I <3 feminist SF

Finished The Judas Rose, Suzette Haden Elgin's sequel to Native Tongue. A very sophisticated novel, which builds up a picture of the misogynist future society and how women patiently, secretly work to change it over decades. I got addicted to the book halfway through and rapidly finished it. Elgin's prose is a pleasure, and the sensation of being trapped that her dystopia gives is heart-squeezing - it's not 1984, it's just a bitchy dinner party, and you're just as damned.

Also read Joanna Russ' germinal When It Changed, which IIRC introduces Whileaway, the women-only colony featured in The Female Man. It's in Again, Dangerous Visions, with a rather fun pro-feminist intro by Harlan Ellison, and an oddly difficult-to-follow afterword from the normally extremely lucid Russ. That story must have gone off in people's brains like a bomb, the way Tiptree's Houston, Houston, Do You Read? must have been a mental explosion.

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Good grief, everywhere you look... I was just following up an NS news item on two cloned African wildcats who've successfully produced eight gorgeous kittens when I realised they were in the Audubon Nature Institute in - guess where - New Orleans. Fortunately the ANI, and the aquarium and zoo it oversees, were left relatively undamaged by the Hurricane Katrina. They do need donations, though, to help animals and staff.

Researching this, I also learned that Houston SPCA are taking on hundreds of animals, including the pets of people forced to flee, and can also use monetary and pet food donations.