Nicola Griffith AsksWho Owns Science Fiction and Fantasy

She does it in an essay here, on Charles Stross's blog, "Charlie's Diary."

It begins:

I’m English. I've lived in the US a long time (in fact last year I got my US citizenship) but I’m still English. You can tell: all I have to do is speak. There's no hiding that accent. In England, I belong. I visit often; I feel at home; I just don't live there anymore.

A few years ago, when William Gibson was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame, he said: I am a native of science fiction but no longer a resident.2 I understood exactly what he meant.

My most recent novel, Hild, has no fantastical elements whatsoever. It's not set in a secondary world, there are no dragons, no wizards casting spells, no special swords or magic rings. Yet the book has been nominated for three SF awards3. Why?

It's a nice essay, but I do have a caveat. In my judgment, and I'm a qualified judge, one would think,  Hild is not a literary novel; it's historical fiction.  It's not even a literary novel as historical fiction, as is Wolf Hall, for instance.

I can give my reasoned reasons as to why that's my judgment, but am mostly occupied by the hell of New Computer: making it be a computer, not a tablet, transferring, migrating, trying to figure out how to use the *&*&^%%$ thing as a useful machine.  Which also might mean dumping my main e-mail account, as MS dropped live mail in favor of Outlook, which they previously dropped in favor of Live, which so infuriated me I never changed over.  I had liked Outlook Express very much, and never did like Live Mail at all.

Dracula - NBC

I enjoyed last week's premiere of Dracula a great deal more than I expected to.  I enjoyed it enough to look forward to the next episode. Evidently, I am not the only one to be pleasantly surprised.

It's too bad that the attraction is not in the actor, who, as Dracula, is the center of the series, Jonathan Rhys Meyers.  Being Stoker's Dracula, by definition then, evil, perhaps we don't want Dracula to be appealing?  So far, as Meyers projects him -- that slicked flat hair, the signature Meyers' hooded eyes, facial ornaments, Dracula seems more like one of those stereotypical oily latin lovers or latin villains of which the early decades of the 20th century were enamored on stage and screen.

So wherein does the appeal lie?  Perhaps in some of what captured my support in the later episodes of Ripper Street* -- a sense of a society on the move, embarked on rapid change, and excited by these changes, not intimidated by them, or jaded by them.  This is a society that does not yet even imagine WWI and is tremendously excited by electricity.  This can perhaps be described in that now convenient catch-all term, steampunk, in which bounds of European Empires, we pale folks -- and who is more pale than a vampire? -- can safely celebrate.  But like Ripper Street, the divisions of class and corruption, poverty and crime, the persistence of these matters' threats to the comfortable segments of society, are all present, if foregrounded more in the metaphor of vampirism and ancient secret societies, whose underground wars with each other are also played out in front of the eyes of the overground population -- those whose eyes are open enough to see them, anyway.

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*  Ripper Street's second season began this last week on UK television.  I loved the opening of the review for it in The Guardian, here:

According to the rules of television, there are only three characters capable of driving a plot in Victorian London: prostitutes, murderers and murdered prostitutes.

About which very thing last spring I fulminated here, and here too.

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to Ripper Street's second season, particularly since the Guardian review stated that this time out it seems no prostitutes were murdered in the course of our entertainment.

Former Reddit co-owner arrested for excessive JSTOR downloads

Hacking JSTOR Shut Down MIT:

This happened last fall and winter (recall ... winter?, she pants, having just come inside from 90 + outside, crawling up to 100) ---

"Former Reddit co-owner arrested for excessive JSTOR downloads"

According to the complaint, Swartz purchased a laptop in September 2010 and registered it under the name "Gary Host" (username: "ghost") on the MIT network. He then ran a Python script that rapidly downloaded articles from the JSTOR. JSTOR detected the script and blocked his IP address. The complaint alleges that there followed a game of cat and mouse in which Swartz repeatedly changed his IP and MAC address to evade JSTOR and MIT's efforts to block access. Swartz also bought a second laptop to speed up the downloading process. Finally, on October 9, JSTOR gave up and and blocked the entire MIT campus from using JSTOR.