![]() Honestly, I’m happy if I can get people thinking and talking. If parts of it strike you as terrible, complain away. This system is closely tied into my own feelings and experiences of gender, which are possibly different from many people’s. I’ll start with a caveat, as I so often do: this is not the right or only way to come up with a new gender system. I created a new gender-organizing system for the city-state of Porphyry, and since readers have begun asking me about it, I thought this might be the place to explain what went into its creation. I recently ran some thought experiments about gender myself in my latest novel, Shadow Scale. I would almost argue that that’s what SF/F is for. ![]() SF/F is uniquely suited to such thought experiments one can set up the parameters of a world, extrapolate them to their logical conclusions, and then run characters through the maze. ![]() Of course, women writers have a long history of using the powers of SF/F for good (or possibly evil) gender explorations, from Ursula Le Guin’s classic The Left Hand of Darkness to Ann Leckie’s recent Ancillary Justice series. What is it good for? How can we stretch it? Is it ok if I break it? ![]() Not just the feminine gender, specifically, but gender in general. ![]() Happy Women in SF&F Month, darlings! I am so pleased to have been included in this year’s line-up of guest posters, not least because it’s a wonderful excuse to talk about one of my favourite topics: gender. The Gods Roll the Dice: Inventing a Gender System ![]()
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![]() ![]() It was also #1 on the overall Book Sense list as well as #1 on regional Book Sense lists across the nation. In addition to being #1 on The New York Times hardcover fiction list, it was also #1 on nearly every national bestseller list, including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, Publishers Weekly, and Fort-Wayne Journal-Gazette. ![]() A Thousand Splendid Suns debuted as the #1 book in the nation, and it held the top position for 4 straight weeks. The paperback of A Thousand Splendid Suns has spent twenty-one weeks on The New York Times paperback fiction bestseller list. Rolling into its second week, the book continued to fly out of stores, with another 150,000 more copies printed. A Thousand Splendid Suns went back to press almost daily its first week on sale, building to 1,255,000 copies in print in the U.S. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Amin Maalouf won the Prix Goncourt in 1993 for his novel The Rock of Tanios. In the pages of The Gardens of Light, Mani’s cry for tolerance can be heard echoing across the centuries of our times. Amin Maalouf brings life and color to the character and times of Mani. The mystic exercised a powerful attraction over his disciples rulers and scholars, itinerant merchants, shippers, baptists and sages who inhabited the shores of the Tigris and was hated by the Magi, the high priests of Zoroastrianism who felt threatened and eventually had him imprisoned, tortured and killed in 276 AD. This came to be known as Manichaeism and attracted vast numbers of disciples. He advocated ‘The Gospel of Light’ a religious system which was a mixture of Gnostic Christian beliefs, ancient Persian Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and some pagan elements. The Gardens of Light tells the life story of Mani, painter, doctor, and prophet born in Mesopotamia modern day Iraq in the early third century of the Christian era. ![]() |