Ursula K. Le Guin reading from "Always Coming Home" at Potlatch 18, streamed into Second Life

I read The Dispossessed for the first time during my junior year of college, and its lesson, in a friend’s words, that “it’s always more complicated” has stayed with me, even if I don’t always remember it. Three Roads Four Ways to Forgiveness should be read by any would-be liberator from oppression.

Earlier this year, I was very happy to help arrange for her reading from Always Coming Home at Potlatch, a small literary SF convention, to be streamed into Second Life. Every time I see that screen shot, I can’t help but think that she’s conversing with the machine intelligences in the City of Mind.

Happy Birthday, Ms. Le Guin, and thank you for your books.

We ran into Timmi Duchamp, the publisher, at the Minneapolis airport. We were all on the same connecting flight to Madison for WisCon 33. So we got to see the finished book.

Forgive the crappy iPhone picture here. I’ll replace it with a better one of Cynthia holding her contributor copy after she gets it in the mail.

Duchamp’s imprint, Aqueduct Press, has published a volume of essays related to each year’s convention, starting with WisCon 30. Lst year at WisCon 32, the big conversations were about race, fandom, and feminism as well as trolling. Cynthia’s essay is a response to the troll who showed up and trashed the people on a panel she moderated last year.

If the troll wanted people to shut up about feminism, race, and gender, they failed since Sylvia Kelso, an Australian fan and writer, will edit the WisCon 33 volume.

Shawl is also co-author, with Cynthia Ward, of Writing the Other: A Practical Guide, a handbook on writing characters from different cultures, genders, and sexual orientations than your own.

Hooray for Nissi and Patrick! See you at WisCon.

Also of interest to readers of this blog, Charlie Stross’ Glasshouse was on the short list.

More details in the press release. Waiting for tiptree.org to be updated.

The dearth of women nominated for last year’s Hugos lead to a proactive response for the 2008 cycle, including:

• A list of women writers eligible for the major genre awards.
• The SF Book Swap to share eligible books.
• A Live Journal Community for reviewing eligible works (created as I write, by the people on the sofa opposite me.)

The deadline for nominations is March 1, 2008, so if you’re looking for books to read, check the sites listed above for suggestions, and blog your reviews.

You wouldn’t be surprised to meet Ruby enthusiasts at a Japanese science fiction convention.

Shimura’s got embedded Ruby running in Illustrator. Press a button, and that evals to ’7′.

The back story: Shimura’s part of Cafe Scifi+tique, a performance event put together by Japanese science fiction fans to invert and parody the creepy ‘maid cafe’ scene.

Cyn and I paid 500 JPY each to sit down with an actual scientist while we were served tea and juice for a half hour.

The annoying thing is that the mad scientist cafe’s set up in the far part of the convention hall, while another group’s running a maid cafe in the main exhibit hall.

WTF, gentlemen? You know there’s a conversation that could be had about marketing, and product design. For instance: how are those decorations on the lid going to survive being lugged about in someone’s laptop bag? What makes you think women are going to buy computers just because someone’s put rhinestones on one would want to buy a particular computer because it has rhinestones on the lid? And that’s rather large for a laptop, don’t you think? But comments concerning your assessment of the model’s perceived attractiveness? Not relevant, and stop doing that. You’re just embarrassing yourselves.

In most cases, you will destroy your career if you report sexual harassment. So unless you are in physical danger, you should not report harassment.

Someone asked me today what my values were, and I said fairness is one of them. So it hurt to read someone tell people to ignore harassment at work. An employee that’s harassed will be less productive, or they will quit. A good employee leaves, and you still have a problem, as well as the expensive task of filling that vacancy. An employee who harasses not only hurts their targets, they are breaking your organization.

If you’re being harassed at work, talk to your manager, your director, or HR representative. If that doesn’t help, seek council. If you know a resource suggest it in the comments.

Update: in the comments, Karen Anderson relates her experience with a harasser at work, and the difficulty in getting evidence. However, as Cynthia’s late father said, “Karma is a bitch.” The harasser got his due in the end.

Celebrating the Fabulous Work of Pat Cadigan, Queen of Cyberpunk

Saturday, 10:00-11:15 a.m.

SF writer Pat Cadigan’s novels take us inside the lives of cybernetic therapists, cops, media artists, and even the dead. Cadigan’s futures are both fantastic and believable, intertwining virtual and real worlds in a way now part of the lives of many geeks. While science fiction has a lousy track record predicting the future, Cadigan’s novels and stories anticipate the questions we’re dealing with in our blogs and “Second Lives”.

M: Maureen Kincaid Speller, Fred Schepartz, Margaret McBride, Bill Humphries, Penny Hill

I wish we would have had this panel last year when Pat came out from London for WisCon 30. Still, a wonderful reason to reread Mindplayers, and Synners

Outsourcing And The Auxiliary Brain

Saturday, 2:30-3:45 p.m.

Your meat brain has only so much capacity, and it wasn’t designed for a technological society. But suppose you could pop in a small, high-tech auxiliary brain to augment your natural abilities. Where would that lead? To what degree is it a good idea to outsource your brain?

Melissa Scott, M: Kimberley Long-Ewing, Jordin T. Kare, Bill Humphries, R. Emrys Gordon

We’re already doing that with Google hosting our email, blogs, and documents. Shelley Powers discovered one danger in outsourcing your memory. We can remember it for you wholesale, indeed. Insist on open source, because it’d be a downer to have to pay Redmond or Mountain View to remember the birth of your first child.

I heard about Ms. Sierra canceling her ETech presentation when Liz Henry IM’ed me this afternoon, and she wrote a powerful response, along with a challenge for all of us:

I’d like to make a call to action. When this kind of shit happens, we’ll call it out and document it in public. Call it in the moment. Call it in front of your coworkers. Call it if it’s major or if it’s minor, it’s all part of the same spectrum of misogynist behavior. How about just saying, once in a while, right in the moment if you can, “That’s not funny,” when it’s really not. Say it crosses your boundaries. Say it’s not acceptable to you. This takes practice, but with time, we can all do it and find strength in numbers.