Jim C. Hines's Blog, page 103

Detcon1 Schedule

This weekend I’ll be joining the amazing filker and all-around fun person Tom Smith as co-Toastmasters of the North American Science Fiction Convention, aka Detcon1 here in Detroit.

I’m really excited about this one. There’s going to be a ton of great people, and from what I’ve seen, the convention staff have been doing some incredible work. I’m getting preemptively bummed because I know I won’t have time to see and hang out with everyone. Too many cool people, too little time…

This is what the weekend currently looks like:

Thursday

8 pm: Opening Ceremonies, Ambassador Salon 1

Friday

1 pm: Writing Humor and Comedy in SFF, Ambassador Salon 2
3 pm: Fanzines and Professional Writing, Mackinac West
6 pm: Gender Roles in Genre Fiction, Ambassador Salon 1
8 pm: Mass Autographing Session, Ambassador Salons 1&2

Saturday

11 am: Reading, Joliet A
4 pm: Kaffeeklatsch with Jim C. Hines, Kaffeeklatsch 1
8 pm: Extravaganza – Masquerade & Literary Awards, Ambassador Salon 2

Sunday

2 pm: Closing Ceremonies, Ambassador Salon 1

For the reading on Saturday, I’m torn between reading my story for the next Chicks in Chainmail anthology, or an excerpt from Unbound. Any preferences?

Who else is going to be there?

A Few Pics from Up North

Hello, world! Still up north for a few more days, but after much patient hunting, I have captured the elusive and wild wifi. I figured I’d share a few pics. (Those of you on Facebook have already seen a couple of these.)

Starting with a shot of my son watching fireworks. This is the first time I’ve tried longer-exposure shots with fireworks. A bunch of them turned out too blurry, but I really liked this one.

A few bird pics from wandering around camp:

Sunset!

The beach at Little Presque Isle:

Random dragonfly:

Book Giveaways and Other Stuff

SF Signal’s Libriomancer giveaway ends tomorrow, July 3, at 9 p.m. CST.

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Twelfth Planet Press is giving away 10 copies of Kaleidoscope over at Goodreads. This is a collection of “fun, edgy, meditative, and hopeful YA science fiction and fantasy with diverse leads,” and includes my story “Chupacabra’s Song,” about Nicola Pallas (from the Libriomancer books) as a teenager.

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What are your thoughts on author newsletters? For authors, do you think they’re worth it? For readers, do you subscribe to any? What do you want from an author’s newsletter, and what don’t you want?

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I’ll be heading up north tomorrow, so blogging will probably be light until I get back. Or nonexistent. There shall be family time and relaxing and fireworks and working on the Secret Project of Doom and trying to catch up on some reading, including:

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Thus endeth the random blog post of stuff.

Detcon1 and Diversity

In talking about diversity in SF/F fandom, I’ve pointed before to convention committees and staff that are mostly or exclusively white, and often male-dominated. This isn’t uncommon, and it’s part of a larger systemic problem with fandom and genre. Recognizing that your favorite con isn’t as diverse and inclusive as you thought doesn’t mean it’s a Bad Con, or that the people running it are Horrible People. What’s important, at least to me, is to recognize and work to change things for the better.

Detcon1 has gotten a lot of things right on that front. They established a Diversity Advisory Board, consisting of Muhammad A Ahmad, Anne Gray, Mark Oshiro, Kat Tanaka Okopnik, Mike VanHelder, Pablo Vazquez, and Sal Palland. They chose to honor a range of guests that acknowledges the broader scope of the genre. They established the FANtastic Detroit Fund to help provide free memberships to fans who might otherwise be unable to attend.

What follows is a video discussion between Pablo Vazquez and Anne Gray about the work Detcon1 has been doing. I’m also including a transcript of the conversation. (But the video is better, because it has music and special effects and stuff!)

Michigan is my home base, so I’m biased, but I think Detcon1 has been doing some awesome things, and I’m really looking forward to the convention.

