Tag Archives: science fiction

Advanced Civilizations and Clever Monkeys – more of why I love sf/f

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Amazing Science Fiction, June 1976 issue, their 50th Anniversary issue. Cover art by Stephen E. Fabian.
Amazing Science Fiction, June 1976 issue, their 50th Anniversary issue. Cover art by Stephen E. Fabian. (click to embiggen)
I don’t believe I’ve ever actually read a copy of the magazine, Amazing Science Fiction which is a shame, seeing as apparently it was in business for more than fifty years. So I’m fairly certain that I first read Lester Del Rey’s short story, “Natural Advantage” when I bought the paperback of Donald Wolheim’s anothology, The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF in a used bookstore in 1978.

In the very first sentence Del Rey establishes that we are on a starship and that the viewpoint character, the captain, is not human—since he is looking through a set of trinoculars toward a small blue planet. The ship was on a cargo run to a colony world when they encountered a cloud of antimatter moving through deep space. In the course of mapping the cloud, the discovered radio signals coming for a star system they thought uninhabited.

It’s obvious that they are approaching Earth, which has an inhabited space station in orbit around it, so the story was meant to be set a short distance in our future. They establish contact with the strange two-eyed beings who call this world home, and in a few days the two species have managed to figure out how to communicate.

Del Rey gives some explanations for why this is so. The aliens have much larger and more complicated brains than humans. Because they evolved a way to delay signals from the third eye, they perceive time differently than we do. Their language expert is amazed to realize that humans only have a language of few tens of thousand words, since the most uneducated of the aliens has a vocabulary of several million.

All of this learning is just window dressing for the main problem of the tale. That cloud of anti-matter is moving toward the solar system, and when it arrives bad things will happen. Live on Earth will likely be wiped out by the gamma radiation caused by the light smattering that will his the Earth’s atmosphere, but then things will be much worse when the bulk of the antimatter cloud hits the sun.

The aliens came to warn them, but can’t really offer any help. Their ship is too small to carry more than a handful of humans, and it took them many years to get to Earth as it was, no other ships will be able to reach them before disaster hits.

The captain agrees to leave the humans all of the science books he can, even though he explains that his civilization’s technology couldn’t possibly be used to evacuate billions of people. Then the aliens goes on their way.

Fifteen years later, the captain and the cargo ship return to their home world, and are shocked when a high ranking government official is sent up to greet them. And with the government official is a human, the first person they met, the woman who was the Administrator of the space station.

The revelation at the end of the story is that humans figured out that the alien’s natural way of perceiving variable time had limited their ability to understand all of the implications of their warp drive technology. Thus in a few years, the humans had built engines and ships much more powerful than anything the aliens have, and have managed to save themselves.

This particular story didn’t wow me. Maybe it’s because I’ve read too many stories where the twist is that the obviously inferior humans turn out to be more clever than the superior aliens. Legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr, used to insist that no story published in his ‘zine could ever show humans to be inferior. They always had to be better than the aliens one way or another.

The difference between this one and a typical Campbell-approved tale is that the aliens aren’t malevolent. The aliens want to save the humans, they just don’t believe it is possible to do more than warn them.

Besides the predictability (which might be more my fault because of the types of sci fi I had read during the years before), the other problem is there isn’t really any conflict in the story. Because it is from the point of view of the aliens who don’t believe they can do anything and who go about their business after the warning, all of the drama of a human population finding out impending doom, scientists and engineers struggling to master another race’s physics and engineering, et cetera, happens off screen. It’s all, “Poor monkeys. They seem nice enough, but they’re doomed because they aren’t advanced enough to have already colonized the stars.” Followed by, “Surprise! We’re more clever than you thought!”

That sort of “twist!” story is entertaining the first few times you encounter it, but after you’ve seen a dozen or more, the story needs to do a bit more to really stand out. The most interesting aspect of the story, as it is, is the notion that have a third eye would change the way a species perceives and understand time and temporal relationships. One of the almost throw away lines in the early part of the tale involves the language expert being flabbergasted that human languages only have a few tenses, and even then only the verbs!

That made me stop for a few minutes to think about how adjectives and nouns could work differently in English if we had different versions of the words for past, present, future, and so forth.

