In the interim, here are a couple of links that I like:

First, I point you to Con or Bust! That’s an effort, associated with the Carl Brandon Society, to assist fans of color to attend science fiction conventions. The last two years they’ve assisted people who wanted to go to WisCon, and they are looking at adding Arisia support next year. Con or Bust! funds come primarily from the auction of donated items. This year’s batch includes things such as pie from Nisi Shawl, getting yourself written in as a god in N. K. Jemisin’s upcoming novel, signed books, lots of crafted items, and more.

Second, James Nicoll is doing a project I thought about doing after my Pyr post last month, but hadn’t yet started. He’s going through all the speculative fiction publishers and tallying authors and protagonists by gender. He’s using the tag cooties to label these posts. Seems to be about two publishers/imprints a day. Head over there to see the numbers (which don’t look good for some publishers), but also to help by proofing his work. A lot of his protagonist marking is done by reading the promo copy for the book, so he can use people who’ve read the books in question to provide information about books.

And yes, this does mean I plan to do the occasional link roundup on the new blog.

It’s still coming.

However, one part has arrived. I’ve moved the Seattle Book Events page that I’ve hosted on Rat’s Reading for just under two years. Links to the old page should redirect to the new dedicated site. I’ll leave the redirect up for a while. Please update links and bookmarks though.

So, ta-da! If you want to know who’s talking and signing books in Seattle, check out the new site: Seattle Author Readings and Lectures.

Hosting it on a dedicated site means I’ll be able to introduce some new features for it eventually. Right now it’s basically the same thing as was here, with different formatting. Eventually, it’ll have it’s own associated Twitter account, blog, and maybe more.

I picked up Distances at WisCon last year, but it sat on my shelf for months. Earlier this month, the Carl Brandon Society gave it their Parallax Award for 2008, so I thought now was as opportune a time to read it as any.

The back cover blurb made the book out to be one that dealt with higher order math. I was worried that this would be too Greg Egan-esque for me. He’s the fellow who likes to write stories where the math itself is what is important, the characters are just foils for plot around the math. It’s generally been not my thing when I’ve read his short stories, but perhaps some day I’ll pick up one of his novels and see if it works better in long form.

Distances central character experiences math as a sixth sense, like vision or hearing. It turned out to be quite un-Egan like. Anasuya’s visions of mathematics for a key stretch are basically a form of virtual reality, requiring little of my It’s Been 20 Years Since I Took Math. I did not need a paper and pen to take notes while I read, as Egan recommends for his stuff.

Anasuya is a member of a tribe where most receive super-power like abilities sometime between the age of 5 and adolescence. Some learn languages for societies that don’t exist, for instance. Anasuya’s is the math thing, which first manifests as sensing the harmonies of waves as she swims. Her tribe is also very water oriented. Much of the plot takes place in a large city, where many tribes make appearances. Hers does not, though how she came to be in the city and not with her tribe comes much later. In the city, Anasuya works/studies at a temple devoted to mathematics, where offworld visitors come to get help mapping out some complex mathematics. As the best, Anasuya becomes the key person helping them.

Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy most of the book. What I did like was the world-building, which was inventive though not particularly well fleshed-out. The key problem was that it seemed so very disconnected at an individual level.

Anasuya lives in a pentad, a five-person coupling. Her living situation receives the focus for several scenes, and then only cameos afterward. The Master of her temple plays a large part in the beginning and once again toward the end. But in the middle he only pops in to criticize and then he’s gone. Anasuya sees a ghost in the machine as she explores the off-world mathematics. This Vara mouths to her that she must make art. Why? Why does she show up in the mathematical virtual reality? Why does Anasuya care so much about this non-corporeal being who can barely communicate with her? The reclusive member of the pentad goes away and the relationship for everyone else falls apart. How did the one who won’t talk to anyone else become key? I constantly had questions like these, for most of the characters.

