February 2015

SF/F Commentary

On Procrastination: The Evil One

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It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that I have a procrastination problem.  As you may well know, I’m working on my PhD in English, which requires me to write a 200-250 page dissertation.  My dissertation is mostly pretty awesome:  my first few chapters explore the work of Tobias Buckell, Nalo Hopkinson, and Karen Lord; the last few chapters explore early Caribbean writings in dialogue with contemporary Caribbean science fiction (particularly Michel Maxwell Philip’s Emmanuel Appadocca and Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands).  Needless to say, I’m actually stoked about the project as a whole, even if I’m having the hardest time actually writing the bloody thing.

SF/F Commentary

Reminder: Patreon + Voting Rights

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In case you missed out on what is happening with my Patreon page, here are a few fun facts: Being a patron at any level grants you voting rights on the content of this blog (usually two polls a month) Most patron levels let you suggest at least one topic each month, which would then be voted on by everyone There are 5 different levels of support, and each has something special — the highest tier involves a monthly Google Hangout just with patrons, which should be fun! $1 gets you the vote; $5 makes you a member of Congress (or some equally amusing analogy — bring on your laws, darnit!). I’m also going to change the voting structure soon to make the levels more pronounced and to make distribution of votes a little more interesting.  So stay tuned! Thanks again to those of you who are currently my patrons.  You rock!

SF/F Commentary

Retro Nostalgia: Silent Running (1972; dir. Douglas Trumbull) and the Heroism of Environmental Madness

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Undoubtedly, the 1970s was one of the most important decades for environmental issues.  At the start of the decade, the environmentalist movement had become so influential that the United States government felt compelled to amend the Clean Air Act (in 1970) and the Water Pollution Control Act (1972).  This action expanded the scope of the law and gave the government greater enforcement capabilities.  Not long after, the Environmental Protection Agency was born.   It should come as no surprise, then, that David Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) appeared in this era.  Praised for its visual effects, Silent Running tells the story of Lowell, one of four crew members aboard the Valley Forge, a commercial spaceship carrying several massive biodomes which house some of the last remaining natural wildlife known to man.  Earth, it turns out, is not so much barren as artificial; its people consume processed cubes of nutrients, and the Earth’s surface is devoid of forests or other natural environments.  When the crew of the Valley Forge receive orders to detach the domes and destroy them, Lowell, the lone environmental idealist, murders his crewmates and conspires to flee with the remaining dome and a trio of clunky robots. Silent Running most certainly has a lot to say about environmentalism, but what I found most fascinating about the narrative were its attempts to grapple with the question of Lowell’s sanity.  From the start of the film, Lowell is portrayed as the outsider — the one weirdo who eats naturally grown foods, who believes in the forestry project, and who finds life back on Earth utterly horrifying.   In one of the most pivotal moments in the film, he rants at his crewmates after they tease him for eating a cantaloupe.  In that speech, he reminds us that Earth is polluted and synthetic:  its temperatures are controlled all across the globe, its food is drawn from processors, and its new generations are growing up without natural environments to appreciate.  This moment strikes at the core of the film.  For Lowell, life in the domes, as artificial as they are, represents a life that might be on Earth; he’s an idealist of the highest order because he exists in a reality where these domes are, ironically enough, the only natural environments left for humanity.   That Lowell strikes out on his own near the middle of the film is not insignificant.  For much of the film, Lowell’s outsider status is not just a simple difference of opinion — an environmentalist versus the contented.  His outsider status is a division of humanity.  His crewmates are the faces of a “new” humanity who have discarded an evolutionary relationship to the natural world in exchange for an intellectual relationship with product.  Lowell is the “old” face, the humanity which appreciates the natural world, not just because of its splendor but because being human means being connected to the natural.  When Lowell does kill his crewmates — one he kills with his bare hands; the other two he kills after detaching a dome with them inside and then destroying it — it is an act of madness, desperation, and separation.  Lowell’s sanity should be drawn into question at this point, not just because he commits murder, but because by doing so, he is severing his ties to his own species.  But is he actually mad, or is there something else at work here? From my own perspective, I do not view Lowell as having succumbed to madness.  In fact, I think there’s something heroic in what he does to save the natural environment, even if his heroism has no connection to a human worldview — without human recognition, how can he be seen as an actual hero?  Lowell doesn’t simply run away.  He creates an elaborate plot to convince the other dome ships that the Valley Forge has malfunctioned, sending the ship careening into the rings of Saturn, which the corporation believes will destroy the ship.  It’s unclear whether Lowell knows he will die beforehand; the ambiguity is later closed off by Lowell’s suicide (we’ll come to that in a minute).  What is clear is that Lowell knows that nothing he can do with words will save the Valley Forge or its last remaining dome from American Airlines (the corporation which owns the dome ships — no joke).  His crewmates never accept his rhetoric, and he knows that he has an even worse chance trying to convince a corporation to save the domes when there is no desire for their existence back home on Earth.  Lowell has no choice.  If he’s to save Earth’s natural world, he has to make the heroic sacrifice:  sever his ties with humanity and flee.  We’re asked to weigh this against the sacrifice of a few human lives. As you might have guessed, this doesn’t quite work.  A search party eventually finds Lowell and the Valley Forge, and Lowell must once more make a decision:  allow the dome to be captured and destroyed or do something extreme.  His solution:  leave one of the robots to tend to the forest, shoot the dome off into deep space, and then use the remaining nukes to destroy himself and the Valley Forge.  This scene appears to be foregrounded by the ambiguity I mentioned earlier.  Here, there is no ambiguity left:  Lowell sacrifices himself to protect the dome.  But his sacrifice also means relinquishing to the inner turmoil he has felt since the start of the movie:  that he is no longer part of the human race.   Lowell’s anti-humanity (or rejection of a new humanity, if you will) is also enhanced by the conclusion’s compelling duality: The human race as we know it is extinct. The salvation of the natural environment must come from the intervention of humanity and its machines. In the concluding shots, we’re shown images of Dewey (the name Lowell gives one of his robots) tending to the forest.  These moments disentangle the paradox of the domes — a natural environment reborn

