Dear DC: Little Girls Play Board Games, Too
The folks on Sword and Laser recently had a brief discussion about the Justice League: Axis of Villains board game, which apparently includes no women. Peter V. Brett has a post about it here. In short, his daughter didn’t want to play the game because it didn’t even have Wonder Woman. WONDER WOMAN. The single most important female superhero in the entire DC canon is not in a fucking board game meant to be played by children. I cannot express how angry and disappointed I am in DC over this. Every single time I hear something about DC, it’s shit like this. DC saying something dumb about women. DC releasing creepy suicide PSAs w/ Harley Quinn practically nude in a bathtub. DC not including women. DC bad. DC bad. The more DC fails at what are the most basic levels of equality, the more I’m reminded how much better its major competitor is by comparison. Marvel has failures, too. It fails a lot. Look at the Spider-woman cover. WTF was that, Marvel? But you know what Marvel didn’t do? Create board games for kids that don’t include women. That link will take you to Marvel Heroes, which is certainly not female heavy, but at least includes enough female characters that a group of young girls could play the game without having to create their own pieces (as Brett suggested he and his daughter do to make up for the stupidity of DC’s failure)(granted, they would have to fiddle with game parameters; thanks, Marvel). The only “team” (X-Men, Avengers, etc.) that doesn’t include a female character in that game is the Avengers, which I also think is stupid (where the fuck is Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, Spider-woman, etc.?). But it at least has SOME female characters. Not a lot. It’s still a failure. But fuck. It’s not a total fuckup. Marvel has other board games which at least have women in them. Marvel Legendary: bunch of women. I’m sure Marvel has failed on the board game thing in the past, but nobody should be failing in 2014 (or 2013, the release year for the game). Nobody. Marvel is not perfect. It is a monstrous beast of a company which is still trying to figure out how to be progressive in an era where you can be ripped to shreds for failing to represent humanity. But it’s a company that gives the impression that it’s trying. Ms. Marvel. Captain Marvel. Black Widow. Storm. They’ve all got their own comics right now. They put Black Widow in Captain America 2 and gave her a prominent role (I think they meant her to be a sidekick, but I actually think she’s more equal to Captain America in many respects — and, hey, Cap actually respects *her* as a human being in that friggin movie…she’s not on a t-shirt congratulating Cap for gettin’ sum — fucking DC). This kind of stuff has put a sour taste in my mouth about DC. When they release a new comic, I find myself turning the other way. There are only two comics I currently read from DC: Batman and Justice League. But the more DC fails at being…modern, the more I’m inclined to drop those, too. Because I’m getting more of what I want from Marvel. I get female characters. I get *good* female characters. I get diversity and new perspectives. Marvel gives me more of what I want, and it fails far less than DC. And when it does fail, there seems to be a greater effort to make a correction. There won’t be any more of those butt-in-the-air Spider-woman covers. We will have better visual representations in the future. That I’m sure of. So I end this rant with this: When will DC realize it is 2014 and grow up?
No, Repetition Does Not Mean Science Fiction is Stagnating…Per Se
(This is going to be a bit ranty. Be prepared.) There’s been a bit of talk lately about Project Hieroglyph, an Arizona State University anthology (and website) which attempts to address the argument in Neal Stephenson’s “Innovation Starvation.” I recommend reading that essay yourself; it makes some compelling points about science fiction and the failure of contemporary culture to meet the demands of the 1960s imagination. Here, I’d like to talk about Ed Finn’s (editor of Project Hieroglyph) article at Slate.com: “The Inspiration Drought: Why Our Science Fiction Needs New Dreams.” In fairness, I came to this article via a wildly misleading headline on io9. Finn’s actual argument concerns the recycling of ideas within and outside of science fiction proper and its impact on science. Finn argues that Hollywood special effects have depended for years on the same kinds of high-end computer modeling that physicists, mathematicians, and other researchers use to solve technical problems. Film design gets cited in patent disputes over product design. And then there’s James Cameron, explorer of real and invented abysses. But the issue is not sharing tools—it’s the limited pool of metaphors behind those tools. Right now, almost everyone is working from the same conceptual playbook. All of these engineers watched Star Trek…[It’s] why the X Prize Foundation wants someone to build a Tricorder. [The] fact that we are all so steeped in the same shorthand of the future (intelligent robots; warp drive; retinal displays) is a hint that we’ve become complacent about our dreams. Part of the problem I have with Finn’s argument is that it relies too heavily on an assumption that