Stupid Things Critics Say: Joel Stein and YA Literature
The NY Times ran a series of mini-debates about YA literature two days ago; one of those mini-debates has pissed some folks off — me included. Why? Perhaps because Joel Stein opens his piece with this filthy gem: The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.” Or a Twilight book. Or Harry Potter. The only time I’m O.K. with an adult holding a children’s book is if he’s moving his mouth as he reads. Stein, of course, isn’t referring to intelligent people who happen to move their lips while they read. He’s talking about people with less-than-stellar mental faculties. At least, that’s how I take it, because I know plenty of perfectly intelligent people who move their lips while reading everything from Austen to Dostoyevsky (fulfilling my pretentious quota here). The rest of Stein’s article reads with as much contempt as the introductory paragraph. He compares YA/children’s literature to video games, because playing games and reading books meant for young ones is exactly the same thing. Never mind that playing video games can have a positive effect on the brain, though the picture is much more complicated than I have time to explore here. By the end, you get a pretty clear sense about Stein as a critic — his opinions about literature, his knowledge of literature, etc. In other words: this little rant reads more like a series of intentional bullshits than it does an attempt to relegate a genre to the place it deserves (the latter being an impossible task). Stein doesn’t actually know anything about YA or Children’s literature; he openly admits to avoiding it: “I don’t know because it’s a book for kids. I’ll read The Hunger Games when I finish the previous 3,000 years of fiction written for adults.” And yet he feels he is qualified to piss on the genre, without any concept of what that genre entails. If Stein is really as pretentious as he sounds, perhaps he would like The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation by M. T. Anderson. Or perhaps he might consider reading canonical works of children’s literature with history in mind. But since the only YA/children’s literature Stein seems familiar with are uber popular works which, even among many readers of the genre, are certainly more popcorn-and-movie than steak-and-fine-wine, it’s difficult to take anything he says with any seriousness. Name-checking The Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter, Horton Hatches the Egg, or Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing doesn’t make you an expert. This isn’t a man who wants to be taken seriously by anyone outside of a select circle of narrow-minded readers. And for that, he deserves a wall of ridicule. ————————————————————- Now to turn this into a positive-ish thing: If you were to suggest a book for Mr. Stein to read in an attempt to prove him wrong, which would you suggest and why?
Karl Schroeder on Science Fiction’s Prediction Skills (w/ a Side of Pinker)
Over at Tor.com, Karl Schroeder, author of the Virga series, has taken a stab at SF’s failures to predict or imagine the future. Specifically, Schroeder takes issue with the genre’s penchant for imagining technological and/or sociological change (in isolation), but not for imagining changes in factors like government and/or violence. He uses as his basis for his argument Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, a book I have not had the pleasure to read, but which I understand to be not only one of the most important non-fiction works of our time, but also an illuminating work. You can read the full argument here, but I’d like to open this post with this: I said I was accusing society in the above quote (“…Our technological society’s one big blind spot is that we can imagine everything about ourselves and our world changing except how we make decisions.”), but actually the people I was accusing of being most vulnerable to this blind spot were science fiction writers. It’s true there are plenty of Utopian futures in SF, but the vast majority of books within the sub-genres of cyberpunk, space opera and hard SF contain regressive or static visions of human conflict in the future. We’ve given them license to break the barrier of lightspeed, but not to imagine that some other organizing principle could replace bureaucracy or—even worse—to imagine that we could without tyranny reduce human conflict down to a level of ignorable background noise. I think the problem with Schroeder’s argument is that it relies on a flawed logic about the purpose of SF (or, rather, the function of SF) that I’ve brought up a number of times before: namely, that SF is, by its nature, about predicting or imagining fully realized (read: totalized) potential futures (read: prediction). Unfortunately, futurism tends to get confused with science fiction, and for good reason. After all, both share the same impulses, the same internal logics, and so on. But SF is not futurism. And by extension, it is not about the future. SF is, by its very design, always already about the author’s present.* We can take as gospel the historical and scientific truth of Pinker’s book, but that doesn’t change the fact that so much science fiction never has to take it seriously. True, public policy and social organization will be different in 200 years, but the alienation of that absolute difference limits the generic potential of SF. What Schroeder seems to call for is a return to the utopian genre — particularly, totalized works like those of Thomas More (Utopia), B. F. Skinner (Walden Two), William Morris (New From Nowhere), or Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward). But reading these works now only alienates the ignorant, as many of the “new” social structures found in these works have been tried (most have failed). But SF isn’t technically utopia, or vice versa.