Tag Archives: fantasy

I feel a Tingle, tingle, tingle…

science fiction, , , , , ,

Puppies in tin foil hats
Puppies in tin foil hats (Click to embiggen)
It’s Hugo voting season again, and as I’m reading through the stories that have been nominated, I’m once again confronted with a number of choices that were placed on the ballot by the bloc-voting scheme of the Rabid Puppies. I’ve had at least one friend ask why I even care, which I suppose is a legitimate question. There are several reasons, but one of the biggies is this: it has been demonstrated that being nominated for a Hugo can have a significant impact on the sales figures for a book and/or author who was not previously really well known. In other words, folks who are mid-listers and below receive an immediate improvement in sales when they are included in the short list for the Hugos. If such a person goes on to win, there is a bigger increase in sales. And many authors have attested to the fact that when they won at a point when their career was struggling, that agents or editors who previously hadn’t shown any interest come knocking at the door.

Because no one has ever taken the equivalent of exit polls when people leave physical bookstores or log off of online stores to determine why people buy specific books, we have less hard data about the long term effects winning awards on someone’s sales. Library data indicates that books which have won the Hugo, Nebula, or Clarke awards have much higher circulation rates (more people check them out, they remain on the shelf for shorter times between check-outs, et cetera). Some marketing research seems to support the idea that when browsing, people are more likely to pick up and look at book that says “award winner” on it than those that don’t.

Which is all to say that one of the reasons I care is because getting nominated or winning the award can significantly benefit a writers’ career, particularly one that is not otherwise well known. So spiteful schemes to push works of dubious quality onto the ballot causes actual harm to the people who otherwise would have made the short list. Super spiteful schemes, like this year’s Rabid Puppy slate, which push material that the organizer chose precisely because of how bad it is, are even worse.

Which brings us to one of this year’s nominees: “Space Raptor Butt Invasion” by Chuck Tingle. Tingle (not his real name) is a niche erotica author who produces a lot of really weird erotic fiction that is clearly not meant to be taken seriously. He had never even heard of the Hugo Awards before his nomination was announced, and had to have it explained to him by an interviewer who was asking him for a reaction. His immediate reaction was to say that he despite getting nominated for an award because of it, he is definitely not in favor of bloc voting.

Tingle said his son told him he needed to look into the folks behind the puppies, especially Vox Day.
Tingle said his son told him he needed to look into the folks behind the puppies, especially Vox Day.
He has since educated himself on the topic. This inspired a series of Gif- and video-illustrated tweets mocking Vox Day, the racist & misogynist guy running (and profiting off of) the Rabid Puppy campaign.

Tingle also wrote a new “book” for the occasion: “Slammed In The Butt By My Hugo Award Nomination.”

That wasn’t the end of his trolling of the Sad and Rabid Puppies. He has since asked Zoe Quinn, who is hated by the puppies and their allies the GamerGaters, to attend this year’s WorldCon and if Tingle’s story should win, to accept on his behalf and give a speech about whatever she wants. So if the puppy loyalists vote for Tingle’s story, they give one of their most hated people another public forum to talk about the issues they hate being talked about: Weird porn author who was dragged into Hugo Awards mess pulls off epic troll.

He didn’t stop there. He realized that despite the fact the Vox Day has managed to use the Rabid Puppy campaign to radically increase traffic to his blog and publishing site, and to sell more books to the sorts of racist, homophobic, misogynist fans who apparently previously didn’t know how to find them, Vox had never purchased the Rabid Puppy web domain. So Tingle bought it and set it up as a site to mock Vox and to promote some of the authors that Vox has so often publickly denigrated: Chuck Tingle thwarts devilman Vox Day, buys TheRabidPuppies.com for HARD buckaroos.

sometimes devilmen are so busy planning scoundrel attacks they forget to REGISTER important website names. this is a SOFT WAY of the antibuckaroo agenda but is also good because it makes it easy for BUDS WHO KNOW LOVE IS REAL to prove love (all).

please understand this is website to take DARK MAGIC and replace with REAL LOVE for all who kiss the sky.

Tingle hasn’t just turned his unique satirical eye toward the puppies. His commentary on the transphobic bathroom laws and similar nonsense, “Pounded In The Butt By My Irrational Bigoted Fear Of Humans Who Were Born As Unicorns Using A Human Restroom” is available (as all of his delightfully weird titles are) on Kindle.

I don’t think that there is anything particularly award-winning about “Space Raptor Butt Invasion,” but Tingle’s actions are definitely award-worthy. I know I’m not the only regular Hugo vote who is considering putting Tingle’s story above No Award on my ballot because he’s been both a good sport about this, and so delightfully entertaining in his take down of the Rabid Puppy ringleader. And for a man who finds many weird ways to put the phrase “pounded in the butt” into story titles, he’s been much more civil in his attacks on Vox Day than Vox has ever been to anyone.

If you want more details on Tingle’s campaign against the bigots: Satirical erotica author Chuck Tingle’s massive troll of conservative sci-fi fans, explained.

When I first started to draft this post, I had more information and links about the Rabid Puppies and Sad Puppies, but I think that Cory Doctorow was right on the money when he recently said, “the two groups who want to kill the Hugos call themselves “Rabid Puppies” and “Sad Puppies” for fantastically tedious reasons you can look up for yourself if you care to.” Re-hashing the reasons they’ve launched these campaigns and the inconsistencies and contradictions in their arguments is tedious. We’ve all written way more about it than they deserve.

Tingle’s bizarre and hilarious response reminds me that life, reading, and storytelling are far too important to take seriously. It’s much easier to enjoy a good story if I laugh about something frivolous first than it is if I’ve been ranting about someone being a jerk.

So I’m going to go read another of Tingle’s stories, then get back to the serious work of reading and writing sf/f.

ETA: Chuck Tingle isn’t the only person who writes silly stuff that is more worth your time than the rantings of outraged people. May I humbly suggest:

Monster Mashed by Grave Robbers from Outer Space, or

John Scalzi Is Not a Popular Author And I Myself Am Very Popular

A World Full of Sisters – more of why I love sf/f

genre, , , , , , , ,

Cover of the paperback edition of the 1977 Annual World's Best Science Fiction, edited by Donald Wolheim
Cover of the paperback edition of the 1977 Annual World’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Donald Wolheim (click to embiggen)
When I was a junior in high school there was one comic book shop in the town I lived in. It was also a used book store, so I visited there a lot. I didn’t have much money, and I was still reading several comics regularly which took up most of my discretionary spending, so I spent a lot more time there browsing—trying to find the cheapest books—than actually buying.

One day at the store I happened upon a paperback copy of The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wolheim. I owned several of his earlier annual anthologies, having gotten several of them as part of my introductory new member shipment from the Science Fiction Book Club a few years previously. The paperback was in pretty good shape, having only been published about six months previous, so it was probably marked at half cover price, which meant it wasn’t in my usual price range, but I had enjoyed the earlier collections, and there was more than one author in the table of contents whose work I really loved, so I bought it.

