Considering that Janis’s novel Mary is one of the five finalists for the award for first fiction in the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes competition to happen in late April, that means Janis can recognize some good storytelling when she sees it. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing what this young adult novel Do the Math is all about, since it sounds like a character I might have been able to relate to back in junior high. And the cover makes it look like there’s probably gender issues involved, too. Very cool. And there’s math. Need I say more?

Well, I’d like to judge the book for myself once I get a review copy. And it seems like I will! Because today I heard from Wendy Lichtman herself (not as huge a surprise as it might have been, considering the single degree of separation). She wanted to know if I might suggest organizations to market the book to. Starting out with She’s Such a Geek was very smart of her, of course! And she already knew about the Expanding Your Horizons network mentioned in Ellen Spertus’s post just before this one. I told Wendy that I’d be happy to review the book for Inkling (perhaps, if the editors agree), and WEPAN and Techbridge also came to mind immediately. WEPAN seems to have a link to BrainCake, another group that encourages girls in STEM.

But I was wondering whether any of you know of any organizations that might also potentially be interested in hearing about what promises to be a darn good mystery starring a girl who likes math? (The open source model of asking here has worked in the past!) If you know of any such groups, please share here! And of course, we shouldn’t just limit ourselves to budding geeks only—we also need to appeal to the girls who have yet to embrace their own geeky parts.

I’ll tell you more about why I’m re-reading The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace in future postings. But I want to note here that I had a lovely chat with People Reading blogger Sonya, who has written her first novel and is a fan of SSAG co-editor Charlie Anders’s writing. Sonya started her blog six months ago in order to reassure herself that people really do still care about books, and sure enough, in this town they really do.

I know that I do my share to buy the sorts of books that unfortunately will never be sold by the palletful at Costco, because the world is not just. (I was just at Book Passage at the Ferry Building yesterday and I saw some hardcover copies of a previous novel by 2006 National Book Award for fiction winner Richard Powers remaindered at $5.98 apiece—ouch! But in Germany he sells hundreds of thousands of copies of his books. Of course, they elected an intelligent female scientist to run their country, which I don’t think could ever happen here. *sigh* Well, like I said, the world is not a just place.)

I was at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting over the weekend, and have much to follow up on with that. Blog you later!

One way, of course, is to collect a couple dozen essays from women about their experiences being women in male-dominated fields that address topics from life in the lab or cubicle to talking about fashion and sex. And if you’ve been reading this blog for the last month or so, you’ll know that I won’t miss any opportunity to plug our book.

But for those of you who might prefer a more homeopathic remedy, there’s also another opportunity for geek women to stand up and be counted in images—and yes, you can keep your clothes on. (Please!) The new online science magazine Inkling has launched a contest in search of the photo which best suits the caption “OMG she’s such a geek!” It runs until the end of the month—read the rules to get all the details about where to send and info on the Ada Lovelace poster prize.

Full disclosure: I’ve written a few pieces for Inkling, which aspires to tell science stories with a touch more whimsy than they are often reported. In the words of co-editors Anne Casselman and Anna Gosline: “Founded in late 2006, we cover the science that pervades our life, makes us laugh, and helps us choose our breakfast foods. We aim to capture a larger proportion of female readers, but, of course, everyone is always welcome.”

Check Inkling out—you’ll probably learn something and have a chuckle at the same time. And if you think you can make a winning photo of female geekitude, have at it. I’ve set the bar pretty low here just wearing my Hello Kitty t-shirt—I know you can do better. There’s gotta be someone out there mired in cable spaghetti or doing cartwheels in the cavern of an accelerator!

I noticed the split that runs through the book in the two San Francisco readings for the book. The January 25 reading was weighted pretty heavily toward games and fantasy, and the February 1 reading was towards science and technology. (Charlie and Annalee read the same sections of their contributions at both readings, so they kind of balanced each other out.)

It’s kind of interesting, isn’t it, that geeks can run the whole span from fantasy to the deepest truths of nature. I used to be at the “deepest truths of nature” end of the spectrum as a geek, until I realized I hadn’t even been hacking anywhere near the forest containing those, much less the particular cluster of trees shading the Truth. (Now I’m a sort-of geek who has forgotten more physics than most people will ever know—and believe me, most people do not need to know higher physics!)

The whole split makes me think of a quote by the English poet William Wordsworth that I swear I read once, where he described the two different aims of his poetry versus fellow Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry. It boiled down to, Wordsworth tried to make the strange feel familiar, and Coleridge made the familiar into something strange.

Of course, now I’m wondering which side maps to which. I would have said that I can relate to making the strange familiar—but as I think of it some more, physics research in a way is more about making the familiar strange, isn’t it? Because it’s very possible to look at everyday phenomena and find some really peculiar behavior. And so the comic book writers and gamers and character bloggers might be the ones making the strange familiar.

