SF/F Commentary

SF/F Commentary

The Weird Tales / Save the Pearls Fiasco: Preliminary Reactions

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(Disclaimer:  This post is a preliminary reaction.  I have not read the novel in question and can only respond to what others have said about it.  As such, what follows will not be based on what I know about the book itself, but rather a series of curiosities and questions that I suspect will be answered later this week.  An educated reaction will follow. Note:  I am collecting links to other responses at the bottom. Note 2:  The original Weird Tales post has been taken down.  An apology has been put in its place. Note 3:  Some new details have surfaced.  You can find my update here.) Twitter was in a rage this morning about this Weird Tales announcement involving the publication of the first chapter of Victoria Foyt’s Saving the Pearls:  Revealing Eden.  Authors/bloggers N. K. Jemisin, Celine Kiernan, Martha Wells, Nick Mamatas were among the most vocal hitters, decrying the selection as, at best, a phenomenally stupid choice of publication and, at worst, a throwback to the racism that might have made Lovecraft proud. If you’re not familiar with Saving the Pearls, then you’re not alone.  I am writing this post from a position of profound ignorance, having only read reviews of Foyt’s novel, and not the novel itself (such as this review or the numerous reviews on the Amazon page). What many seem most bothered by is Foyt’s portrayal of a reverse-racist society which uses blackface to make its supposedly anti-racist point (a historically derogatory practice originally used by whites to stereotype and denigrate blacks — the white-race-glorification film, Birth of a Nation, for example, used blackface in order to portray black males as sexual “beasts,” which, as it turns out, is another stereotype that Foyt, according to reviews, unsuccessfully “turns on its head”).  Coming from the outside, my first reactions were along these lines: Is it possible to reverse blackface without running into the problem of racist history?  In other words, can one take the history of making blacks feel inferior because they are “too dark” and reverse it so whites must now darken in order to “fit in”?  I’m thinking of a reversal of George Schuyler’s Black No More (a novel I am teaching this semester). What is the narrative context for the use of “pearls” to refer to whites and “coals” to refer to blacks?  Since the novel is a dystopia, is it possible these terms actually mean something very different in that world?  I wonder if (one, again, coming from not having read the book) perhaps coal has become a scarce, important resource, thus providing an added value to something we traditionally think of as prevalent and cheap (dirty, etc.). Why is it that whenever we have discussions about these very issues, there are a sea of loud-mouthed people proclaiming that there is no such thing as racism against whites, followed by condescending ad hominem attacks against anyone who suggests otherwise?  (I’m not referring to anyone named in this post.)  Racism is not colorblind.  Some white people are targets of racism.  The difference, as I see it, is a matter of degree and a matter of institution.  That is that whites are rarely targeted by the institutions around them, and only uncommonly the target of racist ideas from other “racial” groups.  Perhaps it’s a question of power dynamics? How many people coming into this discussion are screaming because they’ve already been tainted by other reactions?  Some folks who have chimed in seem to have read the book after reading or agreeing with people who hate it.  Is it possible that some of us are so emotionally driven against racism that we get trapped into knee-jerk-ism whenever something that appears to be racist shows its face? Now, I could be wrong about all of these reactions.  We’ll see.  I’ve said on Twitter that I will try to read the book, in part because I don’t want to offer a proper opinion on all this without knowing what I’m talking about (something some people will do in typical knee-jerk fashion).  That doesn’t mean, however, that the Weird Tales post deserves to be ignored. The book in question… I say all of this knowing that there are all kinds of red flags in the Weird Tales post.  Take, for example, the title:  “A Thoroughly Non-Racist Book.”  If it’s a thoroughly non-racist book, then why the insane overcompensation in the title?  Even my hackles were raised when I saw that title.  Or even Kaye’s need to reject the negative reviews on Amazon by saying “this is America and they have the right to express their opinion(s)” makes you wonder at which point he would acknowledge a negative review as intellectually valid.  Or if you disagree with a review, does that immediately mean it is only valid as “free speech”?   But perhaps what most concerns me is the level of condescension Kaye lobs at detractors of Foyt’s story.  Kaye says that it will be “very clear to anyone with an appreciation for irony” that the book is not racist, but an attack on racism itself.  Typically, one means satire, not irony; likewise, when one says “folks who are X will get it,” you’re essentially discounting the validity of contrary opinions.  The clincher, though, is this: The blessing is to wish they acquire sufficient wit, wisdom and depth of literary analysis to understand what they read, and also the compassion not to attack others merely because they hold a different opinion.  The curse is an integral part of the blessing…for if they do acquire those virtues, they will then necessarily look at their own behaviour, and be thoroughly ashamed. You’re right.  Because only people with insufficient wit, wisdom, and depth of literary analysis will not like Save the Pearls.  Only people without compassion could find something wrong with Foyt’s novel.  Because only becoming “like you,” oh Mr. Compassionate, Witty, Wisdom-filled, Literary Analysis Guru, can we fully comprehend the great wonders of the universe contained within Foyt’s novel.  And

