On Black Widow and Marvel’s Gaps (or, Why We Need a Black Widow Movie)
On the recent Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) episode of The Skiffy and Fanty Show, I argued that part of what bothered me about the Black Widow scene wherein she reveals having been sterilized in the Red Room is that it clarified what was an obvious gap in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. We need a Black Widow movie, I said — more so now than ever. This is a somewhat complicated position, and I’d like to explore that in-depth here. For those that don’t know, I’ll spoil the bit everyone is talking about:
The Reboot: New Schedule, the Focus, and New Beginnings
Here we go. I’ve been thinking about this for the past month. A number of people have offered their thoughts on what I should do about this blog and my various blogging efforts (thanks!). The following list is a far more compact set of regular (in italics) and irregular features, with the former having a set schedule. I think it’s more focused and better tuned to what I want to be doing in each space. Having a set (but reasonable) schedule is also good for me, since it gives me a structure that isn’t too cumbersome. Here it is:
Speculative Fiction 2014: It’s Here!
That’s right. The anthology of online reviews, media and fan criticism that I edited with Renee Williams has officially been released by The Book Smugglers. You can read all about it here. The collection includes works by a whole lot of amazing people,: Abigail Nussbaum, Adam Roberts, Aidan Moher, Aja Romano, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Amal El-Mohtar, Ana Grilo, Andrew Lapin, Annalee Newitz, Anne C. Perry, Bertha Chin, Betty, Charles Tan, Chinelo Onwualu, Clare McBride, Corinne Duyvis, Daniel José Older, Deborah Pless, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Erika Jelinek, Foz Meadows, Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, Joe Sherry, Jonathan McCalmont, Juliet Kahn, Justin Landon, Kameron Hurley, Kari Sperring, Ken Neth, Mahvesh Murad, Martin Petto, Matthew Cheney, Memory Scarlett, Mieneke van der Salm, N.K. Jemisin, Natalie Luhrs, Ng Suat Tong, Nina Allan, Olivia Waite, Paul Weimer, Rachael Acks, Rebecca Pahle, Renay, Rose Lemberg, Saathi Press, Sara L. Sumpter, Shaun Duke, Tade Thompson, Tasha Robinson, The G, thingswithwings, and Vandana Singh. The book is currently available in print via Amazon US and Amazon UK. An ebook version can be purchased on the The Book Smugglers announcement page (scroll down a bit); ebooks should become available on other sites soon. The Book Smugs are also running a giveaway for 5 copies of the book; the giveaway closes on May 9th. A big thanks goes to my co-editor, Renee Williams, for being so organized and putting in so much work on this anthology. I feel like we did an amazing job together, and I am truly proud and honored to have worked with you. Also: a huge thanks to The Book Smugglers (Ana and Thea) for their hard work, their prompt responses to our questions and concerns, and for keeping us (mostly) on track. Lastly, a huge thanks must go to the contributors, who brought so much to the community in 2014, to the fine folks on the Internet for suggesting essays and reviews for us to consider, many of which we might have otherwise missed, and to anyone else who helped me or Renee throughout this process. Now it’s official. I’m an editor person thing. Cool.