Even though I wasn’t reading, I decided to go anyway because I thought it would be cool to meet as many of the other contributors as possible and get them to sign my copy of the book—which is an appropriately geeky impulse, is it not? Besides, my husband was off on Easter Island and I had some serious procrastinating to do on some writing. So off to North Beach I went.

The cozy poetry room upstairs filled up with a crowd of nearly 100 people (I’m guessing) split pretty evenly between male and female. For some reason, my initial reaction was to be surprised by that—I guess I was expecting a more exclusively female turnout—but it just shows how I need to realize that there are more and more people who realize that feminism is not just a women’s issue but a human issue. So it was great to see the broad range of support.

Dressed in trousers, shirtsleeves, tie, and fedora, Annalee introduced the book and the first speaker. When lead-off reader and comic book writer Devin Grayson took the microphone she deadpanned, “All I can say is, gaming at my house afterward.” Devin then read from her essay “Sidekicks” about how as a kid playing pretend Star Wars she insisted on being Han Solo even though that meant a boy would have to play Leia, and she went on to analyze the characteristics of sidekicks in comics.

Whereas Grayson is a veteran of comic book conventions, Michelle Villanueva took the microphone to read before an audience for her first time. She shared passages from her essay “Neville-mania” about writing a blog in the persona of a character from the Harry Potter books, and she gave us the most dramatic moment of the evening when she read the words, “Although I haven’t told my boyfriend that I role-play a male character…” Then she interrupted herself to point out that he was there, so the secret was out—but he took it all in stride among all the laughter. Afterward, Annalee commented, “We had a fan fiction outing tonight!” You can read Michelle’s take on this, too.

Charlie read next from her essay, “I Am Wonk, Hear Me Analyze,” which begins, “I became a wonk about the same time I became a woman, so the two transitions have always been inseparable to me.” She described some of the cultural differences between working as a “just the facts” macho reporter versus getting into the minutia of healthcare policy, and after her piece commented, “This is like the gender fuck reading tonight!” (Indeed—could a SSAG production of Twelfth Night be next?)

In her introduction of journalist and gamer Quinn Norton, Annalee said, “We seem to be veering a little more towards…hobbies.” Quinn began to read partway through her essay, “Dreaming in Unison,” about being a rare woman in the computer gaming world:
The things I learned in gaming turn out to apply beautifully to real life. Here is a helpful checklist:

• Expect fights in bars and taverns.
• Go on, check the door. It’s unlocked more often than you’d think it would be.
• When all else fails and all hope is lost, it never hurts to choose to disbelieve.
• Sometimes in life, narrative trumps all other rules.
• The dice favor style.
• When you’re hopelessly lost, the right-hand rule will get you out.

But what resonated with me, a non-gamer, was this: “Boys get better fantasy lives. Go steal them.” I was right there with Annalee when she commented afterward, “Quinn is my dungeonmaster.”

By chance, Morgan Romine had wound up sitting next to me, and she was up to read next from her piece, “Fantasy to Frag Doll: The Story of a Gamer Princess.” She told about how—and this is so different from my former neck of the woods in physics, where I downplayed my femininity—she used her feminine wiles in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG, for short) to become queen and then empress in their fictional worlds. (Morgan made me feel old—when we chatted before the reading, she was telling me about how the first computer that she played on when she was six years old was a Mac SE. Yep, and that was the first computer my then-boyfriend-now-husband had, too—in college! I couldn’t restrain myself from crying out, “Ohmigod, you’re a babe!”)

Finally, Annalee read from her essay, “When Diana Prince Takes Off Her Glasses.” For the one or two people in the audience not properly educated in ’70s pop culture, Annalee added: “Diana Prince is the secret identity of Wonder Woman.” “DUHHH!” Devin called out, to which Annalee responded, “I love you guys!” Annalee talked about how Wonder Woman in the TV series fascinated her as a girl because of the transformation from geek to fantasy when those glasses came off, and how these issues of image, gender, and geekiness became a thread in her life from hanging out with hackers in high school to becoming a writer navigating the worlds of science and technology.

In the Q & A (and Annalee invited me to come up, too), most of the questions were about pop culture and gaming, about which I have not a clue, though I did answer one question about the significance of blogging in the female geek dialogue (I think all of the anonymous female scientists and engineers out there describing their experiences is invaluable, because sometimes they are telling truths that could be dangerous for them to admit with known identities, because the culture of science has not been as fair or as self-examining as it is ready to admit to itself).

Lots of books got passed around and signed—it kind of felt like the last day of school that way—and it was really cool to chat with some of the longtime geek women who came, including a woman who started out in hardware engineering years ago and switched to writing when she got replaced by a computer to do her job. I’m hoping that with the even greater publicity for the Feb. 1 reading it can be an even larger female geek lovefest!

All good stuff, and I hope these tidbits may have stimulated an appetite for the book out there! There’s more good stuff to come at the February 1st reading, which includes yours truly.

Annalee: Kristin, your recent blog posts have been great! We’re looking forward to more!

Me, with a shrug*: Aw, well, I’m just picking at a wound that’s been festering for the past ten years.

