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August 25th, 2025: PS I WON A HUGO LAST SATURDAY, AHHHHH (SORRY I WILL STOP SHOUTING ABOUT IT NOW, IT'S JUST, AHHHHH) – Ryan | ||
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Me, trying to explain to Spice that the reason I’m spending so much time with the foster kittens is that they have to be socialized to human contact, not because I love them more than the other cats in the house. Spice is, shall we say, unconvinced. I just pray that somehow, we will get through this moment of relationship tension. Perhaps a Churu will help.
(The foster kittens are doing great, thanks for asking.)
— JS
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Many years ago, I had a dream and that I was singing “Yellow” by Coldplay while accompanying myself on guitar, and eventually a crowd surrounded me and sang along. When the song was done, I looked to the assembled crowd and said how wonderful it was that we were all singing along. And someone said, “we weren’t singing along with you. We were trying to drown you out.”
Anyway, here’s me singing “Yellow” by Coldplay. And yes, I played guitar on it. So there!
— JS
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The weekend is here and that’s a fine time to catch up with a book! Here are this week’s new books and ARCs that have come to the Scalzi Compound. What’s calling to you? Share in the comments!
— JS
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August 22nd, 2025: PS I WON A HUGO ON SATURDAY, AHHHHH – Ryan | ||
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muchtooarrogantalycewilson, and you can read her excellent entry here. I think you can read our stories in any order.alycewilson was kind enough to indulge my flight of fancy, and I hope you enjoy both our entries this week.girlgenius_main_feedhafniashadaras came out to visit. This should probably be its own coherent "here is what we did and how it went" post at some point in time, but considering how meh I am at posting in general, well. You get a tiny update about it. scalziwhatever_feedThe other day Athena noted that kittens had shown up in the parking lot of Bryant’s apartment. Sadly, between then and now one of the kittens succumbed to the dangers of outside living, and Athena and Bryant decided it was time to snatch the remaining trio of kittens and move them to a safer environment, i.e., our basement guest room. That cat-napping took place this afternoon and now we have the three kittens in the house. Here they are:
First, this cute little calico;
Then this dilute tortie;
And also this personality-filled black kitten.
We’re isolating them from the rest of the cats in the house until we can get them to the vet next week, but they certainly seem healthy and, once they got over being snatched and transported somewhere they’ve never been before, calm and baseline-level kittenish. The calico and tortie are almost certainly girl cats, genetically speaking; the black kitten is currently of indeterminate sex but I would bet on it being a boy. The three of them get along pretty well, which considering how Athena and Bryant found them, is not entirely surprising.
The plan now is to take them to the vet, confirm that they are healthy, and then either find them new homes or surrender them to a no-kill shelter. We can maybe take one of them (likely the black cat), but we’re also all right letting the entire trio go to safe and welcoming homes. So: If any of you are looking for a kitten (or two!), and can show up to take them away, we’ve got some available for you! Drop me an email (john@scalzi.com) and we can talk. These kittens are, as the kids no longer say, totes adorbs. They would love to come home with you.
— JS
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Author Jane Harrington has more in store today than a book. In her Big Idea she brings us a history lesson, one that will change how you see the entire genre of fairy tales. Follow along to see how teaching this lesson to college students led to the creation of her new book, Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance.
JANE HARRINGTON:
The desire to restore the legacies of marginalized women writers in history was the impetus for this book. And anger.
Some years ago I was called upon to teach a college literature course, and though I’m generally more comfortable teaching writing than lit, I thought, Okay, how about fairy tales? I knew my Perrault, Grimms, Andersen, and Disney, so I could put together something decent enough. It would be fun! But it wasn’t long into the first term before not-so-fun questions started poking at my brain.
One was Why do male writers overwhelmingly dominate the history of fairy tales? The only so-called classic tale with female authorship is “Beauty and the Beast.” And Why do we even call these stories fairy tales? I mean, you can count on one hand how many fairies appear in the combined works of the aforenamed fathers of the genre. Turns out the answer to both questions is the same: because the women writers who were responsible for the popularity of fairy tales—and who coined the term itself, contes de fées (because they were French)—were axed from the canon in favor of male writers. And, yes, there were fairies in every one of their seventy-plus tales.
My first glimpse of these women was in the margins of English-language folklore scholarship, which tends to focus on German, i.e., Grimm-ish, roots, and thus can lack depth in other areas. What was said about them was scant, somewhat dismissive, and (I would only learn later) often inaccurate. But they were female fairy-talers—conteuses, they called themselves—and I wanted to include them in my course.
So began my quest, which involved walls of books growing around me, thanks to an excellent university library and charming librarians who conjured up dozens of physical volumes from beyond the collection. And then there were all the electronic texts, archival and otherwise. Much of what I had to read was in French, a language I’m far from fluent in, but I wasn’t going to let that get between me and the stories of these writers. Truth is, it’s hard for even the fluent to nail down these histories, but more on that in the book.
Some broad strokes of what I learned: The conteuses wrote not only fairy tales but novels, historical fiction, plays, essays, and poetry. Their works were wildly popular, as were the writers themselves, who hosted literary salons in Paris. There they crafted the contes de fées that would usher in the first fairy tale vogue. Charles Perrault attended these salons, too, writing his “Mother Goose” tales from the prompts offered by these women. He produced one slim book, which came out at the same time as the women’s voluminous output, and yet he is the one history remembers from that birth of a genre.
Why were the women left out of the fairy tale canon? Well, all I’ll say here is that it mostly had to do with the misogynistic, homophobic, and ultra-conservative religiosity of Louis XIV’s reign. The conteuses were always under threat of not only losing their pens but their physical freedom. Exiles from Paris were common, as were lengthy stints in convents for mauvaise conduite—being an unruly woman.
Examples of unruliness: writing poems that insulted the king, trying to stop the abuse of a husband (with no recourse in the law), gambling, cussing, engaging in same-sex relationships. For the latter, one of the women was imprisoned in a cell in a medieval castle-turned-prison. Yes, in a tower. And yes, she’d written tales of young women trapped in towers. Only in her tales—and unlike her—the characters eventually prevailed over despotic forces.
So, anger. Probably no surprise here, but the more I learned about these women, the more incensed I became over how men of the patriarchy had disrupted their livelihoods and their lives, some even chipping away at their legacies long after the women were dead (think Voltaire). I kept a list, and before I’d even finished Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance I had a plan: The conteuses would get vengeance on their oppressors in a salon in the afterlife—a quirky novel of the speculative-historical-literary variety. My working title: Women of the Fairy Tale Revenge.
Women of the Fairy Tale Resistance: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
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And who better to enjoy them than Charlie? Honestly, this is a master class right here in making the most of a waning summer season. Get to it, Charlie!
How are you?
— JS
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