It’s not that these things are wrong. It’s that I didn’t get any motivation or backstory for the characters. Got plenty for the cultures and the world, but not for the individuals. Distances might have succeeded better for me had it been novel length, with more space to get me invested.

Title: Distances
Author: Vandana Singh
Cover creator: Lynne Jensen Lampe (designer) / Thomas E. Duchamp (artist)
Series: Conversation Pieces; 23
Imprint / publisher: Aqueduct
Format: Paperback
Length: 154 p.
Publication date: December 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-933500-26-3

A Year of Feminist Classics also had Mariama Bâ’s So Long a Letter as a January read as well as Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

So Long a Letter is a letter from Ramatoulaye to her expatriate best friend Aissatou, the wife of her husband’s best friend. Both are first wives of men who suddenly took second wives. In the cases of the second marriages, neither of the first wives were consulted. Aissatou divorces her husband, learns a skill, and moves overseas to work in the country’s American embassy. Ramatoulaye remains married but lives separately and raises the couple’s 12 children alone. The start of the letter informs Aissatou that Ramatoulaye’s husband Modou Fall is dead. The rest of the letter relates her reaction to her widowhood and rehashes the history of her marriage to explain how she feels now.

The introduction to the book claims it to be one of the first books that presents African women not as victims. Perhaps that suggestion influenced how I viewed the book, as the practicality of Ramatoulaye shows through, as well as her resilience in the face of adversity. You can almost hear the Gloria Gaynor song fading in during the soundtrack to the movie version.

The two main women come across as flawed but sincere women who have strength and integrity. Both are educated. One second wife is portrayed as a conniving gold-digger, the other as a clueless dupe. Both of the husbands are weak, not able to face down their first wives or families. Not all men get that treatment. One of Ramatoulaye’s suitors is very dashing, intelligent, and thoughtful of Ramatoulaye’s needs without neglecting his own. I’m not sure how I feel about these portrayals. It feels just a tad manipulative, but for all I know, that’s exactly how most men who take second wives in Senegal act.

Ramatoulaye is interested in Senegal’s politics. She reminds her suitor, a member of parliament, that only 4 of the deputies are women, less than one per province. But it’s also clear that with the division of labor, women can’t participate very well. Ramatoulaye has 12 children under her care. Even before her husband abandoned her, she had little help from him in the day to day care of them. It’s not coincidence that women started gaining political power in the U.S. when they started having access to birth control (as ineffective as it was around the turn of the century) and could start reducing their family sizes. Which is one of the reasons why I think some the U.S. most effective aid is that which goes toward family planning.

One thing to note is that the polygamy portrayed here is not the polygamy most in the U.S. are familiar with, that of the fundamentalist Mormons. Although the women are young, they are not coerced or kept powerless. The harms caused are different than the ones we’re used to seeing. Abandonment and an inability to support families is what comes up in the book. Abuse is the problem we see in the states.

No links again this time. Check A Year of Feminist Classics for roundup posts and more discussion.

Title: So Long a Letter (originally Une si longue lettre)
Author: Mariama Bâ
Cover creator: Tony Richardson (designer) / John Montgomer (art)
Series: African Writers Series
Imprint / publisher: Heinemann / Pearson
Format: Paperback
Length: 96 p.
Publication date: September 2008 (originally 1979)
ISBN-13: 978-0-435913-52-6

However, there are a number of book blogging topics with which I’m done. So finished, that I’m not even going to tell you why. I’m just going to list out topics that I don’t read. If I realize an entry is about one of these, I go away. If I see a headline for it, I gloss over, never clicking through. Just done.

• Rules for book blogging
• Selling ARCs is evil
• What’s a good book review/reviewer
• Illegal electronic book downloads are evil/good
• Please support writer X who needs money
• Indies book stores vs. chain book stores
• Amazon has done something evil
• Digital rights management is evil
• Splogs are stealing book blog content
• Science fiction gets no respect
• Book blogging isn’t what it used to be
• How to promote your blog

Another few days of watching messages go by on Twitter and I could probably add another five to ten to the list.