One of the stories in this particular collection was a novella, “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” by James Tiptree, Jr. I didn’t know, at the time, that Tiptree was a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon (I think the year I read this was the year that her true identity was revealed, after ten years of being published under the name).

I believe I had read a few of Tiptree’s earlier short stories in the various SF magazines that I followed semi-regularly. I recognized the name, at least, but didn’t have a strong recollection of what kind of stories Tiptree had written before or whether I liked them. So I wasn’t prepared for just how good this story was.

The tale concerns the three-man crew of a NASA mission sent on a polar circuit of the sun. The ship is hit by an unexpectedly strong solar flare and is severely damaged. The crew survives and eventually gets their radio repaired, but are unable to reach Earth. At first it’s because Earth isn’t where they expect it to be in relationship to their position. They eventually figure out that they are further off course than they thought, and start transmitting their distress signal in the correct direction. No answer comes.

Eventually, as they scan more frequencies, they start picking up signals, many of them conversations in English with Australian accents. This is confusing, particularly since many of the signals are coming from various parts of the solar system, indicating a rather large number of space ships. Plus Australia, as far as they knew, didn’t have much of a space program. Also, almost all of the voices on the radio sound like women.

They establish contact with one ship which detected them and has diverted from its course to rescue them. During the radio exchanges before the rescue ship reaches them, they learn that it has been hundreds of years since their mission went up. The world is anxious to meet them, they are told, because they had long been assumed to be dead.

They also learn that there has been some sort of catastrophe on Earth in the intervening years which greatly reduced the population. When the rescue ship finally arrives, the men are surprised that there is only one man in the crew of the ship. Lots of other things surprise them, too. Two of the crewmembers seem to be twins, and both named Judy, but one seems to be several years older than the other. There are several other anomalies and slips of the tongue during the weeks that the ship is returning them to Earth that make the astronauts more suspicious.

Eventually they learn that the catastrophe was even worse than they imagined: it was a plague which only 11,000 women survived; not one single man survived it. The remaining people have been reproducing for several generations by cloning. Children are raised in a communal setting. Some are chosen to receive hormone treatments to give them the musculature and size of men. The story seems to imply that the only reason this is done is for the physical benefits of the muscles and such, and it is unclear if these children choose to became essentially transmen, or if it is imposed by some sort of societal system.

The three astronauts react in very different ways to the discovery. One becomes convinced that god threw them through a wormhole so that they can “rescue” this society and bring men back in charge. Another assumes that since there’s a whole planet of women who have never had sex with a “real man” that he will become sort of a sex god to them all. The last simply hopes that they will be allowed to rejoin society and help repopulate the species (since there are some health problems due to the of lack of genetic diversity).

It turns out, of course, that none of that is to be. The actions of the three men have been being recorded and sent back home. The men were slipped drugs which supposedly made them act out their true natures. The leaders of the world agree that men are simply too dangerous to introduce back into the species. There’s a particularly moving conversation between the captain of the rescue ship and the one man who has remained rational where she points out that most of the heroic behavior the man has tried to cite as proof that men can be good was simply men protecting their own women and children from other men.

The men’s genes are going to be used. Before the three are euthanized, sperm is collected, to diversify the gene pool, but only female babies will be taken to term. Since the entire story is told from the point of view of the one man, the reader never finds out what happens after he and his companions are put to sleep.

I wasn’t the only one who thought the story was good. It won both the Nebula and Hugo award for best novella the year it was published. The story did not kick off much in the way of controversy at the time, in part because people believed Tiptree was simply a feminist-minded man. A man could write a science fiction story decrying generations of misogyny and patriarchal violence and be thought of as open-minded, and a forward thinker. A woman, on the other hand, would (and still often is) branded as a radical man-hater.

I simply thought it was an intriguing story. I was still struggling to accept my own sexual orientation at the time, and I was intimately familiar with how the cruelty of boys toward boys who weren’t manly enough was overlooked, approved, and often encouraged by a sexist society. So the notion that culture might be a better place without all that hypermasculinity was appealing, even if I felt sorry for the reasonable male viewpoint character who was going to be exterminated along with his more brutish companions.

I want to emphasize that Tiptree made the male character sympathetic. She laid out the case for both sides convincingly, and seemed to be inviting the reader to consider (and maybe fight for) solutions to the problems of toxic chauvinism other than simply wiping the men out.

It was another mind-blowing story. Another time that sci fi helped me (as a very closeted queer teen living in a small town among Christian fundamentalists) imagine a better life, particularly the notion of romantic relationships other than opposite-sex pairings. After that story, whenever I saw Tiptree’s name on an anthology or magazine cover, I knew I wanted to read it.

Adventure awaits: more of why I love sf/f

science fiction, , , , , , ,

A silver rocket from the classic Flash Gordon serials.
A silver rocket from the classic Flash Gordon serials.
It’s that time of year, again, where I’m waiting for the Hugo Packet to arrive so I can start reading things that have been nominated for the award. And while several categories have again been piddled by the Rabid Puppies, I am still looking forward to the experience. Particularly since I learned an important lesson last time: the point of the awards is to recognize excellence. I’m not obligated to read stories to the end—as I always have as a small-press editor, where part of my mission is to help the writer improve the story if necessary. These stories have been nominated because, allegedly, they are great stories. So, this year I’ll give each story three pages to hook me. If by that point I’m not feeling interested enough to keep reading—regardless of whether the story was on anyone’s slate—then it goes under No Award on my ballot.

If I am enjoying it, I’ll keep reading. The only stories that will go above No Award will be the ones that kept me hooked until the end. Then I’ll rank those and move on to the next category.

It may be a very busy few months, since only one of the novels that were nominated is one I’ve already read. It’s easy enough to read five each of short stories, novellas, and novelletes in the time frame, and graphic novels usually go relatively quickly, but the novels take a bit more time!

With this new rule, I suspect that I’m going to enjoy the process this year a bit more than last year. Because the reason I care about any of the awards is because I love science fiction and fantasy. I don’t just love it, I frikkin’ love it. I have written before about how I can’t remember a time when sf/f was part of my life, because even when I was a small baby my mom read aloud to me from whatever book she was reading at the time, and she is one of the world’s geekiest Agatha Christie and Robert Heinlein fans.

Thanks to her, my childhood was full of a lot of science fiction. For a few years we faithfully watched episodes of Flash Gordon on channel two every morning, for instance. And our regular trips to the library (and used book store, when we lived in towns big enough to have one) usually resulted in several fantasy or science fiction books coming home with us.

It was one of those used bookstore runs when Mom found a copy of Dune in paperback. That book always sticks out in my memory because it was the first time that Mom was reluctant to tell me details about the book while she was reading it. It was also the first book that Mom told me I would have to wait until I was older. I know she really liked it, because it never once went into the pile of books she was thinking of trading in when we were preparing to visit a used book store. The fact that it was forbidden but also apparently really good instilled more than a bit of longing.

