a short collection of liniks

Swiped from trobadora: Ann Somerville gives a very concise and thematic summary of RaceFail here. If you seriously haven't gotten to read up on this yet due to what probably feels like a metric ton of posts, I'd suggest this would work very well for summary and starter links.

For more info--I almost want to turn this into a blockquote to add to all my posts on this so I don't forget it again:

Seeking Avalon: Timeline which is referenced also in the above post along with a lot of other good links.
Rydra Wong's Link List and for the first link post made about this subject (I read this one first back when it came out, so I'm pretty sure this is probably the first on the subject; also, it's the first in that tag) here have the first posts on the subject. Yes, that is January 14, 2009.

Also, just because this is one of my favorites: I Didn't Dream of Dragons by deepad.

When I was around thirteen years old, I tried to write a fantasy novel. It was going to be an epic adventure with a cross-dressing princess on the run, a snarky hero, and dragons. I got stuck when I had to figure out what they would do after they left the city. Logically, there would be a tavern.

But there were no taverns in India. Write what you know is a rule that didn’t really need to be told to me; after having spent my entire life reading books in English about people named Peter and Sally, I wanted to write about the place I lived in, even if I didn’t have a whole bookcase of Indian fantasy world-building to steal from. And I couldn’t get past the lack of taverns. Even now, I have spent a number of years trying to figure out how cross-dressing disguise would work in a pre-Islamic India where the women went bare-breasted. When I considered including a dragon at the end of a story, I had to map out their route to the Himalayas, because dragons can be a part of a Tibetan Buddhist tradition—they do not figure in Hindu mythology.

Comments

[shinetheway.livejournal.com]

I just read some person I've never heard of, but clicked on his link in the list because apparently he called us all the shallow end of the gene pool (and god, he did, he really did, and that wasn't even the worst of what he said).

I was kind and exquisitely polite and sent him to that summary, among other places.

(I did not say "is THIS the side you want to be on? REALLY?" but I was so tempted.)

[sleepingfingers.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link to that last post; it's very illuminating and heartfelt.

[thistle90.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That was all very useful. I've been deliberately ignoring this thing, but as it would not go away, and as I am home sick and really, really bored.... And OH. I didn't realize it involved a bunch of published fantasy authors and their editors. O_O I thought it was just LJ wank. Not touching it myself: not nearly a good enough writer. Also not *that* self-destructive.

[pir8fancier.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for this. People keep asking me what in the hell is going on, and I'll give them this link.