SF/F Commentary

Announcement: The Migration to WordPress

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I wanted to let everyone know that I’ve decided to migrate this blog over to WordPress.  The reasons are pretty simple:  while Blogger gives me more control over the physical space of the blog, WordPress’ features are more functional (better comments, better “read more” function, etc. etc. etc.).  I can also easily get a domain name for this blog through WordPress ($26 for hosting and domain registration ain’t too shabby). I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, to be honest, but a lot of things kept me from doing so.  For one, I worried it would affect my readership numbers and page rankings.  Second, importing Blogger posts into WordPress used to be fairly limited; they are, thankfully, no longer so.  These mostly seem like trivial things now; the longer I put off switching over, the more difficult it would be.  So…I’m doing it.  Let’s get it over with.  Let’s get me a proper website and make this site less…buggy. Doing this will mean some changes for the blog — layout, colors, design, etc.  If you’re an RSS subscriber, you shouldn’t have to do anything at all because I still use Feedburner.  If you’re not subscribed via RSS, then keep an eye out, because eventually this space will redirect to a completely different one. Nothing will happen overnight.  I need some time to get things set up over at WordPress.  I may post a link to ask for opinions in the near future.  Keep an eye out.  Until I’ve made the switch, blogging will continue as usual around here. Anywhoodles!