** It isn’t meant to be totalized in terms of predictive qualities. Rather, it is supposed to look at our current world and to do two things (both/either/or): 1) think through “problems,” and 2) explore such problems through allegory, metaphor, and estrangement. That is why SF is about the present, not the future. That is why SF is set in the future, but is not necessarily about it. The setting is coincidental for the SF author, whether he or she acknowledges it or not. What separates the various forms of fantasy from SF isn’t the setting, but the method/way/style/approach the author takes to explore his or her present. Fantasy need not be about a real world problem; it can stand on its own as a journey. But SF in its pure and actual form is always about the real world transplanted into a different frame, one which relies on the foundations of scientific exploration, even to the limits of the fantastic. So while SF has done a fabulous job playing out the possibilities of technological advancement, singular social change, and so on, it has and must be, by its nature, utterly terrible at predicting actual worlds. Another way to think about this might be to say that SF has more in common with the modernist literary movement than with the late 19th and early 20th century realists, though it certainly takes a few pages from the real. Having said all of this, I should note that I don’t disagree with Schroeder about the desire to see SF deal more intelligently with the knowledge found in Pinker’s book (or other forms of knowledge, as the case may be). And there is a certain importance in applying the cognitively estranging effect of SF in its proper “futuristic” form to social organization (government, etc.). Perhaps we’ll see that, but it will be in isolated pockets, not as an SF trend or purpose. Before ending this post, here’s one last complication Schroeder does adds: In order to write a credible violent future, you’re going to have to show me how these break down. And because the steadiness of the historical trend shows that these reinforcing circles are not vulnerable to the obvious disruptions described above, that’s not going to be an easy task. He’s right, in a way, but I can’t help thinking that this won’t matter much to the general readership. Convincing Schroeder only matters if he represents the genre as a whole. I’m not convinced, however, that this is true, or that enough SF readers are familiar with Pinker’s book. I’m waiting to be proven wrong. —————————————————————– *By “SF” I mean a particular generic form that shares more in common with Darko Suvin’s cognitive estrangement than Pulp Era science fantasy. I make the assumption that Schroeder shares this definition, even if he does not put it in the same terms. **I like to think that utopia is a subgenre of SF, but this would be historically inaccurate, as the utopian genre existed far before the SF genre (i.e., as generic traditions).
GS Mumbles: Salman Rushdie, Doctor Who, and China Mieville
(GS Mumbles — or Grad School Mumbles — is the second of my new seasonal columns in which I talk about things I’m working on as a grad student, often in relation to geeky things.) I suspect this post is going to be an attempt to make a silly connection between a favorite TV show in the geek community and one of the great literary figures of our time. In his novel, Shame, Salman Rushdie’s autobiographical narrator interrupts the narrative to tell us that the novel is quite clearly not about the things we think it’s about. The scene goes as follows: The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this off-centering to be necessary; but its value is, of course, open to debate. My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan. I have not given the country a name. And Q. is not really Quetta at all. But I don’t want to be precious about this: when I arrive at he big city, I shall call it Karachi. And it will contain a “Defense.” (23-24) In discussing this passage in class, I was consumed by the image provided by the following scene from “The Stolen Earth” (Doctor Who): I wouldn’t say that being “one second out of sync with the rest of the universe” is an adequate explanation for the Rushdie passage, but it does provide a way of thinking about this line: “The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite.” Shame is, perhaps, about an out of sync representation of a place, one which at once seems like the proper thing, but is also something else entirely by the nature of representation itself. To write fictionally about a country as Rushdie does in Shame, you also take away the possibility of writing about that country. Of course, Rushdie might be up to something a little more clever, which is perhaps why I didn’t bring up the “out of sync” comment in class. If I had been smart enough to think of it then, I might have brought up China Mieville’s The City and the City, which more accurately captures this idea of a representation which is two places compacted (almost) into the same place in the form of a literary reference. But even that comparison is an unfair one.I think the crucial part of the scene is where Rushdie says, “My view is that I am not writing only about Pakistan.” It similarly connects to J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, though in less abstract or dislocated terms. Coetzee’s novel could very well be about any number of different former colonies, as all the references are ambiguous enough to point in multiple directions. Shame is not necessarily so ambiguous, though the antihistoricity of the text suggests that the fictional