August 2011

SF/F Commentary

Promo Bits: Kafkaesque edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly

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The wonderful folks at Tachyon Publications are up to mischief again with a new anthology called Kafkaesque, edited by John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly.  I’m letting you all know about this book because I want it, and one of you is going to buy it for me for my Birthday, which is on the 6th of October.  Seriously.  You are.  Or we’re not friends anymore, you hear?  And I don’t care that the book doesn’t come out until November 2011.  You can pre-order it.  Or steal an ARC from a reviewer.  It’s only wrong if you get caught… Anywho.  Enough of that.  Here’s the back cover blurb (ToC to follow): Franz Kafka died in obscurity in 1924, having published a handful of odd stories in little-known central European literary magazines. Yet modern culture has embraced the stark ideas and vivid imagery of his work. Even those who have never read a word of his fiction know enough to describe their tribulations with bureaucracy as “Kafkaesque.”  Kafkaesque explores dystopian, comedic, and ironic fictions inspired by Franz Kafka’s work. In Philip Roth’s alternate history, Kafka survives World War II and immigrates to America, Jorge Luis Borges envisions a labyrinthine public lottery that evolves into bureaucratically-mandated mysticism. Carol Emshwiller invents an exclusively male society faced with its first (mostly) female member. Paul Di Filippo’s journalist by day, costumed crime-fighter by night, copes with the bizarre amidst the mundane.   Also includes Kafka’s classic story “The Hunger Artist,” in a brand-new translation, as well as an illustrated version by legendary cartoonist R. Crumb (Fritz the Cat). Additionally, each author discusses Kafka’s writing, its relevance, its personal influence, and Kafka’s enduring legacy. The table of contents are as follows: “A Hunger Artist” (translated by Kessel) by Franz Kafka  “The Drowned Giant” by J.G. Ballard  “The Cockroach Hat” by Terry Bisson  “Hymenoptera” by Michael Blumlein  “The Lottery in Babylon” (tr: Hurley) by Jorge Luis Borges  “The Big Garage” by T. Coraghessan Boyle  “The Jackdaw’s Last Case” by Paul Di Filippo  “Report to the Men’s Club” by Carol Emshwiller  “Bright Morning” by Jeffrey Ford  “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow” by Theodora Goss  “Stable Strategies for Middle Management” by Eileen Gunn  “The Handler” by Damon Knight  “Receding Horizon” by Jonathan Lethem & Carter Scholz  “A Hunger Artist” by David Mairowitz & Robert Crumb  “I Always Wanted You to Admire my Fasting”, or “Looking at Kafka” by Philip Roth  “The 57th Franz Kafka” by Rudy Rucker  “The Amount to Carry” by Carter Scholz  “Kafka in Brontëland” by Tamar Yellin Let me just say that the ToC looks bloody amazing.  Ballard, Bisson, Borges, Filippo, Emschwiller, Ford, Roth, Rucker, Gunn…  What an impressive list, don’t you think?  My friend Kendra will hear about this anthology promptly.  Because she’s kind of obsessed with Kafka… Admit it.  You want this book too…

SF/F Commentary

The Science Fiction Renaissance: Who is Our Messiah?

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I had a rather strange and characteristically “me” conversation with my friend Adam the other day about the state of science fiction as a genre.  One thing that keeps coming up in our conversations is how fantasy has seemingly abandoned the trappings of respectability for the more lucrative pursuit of market share, while science fiction has done the exact opposite.  I’m not sure why science fiction lovers (not all, but a good enough chunk) have doomed themselves to respectability at the sake of readership, nor am I altogether certain that SF is weakened by its bid for respect (in part, yes). But it does make me wonder why there are so many fantasy authors that fans can’t stop talking about, while there are so few science fiction authors who seem to have the same impact.  Adam often brings up The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi as an example of SF that could revitalize the genre.  But are people paying attention, or are the only ones looking at The Quantum Thief the same people who were looking at SF before?  I’d guess the latter, as sad as that makes me about the state of the genre I love so dearly. Perhaps the problem stems from the absence of SF in YA and children’s lit circles.  There are hardly any SF novels in those categories, and the few that exist are more often of the dystopian variety than the space opera kind (which seems silly to me when you consider how much space opera is like the epic fantasies that dominate the YA shelves). The question becomes:  who is our new SF messiah?  Who can revitalize the genre by bringing in new readers and give back to the reading world all that glory and sensawunda that made the genre what it is/was?  Or will SF sink into a smaller market share and stay there? I’m not saying that SF is dying.  It’s not.  It can’t die.  Not while a huge chunk of the most successful movies these days are SF.  Not while Star Wars and other franchises are doing just dandy.  But I do get the sense that SF has become almost elitist in its pursuits.  That there aren’t many gateway tales anymore (those we point to as gateway tales are often old, stuffy, and not exactly on the advertising list for publishers).  I suppose I’m just worrying that we’re shooting ourselves in the foot here.  Maybe this has something to do with what Damien G. Walter said about critics and the Hugos.   Or maybe it just has to do with being embedded in academia.  I think SF has its respectability.  We just don’t need it.  We don’t need to keep looking for it and trying to get more of it.  What SF needs, it seems to me, is an awakening.  A new renaissance.

