All you wonderful women out there who are feminists and SF readers, have you heard about the new column at Tor, Sleeps With Monsters?

You can expect me to look at the successes and failures of media in terms of portraying women. You can expect me to occasionally mention videogames. You can expect me to touch on the history of women in the genre, riffing off the SF Mistressworks project. You can expect me to highlight discussions about women and genre in the blogosphere — if your not-so-humble correspondent fails to miss them. You can expect me to look at recurring tropes that turn up in genre, often to our detriment. And you can expect me to pop up, yelling, “Feminism WOO YAY!” once or twice a month. (Like a bad penny.)

The first post has loads of links to online feminist geek/SF/genre goodness to keep me busy for days. And, Bourke promises to write about lots of feminist genre writers and their books, so TBR piles beware!

One of the most amazing things about this post, however, is the comments. Usually one can expect some real trolls to turn up with stuff like this. And while there were some challenging males that did make an appearance the general tone did not degrade to name calling and mud slinging.

Sadly, it looks like it is only going to be a twice a month column but I am still pleased. Go check it out and add it to your feed reader.

And while I am on the topic of feminism, have you heard the sad news that Susan Gubar, co-author of Madwoman in the Attic and author and co-author of many other books and articles, is dying of ovarian cancer? She has managed to write a memoir, Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer, that was just published April 30th. I’m number 33 in line for it at the library so will probably find myself reading it in the middle of summer. Of course I will post about it.