Shameless Advertising
(You know, there are times when I wonder if I don’t have some form of brain disease. I posted this yesterday, but didn’t leave the links for any of you to click. How exactly are you supposed to be nice and friendly and vote/review WISB if you don’t even know where to go? My apologies. This has been corrected!) Because I feel like asking for a little love from you all, I’d like to point you to WISB’s page at Websites For Writers and WISB’s Kindle Page. If you like my blog, pop on over to those sites and give me a vote or a review. Let everyone know how much you like WISB! If you hate my blog, well, then I’d appreciate you telling me what you don’t like, because then I can possibly address the issue. It’s up to you, though. Thanks in advance to anyone who partakes in the shamelessness of this request…
The Book Magnet Project: Let’s Cover My Fridge
The other day I put two promotional magnets for two books I have received on my fridge. Why? Because I had them and I’ve always wanted to put stuff on a fridge, but I’ve never had one I could properly call “mine.” Now that I do, I want to cover the blasted thing with promotional magnets for books. That’s where this project comes in. If you have a book (traditionally published or self-published), are a publisher, or print a magazine/journal/webmag/etc. that either fits into the SF/F genres, is related to them, or at least has elements that might be considered a part of the SF/F genres, then I want your promotional magnets. I only need one, not dozens. What will I do in return? Well, every magnet I get will involve a free spotlight post on this blog. That means I’ll tell everyone I got your magnet, what the magnet is for, what the book/mag is about, and where to find it. It’s free advertising for having fun! So, to participate, all you have to do is email me at arconna[at]yahoo[dot]com using the subject line “Book Magnet Project” or something along those lines to tell me about your book and to find out where to send the magnet. I don’t care how you send the magnet, just as long as you send it to me (you can probably send it via standard letter in the U.S., for a measly 42 cents). And to those that can’t participate (because you don’t have a book or a magnet), then please help me spread the word about this. I want to see how quick we can cover my fridge in magnets!
Signal Lost; Sorry For the Inconvenience
I wanted to apologize to everyone for my silence the last few days. My computer decided to cease functioning on Friday. It’s currently being assessed by a technodoc and should be back to operational capacity by Tuesday or Wednesday (depending entirely upon my ability to retrieve it from the technospital). Unfortunately, this means my ability to make use of the Internet is limited. The injured computer is unfortunately the only connection I have to all of you and the rest of the net. Regular programming shall resume when all operations are restored. Thanks for your patience. Transmission closed.
9/11: Thoughts
Here we are again, on this day that has shaped our lives as Americans. Anyone living today that thinks 9/11 hasn’t changed the landscape has been living in a box, buried in the abyss of nonexistence. It would be safe to say that our world effectively ended when 9/11 entered the social landscape. We had to change, and some of those changes were bad. But, we’re still here. 9/11 didn’t destroy America. Instead, it gave us a reason to want to exist, and made us temporarily aware of how much we rely on the kindness and sacrifice of others to keep the gears going. Today, though, is not a day to think about how we’ve changed. It is a day to remember those that died and those that sacrificed their lives doing a job that we take for granted every single day. We should be ashamed of ourselves for ever forgetting how important firefighters, police officers, and even our soldiers really are in the grand scheme of things. They do for us what we can’t do for ourselves. So, today, we should remember them. We should give them some measure of thanks for their willingness to spill their blood and risk their lives on our behalf. And we should remember those innocent people who were ruthlessly murdered. To those of you who may be in the service, or a public servant of some form, I thank you for what you do for this country, regardless of your political position or personal belief. You do a service for all of us and deserve accommodation for it. Thank you.
Punking Everything in SF/F (Part Four): The (Closer) Past (Cyberpunk B)
(Here begins the second part of my conceptualization of cyberpunk. Expect these sorts of things to be irregular, but at the same time a part of this blog, because much of what I will be doing as a graduate student is exactly what I am doing here, but simply on different subjects. This is, for all intensive purposes, practice. Regular programming should, as always be expected.) First, a recap of what cyberpunk is, with some inferences to what it is not: What is it?Cyberpunk is a genre of fiction, primarily of the science fictional vein, that attempts to merge the concept of cyber (taken broadly to mean the speculative future of technology embodied as objects such as the net, artificial intelligence, and other such items) and punk (to be taken as the resistance by a figure or figures to the dominant social paradigm of the post-industrialist complex, with reasonable removal of the unfortunate hypocrisy that eventually took over the punk movement and established its resistance as moot; one can look at Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s concept of “No Future” in his essay “Cyberpunk and Empire” to get an idea of the nature of the gray that is the punk; and, of course, reading that essay can offer some unusually powerful insights into some of the aspects I glossed over in the first post for this series). Typical elements include: noir imagery, excessive representations of urbanity (to the extent that the urban is typically the central scenic POV and the corporate/industrial complex is instead removed or seemingly nonexistent, and thus is present more as a disembodied head than anything else), urban decay, hacker culture, and the introduction and general adoption of some form of social resistance through the technological (enhanced drugs, code manipulation, use of online-as-real environments, rogue AIs, etc.). It would be fair to say, then, that cyberpunk has already happened, insofar as certain aspects (such as artificial intelligent at the human level) have yet to happen, but other elements (the dominance of the web, the use of networks to mount resistance, both locally and internationally, etc.) have certainly occurred or are occurring. Example: Neuromancer by William Gibson and “Cyberpunk” by Bruce Bethke. What it isn’t?Cyberpunk is not a grand, ridiculously