(1) The UCLA Library’s Special Collections include the Gene Roddenberry Star Trek collection and the Robert Justman Papers.
A year ago the Special Collections’ blog posted Justman’s memo to Roddenberry about some wigs and hairpieces that had gone missing. The Captain of the Starship Enterprise was the prime suspect.
Back in the day Shatner’s denials about wearing a toupee were news, but people long ago quit keeping his secret.
That anger spilled out in 1967 when the prestigious Life magazine sent a photographer to the Star Trek set – not to profile Shatner but Nimoy, who was being photographed having his pointy Vulcan ears put on in the make-up room.
James Doohan recalled in his memoir: “Bill’s hairpiece was being applied. The top of his head was a lot of skin and a few odd tufts of hair. The mirrors on the make-up room walls were arranged so that we could all see the laying on of his rug.”
Shatner suddenly exploded angrily from his seat and ordered the photographer to leave. George Takei, aged 70, who played Sulu, recalls: “Leonard was livid. He refused to have his make-up completed until the photographer was allowed back.”
(2) In celebration of Star Trek’s 50th anniversary in 2016, publisher Simon & Schuster is bringing back the popular fan fiction writing contest, Strange New Worlds.
Ten winning selections will be published as part of an all-new official anthology, coming from Simon & Schuster in 2016.
Plus, two first prize winners will receive a free, self-publishing package from Archway Publishing!
Register for the contest here.
(3) “CBS Pulls ‘Supergirl’ Episode Due To Similarities To Paris Attack” reports ScienceFiction.com.
Out of respect for the events that happened in Paris last Friday, CBS has decided to delay the episode of ‘Supergirl’ set to air tonight, titled ‘How Does She Do It?’ Apparently the episode revolved around Supergirl dealing with a series of bombings around National City, which the network felt might be a little to similar to the tragic events that struck Paris. With all of the heartbreak and discord currently enveloping that poor city, it makes perfect sense why the network would delay the episode, especially when shows like ‘Supergirl’ should serve as an escape for people from the real world, not a twisted reflection of current tragedies.
(4) “J.K. Rowling Said THIS Is Her Favorite Harry Potter Theory” – the theoretical tweets are posted on PopSugar.
The first Harry Potter book came out 18 years ago, but not a day goes by where new theories and plot coincidences don’t shock us all (and make us want to reread the entire series). J.K. Rowling keeps up with them too and she recently answered a fan’s question about which is her favorite.
(5) This year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special will be shown in North American cinemas on December 28 and 29. Get tickets through Fathom Events
The Doctor is back on the big screen this holiday season for a special two-night event featuring an exclusive interview with Alex Kingston and a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the special featuring Peter Capaldi, Stephen Moffat and more….
It’s Christmas in the future and the TARDIS is parked on a snowy village street, covered in icicles, awaiting its next adventure. Time traveler River Song meets her husband’s new incarnation, in the form of Peter Capaldi, for the first time! Don’t miss this unique opportunity to celebrate the holidays with fellow Whovians in cinemas this December.
(6) It seems you can’t guarantee a win by betting on Albert Einstein after all. IFL Science brings word that an “Experiment Proves Einstein Wrong”.
Scientists at the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) have proven beyond reasonable doubt that Einstein was wrong about one of the main principles of quantum mechanics and that “spooky action at a distance” is actually real.
We are now certain that entanglement, the ability of particles to affect each other regardless of distance, exists and that it’s an intrinsic property of the universe. When a pair or a group of particles are entangled, they cannot be described independently from each other. Measuring a particular property, like velocity, of a single particle affects all the other entangled particles.
Einstein and many other scientists believed that this phenomenon was paradoxical, as it would allow for information to be exchanged instantaneously across vast distances. He dubbed it “spooky action at a distance” and he believed that there was a way to reproduce this phenomenon with classical physics. He claimed that there were hidden variables – quantities that we didn’t or couldn’t know – that would make quantum mechanics perfectly predictable.
(7) Mark Lawrence seeks feedback on what really creates a sense of diversity in fiction.
JK Rowling told the world after the event that Dumbledore is gay. There was no need to mention it in the books – it didn’t come up. So … after reading seven books with gay Dumbledore and no mention of it … do gay people feel represented?
If Tolkien rose from the grave for 60 seconds to mention that, by the way, Gandalf is black … would that be delivering diversity?
Or does diversity mean seeing black people’s experience (in itself a vastly diverse thing) represented in fantasy – and the fantasy world needs real-world racism imported so the reader sees that particular aspect of black people’s experience?