SF/F Commentary

All Your Human Are Belong to Us: Cats, Authors, and Science Fiction and Fantasy

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Since I’ve already talked about cats in SFF in this “top 10 cats” post, I decided to go after this subject from a different angle:  authors.  On Monday and Tuesday of this week, I conducted an informal survey on the relationship between authors, their cats, and genre.  The results were both familiar and unusual.* As expected, most of the authors who own cats mentioned that the natural independence of the feline species makes them perfect pets for an otherwise introverted or attention-limited group.  The “cats are not like dogs” sentiment came up several times, though some authors expressed a love of the canine species as well, prompting me to consider whether a “authors who don’t own cats” survey would be equally as compelling.  In any case, what we already kind of knew came up in almost every single case:  cats are independent, and authors like having an uncompromising furry creature that is perfectly fine being ignored but won’t let you get away with being a neglectful turd (truth). The more interesting responses were the vaguely fantastic ones.  More than one author suggested that cats seemed to have an otherworldly presence:  they can hear spiders and breach the supernatural, as one anonymous author declared.  These statements were obviously said with tongue firmly planted in cheek, but I think there is an undercurrent of honesty in these statements, too.  Judith Tarr, for example, said that “cats are the distilled essence of the weird” (winner of this year’s Most Profound Statement About Cats Award).  So many authors ascribed supernatural “feeling” to cats that it’s not surprising that so many fantasy novels have included cats in some form, whether at the forefront or in the background — urban fantasy especially.  From Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1996-2003) to recent novels such as Kristi Charish’s Owl and the Japanese Circus (2015) and Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory (2015), cats are a fairly common occurrence in fantasy, active or otherwise Trying to take over the world one kitty barf at a time… Part of that prevalence, of course, is historical.  Cats have been part of human history for almost as long as we’ve we’ve had what could be called “civilization.”  They have been worshiped, given pet status, treated as exterminators, been consumed as food, hunted (in the case of the big cats), and immortalized in our literature (T.S. Eliot anyone?).  They may not have the same symbiotic relationship with us as dogs, but they are undoubtedly a part of the human experience.  There may even be some truth to the notion that cats have some connection to the supernatural that goes beyond normal human experience.  And if not, then they certainly give that impression, don’t they? On the more science fictional side were Martha Wells and Kelly McCullough, who both suggested that cats are about as close to an alien intelligence that one can reasonably get (presumably keeping tapeworms as pets is still a faux pas, which is total crap).**  Wells, for example, stated that “cats are the aliens that live in our houses,” which is a curious phrase indeed.  What I find interesting here is that cats are frequently listed on the survey as influencing an author’s work, but in some cases, cats are granted a higher state of influence.  There’s a duality of function:  on the one hand, cats influence writers by keeping them “in check” or giving them necessary companionship; on the other hand, cats become vehicles for speculative exploration, either directly in the form of actual cats in an author’s work or indirectly as inspiration for characters or creatures. DOAN TOUCH MAH HOOMAN OR IM GONNA EAT U!!!1 The particular alien-ness of cats is also interesting because they are frequently thought of as one of the only proper companion species which is alien to human beings — “proper” meaning “creatures which are domesticated so that they seek out companionship with humans”***  Dogs and parrots do not have the same indifference to humans as cats almost always do.  In fact, some parrots bond to a single owner for life, making it quite difficult to find them replacement homes when their human owners do not outlive them.  I need to say nothing of dogs. But cats are different.  Almost every author in the survey noted that cats take what they want and give what they please, but they are otherwise independent creatures who seem to tolerate our existence.  That is, of course, a human assessment of a cat, so it should be taken with a grain of salt.  I’ve no more clue what goes on in a cat’s mind than any of you for hopefully obvious reasons (I’m not a cat; really).  So reading cats as “alien intelligences” isn’t that far off the mark.  More than so many other companion species, cats really do seem removed.  Alien.  Even our attempts to understand them come up short because we filter everything through a human lens.  While this might work for dogs, which have similar mammalian social functions as human beings, it is less clear with cats.  I think that on some level we explain away cat behaviors in humanistic terms to make ourselves feel better; otherwise, we have to admit to living with creatures whose motives are unknown. The last serious question I had for authors was specific to the topic, which was suggested by Amy Fredericks as one of her patron rewards on my Patreon page:  do you think there is a deeper connection between science fiction and fantasy and cats, or are they a writer thing in general?  Most of the respondents didn’t think there was much of a connection.  Cats may be more common among writers, they remarked, but they are otherwise a people thing, and there’s no reason to think that cats are somehow more “unique” or “influential” in SFF than they are elsewhere. The Kzinti are to galactic wars as cat tantrums are to cat scratch fever… That said, I think it’s worth noting that cats are a huge part of SFF literary and cinematic history, as became apparent

