Tansy Rayner Roberts's Blog, page 28

Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth: May 2016 DOOM EDITION

It’s all apocalypse and global warming and terrifying futures in my reading this month!

First, an extraordinary presentation/monologue presented as a Ted Talk: A Sci-Fi Vision of Love from a 318 year old hologram, by Monica Byrne, a gorgeous and deeply emotional performance that works as a clever, layered piece of science fiction as well as being an affecting love story.

Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology Drowned Worlds explores the many horrific possibilities of those pesky rising oceans, that I normally prefer to think about as little as possible. Thanks for the nightmares, Jonathan!

The opening story of this book, “Elves of Antarctica” by Paul McCauley is a great character piece that sets the tone very well, with a protagonist who rails against the loss of the icecaps in Antarctica, and can’t see beyond that tragedy to the intriguing new possibilities of grass, warmth and oh yes, FREAKING MAMMOTHS. Also, there are elves, or are there? Yes, I think there are. Those standing stones have to mean something, right? A gorgeous, thought-provoking piece.

Scrolling all the way to the end of the book (because yes I have a Kindle and I am shameless in reading anthologies in whatever order I like), the final piece is “The Future is Blue” by Catherynne M Valente – a fun, nihilistic piece of futurepunk which utilises excessive use of the word ‘Fuckwit’ (this only goes to show that she should count as an honorary Australian). The Fuckwits, by the way, are us, the generation/s who allowed the world to get in terrible state that is, honestly, not that far off. This story is furious, filthy and angry, and I love it.

Defying Doomsday, edited by Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench, is a book I’ve been hanging out to read since the crowdfunding campaign last year! I hadn’t read it yet even though I’ve had a copy for a while thanks to being one of the authors. The premise of the book, which is challenging the idea of “survival of the fittest” by featuring apocalyptic stories with disabled protagonist, is expressed with furious, dynamic energy in the introduction (by the amazing Robert Hoge) as well as its opening story, “And the Rest of Us Wait,” by Corinne Duyvis.

The story is a rich character piece told through the eyes a young woman with spina bifida and other chronic health issues, who also happens to be a pop star in her own country in a time when the Earth is being evacuated in the face of disaster. The story is funny, sweet and utterly savage (and rightfully so) in its depiction of how the able-bodied are so often willing to drop the facade of tolerating/helping the disabled in times of crisis. But there’s so much more to this one, including the need for distraction and entertainment (hey girls, let’s form a band right here in the temporary shelter and put on a show!) when facing the worst case scenario, and the way that young women (with and without disability) and their actions are often perceived as shallow and selfish by their elders, regardless of their actual motives. If the whole book is full of stories like this then I am really excited to read the rest of it.

The second story in the collection, Stephanie Gunn’s “To Take Into The Air My Quiet Breath” is beautiful and somewhat harrowing, a story of healthcare and hope and cystic fibrosis, with three sisters struggling to cope alone on their farm in the wake of a pandemic.

Chances are very high that next month’s LSS will be featuring a lot more from Drowned Worlds and Defying Doomsday – these are great books to read side by side! I’m going to have to find some less doomy works to read in between the stories, though, as there’s only so much realistic apocalypse I can deal with before I start hyperventilating and clutching my children to me.

To be continued!

Galactic Suburbia Episode 143 Show Notes

In which we talk reviews and gender balance thanks to the Strange Horizons SF count, and Alisa makes books while Tansy & Alex visit the theatre!

What’s New on the Internet?



Locus Awards finalists

Shirley Jackson nominees: http://www.locusmag.com/News/2016/05/...

Peter MacNamara Achievement Award

Strange Horizons – the 2015 SF Count

CULTURE CONSUMED

Tansy: A Sci-Fi Vision of Love from a 318 year old hologram, by Monica Byrne , Wuthering Heights by shake & stir co; Whip it, Kingston City Rollers

Alisa: Working on the release of the Tara Sharp mysteries by Marianne Delacourt (now available for pre-order) and Grant Watson’s upcoming book of film essays.