In my trilogy, The Red Queen’s War, the main character is of mixed race. It’s not mentioned very often – though he does meet someone in the frozen north who mocks and intimidates him over his ‘dirty’ skin. In the trilogy I’m writing at the moment, Red Sister, the world is reduced to an equatorial corridor hemmed in by advancing ice. All races are mixed and have been for thousands of years. There are many skin tones and it’s of no more note or interest than hair and eye colour. Does a person of colour reading that feel represented – or does the failure to connect with the prejudice of the real world mean that they don’t feel represented?
I don’t know. I’m asking.
I’m not writing these books to promote diversity or represent anyone – the worlds and characters are just the way they are – just how the pieces of my imagination and logic meshed together on these particular occasions. But the question interests me.
(8) Congratulations to Jonathan Edelstein on his first professional story publication, “First Do No Harm”, at Strange Horizons.
For twenty-seven thousand years—through kingdoms and republics, through prophets and messiahs, through decay and collapse and rebirth—the city and the medical school had grown around each other. The campus stretched across districts and neighborhoods, spanning parks and rivers, but few buildings belonged to it alone: an operating theater might once have been a workshop, a classroom a factory floor. The basement room where Mutende sat in a circle of his fellow basambilila was an ancient one and had been many things: office, boiler room, refrigerator, storage for diagnostic equipment. Remnants of all its uses were in the walls, the fixtures, and most of all, in memory….
(9) At The 48th Sitges – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia, The Invitation, directed by Karyn Kusama, picked up the Award for Best Feature Film in the Sitges 2015 Official Fantàstic Selection. The winners of the festival’s other awards can be found here.
(10) MousePlanet has the details about what’s going on with Star Wars at Disneyland – a long article with lots of photos — but SPOILER WARNING.
If you don’t want to know anything about Star Wars – The Force Awakens before you see it in the theater, you should probably skip this update too. Before you go, heed this warning: If you wish to remain spoiler-free until December 18th, don’t go into the Star Wars Launch Bay, don’t see the Path of the Jedi feature in the Tomorrowland Theater, and don’t ride Star Tours. Hyperspace Mountain is spoiler-free, and a complete blast – you can enjoy that worry free, and see the rest of the additions in a month….
Star Wars Launch Bay
The lower level of the former Innoventions building – now officially known as the Tomorrowland Expo Center – is now the Star Wars Launch Bay. From the moment you step inside, you enter a spoiler-filled space packed with artwork, props and merchandise from across the Star Wars saga, including from the upcoming movie Star Wars – The Force Awakens. The Launch Bay is divided into six sections, with some smaller areas around the outer ring of the building.
Entrance and Gallery
The largest portion of the Launch Bay is devoted to case after case of props and replicas from the Star Wars Saga, including previews of people, places and things from Star Wars – The Force Awakens. Again, if you’re trying to avoid spoilers, you have no business in this exhibit.
The Light Side (Chewbacca meet-and-greet)
Enter a rebel hideout, and come face-to-face with the best co-pilot in the galaxy. To occupy you while you wait in what could be a very long line, the queue is filled with props from the Light Side, including lightsabers and helmets.
The Dark Side (Darth Vader meet-and-greet)
Like the Light Side, the queue for the Darth Vader meet-and-greet is filled with Sith props. Lord Vader isn’t much one for conversation, but he does have some prepared remarks for your encounter on the deck of a Star Destroyer. Disney PhotoPass photographers are on hand to document your meeting.
Star Wars Landing Bay carpet.
(11) Norbert Schürer discusses “Tolkien Criticism Today” in LA Review of Books. It takes awhile, but he finally finds something good to say.
It is perhaps no wonder, then, that the field of Tolkien studies is in a sad state. This is not to say that there aren’t excellent critics (such as Tom Shippey, Verlyn Flieger, and Jane Chance) and outstanding scholarly venues (particularly the venerable journal Mythlore and the more recent annual Tolkien Studies). However, judging by seven recent works of Tolkien scholarship, there are various challenges in the field. Much criticism features weak, underdeveloped arguments or poor writing, and the field is overrun by niche publishers who seem to have little quality control…..
With the Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien: The Forest and the City (in parts), the future of Tolkien studies is perhaps not entirely bleak. The Companion in particular is a volume from a well-established publisher, which actually gives Tolkien academic cachet by including him in their Companion series. The essays in this volume and in Tolkien: The Forest and the City make well-developed, well-written, comprehensive, and compelling arguments. Thus, these books show the two requirements for good Tolkien criticism. For one, he should be treated like any other author in being discussed in seriously peer-reviewed journals and established academic presses rather than in essay collections and niche publications. Just as importantly, Tolkien should not be treated with kid gloves because he is a fan favorite with legions to be placated, but as the serious and major author he is.
