Ian Sales Apollo Quartet giveaway (WHICH I WON).
Lightspeed's enormous Queers Destroy Science Fiction issue (to buy).
Finally some robots I can actually identify with (spoiler they fall over, they are human, the machines may do everything better than us but they will never fall over as good as us, yes they can they are human).
Games: Fiasco on Tabletop. (Video. Had a freaky moment when I remembered who Wil Wheaton was / what he looked like the last time I saw him (doing an exam at Starfleet Academy shouting at some guy with a weird hand because the race of weird hand people like it when you shout at them)).
Jonathan McCalmont's list of top one reason why Guardians of the Galaxy reminds us of Star Wars.
Mars Terraform vid (Erik Wernquist / Jamie xx, via Martin Wisse).
Ignore the Rabid Herrings, I am the true enemy for thinking about 1 in 3 @futuristbot tweets actually sounds really interesting and cool.
austerity and the singularity pic.twitter.com/mct1yzTsYC
— futuristbot (@futuristbot) June 5, 2015
Feels like this was the month when everybody got a Patreon.
Here are Ethan Robinson's May picks of short SFF fiction (based on some really big broad reading). & via Ethan, stories by Rachel Reddick, and by Tao Lin (without increasing the hit meter lol).
Quick science fiction short story for you. "JERRY IS CREATING: SOCIAL CARE."
Did you enjoy it?
"Any time we try to envision a different world—without poverty, prisons, capitalism, war—we are engaging in science fiction." Laura Flanders interviewing Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Brown about Octavia's Brood.
Lana Polansky, Beyond the Sea: Subtext and Environmental Storytelling in Ecco the Dolphin (via Aisha's latest links list).
Sad Duppies / Rabid Duppies Podcast (Catapult): Episode 16: Alice Sola Kim & Dolan Morgan. Hosted by Jaime Alyse. "And it's not that I started writing like this book, but more that it got stuck in my head. Like my thoughts started to sound a little bit like the narrator of the audiobook, which I was listening to at like 1.5 speed to move through it more quickly [...]"
Ursula Le Guin? More like Versusula Le Amagone! Um, Ursula Le Guin on Amazon.
FREE SPEECH.
The Toast: A Woman Who Travels Back In Time And Doesn't Have Sex With Anyone. The Other Avengers Are Pretty Busy Right Now. Sir Gawain And The Green Knight.
I added a note / placekeeper thing about Invocation to Academia.edu. (Fwiw, Amazon are now very guarded about Kindle content updating, although I'm not sure it's always been / will always be that way (there's a risk of losing notes & highlights, you see)).
I can't remember where I found this
Cecily Kane on Game of Thrones: Sexual Violence in Epic Fantasy Follow-up & Linkspam: Sansa Stark.
Sarah Shoker: An Ambiguous Utopia: Science-Fiction and Fantasy as the Solution to our Problems? "Perhaps some would laugh at the idea that there’s any connection between elves and the social sciences [...]"
M. Harold Page series defending "traditional" high fantasy, dangling Strossblog lengths of discussion thread. Some interesting stuff here, although (having not read it all yet), it seems oddly thin on obvious (*) stuff like gender politics, and like how fantasy races (or species, you could say) relate contemporary identity politics more generally?
Meanwhile, next door in the gaming world, there's been discussion a-plenty. Here's a little more: Daniel Starkey on the tabletop RPG Ehdrigor. "Ehdrigohr starts from the base assumption that there are no colonizers. There are also no dwarves, orcs, elves, or gnomes. It's a world populated by nine nations of humans, inspired primarily by Native cultures and mythologies. They've learned to coexist with spirits and natural forces around them, but must also contend with monstrous creatures called 'Shivers' that emerge at night from dark places inside the Earth [...]."
OK, re that: three mini-theses on epic fantasy and race:
(1) It is the white supremacists, not the allegorists, who control the border with Fairy. It is difficult or impossible to "address race issues" by transposing them to the struggles of these fantastical beings, these tailor-made myths, transformed and enchanted figures and emblems, insofar as it is precisely the transposition to myth which always militates on behalf of racial domination.
(2) Fairy is definitively, constitutively oblique, and so is the systemic. Maybe they name the same thing. Invoking the systemic is starting to look as childish as invoking the mischief of fairies.
(3) Fantasy tries to honour the power of true names as a way of forgetting about the power of true slurs.
OKAY YOU'VE HAD YOUR TIME OFF FROM PUPPIES. GET BACK TO PUPPIES.
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