Alex: Coriolanus (all female production directed by Grant Watson for Heartstring, Melbourne’s new independent theatre); The Dark Labyrinth, Lawrence Durrell; Nemesis Games, James SA Corey; Saga vol 5; Fringe rewatch, The Katering Show

Skype number: 03 90164171 (within Australia) +613 90164171 (from overseas)

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook, support us at Patreon and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

Sheep Might Fly: Glass Slipper Scandal Part 7

New Sheep Might Fly episode update! Listen now on iTunes (or your own favourite podcast app). You can stream, download & follow Sheep Might Fly on Podbean.

GLASS SLIPPER SCANDAL

Charming is a kingdom where fairy tales come true, which is bad news for its troubled royal family, but good news for the gutter press that thrives on the scandals and gossip provided by their teenage Princes Gone Wild. Kai is a rookie reporter at the Charming Herald. Dennis is a new Royal Hound, charged with protecting the self-destructive princes from disaster.

Disaster arrives in a pumpkin coach… The story of the century is wearing glass slippers… and Castle Charming will never be the same again.

PART 7: FAIRY GODMOTHERS FIGHT DIRTY.

Kai and Ziyi come face to face with the kingdom’s greatest tragedy, and Sarge unleashes the Hounds.

Missed an episode? Catch up:

PART 1: CASTLE CHARMING AFLUTTER FOR AUTUMNAL FLING! (WHO WILL MARRY OUR PRINCES GONE WILD?)

PART 2: PART 2: SMASHING PRINCESSES PARADE IN PUMPKINS!

PART 3: DRUNK PRINCE IN GAZEBO SHOCK

PART 4: WHO IS THE MIDNIGHT PRINCESS? Your most popular guesses, inside!

PART 5: FAIRY GODMOTHER SPOTTED IN GROTTO

PART 6: MIDNIGHT PRINCESS EXPOSED! Rookie Reporter Gets More Than He Bargained For With Unofficial Royal Interview.

Sheep Might Fly now has its own Twitter account: @sheepmightfly

and its own Tumblr account: Sheep Might Fly

Follow along for updates, previews and other Sheep Might Fly specific chatter!

Master list of Sheep Might Fly serials.

Support Tansy & Sheep Might Fly at Patreon.

Sheep Might Fly: Glass Slipper Scandal Part 6

New Sheep Might Fly episode update! Listen now on iTunes (or your own favourite podcast app). You can stream, download & follow Sheep Might Fly on Podbean.

GLASS SLIPPER SCANDAL

Charming is a kingdom where fairy tales come true, which has been bad news for its troubled royal family, but good news for the gutter press that thrives on the scandals and gossip provided by their teenage Princes Gone Wild. Kai is a rookie reporter at the Charming Herald. Dennis is a new Royal Hound, charged with protecting the self-destructive princes from disaster.

Disaster arrives in a pumpkin coach… The story of the century is wearing glass slippers… and Castle Charming will never be the same again.

PART 6: MIDNIGHT PRINCESS EXPOSED! Rookie Reporter Gets More Than He Bargained For With Unofficial Royal Interview.

Kai and Ziyi find a hiding place full of ink and tea, but mostly ink. She gets more of his backstory than he does of hers – anyone else starting to suspect that he’s a terrible reporter?

Missed an episode? Catch up:

PART 1: CASTLE CHARMING AFLUTTER FOR AUTUMNAL FLING! (WHO WILL MARRY OUR PRINCES GONE WILD?)

PART 2: PART 2: SMASHING PRINCESSES PARADE IN PUMPKINS!

PART 3: DRUNK PRINCE IN GAZEBO SHOCK

PART 4: WHO IS THE MIDNIGHT PRINCESS? Your most popular guesses, inside!

PART 5: FAIRY GODMOTHER SPOTTED IN GROTTO

Sheep Might Fly now has its own Twitter account: @sheepmightfly

and its own Tumblr account: Sheep Might Fly

Follow along for updates, previews and other Sheep Might Fly specific chatter!