(12) Jennifer M. Wood discusses “11 Famous Books That Have Proven Impossible to Film” at Mental Floss.
6. UBIK
Believe it or not, there is a Philip K. Dick novel that has yet to be made into a movie. Which isn’t to say that an adaptation of this 1969 sci-fi tale of telepathy and moon colonization (set in the then-futuristic year of 1992) hasn’t been tried. As early as 1974, filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin commissioned Dick to adapt his own work for filming. Dick finished the script in less than a month; though it was never produced, it was published in 1985 as Ubik: The Screenplay. In 2006, A Scanner Darkly producer Tommy Pallotta announced that he was readying the film for production. In 2011, it was Michel Gondry who was confirmed to be at the helm … until earlier this year, when Gondry told The Playlist that he was no longer working on it.
(13) Farnam Street Blog’s “Accidents Will Happen” is an excerpt from Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, 2001), about the management of America’s nuclear arsenal.
A B-47 bomber was taxiing down the runway at a SAC base in Sidi Slimane, Morocco, on January 31, 1958. The plane was on ground alert, practicing runway maneuvers, cocked but forbidden to take off. It carried a single Mark 36 bomb. To make the drill feel as realistic as possible, a nuclear core had been placed in the bomb’s in-flight insertion mechanism. When the B-47 reached a speed of about 20 miles an hour, one of the rear tires blew out. A fire started in the wheel well and quickly spread to the fuselage. The crew escaped without injury, but the plane split in two, completely engulfed in flames. Firefighters sprayed the burning wreckage for 10 minutes—long past the time factor of the Mark 36—then withdrew. The flames reached the bomb, and the commanding general at Sidi Slimane ordered that the base be evacuated immediately. Cars full of airmen and their families sped into the Moroccan desert, fearing a nuclear disaster.
The fire lasted for two and a half hours. The high explosives in the Mark 36 burned but didn’t detonate. According to an accident report, the hydrogen bomb and parts of the B-47 bomber melted into “a slab of slag material weighing approximately 8,000 pounds, approximately 6 to 8 feet wide and 12 to 15 feet in length with a thickness of 10 to 12 inches.” A jackhammer was used to break the slag into smaller pieces. The “particularly ‘hot’ pieces” were sealed in cans, and the rest of the radioactive slag was buried next to the runway. Sidi Slimane lacked the proper equipment to measure levels of contamination, and a number of airmen got plutonium dust on their shoes, spreading it not just to their car but also to another air base.
(14) Tomorrow you can download Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Stories Inspired by Microsoft —
— an anthology of short stories written by some of today’s greatest science fiction authors. These visionary stories explore prediction science, quantum computing, real-time translation, machine learning, and much more. The contributing authors were inspired by inside access to leading-edge work, including in-person visits to Microsoft’s research labs, to craft new works that predict the near-future of technology and examine its complex relationship to our core humanity.
AUTHOR ROLL CALL
Elizabeth Bear · Greg Bear · David Brin · Nancy Kress · Ann Leckie · Jack McDevitt · Seanan McGuire · Robert J. Sawyer The collection also includes a short graphic novel by Blue Delliquanti and Michele Rosenthal, and original illustrations by Joey Camacho.
(15) Abigail Nussbaum has “Five Comments on Hamilton”.
If you’re like me, you probably spent some portion of the last six months watching your online acquaintance slowly become consumed with (or by) something called Hamilton. And then when you looked it up it turned to be a musical playing halfway around the world that you will probably never see. But something strange and surprising is happening around Hamilton–a race-swapped, hip-hop musical about the short life and dramatic death of Alexander Hamilton, revolutionary soldier, founding father of the United States, co-author of The Federalist Papers, and creator of the US financial system. Unusually for a work of pop culture that is only available to a small, even select group of people, Hamilton is becoming a fannish phenomenon, inspiring fanfic and fanart and, mostly, a hell of a lot of enthusiasm….
(16) Local Three Stooges fans will convene November 28 at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. The 18th Annual Alex Film Society The Three Stooges Big Screen Event “showcases six classic Stooges shorts featuring Moe, Larry, Curly and Shemp preparing, throwing and wearing food. Will high society matrons be hit in the face with cream pies? Soitenly!”
On the bill of fare — A Pain In The Pullman (1936, Preston Black), Healthy, Wealthy and Dumb (1938, Del Lord), Idiots Deluxe (1945, Jules White), Crash Goes The Hash (1944, Jules White), Sing A Song Of Six Pants (1947, Jules White), Dutiful But Dumb (1941, Del Lord).
