Rod Rees' can male writers successfully write female characters?

Or, as I like to think of it Or That Time Rees Established a Character Was Female by Having Her Admire Her Own Breasts in a Mirror.

Comments feature frank and educational exchange of opinions.

CBS Radio Workshop: Space Merchants Part 1 & Part 2 (Based on a novel by Kornbluth and Pohl)

Space Merchants Part 1
Space Merchants Part 2

In a world run by ad agencies, Mitch Courtenay wins the plum job of convincing consumers to move to the new colony on uninviting Venus. The malevolent Consies, wreckers seeking to undermine this utopian world of the future, oppose the project and some of them are far closer to Courtenay than he suspects.

There's some nice scene setting in the beginning of this but when I was listening to this I was really struck by how little agency the protagonist has. This is structured like he's undergoing character growth but really, it comes across as a process a lot closer to Stockholm Syndrome.

This is an example of the so-called Garbageman Novel (where a short term trend is extended to the point of absurdity). It was a very influential novel as well. From Wikipedia:

As with many significant works of science fiction, it was lexically inventive. The novel is cited by the Oxford English Dictionary as the first recorded source for a number of new words, including "soyaburger", "moon suit", "tri-di" for "three-dimensional", "R and D" for "research and development", "sucker-trap" for a shop aimed at gullible tourists, and one of the first uses of "muzak" as a generic term. It is also cited as the first incidence of "survey" as a verb meaning to carry out a poll.

An interesting addition to Wikipedia's entry on Weird Tales

In June 2013, Marvin Kaye returned to writers material he had previously accepted for publication and described as "excellent." In an impersonally addressed note he wrote, "Dear Contributor, I regret to inform you that the publisher of Weird Tales has decided to pass on quite a few stories, yours included. This is a measure to reduce our huge fiction inventory. If you have not sold your submission elsewhere, try us again in 9 months. If we have room at that time, it will be an automatic sale (but do remind us of this message!)." In a further note he commented, "I don't like having to do this, but the pressure to reopen the submission portal has been growing and we can't ignore it any longer." Online on June 24, at Adventures Fantastic, fantasy reviewer Keith West said the move was "an unheard-of thing to do." The background to the new development was described more fully in the introduction to an independently published eBook, Witchery: A Duo of Weird Tales. Author Keith Chapman told West he felt a duty to warn others.

It seems like solving the wrong problem to try to reopen submissions, given the relative lack of issues since the new regime took over at Weird Tales.

Elise Matthesen's "How to Report Sexual Harassment"

We’re geeks. We learn things and share, right? Well, this year at WisCon I learned firsthand how to report sexual harassment. In case you ever need or want to know, here’s what I learned and how it went.

A note to people in drought-plagued lands

Apparently me needing to walk from point A to point B outside summons rain.

The Science Fiction Book Club Reviews Revisited: 1956

List courtesy of Andrew Wheeler

Long.

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Tricia Sullivan's "a moment of burnt hat"

Yesterday on Facebook I saw that Liz Bourke had linked to Rod Rees’ little piece of codswallop, and I made a couple of bleary comments on her Facebook to the effect that (a) the guy can’t write and (b) the post was obviously just a cry for publicity for his sad little novels. Then I deleted my comments because I remembered I had sworn blind to myself that I would stay out of online stuff this summer and concentrate on writing my book.

But here we are again: sexual harassment, SFWA, marginalizing of women writers, the VIDA count…women in genre is the issue of the day. And what is happening at Jo Fletcher Books and with Rod Rees is, in my opinion, nothing more than an attempt to cash in on the outrage and frustration that so many women in this field are feeling. I know I’m bloody feeling it. I feel outraged and horrified about what’s happening in my workplace in the wider context of watching atrocities committed against women worldwide, of watching events in the US unfold that would have seemed unthinkable when I was growing up.

"BUT HE DIDN’T KNOW HE WAS HIJACKING YOUR SHIP: On Conference Creeps"

The pirates in the maritime industry were generally a great deal more polite than the creeps in the SFF world. They stuck to terms.

Not my end of town

The Science Fiction Book Club Reviews Revisited: 1957

List courtesy of Andrew Wheeler

Of the twelve offerings here, I have read three. Hrm. Although
those three I read and reread to pieces in the 1970s.

[This changed slightly]

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