I’m not saying these are bad topics. I’ve participated in these discussions and even written a post or two. I’m just done with them now. Said my piece. Won’t be swayed by yet more arguments. Not interested in convincing you. Sometimes didn’t care in the first place.

If they are topics that excite you, by all means post away. I ain’t telling you what to write. I think think people should write about anything that excites them. These topics excite people still. Just not me. It’s your internet; do with it what you want.

Photo by flickr user joshme17, used under a CC-By license.

What are you done with?

I read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as part of A Year of Feminist Classics.

Don’t read the book like I did though. That is to say, don’t go to Project Gutenberg, download the text, and read that. It’s tempting because it’s free. I discourage this not because it’s stealing from the author. No, I discourage this method because Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this book around 1790. In other words, because of the language and style of writing back then, I had know idea what she was talking about about 2/3 of the time. Sometimes it’s the archaic words, though those can be looked up. Sometimes it’s the context. Much of the text is a response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom I haven’t read, for instance. And some of it is just obtuse. I counted fifteen clauses in one sentence.

Do yourself a favor and buy an annotated and footnoted edition. You’ll get a lot more out of it than I did out of this.

Originally, I planned to write something more detailed. Instead, I think I am going to just put in some reactions I had as I read through the text, with just a little bit of context for each.

Introduction. The male pursues, the female yields—this is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. – Wollstonecraft makes lots of scientific pronouncements of fact that just aren’t so. I don’t think it’s unusual for the day and age. The scientific method didn’t become firmly established for another hundred years, was badly implemented often even then, and even intellectuals today get it wrong. Wollstonecraft invokes reason as the basis for modern thought, but reason and science aren’t exactly the same. To me, science should be the basis for knowledge and action, with reason as a supplement. Wollstonecraft’s reason is sometimes imperfect, but especially here it becomes awful because it is based on false premises. What’s more, and what stood out in this and a few other passages was that her false premises work against her ultimate aim, to secure rights for women. I don’t expect perfection from an early work of feminism (or even current ones), but it sure makes me cringe to see her blithely accept some of these things.

from every quarter, I have heard exclamations against masculine women, but where are they to be found? I love this bit. The internet did not spawn concern trolls.

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces Is that sarcasm? I sure hope so!

The Rights and Duties of Mankind Considered. Consequently the perfection of our nature and capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge, that distinguish the individual Wollstonecraft wants to base her vindication on first principles, which she considers to be reason, virtue, and knowledge. Certainly it’s a step up from divine revelation, but there’s a lot of fuzzy wiggle room in there, particularly with virtue. What one person considers to be virtuous is a sin to another. And shortly afterward, Wollstonecraft identifies a flaw in reason…

Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed Yup. We still do. In our defense, I think this failing is common to humanity. But it’s particularly dangerous to classes of people that do not have power when those in power do this.

the regal power, in a few generations, introduces idiotism into the noble stem Wollstonecraft has a very anti-authoritarian bent. Through the book, she criticizes kings, men, the military, and parents as their mere exercising of authority makes them stupid. I wonder what level of authority she would have found acceptable.

The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed. Many are the causes … that contribute to enslave women by cramping their understandings and sharpening their senses. One, perhaps, that does more mischief than all the rest, is their disregard of order. Wollstonecraft is careful to lay the blame for this one women’s education, but her overall frustration with how much women hurt their own causes comes through. She rails over and over against the predominant view that men think and women feel, and that’s the way things are supposed to be.

