April 2015

SF/F Commentary

In the Duke’s Sights: Speakeasies, the Brooding Octavias, Tax Kings, Sorrows, and Machines!

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It’s time to create a new semi-regular column where I talk about things that I’m eyeing for whatever reason and things that I’m currently enjoying (also for whatever reason).  Because what could you want more than anything else in the world than my haphazard thoughts about random pieces of upcoming (or old) sf/f literature, film, and so on?  Assume you can’t have pie as an alternative, because I can’t compete with pie. So here we are:  on the cusp of discussing exciting new and old and time-indeterminate things! The Speakeasy People Are Coming For Us! This gorgeous book arrived in my mailbox on Wednesday, and, well, it’s gorgeous, no?  Valente, of course, is a fine writer, so when something by her appears in my inbox looking all kinds of book sexy, I’m inclined to want to read it immediately. And the story?  Sounds like something I’d enjoy! The hotel Artemisia sits on a fantastical 72nd Street, in a decade that never was. It is home to a cast of characters, creatures, and creations unlike any other, including especially Zelda Fair, who is perfect at being Zelda, but who longs for something more. The world of this extraordinary novella—a bootlegger’s brew of fairy tales, Jazz Age opulence, and organized crime—is ruled over by the diminutive, eternal, sinister Al. Zelda holds her own against the boss, or so it seems. But when she faces off against him and his besotted employee Frankie in a deadly game that just might change everything, she must bet it all and hope not to lose… The immediate parallel in 2015 would have to be Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory, even though they are drastically different sorts of books.  Still, there’s a similar feel to them, so I’m likely to enjoy Valente’s book as much as Bear’s — which is to say a whole heck of a lot. Brooding Octavia’s! Given the vocal campaign against the SJW infestation of science fiction and fantasy, I think it entirely appropriate to give Octavia’s Brood:  Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements (edited by Walida Imarisha and adrienne maree brown; 4/14/15 release) a prominent place in my “In the Duke’s Sights” feature. The anthology collects twenty stories which engage with movements of social change.  I argued in an upcoming review for Strange Horizons that this kind of concentration of theme is precisely what exceptional science fiction anthologies do.  It also appears to be a prominent trend, which I’m happy exists.  Without a doubt, I desperately want to read this one! Tax Kings Who Wear Fancy Pants (Probably) If you haven’t already heard about Ken Liu’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, then I’m put in the unfortunate position of having to tell you that you need to stop living under a rock. Liu has been talking up the book for the past week, noting on more than one occasion that The Grace of Kings is silkpunk which makes taxes fun.  That’s perhaps the boldest claim about a book that I have ever heard, since tax season in the United States is objectively less enjoyable for most people than the following:  root canals, being clawed by 90 very angry cats, having your foot chewed off by a badger, sitting through any Uwe Boll film…twice, and so on.  You get the idea. Initial discussion of the novel has been quite positive.  Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to dig into it later this month. There Are Proper Sorrows, Surely! Coming later this month is Lindsey Drager’s The Sorrow Proper, a literary novel about technological change.  It’s rooted in the present changes to publishing, but there’s some weirdness about the Many Worlds theory and a future where the public library system is no longer, which sounds like something I’d love precisely because it’s my worst nightmare.  NO LIBRARIES?  NO! The novel certainly seems intriguing, so I hope to get a chance to read it soon. The Lady Machines Will Ruin Us (Probably…Not) The one sf/f film everyone is looking forward to this month is Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, starring Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, and Oscar Isaac.  Garland is fairly new to the director’s seat, but his written work includes 28 Days Later (2002), Sunshine (2007), Never Let Me Go (2010), and the under-appreciated Dredd (2012).  For that reason, I’m actually looking forward to what Garland does with Ex Machina, and so you can expect my toosh in a theater seat once I’ve kicked this cold in the face. And there you have it!  So…what are you fixated on at the moment?

