worryingly jolly batman

Linky link: eruthros is doing a version of the NPR list with nominations from fandom. Go, play! It is difficult! (I do sort of wish she wasn't including other media, though, that would have made life easier.)

Here are some links that have been keeping me going lately.

1. This one I may actually have linked to before, because I find myself returning to it regularly. Orson Scott Card, meet Alan Turing. This is a post at Feminist SF about Alan Turing, the British mathmatician who worked on cryptanalysis during the second world war (and was awarded the OBE for his work there), and was later chemically castrated by the British gvt for admitting to having sex with other men; and Orson Scott Card, the famous homophobe (and author of Ender's Game, the tremendously well-known and influential science fiction novel.) Yonmei at feminist SF makes a terrific point, beautifully (and movingly) put, that Orson Scott Card owns a great deal of his literary career to Turing's work; yet people who share Card's views on queer people were probably responsible for his early death by suicide. I've read this post about 10 times now. I just can't recommend it enough, and I think it a challenge, as clear as a bell, to SF fandom: stop tolerating this behaviour. Stop buying Card's books: many of the themes in science fiction we love today are derived from the work of a man who Card despises. Stop tolerating homophobia in SF. Stop tolerating transphobia in SF. Stop tolerating, basically, this bullshit. Stop tolerating racism and sexism. Science fiction is about change. It is about the possibility of a different future. But we need to start enacting change here, now, today.

2. The Top 100 Children's Novels. This list was derived from an online poll asking people to list the ten books that had influenced them most as a child, and why. The top 100 are being posted in a careful, illuminating manner, including posting pictures of covers, quoting from what people wrote when nominating the books, history of the books, and, notably, addressing significant flaws of the books (for example, she linked to numerous criticisms of Lynne Reid Banks' The Indian in the Cupboard, which is notable for its racist and inaccurate portrayal of its titular 'Indian'.)

What would your ten be? I've been thinking about this for a few days now, and I think I have some of them straight, but in no particular order:

10. JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit. This is one of the earliest books I read independently as a child, and in fact reading it is one of my earliest memories. It introduced me to fantasy and all its tropes, and I re-read it several times in my childhood and young adulthood - although I haven't re-read it for about five years. Must get on that sometime. Although I wouldn't say that this book changed or influenced me particularly - if it did, it must have done so much too early for me to now distinguish - it certainly influenced my future tastes, which in turn have, literally, changed my life; changed my friendships; and introduced me to the wide, weird, wonderful world that is fandom (because I read LOTR... and then became involved with fandom through a friend who first fell into fandom through theonering.net.) ETA: I ought to have said earlier that I do not underestimate the influence Tolkien's works had on the fantasy genre generally, which has included pervasive racism, sexism, and Eurocentrism. All of these things should be held in mind when considering Tolkien's enormous influence on the field.

9. Witi Ihimaera, The Whale Rider. One of the earliest distinctively New Zealand books I had ever read, and possibly the earliest book I ever read explicitly about Maori culture and its place in my native country, but I also remember noting its remarkable attitude to transsexuals and gay people (this is actually a real side note in the book, but it struck me at the time), to family, and to expectations.

8. Tamora Pierce, In the Hand of the Goddess. This is a weird pick, the second book in a series, and not, IMO, Pierce's best series, either. (That would be Protector of the Small, for those playing the home game.) This quartet, Pierce's earlist, is in mnay ways the most flawed: it has problems with race, espcially in the first book (Alanna: The First Adventure), but also in the third and fourth. This one, by dint of being set mostly in Tortall - the typical mostly-Europe country of epic fantasy - retains only the usual problems that epic fantasy has with race (monocultural, monoracial). However, this is the book I was reading when I met one of my best friends. It was one of the first fantasy books I read with a female protagonist. It was one of the first books I read that tackled feminism and women explicitly. Still one of not-very-many novels I have ever read that deal with getting your period, contraception, and having sex when you're ready for it. These have all had an ongoing effect on me.

7. David Hill, See Ya, Simon. The first novel I read about grief; the first novel I read about disability and illness; the first novel that ever made me cry. This book has returned to me every time I have had to deal with grief and every time I attempt to become less ablist (although from that perspective it remains a flawed novel.)

6= William Taylor, The Blue Lawn. The first novel I read about being queer, and in many ways this book has dated extremely; on the other hand, it's pretty brilliant for its time and expressive of the struggle for, I am sure, many young New Zealand gay men. (The reasons it's dated: this is very much one of those novels going Oh, It's So Hard To Be Gay, and although neither of the boys die, it doesn't have a happy ending. Optimistic, though.) Incidentally, this is also one of the earliest books I read that talked about the Holocaust, although it's only in retrospect that I realise that's what's going on for the grandmother. That William Taylor, he sure did go for Issue novels.

6= Paula Boock, Dare, Truth, or Promise. Another of my earliest queer novels, and probably the second novel I read, after In the Hand of the Goddess, that really discussed female sexuality. it has a happier, more defiant ending than The Blue Lawn, if I remember it correctly, and I should mention while I'm on these two novels that the experience of reading these novels and having them be set in New Zealand are part of the reason why David Levithan and Nancy Garden aren't here: it's not that I don't love them, but they meant less to me than these novels did.

4. Lois Lowry, Taking Care of Terrific. There is a category of children's and young adult novels that I always describe as 'plain and tall' (of course, a joking reference to the US children's historical novel Sarah, Plain and Tall, which is by the way much better than the Little House books.) 'Plain and tall' books are books with direct, unadorned language. They are lucid, they are clear, they address themselves directly at children and young adults, and they stand up tall in their subject matter, their unpretentious beauty, and their dignity. Lois Lowry's stand-alone books, which include this, Summer to Die, and Number the Stars fit in this category for me (so, by the way, do Sharon Creech and Katherine Patterson's novels: Bloomability and Bridge to Terabithia are nearly on this list). Taking Care of Terrific is, I'm guessing, a weird pick for Lois Lowry, because it's not one of her best-known - oh, Anastasia Krupnik, you are a truly great heroine. But this book is just... beautiful, and that's all I can say about it.

3. Louise Fitzhugh, Nobody's Family is Going to Change. Another weird pick. Harriet the Spy just didn't mean as much to me as Emma did. Overweight, black, angry Emma who wanted to grow up to be a judge to impress her father who thinks women can't be lawyers; who wants to stick up for her little brother, Willie, who wants to grow up to be a tapdancer; who joins the Children's Army looking for change and is let down by their beauracracy; who helps organise her branch to look out for each other. This book made a huge impression on me when I was eleven, which is how old I was when I stole a copy from the bookshelf at school (this was a very weird bookshelf, not part of the library, that contained partial sets of what I am guessing were books that had been previously studied at my school but weren't any longer.) Along with Taking Care of Terrific, this is one of the earliest books I read when I understood how different the US was. (Another one: Maniac Magee, of course.)

2. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. And here's an absolute classic. I'm sure I don't need to explain why this book is so high on my list.

1. Margaret Mahy, The Changeover. My first ever supernatural romance. 'Nuff said.

There's one person I wish I'd fit on here: Tessa Duder, whose courageous, bright, brilliant, influential, sporty, booky, drama-y, musical, overweight, underweight, Kiwi heroines are the women I'd most like to be when I grow up. Here's to Alex, Tiggie, Bingo, and Geraldine.