Youth is the season for love in both sexes, but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment, provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes the place of sensation. This is another thread that runs throughout the work, that how women are taught to behave isn’t a good basis for a lasting companionship. Being flirty and pretty is good to attract the attention of a man, but it isn’t good to hold it. Wollstonecraft repeatedly praises the value of friendship and respect in marriage. I don’t exactly cotton to her notion that gallant love has little place after the initial attraction has passed, but she’s quite correct that people really need to have something to talk about to make them effective long term.

however convenient [gentleness] may be found in a companion, that companion will ever be considered as an inferior, and only inspire a vapid tenderness, which easily degenerates into contempt. I don’t have anything to say about this one. It just needs quoting.

Let [women's] faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale. One of Wollstonecraft’s arguments seems to be, paraphrased, What have you got to lose? If I’m wrong, women will still be at the place they are intellectually, and it won’t have been imposed on us by fiat. She makes this argument over and over in various ways.

The Same Subject Continued. That a girl, condemned to sit for hours together listening to the idle chat of weak nurses or to attend at her mother’s toiler, will endeavor to join the conversation is, indeed very natural; and that she will imitate her mother or aunts, and muse herself by adorning her lifeless doll, as they do in dressing her, poor innocent babe! is undoubtedly a most natural consequence. Just pointing out that supposedly differences in the sexes don’t occur in a vacuum, so that even the differences that appear early in life aren’t necessarily innate. It’s passages such as this that make me think that Wollstonecraft sometimes uses the word “education” in a broad context, though sometimes she also uses it to refer only to formal teaching.

Observations on the State of Degradation to Which Woman is Reduced by Various Causes. I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving trivial attention, which men think it manly to pay attention to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority. Again, just needed quoting.

if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps, created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. There are likely underlying emotional differences between women and men due to differences in hormones, but I’m of the firm belief that they are generally minor. I think nearly all of the emotional differences are the result of cultural inculcation.

many girls become the dupes of a sincere affectionate heart, and still more are, as it may emphatically be termed, ruined before they know the difference between virtue and vice: and thus prepared by their education for infamy, they become infamous. Wollstonecraft laments the pernicious effect of what is now commonly called slut-shaming, but being a person of her times, sees the remedy as better education to avoid being a slut, rather than not shaming people. In a later passage, Wollstonecraft seems to be expressing even more dismay at people’s lack of sexual virtue than even those at the time held. There’s a streak of feminism that’s based on a prudish morality. That’s not surprising given that Western society as a whole has been pretty prudish. Feminism, for all it’s radicalness, can’t completely get away from the society from which it comes. The branches that I identify with more will be the ones that celebrate sexuality. Perhaps that’s merely the male gaze in me, but I’ll live with it.

Animadversions on Some of the Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt. As the conduct of a woman is subservient to the public opinion, her faith in matters of religion, should for that very reason, be subject to authority. Every daughter ought to be of the same religion as her mother, and every wife to be of the same religion as her husband … As they are not in a capacity to judge for themselves, they ought to abide by the decision of their fathers and husbands as confidently as by that of the church. What is to be the consequence, if the mother’s and husband’s opinion should chance not to agree? … Indeed, the husband may not have any religion to teach her though in such a situation she will be in great want of a support to her virtue, independent of worldly considerations. First, I had never heard the word “animadversion” before, and I love it. This chapter has Wollstonecraft doing what I’m doing here: quoting other writers on the woman’s place, and giving her comments. First up is Rousseau, who Wollstonecraft rightly calls out for his serious WTFery. If you are prone to religious bullshit, Rousseau’s advice is hideously dangerous to your eternal soul. Here you are going to heaven for your belief, and then you get married and your husband immediately consigns your soul to eternal damnation by making you believe sinful things. Of course, Wollstonecraft’s most dreaded fear is that the husband gives the woman no religion, which I should think would be an improvement over giving you one. Which also makes me wonder, was Deism as popular among Europe’s elite as it was among America’s around the same time?

true grace arises from some kind of independence of mind Quoting the section where she rips a Dr. Fordyce.