SF/F Commentary

5 Reasons I Won’t Read Your Work

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Having reviewed books somewhat spottily for over half a decade, I’ve developed a mental checklist to use when deciding whether I will read or review a book.  Most often, I just don’t have the time to read 159,997 novels in a year, so I turn down a lot of reviews because I know I won’t be able to get to it.  Otherwise, I usually reject a novel for one of the follow reasons: 5. You write the kind of books I don’t generally like to read This one is obvious, no?  I only read certain kinds of science fiction and fantasy, with rare exception.  Anything outside of that narrow band generally gets ignored.  Most people are like this because most people aren’t interested in every kind of sf/f literature. You’d be surprised how often I get review requests for things that I’ve never reviewed in all my lackluster years as a reviewer.  Not nearly as often as others, I’m sure, but often enough that this is one of the top reasons I won’t review a book.  I’ve pulled myself from a couple reviewer email lists because of this.  If my preferences are for X, I don’t want to get requests for Q and G.  It’s that simple. Note:  that I have made exceptions in the past in no way means I will make exceptions all the time; if I did that, I wouldn’t have to make exceptions… 4. You don’t know how to do basic PR for your book The easiest way to get me to delete an email is to send me something that reads less like a review request and more like spam.  You’re in bad territory indeed if I think your email will end with you claiming that you’re a prince with millions of dollars that you have bequeathed to me and that you need me to front the fee to transfer it to a U.S. bank… You know what I want in a review request?  Simple: a) Basic information about the book (synopsis, title, simple comparisons; book cover; blurbs) b) Basic information about you (a bio!) c) An indication that you’re familiar with me, my blog, or my podcast (major publishers often get a pass on this because they keep big lists of reviewers). I don’t need your life story, weird attempts to make your book seem super awesome, etc.  If you put some personality into a, b, and c, that’s wonderful, but leave all the other stuff out. 3. You spend too much of your time online talking about how under-appreciated you are I’ve only seen a handful of authors do this.  They sit on their Twitter accounts talking about why nobody reads or buys their books and how awful that is.  Not just once, which might be forgiven.  Not just twice, which might also be forgiven.  But so many times that it becomes a semi-regular occurrence. The problem with this has nothing to do with whether it’s true.  It might be that you’re not appreciated as much as you deserve.  Maybe you did write a great novel, but nobody is buying it for whatever reason.  That sucks.  But that’s also the writing “game.”  If everyone could sell as many books as John Scalzi, then everyone would complain about not selling more than that.  You can’t control how many books you sell.  Not really.  You can push them with PR campaigns and the like (see Kameron Hurley for an example), but the market isn’t something that can be easily “gamed.”  Sometimes, you just won’t sell as many books as you would like for reasons you’ll never fully understand. Complaining about it, however, makes you look desperate.  It might convince a few people to buy your books.  But do you really want people to buy them out of pity? As a reviewer, I just don’t play that game for one simple reason:  it’s already difficult enough to be objective about a book when you are embedded in online fandom; adding a negative emotion to the reading process makes objectivity even more difficult, so it is likely to negatively affect my reception of your book.  I’d prefer to avoid that situation altogether. 2. You’re a grown ass human being but behave like a child having a temper tantrum Every so often, you’ll find an author handling author life rather poorly.  They complain incessantly about reviews, they crowd fan spaces when they are clearly unwanted, and they handle criticism either of their work or their online writing in the same way as a child handles being told they can’t have another piece of cake. The line between author and work isn’t as clearly defined as some would like (a fact I’ll discuss in the next section).  At some point, an author’s behavior begins to affect how I view the author’s work.  I can’t help it, and in some cases, I don’t want to.  If an author responds poorly to reviews, I’d rather review something else than risk getting on that author’s shitlist.  Why?  Because I don’t need the additional stress, and if I have the choice between reading something else I might like or risking getting crapped on by an author with a behavior problem, I’ll pick the first one. That doesn’t mean authors should shut up.  There are occasionally good reasons to talk about a review (good or bad) or to address some controversy online, etc.  Authors just need to understand the line between “appropriate” and “inappropriate.” 1. You’re a giant, unapologetic, raging asshole In rare cases, the idea of separating an author from their work is fundamentally impossible.  Some people are so incapable of being anything other than rude, conniving scumbuckets that it’s impossible to see their name on the book and not think about their behavior.  We all know of one or two authors who are like this.  They attack people with whom they disagree; they treat people who interact with them like worthless piles of human flesh; and they have such an air