SF/F Commentary

Captain America Talks About Some Guy’s Stupid Project

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My good friend, Ghetto Captain America, decided to make a video about my Fund-a-Laptop project. You can find the details about the crowdfunding project (how to help, etc.) here. Thanks to +Alison Marlowe +John Ward +Edison Crux +Patrick Thunstrom +Nalo Hopkinson +Mike Reeves-McMillan +Stina Leicht +Brent Bowen +Eric James Stone +Adam Callaway +Dirk Reul Hallie O’Donovan Benjamin Kissell +Jennifer Barth!

SF/F Commentary

Larry’s Silly Survey of Silly

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Over at OF Blog of the Fallen, Larry has put up a bunch of seemingly random and bizarre questions for folks to answer.  The following are my equally silly responses: 1.  Do you believe that global warming could be ameliorated if there were more pirates in the world? Unfortunately, no.  Because pirates have a tendency to burn things — such as boats and makeshift cigarettes and small coastal towns ripe for the picking — they contribute at least 50 times the amount of atmospheric pollutants as all volcanoes combined.  In truth, to stop global warming, we would have to systematically hunt down and imprison all pirates.  I’m told the Federated League of Ninjas is waiting for the call… 2.  What is the last book you read and would you recommend it to a hobo who likes to speak in alliterations? Libidinal Economy by Jean-Francois Lyotard.  And, no, I would not recommend it to an alliterating hobo, as to do so would constitute a violation of the Violence Against Hobos Act of 1996. 3.  Which cartoon group, the Smurfs or the Care Bears, would most likely be condemned by “family” groups today? The Smurfs, obviously.  They look and act suspiciously like immigrants, and they’re always pestering Gargamel, who is nothing less than an honest businessman. 4.  Should there be more catfights among SF Fandom and/or authors? Yes.  In fact, I think SF needs to announce a state of emergency and immediately start an internal war to cull the unworthy from its masses.  There are too many people in this community who shouldn’t be here; we should do what we can to get rid of them, just like the Smurfs. 5.  When I finally decide to post a photo of myself here, should I go with a beret or just merely a scarf wrapped around my neck in a diffident manner? Oh, Larry, you should always go for a beret.  It is appropriately pretentious and, as the Internet has taught me, it makes it easy for people to dismiss you as nothing more than a Condescending Liberal Grad Student (even though you are nothing of the sort).  Or you could go for a scarf if you just want people to think you drink coffee… 6.  Does book porn make you think inappropriate literary thoughts? Yes.  I’m currently on trial for indecent acts with a book or book-like object.  This is the result of excessive amounts of images of book covers and people’s book collections, which are available all over the net…  Make sure to check your local laws to avoid landing you in prison for overlying enjoying book porn. 7.  If you have a Twitter account, how many literate squirrels do you follow on there? That I’m allowed to tell you about?  One.  But there are many others who wish to remain anonymous.  They work for the Ministry of Knowledge in the central government of Squirreltopia.  To tell you their names would jeopardize their missions… 8.  Which genre of books should I review more often:  pirates, westerns, ninjas, squirrels, Shatner? Shatner ninjas.  Duh! 9.  If you could get me to ask any question to any author, what would be the most inappropriate question that would come to mind and to which author would you want that question addressed? To China Mieville:  “Have you ever considered writing Hentai?” 10.  What was the best book that you ever read and ended up kicking across a room? I don’t kick books.  I molest them and occasionally sniff their pages, but I believe it a sin to physically harm books.  You can psychologically damage them, though. 11.  What is more erotic, the sound of pages turning or the smell of an old book’s binding? The latter.  But I’m weird.  As previously mentioned, I sniff books.  I sniff books a lot… That is all.