Modesty Comprehensively Considered and Not as a Sexual Virtue. What can be more disgusting than that impudent dross of gallantry, thought so manly, which makes many men stare insultingly at every female they meet? Is this respect for the sex? This loose behaviour shows such habitual depravity, such weakness of mind, that it is vain to expect much public or private virtue, till both men and women grow more modest — till men, curbing a sensual fondness for the sex, or and affectation of manly assurance, more properly speaking, impudence, treat each other with respect It would be hypocritical of me to rail against the male gaze because I do love to look at pretty women, but the woman does have a point.

On this account also, I object to [women being cloistered]. They were almost on a par with the double meanings, which shake the convivial table when the glass has circulated freely. But it vain to attempt to keep the heart pure, unless it is furnished with ideas. This is the passage I noted above, where it seems like Wollstonecraft is more prudish than those with whom she associates. They seem to have no problem with using double meanings in their dinner conversation, but it does upset our author.

Morality Undermined by Sexual Notions of the Importance of a Good Reputation. Although I agree with the gist of Wollstonecraft’s criticism that women bear the brunt of bad reputation effects, again her solution is to hold everyone to unreachable standards of sexual morality. Rather, I say, Good Reputation is Undermined by Sexual Notions of Morality. For the most part, people ought not to care about who people are fucking. That’s another time though.

Of the Pernicious Effects Which Arise From the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society. But what have women to do in society? I may be asked, but to loiter with easy grace, surely you would not condemn them all to suckle fools, and chronicle small beer! No. Women might study the art of healing, and be physicians as well as nurse. And midwifery … They might also study politics … Business of various kinds, they might likewise pursue. Another set of things that just needed quoting.

Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship, instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers — in a word, better citiznes. Which reminds me I do need to point out that although some of Wollstonecraft’s complaints about sexual prejudice remain relevant today (we still often assume women aren’t good at math), her prescriptions wouldn’t work today. In fact they didn’t really have the effect she thought they would when they were enacted.. She thought educating women would turn them into paragons of virtue. All she had to do was look at educated men to realized that education does not make people behave righteously. It makes them smarter, and able to stand on their own, which are sufficient reason alone. Don’t expect better government or business when women and minorities finally make it to the head of the table in force. They are as fallible as the rest of us in the patriarchy.

On National Education No quote here. This is the meat of Wollstonecraft’s policy prescription. By and large it’s come to pass in Western society. She proposes a government paid for and run system of school that will educate everyone, rich and poor, male and female. She desires for them to be day schools. That is, not boarding schools. Wollstonecraft felt that the approach of vacations made boarding schools a bad choice for education. They would be co-educational; she felt that was the only way to get teachers to treat the sexes equally. That also would allow the students to cross pollinate and develop grand passions for the arts, or politics, or whatever. Whether public schools have had the effect of reducing inequality I’ll leave for the exercises.

Oddly, I made few marks in the last chapter. The only big one is the portion where Wollstonecraft inveighs against novels. These days, novels and the theater are considered cultural. Some day, perhaps, reality television will be considered in the same manner.

No links to other blogs. I read that A Year of Feminist Classics will do some roundup posts, so follow them to see what other people are saying about the tome. I’m going to move on to January’s second book, So Long a letter, by Mariama Bâ. January is going to be a very feminist month. I’m also going to be reading the recent Carl Brandon Parallax Award winning Distances by Vandana Singh. The back cover blurb appears to make it out to be about math.

Title: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Author: Mary Wollstonecraft
Imprint / publisher: Project Gutenberg
Format: Electronic book
Length: approximately 120 p.
Publication date: September 2002

And after that overlong discussion about Slow River, I’m going to follow it up with a relatively short discussion of Gene Wolfe’s classic The Shadow of the Torturer, the first in his Book of the New Sun series. I’ve seen a few people call it a classic. I don’t get it. Sure, it doesn’t have all of the items I hate about fantasy but it has a few.

It’s dour, lifeless and ponderous. Not just the setting and characters. Also the plot and language.

