Thursday News: More on Tor, the DOJ’s case against API, transgender children’s lit, and ‘must read’ book lists
Publishing NewsAPI / book lists / children's literature / copyright / DOJ / Internet / Irene Gallo / LGBTQ / sexism / Tor / transgender11 Comments
And Now For Something Completely Distempered 6/9 – If you’re still following the fallout from Tor’s Tom Doherty throwing Irene Gallo under a very big, very heavy bus, you should check out File 770, which has become one of my go-to sources for anything related to the Sad/Rabid Puppies and the current Hugo disaster. The site’s owner, Mike Glyer, rounds up a lot of different links, and there’s often engaging and wide-ranging discussion in the comments.
For those still wondering what the big deal is, I think Mary Robinette Kowal’s comment on the Tor site does a good job of illustrating one of the extremely troubling double standards on which Doherty’s open letter relies.
As one of your authors, I want to say openly that I find this apology upsetting. In a large part because I was directly harassed by a Tor employee and received no apology from the company. From the employee? Yes. But from Tor? No.
The fact that you are now defending the Sad Puppies campaign, even implicitly, and apologizing to them for being offended is really distressing. It implies things about the priorities of Tor that I find uncomfortable and would very much like to be wrong about. At the moment though, I feel as though the safety of women authors, and authors of color is less important to the company than the feelings of those who attack them. –File 770 & Tor
The DOJ’s Copyright Fetish Might Screw Up the Internet’s Future – One of the problems with having the government involved in copyright is that they’re usually not on the side of narrow interpretation and public rights. So it should be no surprise that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is currently hoping that the Supreme Court will not review a lower court ruling that held API to by copyrightable. What’s API? Read below. Why would this be bad? For many reasons, but a big one is that the broad use of these interfaces across many websites and content creators allows us all to use certain functions in a consistent (and easily accessible) way. Copyrighting API would make common functions (like the map example below) ridiculously complicated and expensive to execute, fundamentally changing the way we experience the Internet and operating systems (especially Android, because of its ubiquity).
“But what’s an API?” you ask. API stands for “application programming interface” and is essentially a way for software developers to interact with information on other sites or on their own sites. When you go to a restaurant’s website and see an embedded map of the location, the restaurant’s developers didn’t create the map from scratch. They merely used an API—perhaps the Google Maps or Mapbox API—to get a map for the location. An API lets one company build on another’s innovation; we don’t all have to create a global mapping company merely to give directions to our restaurants. An API obviously has two parts: the interface and the code behind it. The interface is essentially a shortcut available to others (imagine “1899 M St. NW location” or some other shortcut that probably every map developer already knows) and the code behind it is all the complicated computer lines that create the visual map. . . .
The case would also impact other technologies. According to a legal brief by 70 top computer scientists, uncopyrighted API interfaces have been essential to software innovation since at least the early 1980s. That brief provides example after example, including operating systems, computer languages, Internet protocols, and cloud computing, all of which have benefited from the assumption of uncopyrighted interfaces.–Forbes
Transgender Children’s Books Fill a Void and Break a Taboo – A nice piece on the growing popularity of children’s fiction that focuses on transgender characters and issues, including child and teen transgender protagonists, in a challenge to a persistent taboo in children’s and YA fiction. It has been only about ten years since Little, Brown published Luna, “the first young-adult novel with a transgender character to be released by a mainstream publisher,” and only 50 or so more books have been published in the meantime. The article notes that fiction aimed at 8-12 year olds is now the focus of novels featuring transgender characters who are more than minor players.
A few years ago, gender fluidity was rarely addressed in children’s and young adult fiction. It remained one of the last taboos in a publishing category that had already taken on difficult issues like suicide, drug abuse, rape and sex trafficking. But children’s literature is catching up to the broader culture, as stereotypes of transgender characters have given way to nuanced and sympathetic portrayals on TV shows like “Orange Is the New Black” and “Transparent.” . . .
