Extract from the famous Joanna Russ book of the same name.

Originally shared by Alexander M Zoltai

I enjoy reading novels from different cultural traditions, and a couple of these I will be looking into further.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

“[I]n the past decade, mainstream publishing has inched closer towards better representation, even if we’re still not quite there. Ken Liu’s Grace of Kings proved that an epic based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms could be just as popular as Game of Thrones; JY Yang’s Tensorate Series novellas have been racking up the awards nominations this year; and the anthology A Thousand Beginnings and Endings, a collection of reimagined Asian folklore and myths that has already garnered critical acclaim, comes out this year in June.

So here are five more recently published books about East Asian culture and history, by East Asian (diaspora) authors, that I wish I’d been able to find on shelves when I was younger. I’ve tried to pick books across genres and age groups (adult and YA) so that there’s something here that might appeal to everyone. Enjoy!”

Signal boost for a thing I endorse.

Originally shared by Jason Morningstar

Here’s a thing that happens all the time:

Someone creates a cool game, and it is met with deafening silence. It is hurled into the void and, despite its inherent genius, it is never played by anyone or heard from again. As a game designer this is as essential an experience as the act of creation. It happens to everyone.

But!

If somebody makes an intensely interesting game that speaks to an experience outside the mainstream, or somehow not aligned with a conventional narrative of violence and power, or just plain weird, the chances that nobody will touch it increase dramatically.

However!

The odds of that cool thing getting the slightest shred of attention increase when certain boxes are checked. The biggest boxes are “male” and “white”, and they correlate with things like resources and confidence, which of course correlate with privilege. Many times I have seen similar games enter the world at more or less the same time, with more or less the same built-in genius, and watched one succeed while the other fails. Guess who wrote the one that usually succeeds?

Even more troubling, I’ve seen games by marginalized creators that got zero traction essentially re-written to great acclaim. Sometimes it’s a “hack”. Sometimes it’s a business arrangement. Sometimes it is something else.

Here’s another thing that happens all the time:

People gather at a convention to socialize, and that socialization takes place in a very specific environment – at a bar, where “industry veterans”, genial raconteurs all, hold court among the various strata of friends and admirers. Social connections are forged, and sometimes these turn into business connections. At other times this exact milieu is where actual business is conducted. If you find this environment challenging for any one of a million reasons, hey, that’s on you. Somebody else is going to get the work, down the road. And the people who most easily integrate into this social space check the boxes I mentioned above.

Some friends of mine want to route around these problems a little bit, by putting the work of people for whom the systems in place don’t work super well in front of people who will be interested in them. The ultimate goal here is to connect creators – in this case marginalized creators – with people who buy games. And that’s the important part – sometimes games get praise for their brilliance and become critical darlings, but nobody buys them. And the very best way to thank a creator and encourage more brilliant work is to buy their stuff.

So now there’s More Seats At The Table, which has a newsletter and a Patreon. Subscribe to the newsletter and you are going to be exposed to weird, wonderful games by equally weird and wonderful people, many of whom are friends of mine and all of whom I resoundingly endorse. Support them on Patreon if you’d like to see clever end runs around a dysfunctional status quo succeed.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/moreseatsrpg

Newsletter: https://patreon.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=c71a6dc90e8b0c6728a9e2dcb&id=6eadbc8c82

Via The Fussy Librarian’s newsletter, an interview with some facepalm-worthy revelations from a romance author who doesn’t fit the industry’s prejudices.

Thought-provoking and well written.

I’ve speculated before about a difference between stories where the characters mainly act upon the world and stories where the world mainly acts on the characters being, in part, about how much agency the authors and readers perceive themselves as having.

Contrary to my own reading preference, prizewinning books are more likely to be by men, about men.

Via Sarah Rios.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

“A new journal to showcase Africa’s often-overlooked scientific research has been launched to give the continent’s scientists better global recognition.

Scientific African will be the first “mega-journal” in Africa. It was unveiled in Kigali last week at Africa’s biggest science conference, the Next Einstein Forum (NEF) conference, and the first issue is scheduled to be published at the end of the summer.

Its editor, Dr Benjamin Gyampoh, said the journal would address the problem of African scientists going unrecognised for pioneering work because they lacked access to quality publications.

[…]

Scientific African will be an open-access journal, with no subscription required.

“A lot of the science is publicly funded but then many of the journals charge quite a lot for access to it,” said Rose Mutiso, co-founder of the Mawazo institute in Kenya. She said many African institutions lack the budget for staff to access research from the most notable journals. “There is a big funding gap for science research in Africa. This creates a vicious cycle for African scientists who have issues accessing research and also publishing their work in places that will give them recognition.””

I’ve thought for a while that we don’t expect enough of boys and young men. And in other ways, we expect too much.

Yes.

Originally shared by Rocio Goodey

That’s probably a whole different college class where they teach that.