Take your coat off, make yourself at home

Wow, lots of new visitors! Welcome, everyone, and thanks to Adam P. Knave, John Joseph Adams, Patrick Swenson, Jim Van Pelt, Elizabeth Bear, Sherwood Smith, and Arthur D. Hlavaty for linking over. Please do make yourselves at home, leave comments, point out typos, tell me I'm wrong (I've been hanging out online for fifteen years now, so I have quite a high tolerance for being corrected by random strangers using funny pseudonyms), ask questions, laugh at my jokes, etc. More == merrier.

I originally intended this blog to be about what I'm reading at the moment, but it's turned into a much broader discussion of my work at Publishers Weekly and all things related to books and publishing. I generally write at least one post every day that I'm in the office, though I usually do the actual writing at home in the evenings and save drafts to post during the following day. I'm certainly not using paid time for blogging, just like you're not reading this from work. Right?

This is very much not an official PW blog. (I hope to start officially blogging for PW sometime soon, but I'll probably have to tone myself down a lot.) I'm extremely opinionated--not surprising, given the work I do--and I post about anything that catches my eye, including politics, the serial comma, and other sensitive topics on which I may personally disagree with the official stance of PW. Please do keep this in mind while you're reading, and remember that I am not by any means an official spokesperson.

I should also note that I reviewed over 100 books for PW from 2002 to 2007, but now that I edit PW reviews, I no longer write them (though I still review for Strange Horizons, Lambda Book Report, and other publications). PW reviewers are anonymous, and we take that anonymity really seriously. I often write about my personal opinions of books here, and I want to make it absolutely clear that I did not review those books for PW.

Those who prefer to read blog posts via LJ can find my feed here. I also keep a personal LiveJournal, which may or may not be of interest. And if you're curious about my book reviews and other journalism, links to the bylined pieces available online can be found here.

Short and to the point

Dear Ms. Rosenfeld:

I'm the editor of the science fiction, fantasy, and horror book reviews at Publishers Weekly, a past Lambda Awards judge, and a longtime bisexual activist within publishing and elsewhere. A friend pointed me to the Publishing Triangle website and suggested I should join your organization. I notice, however, that while the words "lesbian" and "gay" are prominently displayed throughout the website (most notably in your tagline, which states that the Triangle is "the association of lesbians and gay men in publishing"), no mention is made of bisexual members or efforts to support bisexuals who work in publishing. Would it be correct of me to infer that I am therefore excluded from membership and that your organization has no interest in assisting me or others like me? Please let me know.

Sincerely,
Rose Fox

I'm guessing this is most likely to go nowhere, but anything's possible. Should be interesting.

(And yes, I'm actually quite happy to join if they'll have me, as long as they understand that once a member I will immediately start agitating for more inclusive language and practices and will not shut up or go away unless they kick me out.)

Coming out of the kitchen

My fellow Strange Horizons reviewer Martin Lewis points out this astoundingly blinkered not-really-a-review of A.L. Kennedy's Day:

When, as happens occasionally nowadays, one hears over the PA system the traditional "This is your captain speaking", and it's a woman's voice, you feel testicles shrivel. OK for the gals to enquire nicely about chicken or lasagne ("sir") - but "we're cruising at 39,000, and anticipating a smooth flight"?

...Statistics record that only 4% of USAF and RAF pilots now are women - and these are the highest figures ever. Can a class of writer so institutionally and historically disengaged from a subject write a classic (or even a good) novel on it?

...nor, for the record, do I think a woman writing about what is historically a man's world is any more objectionable than, say, DH Lawrence rhapsodising on the female orgasm in Lady Chatterley. But it raises interesting issues.

The only issues I see on display here are Mr. Sutherland's. In 522 words, he manages to say essentially nothing about the novel other than that it's written by a woman, set in wartime, and not very similar to Len Deighton's books. Instead, he focuses on the shriveling of his "whatdoyoucallems"--which, if he were really concerned about the delicacy of the fairer sex, I suspect he would not be discussing in a major newspaper read by thousands of women--and asks with some bewilderment, "Why, with all those 'women's subjects' at her disposal, did Kennedy venture into this most exclusive of manly enclaves?"

I imagine she did it because she wanted to. For any writer, male or female, that is really the only necessary and sufficient reason to choose a topic for a novel. Fantasy and science fiction writers aren't the only ones who venture in fiction to places they have never seen in real life; it's just more obvious that they probably don't have personal experience with unicorns or alien abduction*. I have no doubt that many authors of murder mysteries have never killed anyone, many authors of romance novels have never had sex, and at least a couple of authors who sell short stories to The New Yorker have happy relationships with people who frequently say more than one sentence at a time. I know this may come as a shock to some of you, but fiction is made up stories.

* Whitley Strieber may disagree.

I'm reminded very much of this Russell Banks quote I posted a couple of weeks ago, which got a lot of scornful comments when I posted it to my personal journal. Most cogent was Marissa Lingen's response:

"I can only write within my own self-concept," seems like a far, far more limiting belief than, "I am a white American male," to me.

It seems that Ms. Kennedy is willing to write outside her self-concept, which I wholeheartedly applaud. It's too bad that this adventuresome spirit causes such distress for people like Mr. Sutherland, who believe that women should not only stay within their own self-concepts but within the even more restrictive concepts that have been thrown at them by men. I sincerely hope that authors of all stripes will continue to take these chances, and the testicular reactions of antediluvian readers be damned.

Pardon, come again?

From an author profile in this week's PW:

A Village Voice writer once called Russell Banks "the most important living white male American on the official literary map." Flattering, but as Banks sees it, a bit off the mark.