(17) SF Site News announced this year’s ISFiC Writer’s Contest winner:
M. Aruguete won the ISFiC Writer’s Contest with her story “Catamount.” The contest is sponsored by ISFiC in conjunction with Windycon. Aruguete won a membership at Windycon, room nights, and $300. Her story was published in the con program book. This year’s contest was judged by Richard Chwedyk, Roland Green, and Elizabeth Anne Hull.
(18) Jeff Somers, in a guest post for SF Signal, argues that his stories with psionics should stay on the sf shelf at the bookstore.
As the TV Tropes page on psychic powers says, “Telepathy, clairvoyance, pyrokinesis—the powers are supernatural, but the names are scientific, which is good enough for soft Sci-Fi.” This sort of disdain is the top layer of a debate that’s been raging for decades about whether or not a story can have psychic powers and still be considered Science Fiction as opposed to Fantasy. The argument is simple: There is absolutely no evidence that supports psychic powers of any kind being possible, and without at least the real-world scientific possibility, they’re essentially magic powers. Which makes your story a Fantasy, thanks for playing, you might as well shove a bearded wizard in there and start reading Wikipedia articles about broadswords.
Anyway, I started thinking about all this recently because I’ve been writing and publishing digital-only short stories set in the Avery Cates universe, and in that universe (from the very beginning) there are psionic (er, psychic) powers…
(19) Mindy Klasky points out the varied uses of feedback, in “C is for Critique” at Book View Café.
Critique partners offer authors valuable insight into what works and what does not work in a book. Sometimes, that criticism is directly on point—the mere statement of the problem is enough to help an author see what needs to be fixed. Other times, an author concludes that a critic is mistaken—she doesn’t understand the book, or she isn’t familiar with a particular sub-genre, or she was having a bad day as she wrote her criticism. Even in those cases, the rational writer considers the criticism as a warning that the reader was pulled off track at that particular point. Often, a critic finds fault with a particular aspect of a book (e.g., “your heroine sounds whiny when she talks to her best friend”) but an author discovers a completely different fix (e.g., the heroine shouldn’t be talking to her best friend in that scene; instead, she should be taking steps to solve her problem more directly.) Critics aren’t omniscient, but they can be good barometers of when a story succeeds.
(20) Kameron Hurley says this is “Why You Should Be Watching The Man in The High Castle“:
I’m not sure when I realized that this wasn’t a story about the Nazis and Japanese Empire laying waste to the happy United States we have in our happy memories. I think it was when the Japanese Empire raids a Jewish man’s house, seemingly for no reason, and I realized it looked a lot like a swatting raid, or a raid on some innocent brown man with an Arab-sounding name, or the FBI raid on an innocent professor accused of sending sensitive material to the Chinese. And in that moment I realized the entire world I’d been presented thus in the show far wasn’t so much different from the United States in 2015, and that in fact the show was very much aware of that. If you’re brown, or black, or Muslim, or have a non-white sounding name, or you look at a TSA agent funny, or say something about supporting terrorism online (threatening to murder a woman is still OK! But I digress), get ready to get raided, detained, tortured, thrown into prison, or disappeared. I thought about our creepy no-fly lists, about police throwing students to the floor in classrooms, about minor traffic violations that end with somebody strangling you to death in prison and pretending you totally hung yourself with a plastic bag. I thought of this whole world we’ve built, post-World War II, and realized this show wasn’t saying, “Wouldn’t things be so different?” but instead, “Are things really as different as we think?”
(21) Move and groove like everyone’s favorite kaiju with Logemas Godzilla Simulator.
There’s something big coming this way… Logemas’ latest Motion Capture and VR demo!
We’re tracking 7 objects, hands, feet, hips, chest and an Oculus DK2 with Vicon Bonita cameras and streaming into the Unreal game engine for some mayhem!
Of course, we all want to know where they attach the tail-motion-generator.
[Thanks to Petréa Mitchell, Meredith, Will R., Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]
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There is definitely something textual that the wizarding community isn’t particularly open or progressive, and that can add the idea that several students kept themselves in the closet. (Especially if you consider that Harry’s time at Hogwarts is supposed to be 1991-1998, a very different landscape in which to be a gay teenager than today.) And while a Word Of God announcement about Dumbledore’s sexuality that wasn’t in the text is problematic, that knowledge does add a whole new shading to Dumbledore’s backstory highlighted in Deathly Hollows.