Detcon1

North American Science Fiction Convention

Renaissance Center Marriott

Detroit, Michigan

July 17 through 20, 2014

[Welcome to Detcon1.]

PABLO: Hi. I’m Pablo Vasquez.

ANNE: And I’m Anne Gray.

PABLO: Yeah, we’re part of the Diversity Committee, and also doing work with the Afrofuturism programming at Detcon1. And we’re really excited about it.

ANNE: Yeah, we’ve – Right from the first, Detcon1 has been dedicated to having a diverse group of attendees – and, when we started inviting our guests, for example, we really wanted to have a diverse group of people so that it was, I think as you said, “representative of the modern world.”

PABLO: Yeah, of Modern Fandom.

ANNE: Yeah

PABLO: Detcon1 has definitely diversified and found absolutely quality people for their guests.

ANNE: For instance we have people of color…

PABLO: Yeah, like John Picacio and Steven Barnes.

 John Picacio, Artist Guest of Honor

Steven Barnes, Author Guest of Honor

ANNE: Yeah, including Nnedi Okorafor

Nnedi Okorafor, YA Author Special Guest

PABLO: mm-hmm.

ANNE: Which is also part of our reach out to young people, cause she’s our YA Author. Our Scientist Guest of Honor is a woman. Helen Greiner. She’s a roboticist.

Helen Greiner, Scientist Guest of Honor

ANNE: Musicians are a couple, a man and a woman. Bill and Brenda Sutton.

Bill and Brenda Sutton, Music Guests of Honor

ANNE: And you were really excited about our Fan Guests.

Bernadette Bosky, Arthur D. Hlavaty, and Kevin J. Maroney, Fan Guests of Honor

PABLO: Yeah! And I like that our fan guests, I mean, it’s the first time that I’ve seen, like, a polyamorous triad as a fan guest. And as a polyamorous person myself, I was, you know, exceedingly happy to see that. And I’m sure a lot of other people like me will as well. Lifestyles or racial diversity or gender diversity. We also reach out to typically ignored parts of fandom, like the video game fandom, by having our video game guest Jon Davis, who’s worked on, like, Titanfall and other popular video games.

Jon Davis, Video Game Special Guest

PABLO: We have outreach to those communities. We reach out to tabletop role players; we reach out to video gamers; comic book fans. So on and so forth.

ANNE: Steampunk

PABLO:  Steampunks, you know.

ANNE: Afrofuturists…

PABLO: Exactly.

ANNE: I mean one of the things – We’re in Detroit.  I mean, we are the North American Science Fiction Convention, but we’re in Detroit. So we wanted to make sure that Detroit fans, even if they’ve mostly gone to a comicon, or they’re just readers, or something. When they find out about us, they wanna come, and when they come—

PABLO: mm-hmm.

ANNE: They feel welcome. We want everybody to feel welcome and included.

PABLO: By making Detcon1 diverse, we’re introducing fans who have never, like, met each other, or knew about their specific subsects of  fandom, to be able to connect with one another, and share their love of, you know, what makes them a fan within greater fandom as a whole.

ANNE: mm-hmm.

PABLO: So, you know, I can’t wait to see that, to see all these different people actually connecting with one another, on, you know, our greater love of science fiction and fantasy; of speculative fiction.

ANNE: Yeah. Science fiction conventions are where we come together, we have great conversations, and then we take that out into the rest of our lives, and … this should be exciting.

PABLO: Yeah!

Repetitive Stress Injury

I’ve heard it said that if you’re a writer, it’s not a matter of if you’ll develop a repetitive stress injury, but when. Looks like 2014 was my year.

I’ve been getting pains in my shoulders for months now. In the beginning, it was little more than a twinge. I assumed I’d pulled something at karate, and then when it didn’t go away, I thought maybe I was sleeping on my arm wrong, or I needed a different pillow. It was annoying, but not incapacitating.