But it was rare for her to restrict my access to books. She never seemed to worry that I might not understand most books. If I asked to read one of her books, she’d let me, and she was always willing to discuss the story. There were times when I would try one of her books and I’d call it boring, though sometimes it was probably more because I actually was a bit too young to be tackling that particular book.

I loved browsing in the science fiction sections of the library or bookstores. Looking at the cover art, which was sometimes a bit weird and confusing, but always otherworldly. Each one seemed to beckon, promising strange and wondrous adventures if I would brave those pages.

Science fiction was always about possibilities, to me. I never felt that some sci fi wasn’t for me. I always felt welcome. Science fiction, particularly the way Mom enthused about it, was about making the world a better place. About going to new worlds, or creating new inventions, or learning what it would be like to live with aliens—or elves, or dragons. Do I wish more of the sf/f available in the 60s and early 70s had been more inclusive? Yes. Just as I wish more of present day sf/f was inclusive of people of color, queer people, et cetera. We’re getting better, but still have a ways to go before the representation matches the real world.

Whenever I pick up a new science fiction book, especially if it’s one that’s been recommended by a friend, I get a flash of that feeling of wonder and anticipation; the sense of strange adventures beckoning. For a moment, I’m that little boy in the bookstore, clutching a story, and about to plunge into something wondrous!

Stark raving nerd

fandom, , , , , ,

I didn't manage to collect many badge ribbons this year, alas. But then, I forgot to bring my ribbons to hand out, and trading is where I usually get half my ribbons!
I didn’t manage to collect many badge ribbons this year, alas. But then, I forgot to bring my ribbons to hand out, and trading is where I usually get half my ribbons!
My previous NorWesCon post covered Thursday and most of Friday, but there was a lot more to the convention. My husband had had to work the first two days of the con, and didn’t get to the hotel until Friday evening just before we gathered for dinner. He hasn’t been feeling well since his trip to Missouri last week, so he wound up back in the room trying to sleep while I hung out in the bar with Matt kibbitzing on writing until it was time to meet Sheryl and Jon for the Burlesque show. It’s been several years. The last time I attended one at NorWesCon, a friend of mine was friends with several of the performers and had been the seamstress for at least one performers’ costume. I think that might have been more than 10 years ago.

The burlesque show is essentially a series of strip tease acts, often with sci fi/fantasy themes. And usually most of the performers are women, so you might understand why I, as a queer man, don’t attend often.

But they are fun shows, and more about performance and comedy than sex, so I probably ought to go more often. Matt was carded at the door, which was amusing. Jared, who was not attending, happened to text me having just realized I was at NorWesCon and asked me to take pictures. So I teased him about the fact that I was about to watch a strip show where they didn’t allow photography and too bad he wasn’t with us. There was more teasing, of course.

After that I headed back to the room to collapse into bed. Michael was asleep when I got there, but a few hours later when I woke up with a painfully stuffed head because of allergies he was awake. Not voluntarily, by any means. He was feeling even less well. He took another shower, and we commiserated about our various symptoms. After letting some fresh air into the room and waiting for more meds to kick in, I was able to get back to sleep, but apparently Michael didn’t. Before going to breakfast we discussed how to proceed since he was feeling so sick, couldn’t get comfortable in the hotel bed, and the small shower stall wasn’t conducive to soaking (which would have helped his knee which is still recovering for the recent injury).

The upshot was that he headed back home on the train. I tracked him until he was home. He had planned, when he left, to do a long soak in the tub, but he said by the time he was back he just collapsed into bed and sleep the rest of the day.

Auntie, Kehf (as Aunt Baru), Keith, Juli-sans-e, me, Jeff, and Geojlc at dinner.
l to r: Auntie, Kehf (as Aunt Baru), Keith, Juli-sans-e, me, Jeff, and Geojlc at dinner. (Click to embiggen)
So he wasn’t there when a big bunch of us had dinner and Julie and Jeff teamed up to take these panaramic pictures of us.

Geojlc, Mike M, Julie avec e, Mark trying to hide behind his hand, Auntie dressed as a Tatoinne Animal Control Officer, Kehf (still as Aunt Baru), Keith, Juli-san-e, and me again.
l to r: Geojlc, Mike M, Julie avec e, Mark trying to hide behind his hand, Auntie dressed as a Tatoinne Animal Control Officer, Kehf (still as Aunt Baru), Keith, Juli-san-e, and me again. (Click to embiggen)

After thoroughly confusing the wait staff multiple times with our orders and requests, I was sent off to my room to get my box of games and meet up and Juli and Keith’s room. We wound up playing four games of Give Me the Brain, none of which I won before deciding to call it a night.

Sunday morning I was a little slow getting up. I always have a hard time packing up the room on my own. It’s not just that two of us pack faster and can carry more per trip, it’s mostly that my husband is really efficient at this sort of thing, and keeps me focused. I have a number of friends who describe their distractabiliy as a super-power (to the point of at least one calling herself Distract-a-Girl!), but I think my brain is an entire horde of distract-a-minions. So even though I had a lot fewer things to pack than usual, it took me about three times as long to get everything out into the car and confirm I hadn’t left anything in the room.

Which made me a couple minutes late for the Why Representation Matters panel. But I’m glad I made it, not just because it was the third or fourth excellent panel that I got to see the fabulous Lisa Bolekaja in, but also because Paul Constant, whose book reviews I have been reading for many, many years was on it, and I finally got to hear his voice to place to the reviews. And it was an excellent panel.

I went to a lot of good panels, and really enjoyed all of them. Our last NorWesCon, a couple of years ago, had been less than fabulous for a variety of reasons, one of them being that, other than Auntie’s Seattle Opera Costume Department Trunk Show panel, none of the panels I went to felt worth my time (which is why I walked out of a couple). This year there were many hours where I had to choose between several panels that looked really interesting. I know the concom has been making efforts the last few years to shake thing up in programming, bring in some new blood, and so on. So that seems to have paid off. It also doesn’t hurt my perspective that I skipped two years. And this year I wasn’t a panelist, I wasn’t running a fan table, nor helping run someone else’s fan table, and otherwise had no obligations at all.

I didn’t even do my usual trick of stealth covering a volunteer shift or two in a department that is run by one of my friends.

I did hang out with my friends, though some of them less often than I would have liked. I introduced Keith to a new cocktail. I had buffalo wings just about every night. I got nicely squiffy at least one night. I did a pretty good job on my blood sugar all weekend. I picked up a pony plush, a set of pony key right charms, a sonic screwdriver earring, an Ash vs Evil Dead t-shirt, and birthday presents for two friends. I was given a Grumpy Cat as Dungeon Master t-shirt.

