I’ve won a book on Haikasoru’s latest contest. I hope it gets here in one piece! My Book Depository orders get here without problems, but I’ve had books won in contests end up completely lost in transit.

They had an interesting topic: the future of gender, so I’m going to reproduce my answer.

The questions were: “What is the future of gender? Is gender static, or does it shift naturally? Can it, and should it, be manipulated purposefully for scientific or social ends?”

I think gender and sexuality are going to become increasingly flexible with the progress of medical science, but that doesn’t mean they are going to become less important, or irrelevant. To the contrary, people tend to be especially attached to the identities they themselves choose – for example, people who convert to another religion tend to be more vocal about religion than people who stay with their parents’ religion.

Yay Genderform already lists 947 different possibilities, and the list goes on… I think writers often manage to reinvent the wheel, and come up with groups intended to be fictional which already exist. (Not really gender-related, but the other day I even managed to find a story in this year’s Hugo crop which seemed to reinvent Asperger syndrome.) Worse still, the fictionalized group often ends up treated as inhuman in the story universe. I’m hesitant to link to TVTropes because it can eat up time like nothing else, but the Hermaphrodite page is a good example, featuring only a few realistic portrayals of intersexual characters and a lot of, um, alien porn or straight-up fetishism.

A discussion on fictional gender might seem like a diversion from the future of gender, but what I’m trying to say is, the future is already here, it just goes unnoticed by the people who are not “early adopters”. As for whether gender should be manipulated purposefully, my answer is more or less the same – if it can be done, it will eventually be done, and in many cases, it has already been done!

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Tim Lieder is taking submissions for his second anthology of Bible-themed horror stories. I thought the first one was awesome (I didn’t like the Catherynne Valente story, though) and I’m all for Bible fiction, so this is great news. Submit stuff, I want to read the anthology as soon as it comes out

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You can’t be pro-GLBT and still work to exclude transgender and transsexual people, that’s a contradiction in terms. Harvard University still tries to pull it off – post by DesiArcy.

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I realized Amazon also sold clothing items, so I decided to search for clothing items I like to wear – for example, wrap skirts. It’s not that I’m going to order anything from Amazon – the shipping would probably cost much than the actual product – but it’s a fun diversion, you know?

Except it was The Lulzy Fail. Apparently everything that even vaguely resembles clothing I wear is somehow “exotic”, “tribal” or “Gypsy”. (These items have nothing to do with actual Gypsy clothing, but nevermind.)

If you don’t know me in person – I wear two kinds of clothing. Either the “all black with metallic implements of torture” type of oldschool rivethead clothing (with a dash of goth or punk) or loose clothing with color prints.  This time I was looking for the latter, since the former is usually just a black skirt, a black shirt and my mostly self-made accessories, I don’t need an online store for that.

I like bright colors and busy prints, ideally both at the same time, but I often have to compromise on bright colors (sigh!) since it’s hard to buy this type of clothing locally. As a religious Jew I’m also a modest dresser, which really constrains the type of clothing I can buy in mainstream shops, even when I’m taking layering into account.

So I am apparently Super Exotic because I wear long skirts. Go me?

The short story reviews are back after the interruption… Again, spoilers are marked with white.

Clarkesworld #56, May 2011

Whose Face This Is I Do Not Know by Cat Rambo (an American woman)

Last week, I had a strange idea. Sometime in the far future, I’d like to edit a thematic anthology which features body horror stories without the horror… or more accurately, without the revulsion. Body horror is usually presented in a bad way. The character changes into something in a quite graphic manner, and this is presented as horrifying and possibly evil. Stories which still have quite graphic elements, but where the reader is expected to feel the events are good and moral for some reason, or just neutral and normal, are few and far between… even though speculative fiction is supposed to be (at least in part) about just how far the human condition extends.

This story could possibly qualify, though it is not really graphic. The main character is a shapeshifter, but the usual tired tropes about shapeshifting do not apply. For example, when someone dies, everyone (including the reader) expects the shapeshifter killed them, but it turns out the shapeshifter was telling the truth that it was an accident. All throughout the reader is left rooting for the shapeshifter, and in my opinion that’s a Very Good Thing and something so often lacking in modern Western SF. (A Russian parallel I really liked was the Stars duology by Sergei Lukyanenko, unfortunately not available in English yet.) The fictional Other is usually evil, demonized, disgusting – the restraint writers try to exercise when writing about real Others is usually gone and their xenophobia shows through clearly. Not here, and thank Cat Rambo for that.

We still have the evil mad scientist trope – by now you probably know this is one of my pet peeves -, but in this story the scientist is more of a greedy jerk than the classic mad scientist.

The Architect of Heaven by Jason K. Chapman (an American man)

I simply could not get into this story. It starts off very slowly and does not really pick up steam until the second half. A friend of mine showed me The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test the other day and I couldn’t get it out of my head while reading The Architect of Heaven. Trent is extremely rich, extremely popular, and people readily sacrifice their lives for him. This would not be necessarily bad in itself, but I saw nothing in the story that would’ve made me feel that yes, Trent really was that kind of guy. The characterization just wasn’t strong enough for the rest to be believable.

I wasn’t sure if there was a gay subplot, because it is never discussed explicitly, but if there is, then that’s probably worse, because of course the gay man ends up sacrificing himself for the straight guy. LJ user prusik posted a lengthy analysis, so I’m not going to go into more detail; this is definitely not one of the cases where I notice something about a story that no one else has pointed out yet.

I’m writing an article on the characterization of Eastern Europeans, so I’m not going to comment on the stereotyped Russian… and the stereotyped Chinese, either. But I think this story is going to make an apparance in the article…

I have a new story online! I wrote it back in December (I think…) when my friend Dash mentioned Innsmouth Free Press (a Mythos webzine) was looking for submissions to an upcoming multiethnic issue. It straddles the boundary between light horror and urban fantasy… it’s an oddball combination of Hungarian urban myths, Cthulhu Mythos, and my childhood. You can read the issue online or download a nice PDF.

I have to admit I have not written a single story since The Turul Spreads Its Wings (forthcoming in the Roar of the Crowd anthology!). If you’re interested in the chronology, Bottomless Lake Bus Stop came earlier.

I will have to spend a sizable portion of the summer writing – besides fiction, I also have several scientific articles to finish and submit! (See my previous entry.)