More writers and publishers have started tackling the subject, not just with memoirs and self-help guides tailored to transgender youth, but through novels aimed at a broad readership. This year, children’s publishers are releasing around half a dozen novels in a spectrum of genres, including science fiction and young adult romance, that star transgender children and teenagers. “In our culture, it was really something that was in the shadows, but suddenly people are talking about it,” said David Levithan, vice president and publisher of Scholastic Press. “As our culture is starting to acknowledge transgender people and acknowledge that they are part of the fabric of who we are, literature is reflecting that.”--New York Times
30 Books You Need To Read Before You Turn 30 – What is it about literary must-read lists that hold such allure? This one in particular has shaking my head, trying to understand the logic behind urging readers in their 20s to pursue these particular 30 books before some magical cut-off point of their thirtieth birthday. Not that there aren’t some wonderful books on this list — Americanah, Persuasion, Middlemarch, the Invisible Man — along with some head-scratchers (Franzen’s The Corrections?? Really?!), but really, both the list and the age requirement feel schticky and prescriptive. I’m personally unconvinced of any self-improvement from reading Joyce’s Ulysses before my 30th birthday.
The much celebrated, sometimes maligned, decade is an undeniably impressionable one. You’ve happily exited your teens, slowly freeing yourself of the weighty angst you carried throughout high school. You might have one foot in college and the other in a career, even if you’re well beyond graduation, nestled comfortably in a new job — maybe even a relationship. But you’re probably not settled — financially, emotionally, spiritually, artistically. You’re aching for a philosophy, for a template for adulthood; anything that will anchor your constantly evolving life to solid ground. –Huffington Post
Hmm. I have read one book on that list- Persuasion, and tried-and-given-up-several-times on Midnight’s Children. Though I suppose I do have a couple of years of my twenties left if I wanted to attempt this list. However, I wouldn’t quite say I am “aching for a philosophy, for a template for adulthood; anything that will anchor your constantly evolving life to solid ground.”
(You are right, I couldn’t resist clicking to see the list contents, there really is an allure).
I read two of those in their recommended window, and one and a bit of one in my 30s. I really don’t think my age changed my perception of any of them. And seriously, of everything Vonnegut wrote, who picks a book of letters? (I read quite a bit by Vonnegut in college, but not that.)
That ship has sailed me by: I need 60 books before I turn 60 (which is such a depressing thought…)
But the way that list is written, I don’t want to read any of them. They sound difficult and worthy.
(I loved Americanah, but I bought it because Rosario’s review made it sound interesting: I’d never voluntarily buy a ‘raw portrait’ of anything.)
And I think you’d have to be really very bright to make much of Plato and Nietzsche just by reading them out of context. Maybe it’s a list for the elite.
The Tor situation is so disturbing, and the whole Sad/Rabid Puppies movement makes me sad. Vox Day used to freelance for a magazine I worked for in the 90s (though I don’t recall ever communicating with him directly), and I had no idea he was involved til now.
I mentioned the Forbes article to my husband, who works in high tech and he and I both read it in its entirety. He hopes Google wins, but at the same time, he wondered why Google used Java’s API when they could have avoided this lawsuit by using an open source API. Google is all about open source, and they clearly understood they were taking a risk because they rewrote all the code underneath the API. And Oracle is notorious for being a litigious company, one which had sued Microsoft in the past over Java and won. Google could have seen this lawsuit coming, and perhaps they even wanted such a lawsuit, in his opinion.
Sadly, I’ve only read one book on the list, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye which is devastating and excellent.
I tried to read the Nin erotica, and while the language was lovely, I had to stop early on because it was full of incest.
The proliferation of “read this before you die” lists really bothers me. Reading choice is so personal and while I’m not above shilling books to friends of similar tastes, the hubris of making such claims is a real deterrent to even looking at the lists. I gave up long ago when I came away feeling like a loser for not having read even a portion of so-called “best” lists.
OTOH, the now-closed Partners in Crime mystery bookstore on Greenwich Avenue in New York devoted an entire bookcase to their top 100 mystery books. The difference is that the display was offered as help and to spark interest, a reminder of past reads and pointer toward other possibilities; probably my favorite place in the entire store and an outstanding sales tool. It was all about what people liked, without the cudgel of “should.”
I’m surprised that the article on transgender fiction didn’t mention the manga series WANDERING SON. It’s a beautiful, sensitive, much lauded (both in Japan and in translation) series that depicts several young people struggling with gender identity through the equivalent of middle and high school years, with delicate but devastating realism. I have myself handed it to several “queer and questioning” young teens, one of whom told me that she “went to bed hugging [the first volume] every night” for weeks.
This is a more extensive list:
41 Transgender-friendly Books for Young Kids:
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/41-transgender-friendly-books-for-young-kids
@Kris Bock–thanks for the link. That’s a great list, and the discussion in the comments is really interesting.
@hapax: “I have myself handed it to several “queer and questioning” young teens, one of whom told me that she “went to bed hugging [the first volume] every night” for weeks. ”
– Wow! The power of good book.