firecat

Wiscon panel report: Class, Culture, and Values in SF&F
Tracks: Reading, Viewing, and Critiquing Science Fiction (Power, Privilege, and Oppression)

Description:
Class isn't just how much money you have or what work you do; it also involves cultural beliefs, values, and attitudes that are expressed in how you talk, what you do in your free time, and all sorts of less tangible elements. (See Barbara Jensen's book Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America, due out in mid-May.) The SF&F writing and fannish communities are mainly middle-class folks, which makes the class values of SF&F works mostly middle class, too. What works and creators explore classes outside the mainstream, white, European, middle-class value systems? What class markers tend to show up most, or least, often? Do these works show the non-middle classes positively? negatively? realistically?

Panelists:
Moderator: Debbie Notkin
Eleanor A. Arnason
Alyc Helms
Danielle Henderson
Rose Lemberg

[My notes aren't a complete transcription and may represent my own language rather than the actual words of the panelists. I welcome corrections. I did not identify all audience commenters by name. If you said something I paraphrased here and want your name to be used, please comment or send me a private message.]

[The book mentioned in the panel description, Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America by Barbara Jensen, is available at http://cornellpress.cornell.edu/ For a 20% discount use promo code CAU6.]
( Read more... )

I was delighted to discover that the moderators of the excellent LJ community 50books_poc, for reviews of books by people of color, have created a sister community on Dreamwidth: 50books_poc

The announcement is here along with a request for input on how people want the two communities to interact: http://50books-poc.dreamwidth.org/374.html

So here's what I want.
An ebook reader app.

• It works on both the iPod/iPad and Android smartphone.
• It stores books and bookmarks in the cloud so when I open the book on a different device, it remembers where I was.
• It also stores books and bookmarks locally so I don't need to have wireless access to use it.
• It lets me upload and store DRMed and non-DRMed epub format books.

Here's where my research has gotten me so far. These apps meet all the criteria except the one listed.

• Bluefire: Doesn't store bookmark data online.
• Google Books: Can't upload your own books, as far as I know.
• Kobo: Stores bookmark data online for books you get through its store, but not for books you upload.

Do you know any apps that fit all the criteria?

deirdre asked me to signal-boost this article written by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, published in Rose Fox's Publisher's Weekly blog. They were moved to write this article when an (unnamed) agent offered to sign them if they removed a gay character from their YA novel.

http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/genreville/?p=1519

Excerpt:

This isn’t about that specific agent; we’d gotten other rewrite requests before this one. Previous agents had also offered to take a second look if we did rewrites… including cutting the viewpoint of Yuki, the gay character. We wondered if that was because of his sexual orientation, but since the agents didn’t say it out loud, we could only wonder. (We were also told that it is absolutely unacceptable in YA for a boy to consensually date two girls, but that it would be okay if he was cheating and lying. And we wonder if some agents were put off because none of our POV characters are white.)
...
We are avoiding names because we don’t want this story to be about one agent who spoke more bluntly than others whose objections were more indirectly expressed. Naming names can make it too easy to target a lone “villain,” who can be blamed and scolded until everyone feels that the matter has been satisfactorily dealt with.

Forcing all major characters in YA novels into a straight white mold is a widespread, systemic problem which requires long-term, consistent action.

When we privately discussed our encounter with the agent, we heard from other writers whose prospective agents made altering a character’s minority identity—sexual orientation, race, disability—a condition of representation. But other than Jessica Verday, who refused to change a character’s gender in a short story on an editor’s request, few writers have come forward for fear of being blacklisted.

The article also includes links to the following annotated lists:

• YA sf/fantasy with main or major LGBTQ characters
  
• An annotated list of YA sf/fantasy with protagonists of color, Part I: Author surnames A – L.
• An annotated list of YA sf/fantasy with protagonists of color,Part II: Author surnames M – Z.