On Legitimacy, Academia, and the Hugos (or, Someone Needs to Take a Class)
If you’ve been following the Hugo Awards fiasco, you might have come across Philip Sandifer’s fascinating analysis of Theodore Beale / Vox Day, his followers, and the Hugos. Sandifer has since become a minor target within the Sad / Rabid Puppies discussion, but not so much for what he actually said as for who he declares himself to be: an educated man. Why would this matter in a conversation about the Hugo Awards? What is so offensive about being a PhD in English (or any other individual with a PhD in the humanities)? As someone who is roughly a year away from acquiring a PhD in English, I find this blatant anti-academic stance rather perplexing if isolated to the science fiction and fantasy world. After all, so many of our greatest writers were academics — mostly in the sciences, but occasionally in the humanities. But once I think about the wider culture — in this case, U.S. culture — it becomes abundantly clear: it’s anti-intellectual posturing. The U.S. has always had a strong anti-intellectual perspective, but in recent years that has reached alarming levels, with mountains of outright derision lobbed at those who are identified as intellectuals — especially academics in the humanities. And as an academic, I still struggle with how to respond to this derisive viewpoint. How do you convince people who already view intellectuals (and academia) with contempt that there is value to be had among the intellectuals (and academics)? That’s a question to answer another time. All of this leads me to R. Scott Bakker’s recent post on the Hugos. In particular, I’m interested in Bakker’s conclusion, since the majority of his post has little to do with academia, except insofar as he demonstrates a significant dislike for us (we’re fools and clowns, apparently, for believing we can teach critical thinking). That dislike also seems to extend to Sandifer, though I’ll admit that it’s difficult to parse posturing or rejection of ideas from actual dislike (and, hell, they may not be that different anyway). Sandifer is a necessary starting point here, because what Sandifer argues about the effects of the Sad / Rabid Puppies (and Beale in particular) on the Hugo Awards can be boiled down to “damaging the Hugo Awards” and “damaging the value of fandom by infected it with bile.” To this argument, Bakker eventually concludes the following: And let’s suppose that the real problem facing the arts community lies in the impact of technology on cultural and political groupishness, on the way the internet and preference-parsing algorithms continue to ratchet buyers and sellers into ever more intricately tuned relationships. Let’s suppose, just for instance, that so-called literary works no longer reach dissenting audiences, and so only serve to reinforce the values of readers… That precious few of us are being challenged anymore—at least not by writing. The communicative habitat of the human being is changing more radically than at any time in history, period. The old modes of literary dissemination are dead or dying, and with them all the simplistic assumptions of our literary past. If writing that matters is writing that challenges, the writing that matters most has to be writing that avoids the ‘preference funnel,’ writing that falls into the hands of those who can be outraged. The only writing that matters, in other words, is writing that manages to span significant ingroup boundaries. If this is the case, then Beale has merely shown us that science fiction and fantasy actually matter, that as a writer, your voice can still reach people who can (and likely will) be offended… as well as swayed, unsettled, or any of the things Humanities clowns claim writing should do. There are a number of problems here. First, Bakker assumes (or wants us to assume) that the so called “literary works” aren’t reaching audiences. This is easy to refute by looking at the mountains of so called “literary writers” whose works appear on bestseller lists or are invited to give talks in performance halls fit for a thousand or more people. The challenging works of the “literary” form are already reaching audiences. Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan, Karen Russell, and on and on and on and on. This is, after all, what we are concerned with, no? Challenges to our literary and personal sensibilities. Within science fiction and fantasy, that becomes much more difficult to measure. What constitutes “reaching an audience”? Bestseller lists? OK. If so, then we might as well assume that sf/f is utterly stagnant, since its most compelling and memorable work isn’t hitting those lists, which is a problem too complicated to explore here. I am, of course, setting aside the reality that “literary” doesn’t exist in any realistic grouping. As a genre, it is even less well-defined than science fiction, which at least has identifiable traditions. What I will say is this: while Bakker seems to view people like me as clowns, we do have a significant hand in what continues to be discussed as “significant” in the sf/f field. What I teach when I teach a science fiction class influences what thousands of everyday people think of when they think “science fiction and fantasy.” There are thousands and thousands of teachers just like me, and thanks to a massive shift in public and academic interests, we’re now teaching sf/f more than we used to. And what I teach isn’t going to be the repetitive, stagnant sf/f of today. Why would I teach an sf/f adventure novel from 2005 which offers nothing new when I can teach its more compelling predecessor from 1895? When I teach my space opera course in the fall, I’m not going to teach contemporary works which read like E. E. “Doc” Smith. I’m going to teach Smith. I’m not going to teach Heinlein pastiches. I’m going to teach Heinlein. And when it comes to the contemporary writers I want to explore, it will be Ann Leckie, Yoon Ha Lee, Tobias Buckell, and so