SF/F Commentary

Writing Wonders: Are Flashbacks Evil?

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I think with all writing concepts, there are no simple answers.  Flashbacks are no different.  Just as you can ruin a book with poorly constructed multiple POVs, so too can you ruin a book with flashbacks.  It all comes down to how and when you do it. Case in point:  I am currently reading Tobias Buckell’s The Apocalypse Ocean, the fourth book in his Xenowealth series.  One of the POVs in the book is of a woman born from genetically augmented stock by an alien race known as the Nesaru.  But the only way we can really understand what her past means to her in the present of the novel (after the events in Ragamuffin, in which a human revolution against alien control had its first and most important victory) is by flashback.  Buckell could tell us her history in an infodump, but the result would lack the emotional impact we need in order to sympathize with the character.   Thus, Buckell uses the flashback.  Only rather than shove it in the middle of an important sequence, he uses it as a way to further the plot point (specifically, her plot) — it occurs in a chapter devoted specifically to her reaction to a previous scene; we know something will happen in this chapter, but we don’t know what, and so Buckell uses this flashback as a way to show her motivations as an individual.  It’s a smart move, I think, since it avoids all the problems that can come with flashbacks — pulling the audience out of the story, destroying pace, etc.  It also helps that readers of Buckell’s work will recognize familiar themes in this flashback, which might not be something to be expected in other works with such devices. That’s really all it comes down to.  If you’re going to use a flashback, you have to use it with the awareness of its impact on the rest of the narrative.  If inserting a flashback will hurt the pacing or if it appears in a pointless moment in the story, then you’re probably going to run into problems. What I’m curious about are those books which experiment with the flashback form.  One example that comes to mind is Brian Francis Slattery’s Lost Everything, in which much of the story meanders through different points in the character’s lives.  Think of it as a long series of interconnected flashbacks.  Much of his writing follows this format, including Spaceman Blues.  But what other kinds of experimentations are there?  Do they work? Feel free to leave a comment! (Question suggested by Paul Weimer on Google+.) P.S.:  One might also consider The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers as a kind of flashback-infused text, though that’s difficult to argue since most of the book takes place in the flashback, rather than in the “present.”

SF/F Commentary

Question: What happens when laser pistols are everywhere?

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The question is actually more complicated than the title suggests.  It reads as follows: In a science fiction world where guns can be made of deadly lasers, pew pew pew, that you’d have to move at the speed of light to avoid, would there be a need for guns? I mean, if you got mad at someone and whipped out your laser gun, they could be dead before they heard the gun go off, sonic boom style. So… why guns? I take as the underlying assumption here that such guns use realistic laser technology and not the sort of thing we see in science fiction from practically everything written in the 30s, 40s, and 50s to Star Wars to even the absolutely gorgeous trailer for the film adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.  In other words, lasers that likely make less noise than contemporary guns, have beams that shoot at the speed of light (or close to it), and so on. Real laser weapons would actually present a lot of challenges for humankind.  Here I must express minor disagreement with Kathlyn Hawley about the impacts of such technology.  Laser technology would be limited by a number of factors, the most important of which are:  1) power supply, and 2) beam strength.  It is unlikely, for example, that we will have developed a power source capable of making beam weapons with the strength to blast through ship hulls and so on.  People certainly wouldn’t be a problem, but I find it hard to believe that we will have solved the power gap in the next 100 years (though I could be wrong). From that perspective alone, we likely won’t use beam weapons.  They will cost too much money and take up too much space and power.  It’s easier to detonate a bunch of modified explosives against the hull of an enemy ship or over enemy personal than it is to charge and maintain lasers with the same general effect. The same will likely remain true for hand held weaponry, such as rifles and pistols.  In a far future setting, it’s possible we could make the weapons light enough to warrant using as assault weapons, but even then, you’re dealing with a weapon that will run out of charge mighty fast.  Even if you loaded up a mechanically augmented soldier (in a kind of exoskeleton), you’d have encumbered that soldier with a power supply that could be just as dangerous as the weapon itself.  There’s a reason why we still don’t load up soldiers with excessive amounts of protective gear:  they become slow and easy targets.  Tanks and other kinds of vehicles serve the function of massive fire power, yet here we run into the same problem as before:  where do you put the power supply and is it worth it when you can solve the problem with modified nuclear shells that leave no radiation behind (we’ll probably figure out how to suck the radiation out or neutralize it, thus making nuclear warfare a standard model). For me, lasers are just another of those science fiction concepts that you either accept or reject.  Like FTL.  Like millions of species of aliens that look vaguely human.  Like so many tropes of the genre that violate all manner of scientific “rules.”  Because if we’re going to be realistic about future weaponry, I doubt lasers are going to be useful for much more than stopping other weapons from doing their job.  We might see lasers used to take down planes, but since combat ships in space will have considerable amounts of shielding to combat radiation, I don’t see these as being applicable except to take down missiles and other explosive devices.  We should be more concerned about the kinds of weapons we already have.  Future advances will make such things more deadly and easier to use.  And that will make for an interesting future. Now it’s your turn.  What do you think?  Do you disagree with me or Kathryn?  If so, why?  The comments are yours! (Question suggested by Kathlyn Hawley on Google+.)