Master list of Sheep Might Fly serials.

Support Tansy & Sheep Might Fly at Patreon.

Sheep Might Fly: Glass Slipper Scandal Part 5

New Sheep Might Fly episode update! Listen now on iTunes (or your own favourite podcast app). You can stream, download & follow Sheep Might Fly on Podbean.

GLASS SLIPPER SCANDAL

Charming is a kingdom where fairy tales come true, which has been bad news for its troubled royal family, but good news for the gutter press that thrives on the scandals and gossip provided by their teenage Princes Gone Wild. Kai is a rookie reporter at the Charming Herald. Dennis is a new Royal Hound, charged with protecting the self-destructive princes from disaster.

Disaster arrives in a pumpkin coach… The story of the century is wearing glass slippers… and Castle Charming will never be the same again.

PART 5: FAIRY GODMOTHER SPOTTED IN GROTTO!

Dennis and Jack sniff out the Sarge’s secret, Ziyi is so angry she could spit, and the story of the century falls unexpectedly into Kai’s lap.

Missed an episode? Catch up:

PART 1: CASTLE CHARMING AFLUTTER FOR AUTUMNAL FLING! (WHO WILL MARRY OUR PRINCES GONE WILD?)

PART 2: PART 2: SMASHING PRINCESSES PARADE IN PUMPKINS!

PART 3: DRUNK PRINCE IN GAZEBO SHOCK

PART 4: WHO IS THE MIDNIGHT PRINCESS? Your most popular guesses, inside!

Sheep Might Fly now has its own Twitter account: @sheepmightfly

and its own Tumblr account: Sheep Might Fly

Follow along for updates, previews and other Sheep Might Fly specific chatter!

Master list of Sheep Might Fly serials.

Support Tansy & Sheep Might Fly at Patreon.

Galactic Suburbia Episode 142 Show Notes

New episode available now for download or streaming!

In which the Hugo shortlist is more controversial as ever, but in the mean time we’ve been reading & watching some great things.

MANY APOLOGIES for sound issues on this episode – we didn’t catch an accidental microphone shift which means some background noise which should have been muted were not.

What’s New on the Internet?



Hugo Shortlist

Effect of slate nominations on Hugo Shortlist at File 770.com

The Rebirth of Rapunzel winners: Margaret Eve & Kate Laidley, we hope you enjoy your book prizes!

CULTURE CONSUMED

Alex: Rebirth of Rapunzel, Kate Forsyth; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein; Defying Doomsday, Tsana Dolichva and Holly Kench; The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, Kij Johnson

Alisa: Every Heart a Doorway; Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee; Orphan Black

Tansy: Deirdre Hall is the Devil, presented by Jodi McAlister; Teen Wolf, Downton Abbey, Doctor Horrible’s Singalong Blog, Buffy Season 1

Skype number: 03 90164171 (within Australia) +613 90164171 (from overseas)

Please send feedback to us at galacticsuburbia@gmail.com, follow us on Twitter at @galacticsuburbs, check out Galactic Suburbia Podcast on Facebook, support us at Patreon and don’t forget to leave a review on iTunes if you love us!

This Month on the Blog: April 2016

The Secret Lives of Friday Links

River Song: in the Hero Seat (a Great Ladies of Fiction essay, sponsored by Patreon supporter Heather Berberet)

Not If You Were The Last Short Story on Earth: April short story reviews

Sheep Might Fly podcast:

Glass Slipper Scandal Part 1

Glass Slipper Scandal Part 2

Glass Slipper Scandal Part 3

Glass Slipper Scandal Part 4

Galactic Suburbia

Episode 141: In which we stack up months of Culture Consumed into a glorious spiral tower of dubious structural integrity

Verity!

Episode 107: A Tale of Two Families (delving deep into “Aliens of London” and “World War Three”)

Elsewhere on the Internet



Sheep Might Fly has its own Tumblr and Twitter accounts!