I met some cool new people, wrote down a lot of links to interesting web sites and have added a bunch of books to my “need to get this” list. Not to mention several new authors to follow.

For many, many years I would always buy our memberships for the next convention before we left. Three years ago, at the end of the con neither of us was certain we wanted to attend the next year, which is what led to us skipping in 2014 and ’15. I had a good time this year, but I had forgotten to ask Michael before he left Saturday what he thought. So Sunday morning I sent him a text (not certain whether he was awake or not). He replied about 20 minutes later that yes, we want to come back next year. So I’ve purchased our memberships for NorWesCon 40, and look forward to attending next year!

This, by the way, was the most awesome thing shown at the Movies and Previews panel Friday morning at the con:

It's a Mad Mad Mad Max Fury Road – Trailer from Monkey Blood on Vimeo.

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Keymasters and Gatekeepers?

genre, , , ,

Puppies in tin foil hats
Puppies in tin foil hats (Click to embiggen)
So the Sad Puppies have officially released their recommendation list. Yes, I said list, not slate. Last year’s Sad/Rabid slates were coordinated and encouraged bloc-voting. This year different people are in charge of the Sad Puppy campaign, and they gathered a big list after taking recommendations for months. In all of the fiction categories, at least, there are more than five recommendations, so you can’t slate vote it.

A few other people have written about this year’s list. In sad puppies 4: the… better behaving?, Dara Korra’ti says a lot of what I was thinking when I saw the list. I’m glad that the Sad Puppies have taken a more transparent approach. I’m glad that the list isn’t dominated by stories published in only one very small publication house owned by one of the organizers. I’m really glad that three of the recommendations in a single category are not by the same author. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that the people running it this year are sincerely trying to do no more than get more of the works they like on the ballot, rather than push a political agenda. I’ve never objected to recommendation lists no matter who makes those recommendations. As Dara explains:

What I object to is their conspiracy-theory paranoia, their Not Real Fan bullshittery, their political propaganda, their insistence that people voting for things other than their list has nothing to do with actual enjoyment or quality but a cartoonish parody of a political standard they made up, and – most of all – their ballot-stuffing last year. But I do not object to them making recommendations lists.

I am also still a firm believer that at this year’s World Science Fiction Society business meeting we must ratify E Pluribus Hugo so that the particular hack that the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies exploited last year won’t easily happen again. And I remain slightly worried that the only reason the current leaders are being reasonable this time (and the more noxious folks are being quieter) is because they hope the rules change won’t be adopted, so they can do what they did last year again, since any rules change has to be approved in two consecutive annual meetings to take effect. I really hope that isn’t what they’re doing.

Unfortunately, since last year they were crowing that there was no way they could lose because they had taken over a couple of whole categories, then threw a hissy fit when it was pointed out that Hugo voters could No Award those categories, and then they tried to claim that’s what they wanted all along, et cetera, I have no confidence that this isn’t just a tactic to lull some voters into a sense of false security.

Alexandra Erin also shared some thoughts on the topic I found myself nodding in agreement to in Hugo Stuff: Just taking a moment to acknowledge…. The most important bit, I think is:

The fact that a small, self-entitled clique that sought to wrestle control of the award away from fandom at large was able to game the ballot formation so effectively last year came down to how low participation in the nominations historically has been. The fact that this same clique was given a thorough drubbing by fandom at large in the actual awards came down to how high participation was.

Meanwhile, in Sad Puppies Are Up + My Hugo Recs Cisrova wonders:

It may have been a mistake to post a recommended reading list with probably over a million words of content two weeks before nominations close. Unless it was a clever trick to say “aha! Sad Puppies was about the discussion, not the final list!” in which case, well played. That means that those who came over from places like File770 to leave comments and votes are now Sad Puppies.

And Cora Buhlert rounds up a few more comments and facts at Hugo Season 2016: The Return of the Puppies, and asks:

…if your followers heap abuse on everybody who dares to disagree with you, is it any surprise that a lot of people want nothing to do with you?

All that said, I am still happy about a few of the silver linings of last year’s Affair of the Melancholy Canines: lots of fans and small press writers who never participated in the Hugo voting before have joined; I met several cool people (particularly several very interesting queer and feminist writers) because of the discussions surrounding the affair; and the nominees for Dramatic Presentation, Short Form finally had some diversity.

I don’t think enough people give the Puppies credit for that last bit. In the previous nine years, at least two of the options in this category each time were episodes of Doctor Who (or a related show). The last few years the category has been three or four Doctor Who eps and a Game of Thrones episode, and maybe one other show. But last year, five different television series were represented. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m one of the biggest Doctor Who fans out there, but there are and have been other shows that deserved a nod. Last year the ballot consisted of five different shows, one episode each. Which I think was great.

I have been reluctant to post my list of Hugo recommendations because, as Cisrova observes, with only a few weeks left until the deadline, there isn’t much time for people to actually read all the things I might recommend, and I think you ought only to recommend things you’ve actually read/watched/listened to et cetera. I’ve spent most of my spare time the last two months reading books I bought that were published last year, and reading short stories in on-line zines in order to have more things to nominate. But I figure there is nothing wrong with sharing recommendations, as long as one is clear that it is just a recommendation for things I think you ought to read or check out:

Dramatic Presentation, Short Form
(I decided in the spirit of choices, to limit myself to one episode for each series I nominated)

  • Ash vs Evil Dead: El Jefe
  • Doctor Who: The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion
  • Orphan Black: Certain Agony of the Battlefield
  • The Expanse: The Big Empty
  • Person of Interest: If. Then. Else.

Novel

  • The Discworld Series, by Terry Pratchett
  • The Shepherd’s Crown, by Terry Pratchett (in case the series as a whole doesn’t make it)
  • The House of Shattered Wings, by Aliette de Bodard
  • The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin
  • Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear

Novella
(I’m still working on this… lots of stories I’ve read and liked are shorter than novella length)

  • The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, by Kai Ashante Wilson
  • The Witches of Lychford, by Paul Cornell
  • Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor

Novelette

  • “The New Mother,” by Eugene Fischer

Short Story

  • “How My Father Became a God” by Dilman Dila
  • “Ashfall,” by Edd Vick and Manny Frisberg
  • “In Libris,” by Elizabeth Bear
  • “The Ways of Walls and Words,” by Sabrina Vourvoulias

Fancast

  • Cabbages & Kings
  • Galactic Suburbia
  • The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast
  • The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • Flame On!

Fan Writer

  • Vajra Chandrasekera
  • Leslie Light
  • Mark Oshiro
  • Cora Buhlert
  • Alexandra Erin

Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

  • Mad Max: Fury Road
  • The Martian
  • Star Wars: The Force Awakens
  • Ant-Man
  • The Rocky Horror Show Live

Related Work

  • Geek Knits, by Toni Carr
  • Bone Walker, by Crime and the Forces of Evil

Next, I need to go through all the online zines I read and figure out which editors to nominate in short form, and figure out what fan sites (in addition to File 770) that I read regularly count as fanzines.