the repetition of ideas is necessarily tied to intellectual or imaginative stagnation. I’ve left in the line about the tricorder to illustrate a point. As far as I can see, the reason we continue to talk about warp drives and tricorders has less to do with the inability to imagine new technologies, but rather than fact that these tools are utterly absent from our everyday lives. And we notice that absence because we feel a need for these tools. The tricorder serves a function. Our desire for it is largely utilitarian — we have nothing that can replicate its functions, and yet having one would fill a need gap in the same way the now-old-hat calculators we used in school also filled a need gap. Many of the science fictional things we keep turning to in our everyday lives arrive from a center of need, not an inability to imagine beyond the confines of reality. Whether the functions of a real world tricorder will be the same as described in the Star Trek universe is secondary to the symbolic function of the device itself: it’s a catchall term for a tool which serves a variety of scientific and biological functions (and its name will likely change when we actually build one). The exoskeleton is another example. Is it original to the now? Nope. Does it serve a need in the now? Yup. Is creating a real exoskeleton an act of innovation? Well, Finn’s argument requires him to say no, but I’m inclined to say “hell yes.” There are a sea of common, repeated terms in everyday life that come from science fiction. Repeating them in our narratives doesn’t suggest stagnation to me. In a way, the repetitions are necessary to convince our culture that we do, in fact, need some of these imaginary tools from our literary past. Would we be talking about exoskeletons without the repetition of the term (and related terms) in our narratives? Probably not (or maybe). Would we continue to strive for faster-than-light travel in the form of a warp drive without Star Trek and the constant reference to the past? Maybe, but it wouldn’t have the same cultural resonance. The same language. That’s the thing: these repetitions are for Finn a mark of stagnation, but I see them as a mark of a cultural language of need and fulfillment. That we share this language — the warp drive, the tricorder, the ansible, the exoskeleton, etc. — is significant. Without that shared language, without shared reference points, we would have no way to talk about innovation and desire. There would be no way to talk about a possible future or a future that we desire. Rather, we’d be trapped with no way to conceptualize the future as it might one day be. This is not to suggest that science fiction cannot continue to add to that language; indeed, it must by continuously imagining new technologies and ideas in response to the present. Who would have imagined we’d live in a world where a huge number of people have access to immense amounts of data from the comfort of a pocket? Star Trek. Science Fiction. The common language. Additionally, I’d argue that the common language is a necessity. It is inevitable that whatever device we create that falls under the title of “tricorder” will serve an entirely different function from the tricorders of Star Trek fame. Function will outweigh the fiction. But by referring to it by the same term, we create a narrative of that device’s creation that is recognizable by a larger population. Everyone knows what a tricorder is (well, most people), and so using that concept to describe a device with similar properties as the fiction gives us all a frame of reference. “This is a tricorder.” That means something. That meaning is transferable. It has no immediate affect on innovation, since what we might create to fall under the name will be different by default. Even so, Finn can’t honestly think that we’re not creating innovative technologies all over the world despite science fiction’s input, right? Look at the cell phone. Look at medical technology. Look around you. Finn, of course, is right to point out that there is a certain degree of stagnation in filmed science fiction, which more often than not offers nothing new to the table, even if the technologies
The Purpose of Science Fiction (and, Technically, Fantasy)
In the 200th episode of The Coode Street Podcast, the hosts (Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe) and guests (Kim Stanley Robinson, Robert Silverberg, and Jo Walton) briefly discussed the seemingly nebulous question, “Does science fiction have a purpose?” It’s worth a listen. I would respond initially by saying that the question is somewhat malformed. In what sense does any literary product have a purpose except that provided by the author, which is necessarily individual? Even if the author defines a purpose, should that have any bearing on whether the text is perceived as having that defined purpose? I personally subscribe to the view that in matters of interpretation, intent is irrelevant. What the author meant to do, insofar as we can even know it, has no bearing on how the work can or should be perceived, in no small part because what a reader perceives is more valid than what the author thought they were creating. Perception is the conversation. I also tend to think that unless we can have universal access to