I started a Jennifer Roberson reread over on Tor.com – remember the Cheysuli Chronicles?

Introducing the Cheysuli Reread and Book 1: Shapechangers

You can preorder a copy of And Then… the great big book of adventure tales over here at Indiegogo which includes novelettes and novellas by a bunch of exciting Aussie crime and SF authors – including my own story of assassins, trapeze artists and dragons: “Death at the Dragon Circus.”

Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth: April 2016

Every Heart a Doorway is a gorgeous, perfect novella from the twisted mind of Seanan McGuire, published by Tor.com. Part love letter (and suspicious side-eye) to the popular trope of children’s literature about accidental doorways into magical worlds, part slasher movie.

Seriously, it’s like all of my favourite fantasy novels of all time ganged up on each other for a game of murder that got a little too real.

Nancy is a wonderful, sad, thoroughly complex heroine, still mourning that she was made to leave the Land of the Dead (and still, like many other children at Eleanor West’s Home For Wayward Children, waiting and hoping to be invited back to her beloved magical land). Her new friends at the school are equally layered and fascinating, from Kade, the trans boy who was rejected from his magical land for not being the princess they thought he was (SO SAD) to bleak, former-assistant-to-mad-scientist Jack, and her pale, vampire groupie sister, Jill. Each of these children are shaped by the magical land they visited, and have been sent away from parents who can’t accept the change in them since their return.

Every Heart a Doorway is so sad and beautiful and clever and I can’t recommend this novella enough.

Kate Orman is one of those writers who I always make the time to read when a new (rare) story makes its way out into the world! “Keeping Mum” (Cosmos Online) is an emotionally fraught story about alien linguistics, brain surgery and how a distant race could invade the Earth without even setting foot here, by gifting us with advanced communication and cognitive skills.

“Touring with the Alien,” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld) deals with similar ideas to Orman’s story – humans who are altered in order to more effectively communicate with an unseen, unknowable alien lifeform – but this version is told as a dark, thought-provoking road trip between an confused, uptight alien host and his security detail – a woman still working through her own personal demons.

“The Destroyer,” by Tara Isabella Burton (Tor.com), is a weird and wonderful (and utterly horrid) mother-daughter mad scientist/robotics story, based in an alternate Rome [so basically, yes, a short story designed to hit all my buttons and become an instant favourite]. I’ve never read anything by Burton before, but will now be watching out for her name! Loved this piece so much.

Sheep Might Fly: Glass Slipper Scandal Part 4

New Sheep Might Fly episode update! Listen now on iTunes (or your own favourite podcast app). You can stream, download & follow Sheep Might Fly on Podbean.

GLASS SLIPPER SCANDAL

Charming is a kingdom where fairy tales come true, which has been bad news for its troubled royal family, but good news for the gutter press that thrives on the scandals and gossip provided by their teenage Princes Gone Wild. Kai is a rookie reporter at the Charming Herald. Dennis is a new Royal Hound, charged with protecting the self-destructive princes from disaster.

Disaster arrives in a pumpkin coach… The story of the century is wearing glass slippers… and Castle Charming will never be the same again.

PART 4: WHO IS THE MIDNIGHT PRINCESS? Your most popular guesses, inside!

In which gossip is better than coffee, and the first rule of glass slippers is that you don’t talk about glass slippers. Amira introduces Kai to the wonders of investigative journalism, while the king throws a tantrum about uppity princesses.

Missed an episode? Catch up:

PART 1: CASTLE CHARMING AFLUTTER FOR AUTUMNAL FLING! (WHO WILL MARRY OUR PRINCES GONE WILD?)

PART 2: PART 2: SMASHING PRINCESSES PARADE IN PUMPKINS!

PART 3: DRUNK PRINCE IN GAZEBO SHOCK

Sheep Might Fly now has its own Twitter account: @sheepmightfly

and its own Tumblr account: Sheep Might Fly

Follow along for updates, previews and other Sheep Might Fly specific chatter!