I’m nominating only things I’ve read/watched/listened to myself. And I plan, just as I did last year, to read everything that makes it to the ballot, no matter who wrote it or who included it on a slate or list. If I don’t like the piece, it goes below No Award; if I like it, it’ll rank above No Award—again regardless of who wrote it or recommended it.

Problematic conventioners, take two

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Secret Masters Of Fandom unoffical beanie.
Secret Masters Of Fandom unoffical beanie.
So the Mark Oshiro post has kicked off a lot of discussions all over the place. In other words, I was not the only person who linked to it and commented. One of the more interesting revelations is that one of the ConQuesT concom members was so upset that the rest of the committee refused to do anything that she resigned from the con a few months back. She posted her version of the situation here.

File770 has an extensive post, with links to several other comments and additional information, and a very long comment thread (which has remained mostly civil): Mark Oshiro Says ConQuesT Didn’t Act On His Harassment Complaints.

I’m more than a bit disappointed in how many people are still jumping to the defense of a couple of the harassers with re-treads of the “can’t you take a joke”/“But everyone knows she didn’t mean anything by it.” One version of that which has surfaced a few times in regards to the person who has a history of taking her pants off at panels is, “she does that all the time; I’m not offended by it; Therefore it isn’t offensive and there’s something wrong with you if you think there is.”

This is an old defense that has been used to excuse sexual harassment and sexual assault for decades. A woman complains that she was made uncomfortable by someone who kept commenting on some part of her anatomy, kept crowding in on her, et cetera, and people say, “Oh, so-and-so does that all the time, but he’s harmless!” By which, presumably they mean so far as they know he has never murdered anyone, or raped anyone at knifepoint. This completely ignores the fact that the leering, crowding, groping, or whatever that he does do makes the person feel very uncomfortable, unsafe, and completely obliterates any enjoyment she gets out of the activity/convention/party/panel whatever.

Similarly, the pants situation this time isn’t just about whether it is offensive for a woman to stand around wearing a pair of mens boxers as outerwear, it’s whether after dropping her pants bumping into and continuously rubbing up against another panelist who has previously indicated he isn’t comfortable with that behavior is an acceptable way to behave. Never mind whether it is conducive to a serious discussion about tolerance for a panelist to do that on stage at the panel.

To switch sides for a moment: I’ve been on the other side of the “is it offensive” debate. There are still people (they got quoted in some of the news stories after the last Hugos, for instance), who angrily insist that even including a platonic gay relationship in a story/movie/TV series is deeply offensive to them. Heck, there were calls for boycotts because a black actor was cast as a stormtrooper in the new Star Wars movie, not long after the calls for a boycott of one of the official Star Wars tie-in novels because it included a gay character. I totally understand that someone merely saying that something is offensive is not justification for utterly banning that something. For those people, seeing me simply giving my husband a quick peck on the lips before heading into a panel room completely squicks them out. And I refuse to stop being who I am just because some bigots think they have a right to live in a diversity-free world.

So, I understand that the woman who takes her pants off may be trying to make a statement about body positivity, and about women being in control of their own bodies and having a say in how they dress. I understand that I don’t have a right to veto her choices about herself. But if I happen to be on the panel with her, my lack of a veto over how she dresses doesn’t mean that I have no right to be upset if she rubs up against me, leers at me, and otherwise tries to turn me into a prop for her performative critique of societal norms. My lack of a veto over her sexuality or identity doesn’t mean I have to participate at that level.

Related to all of this, our local furry convention seems to have finally self-destructed: What really killed RF2016 was RF2011 to RF2015. Yes, I said finally. I know it isn’t nice to pile on when someone is already down, but there were very clear warning signs early (as the person, a recently resigned conchair, who wrote that post-mortem alludes to) that the concom had serious problems. The ones mentioned in the post are bad, but they were the tip of the iceberg from my experiences: as an attendee, as a dealer, as a panelist, as someone who offered to help on staff, and as someone who filed multiple reports of times the convention didn’t adhere to their own policies. The thing that actually brought them down was failing to deal with misbehaving attendees, but that was only a symptom of a deeper problem—just the most obviously expensive symptom.

These things don’t have to kill conventions, though.

Last summer, after the incident of the drunken writer contacting the local police to file a false report that one of the WorldCon guests of honor (with whom he had a political disagreement) was a dangerous person who might commit violent acts at the con, Lydy Nickerson posted a lengthy post about her own experiences as a staff member dealing with problems at conventions over the years: Harassment: What do we do? It’s really well done. She lays out a lot of real scenarios and explains the options and how to take some mitigating circumstances into account and so on. It is really worth a read.

He wants to believe – more of why I love sf/f

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THE X-FILES: L-R: Mitch Pileggi, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and William B. Davis.
THE X-FILES: L-R: Mitch Pileggi, David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and William B. Davis. ©2015 Fox Broadcasting Co. Cr: Frank Ockenfels/FOX
In September of 1993 I tuned in with some hope, but also some trepidation, to the first episode of The X-Files. A show that was going to be about FBI agents looking into mysterious, unexplained, possibly paranormal happenings. The first episode was framed around Special Agent Dana Scully, who was a medical doctor as well as an FBI agent, who was being assigned as much to investigate Special Agent Fox “Spooky” Mulder as to assist him in handling the strange cases—the so-called X Files.

I enjoyed the show. So did my (now late) husband, Ray. We tuned in faithfully each week, chatting about various aspects of the show as we watched. I’d been such a big fan of Kolchak: The Night Stalker that of course I was interested in this show. Ray, on the other hand, barely remembered the other series (and he wasn’t sure if it was because he was a few years younger than I, or if maybe his family simply hadn’t watched it), but he was a fan of mysteries and sci fi and “spooky stuff” so was just as interested in the concept of the show before we had even seen it.

The show’s mysteries were interesting. Sometimes very creepy, sometimes sad. There was just the right amount of human and pathos in the most serious shows to keep you hooked. And then occasionally there were episodes that were primarily funny.

They avoiding the obvious “she’s always a cold-hearted skeptic”/”he’s a passionate true believer” dynamic that he seemed implied from the beginning. Mulder wasn’t a true believer. He frequently repeated the line, “I want to believe.” As we learned about the childhood disappearance of his sister, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding it, we understood why he needed to believe that there were things happening beyond the simple, rational explanations with which so many mysteries are dismissed. And Scully, of course, wasn’t cold-hearted, and while she remained skeptical, she wasn’t close-minded.

The show did a really good job of portraying different ways that a sense of wonder (and sometimes dread) could manifest when we are confronted with situations that don’t have an obvious, simple, and safe explanation.