As I said a couple of weeks ago, not every story has to be a masterpiece. And even if the story is merely not bad, but it makes you think, that’s a good thing.

Antique Books and Incongruous Pages, more of why I love sf/f

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Cover of the October, 1976 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, cover by Chesley Bonestell.
Cover of the October, 1976 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, cover art by Chesley Bonestell. (click to embiggen)
There are some science fiction stories that you read, enjoy, but when you encounter them again months or years later, you don’t remember them until you have nearly completed re-reading them. Richard Cowper’s “The Hertford Manuscript” is one of those tales for me.

I think that I read it for the first time in the fall of 1976, shortly after my mother, oldest sister, and I had moved to southwest Washington some months after my parents’ divorce was finalized. My subscription to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction had lapsed not long before we moved, but I had been happy to discover that the public library in our new home town subscribed to the magazine. A couple times a month I spent a couple hours at the library reading the magazine, and I am fairly certain I read the October issue, which contained “The Hertford Manuscript” on one of those visits.

I definitely read the story a subsequent time when I bought the paperback of Donald Wolheim’s anothology, The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF a couple years later at the used bookstore. And since I re-read stories in that collection off and on over the next seven or eight years, I probably read it again several times.

Each time I’ve read the story, I began to suspect that the story was going to be a Lovecraftian tale, even with the hints in a completely different direction. And then each time there’s a point where I say to my self, “Oh! I think I remember this story…” Including when I re-read it this week.

The tale starts slow. Our narrator, Francis Decressie, tells of us of his eccentric Great Aunt Victoria, whose husband died in World War I, leaving her to run a rare books business, which she excelled at for many years. She occasionally told slightly scandalous stories of her youth when she was acquainted with H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley. When his Great Aunt dies, her will bequeaths on him a 17th Century Registry—specifically a list of the admissions, discharges, and deaths of patients at a Franciscan Charity Hostel/Hospital in London.

In addition to the ordinary 17th century pages covered with small columns of very compact writing, are a number of pages that don’t match the others. The paper is just as old, but it is clearly manufactured using more modern methods, and the handwriting is very different than the rest of the register. And it appears to be a journal.

The narrator then reproduces the journal, and we find ourselves following Dr Robert Pensley, an acquaintance of H.G. Wells, as he recounts how, having completed his journey into the far future, meeting the Eloi and escaping the Morlocks to return to his own time and recount his findings to some friends, had undertaken a journey into the distant past. Except one of the quartz crystals in the mechanism of the machine breaks (he attributes this to damage inflicted by the Morlocks), trapping Pensley in 1665 England—right when the Plague is ravaging the land.

Pensley must find a jeweler or lens maker to create a replacement crystal, and has to deal with all of the problems of a nation in panic over an illness they do not understand. There are increasingly amusing attempts by Pensley to convince various authorities that the illness is spread by fleas on the rats. The lens-maker has difficulty tracking down a large enough piece of quartz, and various other things go wrong over the course of the tale.

The story ends with a few pages of the narrator explaining how he tried to prove that the pages were a hoax, but experts all agree the book has not be taken apart and restitched since the late 1600s, and he does find various bits and pieces of obscure historical evidence to back up some of the minor details the journal recounts.

And that’s it. The story ends with a philosophical observation about tragedy by the narrator.

The tale told in the enclosed journal was very engaging. The descriptions of the time traveler’s experiences in the mid-1600s pull you right into the tale. Cowper’s attention to historical detail is something that is seen in many of his other works, and serves him quite well here. The framing story is written in the style of a 19th century novel, evoking Dickens and Anthony Trollope and even a bit of Bram Stoker. Which is a little out of place given that the narrator is living in the late 20th Century, but is a nice homage to Wells.

As a kind of sequel to The Time Machine the story works well enough. The framing sequence is not quite as good as the time traveler’s journal. Especially the ending, which I found a little flat. I wanted more. I’m not sure how, exactly, but rather than leaving me wondering what happened next, it felt like he left out something.

So it was enjoyable, but not a mind-boggling revelation. Still, each time I read it, I recognize certain minor details that stuck with me, and have resonated with some of the ideas I’ve tried my hand at in my own stories. Every story we read doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Sometimes merely good is good enough.

