RoF’s Women-Only Issue: Good or Bad?
Realms of Fantasy Magazine recently announced that in August of 2011 they will be releasing a special themed issue of the magazine called “Women in Fantasy.” The idea is that every department will be dedicated to that theme in some way, and only women can submit. I have mixed feelings about this: Are they going to do a “Men in Fantasy” issue? If not, why? While I understand the impetus behind creating the issue, it also has the potential to do more harm than good if the RoF folks aren’t careful. Yes, there should be more women writers in SF/F, but this is going one step farther by intentionally discriminating based on sex, without considering fairness; it could be seen as playing the payback game rather than doing anything for the community as a whole. This, to me, could be as divisive as all the other discussions begun and ended over the last year. I don’t think this is nearly as “revolutionary” as the title and the explanation seems to indicate. While there are not enough recognizable female figures in the speculative genres, this is far less true of fantasy than science fiction. Most of the problems with under-representation seem focused more on SF than F. If Analog or Asimov’s were doing a similar thing, then not only would there be more of an uproar (for various reasons, many of them wrong), but such as issue would have a greater impact on the genre. Right now? I don’t see this as being all that revolutionary when you consider that their primary genre (fantasy) is much more friendly to women than other genres (and no, I am not saying that F is perfect at all). I agree with one of the commentators that the “Women in Fantasy” idea comes off very much like a stunt. I don’t mind stunts, generally speaking, but when dealing with a clearly sensitive issue, this is problematic. I fail to understand why this issue of RoF is “women only” when the theme is “Women in Fantasy.” Is there an assumption that men can’t properly address the topic? Are men assumed to be less adequate at writing female characters or talking about women figures in fantasy? I don’t know. Maybe that’s not what they are thinking, but these are things that pop into my head. Generally speaking, I like the idea behind it. I think an issue dedicated to the discussion of women in fantasy (including fiction about women in fantasy worlds) is a fantastic idea. It could turn into something stunning, if done right. Having said all of this, I’m both curious and put-off by RoF’s “Women in Fantasy” issue. I hope it turns out well, but I think the potential for it to be regarded as something astonishing may be hampered by a failure to address the underlying problems of a gender-specific issue. We’ll see how it turns out. (Mike Brotherton offers his opinion here.)
Ebooks Prices: Now I Understand
I’ve recently been trying to convert the first issue of Survival By Storytelling into a Kindle ebook, thinking it would be a fairly easy process. Technology had other ideas. Here’s what I thought was going to happen: I’d go online, pop the file into Amazon’s conversion tool, and end up with a slightly imperfect file. I’d fiddle a little bit by fixing the small problems. Finish, publish, and rake in the dough to give to all my contributors. How it actually happened: I went online, popped the file into Amazon’s conversion tool, and realized that the final product was so screwed up it was practically unreadable. Tried to figure out how to fix it and found out the following:a) There are no magic, simple ways to change the conversion problems.b) It will take ten times the amount of time it took to make the print version of the book to put together a suitable Kindle version. I’m currently not finished, despite many hours of trying to figure out how to do it. I may end up throwing my hands up when the file is in “acceptable” state and get it out there. So, having gone through all of this, I now understand why it costs so much to produce eBooks, because you could not pay me enough money to sit down and do this, day in and day out. No way. I’d rather chew on broken glass or cut my own heart out with a spoon. Seriously. And this is supposed to be the wave of the future? P.S.: Yes, I’m still going to get Survival By Storytelling, Issue One up on the Kindle. It’ll just take me some time, because the whole thing is a pain in the butt.
Newton Talks: What makes a good book blogger?