I really loved the show in the early seasons. I recall especially being on the edge of my seat at the end of the season two finale, barely able to contain myself waiting to learn what the answer to the cliffhanger would be the next fall. Things started to go awry, for me, during the third season, and by the fifth or sixth I was finding myself irritated by the show more often then entertained. I might have given up if not for a friend who suggested this way of looking at it: “I’ve decided to think of it as two completely separate shows happening in parallel universes. They happen to have identically named characters played by the same actors, but they are other wise unconnected. One is the quirky, cool ‘there are more things than are dreamt of in your philosophy’ mystery of the week show that I adore; and the other is the awful, poorly written, contradictory, batshit alien conspiracy/maybe we’re all crazy show that I hate—and I have to put up with the latter in order to keep watching the former.”

And that helped a lot. Don’t get me wrong, the conspiracy related to aliens was there from the very beginning, and I was onboard with watching them confront and explore that. The problem, from my perspective, was that unlike their monster of the week kinds of episodes, they never seemed to have a clear idea of what was actually happening with the conspiracy. Years later we might call their problem the “Lost syndrome,” because like that more recent show, the writers seemed to be throwing contradictory and confusingly cryptic clues at us without a clear idea of what the “real” explanation was.

I think that the show’s original creator did have an idea of what the explanation was, but either he allowed other writers who didn’t know to go off on misleading tangents that couldn’t be reconciled as simply red herrings, or perhaps he didn’t know how to keep the series going if he ever revealed the answer.

So it was with a bit of trepidation that I watched the first episode of the new mini series a few weeks ago. And I have to admit, that opener left me with a lot more dread than hope. Then the second episode was a bit better, like one of the typical mystery of the week shows I used to love.

And then we got to the third episode, “Scully & Mulder Meet the Were-monster” and I was in heaven. It was funny. And with a lot of Easter Eggs that weren’t annoying. Two actors who played stoned teen-agers who witnessed a mysterious event back in the very first season, returned to play the same characters, no longer teens, who are out in the woods huffing spray paint when they witness another event. There was a homage the Kolchak in the story, an incredible amount of humor, yet it was an incredibly dark commentary on real life at the same time. It was really, really good, and included everything I had loved about the best of the earliest episodes. And I was incredibly happy to see, online over the next several days, the number of review sites and sci fi/fantasy enthusiasts who had enjoyed the episode the same as I had.

At its best, the X-Files was about things in life—sometimes awful, tragic things—that don’t fit neatly into our preconceptions of how the world can be. More importantly, it is about the way we try to understand those things—how we confront mystery, tragedy, disappointment, horror, and betrayal—and how we cling to meaning and hope in spite of it. It’s about finding the human connection, finding the reasons to hope, finding the things to cherish, and never losing our curiosity.

And it’s also, sometimes, about really creepy monsters.

“This nut thinks he’s a vampire!” – more of why I love sf/f

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Darren McGavin and Barry Atwater in a still from The Night Stalker television movie © 1972 American Broadcasting Company
Darren McGavin and Barry Atwater in a still from The Night Stalker television movie © 1972 American Broadcasting Company (Click to embiggen)
It was January, 1972 when I first saw Darren McGavin playing reporter Carl Kolchak, dressed in that hat and cheap suit, ranting to his editor and the police about a serial killer. I was in the fifth grade and Dad’s nomadic employment in the petroleum industry had sent us to a small town in Utah. We had been there the just over a year, which was longer than we had stayed in any one town in several years1.

In the movie, The Night Stalker, Darren McGavin plays Kolchak, a reporter working in Las Vegas, dating a showgirl, and covering typical news stories. Until he began being suspicious about a series of deaths that seemed very similar, but which the police insisted were unrelated. First Kolchak was convinced that it was simply a serial killer who was draining all the blood from his victims’ bodies because he was insane and believed he was a vampire. As Kolchak finds more and more evidence of similar crimes going back decades, he begins to worry that the killer really is a vampire.

Which, of course, turns out to be the case. Kolchak witnesses a couple of attempts by the police to capture the killer. The second attempt is such an epic failure, with multiple cops killed and dozens of bullets striking the killer (played creepily by Barry Atwater) to no avail. This convinces at least one FBI agent that it is a vampire. Kolchak and his FBI buddy track down and kill the vampire.

Kolchak writes the full account of the vampire’s long career of murder and eventual destruction, proposes to his girlfriend, and prepares to move to New York City where he expects to be able to write his own ticket. Except the FBI and local police don’t want anyone to know about vampires. They kill the story (getting Kolchak’s boss fired, I believe). They substitute a more mundane tale of a serial killer with Kolchak’s byline. Then they inform him that his girlfriend has already been convinced to leave town, and tell him he’s no longer welcome in Vegas.

The story ends with Kolchak re-dictating the entire tale into his portable tape recorder while sitting alone in a sleazy motel room. He explains how all the evidence is destroyed, and that he’s exhausted his savings trying to find his fiancée, so far to no avail.

It was a sad and creepy end to a film.

The Night Stalker was a made-for-TV movie based on an unsold novel by Jeff Rice, originally titled The Kolchak Papers. Rice’s agent had more luck selling the novel idea to ABC as a movie idea than he’d had selling it to a book publisher. The movie was a surprise hit, drawing in unheard of ratings when it ran. It was so successful that the network commissioned Richard Matheson, who had adapted Rice’s book into script from, to write a sequel. A book publisher was suddenly interested in Rice’s novel, but only if they could also get a deal on the sequel. So Rice wrote a novelization of Matheson’s sequel script, and in 1973 two Kolchak books, along with the sequel TV movie, The Night Strangler were all released.

The Night Strangler came out almost exactly a year after the first movie. In it Kolchak had relocated to Seattle where he stumbled upon an immortal who was living in Underground Seattle2 who every 21 years has to kill several women in order to harvest their blood in a very specific fashion to manufacture his “elixer of life.” The sequel did well enough again that work began on a third movie. Until the network put that all aside and decided to turn Kolchak’s story into a regular weekly TV series, which debuted in September of 1974 and ran for one season.

McGavin returned to play Kolchak. In the series Kolchak, along with his editor from both movies (played by Simon Oakland), have been relocated to Chicago where they work for the Independent News Service. Each week Kolchak stumbles upon a new monster or mystery that winds up having a fantastic explanation. Unlike the original movie, Kolchak never has any credible witnesses survive to corroborate his stories, so no one ever believes.

After the two wildly successful TV movies, the network had high hopes, but the initial ratings weren’t terribly exciting. After four episodes of The Night Stalker had aired, the series went on hiatus for a bit over a month. It came back, re-titled Kolchak: the Night Stalker! with new theme music, though not any changes to the tone, setting, or cast.

Ratings continued a slow, steady decline, causing the network to pull the plug at episode 20, cutting short the original order of 26 episodes.