It features an apparently lowly orphan who is destined to rise to a throne.

The protagonist starts on a journey, becomes part of a band of misfits, and participates in unconnected episodic adventures along the way.

At least it doesn’t have any magic. The book sort of hints at the fact that society has devolved from one that had inter-planetary travel and has lost contact with fellow worlds. Some of the scenery implies a technological past. See, it’s science fiction in fantasy guise! It needs far more of a selling point than this.

Other blogged reviews:

• Ruthless Culture
• Sandstorm Reviews
• bombastic bagman
• The OF Blog
• Das Übernerd

Title: The Shadow of the Torturer
Author: Gene Wolfe
Series: The Book of the New Sun; 1
Imprint / publisher: Pocket Books / Simon & Schuster
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 262 p.
Publication date: May 1981
ISBN-10: 0-671-54066-1

Nicola Griffith’s Slow River is the first selection of the Feminist Science Fiction Book Club that I joined. It’s also the first electronic book I’ve purchased from the Barnes & Noble bookstore. I am not impressed with the formatting job that Random House did to convert the book to epub (or whatever base format the B&N store uses). The book tells four stories of Frances Lorien van de Oest: before, during, immediately after and long after she is kidnapped. There’s no visual cue when the text transitions from one to another. No horizontal rule, no graphic, nothing. Every transition not done at a chapter break confused me until I figured out I was in a different setting. This could have been done much better.

The story itself qualifies as mundane s.f. In the somewhat near future, we appear to have suffered a slow ecological disaster due to pollutants. The van de Oest family business repairs environmental disasters, up to huge sizes. They also control the patents for a number of methods of clean up and for the genes for a number of bacteria and plants that are used in their methods. Consequently, they are very very rich. While the details are not central to the story, Griffith geeks out including some elaborate information on the running of a water treatment plant. Much more interesting than some of the hard s.f. that’s out there.

Slow River starts with Frances Lorien Lore van de Oest’s escape from her kidnappers. Bloody and beaten, she’s left on the street and no one will help her. No one except Spanner, who uses no other name in the book, who just happens to work outside the system in a number of scams. That suits Lore just fine; she does not want to resume her life as a member of one of the richest families in the world. She’s come to believe her father molested her siblings and wouldn’t pay the ransom to free Lore because she might reveal his perfidy.

So begins a life of grifting for Lore. But at the beginning of the book she’s also left Spanner, one of the four periods of Lore’s life that gets its own narrative. While still disillusioned by the rich life, she’s come to think of her life with Spanner as degrading. Assuming the identity of a recently deceased person, she takes a job as a grunt in a water treatment plant she’s qualified to manage and struggles to establish herself honestly based on her abilities. It’s not so easy though.

I didn’t care much for Lore in the first half of the book, but I did come to like her later on. Too much rich kid. Despite being a capable manager of large projects for the family business, she reverts to being a child after the kidnapping. I suspect I’m just a little too callous for wanting her to hold it together better. I also didn’t like that, at the water treatment plant, she couldn’t sit on her knowledge in order to maintain her fiction as a grunt. It was just too tempting for her to point out things that revealed she knew way more than a basic grunt would. I didn’t like these qualities. I kept on thinking If you want to live your life a certain way, you have to commit to it. Over the course of the book I gradually warmed to caring about what happened to Lore.

Still, my favorite character of the book was Cherry Magyar, Lore’s immediate supervisor at the water treatment plant. She’s got her position without adequate training and doesn’t have the power to do much about it, but was smart enough to know it. Magyar also had the self-assurance to listen to people who knew more even if they had a lower station. She treated her employees as genuine people on whose success hers depended. I checked Ms. Griffith’s web site, but I can’t tell if Magyar has featured in any other stories.

Pretty damn good book.

From here on out, I’m gonna write up some thoughts in preparation for the book club. These will contain spoilers, so look away if you care.