But it didn’t go away, and it gradually got worse. If I used my right hand and tried to reach around to touch the back of my left shoulder, pain jabbed through the core of those upper arm muscles. If I used the left hand and reached for the right, it was worse. So I finally headed over to the friendly neighborhood Doctor-Man, who had no problem diagnosing me:

Wait, what? No, that’s not– Stupid random Dogma references sneaking into my blog post!

Anyway, the doctor diagnosed me with biceps tendonitis, which is an inflammation of the long head — get your mind out of the gutter — of the biceps tendon.

The good news is that it’s not terribly severe. He put me on anti inflammatories, told me to try icing the shoulders, and talked about the kinds of thing that can cause this injury to develop, and what to do about it. This talk can be boiled down to, “Whatever you’re doing to mess up your shoulders, stop doing it!”

As far as I can tell, the problem is that the arms of my desk chair at work were a little too low. This means the tendons were strained by holding my arms up all day while I’m typing. Why was the left shoulder worse than the right? Because I mouse left-handed.

It’s been about a week, and my right shoulder is noticeably improved. The left … that’s going a little more slowly, but hopefully it will catch up.

Ah well. If all else fails and my left arm never heals, there’s always this option from He-Man…

Cool Stuff Friday

Curious how many people will click on the spider link today…

LEGO Boba Fett cosplay. (Link via the Mary Sue)
Duct tape prom dresses & tuxes. (Link from Claire)
The Search for Love, as told by cats in boxes.
Spiders being goofy and/or cute. I know, I know. Spiders! But they really are cute. (Link from Seanan McGuire)

Unbound Cover Reveal and Libriomancer Giveaway

I had another blog post all ready to go today, but this was far more exciting

Last night, SF Signal revealed the cover for Unbound, the third Magic ex Libris book. They’re also hosting a giveaway of three autographed copies of Libriomancer, the first book in the series.

Here’s a small view. Like the other books, the cover for this one was done by Gene Mollica, and I love what he’s come up with for book three. Click through for the full-size cover and to enter the giveaway.

Unbound will be out on January 6, 2015. But you can pre-order now at: B&N | Indiebound | Amazon.

My thanks to Gene for the great cover, and to SF Signal for doing the reveal and giveaway!

Above World, by Jenn Reese

I’d been wanting to read Jenn Reese‘s novel Above World [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] for a while now. Having now read and enjoyed it, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that this book has the wrong cover art.

It’s not that I think it’s a bad cover. It’s vivid and colorful and clear, and captures the mermaid Kampii nature of the protagonist. The cover also conveys that this is a middle grade novel. So far, so good. But the book is so much more. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic Earth with advanced tech and bioengineering and settlements of humans who have been modified for their environments and robot pets and more. I wish the cover showed more of those elements, because they’re pretty sweet.

Here’s the official summary:

Thirteen-year-old Aluna has lived her entire life under the ocean with the Coral Kampii in the City of Shifting Tides. But after centuries spent hidden from the Above World, her colony’s survival is in doubt. The Kampii’s breathing necklaces are failing, but the elders are unwilling to venture above water to seek answers. Only headstrong Aluna and her friend Hoku are stubborn and bold enough to face the terrors of land to search for way to save their people.

But can Aluna’s warrior spirit and Hoku’s tech-savvy keep them safe? Set in a world where overcrowding has led humans to adapt—growing tails to live under the ocean or wings to live on mountains—here is a ride through a future where greed and cruelty have gone unchecked, but the loyalty of friends remains true.

I liked this book a lot. It’s a fun read, with action and adventure and romance and great characters. I liked the relationship between Aluna and Hoku. I liked the backstory and the worldbuilding, and the larger-than-life villain. There’s just a lot going on in this book that made me say, “Oh, cool!”