SF/F Commentary

My #HugoAwards Final Ballot (To Be Submitted in the Future)

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Over the weekend, I explained why I intended to use No Award and Blank Spacing as a response to the Sad Puppies / Rabid Puppies campaign to manipulate and take over the Hugo Awards.  Since I am fundamentally opposed to slate-based voting measures, I can’t in good conscience support works which appear on this year’s ballot as a result of the SP/RP slates.  And so I won’t. Others, of course, may have different views.  TheG intends to give most things on the ballot a fair shake under the guise that voting No Award would unfairly punish those that are on the ballot but are otherwise not really part of the SP/RP world.  He admits, though, that this is hardly a strong response.  Where we do agree, however, is that there are some problematic cases here.  Some folks are on the ballot who didn’t know they were included in the SP/RP slate and would have declined if they had known.  However, I’m of the mindset that support for anything on the ballot may be perceived as tacit support for the entire campaign — a point on which Abigail Nussbaum and I agree. With that said, voting will be rather easy for me, since the SP/RP folks have taken almost every slot on this year’s ballot.  Here’s what my ballot will look like when I’m allowed to submit it (feel free to lob your disagreements or what have you in the comments): Best Novel Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison No Award Best Novella No Award Best Novelette The Day The World Turned Upside Down by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Lightspeed Magazine, April 2014) Best Short Story No Award Best Related Work No Award Best Graphic Story Ms. Marvel Vol. 1 Saga Vol. 3 Sex Criminals Vol. 1 Rat Queens Vol. 1 No Award Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form Interstellar Captain America:  The Winter Soldier Guardians of the Galaxy Edge of Tomorrow The Lego Movie No Award Note:  I’m going to make an exception for the long/short form media categories because it’s unlikely the works listed wouldn’t have made it anyway. Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form Game of Thrones:  “The Mountain and the Viper” Orphan Black:  “By Means Which Have Never Yet Been Tried” No Award Note:  I haven’t yet watched the others yet, so I may include them in the end.  The Doctor Who piece is unlikely to make it because I’ve completely bounced off the show. Best Editor, Short Form No Award Best Editor, Long Form No Award Best Professional Artist Julie Dillon No Award Best Semiprozine Strange Horizons Beneath Ceaseless Skies Lightspeed No Award Best Fanzine Journey Planet No Award Best Fancast Galactic Suburbia Tea and Jeopardy No Award Best Fan Writer No Award Best Fan Artist Ninna Aalto Brad W. Foster Elizabeth Leggett Spring Schoenhuth Steve Stiles John W. Campbell Award (It’s a Fucking Hugo SHUT UP) Wesley Chu No Award I strongly encourage you to use “No Award” if you are opposed to ballot stuffing and the blatant politicization of the Hugos, as has clearly happened this year.  Leave everything off the ballot that was on the SP slate.  Send a message.  Gaming the Hugos will not be tolerated.