Mark Charan Newton recently had an curious post about what makes a good book blogger. Being a book blogger myself (sorta), I thought it would be interesting to give my two cents on his proposed guidelines. 1) There are bloggers who use the right tools, and those who are tools (i.e. reasonable vs. unreasonable expectations) I completely agree with Newton here. Don’t get uppity about a book if you read something outside your comfort zone and don’t get what you usually like. As he says “don’t approach an entertaining romp expecting philosophical ramblings if it isn’t meant to be one. I wouldn’t say ‘I don’t like beer on account that it’s not whiskey,’ would I?” That’s absolutely true. I rarely read outside of the SF/F genres, so this isn’t usually a problem for me. Occasionally a book surprises me by being about something I never expected. Usually that’s a good thing, though, and I mention it as such in my reviews (such as my recent review of Kage Baker’s The Empress of Mars). 2) Slow and steady. (i.e. slow books/fast books are not bad books) I disagree with this point only because it’s too simple. Sometimes a slow book is a bad book (and vice versa for fast books). Sometimes pace has everything to do with it (not always, but sometimes). However, as a reviewer, I bring up pace because I write reviews to tell people what “I” liked, not necessarily what they like (I have no idea what you folks would like, because I’m not in your heads). If I don’t like stories that take 200 pages to get to the meat, then I’ll bring that up. Maybe someone else will like stories like that, and, as the old adage goes, all publicity is good publicity (mostly). 3) Prose & style. (i.e. books usually don’t “improve” in style by the end; you just get used to it) I’ll agree with Newton here only because I can’t recall ever having the experience of feeling like the latter half of a book was better written than the first half. Have any of you had that experience? 4) The synopsis should remain on the back of the book. (i.e. don’t describe the back of the book for your review) I completely agree. There are people who do this? I usually write short, concise reviews where I say something about my experience with the book from the start, then say what the book is about, and then go a little deeper into my experience with the book after (for a few paragraphs). I’m not a “literary reviewer,” though, and I have yet to write a book report for a review. That’s crap you expect to do in third grade. 5) Reviewers who are also writers (of the unpublished variety). (i.e. don’t play the “well, if I had written this, I would have done this” card) Again, there are people who do this? What kind of asshat writes a review telling everyone how he would have written the book? That’s absurd. I get that many people feel that they can do better, but unless you’ve actually been legitimately published numerous times and received every literary award available, it seems rude, at best, to say “I could have done this better” in a review. I sure as hell have never done this. 6) You can’t love every novel. Another point I agree with completely. I don’t love everything I read. Some books I hate with a passion. Others are okay. Some are damned good, and a few are brilliant. Any reviewer who loves everything he or she reads either has very low standards or doesn’t really read anything. That said, there are reviewers out there who only review the books they like. I think those folks should be very open about that, though, so as not to mislead their readers. If you never finish the books you don’t like, and, thus, never review them, then you should say as such. 7) Edit thyself. I agree with this one too. I think more bloggers could edit their work. Now, when I say that, I mean that I’m sick of reading bloggers who can’t use proper punctuation (even on a rudimentary level) or capitalize their “I”s, or what have you. There are too many out there and you’d be surprised how many of them get upset if you point out where they have made mistakes (which is usually everywhere). Hell, I’ve been having a little fun with a fellow recently who can barely string a sentence together, let alone say anything remotely intelligent. I try to edit myself, but I also am not the kind of person who is going to edit my blog the same way I edit my fiction. It’s not because I don’t like my blog, but because if I did that you’d never hear from me. You all still want to hear from me, right? I’ve had the occasional error (or maybe more than occasional), but I do try to fix them and edit my posts before I post them. I assume it has worked out, right? You all should check out Newton’s post, though, and read all of the stuff he has to say. He makes a lot of valid points and if any of you are considering being reviewers, even just for fun, his post is definitely worth checking out. On the other hand, based on what’s been written here, what do you all think?