Someone who loves the same books as me…

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“Happiness is discovering someone who loves the same books as you do.” lastlemon.com
“Happiness is discovering someone who loves the same books as you do.” lastlemon.com (Click to embiggen)
This was a very busy weekend. Seattle’s Pride Parade was Sunday, the Locus Awards Banquet was on Sa turday, and there were many other things we either needed to take care of or wanted to do. I’ve never attended the Locus Awards weekend, before. I actually hadn’t really realized it was a thing, despite having followed the Locus fanzine for years, and having each year looked forward to seeing which books, stories, zines, and so on would win the award.

I should pause here, in case you don’t know what the Locus Awards are. Locus (The Magazine of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field) was founded back in 1968 as a fan produced news magazine and to promote a WorldCon bid. The ‘zine has continued for decades since, printing news about fannish and pro activities in the SF/F realm. In 1971 Charles N. Brown, the founding editor, decided to have the readership nominate and vote on deserving works in the field, in order to help the Hugo awards. Think of it as an organized recommendation list. Readers and contributors to the zine recommended books and stories and editors and so forth, and voted on them. The Locus awards has different categories than the Hugos, and since you don’t have to have a membership at WorldCon to participate, in theory the awards may draw on a more diverse crowd.

What I like about them is that they have multiple novel categories. While the Hugos just have Best Novel of the Year, the Locus Awards separate Science Fiction novels from Fantasy, and also have a separate category for Young Adult novels and first novels. Anyway, the recommendation list that is generated in the process alone is a wonderful resource for finding good things you would have otherwise not heard of.

Even though I have been reading the list of winners every year for a long time, it somehow never occurred to me that there was an award banquet, and even more important on a personal level, I didn’t know that the banquet has, at least for the last several years, been happening right here in Seattle. I found out because a woman mentioned it at a panel at NorWesCon, and handed out fliers.

The event is like a miniature sci fi con. There are a couple of Readings by pros the night before the banquet, followed by a party, then on Saturday morning there are a couple of panel discussions. There is an autograph session and a bookseller is there ready to sell you books by the authors who are signing, and there is the banquet. In addition to the awards, there’s several silly activities that have grown up as traditions around the event, such as a Hawaiian shirt contest (Charles Brown, Locus’ founding editor, was famous for his fondness of loud Hawaiian shirts).

We both have been having worse than usual hay fever lately, so neither of us have been sleeping well, and we both wound up taking naps Friday afternoon after work that lasted late enough that we skipped the Friday evening activities. Saturday, we made it to the event and had a great time.

First, no one told me that there would be free books. Apparently the publishers of books that make the shortlist often send boxes of the books to the event. So those (and other books) are set out in little piles on each banquet table. And a bunch more are on a give-away table in the back. We brought home free books whose retail prices definitely exceeded the cost of tickets to the event!

It was also just a fun event. There were a lot of familiar faces there (since I’ve been attending Northwest sci fi conventions for nearly three decades), but it was a smaller crowd, and a much higher percentage of the attendees were pros.

The event also overlaps with the first week of the Clarion West six-week summer writing workshop, and we wound up sharing our table with three of the students from the workshop. They were really nice, and were a diverse group: one guy was from Chicago, a woman was from Wales, and another guy was from India.

I knew our new acquaintances were “my kinda folks” when the young woman from Wales picked up one of the books in the free pile and said, “I should not pick up a new book that is this thick when I have no free time for the next several weeks” then, a second later she gasped and said excitedly, “It has a map!” and the other two immediately stopped their banter to add comments about how books with maps are temptations one can never resist.

I had been about to make a similar observation. Having written about it before: “Some of my favorite books have maps…”.

Whenever I go to a con, I come back feeling excited in new ways about my writing. Some of it is from hearing authors at panels talk about their own troubles and triumphs writing. Some of it is from learning new things or finding new stories that inspire me. Some of it is because I almost always wind up sitting in a corner somewhere with my laptop or iPad or a paper journal working on one of my stories in progress, and being out of my usual routine makes me look at the plotholes and so forth differently.