intention, by which we would need not only biographical and personal writings, but also actual access to the mind, then an author’s intent is useless to us. How am I supposed to know what the author really intended to do? This is not to suggest that we can’t discuss intent, mind; rather, I’m suggesting that we shouldn’t assume intent as the sole arbiter of interpretation or perception. However, purpose is something quite different from intended-reception. whatever the author intended as the purpose of a written work need not determine how we interpret that text’s purpose. Intent and purpose, in other words, are different beasts, as the former concerns the activity of production while the latter merges production and perception together. We can, after all, discuss the success of a text in its presentation of a message while also discussing the other interpretative possibilities of a given text. Indeed, the purpose, insofar as one is defined, only offers possibilities, as it does not suggest “this is the only way to read the text,” but rather that “the author meant to do Y, but what we see are A, B, and Q.” (Alternatively, it might be helpful to avoid the total linguistic separation and simply make a distinction between “purpose” as an intention” and “purpose” as an end product. But maybe that’s abstract, too. Oh well.) To return to the question of science fiction’s purpose: as I noted in my post on the taxonomy of genre, science fiction doesn’t seem to me to fall under the traditional category of genre anymore because it lacks the narrative devices which define all of the other market genres (crime, etc.); science fiction, in other words, is a supergenre because it is conceptual, though it s possible to think that at one point, science fiction had a narrative practice. In a similar sense, I think the purpose of science fiction has been obscured by time. At one point, the most obvious purpose for the genre might have been to entertain (as in the Pulp Era) or to expound upon the radically changing world of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and so on and so forth. Now, I think the genre’s purpose is less apparent, and perhaps for good reason. It can entertain, experiment, extrapolate, examine, elucidate, and encapsulate. There is no singular purpose anymore than there is a singular narrative space. And that’s another reason why I think science fiction is one of the most important literary genres, as its narrative spaces, purposes, and perspectives exist in an endless sea of variations. One can write science fiction for any number of reasons — and one should feel comfortable doing so. Entertainment, experimentation, whatever. The idea that we can identify a singular or minute number of purposes for this genre is an exercise in futility, because science fiction cannot be a genre of limits if it is to also be a genre of endless narrative possibilities. What do you all think?
Video Found: John Brunner on SF
This is making the rounds: John Brunner talking about genre classification, sf poetry, and so on. What it reveals, I think, is the cyclical nature of the sf community. We keep coming back to the same questions, but it’s surprising how little progress we seem to have made in these matters. At least a good number of academics have stopped trying to define sf. Enjoy!
Top 10 Posts for August 2014
Not a whole lot was going on here for most of August, but I did post a few new things, which appear in the following list. Enjoy! The Taxonomy of Genre: Science Fiction as Supergenre Movie Review: Riddick (2013) (or, I’m Going to Mega Rant Now) Top 10 Overused Fantasy Cliches Top 10 Science Fiction and Fantasy Movies Since 2010 (Thus Far) Speculative Fiction 2014: Announcement and Call for Submissions! Top 10 Science Fiction and Fantasy Anime Movies On LonCon and Thanks 5 Don’ts of Panels (and Podcast Roundtables) Top 10 Cats in Science Fiction and Fantasy Retro Nostalgia: Legend (1985) and the Power of Innocence
On Robin Williams
You have probably already heard about the death of Robin Williams by (apparent) suicide. Given the public nature of celebrity deaths, I have a feeling a lot of people are somewhat desensitized to the whole thing. I, however, feel inclined to say a few words about Robin Williams. I was born in 1983. Basically, I was a 90s kid. I grew up on 90s cartoons. I grew up on 90s movies.[1] Among my fondest memories are those films which featured Robin Williams. Hook (1991), FernGully (1992), Aladdin (1992), Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), Jumanji (1995), Jack (1996), and Flubber (1997). My siblings and I watched a number of these films many times over. They brought us joy. Robin Williams had a way of making us laugh — his greatest gift. In a small way, Williams helped make our lives better. Those that know me are probably aware that my childhood was pretty crap. I wrote about some of that here. Movies and video games were some of the methods through which I survived that growing-up experience. Robin Williams was a part of that. And so, for me, his death had a personal feel to it. The man who made us laugh. Who brought joy and wonder. He’s gone. Forever. I’ll never forget the laughs. It’s just sad that we won’t have any new laughfests from Robin Williams. We’ll only have the memories.