A New SF Manifesto of Bologna: Jetse de Vries and the Literature of Change (Part Three)
Now for the final post in my response to Jetse de Vries’ post. You can read the previous two parts by clicking the following links: part one; part two. Here goes: Point Five – SF dismisses actual science This one is easy to deal with: what consumers want is what they get. You want more SF that deals realistically with all aspects of science (even the aspects that most readers don’t know about anyway)? Well, then you have to change the public. Good luck with that. If scientists knew how to change the public’s view of science enough to make them want to change how we teach science in school (and thus affect change on science literacy), then they’d probably have done it already. Consumers don’t know the vast majority of the actual rules of science; SF writers tend to know this. Some of them want accurate science; some of them don’t. You tell me which way works best. Now, we can moan and groan about how this is terrible and oh so sad, but that’s not something consumers give a flying fig about. Why? Because they don’t read SF to be educated about physics or chemistry or what have you. They read SF to be entertained. The ones who read SF for accuracy are a minority. That’s not to say that accurate SF can’t work, just that consumers generally can’t tell the difference between what is right and what is not. Don’t believe me? Take a camera and a microphone to the streets of any major city and start asking people either whether they care if the science is accurate or whether or not they know the basics of science. I guarantee you that most people (i.e. most consumers) will not have a clue. It is not SF’s job to educate people. Point Six – SF isn’t relevant (enough) Never mind that de Vries contradicts himself on this point (earlier he says that SF doesn’t really deal with present worldly concerns, but then here he says that it does; maybe he should make up his mind). What is important here is the whole point of the optimistic anthology he’s been working on: SF is so depressing and doom and gloom and sad and boohoo. SF has no solutions. It’s just about how things go from bad to worse. My question is: does de Vries actually read books, or does he just make this stuff up as he goes? Of course things go from bad to worse. That’s what makes a novel tick. You can’t have a story that goes from good to gooderer and expect anyone to pay attention. That’s the kind of crap that keeps five-year-olds entertained during the day while their parents are cleaning the house. That’s what makes Barney, the Teletubbies, and Blue’s Clues work for kids and not for adults. The only way literature for older kids and adults works is if it goes from good to bad to worse to better. That’s how it works. The whole doom and gloom proclamation, however, is remarkably narrow-minded. Maybe if all you ever read are SF novels about doomsday futures you’d get a bit bothered, but this all reads to me as a desperate need on the part of de Vries to actually get out there and do some more reading. Either he has been incredibly isolated where he lives or he’s just never picked up the right books, because all this talk about how most SF is about how the future is all bad (and not good) is like saying that all football games are about hitting other people for the fun of it. Hardly. There are plenty of science fiction writers who are imagining futures that have problems that get resolved. They don’t always get fully resolved (after all, a lot of SF deals with planet- or multisystem-wide problems), but there is usually a significant leap in the happy direction at the end (the world is saved, the characters we’ve rooted for finish a mission, or bring down and evil dictator, or whatever—the examples are endless). The doom and gloom stuff is a particular brand. We call them dystopias, and they’ve been around for quite a long time. And it is here again that de Vries demonstrates his complete ignorance of the real world. SF is supposed to “get off its arse” and “be totally open to outside influences and other cultures, and get involved with proactive thinking, proudly using science, about the near future.” Just before that little quote, however, de Vries points to something said by Athena Andreadis about the fall of science within the mainstream (political and social) in the U.S. Somewhere in there de Vries has a little disconnect. This is what he is saying: SF should further ostracize itself by becoming more and more about real world science, despite the fact that the general public (i.e. consumers) is scientifically illiterate and that such illiteracy is unlikely to change any time soon. Yeah. Smart. Let’s make SF more and more about stuff that the general public clearly doesn’t give a crap about. Don’t get me wrong; I agree. I’d like my SF to be more accurate at times, but to assume that this is going to help SF in any way is absurd. People do not give a shit. If they did, scientists would be revered for being totally awesome and we’d all be living in a world that reminds us, surprisingly, of an episode of Sliders (you know, the one where Quinn’s twin in another dimension is both a science wiz and on a Wheaties box, and everyone seems to get off on the whole science thing, with Einstein being the equivalent of Elvis). Boy would that be one heck of a fantasy world. That’s all I have to say on that. As much as I’d like to get on board with all this, I feel like it’s doing nothing but proposing a lot of ideas that sound good,
A New SF Manifesto of Bologna: Jetse de Vries and the Literature of Change (Part Two)