SF/F Commentary

10 Reasons I’m a Feminist

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What’s that?  I’m a feminist?!  Yup.  A wicked awesome feminist who wears Feminist Cannons on his shoulders and shoots Holy Feminist Balls at sexism.  Or something like that. Something I’ve never done before is provide some kind of explanation for why I am a feminist.  Hence this post. Here are the ten reasons I am a feminist.  Feel free to list yours in the comments! 1.  I am fundamentally opposed to all forms of inequality, whether intentional, structural, or otherwise. 2.  Most of my life has been in the care of women.  My mother and grandmother played pivotal roles in my life, most notably because they were the people who actually raised me. 3.  I studied feminist theory in college before I was willing to call myself a feminist.  In doing so, I learned about dozens of different interpretations and worldviews, some of them more radical than others.  I also studied queer theory in college, though I was already pro-LGBT before that (for another time). 4.  It took a lot of doing, but making myself open to the possibility that I might have things wrong meant I could hear what my female friends were telling me when they called me out on things.  This willingness to “hear” people meant I learned far more than I otherwise would have, whether specific to feminism and women or to other issues (homosexuality, etc.). 5.  Feminism has done extraordinary things.  The Women’s Suffrage Movement.  Abortion Rights.  Changing the social fabric of much of the world.  In brief, feminism has been one of the most influential ideas in human history.  Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that? 6.  I’ve spent so much time online looking at how the world treats women that it’s difficult for me not to see the inequality all around me.  I’ve even taught media representation at the college level in order to show how men and women are presented in advertising, and why that affects both men and women by imparting certain social and/or physical standards by which we are expected to live (not an absolute, of course).  Being so embedded in this “world” means it is nearly impossible for me not to believe something is wrong and that we need to do something to fix it. 7.  Feminism represents my interests, too.  Fighting for maternity leave means fighting for paternity leave, too.  Fighting for equality for women means fighting for equality for men! 8. Representation matters.  Women make up roughly 50% of the population, so why would we accept a world in which our media doesn’t represent them as they actually are?  I don’t. 9.  I’m a science fiction scholar, which means my day job literally involves reading about the future in its myriad forms (and sometimes about weird alternate histories and the like).  I see equality as the future for which we must always strive, so it makes a great deal of sense that I would be inclined towards ideas that are concerned with creating a better future.  Feminism is, in a way, a type of theoretical science fiction. 10.  Now, more than any other time in my life, there is a concerted effort to roll back the rights of women, whether by restricting reproductive rights, repealing or weakening laws that protect women economically or from abuse, etc.  Now, more than ever, it is important to be a feminist, and openly so. And there you have it. —————————- This post was selected by voters on my Patreon page.  To get your own voice heard, become a patron!  $1 gets you voting rights.

SF/F Commentary

“No Award” and “Blank Spacing” the #HugoAwards — The Only Response I Can Make to What is to Come