This looks like an interesting book:

Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories, with N.K. Jemisin, Amal El-Mohtar, Sara M. Harvey, Mike Allen, Shweta Narayan, Meredith Holmes, Georgina Bruce and Matt Kressel

Preorders of the print book available at Torquere Press' bookstore.

http://upstart-crow.livejournal.com/427179.html

Anathem by Neal Stephenson


I tend to dislike fiction where the author breaks the "fourth wall" by popping into the text to say something clever. Stephenson does this a lot in his books (the ones I've read), but I tend to make an exception for him. Nevertheless, I liked this book better than Snow Crash or The Diamond Age because it seems he does the "clever authorial injection" less in this book. Also the plot hangs together better. So my overall impression of the book was that it is more "mature" than those earlier works.

It has all the other stuff that Stephenson does well: multiple complex societies with long histories, with echoes of old Earth cultures, interacting in interesting ways; hard science, math, and philosophy explained in lay language (he did a particularly good job of explaining the science in this book; he did a less good job with the philosophy); plot twists and puzzles; multiple points of view.

Stephenson is less good at portraying romantic relationships, emotion, and complex character development than at that other stuff. The main characters do develop and most of the characters have distinct personalities and realistic, if simple relationships. It works well enough and doesn't distract from what he's good at.

I particularly enjoy a novel that makes up a society I want to live in, and Anathem does a great job of that. (I've always kind of wanted to live in a monastery, except for the celibacy and believing in religion parts.)

Another reviewer on Goodreads complained about all the made-up words in Anathem. I think this is one way in which the audio version is superior to the paper version. I knew that made-up words were being used, but a lot of them sound enough like Latin and French words that I didn't get very distracted by them.

The audiobook is narrated well, mainly by William Dufris. Stephenson himself reads some of the definitions from "The Dictionary, 4th Edition, A.R. 3000" that preface each chapter.

The audio production includes monastic-sounding vocal music that was composed for it; it includes overtone singing similar to that performed by the Gyuto monks. (You can hear more of it on the Neal Stephenson web site.)

View all my (goodreads.com) reviews >>

Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child


My friend piglet/porcinea said that the Jack Reacher series is "like a feminist James Bond" and that's a pretty good description, although Bond is more upscale and camp, based on this novel. This is the first of the Reacher series I've read, and I'll be reading more. I liked this especially because it emphasized a team approach to solving a crime, rather than being all about the Lone Hero(tm), and because most of the characters are smart and competent (I dislike thrillers where the plot is driven by stupidity), and because Child takes a geeky delight in details, and the details actually make sense.

View all my (goodreads.com) reviews >>

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

I didn't expect much from the book that inspired George Romero to make Night of the Living Dead (I am not a fan of zombies), but I was pleasantly surprised. Published in 1954, I Am Legend had a huge influence on the modern vampire and zombie horror genres. The story focuses exclusively on the activities and inner dialogue of a man who believes he is the last survivor of a plague that infected all other humans with a zombie-ish form of vampirism. The book is well written and doesn't pull any punches. The survivalism/vampire trope is basically an excuse to explore human emotion in all its variety.

Trivia note: Richard Matheson also wrote the Star Trek:TOS first-season episode "The Enemy Within."

View all my goodreads.com reviews >>

I listened to the Audible Modern Classics edition, well narrated by Victor Levine. I especially liked his characterization of the Blue Fairy Godmother.

This book is set in WWII Germany, post-war New York City, and a prison cell in Israel. It has no science fiction tropes. I did not find any of the characters particularly likeable (but that's true of most Vonnegut for me).

A line from this book is one of the favorites in my quote file, and it sums up one of the themes of the book:

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

This book is evidence that Vonnegut is one of the great American writers. He has the gift of making hope out of emptiness and simplicity, something that many people assume only Zen Buddhist masters can do.

View all my goodreads.com reviews.

---

Goodreads.com posted to my Facebook status line when I added this book, and my friend supergee commented that he didn't like the book. I asked why and he wrote "Not sf, crappy characters, dumb moral."

I agree with point 1.

I also somewhat agree with point 2 (see above) and it puzzles me why Vonnegut's "crappy characters" don't bother me the way some writers' crappy characters do. I think it has something to do with how Vonnegut's protagonists mostly aren't emo, and/or how Vonnegut's writing style is definitely not emo. (I'm contrasting it to my reaction to Dan Simmons's Hyperion, which has some tremendously emo characters which are punched up because the writing style can be pretty emo.)