It would have been better that it was in the text, but one thing Rowling does throughout, with the exception of a handful of chapters, is keep things tight in Harry’s biased-and-with-blinders-on POV. Harry’s kind of dense and self-centered; he could barely figure out that Ron and Hermione were deeply into each other, and he spent all his spare time with the two of them. He’s exactly the sort of privileged worldview that doesn’t notice the absence of diversity.
@ Greg Hullender:
It can also be about the interaction of cultures and points of view, which can but doesn’t necessarily imply oppression or conflict.
@clack
We could have a long debate over the numbers, but the truth is that until the day when sexual orientation is treated like eye-color or handedness, the numbers from surveys are going to under-represent the truth. Here’s a NYT article that discusses that in more detail. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/opinion/sunday/how-many-american-men-are-gay.html
The best numbers I’ve seen suggest about 4% of men are exclusively gay and perhaps 75% to 80% are exclusively heterosexual, with everyone else in between. But it’s hard to know.
As you say, in a place like Hogworts, you might expect to see more openly gay people, but not because it attracts them. Rather, it would be because they felt safe being open.
@Greg Hullender
Gotcha. I personally like the option of both, so there’s that anecdata for my various minority credentials. 🙂
My hed iz pastede on yay – in this case I meant fake, shallow, not real.
@Jonathan Edelstein
That meets the dictionary definition of diversity, but it is certainly not what most people mean when they complain about the lack of diversity in books, films, etc. Pretending otherwise is a good way to make people angry. (Adding a French person does not make up for having no black people.)
I don’t know if this is what anyone else means by it.
Isaac Asimov’s “The Currents of Space” and other stories in similar milieux have people whose skin is described as dark. Beyond that they act exactly like all the other cardboard caricatures of middle class Americans that most of his characters were.
I have his stories serialized in magazines, and the illustrations are usually cartoony drawings of comic book-style white men and women with a dot screen laid over their faces so they look grey.
@ Greg;
I didn’t mean to suggest that adding a French person would make up for having no black people – my fault for not being sufficiently clear. What I meant was that being any kind of minority is not merely an experience of oppression but a cultural heritage. In a hypothetical future where African-Americans are not oppressed, it’s likely that they will still have a different point of view from other Americans, not only due to the history of oppression but also due to the continuing influence of several ancestral West African cultures. And the part that does result from the history of oppression will continue to have influence even if the oppression were to cease – cultural change is a multi-generational process, and people like to hold onto their history.
I don’t think that present-day oppression (“present” measured as of the time of the setting) is a necessary part of telling that story, or that a story which involves African-American characters necessarily has to be about oppression.
So… I’ve been following the diversity conversation here, and one thing is troubling me. As a (would-be, budding, not-yet-published) writer, I’ve been trying to deal with issues of racism and kyriarchy. Might I ask for some insight and suggestions from the hivemind?
The setting is essentially so far in the future that modern ethnicities can’t apply, but the cultures that have developed have their own biases and discriminations; because of the homogenity of genotypes, it’s less about skin color and more about culture, but that cultural discrimination can be really sharp. Like, for example, the nation-state that occupies a portion of Europe expanded into and absorbed the Iberian peninsula, which for several hundred years had their own culture, but the European state still views them as backwards and uncultured. Iberians are marginalized, rarely elected to higher offices, and mistrusted by the majority Europeans. It’s a Big Deal when an Iberian becomes the ground control director for the space mission the story focusses on. (Obviously these are different names than what will be used in the story.)
The thing is, though, I’m a pasty white cis-het guy who has about as much privilege as you can cram into this pudgy body. These are elements that I can’t handwave away, they are central to the story that I want to tell, but portraying them, depicting them properly is not coming easy… even if they are “made up” ethnicities/classes.
So, um… help?
The Ancillary series doesn’t import contemporary American racial/ethnic identities or oppression to its far-future milleu, but inter-ethnic conflict is essential to the plot.
Back on Earth-770, I know of one organization which scheduled multiple “diversity” events to coincide with Jewish holidays. They’re so diverse, they make [redacted] a safe space for Catholics and Protestants….
Greg said
If you had avoided that “should”, I’d have no argument at all. My coming-out involved no self-hate whatsoever, although I’m right there with you on the fears, the need to be cautious, the circumspect navigation of bookstores, bars, and the rest of the underground culture.
In the general discussion:
With respect to diversity, it’s more than just paying lip service to skin color, sexual orientation, and other marked states: you have to address these from the default position. When authors don’t get this, they’re usually living in a highly privileged state, such as being white heterosexual males. If you want to see diversity in a marked state that’s positive and subtle, yet profound, look at Ben Aaronovitch’s Wizards of London series. Has no one else noticed? All of his characters are described in the same manner, including the white people. In other words, being white isn’t a default for comparison to, it’s another variable of being human, and is used as a regular descriptor, just as it is for every other possible marker of humanity. This is someone who gets diversity deep down.