But a big part of it is simply the joy that comes from meeting other people who love the same kinds of books I do. Shared joy multiples. Chatting with another person who loves something you love, explaining to each other which bits made you squee and so on, increases that wellspring of delight inside you.

That remembered elation can help carry you over the rough spots in your next round of revision.

Nostalgia for a Time that Never Was – more of why I love sf/f

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The cover of Futurs No 3, an anthology of translated science fiction published in Paris, September, 1978.
The cover of Futurs No 3, an anthology of translated science fiction published in Paris, September, 1978. (Click to embiggen)
One day, back when I was in high school, I found a paperback copy of The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wolheim in the used bookstore I frequented. I already owned several of Wolheim’s earlier annual anthologies, so I knew they usually the contained a lot of good stories. The table of contents of this issue featured several authors I loved, including at least a couple of titles that I remembered reading elsewhere and liking. So, of course, I picked it up.

The third story in that anthology, “Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel” by Michael G. Coney did not wow me on the first reading. Honestly, the thing that I found most interesting in the first paragraph was the revelation that it was apparently set in Western Washington state. The story is told by a first person narrator, who is taking a ferry to go to a port to meet a shipment of some sort of alien creature. We never learn much about them, other than that he raises them for their pelts, which he can sell for a profit. Though the way he describes his farm, he is mostly just getting by in this endeavor.

Most of the first two pages of the stories consists of the character describing his ferry trip in such a way that we learn that Earth is part of some kind of Galactic society, that only recently have they replaced rockets with antigrav for vessels that move from ground to orbit, and so on. The hook of the first paragraph is him noticing on his “newspocket” that all the old shuttles at the abandoned Pacific Northwest spaceport are to be scrapped, finally.

He arrives at his destination early, finding himself with five or six hours to kill, and decides to drive up to the old space port. During the drive he rambles some more, dropping hints about what his life was life before, and telling us more about how things have changed since then. It isn’t until halfway through the fifth page that he gets to what appears to be the meat of the story, as he flashes back to junior high school, when he and his best friend used to sneak onto the grounds of the spaceport to watch shuttles land and take off.

The narrator, as a young man, loved everything about the shuttles: the roar of the engines, the sleek shapes of the ships themselves, et cetera. His friends was obsessed with identifying and checking off the shuttles from a book he had of every registers craft that ever landed on Earth. There are a few anecdotes about the mild misadventures the narrator, his friend, and a few other people who liked to sneak onto the grounds of the space port had watching the shuttles land and take off.

Then everything is ruined when his friend gets a crush on a girl. Who just happens to be the same girl that the narrator once got into an altercation with in grade school and of course they hate each other. To say the friendship is strained is an understatement. Then there is a disaster involving the girl’s pet, with is a cat-like animal imported from across the galaxy, which happens to be telepathic, but only with members of its own species.

After the disaster, we flash back to the present, and then the narrator—who has lamented about five dozen times so far in the story how much he misses his old friend, and how astonished his middle-school-aged self would be to know that he doesn’t even know where the friend lives any longer—sees said old friend. The friend, it turns out, owns the wrecking company that is going to tear down the spaceport. But the narrator, of course, doesn’t say hello. He skulks away.

There are a lot of things not to like about this tale. The rambling expository lumps. The lack of characterization. The clichéd use of flashback to tell most of the story. The extremely dated boy vs girl dynamic of the tale. The ludicrous ways that chauvinism pops up and is even defended at one point.

Then in the category of merely cringeworthy, there is the fact that the only female characters who appear in the story all dress and act as if they are characters out of the 1950s. Remember, this was written in 1975—women’s lib had been a thing for many years by then! Even in 1978, when I read this story, that section seemed terribly dated!

I read the story one more time, when I found it in another anthology years later. I didn’t recognize the title, or I might not have read it. The second time I didn’t remember the story until fairly late into it, just about the time of the disaster near the end of the tale. I read it to the end, hoping to have a bit more insight, but still wasn’t impressed.

When I re-read it again last week, I was having the same reaction as before all the way until the end. And then I finally had an epiphany about what the author may have been trying to do. It had never occurred to me during my earlier readings that the narrator was unreliable. The section early on where he defends men’s only clubs and no girls allowed spaces as not being sexist at all should have tipped me off. It was too over the top. And there were several other hints throughout the story where our narrator is being very defensive in describing the events.

