September 2010

SF/F Commentary

A. Lee Martinez’s Marriage to the Internet (or Why the Internet is a Walking Contradiction of Good/Bad)

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If you haven’t seen it already, A. Lee Martinez has come out in defense of the Internet.  You see, folks are bashing the poor Internet, and someone needs to come out and say how good it really is, because, after all, the Internet is wonderful and it makes things all rainbows and flowers. Okay, so that’s an unfair look at things.  I’m being facetious, or attempting to be anyway.  A. Lee Martinez is right that there has been an inordinate amount of anti-Internet stuff lately.  Hell, there has been anti-Internet stuff flooding the, well, Internet for a while now.  See for yourself.  Even The Atlantic has provided some interesting thoughts on the “it’s making us stupid” argument.  The thing is, there are probably truths and falsehoods on both sides of the argument.  There are real consequences for the changes the Internet has brought on us.  As a teacher (new though I am), I have seen what many of these changes look like:  there is an increased reluctance to “search on.”  I wouldn’t say that this is somehow making us dumber so much as making us progressively more ignorant.  That is a problem all on its own. The only thing I take issue with in Martinez’s post is this: But for all its unpleasantness, stupidity, and absurdity, the internet has done the unimaginable. It has given nearly everyone a voice. (Except for the very poor, who always, always get screwed.) It has taken the ability to express yourself and made it such a common thing that we don’t realize how amazing it is. It’s allowed us to tap the collective knowledge of mankind without having to even leave our homes. I find it amusing that this paragraph begins with what is not necessarily “good” by default, and then ends with an overwhelming positive. Yes, the Internet has completely changed how we share knowledge, and for all the bad things that the Internet does to us (I challenge the “stupid” assertion, though), the fact that it has made information, vital and trivial, instantly available to a much larger portion of the world’s population than every before is a monumental feat. Yes, our world is still imperfect; the poor still do not have access to the Internet, even in the United States. But we’re getting there. There will be a time when almost everyone will have access.  The more knowledge we have at our fingertips, the greater the possibility that we can be informed about the things that really matter.  The Internet, more or less, makes that possible. The problem, though, is this idea that providing everyone with a public voice is somehow a good thing. I challenge this notion because we have seen the consequences of this in the book world. Anyone can say anything about a book these days. There are rarely consequences for what we say, except consequences that go in the opposite direction (poor sales, for example). The “expert” opinion seems to have been supplanted by the “amateur” one. There are certainly amateurs who have valuable things to say about a subject, but there are also seas of individuals who have nothing productive to add to the conversation, and yet still feel as though they should somehow be granted the same attention given to the adequate amateur or the “expert.” I’m not suggesting that “experts” are always correct, or even always good at what they do. They get things wrong all the time, as do “amateurs.” But they are right more often than the folks who write one line critiques on Amazon.com or incoherent blog posts about why *insert President here* is evil and should be impeached. Even positive critiques from these folks are meaningless in the long run. So, I challenge this idea that providing a space for everyone to say whatever they want in public is inherently good. There are consequences: the quality of rhetoric drops drastically, false information is easy to spread, and so on. It’s great that we have more voices, because diversity is always a good thing, but a limitless diversity is problematic.  The Internet, for all its wonders, has no way to deal with this.  It is powerless to what is eating it alive from the inside.  I don’t think it will ever gain the power to do something about the problems it has created either.  I think we’re stuck with them, for good and for bad.