Hollywood-ized foray of random technological gadgets and faux-hacker-culture obscenities that have been so readily adopted by the reading/viewing public as definitively “cyberpunk.” While cyberpunk certainly includes those elements found so grandly exposed in The Matrix and various other films and novels that have been applauded as cyberpunk, it is not so much a genre of visual or technological appeal as a genre of deeper, grander meanings and statuses of resistance. So, while one might say “that guy has a bionic eye and a talking computer” and think “it must be cyberpunk,” we can automatically dig deeper to find where its cyberpunk-ness ceases to be anything but visual aesthetics. We cannot, for example, call such a tale “cyberpunk” simply because of a bionic eye and a talking computer, but precisely because the bionic eye and the talking computer are part of a grand resistance as per the “punk” suffix, demonstrated as such through the interaction of said subjects, willingly or otherwise, with a social paradigm that is radically corporate and radically homogenized as such. Example: The Matrix is arguable, because one could argue that the robots, intelligent and sadistic, in a way, are simply an allegorical representation of an economic model of social structure, precisely because the use of humans as commodities (i.e. the use of people as objects rather than as subjects) is so obvious. But, one would have to see the Animatrix to understand that The Matrix and its sequels are not about commodity so much as about revenge and survival. A grey area still exists; perhaps further attention to such a thing may be elemental to a broader conceptualization of cyberpunk. Now, having said the above, I think it is fair to resume the discussion of cyberpunk as a genre. Cyberpunk is comprised of three movements, though not, by any stretch of the imagination, linear movements, but movements equally as resistant to standards as the punk in cyberpunk. It should be noted, too, that these movements are not definitive categories in the sense that they exist independent of one another, though it is true that they are in genres other than cyberpunk. These movements can be imagined as follows:–Post-humanism–Post-industrialism–Post-nationalism I will only briefly discuss these, because their broader contexts are not necessarily needed here, though certainly worthy of exploration outside of this attempt at literary criticism. Neither of the above categories are necessarily extreme in representation when seemingly adopted by an author, nor are they categories that should be ignored simply because they have been given a weaker role than others (literary critics would tell you that it is possible that those elements which are so hard to discern in relation to other elements are probably the ones most worth paying attention to). But to the descriptions: Post-humanism, in the sense of science fiction, is quite literally what the name seems to imply: post (after) the human. In cyberpunk, and most of science fiction, post-humanism takes the shape, primarily, of the technological: artificial intelligence, robots, cybernetics, bionics, and other forms of prosthetics, whether for the outward body (a robotic arm) or for the internal body (a chip in the brain). Post-humanism, however, should not, in this broad definition, be confused with the alien, and if further explanation is needed for this point, then feel free to tell me in the comments. Post-industrialism we have discussed before. It is the switch from super economies to service economies. Taken literally, again, it means the reduction of manufacturing and the production of service. Post-industrialism is not the end of manufacturing, since no society can possibly survive without the ability to create the goods that thus enable service, but there is simply less emphasis on the creation of objects, and more emphasis on what those objects do for us. For example, one
Publication Against LGBT Content: Writers Be Aware
(LGBT = Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) Notice I said “be aware” in the title. I am not saying you should avoid the publisher mentioned as unfriendly to LGBT in this post over at Crossed Genres. Rather, I’m telling you to be aware of it. What you choose to do with the information presented in the Crossed Genre post is entirely up to you. However, I will offer my personal perspective on this. Flash Fiction Online, while not a market I can recall submitting to, has made a decision to enact an editorial policy without making such information available to you. Why is this a problem? Well, when you go to a publisher and you look at their guidelines, you get a good sense of what they are looking for and what they are not looking for. Strange Horizons, for example, publishes science fiction and fantasy, not hard cut literary fiction about old people. Likewise, Analog is very specifically a science fiction market, while F&SF is both fantasy and science fiction. None of these magazines, as far as I know, have a policy against certain kinds of literature that is not stated, especially not in the form of a bigoted viewpoint. But Flash Fiction Online has such a policy that is not indicated to all of you. This is not a publication that says “we do not take stories about LGBT characters,” but one that says “submit anything that fits into this (a vague series of non-controversial categories), but secretly we’ll reject anything that doesn’t fit our narrow and biased view of the world, specifically because we have a religious, fundamentalist, and negative view of LGBT issues.” Now, this isn’t to say that everyone who works at FFO is necessarily anti-LGBT, but the fellow mentioned in Crossed Genres is. So, for me, this information tells me that I cannot, in good faith, support such a magazine, not even with a direct link, when its editor so clearly holds a negative, and ignorant, view of LGBT people and issues. Period. There is no negotiation for me. As I wrote in the Outer Alliance when this issue came up: I will not, under any circumstances, submit my work to or send money to, or read, any magazine or other publication which so obviously disapproves and holds biases against LGBT authors and subject matter. This is my personal bias, and a publication that is so willing to hide such information from the general public is, in my opinion, being disingenuous. They are, as I perceive it, hiding that information from people who might actually act upon such knowledge, precisely because they know, whether consciously or not, that to be forward with an anti-LGBT stance would constitute a loss of a share of their reading market. I encourage you to read the Crossed Genres post linked above to get a clear picture of what this is all about. This is where I stand. Now it’s time for you to decide where you stand. That is all.