to bookmark this to read later. I think this might be the sole survivor on my ballot for this category.