Pakistan and the real Pakistan are, if not separate in concrete terms, then certainly held apart by a blurred boundary — the boundary that normally is embodied by the fictional allegory in the strictest of separations. You’d have to think of Shame as an anti-historical novel — that is, a novel which actively fights the idea of the empirical truth of a real place in a narrative which challenges, at every step, the nature of reality and truth itself. In other words, there is no Pakistan, only the imaginary shared “idea” of “nation” the people who call themselves “Pakistanis” have bought into, just as those who call themselves “Americans” have bought into the idea of a stable thing called “The United States of America.” There’s no point pretending something is when the conditions of its existence are always already compromised by the near-fictionality of the imagined community (this is Benedict Anderson’s concept, which, if reduced, reads something like: the nation is neither real nor fake, but the imagined or dream-like entity people accept as a nation — i.e., we make the nation by believing it exists).Does anyone have any thoughts here? Whether about Rushdie, Mieville, Coetzee, or nationalism? The comments are yours…
Crying “Censorship”: Why Getting Banned Isn’t Censorship
You’ll probably have noticed that a lot of crazy nonsense took place here and then migrated over here when Jen and I put our feet in piranha-infested waters. This isn’t the first time Jen and I have played emotional bees and frolicked in the convoluted mess of gender politics. But that’s not really the point of this post. Rather, I’d like to use the aforementioned links as illustrative examples of my central point: Deleting a comment or banning a commenter on a private website is not censorship. Since Liz Bourke’s original post, a number of people have almost joyously proclaimed they have been censored when they were banned from Tor.com (or would be banned from The Skiffy and Fanty Show — one individual on Baen assumed we would delete anything he wrote simply because he would disagree with us; the comment is still there). Neither of these things, however, constitute censorship, in part because private spaces have specialized rules which determine what can and cannot be said. If someone waltzes into your house and starts babbling at you about why Obama is a bad choice for President or Gingrich will repeal child labor laws, you have every right to remove that person from your home and prevent them from entering again. This act is defended by the U.S. Constitution, by our laws, and by our social codes. Few would call that censorship. A house is a private space, inside which you make the rules for interaction (provided they follow the rules from the outside — no murdering in your house). The same concept applies to websites that are privately owned or run.* Much like the privacy guaranteed in your home, you equally are guaranteed privacy on your website. That means that you are able to determine who can and cannot see your posts, who can and cannot comment, and so on. In fact, Google does much of this on its own by snagging spam comments from the aether and casting them to the dark abyss (the same with WordPress, etc.). None of these acts are censorship, since nothing has been done to prevent you from being able to speak on the Internet. Provided you still have a place to speak, your rights have not been violated. You are entitled to your opinion and your voice, but not to a listening audience. Censorship on the web, thus, is rather tricky. At what point does the removal of content become censorship? I’m not sure there are any easy answers to this question. Because the Internet is vast, if not nearly infinite, there are few boundaries to free speech in the U.S. The tables turn when you go to a place like China, where hackers serve as police officers against online dissent, where content from main sources are removed from Google’s search database, and so on. Is that censorship? I would argue that the distinction between personal space and censorship seems to follow this logic: so long as the avenues of discussion remain open, your rights have not been infringed; so long as websites themselves are subject to removal without reasonable cause,** you’re looking at censorship. This seems like a relatively simple concept to understand, but plenty of people cry “censorship” anyway. Perhaps they do so as an emotional reaction, or because they really believe that the 1st Amendment means you can say whatever you want wherever you want. The truth is that private spaces come with limitations and rules, many of them unspoken. Many websites don’t have comment policies, running instead on the tolerance levels of the owners. Those tolerance levels will vary considerably. In other words, think of your website as a digital house. If you have no problem letting anyone come in and say whatever they want, then good for you. But if you want to limit discussions or focus them, doing so in your own space means you’re simply taking control of your house. And if we’re being honest, most of us have house rules that we expect others to follow (and house rules we set for ourselves when we visit other people’s homes). The difference between a house and the Internet, however, is that the Internet guarantees anonymity and/or distance. Bravery is necessarily an attending element. ——————————————- *I don’t know whether censorship applies to government websites, though there aren’t many government websites with comment threads, as far as I can remember. **For example, I wouldn’t consider the removal of a website that shares pirated files (not links, but files) as censorship, since free speech does not extend to violating the law.
