ICYMI/SYD #5: Ten Great Online Essays & Articles

In case you missed it, so you don't:

On Positron:

• Some thoughts on Arrival, the film adaptation of Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life".
• Weird & Wonderful discussion notes for The Island of Dr. Moreau & To Say Nothing of the Dog.
• Chicago Nerds discussion notes for Leviathan Wakes.
• Think Galactic discussion notes for Sisters of the Revolution.

Around Chicago:

There's not a whole lot on the close horizon, events-wise. However:

• 2017 already has a great list of upcoming book discussions & events, with more on the way. A lot of the plan-far-in-advance book clubs have made their selections.
• Capricon is coming up: February 16-19.
• Columcon's not far behind: March 3-5.
• Now's the time to submit proposals for Panels (deadline 1/20) and Academic (deadline 2/23) programming at Wiscon.

Around the Interwebs:
I ran into an unusually large amount of good articles and essays over the holiday season. Here's ten I'd recommend:

1. In the LA Review of Books, Eliza Glinter's "The World According to Stanislaw Lem", a short biography & critical look at his work. 
2. On Tor.com, Jo Walton's "The Tremendous Continuity of Science Fiction in Conversation with Itself", a delightful look at how a hefty handful of recent novels are building on previous work. I love this aspect of the field, and Walton has a keen eye for it.
3. Barnes & Noble's "Mind Meld: Books We Want to Bring into the Spotlight" is a great list of lesser-known books suggested by current authors. Rather similar to Positron's first Hive Mind column, actually.
4. In The Outline, the ever-insightful Angelica Jade Bastién writes "Female Androids Should Be More Than Vengeful Sexbots", a look at the feminine robot in Westworld, Ex Machina and more.
5. In Amazing Stories, Foz Meadows' "Unempathetic Bipeds of Failure: The Relationship Between Stories and Politics" is a must-read, looking at how politics are unavoidably encoded even in SFF stories. There's also an included synopsis of the drama that accompanied this article's publication—Meadows (imho, correctly) calls out Beale as a Nazi, which led to the article being pulled from its original home on Black Gate.
6. On Tor.com, Brian Atterby shares a transcript of his speech "The James Tiptree Jr. Book Club; or, a Mitochondrial Theory of Literature", which was his keynote address at the 2016 Tiptree Symposium honoring Ursula Le Guin. Highly Recommended.
7. SFFWorld has a good interview with Yoon Ha Lee, whose Ninefox Gambit I reviewed rather glowingly.
8. On LitHub, authors Ken Liu and Kate Elliot's conversation on the question "Why is it 'unrealistic' to show women in power in fantasy?" is a great read.
9. Helen Rosner (executive editor of Eater.com by day) has a hilarious and in-depth take on Brigadoon, problematic and musical time-travel tale that it is.
10. In Uncanny, Keidra Chaney's "Living, Working, and Fangirling with a Chronic Illness" is a really great piece.

And that's all for now!