“Why I Think RaceFail Was The Bestest Thing Evar for Science Fiction & Fantasy”

This post is for MLK Day. It’s also prompted by the coincidental approximate anniversary of RaceFail, which began in January of last year. (Missed the fun? Google is your friend. But here is a good place to start.) For those who want the Twitter version, RaceFail was a several-months-long conversation about race in the context of science fiction and fantasy that sprawled across the blogosphere. It involved several thousand participants and spawned several hundred essays — and it hasn’t really ended yet, just slowed down. But the initial outburst was very frank, and frequently very heated, and over the course of the whole thing a number of well-known or influential personalities in the field said things that revealed problematic assumptions/thinking about people of color, or race issues in general. Hence the “fail” suffix.

Continue reading @N.K. Jemison.

Galaxy Science Fiction December 1954

Reverie

Mixed media on printer paper; digital.

A beautiful woman has no need – nor time – to be anything else.

Illustration by A. H. Fish, photo by Baron de Meyer.

A beautiful woman has no need — nor time — to be anything else. Among her virtues she must include courage, patience and perseverance, but the ends justify the means. Success in her chosen career allows her to achieve everything a woman could want — a jealous husband, envious friends, and the admiration of her grandchildren. Besides, it gives pleasure to appreciators and jobs to many nice and worthy people.
- “Vogue Body and Beauty Book” by Bronwen Meredith, 1977.

“Beautiful women of her type lose, in this matter of admiration alone, their tremendous sense of class distinction: they are obscurely aware that it is their mission to flash the jewel of their beauty before all men, so that they desire it and work to get the wealth to buy it. And thus be seduced by a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the future.”
- “The Return of the Solider” by Rebecca West, 1918