SF/F Commentary

Polarized Politics and How Republicans Can Earn My Vote

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If the title didn’t give it away, I’m stepping into politics again.  Paying attention to the news makes one intimately aware of just how polarized the political process in the United States has become; this isn’t anything new, but it is something that I think we should be highlighting more and more when we try to talk about politics.  We’re victims to it–the political process.  Even when we attempt (by “we” I mean a good portion of “everyone”) to engage in “fair” politics, we inevitably are sucked into polarized rhetoric or thought processes:  namely, the “us vs. them” mentality that so defines American politics today. But while I say the above with all seriousness, I do think there is a fundamental problem with viewing polarized politics as inherently negative.  The problem in the U.S. isn’t necessarily that there is an unfair level of polarization which creates its two primary parties, but that the view of the political element here has been one that limits itself only to the “us vs. them” and not to the real question that needs to be asked:  if we must choose a side, which side is the one offering a solution? Regardless of what we might think about the solutions proposed by Democrats, the fact of the matter is that they are offering a solution, one that is fairly concrete, if not difficult to understand due to the monumental nature of it.  Democrats have, from fairly early on, offered solutions to the environment, the economy, healthcare, LGBT rights, and much more (immigration seems to be the next on the list).  Republicans, however, seem to offer a platform based entirely on preventing their “opponents” from doing anything whatsoever.  Where they have ideas, they are kernels, rather than full-fledged plans (though some plans have been suggested, and summarily executed by budget councils who pointed out that the “fiscally responsible” version of a bill will in fact prove to be more costly in the long run). With all of this in mind, I’d like to offer a list of things that Republicans can do to steal my vote away from the Democrats.  Note that almost all of the following requests are, in some way, being countered by Republican lawmakers, lobbyists, and so on in this country: An economic policy that does not revolve around extending Bush-era tax cuts, but instead focuses on reasonable methods for creating jobs, protecting middle and lower class individuals, punishing business owners and so on for poor behavior (such as the banks), and preventing the continued expansion of the gap between the rich and the not-so-rich.  If trickle-down economics worked, then we would have seen it do so in the last twenty years.  As it stands, the poverty level hasn’t dropped down to 25 million (where it was before Reagan) since the recession of the 1980s.  No such platform exists. A rejection of all anti-gay rhetoric and an acknowledgement that homosexuals are a) not morally inferior people, and b) deserving of the same rights as myself (a straight man), even in a country dominated by Christians.  Republicans need to acknowledge that gay people deserve the same protections as people of color, that denying marriage to them is a violation of their civil rights, and that a country that fights to prevent or destroy existing homosexual families is a country flirting with the edges of fascism.  No such platform exists. An environmental policy that acknowledges that global warming, whether caused by humans, or accelerated by them, is a reality and that regardless of our beliefs, it is a signal that we need to restructure our entire transportation model so as to usher America into a future completely independent of oil, foreign or otherwise.  It also must seek to protect, preserve, and maintain the pristine beauty of our various parks, ecosystems, waters, and so on.  No such platform exists. A social policy that readily acknowledges that racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism, and so on, in all their forms, have not ended, and that we still have much work to do to protect people from the wrongs other people would do to them.  It must be a policy that seeks to mend the lingering social, economic, political, and emotional scars/echoes of a lost era.  No such platform exists. A healthcare policy that offers detailed and reasonable solutions to our healthcare problems in this country, that finds ways to reduce the cost of healthcare so that everyone can afford it, and that does so without resorting to the rhetorically empty phrase “let the private sector take care of it.”  Republicans need to acknowledge that the private sector is not a sea of morally or ethically sound individuals.  No such platform exists. An educational policy that seeks to push us away from test-culture into a “hands-on” culture, that pays attention to and amends key issues in schools in regards to funding and race (i.e. schools with predominately non-white students are also often the poorest, or in the poorest areas, and, thus, are often under-served by the government), and that reasonably provides a flexible blueprint by which students can learn the necessary critical thinking skills that will foster mental growth and produce a generation of Americans ready to take America forward into a very competitive future.  No such platform exists. An acknowledgement that science, however flawed, continues to provide us with wonderful advancements in all fields, that creationism is not science by any stretch of the imagination, and that it is absolutely crucial that we build up a generation of able-minded scientists in all fields to improve the intellectual and technological value of America.  No such platform exists. A publicly stated refusal to support any bill, amendment, or public school district that seeks to violate the rights of its patrons and students by teaching religion as religion in public schools.  Religion is and should remain private.  No such platform exists. Finally, a public and private refusal, under any circumstances, to lie, misinform, misdirect, or otherwise lead astray Americans in any political/public engagement, and

