Oh is this fucking science fiction

Time to take a break from Youtube NEEERD WEEK (LOL xP) where women are moaning about how good Dragon's Crown is and from tumblr where a bunch of white wahms are whining about how awesome that new Robin Thicke music video with tits is and let's read about what the fairer sex has been doing to ruin scifi.
Don't worry white women Robin Thicke had to get permission from his mom wife before he made the video so your misogyny is safe.
If I seem a little hostile to women today it's because I spent all dinner listening to some white knight try to get into a social justice warrior's pants so I've taken it upon myself to set womens' lib back at least five years with one blog entry.

This month's guest blog is by new novelist Jacqueline Koyanagi, whose novel Ascension, was recently released by Masque Books. This is definitely going on my TBR list: a starship engineer protag who's queer, disabled, and a woman of color? Count me in!

Yeah it's the fucking future and people can warp reality to move faster than the speed of light but you can't just fix someone's legs with implants you FUCKING IDIOT.
Also if any of you cunts posts at me about how one has nothing to do with the other if you really think people are going to live in space without cybernetics fixing how shitty being human is I'm going to find where you live and carefully explain to you how much of a fucking moron you are.

Guest blog:
I’m delighted to talk about my science-fantasy queer romance, Ascension, and its characters, the crew of the Tangled Axon. At its heart, it’s a story about found family and the lengths people will go to self-actualize, so I thought I’d focus on the characters for this post.

The main character, Alana, is a sky surgeon (starship engineer) who makes plenty of mistakes on her way to finding her place in the world.

Sky surgeon = starship engineer
are you fucking joking?
What's wrong with starship engineer?
Even EVE Online, which has sold me on such terms as Minmatar and Gallente managed to tone down the bullshit made up nonsense and still calls a spade a spade.
In fact the skill set in that game can often get a little too same-y.

Because the novel features her emotional journey through chronic illness, poverty, the trauma of loss, and falling in love, I chose to write it in first person and focus entirely on what’s subjectively important to Alana.

That turns out to be her undeniable passion for starships, the Tangled Axon in particular—a passion that borders on sensuality. In fact, she’s so taken with the Tangled Axon that her desire to be on the ship gives her a case of tunnel vision. Still, her innate talent for connecting to the suffering of ailing starships lends her an ability to diagnose and repair them that’s half-mystical in nature.

This really sounds awful.

We learn that this talent is connected to the abilities of her “spirit guide” sister, Nova, who makes a living lending her psycho-spiritual talents to clients. Anything from serving as muse at a writer’s retreat to divining paths to large profit margins at Fortune 500s. She finds Alana’s obsession with starships tiresome and pointless in a world where the need for engineers is becoming obsolete. I’ll let you read the book to find out why!

Technology has advanced to the point people live in space but clearly we'd have no need for people who can fix spaceships.

Day 2 dawned bright and early in the sense of me waking up at my usual time. I enjoyed a quiet breakfast in the lobby, met up with friends and did a bit of prep for my 10AM “Depictions of Aging in SF/F” panel. By the time it started, I realized I was getting a migraine and had cleverly forgotten my pills at home (this will be entertaining later), but we soldiered on, talking about our various likes (realistic portrayals of older characters,) and dislikes (magical fixes, body swaps), whether female writers in genre tend to do more realistic portrayals of aging than male writers (general impression was yes, and most recommendations were by female authors, but we agreed that we didn’t have a representative sample) and sundry recommendations.

>Body swaps are stupid because they aren't realistic
wow no wonder women can't write.
The point is you can do whatever you fucking want because it's the future. 

Diversicon 21 is looming large on the horizon. Next week, to be precise. We'll be kicking this off with a guest reading at DreamHaven Books, Comics and Art on Thursday, 8/1. 6:30-8:30, featuring Jack McDevitt, Roy C. Booth and me. The convention fun starts on Friday and runs through Sunday afternoon. I don't have my finalized schedule yet, but I'll be autographing, participating in the auction, talking about female werewolves, talking about LGBTQ fiction you should be reading, sfnal romance and science fiction organizations promoting diversity in the field. And probably something else that I've forgotten. Should be a good time.