SF/F Commentary

Question: Why does fantasy default to pseudo-medieval?

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It’s an obsession.  The contemporary fantasy genre has been making sweet, soft, dirty love to vaguely medieval Western cultures for almost a century now.  You can tell because the two have made so many degenerate babies that the bookshelves are full with them.  Some of them are more degenerate than others, taking those medieval Western cultures as mere background rather than as setting.  Others are clearly the product of a well-managed, passionate marriage (or other applicable union). Joking aside, the reason for the clinging behavior of fantasy has more to do with the heritage of colonialism than it does with anything else.  The last 400 years of empires, scientific racism, hierarchical anthropology, and so on have created a deep link within our conscious and subconscious minds that privileges the West.  At some point in our cultural history, we started calling some “ancient cultures” by a new name:  “primitive.”  Thus, Rome became the pinnacle of the West, despite also being an “ancient culture,” and all those non-Western cultures, from Africa to Asia to the Americas, became “primitive.”  “Primitive” ceased to mean “old, dead culture” and came to mean “unsophisticated, lesser culture.” Note the problematic distinction made between these terms.  How can an equally ancient culture be “superior” to other ancient cultures?  What makes them superior?  A hard question to answer.  Some would suggest that the West appeared superior because it rapidly advanced while the rest of the world seemed stuck “in the past.”  There’s not enough space to deal with such a questionable argument here, except to say that there might be good reasons for why some cultures did not “progress” the same way as others. In contemporary anthropology, however, “primitive” represents the earlier forms of Homo Sapiens sapiens.  The Cro Magnon.  The first cultures.  Rudimentary.  But the wider culture has yet to catch on to this usage.  Instead, anything “not West” is “primitive” and, therefore, “other.”  That stems from centuries of imperial rhetoric and Western superiority (a complex, really).  Our culture is a product of being told we are special, and that everyone else strives to be like us, to take from us the modes of progress, and so on.  The “primitive cultures” were simply “on their way to being advanced, Western ones.” From that perspective, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine why the pseudo-medieval setting is the one that dominates fantasy, a generic tradition that began in the West and unfortunately remains there (with some exceptions).  For all people in the West, the medieval period is the only medieval reference we can call “ours.”  This despite the fact that many people in the West have links to other cultures (often intimate links).  While these exceptions certainly value non-Western cultures, they are up against a wall which tells them “our history [the West’s] is most important, and so you should write analogues of it.” We are starting to see a serious push against this history.  The “other” is creeping its way into the dominant discourse of the West, supplanting its authority to remind us that culture is mostly relative.  It’s a slow, drawn out process, just as imperialism and its cultural parasitism took decades to build and decades to tear down.  That’s the way it goes, though.  When you build an immense hegemonic system of oppression, control, and assimilation, you can’t expect tomorrow to be full of sun when we’ve only just started pulling its ropes on the horizon.  At least we have an explanation for the obsession, though.  And having that knowledge might be useful some day. What do you all think?  Which recent fantasy novels have you read that don’t include Western settings?  I immediately think of work by N. K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, and Karen Lord.  Things I haven’t read included Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon, the numerous Philippine SF/F anthologies that Charles A. Tan reminds us about, and a number of interesting works mentioned on the World SF blog (are Lavie Tidhar’s fantasy novels set elsewhere?).  Let me know of some others.  We could make a wicked list of fantasy set somewhere other than the West! (Question provied by Mike Reeves-McMillan on Google+)

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