The Bad Bully Review(er) Manifesto (or, Why Negative Reviews Are Good)
If you haven’t heard or seen it yet, the proverbial shit hit the SF/F-community-fan today on this Strange Horizons review of Michael J. Sullivan’s Theft of Swords.* Not just any shit, mind you, but a rather familiar kind of excrement that makes the SF/F world an amusing and altogether strange place. The short version: Liz Bourke wrote a scathing review of Sullivan’s novel (technically two novels packed into one), in which she derided the book for weak prose, inaccurate use of Early Modern English, plot and character inequities, and the frequency of weak female characters. In response, a number of people left comments assaulting Bourke in one of two ways: 1) rejecting Bourke’s criticism as patently bunk, and 2) launching accusations at Bourke herself. (There were other reactions too, but you should read the comments to get the full picture.) The result? A long dialogue about the value of negative reviews, what constitutes “being mean,” and similar themes we’ve seen before. The review/comments also inspired this post by Adrian Faulkner about why bullying reviews are bad news indeed, from which the following gem-of-a-quote comes from: I don’t know what happened to make some of these reviewers so bitter. Jealousy of the author’s success, a misguided thought that this will make a name for themselves? I wouldn’t accept racism, homophobia or anti-Semitism in a review, so why should I accept bullying? Surely, in the 21st century, we’re better than that? It genuinely shocks me that the genre community believes that type of behaviour is acceptable in this day and age. Seriously, people, it’s not hard to write an honest review! Hard, indeed. So hard, in fact, that it must be difficult to find said honesty in a negative review. Clearly a spirited reviewer like Bourke must be lying for cheap shocks, lambasting Sullivan because he just so happens to be the random victim of the week. And by lying, Bourke clearly has put herself in league with racists, homophobes, and anti-Semites. Why not neo-Nazis, the Westboro Baptist Church, Rick Santorum, and the British National Party too?** Or perhaps not. What all of this seems to point to is a public devaluation of actual honest criticism. We have grown used to — in this community, at least — a misdirected honesty. Too little attention has been given to the full picture, one which has, on the one side, the good and the beautiful, and, on the other side, the bad and the ugly. You can imagine which side isn’t getting its fair shake. But negative reviews are not only fascinating, but crucial. As a writer who occasionally workshops his fiction, I know how important it is to be told honestly when something doesn’t work. That usually means having to accept harsh criticism not unlike what Bourke wrote in her review. Someone who only tells me good things, or refuses to tear my work to pieces where it needs such treatment, is useless. Likewise, a reviewer who cannot write negative reviews is less a reviewer than a slave to publicity. We have to be able to tell people when we don’t like something, just as we have to be able to tell people when we do. And we should have free reign — minus those spaces where libel might be committed — to explore the “why.” Negative reviews are a way to remind the public, authors, and publishers about the standards expected of publication.*** The fewer negative reviews available where they belong, the more likely it is that bad books will continue to be published.**** None of that makes a reviewer a “bully.” To make that assessment is to expose a woeful ignorance of how bullies operate.***** Bullies don’t stop at criticizing the “behavior” that you make public for consumption. Rather, bullies seek to inflict personal damage, physical and emotional, assaulting you where you should feel safe. They’re opportunistic predators. Is Liz Bourke a bully? Not by a long shot. Passionate and brutally honest? You bet. But very little of her review could be misconstrued as a personal attack against Mr. Sullivan, and those elements which some have taken to be “bully behavior” might be better called “hyperbolic criticism.” Her review does what some of the best reviews do: provide solid evidence, passion, and personality. To question her argument because you disagree with her tone, her method, or her chosen “target” says more about your personal investment in fandom than the quality of Bourke as a critic. Nor does launching personal attacks against someone you accuse of the same activity useful to your cause. Rank hypocrisy is a one-way-street, as it were. Whatever we think of reviews, good and bad, they must be honest and they must provide sound reasoning, even if we still disagree with them in the end. They should not, however, be held to Adrian Faulkner’s standard: The best reviews create debate about the thing they are reviewing, the worst create debate about the review. Holding the value of a review to the whims of human reaction is not unlike deciding drunk driving by whether someone crashes their car. Then again, there are probably better analogies for this… What do you all think about negative reviews? ————————————————————- *For the record, I have had two reviews published in Strange Horizons: Tron: Legacy (Adam Roberts disagreed with me here) and Bricks by Leon Jenner (no thoughts whatsoever). **Look these folks up if you have no idea who I’m talking about. ***When I say negative reviews, I don’t mean one-line rants, as is common on the Internet. ****I have not read Sullivan’s work, though we are interviewing him for The Skiffy and Fanty Show next month, which will require me to read his work. Bourke’s review will have little influence on my take, as my reading standards are understandably different. Personally, I can let go and enjoy a fluffy book. Don’t take my word for it, though. Read my reviews in the last year or so. Don’t go farther than that, though. The deeper