He also titled his final chapter in one of his books as “Mornington Crescent”, so that tells you what kind of a person he really is.
Really, when we think about it, any kind of person — any human at all — is equally likely to have [adventure], so on the face of it, yes, you could plug in a black woman for Captain Kirk, and still have a Star Trek adventure. (Captain of the USS Saratoga, anyone remember her?) A deeper understanding of the different ways in which people experience their lives, in comparison to the accepted default, leads us to a greater appreciation of the diversity of human lives. It should also lead us to examine that “default” and possibly even change it. When the default human being is more inclusive, then diversity is even easier.
@clack, @Greg
Yep I have no faith in those figures. The “Demographics of sexual orientation” page on Wikipedia shows that the numbers can be all over the place depending on the question asked and methodology of the survey.
However on Harry Potter I think part of the problem is that Hogwarts isn’t very representative of real schools in the UK anyway. In style it is somewhat of a throwback to the public school stories of the middle of last century. I am a year or two younger than Rowling. and from my experiences of school (I went to an all boys school – well all boys until I got to the sixth form when the school enrolled its first two girl students in the sixth form) and there were no hints of any relationships between the boys. Of course it may be different these days, although I’m not that sure – my nephew currently goes to the same school.
To my mind, one tricky aspect of representing diversity in far-future or secondary world settings is the twin specters of “person with superficial characteristic who is otherwise identical to majority/dominant group” and “person whose difference from majority/dominant group is unrealistically mapped precisely from the author’s culture”. What I mean by the second (to use a deliberately silly example) is that a story set in 25th century North America fails similarly whether it describes people with different ethnic/racial backgrounds but shows a completely homogeneous monoculture, as it would if it shows cultural differences that are close mirrors for present-day cultural differences.
Representing diversity in a 25th century setting might simply mean showing a variety of clearly distinct cultures — most likely with the lines drawn in rather different places than they are today and where the manifestations of those cultures are as different from contemporary experience as the other aspects of that future setting are.
@Jonathan M.
So you’re just trying to show the anti-Iberian prejudice rather than “telling” it in an infodump, and you want some advice as to what real discrimination looks like?
The simplest kind is overt. “Iberians don’t wash properly; I always use a toilet seat cover since we hired him.”
Then there’s the partly-true stereotype. “Iberians are all criminals.” The same week that an Iberian jewel-theft ring is broken up. Or an Iberian manager is arrested for embezzlement.
And the self discrimination. “Even other Iberians don’t trust them.”
Or discrimination of low expectations. “I realize this job is too hard for you, but we can find something more suited to your abilities.”
Hardest is the unconscious sort. “I treat everyone the same. It’s sheer coincidence that no Iberian has lasted more than three months on my team.”
In a place where there has been long-term, deep discrimination, almost everyone is a bigot, whether he/she knows it or not. The only question is how they deal with it. “Everyone is prejudiced against the Iberians. Even the Iberians! You just need to be conscious of the fact and compensate for it.”
Most people trust their gut feeling a lot. When prejudice is part of the equation, your gut will lead you astray. The mind abandons bigotry long before the gut does–if it ever does.
At at certain point, discrimination only applies to unsuccessful people. “A top-performing Iberian gets the same appreciation as anyone else, but an Iberian with problems gets the boot, even though anyone else would get some help.”
Finally, Iberians often don’t speak up for themselves because it feels too much like demanding special treatment. “They were nice enough to hire me–I shouldn’t rock the boat.”
@clack
So, being representative in the Potterverse means that about 1 in 80 of her characters would be gay, lesbian, or bisexual. So, strictly speaking, if Rowling has less than 80 characters, she passes this particular diversity test.
1 in 80 does not mean the first 79 are straight.
(There’s also some doubt over those figures – the collection method could well lead to some underreporting)
Bruce Baugh on November 17, 2015 at 7:55 am said:
This is interesting. So what about books like Randall Garret’s Lord Darcy series? They take place today (or, at least, the “today” of when he was writing) but have an alternate history of A) Richard the Lion Heart didn’t die of a crossbow bolt but survived that injury and B) the scientific revolution of the late 16th and 17th centuries didn’t happen with science, but with magic. So magic is studied with the same seriousness as we study science, its practitioners are taken as seriously as we take scientists, and forensic crime solving goes on, but with magic instead of science. There are conferences and learned societies and, presumably, Nobel prizes in thaumaturgy.