Diversicon holy shit.

I met Rachael while working at the SFWA table at the 2012 Chicago Worldcon and have been enjoying her company on social media ever since. She's working on a series of 5 steampunk novellas for Musa Publishing which feature a bisexual Latina protagonist and her male sidekick. 

So there you go if you want some of that sweet, sweet social justice snowflake cash just remake your lead.
Instead of a badass war veteran with a cybernetic arm and eye make it an obese black transsexual furry twin spirit water basin in a wheel chair.
DOSH.
Because as I learned from this blog it's the fucking future but you can't just replace a lost limb with a robot one because that isn't social justice enough.

Sherlock Holmes is always a white guy.

To be fair, that’s how he was written over one hundred years ago, by someone who was also a white guy. White guys, as one might expect, have a long and glorious history in Western literature as both writer and subject. They’re everywhere. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that (hey, some of my best friends are white guys!) but I don’t think I’m alone in thirsting for a deeper taste of the glorious rainbow that is human existence.

Does Sherlock Holmes always have to be a white guy? 

Considering the guy who created him says he's a British guy I think the answer is yes.

Consider another hallowed canon of Western: all of the great Shakespearean heroes were white guys (with the sole exception of Othello, who was normally until modern times played by a white guy in makeup) as well. 

Until modern times
yeah because tons of black people lived in 17th century London.
Jack off.

There are sundry posts going about, including this one about from various publishing folks which emphasize to one degree or another, that they or their colleagues or their particular sfnal institution isn't biased against Group X, it's that they just don't get enough submissions. And as long as those submissions are of a "uniform quality" or "do not compromise on quality," they "read everyone equally." 

Not me, sister.
You're shit until you can prove otherwise.

So I'm a middle-aged cisgendered, lower middle-class woman of Northern European extraction with a university education (B.A./B.A., MA), born on the East Coast of the United States, now living in the Midwest after stints of living around the country, particularly in the South. I can read in one language besides English (Spanish). 

Read: white wahm whining about shit that isn't really any of her concern.

In general, the breadth of my high school and early college reading in what are regarded as English-language fictional "classics" is enough to make Harold Bloom weep for joy: Plato, Dante, Aquinas, Virgil, Euripides, Graves, Melville, Dickens, Thackery, Maugham, Foster, Austen, the Brontes, Shakespeare, large chunks of The Bible in various translations, Milton, Twain, Alcott,  Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov, to name a few. 

Look at all of those white men.

Do I or could I read all of them "equally"? No. That would be ridiculous and meaningless. I have favorites, I have things I read for class assignments, I have things I read because I was doing research. I have things I have read for editing, reviews or blurbing.

It''s clear that my reading has been pretty concentrated. There are no African authors or even African American authors listed above, or Asian authors, and very few women. 

My bookshelf is like 20% Asian so thanks I am totally inclusive and social justice up in this motherfucker.
I have the complete, unabridged Journey to the West next to the complete, unabridged A Dream of Red Mansions.
I am totally diverse. 
Or more specifically I have found almost all good writing comes from like 5 cultures on earth.
Sorry everyone not these places.

Hi everyone! I’m Susan Jane Bigelow, and I’m here today to talk about my new book, The Daughter Star. It’s the story of trade ship pilot Marta Grayline as she tries to care for her sister Beth, get answers to her questions, figure out her relationship with her long-distance girlfriend, and find the freedom she so desperately craves against a background of interplanetary war and alien intrigue. 

Boooooring.

Just found out that "Silver Moon" has been nominated for Best Speculative Fiction Book at the brand shiny new Bisexual Book Awards :-D

Bisexual Book Award.
Man.
I better just try for the good ol' Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick award.
All right I'm out like shout.