I started this series of posts the other day and will now continue. You can read part one here and part three here. Point Three – SF is WASP-ish By that, de Vries means that SF allows for the perpetuation of white-privilege, which is true on some level, but also somewhat ignorant of what WASP actually stands for (historically speaking). He uses this to point at the problem of international SF to get any play in the Western market, which is also true on a lot of levels, but once again misses a very important problem: translations. First off, the Western world speaks English (mostly), and, thus, only reads in that language. You can’t expect writers from China to have much hold on the Western market without their work being in English. What’s wrong with that? There isn’t much of a market for translations in most of the literary markets to begin with. While there are translations that do quite well, there are also lots of translations that don’t, and expecting publishers to take on the burden of translating work that will likely lose them income is like expecting football players to try to be as graceful as ballerinas on the field while simultaneously making big plays. You find a way to make the market (i.e. the consumers) interested in translated fiction, and you’ll have solved this problem entirely. Right now, that hasn’t happened. However, de Vries is correct that SF probably should be more inclusive of non-standard (i.e. white) characters and themes, but that is also true of a lot of genres (most literary forms should be multicultural, not necessarily universally, but certainly more frequently). For the record: I actually wish more works were translated into English, particularly from China, because I’m curious about what is being written out there, but I also understand that I am a minority in the market. The people who control what gets produced by publishers are the people who put books on the bestseller’s list, generally speaking (yes, I know this is not true of everything). Point Four – SF is commercially dead This is where I think the most tired arguments are being presented. Perhaps the funniest part of de Vries’ discussion of the commercial death of SF is that he uses as an example a book written over twenty years ago and associated (or started, rather) with a genre that has, for the most part, actually experienced commercial death (it didn’t truly die, but it certainly ceased to be a major player and has since been consumed by other forms of SF). So, his example of “risk-taking SF” is a book that represents a genre that is already dead, and this is what SF should become? (He’s talking about Neuromancer, in case you didn’t read his post.) Let me rephrase: de Vries thinks that SF doesn’t take enough risks (it does, but nobody buys the books that take a risk, apparently, and consumers seem far more interested in re-hashes of the stuff that sells in the theaters, which is true), and so his solution is to follow the lead of other seemingly dead-end subgenres in order to make SF wonderful and vibrant again. Brilliant idea. Let’s kill SF while its still standing and feign shock when it stops breathing. For the record, William Gibson actually thought taking on the label “cyberpunk” was a horrible idea. He said as much in an book signing in Santa Cruz some time back. See, Gibson is not a moron; he knew that cyberpunk would be short-lived, and it was. The result? Gibson survived because he refused to take on the title and continued writing in and outside of that genre, and the vast majority of the other “cyberpunks” disappeared entirely (with the exception to a handful of authors who managed to get a hold in other subgenres). The thing is, SF is taking risks. Many writers of non-tie-in SF are doing exactly what de Vries wants the genre to do and they either sell very well (Robert J. Sawyer) or not. Some have tried to revitalize some of the old gosh-wow elements of golden age SF (John Scalzi and Tobias Buckell) and a lot are simply going with what works: tie-in fiction and space opera. SF, contrary to what de Vries seems to think, is also tackling the modern world in a future context. Kim Stanley Robinson and many others have written on climate change and there are authors today tackling everything from the potential ramifications of a Chinese superpower to the rise of a radical religious movement here in the States and elsewhere. I don’t know where de Vries has been living, but he’s certainly not on the up-and-up in the SF genre (I’m not even on the up-and-up and I seem to have a clearer picture of what is going on). The problem? He expects the genre to tackle real-world dystopic situations with puppies and flowers. Screw realism. Screw what might actually happen to a world struck by rapid, unstoppable climate change. No, we should paint it all pretty and make it a giant masturbatory scientific orgy in which the conflict is little more than “how do we fix it / oh, let’s do that / but it’s hard / it’s okay, we’ll manage / yippee.” Well, if that’s the kind of SF de Vries wants, you can count me out. In fact, what SF should probably be doing is splitting in two, with the “serious” side pulling out all the stops and coming up with the nifty ideas, the harsh realities, and the hardcore SF we’ve come to love, and the more flashy side exploding Star Wars style with as much escapist fantasy as humanly possible. He (de Vries) thinks the second part is a bad thing, and you have to wonder why. What could possibly be bad about SF doing exactly what all literature should: entertain. Consumers want this; publishers are giving it to them (kind of). Get over it.