SF/F Commentary

The Sexy Geek Ideal Imaginary: Do We Have a Problem?

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I’m going to direct you all to read Geek Feminism’s post entitled “‘Geek Girls’ and the Problem of Objectification” as a starter, because much of what I’m going to say below stems from the fascinating discussion taking place there.  But to start, I’ll offer the following quote: There’s nothing wrong with wanting attention and approval in one’s community. What cosplayer and geek wouldn’t want those things? What female geek doesn’t want to be welcomed into the community with enthusiasm and excitement (instead of derided as a harpy feminist or annoying squeeing fangirl)? The problem, then, isn’t what women do, but a culture in which the only way that women can be recognized as a desirable part of the culture is when they participate by making themselves consumable sexy objects for geek men. One of the problems with geek culture is how readily it has moved to adopt the paradigms of the cultures that exist outside of it (the very cultures which at one point looked down at geeks for being, well, geeky).  I don’t have a problem with sexy geeks, or sexy geek clothing.  In fact, most people don’t, in principle.  There’s nothing wrong with looking sexy, or wanting to look that way.  The problems arise when the sexy geek becomes the image we hope to attain (or, rather, that women hope to attain, since men, by and large, are not compelled to fulfill particular and very impossible physical images in order to achieve acceptance and “love” from others).*  Specifically, it’s a very particular kind of “sexy image.”  An image which says “only people with certain dress sizes and certain body proportions look sexy in the sexy clothes.”  Because that’s an image that women will try to fit, even if their bodies aren’t designed for it.  Even if doing so is bad for them.  Even if doing so could end up killing them or destroying young girls from the mind out.  There’s nothing wrong with sexy, but there’s something very wrong with the way we use it. Geek culture really shouldn’t have ideal body images.  Not in any immediate sense.  We should be just as willing to commend someone for wearing cat ears and a tail in any body shape (or gender) as we would someone wearing a skimpy ninja costume (is it fair to say that certain clothing is body specific?  I don’t know.  It seems horrible to suggest as much…).  They should be seen as equal forms of expression.  But I don’t think we’ll ever be there, in part because we have and will always be a highly sexualized culture.  Clothing deemed “sexy” will always elicit seemingly positive responses (objectifying responses, but positive nonetheless because of our perceptions). I would be lying if I said I didn’t have those responses for Slave Leia cosplayers, or that sexy geek calendar everyone is talking about (I won’t buy such a thing, but seeing the images will undoubtedly elicit a reaction).  But I’m aware of those responses.  And it’s never stopped me from saying hello to people who don’t dress like Slave Leia (and, in fact, it’s helped me talk to those people, because I’m uncomfortable around half naked people in public).  But I’m also aware of how many of those responses are socially conditioned — of all those times when I’ve seen someone who doesn’t look like a “hot girl” and reacted poorly in my head.  I’ve had to shut those things out, because geek culture should always be about the geekery, not about what people look like, how they dress (unless they dress in people’s skin or something), and so on.  It’s not about who should be pretty or who wears the sexiest clothes.  It’s about a whole different set of ideals (in my head).  This is turning into a ramble, though, so I’ll shut up and move on. I say all of this as a geek and someone who has attended geek-oriented events (and hopes to do so in the future).  I’m not particularly pleased by the subversion of geek culture’s original disaffected attitude towards standardized models for engagement.  Maybe what I see in my head is utopian nostalgia, wherein women were more likely to be accepted into the group as people because they were geeks too and not because they wore bikinis.  And, well, it probably is utopia and formed out of nothing.  Because women haven’t been a part of geek culture, largely speaking.  They’ve been excluded for all kinds of stupid or sexist or unintentional reasons.  Not to the extent that women weren’t a part of it at all, mind you, but certainly to the point where you could look around and not find a whole lot of them there.  Now?  It seems like they’re all over the place (and hello to you all), but following on their heels are the ideologies that still turn entire generations of young women into anorexics, etc.  Nobody should have those things forced on them. What are we going to do about it?  I don’t know.  I really don’t. —————————————————- * — I don’t want to suggest that men are not susceptible to “ideal” body images.  They are.  But the pressure is less pronounced than it is for women, and likely not as well-researched.