The series ran during my 7th grade year. We had moved by the Colorado, this time returning to the small town where I’d been born, and where one set of grandparents and one set of great-grandparents still lived. Puberty had hit the year before, and I suddenly knew exactly why I’d always felt out-of-place to the point of wondering if I was a changeling left in place of my parent’s real child by evil elves, or maybe an alien sent to study humans—I was gay. It was during this same period that I started fooling around regularly with one other gay classmate (while having a completely unrequited crush on a different classmate that as far as I know was straight). I lived in a constant state of fear of being found out, terrified of what family, friends, and the rest of the town would do if they had proof I was a fag.

I threw myself even more fervently into reading science fiction and fantasy, so of course I was a faithful viewer tuning in each week to see what Kolchak would uncover next. Kolchak was appealing in part because these incredible, usually awful, things kept happening around him, but no one ever believed him. He was in sort of a reverse closet. He wanted people to know the truth, but everyone else did everything they could to ignore, explain away, and ridicule that truth.

While I did tune in faithfully each week, I have to confess that as the series went on, each episode was a little bit less satisfying. I can’t be certain why, having not re-watched it in years, but something about seeing Kolchak not be believed week after week was much less interesting than seeing it in two movies separated by a year. Maybe it was because Kolchak was seldom heroic. He had a determination to learn the truth, yes, but clearly he would have much rather interviewed people after the fight with the monster, rather than take on the creatures himself. He was always a bit rumbled and always seemed to stumble and fumble his way into a lot of the stories and events in the series, rather than get there through dogged determination. Maybe the series just didn’t know how to walk the tightrope between mystery/horror and comedy.

Some years later Chris Carter would have more success with The X-Files, a series he admitted was inspired by Kolchak. So the week-to-week mysteries the world doesn’t want to admit exist notion could be spun into a successful show. I don’t know what about the collective consciousness of 1974 made Kolchak less appealing than the audience of the 90s would find Scully and Mulder4.

I still look back on The Night Stalker with a lot of fondness. I empathized so much with they guy who knew and believed things no one else would credit. It wasn’t just the parallels to my own queer secret, though. I was also having an ever more difficult time reconciling my love of science and history with the fundamentalist evangelical beliefs of our church and the vast majority of our neighbors. I felt as if people were constantly belittling scientific facts and scientists, blatantly ignoring evidence right in front of them and insisting on a worldview that just didn’t square up with not just my lived experience, but theirs.

Kolchak kept chasing that truth, kept examining the evidence, never letting the naysayers or conventional wisdom stop him. And that was a role model I desperately needed.

Notes:

1. I wound up completing the entirety of 5th and 6th grade, in addition to the half of 4th in that same school. This tied my previous record of Kindergarten, 1st, and part of 2nd in the Ft. Collins, Colorado school district. By contrast, 3rd grade was split between three schools, each in a different state (and if the brief sojourn in Kansas had begun a few weeks earlier than in did, 3rd grade would have been four schools in four states).

2. This movie makes the mistake of most pop culture representations of Underground Seattle do. It portrays it as if some sort of disaster buried part of the city in a single night and the survivors rebuilt on top. A dining room underground that still has dishes, silverware, and petrified food figures in the story, for instance. In actuality, Seattle decided it was tired of the routine flooding and sewer backups that happened in the part of downtown built on swamp land, and they razed a hill at the north end of town to redistribute the dirt to raise the streets in the south end. It took many months. During the transition some of the taller buildings had new doors built into the existing second or third floors at the new street level. Other buildings had additional stories built atop them. Spaces that had originally been ground floors became basements. In only a very small number of cases have any of those old spaces been kept in anything close to their original state3.

3. Many, many years ago a software company I worked for that had offices downtown rented storage space in the basement of the building next door. The basement had originally been a dance hall before the streets were raised. The solid wood dance floor was still there, and some of the fancy woodwork on the walls was still visible, but the building owners and subdivided the space into a bunch of 10 foot by 10 foot cubes with cheep plywood, and rented each out for storage. It wasn’t terribly exotic any longer. And you just walked down ordinary stairs to get to it.

4. A subject I’ll go into much more detail about next week, I think!

Confessions of an incorrigible shipper

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Poe and Finn kiss while Rey gives Finn a congratulatory low-five (Earlier this week the writer/director of Star Wars Episode VIII re-tweeted this cartoon drawn by Jeffrey Winger (jeffreywinger.co.vu).
Earlier this week the writer/director of Star Wars Episode VIII re-tweeted this cartoon drawn by Jeffrey Winger (jeffreywinger.co.vu). Click to embiggen.
The first time I saw the original Star Wars I didn’t consciously have a strong feeling about the apparent love triangle being set up between Luke, Leia, and Han. I was frankly a bit surprised when some of my friends started talking about it. I mean, yes, there was the cute scene when Han realized that Luke was developing a crush, and he asked, “Do you think a princess and a guy like me–?” But he was so obviously teasing Luke. Clearly he wasn’t actually interested in the princess, right? I mean, what other possible interpretation could you have to that indulgent, slightly condescending smile?

And Han, being a much more experienced man, also, to my mind, knew that there was never any chance that a guy like Luke could win the princess, either. That was the other meaning of that smile. And during the dozens of times I re-watched the movie over the next three years, I was still convinced that there wasn’t going to be a serious conflict between Luke and Han trying to win Leia’s heart.

I was definitely in the minority. Lots of people expected, if there was a sequel, that a love triangle would figure heavily in the next movie.

I would like to be able to argue that I had somehow perceived some hint of the revelation that was going to come along later that Leia was Luke’s twin sister. But that wasn’t it. It wasn’t until after I first saw The Empire Strikes Back, that I realized what had been going on in my subconscious. Empire remains my favorite movie of the series for a lot of reasons, but after the first showing I had very mixed feelings about one subplot.

I was still deeply closeted at that point, but I was quite aware that I had a crush on Harrison Ford (or at least all the characters he played), while I had also very strongly identified with Luke, but didn’t have the same kind of feelings for Mark Hamill. I realized that my subconscious had been rooting for a romance, all right, but one between Luke and Han. Which in 1980, when Empire was released, was absolutely impossible in a mainstream film. Heck, even the most radical art house films seldom portrayed mutual same sex romances. They might show a homo obsessed with another man, but it was unrequited and tragic and depressing.

But that was what my subconscious saw precisely because we never saw it on the screen. I’ve written before about why queer people read same sex attraction into all sorts of characters in movies, television, and books. Because if we didn’t imagine them, we never got them. The unrelenting message of culture and media is that queers don’t exist, queers don’t matter, queers don’t love, and if they dare to, they deserve whatever horrible things befall them.

That’s why it’s homophobic when straight people roll their eyes or demand to know why we “do that” to characters who aren’t explicitly identified as gay. It isn’t necessarily malicious or intentional, but being annoyed that we dare to imagine such relationships perpetuates our erasure and is condescending at best.