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The Hugo Award ballot has been announced, and if you’ve been paying attention to Twitter, it’s certainly controversial.  Not controversial because a novel everybody loved didn’t make it.  Not controversial because a novel a whole lot of people didn’t love did make it.  Controversial because some people have taken it upon themselves to game the system in order to create and relish in political chaos. That last sentence would certainly sound melodramatic if not for the fact that the proponents of a certain ballot-to-be-copied hadn’t already publicly stated that one of their guiding purposes for last year’s rendition of this political fiasco was as follows: “We got in [7 or 8] Hugo nominees [out of 10 or 11 that we pushed]…and ah man, all hell broke loose.  It was the end of the world.  So we had a lot of fun with that.  We made our point.  I said that if people who are not politically acceptable to these clicks are nominated for an award, the other side will have a come apart…and then, they pretty much did exactly what I said in a very public manner.  And we had fun with it.” In short:  they sought to create chaos and unrest in order to make a political point.  And when they succeeded, they relished in it.  Perhaps this is all facetious dribbling, but it does illustrate a clear contradiction:  this whole thing has never been about the quality of the work.  If it were, the intent would not be so blatantly political and so blatantly at odds with the spirit of the awards.  That any of these folks can utter something like the above in one breath and claim to respect the Hugo voter and the Hugo nomination process in another is a supreme sort of cognitive dissonance.  That some involved in this campaign can also claim that the act is not capital-P political is like courting madness with Cthulu. As a result, the ballot has been flooded by Sad Puppies. If this whole thing had begun simply as people sharing their love of X, I would not have to write this post.  I would not have to think of my ballot as a political tool, either.  I could look at what was there and make a judgment about the works, not the intent behind their inclusion.  Voting is already political enough, even in something as seemingly innocuous as the Hugo Awards.  I don’t appreciate being put into a position where “intent” actually matters, since the only thing that should matter is the work. But that’s not how this began.  It was and remains a political campaign to game the system for personal and political gain.  It’s not the same as Wheel of Time fans realizing they can all nominate their favorite fantasy series and then doing so.  It’s not the same as fans who love X nominating X.  It’s people with a political ax to grind taking advantage of that system to make a point.  This action shifts the voting process from small-p political, whereby one’s everyday politics organically produces certain taste values or perspectives, to cap-P Political, whereby voting itself is treated as a political act separate from the preservation of small-P political interests.  That’s the difference between “I love this thing because it’s about the kind of stuff I enjoy” and “I’m nominating this thing to make a point to people with whom I disagree.” I take the Hugo Awards seriously as an award and as a process, and so I can’t offer my support for any campaign of this type, whether it comes from liberals, conservatives, anarchists, socialists, feminists, capitalists, etc.  I don’t care about the particulars of the politics.  I do not believe the Hugos should be a battleground for sf/f’s infighting.  For that reason, I believe that if your intent is to use the Hugos to make a political point first and foremost, then I am obligated and justified to use my ballot to make a clear statement about the works which will be nominated as a result.  In this respect, I view the Hugos in much the same way as Abi Sutherland: My Hugo nominations and votes are reactions to that broadening-out of my mental universe. As such, they’re intimately, intensely personal. And that’s part of the visceral reaction that some fans are having to the Sad Puppies’ slate: it looks like the institutionalization of a private, particular process in the service of an external goal. It comes across as a coarsening and a standardizing of something that should be fine-grained, unpredictable, and unique to each person participating. It seems like denial of variety and spontaneity, like choreographed sex. As such, I suspect I will leave a good number of items off of my ballot in protest.  Since the Hugo Awards use a preferential voting system, any item which appears on your ballot will receive a vote of some kind when the ballots are counted.  Putting No Award as the last item on your ranked list means anything left off the ballot doesn’t get any “points.”  This is not preferable, since the “No Award” should be used to say “I don’t actually think this is good enough.”  Last year, I mostly used the “No Award” for its intended purpose; in fact, some of the works on last year’s ballot from people who I’m sure are part of the “evil liberal conspiracy to destroy science fiction” didn’t make it far on my ballot because I just didn’t enjoy them.  Because that’s how I normally vote:  based on my subjective sense of the quality of the work, which is, to varying degrees, influenced by my small-P political values. This year, however, it is clear that there is no reasonable way to treat the ballot as a reflection of what people loved in the sf/f field.  It is a manipulated ballot.  A broken ballot.  And I suspect that it will result in a lot of bad blood within sf/f for years to come.  Nobody

SF/F Commentary

A Story Out of Time and Place and the Escape Hatch of Fantasy: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005) — Retro Nostalgia