That’s when I realized that the ending, where he decides he doesn’t have anything in common with the old friend anymore is supposed to be tragic or ironic (depending). The narrator drives many hours out of his way and spends the entire tale wallowing in a nostalgic lament for the good old days. He goes into inordinate details on fairly minor stuff, is very defensive of himself and goes to pains to describe every other character in the narrative as betraying him or at least not treating him right. He had these great dreams and aspirations, which have all come to naught because the world is just not fair to nice guys like him.

Meanwhile his old friend is now a successful businessman, and is literally in the business of tearing down the obsolete relics of the past so that something new can be built.

Now, finally, the story makes sense when I think of it as a critique of nostalgia and clinging so hard to the past that you can’t move forward. And those expository ramblings sound an awful lot like an old bad way that some sci fi stories in the 30s, 40s, and 50s would do their world building: by having two characters say such unnatural things (while riding a subway or something), “Thank goodness for modern convenience! Can you believe that our ancestors used to have to connect their appliances to receptacles in ways with physical cables to draw power! What a primitive nightmare!”

As an indictment of nostalgia, “Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel” isn’t quite so bad. I’m not sure I agree with Wolheim that it was one of the best story published that year, but it did make me think, even before my epiphany. Struggling with a story is good mental exercise.

And I have to admit that the descriptions of the shuttles taking off and landing and the sense of wonder the narrator had as a child was pretty good.

Very Big Questions and Very Small Epiphanies – more of why I love sf/f

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A cover of a later paperback reprint of the 1977 Annual World's Best SF anthology edited by Donald A. Wolheim.
A cover of a later paperback reprint of the 1977 Annual World’s Best SF anthology edited by Donald A. Wolheim. (Click to embiggen)

Some opening lines are better than others. “Something very large, something very small: a galactic museum, a dead love affair. They came together under my gaze.” Those are the opening sentences of Brian W. Aldiss’ short story, “Appearance of Life” and they’re one of the better examples. The opening tells you, thematically, where the story is going, without giving anything away.

“Appearance of Life” by Brian W. Aldiss is another story that I first encountered in the pages of the 1977 Annual World’s Best SF anthology edited by Donald A. Wolheim. So I was a junior in high school, 17 or 18 years old, when I discovered it. The story is narrated in first person by a character who is on their way to a museum. The character never gives us their name, identifying them self only as a Seeker, which is either a job title or avocation.

The Seeker tells us first about a long lost alien race, the Korlevalulaw. We don’t know what they looked like and virtually nothing about their culture. Because they had vanished by the time humans reached the worlds they once colonized. And the aliens left behind only empty buildings. But they are vast empty buildings. Our narrator is traveling to one such building, which is a single structure that completely encircles a planet exactly on its equator. The building it over 1600 kilometers long, and at different parts of the equator, it is between 15 and 22 kilometers tall. It is called a museum because humans have decided to start filling the empty space with artifacts they have gathered from around the galaxy. Not artifacts left behind by the Korlevalulaw, but artifacts left behind by previous human civilizations.

The story slowly reveals that by the Seeker’s time humans have changed a lot. The Seeker makes references to both the First Galactic Era and Second Galactic Era as distinct long periods of interstellar civilization. He or she makes references to how much smaller humans were at the time, and to other limitations of human bodies. But the Seeker never describes what humans look like, now. The gender of the Seeker is never given… the narrator does refer to every android they interact with as she. And there is a point when a reference computer points out that current human engineered breeding produces a ratio of ten women to every man, which is why “modern humans” don’t understand the importance more primitive humans placed on being husbands and wives.

The Seeker has been commissioned by several academic institutions to explore the museum and look for evidence to shed light on various questions these academics have. The Seeker spends several days exploring the museum.

The Seeker finds a holocube in one of the exhibits which contains a recording of the personality of a long dead human woman. When activated, she informs him that she is only for use by her husband, and to please put her back on the shelf rightside up. A while later the Seeker finds more holocubes, and one of them contains a male memory recording that says he is only for his ex-wife.