Indeed, thinking about it, much of the Fantasy of Manners subgenre is like this. It’s Regency with Magic. But Glamour (Mary Robinette Kowal) is studied with the same scrutiny as, say, optics. Heather Rose Jones’s Daughter of Mystery uses familiar scientific discovery processes to create repeatable liturgical miracles and her Mystic Marriage is a quite serious look at alchemy—with the same experimental mindset we bring to science.
These books are all appealing to the authority of Scientific Process to justify a scientific approach to magic. It’s just the physics are a bit different to produce magical outcomes.
And how is that distinct from the physics being different in Anatham to enable Fra Jad to do what he does, or the Cousins to get to Arbre?
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Ginger on November 17, 2015 at 9:29 am said:
I think the diversity of QUILTBAG experiences are even more diverse than that. No self hate, here. No underground culture, no bars, no desire for gay books (though I enjoy many of them quite a lot, I don’t seek them out just because they’ve got gay characters—it’s more that I appreciate gay relationships in books I’d already like anyway). In fact “gay” is quite down the list of characteristics I define myself by. Aside from being married to someone of the same sex, and dealing with {many expletives deleted} insurance issues, it’s not had that much impact on my life. I recognize this is very different from most other gay people I know so I try to be very careful of projecting my experiences on others.
@Mark: I’ve read Rolling in the Deep and don’t think you need to spend £25 on it, or any amount, really. It is an extremely classical monster story where a motley expedition set out in search of “mermaids” (or something tha they can pass off as such on TV); there are conflicts between the scientific and media parts of the expedition, and interpersonal interactions; we are introduced to a cast of characters who inevitably are going to die one by one; they find real monsters, which are bloodthirsty and have apparently unlimited, unrealistically exaggerated abilities; the first person to die is the biggest asshole on board, the last is the final girl who’s the cloest thing to a main character this ensemble cast has; there’s a hope spot right before the end… Every single development is utterly, utterly predictable. There’s no thematic complexity, it’s just the straightforward story of a disaster. The only thing at all innovative about it is the diversity and 21st-century nature of the nicely written characters, a majority of them women, with various sexualities and disabilities represented. That makes it above-average popcorn fare.
@Ultragotha: I hear you on that diversity of experience! It does depend on location, family, as well as the time — my family was always supportive, and there were gay relatives in my family even before I woke up, but society at large was less welcoming back in the late 70s- early 80s. My partner came out at a later age in her life, so she’s more afraid of her family reaction, but she lives in a world where same-sex marriage is legal, and we can commit PDA in the street without censure. Well, on the sidewalks, really. The traffic around here is dangerous.
Greg Hullender: And there should be self-hate, at least at some stage.
Why? Your experience is your experience and I would never discount it, but self-hatred is certainly not a universal accompaniment to being queer. I was surprised by the realization, certainly, but Yay! has always described my feelings about being queer (and I don’t come from a family or an environment where this was particularly acceptable, but their uneasiness wasn’t my problem).
*is taking notes* Many, many thanks! This is VERY helpful!
@Jonathan M
Anti-Iberian prejudice may also contain a sexualized component. People may be more likely to assume an Iberian wants sex and either be concerned that Iberians will assault them or be more prone to assault Iberians or both. Iberians may not feel free to report sexual harassment or assault. Iberians may spend some of their cognitive effort planning how to gracefully escape harassment or assault or planning how to avoid being accused of it. This issue may affect where or when or with whom they can travel, and impact their private or work lives.
People may assume Iberians are more or less emotional than normal–this may affect whether they are willing to be friends with Iberians, whether they believe an Iberian reporting a problem is exaggerating or hysterical, and whether they believe Iberians can handle high-stress jobs.
I was deeply disappointed when I learned that Kyriarchy did not mean rule by Kyras.
Ultragotha: But, unless memory is failing me (it might, I have a cold), all of those series explicitly say they’re dealing with something magical. They handle it scientifically, in part, but there’s no claim that the magic is anything but magic.
I haven’t read Anathem, so I couldn’t say there.
@Meredith
In movies and television, especially in the late 80s and through the 90s, it was mandatory to have a black character. If male, he was always polite, wellspoken and with no real negative traits. If female, she was a sassy voice of reason. That was the sum of the characterization; being the black guy/girl around a group of white people to reflect them. In the late 90s-00s, the same thing happened with the gay character, who would be heavily feminized (I don’t recall many lesbians used) and, again, would have no actual agency or development beyond being the gay guy.
I’ve always called it ‘checklist diversity’, where you add characters that are secondary to the focus and their role is largely to be the ‘other’ as contrast, as opposed to representing an actual person but checking the box off for minimum required non-whiteness.
