by Sumana Harihareswara on February 1, 2016
In this post I’ll discuss some ways in which Walton’s Thessaly series is transformative and some ways in which it’s feminist, and some thoughts on how those choices reinforce each other.
To start with, clearly, Thessaly is transformative in that it concentrates on reusing and commenting on a text someone else made. As Walton [says](http://www.jowaltonbooks.com/books/the-just-city/):
> Writing about Plato’s Republic being tried seems to me an idea that is so obvious everyone should have had it, that it should be a subgenre, there should be versions written by Diderot and George Eliot and Orwell and H. Beam Piper and Octavia Butler.
I’m currently [obsessed](http://www.tor.com/2015/12/21/the-uses-of-history-in-hamilton-an-american-musical/) with *Hamilton: An American Musical* which, like Thessaly, takes old text — often taught in history or philosophy or political science classes — and infuses it with emotion and suspense. But, where *Hamilton* only has a few songs focusing on the process of group decision-making and problems that crop up in the implementation, Walton pays consistent attention to those details. This approach also shows up in Walton’s [“Relentlessly Mundane”](http://www.strangehorizons.com/2000/20001023/relentlessly_mundane.shtml), which you can read as a Narnia fanfic with the serial numbers very rubbed off, or as a general commentary on YA portal fantasies. Paying attention to the concrete details within utopias and after quests, Walton un-deletes the deleted scenes from other stories. [click to continue…]
by Sumana Harihareswara on May 21, 2015
Hi – Sumana Harihareswara here. You might remember me from [my April guest post about free/open source software, licensing, and codes of conduct in open
communities](https://crookedtimber.org/2015/04/10/codes-of-conduct-and-the-trade-offs-of-copyleft/). In that piece I took a stab at thinking about some useful vocabulary and distinctions that help us understand the political values and intuitions common to those communities. Today I’m considering where we got frameworks that we free software/open source folks often take for granted, and specifically what might have been erased from our intellectual heritage due to sexism.
As a soundtrack to this piece, consider [“Erase Me” by Ben Folds Five](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzfXD5igRDM) (off *The Sound of the Life of the Mind*) and [“Whatever You Want” by programmer Vienna Teng](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4wzzLkwAog)(off *Dreaming Through the Noise*; I recently heard tell that “Whatever You Want” is inspired by the film *Office Space*, which is amazing.)
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by Sumana Harihareswara on May 13, 2015
I had, frankly, been afraid of trying to read Ken MacLeod, because I wasn’t sure I had the prerequisite domain knowledge. I studied Russian and majored in Political Science at UC Berkeley,[^fn0] and wasn’t sure that this had given me enough expertise on the history of Communism to jump into his work. Now that I’ve overcome this fear, I should check whether there’s a market for a MOOC, “Remedial Ken MacLeod Prerequisites,” in which I discuss leftism in the twentieth century, MacLeod’s crony and [former Big Pharma dispenser][1] Charles Stross, and the landscape of rural Scotland, or, “Reds, meds, and sheds.”
Then again, perhaps that’s unnecessary; even if you think a Mexican icepick is a margarita with extra salt, you can still enjoy *The Restoration Game* (novel, 2010) and, to a lesser extent, *The Human Front* (novella, 2001). Spoilers commence here!
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by Sumana Harihareswara on April 10, 2015
A lot of [open stuff](http://infotrope.net/2011/01/28/why-im-not-an-open-source-person/) — such as the Wikimedia/Wikipedia and Linux projects — are discussing or adopting codes of conduct, or expanding their existing policies. I’ll reveal my biases at the start and say I think this is a good thing; for more, read my speech [“Hospitality, Jerks, and What I Learned”](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hospitality,_Jerks,_and_What_I_Learned). But in this piece, I want to talk about the similarities and differences between codes of conduct and a set of agreements that some of these communities are more used to: “copyleft” or other restrictive software licenses. And I’d like to draw out some ways that the kinds of acts and artifacts that these policies cover reveal different attitudes towards contracts and governance.
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