Master list of Sheep Might Fly serials.

Support Tansy & Sheep Might Fly at Patreon.

River Song: in the Hero Seat

Great Ladies of Fiction is a Patreon-sponsored essay series for tansyrr.com! One of the rewards at the $10 tier (Great Ladies Patron!) and at the $20 tier (Deluxe Super Special Queen-Emperor of Glorious Patronage) gives you the magical ability to choose any woman of history, fiction or art (yes, superhero comics count) for me to write about.

You can check out this and many other exciting Patreon rewards at my sponsorship page.

This essay is sponsored by Patreon supporter Heather Berberet.

River Song: in the Hero Seat (finally)

I have felt more and more defensive of my love of Professor River Song over the last couple of years. This wasn’t always the case – while she has always had something of a controversial/’problematic fave’ status in Doctor Who fandom, on the whole the pro-River voices were loud enough that I didn’t mind so much that there were so many fans who didn’t like what she represented – either the idea of the Doctor having a future romantic history at all, or there being a woman in his life who is better at stuff than he is.

River and her relationship with the TARDIS is an absolute gift, and I refuse to see it otherwise. Ditto: her dress sense, her attitude, almost all of her dialogue, the splendid actress who plays her, the rare occurrence of a confident female action hero who is over 40, and, well. I just really like River, okay?

While I’m at it, I loved all the ‘story arc/River Song’ episodes of Series 6, too. Talk about problematic faves! I don’t think it’s considered good etiquette in fandom to say anything positive about Series 6 at all (let alone Steven Moffat as a writer), but I found those episodes some of the most exciting, groundbreaking, character-rich and chaotically excellent stories of New Who, even if they didn’t always make 100% good sense.

The weakness of Season 6, to my mind, was that most of the non-arc/non-River Song episodes didn’t provide enough emotional depth to follow through on the episodes that Moffat wrote, but I’ve discussed this (and the disappointing resolution of the Amy baby storyline) elsewhere.

River, though. We learned so much about River in these episodes: the Impossible Astronaut, Day of the Moon, A Good Man Goes To War, Let’s Kill Hitler and The Wedding of River Song. The questions got bigger, the shoes got more fabulous, and then there was That Reveal, the one that our glamorous archaeologist secret agent, the Doctor’s future maybe-wife, was also Amy and Rory’s baby, conceived on board the TARDIS. In, apparently, bunk beds.

Somehow, it wasn’t the revelation that River lost her entire childhood or was separated from her parents or was part Time Lord (ish) or a bespoke assassin trained to be the perfect sociopathic muderer that was most controversial, at least among the viewers who had already taken River to their hearts.

No, the worst sin of the character was that she apparently chose the field of archaeology because she was “looking for a good man.”

Personally, it never occurred to me to take that line of dialogue seriously – not with River, who is constantly sarcastic and flippant to hide what she is really after. But many of River’s most ardent fans took that line as a knife in the back – and while their reading isn’t my reading, they are well within their rights to be offended.

River Song is defined by her relationship by the Doctor, it’s true. He is the protagonist of the show, it was bound to happen. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it. At the same time that fandom was coming to terms with the fact that the more we learned about River, the less mysterious and cool she became, there was also another conversation beginning to catch alight: the conversation about when and how the Doctor could be regenerated into a female character, and whether that would break the show’s pretty bendy format. It’s an important conversation, and the sidelining of characters like River and the female companions (who are to many of us, our prime audience identification figure) provides fuel for that important, fascinating conversation.

I grit my teeth whenever River is held up as the prime example of “why Steven Moffat can’t write women,” one of the most frustrating recurring fannish ideas about New Who. The River-Eleven relationship is definitely an example of one of Moffat’s recurring writing quirks, which is that he tends to write romantic pairings as if they just stepped out of a 1930’s screwball comedy (and maybe has not properly examined some of the problematic gender ideas that fall out when you start dreaming your script will be read by Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn). But the quirks (I won’t say faults) of Moffat’s writing apply as equally to his writing of men as they do to women, and it drives me up the wall when my beloved female characters from the show are regularly thrown under the bus as part of a hate campaign for the show runner.