I don't know what supergee thinks the moral of the book is; the closest I can come to a moral in it is what I quoted above. I don't think that's a dumb moral, although I'm not sure I agree with it. (For me, it might be a prescription that I tend to over-follow. I have a hard time pretending, and it limits me in some ways.)

A Different Light by Elizabeth A. Lynn

If I told you the plot of this book it would sound like a space opera, or possibly a romance, but it doesn't entirely have the feeling of either. It's sort of noir, and it's sort of...langorous. The protagonist is a visual artist, and Lynn pulls it off so I got a pretty clear picture in my mind of what he was seeing and depicting.

I really liked that the main characters were bisexual and non-monogamous and that no big deal was made out of this -- it was just how they behaved naturally. I really liked that the relationships among the main characters were emotionally complex and that the characters gave each other emotional space.

Yes, I mostly read this book for the atmosphere and relationships, and I didn't read carefully enough to comment critically on the science or the plotting.


View all my Goodreads.com reviews.

There may be spoilers in the comments.

Romancing the Beast
Track(s): Reading, Viewing, and Critiquing Science Fiction (Feminism and Other Social Change Movements)
Description: Paranormal romance almost always features the hero as a paranormal being and the heroine as an ordinary human. How does this resonate with gender relations and power relationships in our society? And is it emblematic of women seeing men as Other?
Moderator: Vito Excalibur
Panelists: Catherine Cheek, Stef Maruch, Heidi Waterhouse, Janine Ellen Young

I was a panelist so I didn't take very thorough notes.

When I read the panel description I immediately thought of a bunch of counterexamples, so I played the panel contrarian.

Counterexamples:
--Anita Blake books (everyone is paranormal. However, heroine starts out more human. In one sense she stays more human than her entourage, in another sense she becomes more paranormal than they are)
--Marjorie M. Liu, A Taste of Crimson (a romance in which the lovers are a male vampire and a female werewolf)
--First Underworld movie (ditto, except a female vampire and a male werewolf)
--My unpublished vampire erotica story, with a female vampire and a male human (Vito asked if my vampire character is very old. She isn't. However, she is older than the human character.)

We discussed stories in which the male beast becomes human (e.g., most versions of Beauty & The Beast) vs. not (e.g., Robin McKinley's Sunshine, although I gather this isn't a bog-standard romance)

I mentioned Cocteau's version of Beauty & The Beast, in which the beast becomes human but he resembles a man who had been pestering Beauty, and she expresses some displeasure/distrust at the change.

Things that were mentioned, but I don't remember what was said about them:
--Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance by Jayne Ann Krentz (Editor)
--http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/
--The beta hero (I think this referred to a less dominant, more sensitive male hero. I didn't say this on the panel, but Liu's A Taste of Crimson had some gender-role switching between the protagonists and the vampire could have been said to be a beta hero.)
--Dark Hunter series
-- (the beast remains "beastly")
--Reaper TV show: Hispanic boy has relationship with demon woman
--Queer reading of paranormal romance

Someone suggested there should be a panel in the future about the uterine replicator.

Toward the end of the panel we began discussing "male human, female sexbot" romances. A theory was promulgated for why women prefer beast romances and men prefer sexbot romances: Women fear loss, and men fear failure. The beast is only attractive to the particular woman who sees his inner beauty, so she won't lose him. A man can't mess up with a sexbot (is this what was said? I can't remember), so he doesn't experience failure. (In her writeup vito_excalibur vito_excalibur said that this was interesting but these arguments could get too essentialist. I agree.)

SF writers are supposed to be good at building compelling and believable worlds. So why is it so hard to build a world featuring working class characters in working class settings, especially given that a lot of SF writers come from that kind of background? What has worked, for you? What hasn't? Who clearly hasn't tried? Who has tried, but failed spectacularly? SF fans have done a good job of demanding better–written women and minorities in SF; what about their working class counterparts?