But to get back to Empire, the movie did such an excellent job of portraying the complex emotional relationship between Han and Leia, that by the time of Han’s famous, “I know” answer just before he was frozen in carbonite, I was cheering for them. Of course they were in love! They were perfect for each other! At least that’s what one part of my heart said. Meanwhile, another part was mourning the loss of the love between Han and Luke that I’d hoped for, even though I knew it wouldn’t happen in a mainstream movie.

But once I got over my disappointment, I was totally on the Han and Leia train, and was happy to see them decades later (“You still drive me crazy”) as a realistic older couple who have had their ups, downs, and a falling out but still caring for each other in The Force Awakens.

I don’t only ship same sex couples. The first two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I was totally a Willow/Xander shipper. I so wanted Xander to pull his head out and realize that Willow loved him. At different times in the series, yeah, I was elsewhere. I’ve written Xander/Spike fic (and if I ever finish my WIP there’s also some steamy Graham/Riley action and hot Gunn/Buffy action in there). I adore well written Buffy/Spike fic. For a while I was a Xander/Scott shipper, but have often been completely onboard both the canon Xander/Anya and Willow/Tara relationships. I realize if you’re not familiar with the show that you won’t know that half of those are opposite sex couples. In another fictional universe, I remain an unapologetic Parker/Hardison/Spencer One-true-threesome shipper!

But yes, I saw the chemistry between Finn and Poe during my first viewing of The Force Awakens, and given how many millions of other fans saw it, it clearly isn’t an unreasonable inference. I get that other people see the Rey/Finn pairing, and I’m not saying I wouldn’t be able to enjoy that, but I would really, really like for a galaxy filled with aliens of all shapes and droids and so forth the acknowledge that queer people exist, too. (Also, hey! Why can’t we have a Finn/Poe/Rey triad? Polyamory is real, too!) That’s why I enjoyed reading Rian Johnson Gets It, where I first saw the cartoon I linked above.

As Chuck Wendig said in a post I’ve linked to before regarding people who were angry he put gay characters in an official Star Wars novel:

“…if you’re upset because I put gay characters and a gay protagonist in the book, I got nothing for you. Sorry, you squawking saurian — meteor’s coming. And it’s a fabulously gay Nyan Cat meteor with a rainbow trailing behind it and your mode of thought will be extinct. You’re not the Rebel Alliance. You’re not the good guys. You’re the fucking Empire, man. You’re the shitty, oppressive, totalitarian Empire. If you can imagine a world where Luke Skywalker would be irritated that there were gay people around him, you completely missed the point of Star Wars. It’s like trying to picture Jesus kicking lepers in the throat instead of curing them. Stop being the Empire. Join the Rebel Alliance. We have love and inclusion and great music and cute droids.

Also, I was really pleased with this: when a fan recently asked Mark Hamill on line if Luke was bisexual, Mark replied, “His sexuality is never addressed in the films. Luke is whatever the audience wants him to be, so you can decide for yourself.”

Meta-labels and Sub-genres – loving sf/f in all its forms

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https://thehopefulheroine.wordpress.com/2014/01/02/dont-judge-a-book-by-its-genre-an-intro/ (Click to embiggen)
https://thehopefulheroine.wordpress.com/2014/01/02/dont-judge-a-book-by-its-genre-an-intro/ (Click to embiggen)
I had two different ideas for this week’s “Why I love sf/f” post. Unfortunately, the one I had gotten furthest along in was turning into a mash-up of last week’s and the one before. The other one showed a bit more promise, and then I saw this post on the Over The Effing Rainbow blog: [Sci-Fi Month] Guest post: Aliette de Bodard – Science-fiction, fantasy, and all the things in between.

Go read it, because she says what I wanted to say, only better!

I went through a long phase where I preferred science fiction over fantasy with a bit of self-delusion along the lines that somehow fantasy was “just making any old thing up” while science fiction required an understanding of science! Likewise, I often expounded the notion that hard sci fi was superior to all others because you were constructing your what-if scenarios inside even more demanding parameters. Somehow I was able to express those beliefs at the same time that I would read and re-read any Andre Norton book I could get my hands on because I always loved them. I’m not sure why it took so long for me to recognize the cognitive dissonance between the kinds of stories that moved me most, and the sorts of stories which didn’t but which I claimed were superior.

Some of it is pure stubbornness: you express an opinion at one point, and then you feel obligated to keep justifying your original statement. But when I finally started to recognize this particular contradiction, that didn’t seem a sufficient explanation. Until I had an epiphany.

The epiphany came from an unusual source. I was watching a recording of a question-and-answer session that sex advice columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage was having after giving a talk at a university. A young woman had a question about why guys her age would be friendly and sometimes flirty with her and other woman she knew who weren’t “model thin,” but always distancing themselves before things got beyond friendship. Yet she found older men pursuing her. She feared that the older men were desperate because of some other flaw she hadn’t uncovered, and that younger guys were merely shallow.

Dan pointed out a couple of things. One was that every week since he’d become an advice columnist he received at least a couple of letters from straight guys who confessed that they were really attracted to bigger women, but terrified to admit it because they thought it meant something was wrong with them. In an aside, he said that he got similar messages from some gay guys about their attraction to big guys. He said the thing nearly all the letters had in common was that the letter writer was either in their teens or their twenties. At that age, Dan said, guys are still very focused on winning the approval of other guys. So they are much more concerned with appearing to be interested in the things they think others expect them to be interested in.

His conclusion was that a lot of the guys she thought were sending mixed signals were doing just that. They were genuinely attracted to her, but when they recognized what was happening, they bailed because they thought they weren’t supposed to be attracted to that kind of body. So his advice was to go ahead and take men who did express interest at their word, and if they didn’t otherwise set of alarm bells, there was nothing wrong with dating them. But also, she would find when she got a bit older, that there were plenty of guys who always had found her attractive, they just had to grow up enough to stop worrying about the approval of their friends.

I realized that I had started espousing those opinions about sci fi vs fantasty, and hard sci fi vs so-called soft science sci fi, and very cerebral sci fi vs action/adventure sci fi when I was in my teens, and I hardened those opinions in my early twenties. At the time it seemed that the fans I most admired all held that opinion. And the way that libraries often classified various books seemed to reinforce that. All of the “soft” sci fi and fantasy was filed in the young adult section or the children’s section of libraries that divided things up that way. Only the hard sci fi and certain kinds of action/adventure sci fi was over in the adult sections. Clearly fantasy and so forth was for less mature, and therefore less sophisticated, readers.

Bull.

“If you’re going to break a rule, break it good and hard. My personal motto!”
—Aliette de Bodard

Especially since science fiction is supposed to be not just exploring limits, but pushing beyond frontiers into the unknown, we shouldn’t look down on things that vary from the familiar. That’s the whole point, right? It’s timid to worry about whether a story is supposed to go this way, or whether we’re supposed to like a particular kind of story, et cetera.

Isn’t science fiction and fantasy supposed to be about boldly going where no one has gone before?