The Seeker notices that the names are similar, and so tries an experiment. Placing the cubes next to each other, the Seeker activates them and observes as the two holograms have a discussion. During the exchange of messages, the Seeker has an epiphany about the place of humans in the galaxy, and what the ancient disappearance of the Korlevalulaw means about the fate of human society.

The Seeker is so disturbed by the epiphany, that they abandon their mission, flee the museum, and find a mostly uninhabited world to hide out on, lest they accidentally reveal the epiphany to others and hasten the end of current civilization.

I was a little bit disappointed in the ending. The epiphany as described by the Seeker didn’t seem that alarming or profound, to me. I had been enjoying the story up to that point. It was very interesting to recognize how my image of the narrator and the situation kept changing as certain details were casually revealed. In the beginning, I was imagining a person much like myself. By the end, my imaginary version of the Seeker was only vaguely humanoid, and neither male nor female. Similarly, at the beginning of the story I assumed the human civilization was a kind of standard space opera interstellar empire, or multiple competing federations, something like that. But by the end I was trying to imagine a civilization that barely understood the idea of nations and political systems and even the concept of ownership.

I don’t know if Aldiss meant for the reader to think the Seeker’s epiphany only made sense because we didn’t, still, fully understand the Seeker’s frame of reference, or something else. I thought the way Aldiss built up the idea of this very alien culture, and how they didn’t really understand us, and therefore how we likely don’t understand previous generations, either, was really well executed. I didn’t realize that’s what was happening until I reached the end and was trying to figure out if I misunderstood the ending.

The story is very cerebral, with the conflict being something that the narrator doesn’t even realize is happening until the end. The Seeker wants the answers to particular questions, and doesn’t realize that he/she lacks the frame of reference to understand most of the evidence being examined. So you could describe the plot as Man vs His Own Ignorance. And the resolution is that the Seeker gains just enough insight to realize that none of the answers are pleasant ones.

And though I have been reminded of this story from time to time while reading other sci fi tale, I never realized until I was writing this post that it has more in common with a classic Lovecraft horror story than a science fiction tale. The Seeker gets a glimpse of a much bigger truth about their place in the universe, and that glimpse destroys their sense of self. It’s just a bit less melodramatic than a typical Lovecraft tale would have been. I don’t know if Aldiss was doing that on purpose, but it’s an interesting question.

The story left me pondering and debating with myself how I might have tried to tell the story better. Except I think the best part of it isn’t the traditional form of a story. The best part of the tale is how the writer made me slowly deconstruct my own assumptions about who the narrator was and what his/her world was like and the way the story made me uncomfortable to give the narrator a gendered pronoun.

It didn’t translate as a big epiphany for me. But it did change the way I viewed many stories afterward. It affirmed my suspicions that much of what we thought we knew about our own history, and about ourselves, was way off. And reminded me that we should never be satisfied with the easy answers.

I feel a Tingle, tingle, tingle…

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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

Out of Body Vacations – more of why I love sf/f

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Cover of the May 1976 edition of Galaxy Magazine, which is where I probably first read Varley's “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.”
Cover of the May 1976 edition of Galaxy Magazine, which is where I probably first read Varley’s “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.” (Click to embiggen)
In the spring of 1976 I still had a subscription to Galaxy magazine, thanks to my grandparents, though things were not going terrible well in my life at that time, so I didn’t always get all the way through one issue before the next came in. So I might not have read it until some months, after my parents’ divorce was final, and Mom, my sister, and I moved 1200 miles away. I definitely remember owning the magazine with this cover. This issue contained the story, “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” by John Varley.

Varley was the author of “Picnic on the Near Side” which I wrote about before, and which made quite an impression on me. This story is set in a similar world, with extensive colonies on the moon. It concerns a man named Fingal how has purchased a vacation at one of the “disneylands” which was large lunar caves that have been made to duplicate long lost environments on earth, complete with cloned wildlife. Fingal’s memory and personality are transferred from his brain into a cube, which is then implanted in a lioness so that Fingal can experience the life of a predator on the savannah.

Something goes wrong, and Fingal finds himself back in his own life sooner than expected, and strange things keep happening, such as books rewriting themselves before his eyes to become messages to him. He eventually learns that his body has someone been misplaced, so the memory cube has been put into a safety mode, interfacing with a computer which is creating a simulation of his real life. Messages come to him from a technician named Apollonia Joachim who explains that the simulation is necessary to keep his memories and personality intact until it can be returned to his body.

