The Future Spells Doom?
I know this has been discussed before, but I find it curious how prevalent the pessimistic has become in science fiction. I don’t think this is a bad thing, mind you, but it is something to acknowledge. But why? As curious as this whole thing is, the reasons why seem more intriguing. What draws science fiction writers to the more dark aspects of the human condition? To me, it seems that we focus on the bad because the good isn’t always so interesting, or perhaps because the good is already covered by an entire community of individuals with the future of the world in mind (we call them folks “scientists”). Maybe the bad is just that much more entertaining to write. For me, this is definitely true. It has something to do with beating up on my characters; I find something entertaining in torturing them. Maybe there is something similar going on with more well-established authors than myself. I don’t know. What do you think are the reasons why there is such a strong focus on the pessimistic in science fiction? Why is the optimistic not as appreciated? I’d like to know what you all think.
Science Fiction and Aliens: Human Relationships to the Other “Other”
I’ve been reading a book called Alien Chic by Neil Badmington and the first chapter got me thinking about how science fiction imagines us relating to aliens. This very concept is part of what I will be writing about for my postmodern animal seminar, although in a more limited and theoretically complicated manner, since my final paper will be trying to tackle Jacques Derrida in relation to the alien. But that’s getting away from what this post is about. I don’t think I have ever sat down and thought about all the different kinds of relationships humans have with aliens, but doing so today brought up an incredible multitude of relationships, which spells out something remarkable to me: the alien is the ultimate “other.” It can be exchanged with almost every kind of “other” we have created as a species; aliens figure as animals or as humanoid figures with intelligence, and the human response in science fiction varies greatly. They are a way for us to discuss human/”other” relations without ever breaking down into the discourses of racism, without resorting to constantly thinking only of the limited past or present. They open a gateway into a new way of imagining what might be, and how we might deal with ourselves and alien others when the tables truly turn. It would be impossible to list all of the different ways humans relate to aliens, so I’ve tried to put together a list of fairly broad relations. A long, though not exhaustive list of human/alien relations follows: Alien as invader (vice versa) Alien as accidental positive/negative discovery (vice versa) Alien as animal (possibly vice versa) Alien as lesser-intelligent beings that pose a minor (and natural), but immediate thread (think Galaxy Quest) Humans as superior to aliens (in sub-intelligent or early-intelligent form) (vice versa) Aliens as seeders of Earth (as divine) Aliens as supreme and seeders of other subjects, such as motivation (think 2001) Aliens as general antagonists Aliens as neither friend nor foe Aliens as antagonists to other aliens, with humans attempting to be mediators Aliens as clear friends Alien as necessary other Alien as human/other amalgam (Alien Nation) This list can really go on and on and on and on, with the broader categories being broken down into smaller ones. We’d need an encyclopedia for this stuff, to be honest. But, if I missed any big ones, let me know.
The End of Good Writing: The Damage of Twilight, Harry Potter, and Their Friends
(Disclaimer: I do not hate Twilight–not really–nor do I despise the things I am going to talk about here. I am simply pointing out a potential problem that nobody has solutions for.) There has been a resurgence of crap in the last few years. I don’t mean published crap, but crap in relation to writing in general. And I’m blaming Twilight, Harry Potter, and every other significant, top-selling literary franchise currently flooding the shelves. As the co-owner of an online writing workshop for young writers, I have seen first hand what the surge of sales and admiration of these books has done. The quality of written English, in general, has drastically de-evolved. That’s not to say that there aren’t good writers, just that the profusion of online writing forums (of all stripes) and the injection of relatively sub par storytelling into the mainstream landscape has created a new environment indubitably friendly to the prospect of universal value. It’s a nice thought, but a faulty one. It is faulty because there is no such thing as universal value that actually places real value on something. The only universal value in writing is the one given to anyone who tries, but that ends, for anyone with the heart to tell someone about reality, where accomplishing the task turns into trying to do something more. The conditions have, I think, been set for this sort of presumed universal value, and for the infusion of poor knockoffs, poor storytelling (plotting, etc.), and other problematic relationships to the very idea of writing. There are a few things that signal this to me: Text-speakIt would be fair to say that this existed prior to Twilight and Harry Potter, but I have seen an enormous surge of text-speak as the dominant mode of communication despite its incoherence to most people and its improper placement in spaces particular to writing mentalities. There is also a correlation between Twilight and text-speak that is impossible to deny: often the first thing we see from someone incapable of speaking in normal English is something akin to “I luv twlght,” or whatever it is that makes that proper in text-speak. Disregard For Remotely Standard EnglishApparently caps are unnecessary, along with apostrophes, periods, commas, proper ellipses, and a multitude of other illogical exclusions. Sadly, this is also, in my experience, tied to a love for Twilight. We’ll be talking about this in a minute. IncoherenceThe idea of writing logical sentences, or sentences that resemble actual sentences, seems to have been lost to a lot of folks. I’ve always believed that creative writing should be required in order to graduate high school primarily because I know for a fact that many people who write fiction also happen to be better writers in general. That’s not to say that they don’t have flaws with argument, just that they are able to construct sentences and use commas properly. Flagrant Disregard of RealityI think in the last three months I have seen two dozen different versions of the exact same story, all of them also repetitions of Meyers’ story, which is a repetition of some other stories, and so on. This wouldn’t be a problem if these same people also acknowledged that their teen “romance” involving a vampire who glitters was a direct ripoff of a far more popular book series. But they won’t have any of it. They don’t understand what a cliche is, or what a recycled plot looks like. They’re oblivious because they want to be. Where am I going with