A New SF Manifesto of Bologna: Jetse de Vries and the Literature of Change (Part One)
(You can read parts two and three at the following links: part two; part three.) I struggled for hours on how to respond to Jetse de Vries’ post on whether science fiction should die. Part of the problem with the post is that it’s just another re-hash of several tired, inaccurate, and as-yet-properly-researched arguments we’ve all heard before. How do you respond to something that is saying the same thing over and over while simultaneously ignoring dozens of counter arguments that are not illegitimate or capable of being reduced to “part of the problem?” But, having thought about this, I think I know what it is that bothers me so much about his arguments about SF: they lack the ingenuity and strength that have made science fiction as a literary genre (and now a visual medium) so important and groundbreaking in the history of literature. It’s precisely because he is re-hashing tired arguments and pontificating about things that would be downright devastating to a genre he claims is having so many problems that I have an issue with de Vries’ arguments (SF is not actually having that many problems, but hey, if we say it is over and over, maybe it will become true, right? He also thinks that SF is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Forget all those bestselling Star Wars novels and Alastair Reynolds and what not; totally meaningless, the whole lot). That’s how I’m going to respond: by de-constructing de Vries’ arguments to point out what exactly is wrong with what he is saying and how it will do nothing but irreparable damage to the genre. (This will be broken up into three parts, because there’s a lot to be said, and I wouldn’t want to put you through reading 4,000 words of rant in one go.) Point One – SF should be the literature of change One of the things de Vries proposes is that SF should stop calling itself the literature of ideas (I disagree) and should instead become the literature of change, an concept that has no business being applied to SF as a genre. Changing SF from being about ideas to being about change is ridiculous on two levels: 1. His reference to addressing the supposed racism and general non-inclusive nature of SF is true of almost every single genre of written literature being produced today, regardless of the number of awards won by people of color and women within other genres. Hell, it’s true of every single entertainment medium. I’ll mention this later, but the simplistic route everyone takes to proclaim SF racist works for romance, mystery, general fiction (literary or what have you), movies, television, etc. Trying to say that SF should change its mission statement because of this is not saying anything new, and it’s not saying anything revolutionary either. 2. The idea that SF should be about change internally (i.e. in what it’s talking about) is like saying that SF should become the liberal scientist version of a preacher. Readers are not interested in being told “this is how we fix the world, yippee” anymore than they are interested in having their pastor come unannounced into their homes to tell them how to repent for their sins. If that’s not what this whole optimistic SF manifesto bologna is calling for, then they need to rework how they present their little movement; right now, it sounds like they want SF to become exactly what nobody wants (and I’ll talk about that some more later, too). Point Two – SF is racist (sorta) Well, we’ve heard this argument before, and it wasn’t (necessarily) any more true back then than it is now. Is there a problem of under-representation of people of color (and women) both as characters and authors in SF? Of course. Is this somehow indicative of institutionalized racism in SF? Nope. In fact, what de Vries and everyone else who has claimed that SF is racist miss are the real questions we should be asking: How many SF books are written by people of color and how many have people of color (or women) as significant characters? How many women and people of color submit SF manuscripts to publishers? (Nobody has an answer for this, and any time you ask you either get silence or someone blames you for contributing to the problem; honestly, if you’re going to talk about institutionalized racism in SF publishing, you have to have all of the data to support it.) What is the ratio of submissions and publications by people of color and women in the various publishing industries? There’s a lot of talk over at de Vries’ post about the Nobel Prize and the Man Booker Prize, both of which are irrelevant without appropriate correlating data. Has anyone actually bothered to understand the social and statistical conditions of the SF genre? No. This is why I’m tired of seeing this argument. If you think SF is racist, fine, but I’m less inclined to believe you if you’re unwilling to actually do the work necessary to actually prove that. Perhaps the problem with SF is precisely that everyone says it’s racist, and so people of color and women typically avoid it. After all, if people kept saying “that genre is racist,” would you continue writing fiction in that genre and submitting? Taken another way, if everyone told me that SF wasn’t for men, and that no men ever get published in SF, etc., I think I’d have a harder time justifying writing in that genre (I’d then write fantasy). I get the frustration, but it’s far more frustrating to want to actually affect change when nobody is a) providing the answers to do so (de Vries does not; he just says the same things that everyone else has said, without actual solutions, ironically enough); and b) actually understanding the larger picture (again, de Vries is not doing that either, but is instead saying the same things we’ve heard all year, all of which have