Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 187

Wives (and other Hugo recs)

Paul Haines is offering his acclaimed novella Wives in free electronic copy for anyone who asks. This is an awesome, epic piece of Australian horror/post-apocalyptic science fiction from last year, and if you'd like to see some Australian content on the Hugo ballot, this would be a marvellous one to support.

Wives isn't just a great piece of fiction, it's an important piece of fiction.

Here is what I said about it in Last Short Story last year:

For me, the brilliance of Paul Haines is that...

Going Bovine, by Libba Bray

Going Bovine is an amazing, heartbreaking, impossible book. How do you write a comedy about a dying teenage boy? Honestly, how do you do that? How do you write a road trip adventure that might not really be happening, and yet maintain tension and drama throughout? How do you turn a garden gnome into a dignified and heroic mythic warrior?

Impossible. And yet Libba Bray has pulled it off.

I made some entirely false assumptions about this book. One of which was that it was mainstream YA –...

she is too awesome for me to relate to

Some links on feminist issues, sexism & gender awareness.

Sarah Rees Brennan is writing awesomeness about women in fiction again, debunking all the dumb excuses people give for being more critical of female characters than male (features the big spoiler for The Demon's Lexicon):

There are also issues with writing people with disabilities, people of colour, people who are gay. There are even issues with writing straight white guys, because they too live in a world where inequality exists, and...

The Princess and the Frog

Before I went to see this film, I read this great post by Nnedi Okorafor which deals with some of the issues she had with the film (which she otherwise liked), particularly with racial & cultural themes. You should read it too, because it's great.

My response to the film is not just as a woman, someone who generally enjoys Disney movies and a feminist, but also as the mum of a little girl who adores Disney Princesses and has bought into the brand lock stock and barrel.

The movie itself is...

Party Good

We survived Raeli's first 'real' party. I was proud of my planning, particularly that I didn't do my usual thing of reaching for the moon and trying to do too much elaborate shit and ending up hyper-stressed. I made the cupcakes, yesterday, with Raeli. Today I buttered fairy bread, made a few cups of tea and opened a lot of packages (cheezels, corn chips, rice crackers etc.). My honey manned the barbecue to provide victuals for the parents who stayed (the kids are old enough that the...

The F Bomb

Interview with Julie Zeilinger, a pro-active teenage feminist, creator of teen website The F Bomb:

From my perspective, I see so many young girls and guys my age who are feminists to the core but absolutely refuse to identify as feminists because of the stigma or because they think it's only for women. I actually called my blog the F Bomb as a way to recognize the stigma around the word. We need to include men, because feminism and sexism affects them as much as it does us. The older...

Party Hard

Well, that was a bizarre evening! After a day of tidying in preparation for Raeli's birthday party tomorrow (her first 'proper' one at home instead of at a kids centre, with games and everything) I settled down with a baby on my lap to follow the Aurealis Awards via Twitter. It turned into a rollicking good time, with many of us playing along at home chatting away merrily. Scott Westerfeld and Donna Hanson vied for the role of star twitterer from the event itself – Donna was quicker off...

Ash, by Malinda Lo

This one had me at hello. I love retellings of fairy tales, and adding bisexual themes to Cinderella instantly made me sit up and take interest. Also, there was buzz, and I do love me some YA fiction that comes with added buzz.

I pre-ordered this beautiful book (isn't the cover glorious?) and it promptly sat beside my reading chair for months, as Christmas and the post-Christmas haze swallowed up my intensive reading time. I was pretty sure this was one of those books I was going to tear...

Birthday Bumps

Raeli is five today. I've been thinking of her as a nearly-five-year-old for a while now, so this shouldn't be a shock. The last five years have been the best of my life. Being a mum is completely awesome, and she really is one of my favourite people in the world. She's spent the last several days making a book (a real stapled book!) with the story of Snow White and the Wicked Queen (obviously the two important characters in the story) written out laboriously, with spelling help from me...

Happy Day of Awesome Posts About Gender

Mari Ness posts about gendered gaze, artistic assumptions and the way that women's participation in the arts becomes so quickly forgotten, and made invisible. (via @Krasnostein on Twitter)

This is a great post, and raises one of the issues that I know I need to keep in mind – when complaining about the imbalance of women in the arts, it's very easy to render invisible those who are and always have been a part of the scene. That's one of the reasons that I like to review books that I read...