Everyone has a set of privileges that arise as a result of their race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, class, etc. For instance, I have the privilege of not working due to family inheritance and lucky timing in a former job. Some of my hard work went into getting me this position, but quite a bit more is the result of outside factors. More subtle is that I have different fears when travelling after dark than a woman generally would. I don’t have to worry about getting raped, for instance. I can also be driven and ambitious at work and be admired for it, while a woman runs a far greater risk of that attitude being viewed negatively. See how Hillary Clinton was treated in the media for a prime example of that.

In Slow River, Lore tries to renounce her privileges that stem from membership in the van de Oest family. She’s unsuccessful in a lot of ways. For one, she can’t unremember her education. She can’t unremember the confidence the family bred in her. Is it laudable to even try? Should someone give up their privilege just because someone else doesn’t have it? Most of Lore’s privileges are good. If she doesn’t use them as a sword, she could in good conscious keep them. Claire Light has a really good piece on privilege titled White Privilege in which she knocks out her thoughts on privilege that can and should be given up, and ones that can’t or are destructive to take away. I haven’t found anything to quibble with in her article, and I re-read it every few months since I came on it about a year ago.

Giving up privilege comes to a head in Slow River. Lore’s workplace is subject to sabotage, and people would die if Lore did not use her superior knowledge of water treatment to avert disaster. Her and Magyar’s budding attraction faces a test. Not only has Lore really lied, but their stations can no longer be viewed as equal.

While Lore can give up being van de Oest, she cannot give up the option of being van de Oest. Just having the option makes her different. When Lore reveals who she is to Cherry Magyar, Magyar’s reaction is angry:

I don’t understand. Why are you angry?

Because I feel like a fool Her nostrils were white. She was breathing hard. In, out. In. Out. Abruptly, she jerked her arm around, looked at her watch. We’ve already lost shift time. Time is money. Unless you’ve decided you’ve had enough of playing at poor little miss worker bee, I want you on-station in three minutes. And I’ll expect you to make up the time you’ve lost.

Just like that. Dismissed. But…

But what? Hand on hip.

But I’m Frances Lorien van de Oest! Didn’t she know what that meant? She could just dismiss me, as if I were anyone else … But she had. Which is what I wanted, wasn’t it — to be treated as a real person?

That she always had the option to return to the rich life meant she always had an out. It might be distasteful. It might have problems. But it’s something she can do that Magyar can’t. And for Magyar, the revelation of Lorien’s identity brings further complications. She’s now with someone who can walk away from her at any time. If she stays, it’s a testament to the relationship. Most of us, however, are with partners who can’t walk away from us free and clear. We shouldn’t want them with us merely because they have these ties, but they are something we assume and both get to live with and have to live with. Magyar runs a greater risk of her love walking away than most do, simply because she can without consequence.

A few years ago, I walked away from a high paying software development job. I took a job at Barnes & Noble shelving books. That I could walk away from that job at any time, that I didn’t depend on it in any way, made my experience there very different than most of the employees. If a customer got irate with me, I didn’t fear managerial backlash. Twice, managers publicly and overbearingly berated me. I shrugged it off. In fact, I told fellow employees to blame me if a problem came up, and I meant it. The job was a fun pastime for me.

A lot of the moral issues in Slow River deal with class issues. However, gender issues play a part too. Less as an item that is food for thought, I liked very much that the female characters got the majority of the ink. The Bechdel rule is so far in the rear view mirror that it puts the rest of the field to shame. Lesbian relationships merit no particular mention, they are presented as perfectly normal, and that’s exactly how it should be.

But Griffith does reverse some gender stereotypes though. Child sexual abuse features prominently, but the perpetrator is a woman. Not female sexual abuser as a sidekick to a male abuser, or even a teacher/counselor/person in power who exploits her position for favors from a vulnerable nubile young man. That’s something that rarely gets our approbation to the same extent that men using teen girls does. The van de Oest matriarch, the one who runs the business, molests her own children. I haven’t unwound my feelings toward this phenomena in general, and I haven’t the head space at the moment to do so even with the book as a spur. I think the role reversal is important to unpack though.

