My #HugoAwards Final Ballot (To Be Submitted in the Future)
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.
10 Reasons I’m a Feminist
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.
“No Award” and “Blank Spacing” the #HugoAwards — The Only Response I Can Make to What is to Come
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
A Story Out of Time and Place and the Escape Hatch of Fantasy: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005) — Retro Nostalgia
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.
Movie Review: Hot Tub Time Machine (dir. Steve Pink; 2010)(A SFF Film Odyssey)
The first time I saw Hot Tub Time Machine (dir. Steve Pink; 2010), I wasn’t sure how to take it. So much of the film made me uncomfortable because the characters seemed, for the most part, painfully unlikable. That fact became clearer as I began comparing HTTM to other films of its type, leaving me to wonder: why would I root for anyone in this movie when I’d rather each of them got hit by a bus instead of the one-armed Phil (Crispin Glover)? Here lies a film that I’m sure even a teenage version of myself would find impossible to stomach — bereft of redeemable characters, excessive for shock value, and overall a perfect storm of the worst raunchy comedy tropes. It’s a film best avoided so you can spare your brain the scrubbing. HTTM is another take on the raunchy teen comedy, albeit one which uses time travel so its adult characters can relive the glory days of their teen years. The story follows Adam (John Cusack), Nick (Craig Robinson), and Lou (Rob Corddry), former high school friends who reconnect after Lou attempts suicide because he can’t let go of the past. Together with Adam’s nephew, Jacob (Clark Duke), Adam and Nick try to raise Lou’s spirits by taking him on a trip to the fictional Kodiak Valley, where the three them used to party in their youth. The problem: like their lives, Kodiak Valley is quickly falling apart. But surprise…their hot tub moonlights as a time machine, and soon all four of them are whisked away to the 1980s, reliving their glory days all over again. Only this time, they’re going to do things a little differently. OK, a lot differently. Like most raunchy teen comedies, HTTM is about a few things: partying, sex, drugs/alcohol, and friendship. It also happens to be about a group of almost ne’er-do-wells striving to fix their past mistakes in what is best described as hypermasculine wish-fulfillment. One of my favorite examples of this subgenre is American Pie (dirs. Paul and Chris Weitz; 1999), which on its surface is just another “teens trying to get laid” story, but upon closer inspection becomes a comedic critique of the subgenre’s tropes and an amusing tale of young men on the cusp of actual adulthood — mediated, of course, through a narrative primarily focused on sex. It’s far from a perfect film, in part because it relies, at times, on too many of the cheap sexist gags that continue to plague raunchy teen comedies, but it is a film that, at its core, is about something beyond the simplistic “fucks and friends” stories that lazier raunchy teen comedies present. HTTM’s narrative, however, is exhausting primarily because it is so unlike American Pie in its vulgarity. Where American Pie attempts at a correction of its high school dickery by making most of its characters realize the absurdity of an anti-virginity pledge, HTTM flips everything in the other direction by trying to convince us that the only real answer to the world’s problems is for the sex-crazed, drug-addled, lazy troublemaker to have unprotected sex with his friend’s sister. It doesn’t temper its vulgarity to support its narrative of friendship, either; it relishes in the excess of its validated crude “hero.” Lou repeatedly cries out “semen” and other vulgarities as he knowingly impregnates Adam’s sister, all so we can watch Adam cringe, as we rightfully should, at what is happening. It is a film awash in its own bodily fluids, unsure how to paddle out of the kiddy pool. Every crude act, mistake, and horror is validated in this film as appropriate male behavior. Worse, where American Pie shows its characters actually working toward a future, almost all of the characters in HTTM are essentially thieves who either literally steal from the hard work of others, as in the case of Lou (a girlfriend who “gets him”) and Nick (a music career), or who steal time to make up for past mistakes, as in the case of Adam (who uses his future knowledge to screw over the Google creators by making Lougle). Because ultimately, all of the protagonists are losers with no perception of the future, no plan, no hope, no dream. Their dreams have died with their youth. In this stark atmosphere — which can only lead us to Idiocracy (dir. Mike Judge; 2006), not the conclusion the film actually gives us — we’re also smacked over the head by the fact that the younger generation is resigned to a similar fate, as Jacob’s future is practically forfeited from the moment we meet him. The young, like the old, have no dreams at all — as Adam says to Jacob while castigating him for spending all his time playing Second Life: “You’re twenty years old. You’ve never made an important choice in your life.” This would be brilliant if it were an intentional satire of what we might call the new Lost Generation of men — if the comedy was at their expense, not as a reinforcement of their values. But HTTM is none of these things. It is a male power fantasy whereby self-disenfranchised 40-somethings can drink, fuck, and steal their way back to success. That makes its comedy all the more irksome and all the more less palatable than something more honest with its narrative. American Pie, for example, is a mostly successful comedy about young men learning what it is to be men (and sometimes (often) failing, learning the wrong lessons, or becoming mockeries of themselves); HTTM is a comedy about the men who never learned the right lessons and never will. One of these stories is funny. I’ll let you guess which one. About the only thing I can praise the film for is its soundtrack, which contains such classics as Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home” and Salt-n-Pepa’s “Push It.” That’s what I’ll choose to dwell on for the next few hours. —————————- This post was selected by voters on my Patreon page. To get your own
The Fictioning: I actually wrote something! Ahaha!
If you missed it on Twitter, I actually wrote some new fiction last night for the first time in months. I’ve been fiddling with the idea for a YA space opera featuring a wheelchair bound combat expert and his tech-savvy sibling. I won’t ruin the plot, but I will say this: there will be a mecha wheelchair, space battles, and good old adventure with a healthy side of character development. And if that sounds of interest, here are the first few paragraphs in rough draft form (click to view a larger version): Now back to writing stuff…