SF/F Commentary

Lambda Literary Award: Celebrating the LG, Kicking the BT in the Ass

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I won’t profess to understand the full history of the Lambda Literary Foundation (to which the award belongs). As a Foundation that has in recent years honored lesbian, gay, bisexual, transexual, and other-sexuals (genderqueer, etc.) writers, the place is near and dear to my heart.  But then they announced this: LGBT authors will be recognized with three awards marking stages of a writer’s career: the Betty Berzon Debut Fiction Award (to one gay man and one lesbian), the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize (to one male-identified and one female-identified author), and the Pioneer Award (to one male-identified and one female-identified individual or group) – Awards for the remaining Lambda Literary Award categories will be based on literary merit and significant content relevant to LGBT lives. These awards will be open to all authors regardless of their sexual identity – All book award judges will be self-identified LGBT The above is the result of a lot of discussion and arguing among differing camps of the LGBT community (supposedly, though I’ve yet to hang out with any LGBT people who disagree so much as to make a concession like the above remotely rational).  But it is also the third major response to criticism about how the awards are structured.  According to their 20+ year history, the award went from accepting submissions “based solely on a book’s LGBT subject matter” to being restrict to self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer authors” in 2009.  This, apparently, is what has created the divide.  Some believe the award should go only to writers of the LGBT persuasion (broadly defined), while others think that the awards should reflect LLF’s function to promote positive LGBT images, as their mission statement makes clear: The Lambda Literary Foundation nurtures, celebrates, and preserves LGBT literature through programs that honor excellence, promote visibility and encourage development of emerging writers. But even more importantly:  the previous guidelines couldn’t be reasonably enforced, as Nicola Griffith points out in her post on the recent changes — “if you can’t substantiate (check, prove, police, ensure) eligibility, it’s pointless.” The problem, then, has to do with representation.  The new categories are oddly LG- and gender-normal-centric.  One of the new awards (for debut fiction) is oriented only towards gay and lesbian people (both of which would be associated with standard genders); the other two are geared towards people who identify as male or female.  The other categories, presumably, are open to just about anyone, so long as the content of their work is relevant to LGBT people.  But the new awards are oddly exclusionary, giving the T side of the “LGBT” label little room to “play.”  Where exactly to transgender or transsexual or genderqueer people fit into all of this?  While Cheryl Morgan and I have had our differences (in days of yore, as they say), I think people should read her slightly angry response to the changes, or at least this juicy quote: First of all, why is one award specifically restricted to “one gay man and one lesbian”, while others are for “male-identified and female-identified” people. At least the latter appears to include some bi people, which the former seems to exclude. As for trans people, apparently they are OK for the first award if they identify as gay or lesbian, but not otherwise, and they are OK for the other two awards is they are male-identified and female-identified, but not otherwise. Let’s face it:  When an important award which is supposed to celebrate LGBT issues in literature doesn’t get how its policies discriminate against its own target demographic, then something is seriously wrong…

SF/F Commentary

SandF Episode 5.1 (Torture Cinema Meets Mansquito) is live!

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Our listeners were kind enough to select Mansquito for our Torture Cinema feature this week (which might include some of you).  If you don’t know anything about the movie, that’s probably a good thing.  I strongly suggest listening to our humorous and slightly angry review instead.  It’ll save at least 60 minutes of your day (seeing how the movie is about an hour and a half, and our review is 1/3rd of that). In any case, here’s the episode! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go edit something, and then blog about something else…

SF/F Commentary

What Are You Reading? Inquiring Minds Want to Know

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In the interest of giving all of you the floor to talk about books, I’d like to know what you all are reading and what you think of it (anything counts, from articles to audiobooks). I am currently smack dab in the middle of the following: Down the Mysterly River by Bill Willingham (and Mark Buckingham) Loving it! The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein Interesting, but I need to get deeper before I can make a valid judgment. Gateways edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull Some really smart stories in here! Future Media edited by Rick Wilbur Just started! When the Great Days Come by Gardner Dozois So far:  loving it! Imperial Eyes:  Travel Writing and Transculturation by Louise Pratt Just started!  But I’ve read it before, and it’s an interesting text. Maps of Englishness by Simon Gikandi Just started! The English in the West Indies by Froude (can’t remember the the first name) Just started! The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader Just started! The New Negro:  Voices of the Harlem Renaissance Just started! I also finished a few short stories by Mary Robinette Kowal (“Clockwork Chickadee” and For Want of a Nail — the latter won the Hugo and is quite good).  And yes, I realize that is a lot of reading.  I’m a grad student.  So sue me… So what are you reading?

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