Panelists: Eleanor A. Arnason, Chris Hill, Michael J. Lowrey, Diana Sherman
Moderator: Fred Schepartz

badgerbag has detailed notes on most of this panel here. I'm including my notes from the beginning of the panel. My notes aren't verbatim so don't blame the panelists for any words I am putting in their mouths.


Panelists introduce themselves:
Eleanor: Writes science fiction and fantasy
Diana: Writes for a video game company
Fred: Novelist, cab driver, union organizer, shows communist party card
Chris: British working class origins
Michael: Union organizer, NWU


Fred: We aren't going to have a debate on class because that panel has been done before and it hasn't worked well. But let's define "working class"

Eleanor: Can get fired by boss, doesn't own means of production
Diana: Personal schedule is defined by job, can be fired
Chris: Opportunities are limited by upbringing and attitudes
Michael: Economic well-being is at the mercy of someone else


Fred: What's the status quo with regard to working class characters in SF?

Eleanor: Blue collar workers are not represented -- there are no plumbers in the future, e.g. Shadow economy is represented. Blue collar work is repetitious and doesn't include creative problem solving (e.g. in construction -- because you don't want creative problem solving in construction work). So it's not inherently exciting. SF came out of pulps, and has a bias toward stories of individual action.

Diana: Working class people exist in SF&F but are usually a secret prince or an apprentice who saves the planet. They are "hidden" and then they "leave." Working class job is seen as a trap. SF is escapist adventure.

Chris: It's a generic truth about literature that working class people don't generate story unless they are escaping. Dickens gets a cooking for writing about the working class, but actually all his working class characters were either tragic or comic.

Michael: Soldiers are working class people who show up in SF. Roots of SF are in American pulp literature, which has a bias against collectivism. Leader stories are about leaders, not the movement. Exception: Some Harry Turtledove, and Eric Flint's 1832 series. (Eric Flint was a union organizer.) There is potential for greatness in working class people, so unleash it in your writing.

Fred: Labor struggle is difficult to talk about in America because it's difficult for us to talk about class. Some writers are working class but write escapist SF because they want it or think audience wants it. Also to portray a labor struggle requires an ensemble cast which is harder to write (more characters).


Fred: Will there be a working class in the future?

Michael: Who built the Death Star?

Audience: Robots!

Eleanor: If robots built the Death Star they would also do the fighting. In Charlie Stross book Saturn's Children, only robots are left. People are versatile/cheap. (So there will continue to be a working class.

Diana: Humans are more flexible than robots.

Chris Hill: People are cheap. In utopias, who is doing the work? These societies are often untenable because the author is not interested or isn't thinking about those issues.

Michael: Writers of magic utopias should be required to work at jobs where they have to maintain something. "There's no such thing as 'away.'"

(badgerbag's blogging begins here)

During this section of the panel I was thinking about Jeanne Duprau's book City of Ember (which is also a movie), because it's all about work. ( spoilers )

A number of jobs are described including courier, maintainer of electrical systems, maintainer of water pipes.

In a later section of the panel, one of the panelists was describing a story by Kornbluth about a Puerto Rican dishwasher who is a math genius. The panelists were lamenting that this kind of story is no longer being written. But it reminded me of a story in Walter Mosley's Futureland in which a technical genius is born into a poor family. So maybe some of them are being written again.

These are the Wiscon panels I'm on. I've never been on a Wiscon panel before. I would welcome any comments about these panel topics and any ideas you would like to see addressed at these panels. And if you're at Wiscon I hope you come, but if there's something else fascinating going on at the same time, I hope some of you go to that instead, so I can find out what happened!


Romancing the Beast
Sat 4:00 - 5:15PM, Conference 4
Moderator: Vito Excalibur. Panelists: Catherine Cheek, Stef Maruch, Heidi Waterhouse, Janine Ellen Young

Paranormal romance almost always features the hero as a paranormal being and the heroine as an ordinary human. How does this resonate with gender relations and power relationships in our society? And is it emblematic of women seeing men as Other?

I wanted to be on this panel because the disparity has always bugged me. To give an example that has nothing to do with paranormal romance, I refuse to see Cyrano de Bergerac in any form because I'm not aware of any gender-reversed version.


