Sunday Links is not Friday Links
It was the Aurealis Awards last night! Congrats to all the winners, and to Nicole Murphy and her team for putting on what sounded like a great night. Here’s a Storify of how it all looked on social media, thanks to Sean the Blogonaut.
The Mary Sue reports on the King Joffrey statue that has been erected in New Zealand, which will be slowly toppled via social media hashtags. Does anyone else think it is SUPER CREEPY to be publicly desecrating the image of a real live teenage boy in public to promote a TV show? I don’t mean Joffrey – like anyone else who has read the books and watched the show up to this point, I am happy to see the kid bumped off as gruesomely as possible. But the statue depicts an ACTUAL teen actor, and surely he has enough trouble walking down the street without having rocks thrown at him without literally being destroyed in effigy in a public square.
Justine Larbalestier and Kate Elliott began their new book club, discussing bestselling fiction by women from other eras. First up: Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. (I read it for the first time in my early twenties after finding it in the uni library and was startled to discover it wasn’t an H Rider Haggard style lost world epic but a grim tale of failed glamour and pill-popping in Hollywood.)
Nisi Shawl writes about Reviewing the Other, with some fascinating insights into the ways that reviewers can help promote diversity but also the limitations placed upon them.
Cheryl Morgan responds to Nisi’s article with a thoughtful piece about how there is no such thing as an impersonal, objective review (nor should there be).
SL Huang asks the vital question – who chooses our recommended reading?
Foz Meadows has an important point to make about why the focus on losing weight in our culture is so insidious, and how the skewed images we get from media make it difficult for most people to tell what ‘overweight’ actually looks like, especially when it comes to female bodies.
The Verity Podcast bid farewell this week to Kate O’Mara, the actress who (among many other parts in her career) created the role of the Rani back in the 1980′s. Here’s a flashback link to my essay about The Mark of the Rani during my WHO50 project.
Saladin Ahmed talks about the badass female superheroes of pre-code comics.