Fantasy and Moral Ambiguity: Repetition Rears Its Ugly Head
Author Bryan Thomas Schmidt has taken a stab at author/editor James L. Sutter’s Suvudu post on why moral ambiguity in fantasy is a good thing. In said stabbing, Schmidt makes some well-worn arguments about why moral ambiguous fantasy presents problems for society, but the bulk of his argument — in my mind — rests on a bed of false assumptions. For example, Schmidt argues that our world is one beset with nihilism and moral ambiguities fermented by the entertainment industry. He suggests that We are bombarded with images of violence, sex, language, etc. which of things, people, places being torn apart. We are shown these as motivated by impurities and negative motives more often than pure motives. And we are told that’s because human beings will always go that way by nature. While I do believe in the depravity of man, I also believe man has the capacity to grow and reach beyond natural tendencies and become so much better than that. And that’s what I want from my heroes. While I don’t want unflawed, perfect heroes—who can relate to those either—at the same time, I do want to know who should win; who is on the right side. Underlying this argument are two problems: 1) the assumption that the media overwhelming fails to provide us with morally ambiguous or questionable heroes who we can root for, and 2) the absolutist logic the continues to dominate colonial and imperial ideology to this day — namely, the idea that we can easily determine who is right in a given situation based solely on their apparently moral behavior. The first assumption is false the second you look at what gets put on our screens and on our shelves. Most of what we view/read for pleasure contains flawed, realistic characters who are still our heroes. Is it not possible, for example, that a semi-violent police detective can still be someone we root for even if we disagree with the occasional abuse he launches at his wife? True, we would mostly all agree he must get help, and perhaps end up in jail, but we can also agree that his pursuit of the bad guy (who may have very difference motivations of his own) is right. Or perhaps a better example is a police detective who drinks too much, sometimes putting himself and others at risk with his drunken behavior. Flawed? Yes. Needs help? Yes. But can we still root for him? Sure. Just as we often root for the detectives on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, some of which have roughed up suspects and so on in the pursuit of justice which is never pure and almost always slightly disappointing. It doesn’t matter that Stabler is kind of a douchebag; we still want him to get the criminals. Most of the right/wrong elements in the above positions are only absolute if one holds to a puritanical view of the human species, one which cannot take into account the variations of human believe, the variations of human psychology, and the variations of human biology. Schmidt brings up genocide and rape as specific examples of pure morality. While genocide and rape are certainly detrimental to society, their activity is shaped by ideologies that are absolutist in themselves. Those who freely commit genocide believe fervently that they are doing a service to society. We can only say they are wrong because we come from a different moral framework, one which has done little to stifle murder and rape within itself. But none of this means that those positions are right, nor does it mean that adding moral ambiguity to fantasy means that anti-murder and anti-rape are questionable positions. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. What moral ambiguity tells us is this: things are far more complicated than it is easy to admit. Murderers may need to be punished, but every murder is not committed for the same reason. The same is true of genocide and rape. We punish these people not because they break moral codes (recall, for example, that it wasn’t all that long ago that there were no legal rules to prosecute rapes as rapes), but because they do things detrimental to society or other people. But their motivations cannot be discounted. To do that is to shut ourselves away from the variations of selfhood that make up the human species. We’re a complicated bunch. The second piece to the above puzzle is a slightly more problematic assumption. What we’ve learned in the last 50 years is that #2 is always already false so long as there are at least two sides to an issue. That doesn’t mean we have to agree with the other side, whatever that may be, but it does mean that there are always two sides to a given coin. We might, for example, argue that Al Qaeda is purely evil based solely on what they say and what they do, but to do so would mean ignoring historical precedence, religious tutelage, and a host of other factors which paint a different picture. In the end, most of us would agree that Al Qaeda deserves to be stopped, but we might also agree that some of the people who are a part of that organization may not be there for reasons we would consider morally questionable if the roles were reversed. It is, however, false to argue that America is purely right and Al Qaeda is purely wrong in a moral sense. To do so would require one of two things: 1) a head-in-the-sand view of reality, or 2) an open acknowledgement that every action made by the “right” party must be questioned unless or until a pure moral position can be found. Neither of these are particularly good options. Yet if we take Schmidt’s moral positioning seriously, it’s perhaps his first volley of questions that exposes the fundamentally flawed assumption trapped beneath his entire post: [How] can it be wrong to write stories which show a clearer sense