Also, it’s astounding how often the ‘Moffat can’t write women’ meme is repeated not only among feminist fans who would like to see women treated with greater nuance or complexity on the show, but among those fans who feel the show would be better with fewer women in it altogether. Generalised criticisms like this are next to useless, and are often used to fuel the wrong argument – look how quickly the critique of the uncomfortable gender issues in Twilight caught on in popularity, shifting from ‘this sends the wrong message about romance to teenage girls’ to ‘women who like these books are stupid and the women who wrote the books is stupid, and really, women are stupid.’ (yes, I’m exaggerating, but try to find an argument about Twilight these days that doesn’t have at least a whiff of that)

It will be REALLY interesting to see if the Moffat hate (and specifically, the directed hatred of his female characters) continues to burn hotly among fans when his final season screens, now that they know he is leaving…

Anyway, River Song. I love her. I’d watch her shoot bad guys in amazing shoes while reciting the telephone book. But I will admit, after only getting to see glimpses of her narrative in the shadow of the Doctor for so long, I took particular pleasure from the appearances of River over the last year, both in the 2015 Christmas Special The Husbands of River Song and in her own 2016 audio series from Big Finish.

Having been arguing for years that it’s a bit much to criticise a character for having their narrative revolve entirely around the protagonist of the TV Show named after him… oh, it’s been lovely to see River reframed as her own hero. Because, of course, she’s REALLY GOOD AT PROTAGGING.

The Husbands of River Song felt like a giant apology letter to fans for that “looking for a good man” line and all the other little indignities that have sideswiped the character over the years. Here, with the Twelfth Doctor incognito and finally wearing a face she does not recognise, we not only get to see what River’s life is like when her sweetie is not around (four times as bonkers, as it happens), we also get to watch the Doctor himself witnessing it.

His offended face at her slew of husbands is pretty great. He thought he was special! But we also get to see his fondness for her, and his fascination at who she is and what she’s like when she doesn’t think he is watching her. We’ve had hints of this before – when she terrified the Dalek in The Big Bang, or when she warned Rory not to tell her old man of the violence she was capable of perpetrating (“He gets ever so cross”) but here the Doctor gets to eavesdrop on the true, hard-edged River. And he adores her even more.

All this, and in the closing moments of the episode, we finally get resolution to the relationship that was always told in the wrong order – finally they are both old enough and experienced enough with each other that the power dynamic is balanced instead of slightly creepy.

I seriously could watch a whole season of Alex Kingston and Peter Capaldi acting out River and Twelve’s final, super long marathon date together. I bet there’s a heist in there, somewhere. And space dragons.

That brings me to the wonderful recent audio series, The Diary of River Song, in which River Song is so completely the protagonist, that I finally admit – yes, this character is too good to be playing support, she should have had her own show YEARS AGO.

This is River at her glorious best – romping around the universe’s archaeological digs, glamorous parties, crashing spaceships and nearly dying several times over – as well as running into two separate versions of her beloved Doctor, only one of whom is real. If you’re one of those many fans who always felt a little cheated whenever a Doctor Who episode screened which didn’t have River in it, or if you felt she was badly served by the TV show, or if you loved every appearance and just want MORE…

Well, the Big Finish River is everything her fans deserve.

Tansy has also written about River Song, Amy Pond & the Steven Moffat era of Doctor Who in the following essays/posts/reviews:

Domesticating the Doctor IV: Marrying the Ponds

Domesticating the Doctor V: Divorcing the Ponds

Watching New Who: The Time Of Angels/Flesh & Stone

Why Amy Pond Must Live

Policing Amy Pond

For more of Tansy’s Doctor Who opinions, check her out on the Verity! Podcast.