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With the monumental success of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (dir. Chris Columbus; 2001), Lord of the Rings:  The Fellowship of the Ring (dir. Peter Jackson; 2001), and their immediate sequels, Hollywood perhaps hoped to capitalize on the epic fantasy feel of Tolkien’s narrative and the young adult/children’s audience that so fervently devoured the Harry Potter books.  Naturally, they turned to The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. If I’m honest, I’m quite a fan of the Narnia films even as I’m critical of their structure.  There’s something deliciously joyous about portal fantasies wherein children are whisked away to save the world, hanging out with talking beavers and every fantasy creature under the sun.  Narnia was wish fulfillment for me in so many ways.  Adventure?  Check.  Epic scale?  Check.  Kids becoming greater than themselves?  Check.  It is a deeply hopeful series of films (and novels — though I suppose The Last Battle might be perceived as rather “doomsday-ish” today).  Sometimes, one needs a little optimistic, no?  The first of these films, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (dir. Andrew Adamson; 2005), is perhaps the strongest as a narrative, but it also has its problems.  Granted, these are problems which make more sense in a certain perspective, even if they don’t quite work in film. The first of these problems is fairly easy to critique.  If you’ve seen the film, you’ll know that Peter and the rest of the Pevensies somehow miraculously learn military tactics, swordfighting, horseback riding, bow shooting, and other combat-relevant skills in a matter of minutes.  In the film, this is assumed to occur in a handful of days; the White Witch and her army, after all, are merely hours from the location of the Narnian army.  Throughout the film, the sense of time is skewed, partly because, as we learn, Narnia runs on a different clock from our own (a year on Earth is decades on Narnia) and partly because time is not strictly relevant in this world.  The first film doesn’t address this latter point all that well, to be honest, though you can sort of follow the logic after repeat viewings.  Regardless, the longer the film runs, the more its sense of time deviates from the measured pace of the opening scenes, wherein the Pevensies survive a Nazi bombing of London, are sent off to the countryside by train, and spend a considerable amount of time trying to being normal kids whilst living in a country at war.  The deeper into the fantasy world we go, the less time (and, by necessity, space) become relevant features for the narrative. Additionally, the film’s logic of time is intricately bound up in its treatment of space.  That Aslan can run vast distances in mere hours at what is a remarkably quick pace for a very large lion (as indicated by the development of the battle between the Narnians and the White Witch’s army) suggests either that the film has no sense of time or that the world of Narnia is not nearly as big as we assumed.  The latter seems the more accurate interpretation in the sense that our interpretation of space is necessarily an Earthen one, a problem which the Pevensies are or become, as with time, deeply disinterested.  Once they become embedded in the conflict of Narnia, in fact, the temporal and spatial skewing is more pronounced, such that by the end of the film, neither is particularly stable.  And this all hinges on the entire series’ underlying Christian allegory:  if Aslan is literally God, then it follows that his access to and understanding of time and space in Narnia is not like ours at all, and thus anyone operating under his influence would not be bound by the restrictions of space and time either.  Once the Pevensies meet Aslan and become part of his “world,” time and space lose their Earthen focus.  They are meaningless distinctions. None of this quite excuses the film’s somewhat rushed epic narrative or the series’ propensity for deus ex machina antics.  But understanding why the narrative is structured in such a manner that time and space just don’t make a lot of sense gives us, I think, a better understanding of the film’s narrative of child heroes.  Unlike The Lord of the Rings or even Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia is absolutely embedded in a child’s fantasy, albeit a Christian-influenced one.  That fantasy, like a bedtime story, never adheres to novel-length conceptions of time; such stories rush to the conclusion because they are not about the “grand narrative,” but about the immediate gratification of the child’s fantasy, whether via the characters within the story world or the actual children (or, in my case, adults who miss certain qualities of childhood). In fact, this may be the thing that makes me love these films so much.  They are, in a sense, free from the constraints of serious storytelling, opting instead for metaphor, blatant allegory, and absolute heroic fantasy mediated through the child.  I watch the films in this series and can’t help but become immersed in a world where heroes still exist and can be drug out of the depths of cowardice or made from the spark hiding beneath childhood insecurity.  They’re so much about doing good because it is good, and being rewarded for that deed.  Even as an atheist, I can appreciate this sensation, because however realistic one wishes to be, there will always need to be an escape hatch for life, even if it just comes in the form of a children’s fantasy movie.  The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is my escape hatch. —————————- This post was selected by voters on my Patreon page.  To get your own voice heard, become a patron!  $1 gets you voting rights.

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