this? All of these problems have been rising dramatically in the last year, due almost entirely to the influx of popular titles into the public of would-be writers. More and more wannabe writers (young and old) are flooding my forum with the expectation that they will be the next Meyer or Rowling, but then they disappear moments later when they realize that a) you can’t be on a writing site and not conform to standard written English; and b) sometimes when you suck, you actually suck. A lot of them come in expecting to write in a way that not even an elementary school teacher would accept (not in fiction, but in communicating with others), and then are shocked to find that a site for writers might actually have standards. These folks want to be the next Meyer, and they’ll do everything they can to be it short of actually working on their craft; to tell them that they have a lot of work to do is to tell them that they will fail, always (some of them undoubtedly will, even if they try to work on their craft). But, they don’t disappear forever; they go to other places where they are not subject to such rules, where they can put out incomprehensible drivel and receive glowing comments instead of anything resembling a critique (there is, after all, absolutely nothing helpful about such things as “OMGZ dis r awzum!!!1!”). And this worries me because it feels like the end of good writing. I get the impression that standards are being relaxed, not in publishing, but in the wider web, and the way the community functions is to provide places for people to get false hope, to dream of things that aren’t possible, and to continue to fulfill their fantasies without a dose of reality. Not everyone is cut out to be a writer, of any kind. Some people simply are better suited to other duties, but everyone can try. But the most basic thing we all need as potential writers is a modest ability to use the language we intend to write in and a healthy dose of the reality we all live in. We can’t pretend to be writers and conform to a non-standard method of communication that involves complete disregard for even the most basic of English rules–capitalizing letters is not that difficult. Even worse is the fact that I don’t know how to to figure in the influence of
Cultural Literacy and Genre Fiction
I’ve been researching this concept called “cultural literacy” in preparation for my final paper in my pedagogy course. In doing so, I’ve come to an interesting “revelation,” if you will. Science fiction and fantasy are part of our culture as much as something like math or English; they are unconscious elements present in all of us that sometimes make themselves known, and other times remain in the background, operating as little signals in the reaction center of the brain. The obvious, though, is how science fiction and, to a lesser extent, fantasy have consumed popular culture. As much as all the other elements that seem to make up the culturally literate figure (history by locale, basic science, math, etc., and all those things that make up our language, our thought processes, and our acknowledgment of the social, however minute or forgotten), pop culture as embodied by SF/F has consumed society itself. Even if you don’t want SF/F television or movies, you know about them. Even if you don’t read Harry Potter or Twilight, you know about them, and you may even know about all of these things in some basic detail. You know, for example, without having read Twilight, that Meyers wrote a book about vampires and something resembling romance; you know that Harry Potter is about a boy wizard and wizard-like things; you know that Star Wars has the Force and lightsabers and Darth Vader; you know that Star Trek is about humans and some guy with pointy ears traveling around in the universe seeing nifty stuffs. We all know these things (well, almost all of us) in the U.S. (and Canada and the U.K., mostly likely), because they make up a part of who we are and how we communicate with the greater social apparatus. John Scalzi said it clearly: SF (and you have assume even F, to a lesser extent) has mainstream acceptance. Whether or not it has any other form of acceptance seems irrelevant at this point. SF/F is a part of our culture, part of that cultural literacy that some older theorists have suggested allows every one of us to be able to communicate without confusing the hell out of one another. And you have to think about that for a minute and bask in the amazing sensation of that feeling. Science fiction and fantasy have become so integral to the social landscape of the U.S. and other countries, that even Shakespeare is being challenged by the new social paradigm. Having thought all of this, I have only one thing left to say: now what?
The Strange (n.) – Being intrigued by something that doesn’t make sense!
I’ve had a most curious epiphany. Apparently if the description of the book is so far out there, so absurdly bizarre and unimaginably unintelligible in the light of logic, then I’m instantly fascinated by it and must have it in my collection. I don’t mean books with twisted or disturbing plots, but books with plots that simply don’t make sense, that are intentionally inconsistent with a reality that follows logic. What spawned this post was my discovery of a little known book called The Other City by Michal Ajvaz. Go ahead and click that link and read the description. It sounds bizarre, doesn’t it? That’s what led me to buy it yesterday. I had to have it in my collection. Who knows, maybe I’ll write a paper on it. All I know is that I have a bit of the Strange right now. With Jason Sanford filling my brain with his weird ideas and the odd ideas of books like Brian Francis Slattery’s Spaceman Blues or the aforementioned The Other City, it’s hard to not be drawn to the weird forms of fantastic literature, a condition I’m calling the Strange. If you like the whole New Weird craze, you’ve got a case of the Strange. I have the Strange, and I don’t want it to go away. If there’s a cure, I want nothing to do with it. In fact, I sincerely hope that the science fiction and fantasy communities, and even those communities outside of it that are flirting with SF/F, don’t acquire a cure either. Something tells me that all this strangeness is doing SF/F a lot of good right now. We no longer have Philip K. Dick to surprise us with an astonishingly disconnected view of the world (read Ubik or Lies, Inc., or just about anything he’s written, to be honest, with exception to his short stories, which are not, in my opinion, as good as his novels). Instead, we have Jason Sanford, Michal Ajvaz, and a few others, whose names I’ve forgotten. Hopefully my case of the Strange will spark some truly crazy stories. Right now I have a story involving a bearded lady, another that I can only describe as semi-Miyazaki in style, and something to do with packaging the universe into a little box. I don’t think I have anything quite as strange as some of the stuff I’ve seen elsewhere, but so be it. What about you? Do you have anything truly bizarre in the works? Let me know in the comments.