As the days stretch into weeks, Fingal starts taking classes in the simulation to teach himself new skills to get a better job when he does get back. Strange things happen, as the technician tries to keep him focused. In one incident, Fingal notices strange patterns in the floor tiles in his bathroom, and starts tracing them with his toe, suddenly the bathroom fills up with money. Fingal’s consciousness had somehow gotten into someone’s financial records. Apollonia warns him about losing himself again and again.

Over the months that follow, Fingal finds himself falling in love with Apollonia, and making plans for a future together.

Eventually Fingal is reunited with his body, and then learns that what felt like years to him in the simulation was only six hours, because his thoughts were moving at computer speed while connected. Ms Joachim has only been interfacing with him for a few hours, and doesn’t share his feelings.

The simulated classes he took did result in real learning, so he does have new skills and can pursue a more interesting job. Plus, of course, he gets a refund on the vacation and a lump sum settlement from the company. He’s informed that other people who suffered similar accidents have not always fared so well, and he’s the first person two survive six hours outside the memory cube’s normal limit.

Varley didn’t win an award for this particular story. He did win a Special Locus award the year this was published for having four novelettes, including this story, voted in the top ten in the Locus Reader Awards.

The story was adapted badly into a movie that changed a lot of things for no particular reason. Avoid the movie. The story isn’t action packed, but is more focused on the internal conflicts of a man unhappy with his life who is forced to stay there even if it is simulated. The notion being that if they allow his fantasies to run wild while his personality is in the memory cube, he will go mad and forget who he really is.

I enjoyed the story a lot. The notion that it’s the boring and repetitive parts of our lives that anchor our identities wasn’t terribly revolutionary, but it was interesting to see how this sort of technology might play out without any world-threatening peril giving it at artificial sense of danger. Really, who needs a bigger threat than literally losing your mind to provide a sense of dramatic tension?

One odd side note: I always get this story mixed up with another Varley tale, “The Phantom of Kansas.” They’re both set in the same fictional future world (the Kansas in the title of the second story is an artificial recreation of the midwestern plains of North America in another Lunar cave), and both stories involve stored personalities, but otherwise the plots have nothing to do with each other. The simple fact is that I think the title “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” would have been better for the second story as it evokes a metaphor for the central plot better than the notion of a phantom. So there has been more than one occasion when I’ve pulled out an anthology, such as my hardcover copy of Wolheim’s 1977 World’s Annual Best Science Fiction, see the title of Varley’s story, turn to it expecting to read the other story, and then as I read the opening paragraphs remember that I always get them mixed up.

Oddly, I own more than one anthology that includes “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” but absolutely none that include the other story. I need to fix that.

Robots Aren’t People, Are They? – more of why I love sf/f

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Cover for the first edition hardback of <em>The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories</em> by Isaac Asimov.
Cover for the first edition hardback of The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov. (Click to embiggen)
I first heard of “The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov when I saw the anthology, The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories offered as a selection in the Science Fiction Book Club. I was 16, and still technically a member of the club, but most months I checked off the “Send nothing at this time” box on the card, because even the cheaper prices of the book club were a bit much for my budget. It a bit over a year later when I found a paperback copy of The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wolheim in the local used book store when I finally got a chance to read the story.

Asimov wrote a lot of short stories about robots. Most of the stories collected in his anthologies I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots dealt with various logical contradictions that robots would be placed in by various circumstances, and how the robots (and the humans working with them) would work out those conflicts between the Three Laws of Robotics, their other programming, and the situation at hand. Even in his longer novels where robots figured prominently, such as the two sci fi murder mysteries, The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, the robots were always motivated by pure logic. The fact that the world is not a purely logical place, and that humans are seldom covered by rationality alone, formed the framework for the conflict in the stories.