The last (at this time) moral issue brought to my mind by the novel is one of consent. For a chunk of the book describing Lore’s life with Spanner, Spanner’s normal scams are insufficient to live by, and Spanner turns to prostitution. Not only that, but Lore participates. Spanner drugs her. Griffith makes it somewhat less of a moral quandary later on by revealing that Lore got dosed only after the sex started. Things aren’t completely clear cut to me.

I don’t really call myself a feminist except in the broad sense of the word: I believe in equal political, social, and economics rights and opportunities for women. There’s a lot of different feminist theories, and I only know the beginning pieces of a few of them. I say this because I’m not sure where my next opinion falls in the grand scheme of feminism, if at all.

When negotiating consent, I don’t believe there’s a bright line that divides the acceptable from the unacceptable. There’s a lot of shades of gray. Things that fall to one end of the spectrum or another are clear. Situations in the middle are murky. One one hand, Lore has a (self-induced) power imbalance with Spanner, she can’t just walk away. She is also placed under the influence of drugs which make the experience pleasurable. Although after Lore’s initial decision has been made, she can’t change her mind when drugged like that, and she didn’t choose to take the drugs. On the other side of the ledger sit the fact that Lore participates for a year (if I remember correctly). She has ample opportunity to walk away, and eventually does. The length of time isn’t clearly on one side though. That inures a person. What’s one more time, since I’ve been doing it so long? Things can become acceptable in a person’s mind if they’ve been repeated long enough. In spite of Lore’s perception that Spanner holds power over her, she still holds her option of being Frances Lorien van de Oest, which tilts things strongly in her favor.

One reason why I don’t fall into the camp that consent is only legitimate if there is no power imbalance whatsoever is that power is never perfectly equal. It can be roughly equal. But at best, in my opinion, relative power between two people will shift from one person to another.

So I’m not sure where exactly I stand with regard to Lore’s consent to be pimped by Spanner. She doesn’t seem too worked up over that Spanner perpetrated a wrong against her, though she does question her own consent somewhat after she’s withdrawn it. Her attitude seems to be one of pragmatism, of moving on and not dwelling too much on it. That tends to be my own reaction to things, but I’ve also never felt as if I was pressured to do something sexually that I didn’t want to do. And I’m not likely ever to either.

Other blogged reviews:

• This Ain’t Livin’
• Libritouches
• Eve’s Alexandria

Title: Slow River
Author: Nicola Griffith
Imprint / publisher: Ballantine Books
Format: electronic book
Publication date: originally 1995
ISBN-13: 978-0-345-46448-4

However…

This list shows something else that is apparent. To my knowledge, Lou Anders is the only editor at Pyr, so that list comprises the entire Pyr 2010 catalog. According to Lou at the end of the list, that’s 30 novels. A whopping two were by a woman, Kay Kenyon. Another was co-authored by a woman. That’s 8.3% of the output for Pyr for last year (counting the co-authored book as ½).

That seems awfully low. So I checked Lou’s 2009 pimpage post: 28 books, 4 female authors, or 14%.

Total number of books on the Pyr catalog page: 107. Number by women: 13. And 2 that were co-authored by women. That’s 13%. I may have miscounted, and I may be unaware of a pseudonym.

I haven’t met Lou Anders, nor have I interacted at all with him even in blog comments or on Twitter. Despite my limited reading of his online writing, he’s always seemed like a fairly aware and forward looking guy. He was one of just a few people to mention a female author in an SF Signal Mind Meld I criticized a few years ago for similar reasons. Was I wrong? Is it just a blind spot? The parent company has an issue? Women aren’t submitting there? Is there something else I don’t know about? Did I really miscount? Is there a good reason for the number to be that low?