A Reiteration: Books and Music; Lovers, But Not Twins
I am consistently shocked by the persistence of the belief that books (and particularly the book industry) are somehow exactly the same as music (and the music industry). While there are certainly analogous relationships between the two, the idea that consumers view them as the same is absurd. Let’s break this down, because it needs to be made clear that no matter what parallels exist between the two, they are inherently different things. Point #1 — ConsumptionWhen you listen to music, you are engaging in a particular form of auditory consumption that requires very little in the way of thought processes. This is not to say that music cannot foster thought, just that the vast majority of people listen to music primarily for effect. The necessity for anything else does not typically exist. This is not true with books. When you read a book, you are engaging several different sections of your mind. You are using visual thought processes on top of a string of cognitive processes that take in the words and translate them so your brain can make the appropriate visual or non-visual stimuli that denotes understanding. You cannot read a book without also thinking. It’s impossible. To put it simply: we read books and listen to music. This is irrefutable. To say that this is not true is to essentially claim that anything we know about human culture and biology is 100% incorrect. Now, obviously audiobooks change the equation a bit, but only slightly. All an audiobook does is change the visual process to an auditory one; everything else, generally speaking, remains the same, with exception to poor audio quality or annoying voice acting that can ruin the listening process. This leads us into point #2. Point #2 — Determining QualityOne of the primary problems with the self-publishing argument for the book/music analogy is that it intentionally ignores the process through which consumers determine quality. As with the modes of consumption, determinations of quality for books and music differ greatly, and this is linked directly to how we consume these two things. With music, determining quality is typically immediate, with little time on the part of the consumer to create an opinion. Most people have particular listening tastes (such as only liking certain genres) and have different reactions to different forms of music. The result of this is that usually a consumer can tell if something will be enjoyable (of any degree) within the first few seconds (this also varies somewhat depending on the music. I hate country music, so when I hear two seconds of a country song, I tune out; but I don’t hate all rock music, and sometimes it can take ten to twenty seconds to decide if I want to listen to any more of a song). Books, however, require of consumers a considerable amount of time. One cannot, for example, multitask while reading a book (with minor exceptions), and so when a consumer reads a book, they have dedicated themselves to the process. Unlike music, determinations of quality in books are not immediate, and neither are they quick or smooth processes. Bad books are not always determined by the first sentence or even the first twenty pages. Sometimes a bad book doesn’t show itself until the end, and getting there understandably takes time. Even if it takes you until the end of a song, chances are it will have taken you only a few minutes, as opposed to several hours. The only way we currently have of determining quality in books is through editors or reviews; neither are perfect, and usually the latter is useless primarily because personal taste always enters into it–tastes are different from person to person. Point #3 — Indie ProblematicsSelf-published authors often try to claim that because independent music took off, so too must independent writers. The problem is that a lot of the times, these same authors have no idea what they are talking about. The indie music scene is not a new thing. It wasn’t even new when mp3.com and the various other indie music sites appeared. In fact, the independent music industry has been around since the early 1900s, and it has never been quite as non-traditional as people think. The creation of indie labels was not an attempt to allow artists to do whatever they wanted with their music, but simply a way of escaping a system of enormous record labels who wanted too much control; the big labels still exist, and so do many of the indie labels, who have since become rather large themselves. Additionally, true indie music is not nearly as glamorous as people think, and often the instances people cling to as great examples of how “self-publishing” can work are actually of bands/singers who already had enormous followings before going true indie. Some good examples of artists starting indie and being successful do exist, but they succeed primarily because of the first two points in this post. The book industry, by the way, already has its own indie industry. They’re called small presses, and these places publish all sorts of niche literature all across the world. They have editors and marketing teams too, but obviously are not as powerful as the big boys. But where everything falls apart in the self-publishing argument is when they make the assumption that if indie worked for music, it must work for them too. Well, that would be true if the first two points of this post were incorrect. Since they are not, the reality has to be acknowledged: all success in indie music is because of points #1 and #2. Consumers simply do not view music the same as books, and, thus, are much more willing to accept music as a self-published form. After all, a consumer can listen to samples of music and spend only a few minutes of their day doing so; they cannot do the same with books. What all of these points come to is this: books are