"As a writer I don't have a nationality," he says. "As a writer I don't have a race. As a writer I don't have a gender."

...When I visit the 67-year-old writer on a recent fall afternoon in his home in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, he is wearing jeans, a flannel shirt and a fleece vest. With his close-cropped gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard, he looks every bit the white American male. But he resists thinking of himself that way, he says, because "then I would only be able to write about living, white American men and I would rather not limit myself that way."

Discuss.

This week's PW also includes a Q&A with Ben Peek. My goal is to do at least one SF/F/H-related Q&A, profile, or signature review per month, so keep an eye out! And we have reviews of the following: Tangled Webs: A Black Jewels Novel by Anne Bishop (starred), In the Courts of the Crimson Kings by S.M. Stirling, Waking Brigid by Francis Clark, Victory Conditions by Elizabeth Moon, and Got to Kill them All by Dennis Etchison.

Is there a logic course that one of us could enroll in?

I've been following the debate over the cover of the new anthology coming out from Night Shade, but I haven't said much. It's a big topic and there's a lot to think about.

A lot of the problems I see in the ensuing debate are problems of language, and of familiarity with the situation. The people who are used to writing and reading blog entries about racism and sexism start out weary. They've seen it all before. They have their bingo cards ready. The people who are not used to online discussion of these issues have no idea that the phrases that come to mind as perfectly reasonable responses are not only unoriginal but also rife with unintentional prejudice. The experienced -ism bloggers are outraged (understandably) and say "You should know better!" and the inexperienced ones feel insulted (understandably) and blow their tops, lather rinse repeat. It is all very predictable, like watching two people play chess when one is an old hand who can see several moves ahead and the other learned yesterday and is still trying to remember which way the knight moves. Being able to beat someone at chess under those circumstances says nothing about skill or intelligence or righteousness. It's just about training. Using that training to grind someone into the dirt is, shall we say, less than sportsmanlike.

This is escalated in the SF community, because we all know one another personally, and as hard as it is to critique someone's behavior when you don't have a personal connection, it's much harder when there's history between you, whether friendship or rivalry or mutual dislike. The worst thing that can happen in this kind of discussion is for someone to make it personal--whether by taking critique of behavior to equal critique of self or by turning critique into insult and ad hominem attack or even, in many cases, by saying "I'm telling you this as someone who cares about you"--and with this set-up it's pretty much inevitable.

I don't think efforts to uproot entrenched -isms are doomed to fail, but I do think all these factors need to be taken into consideration if conversations on these topics are going to be productive. I'm serious about phrasing critique as a response to a manuscript submission; it puts it in a familiar framework that in our community specifically indicates a critique of product rather than a critique of person, and there's plenty of room for personal nuance ("It's a fine story, but it just didn't grab me") and indicating where further discussion might occur ("I'd be happy to see other submissions from you/look this over after extensive revision"). It also makes the power relationship clear. Just as editors get to accept or reject manuscripts, consumers get to accept or reject finished books. While someone receiving multiple rejections would be perfectly within their rights to say that their unique artistic vision cannot be compromised by the sneers of the ignorant, they might also start considering whether perhaps some revisions are in order.

As for the specific topic at hand, my opinion is divided. On the one hand, Maureen McHugh's name on a cover excites me as a reader far more than Bruce Sterling's. On the other hand, when I'm urging my boss at PW to send a small press anthology out for review, I point to big names in the table of contents as evidence that it's likely worth paying attention to. (PW has no policy against reviewing terrible books and calling them out as terrible, but we do unofficially prefer to review good books rather than bad ones if we're given the choice.) On the gripping hand, the consumer side is what pays attention to the cover and the reviewer side is what looks at the TOC. Covers are meant to appeal to consumers. Maybe there's even market research out there showing that consumers prefer anthology covers with no more than five names on them, though I kind of doubt it.

So I think the cover should have six names on it: four big-name authors, two lesser-known authors with small but dedicated followings. I think that accurately reflects the TOC, and I suspect the gender split among those names would also be representative. I'm no fan of quotas or tokenism and wouldn't presume to suggest what the gender split should be, but if it's not reflective of the TOC, I'd see that as a flag of possible unconscious bias that might be worth consciously correcting. I was a little shocked to see comments from the folks at Night Shade that seemed to amount to "We don't intend the front cover to be representative of the book". That sounds to me like a betrayal of the reader's trust that can only reflect negatively on the publisher. People who pick up an anthology promoted by five male BNA names may not want an anthology with a TOC like Eclipse's. Why not promote it as the well-balanced book that it apparently is? If the idea is to hitch all those other authors to the BNA coattails, to subversively get their names and work in front of readers who would otherwise pass them by... honestly, that seems a little insulting to both the authors and the reader. Truth in advertising seems to me a pretty laudable goal here. If Night Shade's business model depends on deceiving readers, I think that's a problem with their business model, not a problem with the market.

Does the market need to be changed? That's not clear to me. A big part of the issue in the case of Eclipse was that all the BNAs in it happened to be men, or perhaps that all the women in it happened to not be BNAs. That's one anthology. That doesn't mean that all BNAs are male, or that all male writers are BNAs. It may well be that fewer women are offered the big advances or get the big sales numbers or have the household name recognition or get first novel contracts or appear in small press anthologies or however you want to quantify success and achievement in this field, but this particular incident doesn't prove any of that. I haven't seen any data on those things. If anyone has it, I'd love to know. If not, I'd love to see someone with more readership than I have collecting that information (and please, not via LJ poll; limiting poll-takers to LJ account users automatically skews the data). The publishing industry's apathy towards market research never fails to amaze me. I hope that apathy won't be matched by people on the consumer end of things. Let's get some hard data here and see where it takes us.