Dealing With Your Male Answer Syndrome
Sun 10:00 - 11:15AM, Assembly
Moderator: John H. Kim. Panelists: Suzanne Allés Blom, Moondancer Drake, John Helfers, Stef Maruch

Although it's not absolute, there's a strong tendency among masculine people to always want to have the definitive answer for everything, even if they don't necessarily know. In panels and elsewhere in life, it can be hard for men to admit they don't know things. Why is this? How can men deal with the pressure (either internal or external) to always have the right answer? How do women and other non–masculine folks deal with Male Answer Syndrome? If you think the answers to all these questions are obvious, then you need to come to this panel!

I wanted to be on this panel because it's All Answer Syndrome All The Time at my house...and the XY person in the relationship is not the only person participating. So I have experience from multiple sides. I also have funny stories and techniques that you'll want to know about!


Wish Fulfillment in Fiction
Sun 2:30 - 3:45PM, Assembly
Moderator: P. C. Hodgell. Panelists: Beth Friedman, Anne Harris, Stef Maruch, Caroline Stevermer

What is the role of wish fulfillment in fiction? If you're a writer, what personal wishes do you want your stories to fulfill? Are they the same ones you want to read about? How do our fictitious wishes affect our everyday dreams?

I wanted to be on this panel because I fundamentally don't get wish fulfillment fiction, and I think that has something to do with why I find it difficult to write fiction, so I hope to provide an alternate viewpoint and I also hope it will shake something loose.

The OH is envious that I get to be on a panel with P.C. Hodgell. (He isn't going to Wiscon this year.)

George Alec Effinger Live! From Planet Earth by George Alec Effinger

rating: 3 of 5 stars
I have been a huge fan of When Gravity Fails since it came out, and I recently read and enjoyed the other Marîd Audran books. So I wanted to find out if Effinger's short fiction was as good as those novels.

My overall impression was "mostly not." But even though I disliked a number of the stories for one reason or another, I found it interesting to read a set of stories that had been written over such a long period of time (between 1971 and 1997).

This book was published after Effinger's unfortunately early death and each story (or set of stories) is introduced by a different writer. Do skip the introductions until afterward if you aren't familiar with the stories, because some of them contain spoilers.

One thing I found interesting was that although all the stories are skillfully written, stories written later (generally but not universally) brought up more complex emotions for me than stories written earlier.

Of particular interest are the seven stories and one poem that Effinger wrote under a pseudonym, O. Niemand. Each of the pieces was written in the style of a different American writer (O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, etc.), and they all more or less take place in the same sfnal world. The gimmick itself is pretty clever, and he pulls off effectively, but I thought most of the stories also worked well as science fiction in their own right. (I read them without knowing the gimmick, and the only one I recognized the style of was the poem.)

View all my goodreads.com reviews.

I listened to an audiobook edition of Kindred by Octavia Butler. It is fucking brilliant, and really disturbing because it is about slavery and abusive relationships. It is also depressing because it's about unpleasant parts of US history. But that's not the whole story.
( lots of spoilers, and if you haven't read it, you don't want to be spoiled about some of them )

There are also notes of hope. Several of the characters who have cross-racial interactions gradually move toward seeing at least some people of the other race as human—that is, similar enough to themselves to attempt communication. I imagine that Butler is saying there is a human urge to see other people as equal humans, and that if there’s enough interaction between people who start out as Other to each other, eventually Similar will start to infiltrate. But there are cultural and historical and personal reasons why, in a slave-owning society, no one on either side can fully replace Other with Similar.

I found Kindred a compelling read in a way that Parable of the Talents wasn't for me.

There's a certain emotional detachment in both books, at the same time that Butler describes some horrific behavior and screwed up relationships. I'm not sure if the detachment I sense is due to the way the audiobook narrators chose to approach the works, or if I would have felt the same way if I read the books on paper. Butler's characters for the most part are survivors, whose response to suffering is to get up and go back to the work of surviving and at the same time following their dreams. So it feels as if some of the emotional hard stuff is diluted or buried in hard work. On the other hand, what this also means is that Butler anchors her stories very strongly in the work the characters do and therefore in day to day living.