“The Bicentennial Man” centered on a single robot, dubbed Andrew by the daughter of its first owner (a Mr. Martin, identified in the story which is told from Andrew’s point of view as simply Sir). Andrew demonstrates an unusual talent with wood carving—his works of art fetching high prices when offered for sale—and develops a desire to became human. Andrew is part of a new series of robots with what Asimov describes “more open-ended architecture” in his positronic brain, which the experts believe is where his apparent artistic talent comes from. Andrew’s stubborn insistence that he can become a human worries the scientists at the world’s largest robotics company, causing them to try to buy Andrew back.

In part because of the pleading of the owner’s daughter (whom Andrew calls Little Miss), Sir refuses to sell Andrew back to the company. Later, Sir helps Andrew gain some form of legal independence as a “free robot” with the legal name of Andrew Martin.

From there the story follows Andrew’s physical and legal journey through several generations of the original family, as Little Miss grows up, grows old, and dies, and her son and grandson found a legal firm which, among other things, fights to secure Andrew’s legal rights. Andrew designs new kinds of prosthetics, which are almost indistinguishable from natural body parts. Andrew’s body is slowly ungraded to first being a more human-looking android body, to an organic one. The proceeds from the patents on the various processes to create the prosthetics (which are used medically to improve the lives of disabled, maimed, and diseased people) providing Andrew’s income and funding the legal fight.

One of his important legal victories happens when he is 150 years old, where at a dinner in his honor (celebrating his medical inventions), he is toasted as the Sesquicentennial Robot.

Eventually, as Andrew realizes that he will never persuade a human legislature to pass a law declaring him, or any robot, a human because the key difference will always be his positronic brain. Which leads Andrew to compel a robotic surgeon to perform an operation on his brain that will cause the brain to slowly decay and die. Andrew’s reasoning is that it’s the immortality that forms the final barrier between him being accepted as a human.

The story really resonated with me. And it was interesting to see Asimov explore the nature of emotions and creativity from the point of view of artificial intelligence. But more interesting was the series of legal barriers that Andrew has to go through. Laws have to be changed to allow a robot to own property, for instance. Laws must be changed to make harming a robot a crime, at another point.

The legal progression to personhood that Asimov takes us through is based on the historical legal fights for woman’s rights and racial equality. For millenia, the legal system treated women as property. Assaulting a woman was a crime, yes, but the penalties imposed always included paying a fine to the woman’s father (if she were unmarried) or her husband, because the man in her life was deemed to have been harmed by the degradation of his property.

Similarly, Andrew discovers, once he is a free robot, that since there is no owner to whom damages would be owed, the legal system doesn’t consider anyone assaulting and damaging him a crime as assault. Vandalism, perhaps, but then, who is the owner who should be compensated for the damage?

It seems ridiculous to us now that some people, simply because of their gender or the color of their skin, had once been in a similar situation: harming them wasn’t inherently a crime, it was only a crime if it caused their “owner” to suffer a loss. And especially frightening to realize that in the matter of sexual assault laws in the U.S., for instance, that as recently as the 1970s the law was still structured this way. A woman couldn’t file rape charges against her husband or sometimes even her ex-husband, because once married her consent was no longer hers to give or withold, in that regard.

Andrew’s struggle for human rights parallels, thus, every oppressed groups struggle for equality. Something that I came to appreciate more some years later, when I finally bought my own hardcover copy of The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories and re-read this particular short story again. There is even a point, during the discussion about the assault laws, where another character makes the same argument at homophobes current make against hate crime laws: they aren’t needed, because the action is already a (minor) crime under existing laws.

Asimov’s story about a robot who wants to be a human might seem, on the surface, to be little more than a retelling of Pinocchio, but we see here one of the Grandmasters of Science Fiction—a sci fi writer who first reached prominence during the “golden age” of sci fi—turning a civil rights argument into a rattling good tale of old-fashioned science fiction. Who would have thought an old, white (okay, jewish, but still) male sci fi writer who made his first professional sale in 1939 would be a social justice warrior? Don’t tell the melancholy canines!

When I read “The Bicentennial Man” I was a very closeted high school student, terrified that people would find out I was queer because I knew that strangers, friends, and even family members would see me as an abomination if they knew. So the story of Andrew, who wanted to be seen and accepted as a person certainly struck a chord. Even if his ultimate solution, dying, seemed like a terrible way to achieve his goal.

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

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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

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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!