SF/F Commentary

The Problem With “Great” Science Fiction

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Twitter is abuzz today with an io9 article called “What are the ingredients for great science fiction?”  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, since many of us in the SF community are constantly amused, obsessed, and/or perplexed by the attempt to define the “great” in the title.  On some level, it’s probably good for us to be always conscious of the evaluative quality of what we read; after all, what we consider to be wondrous is inevitably what we will try to peddle to others, because, deep down, we want them to experience the same feeling, however unexplainable, that we did when reading a “great” book. On another level, however, I think we often forget that the “great” in the title is both relative and problematic.  How do we define what is and is not a “great” SF book?  When it comes to literature–or any creative project, for that matter–there are no hard-set definitions; there can’t be precisely because to provide perfect, exception-less definitions is to imply that literature cannot change, that it is hopelessly standardized into a set group of features and objects.  Science fiction can never be that.  We’ve had the arguments over what “is” and “is not” science fiction before, here and elsewhere, and those discussions rarely get anywhere. So why the attempt to define “great?”  In the end, the term will remain hopelessly relative.  There is no point at which we can ever set “great” down and say “this is what great means for science fiction, and there are no relevant exceptions to it.”  What I consider to be “great” SF will likely run counter to another’s view on the subject.  Even if one agrees with my view of “great,” there are bound to be varying degrees to that “great”-ness, to what one considers, as the author of io9’s post suggests, to be an appropriate description or address of/to the “human condition.”  While I might agree with that, it doesn’t explain what one means by “human condition,” nor does it provide criteria one might say should go unspoken (the quality of the writing, for example, however relative that may be). I think the questions should be:  Does explaining what “great” SF is really matter?  If we can agree that evaluative qualities such as those that would apply to “great” are relative and malleable, then shouldn’t we wonder whether there is value in the term or in our opinions on “something?”  How do we justify what is “great” in terms of its relativity, let alone the value of our opinions in a relative world? I suppose where I’m going with this is here:  If we can’t say what is and is not “great,” then can we as readers, reviewers, or what have you justify saying anything at all about the quality of a thing?  I don’t think there are any easy answers to that question.  But I’ll leave that up to you.

SF/F Commentary

Haul of Books 2010: Stuff For Me v.24 (Derrida Edition)

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I have a few more lovely books for school that I want to let you all know about, although it occurs to me that these may be of even less interest to most of you than they are to me, since they’re not even genre-based.  But  who am I to say what you’re all interested in, right? This edition rounds up almost all of the remaining books for my schoolwork.  There are still a handful of lingering books here or there, which I’ll throw up here in a future edition, but I won’t know what those are for a few more weeks (my science fiction/utopia course has four weeks of “you’ll all decide what we’re reading”). Here’s the image: And now for the descriptions, from left to right, top to bottom (taken from Amazon): 1.  Acts of Religion by Jacques Derrida “Is there, today,” asks Jacques Derrida, “another ‘question of religion’?” Derrida’s writings on religion situate and raise anew questions of tradition, faith, and sacredness and their relation to philosophy and political culture. He has amply testified to his growing up in an Algerian Jewish, French-speaking family, to the complex impact of a certain Christianity on his surroundings and himself, and to his being deeply affected by religious persecution. Religion has made demands on Derrida, and, in turn, the study of religion has benefited greatly from his extensive philosophical contributions to the field. Acts of Religion brings together for the first time Derrida’s key writings on religion, along with two new essays translated by Gil Anidjar that appear here for the first time in any language. These eight texts are organized around the secret holding of links between the personal, the political, and the theological. In these texts, Derrida’s reflections on religion span from negative theology to the limits of reason and to hospitality. Acts of Religion will serve as an excellent introduction to Derrida’s remarkable contribution to religious studies. 2.  Rogues:  Two Essays on Reason by Jacques Derrida Rogues, published in France under the title Voyous, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term “État voyou” is the French equivalent of “rogue state,” and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida rigorously and exhaustively examines. Derrida examines the history of the concept of sovereignty, engaging with the work of Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and others. Against this background, he delineates his understanding of “democracy to come,” which he distinguishes clearly from any kind of regulating ideal or teleological horizon. The idea that democracy will always remain in the future is not a temporal notion. Rather, the phrase would name the coming of the unforeseeable other, the structure of an event beyond calculation and program. Derrida thus aligns this understanding of democracy with the logic he has worked out elsewhere. But it is not just political philosophy that is brought under deconstructive scrutiny here: Derrida provides unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current political realities, and these essays are highly engaged with events of the post-9/11 world. 3.  Points:  Interviews — 1974-1994 by Jacques Derrida This volume collects 23 interviews given over the course of the last two decades by the author. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of the Derrida’s concerns, touching upon such subjects as AIDS, philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, politics, and nationalism. 4.  The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1 by Jacques Derrida When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract. Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal. 5.  Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida The most influential of contemporary philosophers explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences. “O, my friends, there is no friend.” The most influential of contemporary philosophers explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future. Until relatively recently, Jacques Derrida was seen by many as nothing more than the high priest of Deconstruction, by turns stimulating and fascinating, yet always somewhat disengaged from the central political questions of our time. Or so it seemed. Derrida’s “political turn,” marked especially by the appearance of Specters of Marx, has surprised some and delighted others. In The Politics of Friendship Derrida renews and enriches this orientation through an examination of the political history of the idea of friendship pursued down the ages. Derrida’s thoughts are haunted throughout the book by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, “my friends, there is no friend” and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. The exploration allows Derrida to recall and restage the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy and political thought—friendship and enmity, private and public life — have become madly and dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar

SF/F Commentary

A Brief Linking to the Manifesto of No-Consequence

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I’m contemplating whether I want to say something more about this fellow’s counter-boycott against those who have condemned Elizabeth Moon over her recent comments on Islam (you can read what I’ve had to say about consumer activism in relation to literature here).  The level of hypocrisy, intellectual vacuity (the argument of no-consequence, specifically), and repetition of fallacious arguments is alarming, particularly considering that I’ve agreed with the author of the post in the past on issues related to what he calls the “fail community.”  The fact that he can’t separate the truly awful from the misunderstood or mistaken is mind boggling to me. So, I’m going to throw the link to all of you for now.  Read the comments if you dare.  Maybe I’ll talk about it.  There’s certainly plenty to be said about the rhetoric being forced there, but I don’t know if I have the stomach for it right now.  Elizabeth Moon’s misguided and incredibly problematic rant is enough to swallow from the SF community at the moment. What do you think?

SF/F Commentary

Future Plans: A List

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I’ve been thinking about things I’d like to do on this blog over the next few months (or year) and decided to write up a list for your perusal.  Some of these things are pretty much set in stone, and others are flexible.  If you have suggestions for things you’d like to see on this blog, please let me know.  I’m always open to suggestions, whether of the “we want more of that” or the “you haven’t done this” variety. Update:  I added some things to the list which I had previously forgotten. Here’s the list: Upcoming Projects A video review of the Barnes & Noble Nook.  I recently purchased one and plan to review it, but not for a few more weeks.  I want to get used to using it first. The sort-of-final post in my New Weird and Scifi Strange series.  I expect I’ll come back to it again, but this third post will be enough for now. Pick My Next Read Polls.  I’ve done them before, but I thought it would be fun to do it again.  I’m not sure how I will run it.  Either I’ll pick the books from my to-be-read pile, or perhaps I could open it to your suggestions.  What do you think? Book reviews of The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell, The Misadventures of Benjamin Bartholomew Piff:  You Wish by Jason Lethcoe, Angel Dust Apocalypse by Jeremy Robert Johnson, City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer, and Mouse Guard:  Fall 1152 by David Petersen.  I have a dozen other books I’m reading, so this list will likely get longer as the weeks go by. A post showing the before and after state of my bookshelves.  I bought a new bookshelf a couple weeks ago, and things have shifted significantly around these parts.  My apartment still looks like a cheap library, but so be it. Possible Projects Discussions centering around my research (expatriate Caribbean science fiction, to be specific).  This may be focused specifically on science fiction, or it may look at cultural elements and theory.  Think of it as an on/off ordeal. Worldbuilding progress on Altern, one of my fantasy worlds.  I’m not treating the worldbuilding in the same way as Tolkien, primarily because the world I’m writing in is post-Elizabethan and pre-coal in design.  The people there are on the cusp of their version of the industrial revolution.  There is a hint of magic, but its presence is severely limited to the point of being impossible to discern from natural phenomenon.  Mythological creatures do exist, though (not all of them; no dragons, yet). Discussions and reviews of non-traditional speculative literature.  By that I mean non-Western in a limited sense.  One of the professors on my M.A. committee is judging a translated SF award right now, which is part of what led me to this idea. More discussion of books that aren’t released by major publishers, or books by major publishers that simply aren’t receiving much attention (which almost amounts to the same thing, since, as I see it, books that don’t get as much attention are often the kinds of books I really enjoy, and which I think most of you would enjoy learning about). A little more current events/real world stuff.  Maybe a post every couple weeks about something that needs to be addressed.  I’ve avoided politics as much as possible, but I don’t think it’s worth hiding away from the things that matter to me on this blog. A discussion of my experiences reading The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis in Spanish.  Yes.  I am doing this, and it will be an experience. That’s what I’m thinking right now.  What do you think?  Do any of those things sound completely uninteresting to you?  Is there anything you’d like to see on the list that I haven’t put there?  Let me know.

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