Annalee: Well, if that’s the case, then let the blog be your lance!

And you know, Annalee had taken the metaphor about as far as it could go.

But I should have known that a woman who wrote an entire book about monsters and capitalism would have some grotesque imagery at her fingertips to parry with.

I will blog more about last night’s reading later….

*Of course, from all those years of being called a brain accusatorily as if it were a crime, I learned to be modest and self-deprecating about receiving compliments. Part of the acculturation!

• Best Buy Gets In Touch With Its Feminine Side (USA Today). “The feminization of the consumer electronics business is underway… Shoppers may notice a softer, more personal atmosphere… Women now influence 90 percent of consumer electronics purchases… About four years ago, Best Buy realized women were warming up to technology…. Women are drawn to flat-panel TVs.”
• Miss Video Game 2007 (Average Gamer) “Lets take a look at the requirements… Number four. Loves the beach? Uh-oh! This one looks like trouble… You see, as a gamer I love dark cold rooms that are lit by flat panels and LCD monitors.” (From GenderInGames.)
• Social Morons and Daily Stereotype (Female Science Professor). Sexism and clueless behavior around a science conference. “At a conference this week, I was talking to Famous Professor X, and we were having a very interesting conversation about a topic of mutual interest. A man I don’t know and didn’t recognize walked up and started talking to Famous Professor X, completely ignoring me and ignoring the fact that he interrupted a conversation. Famous Professor X glared at the interrupting man and said “I am talking to Professor W (me)”, made a wonderful little shooing/dismissing motion with his hand, and turned back to me so we could continue our conversation. The interrupting guy slithered away sadly.”
• Women Scientists And Engineers Use New Information Technologies To Tackle Isolation On Campus (Science Daily). “Women researchers have plenty of human capital — the ‘what-you-know’ component of career success — but, because they are isolated, it is much harder for them to accumulate social capital, the ‘who-you-know’ connections through which insider information flows… NJIT Advance will address this problem by seed-funding small cross-disciplinary communities within which women faculty can do collaborative research, with each other and with male peers, from a position of numerical strength. The researchers will then interconnect these communities using traditional face-to-face networking strategies in combination with 21st-century pervasive information technology.”

For one thing, there’s Alice Frick, who took part in the early BBC meetings that came up with many of the concepts that would later become the basis of Doctor Who.

More importantly, the first producer of Doctor Who, Verity Lambert, was a 28-year-old newbie producer who faced down institutional sexism and rigidity to push her own vision of the show. She was originally saddled with an older executive producer, Rex Tucker, who tried to push her around. As she explained in an interview in the DVD featurette Doctor Who: Origins (on the Beginning box set), Tucker didn’t expect Lambert to push back:

From the time I arrived it was quite obvious that he and I didn’t agree on anything… we didn’t agree on casting. We didn’t agree on what sort of input I was going to have… I think he’d been led to believe that really there was this young producer coming in and he could hold her hand and make all the decisions. I’m afraid I wasn’t that sort of person.

Lambert also had to stare down her bosses, when they tried to pull the plug on the Daleks in Doctor Who’s second story. She had to battle with other departments at the BBC that tried to starve the show of resources due to petty turf battles. Doctor Who wouldn’t have lasted a dozen episodes if Lambert hadn’t been willing to kick a lot of ass. You also get the impression that the show would have been a lot more “educational” and less focused on being a really intense drama.

That featurette also showcases Delia Derbyshire, who turned Ron Grainer’s score for the show’s theme tune into a novel piece of electronic music. The well-known rumblety rumblety woooo of the theme tune owes much more to Derbyshire than Grainer. She painstakingly pasted together pieces of tape and electronic noises to make the arrangement of the theme tune that lasted from 1963 to 1980. Here’s an amazing video of her explaining how she cuts and pastes different sounds to create music. Record companies wouldn’t hire her in the early 60s because she was a woman, but she’s now regarded as one of the pioneers of electronic music.

Finally, I was really blown away by Paddy Russell, who directed a bunch of Who stories in the 60s and 70s. She was one of the first female production assistants at the BBC and then one of the first female directors. She was definitely the first woman to direct Doctor Who, and had to deal with the notorious diva William Hartnell. In the featurette on her directing career (on the Horror of Fang Rock DVD) she talks about how she used the fact that Hartnell was also playing the Doctor’s doppelganger to keep him off guard. She also had to convince Tom Baker to dress up like a mummy in Pyramids of Mars. On the Mars DVD, there’s some great stuff about how Russell and Elisabeth Sladen (who played companion Sarah Jane Smith) rewrote the scripts to make Sarah smarter. In several instances, they gave Sarah some of the Doctor’s lines, so instead of asking him what was up, she was figuring it out for herself.

Doctor Who has a much-deserved reputation for sexism, in both its old and new incarnations. But it’s cool to realize that some totally kick-ass pioneers worked on the show behind the scenes.

Watch Wired Science Jan. 3 [via Wired Science Blog]