SF/F Commentary

SFF Reappraisals: Brian Francis Slattery

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SFF Reappraisals is a new column on WISB which discusses under-appreciated or lesser known writers in an attempt to explain why they deserve greater recognition. ————————– Though a winner of the Philip K. Dick Award in 2012, Brian Francis Slattery’s literary science fiction has thus far been “under the radar” within wider SF circles.  I think this is a mistake, if not because Slattery is an exceptional writer, then certainly because Slattery’s work speaks to our present in a way that so few writers today have shown (or the other way around).  For this reason, I’ve selected Slattery as the first author in my SFF Reappraisals feature. So, without further ado… The Work Slattery is primarily known for his novel writing, one of which, Lost Everything (2012; Tor), won the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award.  His other novels include Spaceman Blues: A Love Song (2007; Tor), Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America (2008; Tor), and the forthcoming The Family Hightower (Seven Stories Press).* As a literary stylist, Slattery is perhaps best thought of as SFF’s Cormac McCarthy, though even that is a limited comparison.  There’s a distinctly “southern” feel to some of his work, which either comes from personal history or literary allusion.  Lost Everything, for example, bears the traces of Faulkner in its examination of a post-climate change America, and may even have the characteristic dark wit for which Faulkner seems to have been divested of as generations of students become increasingly removed from the Great Depression.  One might also see parallels to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, though not so much in plot as in its allusions, which are, at times, clearly reminiscent of Civil War Era literature.  This “feeling” certainly reminds one of a literary modality — in the sense that Slattery appears to borrow from literary forms to tell otherwise speculative stories which speak about our present either directly — as in the case of Lost Everything — or more abstractly.  Spaceman Blues, for example, is an urban retelling of the classic myth of Orpheus, yet bears resemblance to the postmodern stylings of Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick and the literary traditions of the Pulps.  Yet Spaceman Blues, whose protagonist is homosexual, has the (mis)fortune of having been published during a remarkably bigoted period of American history, wherein the vast majority of States had some form of same sex marriage ban on the books.  That this mythic retelling features a homosexual man, then, is not insignificant at all:  the great mythic romance is not just a hetero romance. The appearance of literary mimicry gives Slattery’s work a certain gravitas that I find compelling.  What on the surface appears to be a simple narrative canvas quickly becomes a complicated foray into the lives of very real, sometimes very strange or unique people.  Spaceman Blues is, on the surface, a simple mythic retelling, but it is also a love story which revels in and interrogates SFF’s narrative traditions; Lost Everything is another climate change dystopia, but it is also mythic in scope and so closely focused on the everyday lives of those trying to survive that it transcends — even reduces to mythic monstrosity — its dystopian setting:  it is about people, not the end of the world. Slattery is an interesting case because his work is undoubtedly of the literary vein, yet it is published by a major SFF publisher who is largely recognized for its backlist of straight SFF — much like metafictionalist Paul Park.  But he is also a writer that deserves greater attention.  If you haven’t read a Slattery novel, you should. Recommendation If you’re a fan of Cormac McCarthy, Paul Park, or William Faulkner, you’ll certainly enjoy Brian Francis Slattery’s work. Further Reading and Listening I have written two reviews of Slattery’s work (Spaceman Blues and Lost Everything), and he has made one appearance on The Skiffy and Fanty Show.  Slattery also writes short fiction, most of which is available via online venues.  They are linked on his website. —————— This post was suggested by Paul Weimer as one of his patron rewards on my Patreon page.  You can have a say in the content for this website, too, by becoming a patron. —————– *Which I have not read.

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