What To Read This Week: Hey Mickey, You’re So Fine

A few months ago, I was asked to curate a reprint short story over at Strange Horizons, which was a great honour and a lot of fun. I wanted to choose something personally significant, and Australian, and couldn’t do better than “My Lady Tongue” by Lucy Sussex, one of the first feminist science fiction stories that I ever read. Luckily when I re-read it to check, the suck fairy had not visited at all – and I think if read in historical context you can see what an important and awesome piece it is.

Read my introduction to “My Lady Tongue” here.

Read the story itself: My Lady Tongue, by Lucy Sussex (1988)

And oh look, it’s a podcast too!

There have also been a couple of books announced recently that I’m very excited about.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I am appearing in Speculative Fiction 2012, an anthology of online reviews, essays & commentary. This is a super exciting project, just the sort of book that SHOULD exist, and I was delighted that my Supergirl essay was picked up for it. It’s up on Amazon now!

This collection contains over fifty of the year’s best online essays and reviews, from Tansy Rayner Roberts on Supergirl to Lavie Tidhar on China Miéville to Aishwarya Subramanian on My Little Pony to Joe Abercrombie on, er, himself. It is a diverse collection of some of last year’s best and most interesting writing. We fully expect – and hope – it will cause discussion, debate and a bit of a ruckus.

The book also contains a foreword from Mur Lafferty, an introduction from this year’s editors (Justin Landon and myself) and an afterword from the 2012 editors, Ana Grilo and Thea James of The Booksmugglers.

All proceeds from sales of this book are donated to Room to Read, supporting literacy and gender equality in education around the world.

I’m also super bouncy that I just got a review copy of Queers Dig Time Lords, which will be coming out in early June. This, the latest of the pop culture series of essay collections from Mad Norwegian Press, is edited by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damien Thomas – and features so many great writers and friends of mine!

Check out the Table of Contents:

Queers Dig Time Lords

Table of Contents

Introduction, by John and Carole E. Barrowman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Editors’ Foreword, by Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas. . . . . 10

The Monster Queer is Camp, by Paul Magrs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Time, Space, Love, by Emily Asher-Perrin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

Seven Ways of Looking at Captain Jack,

by Mary Anne Mohanraj and Jed Hartman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Born Again Whovian, by David Llewellyn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Queer Doctor vs. Straight Trek?, by Paul Cockburn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Sub Texts: The Doctor and the Master’s Firsts and Lasts,

by Amal El-Mohtar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Nice TARDIS, by Jason Tucker. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

The Incredibly True Adventures of an Intellectual Fan Dyke,

by Sarah J. Groenewegen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Bi, Bye, by Tanya Huff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

In Praise of Mature Women, or Why Donna Noble and River Song

Totally Need to Call Me, by Jennifer Pelland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

We’re Here, We’re Queer, Rate Us on iTunes, by Erik Stadnik. . . . . . 96

Secrets and Lies, by Scot Clarke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103

Long Time Companions, by Melissa Scott. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

Jack Harkness’s Lessons on Memory and Hope

for Cranky, Old Queers, by Racheline Maltese. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115

My Straight Best Friend, by Nigel Fairs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

A Kiss from Romana: Lesbian Subtext in The Stones of Blood,

by Julia Rios . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

Bothersome Otherness, by Martin Warren. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140

PVC Made Me a Gay, by Gary Russell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150

Torchwood, Camp, and Queer Subjectivity, by Brit Mandelo. . . . . . . 156

The Doctor: A Strange Love, Or: How I Learned to Stop Hating

and Love the Who, by Hal Duncan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164

A Man is the Sum of His Memories, by Neil Chester . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

Spoilers: A Letter to Myself, Age 16, by Kaia Landelius. . . . . . . . . . . 186

The Heterosexual Agenda, by John Richards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193

Hey, Mickey, You’re So Fine, by Naamen Gobert Tihaun. . . . . . . . . 202

Mutants, Monsters, Mutts, and Mentiads,

by Cody Quijano-Schell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209

Same Old Me, Different Face: Transition, Regeneration,

and Change, by Susan Jane Bigelow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

The Girl Who Waited (for the Guidance Counselor

to Get to His Point), by Rachel Swirsky. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223

One of my favourite things about these books are the essay titles.