Galactic Suburbia is a podcast out of Australia that’s hosted by Alisa, Tansy and Alex. They’re three women from Perth, Hobart and Melbourne respectively. Alisa contacted me after hearing my comment, that I’m always looking for new podcasts on SF Signal Podcast Episode 70. She wrote:
I noticed that not very many women podcasts, nor podcasts aimed at or interesting to women, came up in discussion. I thought I might let you know about the Galactic Suburbia Podcast, of which I am a member of the audio team. We are a group of women talking about SF publishing and news, with a feminist lean. I am particularly proud of one of our recent episodes which was a tribute to the late Joanna Russ [episode 36] The Spoilerific Book Club: Joanna Russ
I’m not a fiction writer, don’t have any interest in publishing or the publishing business, but I found some value there. One story in particular in Episode 36, about Samuel R. Delany and his wife Marilyn Hacker (and their pockets) was absolutely masterful. Unlike SFSignal’s podcast, which is short, Galactic Suburbia is a long format discussion podcast, with shows regularly running near the two hour mark.
In their latest show, Episode 38, they talk about SFSignal Mind Meld titled: “What’s The Importance of ‘The Russ Pledge’ For Science Fiction Today?” and Alisa makes the argument that there’s a gender bias at SFSignal. Later, she brings up the specific SFSignal Episode #70, the one I was in, and … well … here’s a clip of both segments (first from SFSignal, then from Galactic Suburbia) back to back |MP3|. Here are the full files for both:
SFSignal #70 |MP3|
Galactic Suburbia #38 |MP3|
Podcast feed:
http://web.me.com/aifinch/TPP/Galactic_Suburbia/rss.xml
iTunes feed:
itpc://web.me.com/aifinch/TPP/Galactic_Suburbia/rss.xml
Episodes not in the feeds are available HERE.
Posted by Jesse Willis
I just posted the following comment on Galactic Suburbia’s post for episode 38:
Hi! I was part of episode 70 of SF Signal’s podcast. Although I’m hardly the poster boy for feminism, I have to point out that many of the podcasts we mentioned have female contributors. Among the podcasts I mentioned that have female contributors were StarShipSofa, Lightspeed, Podcastle, Escapepod, The Dunesteef, The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, The Moth, I Should be Writing, Writing Excuses, Notes from Coode Street, Adventures in Sci Fi publishing (more interviewees than contributors, I think) and Scientific American’s podcast, Science Talk.
Also, to clarify, the SF Signal podcast is not generally open to the public, but to contributors to the blog. We all get an e-mail every week mentioning the show’s topic and asking those of us who are interested to join in. Among the female contributors are Karen Burnham, Lisa Paitz Spindler, Terry Weyna, Ashley Crump, Jessica Strider and Rhonda Eudaly. You can, and I imagine you will, make the argument that SF Signal should have more women contributors than it does.
Marilyn Hacker wrote the intro to The Female Man. She complained about hard to understand terms in science fiction, but I didn’t understand her vocabulary either.