There were a few elements that felt a bit too plot-convenient, where our characters encounter just the right character at just the right time. But that’s a minor complaint, and didn’t detract from my enjoyment.

This is the first book of a trilogy, and all three books are available, so you don’t have to wait.

You can read an excerpt of Above World at the Candlewick website.

Rape, Abuse, and Marion Zimmer Bradley

My very first rejection letter was from Marion Zimmer Bradley. It was both harsh and helpful. So I was thrilled when, years later, I made one of my first professional sales to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine. I was even happier when I sold a story to her anthology Sword & Sorceress XXI.

I’m proud of those stories. I believe the Sword & Sorceress series was important, and I’m grateful to Bradley for creating it. I believe her magazine helped a lot of new writers, and her books helped countless readers. All of which makes the revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley protecting a known child rapist and molesting her own daughter and others even more tragic.

Here are some of the relevant links.

Marion Zimmer Bradley’s testimony in defense of her husband, Walter Breen, a convicted pedophile.
A blog post from Deirdre Saoirse Moen, in which Moira Greyland, daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen, states that Bradley molested her starting when she was three years old and continuing until Greyland was twelve and able to walk away. Greyland also describes Breen as “a serial rapist with many, many victims,” but says Marion “was far, far worse.”
The “Breendoggle” Wiki. Much of fandom seemed to know about the allegations against Breen. The documentation includes eyewitness accounts of Breen molesting children and discussion that even if Breen was indeed an active pedophile, that doesn’t mean he should be expelled from fandom.
Silence is Complicity. Natalie Luhrs talks about Breen, MZB, and the damage done by prioritizing silence over safety, complicity over acting to protect the vulnerable members of our community.
On Doing a Thing I Needed to Do. Janni Lee Simner talks about having written for some of MZB’s projects, and her choice to donate her income from those sales to RAINN.

There’s more out there, including people defending MZB, as well as people insisting we must “separate the art from the artist” and not let MZB’s “alleged” crimes detract from the good she’s done. And there’s the argument that since MZB died fifteen years ago, there’s no point to bringing up all of this ugliness and smearing the name of a celebrated author.

I disagree.

To begin with, while Bradley and Breen are both gone from this world, their victims survive. The damage they inflicted lives on. Are you going to tell victims of rape/abuse that nobody’s allowed to acknowledge what was done to them? That the need to protect the reputation of the dead is more important than allowing victims their voice? To hell with that.

Second, as Luhrs and others have pointed out, many of the same behaviors that allowed this abuse to continue for so long are still present in fandom and elsewhere today. We excuse sexual harassment as social awkwardness. We ignore ongoing harassment and assault for years or decades because someone happens to be a big name author or editor. Half of fandom shirks from the mere thought of excluding known predators, because for some, sexual harassment and assault are lesser crimes than shunning a predator from a convention.

I’m not going to say that people should or shouldn’t throw all of MZB’s books away. There are authors whose careers might not have happened without MZB’s help, and our genre is better for many of them. But it’s also important to acknowledge that predators exist. They may be in positions of power and influence. Sometimes, they’re people who have done good work for a community. They often have very smooth, well-practiced tactics for defending or excusing their actions.

When we ignore ongoing harassment and abuse, when we belittle efforts to create harassment policies, when we respond to people speaking out about their own abuse and harassment by accusing them of starting “lynch mobs” and “witch hunts,” we’re teaching predators that fandom is a safe hunting ground. We’re teaching them that they will be protected, and their victims will be sacrificed so we can cling to an illusion of inclusiveness.

We need to work on teaching a different lesson.

Cool Stuff Friday

When this goes live, it should already be Cool Stuff Saturday in Australia…

Animal photobombs. (I don’t think I’ve shared this one before, but I’m not sure.)
Slideshow of animals being jerks.
Naughty cats.
Time-lapse video of an exploding star.
LEGO Imperial Star Destroyer. Two meters long, weighing roughly 50 kilos. Wow…