Why I Don’t Shop at Chain Bookstores (Often)
I live in a town which has very little in the way of independent bookstores. There’s one very tiny feminist bookshop, which is nifty, and a handful of comic shops, but there’s little else. If I want to shop somewhere that isn’t a chain, department store, or Internet store, I have to wait for one of the two massive Friends of the Library events (one in the fall; one in the spring), which is always a zoo and hardly conducive to calm browsing. Basically, I have few options. None of this would be a problem if I still had access to a Borders or a good independent bookstore. Back in the old days of living in Santa Cruz (pre-2009), Borders was my go-to-chain. It had a decent enough selection and little of the stresses that other chains often created. Their membership club was free (and for a time offered “points” for purchases, which you could add up to discounts later on), too. It wasn’t the only bookstore I went to, of course. There was a great used bookstore in the part of town (called Logo’s) and a wonderful independent bookshop with superb selection. Basically, downtown Santa Cruz was the ultimate bookshopping spot for me. Gainesville has none of that. The Barnes & Noble shop closed down. I don’t know if we ever had a Borders, but there certainly hasn’t been one here since at least 2009 (and now there never will be). The only good independent bookshop closed down years ago because the University of Florida bookstore did everything it could to cannibalize its sales (not just conjecture; it did — ok, it’s conjecture…). Gainesville has two Books-a-Millions, which are poor excuses for bookstores, generally speaking. When it had a B&N, things weren’t much better (except that I could talk to a real person if I had questions about my Nook/Nook HD+). What’s the problem with places like BaM, B&N, etc.? In the current bookshopping climate, chains offer the least pleasurable experience. Since they’re desperately fighting off the online marketplace, many of these chains have put more effort into pushing things that aren’t books on customers. Books-a-Million, for example, puts far more effort into trying to sell people their $25/yr memberships than it does in curating a good selection of books. Their science fiction and fantasy section, for example, is lackluster on average (one of the stores in town might as well stop carrying sf/f, since their selection is just shy of pointless). When I do shop there, I’m always measuring the desire for a book against my desire not to have to tell that poor cashier that I don’t want to join the club or do X or whatever to get some added discount. I’m always trying to avoid the guilty shopping experience. That’s a horrible thing to feel when I’m at the bookstore. I want to feel excited about that new book, not uneasy because I know I have deal with the hard sell. There’s a reason I do so much of my bookshopping online. I get all the selection I could possibly want and none of the uncomfortable feelings. Why leave the house for anything less? All of this was highlighted further by today’s experience at Books-a-Million. When I went up to the counter, I noticed that this particular BaM sold comics at the register. I knew they sold graphic novels, but I had somehow forgotten or missed that they also sold comic books. Being a new comic book convert, I had to say something. And what did the cashier say? He said “hey, there’s actually a whole section of comics if you’d like me to show them to you.” I hesitated, because I knew the hard sell was coming. He was going to push that damned membership on me again: “And if you join our super duper club, you’ll save $0.37 on a comic book! Come on, you know you want to!” If I said know, he’d push again. And again. And then he’d give that look they all give because somehow that membership is tied to their job security… But that’s not what happened. He gave me an enthusiastic smile and showed me those comics. I ended up grabbing the first volume of Black Science, which he apparently loved enough to give me a high five. (This same fellow made several recommendations to another customer, who then bought those books.) This experience is so uncommon at Books-a-Million that it stood out. Here was a guy actually showing customers things they might like. He was doing his job as a bookseller, not as some guy working for a chain trying to upsell their non-book-specific bobbles. This has never happened to me at a Books-a-Million. Or any chain for that matter. The chains are always about general sales, not recommendations. They’re about shoving non-book product on the consumer, not helping them find new things to read. They’re about everything other than selling books (except in the most basic sense of the phrase, since they are bookstores). So when a cashier at such a place goes off script, I can’t help but notice. Because this is the kind of behavior I expect at Powell’s or Santa Cruz Bookstore. There’s a reason the chain bookstores are struggling. They don’t offer this kind of service as a default. They don’t give us a reason as consumers to continue to go through their doors, particularly if we’re regular book shoppers. Because for chains, it’s not about treating customers as individuals who want to read, but about treating customers as walking wallets you have to prod and tweak to open up. There’s a reason I always go to Powell’s when I visit home: I get the personal experience I want. And Powell’s is enormous. Thousands and thousands of customers shop there. And every time, I get that personal experience. Period. It doesn’t matter if I’m there to buy 50 books or one. I don’t pretend for a second that “personal experience”
Non-US SF/F Fandom Survey: Perspectives on the Hugo Awards
As you might have heard, I’ve been working on a survey for non-US sf/f fans to get their perspective on the Hugo Awards (as the title suggests). That survey went live yesterday. If you are a non-US sf/f fan, please consider taking the survey to give your thoughts! Thanks!