Remember how we were wondering if Andy Weir would be eligible for the Campbell? Well, I cornered the MidAmeriCon Hugo Administrator last weekend, and asked him about it, and he said …
[dramatic pause]
that ruling on Campbell eligibility isn’t up to him. Dell Magazines is the sponsor of that particular Not-A-Hugo, and they decide.
I’ve no idea who to ask at Dell….
@Ginger
Just one data point. I first encountered the concept of the “marked” and “unmarked” states a few months ago, but just recently I’ve noticed that I seem to have internalized it in my writing. Suddenly when I do physical descriptions, I find that I’m (e.g.) marking the white characters too.
Oddly, I didn’t consciously decide to do that, but I suppose once you’ve been exposed to the concept you can’t unsee it.
Attention Godstalk aficionados:
In my largely successful quest to procrastinate on my NaNoWriMo efforts, I have been chipping away at my TBR pile. I started Godstalk. Meh’d out in chapter one. Started Sunshine. Devoured it. Picked up Dragon Wing (Weis and Hickman). Finished it. Tried Godstalk again. Got a bit further (not much). Picked up Lock In. Breezed through it in two days.
Contemplating Godstalk again. Don’t want to just keep bouncing off it, though. So, can anyone offer me some hope that yes, indeed, it is really enjoyable (without too many spoilers)? Does it get great as it goes on? So far it seems really generic. I’m a bit worried I’m being pranked (that it’s MST3K experiment “great”, not Lord of Light great).
Oh god, I have really mixed feelings about that anthology. It contains works by several authors, of whom a single story by any one is normally enough to sell me an anthology. But Microsoft’s unethical behavior over the years has had real victims, several of whom are friends of mine, as a result of which, I have not used a Microsoft product in nearly twenty years. (Nor Apple, for quite different reasons.) Maybe I’ll have to modify my long-standing rule and limit it to software, so I can buy a non-software product from MS. But it still feels like a bit of a betrayal.
—-
As for psychic powers, I agree that they’re pretty fantastic, but so are a lot of staples of SF. FTL being an obvious one. Personally, I take SF as being mostly a matter of intent. If it’s presented as being scientifical, I’m willing to accept it as such, even if it’s ridiculous to think it might be. And we’re in danger of restarting the SF vs. Fantasy debate again….
—-
Devin wrote:
This. Precisely. Couldn’t have said it better myself. Moreover, the Standard Model is basically complete at this point, aside from pinning down some of the numbers we’re still a little vague on (like the actual mass of a neutrino), but it’s a model, not a theory. It provides no reason for the neutrino even having mass, let alone an explanation for why that mass is what it is. It’s basically a more-or-less complete model of a subset of physics, and we’re going to have to go beyond it to explain things it doesn’t cover (and doesn’t try to).
GR is probably going to have to change, but at the moment, we don’t exactly have a solid model, let alone a theory, for how it will have to change.
@ Meredith:
Monika Kothari gives the example of the “underdeveloped black authority figure,” i.e., a black boss, judge, cop, etc. who rarely appears, gets very few lines and isn’t developed as a character.
Kyra on November 17, 2015 at 10:36 am said:
I was deeply disappointed when I learned that Kyriarchy did not mean rule by Kyras.
And thank God that is true. Those dice are evil.
Last night I saw the first twenty minutes of Incubus, a 1966 movie whose chief points of interest are (a) it stars a pre-Trek William Shatner and (b) the dialogue is all in Esperanto. (Micro-review: it makes the first Trek movie look like an action-packed thriller.)
I had described it to my wife as having Shatner in his pre-hairpiece era. Was I mistaken about the “pre-hairpiece” part?
@Ginger, Jon: This default thing, I think I noticed it most clearly in S.L. Huang’s Zero Sum Game. It’s set in modern L.A., the narrator and most of the characters are non-white, and whenever the narrator’s describing a new person and they’re white, that’s the first thing she says.
@Jonathan M:
Writing the Other is a workshop and also a book by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward that I can highly recommend (have assigned it in creative writing classes).
Cannot resist: the PHOTOSHOPPED diversity from a university: literally cut and paste diversity.
On God Stalk, do at least keep reading until Jame sees the temple of her God for the first time — that’s the point you realize this book is likely to be darker and less generic than it seemed. In some ways this book is very 80s, and I’m not among those who’d call it my favorite novel, but I’d never, at all, call it uninteresting.
@robinreid
Strongly second that – Writing the Other was my first introduction to some of these concepts in a literary context, and it’s become a mainstay for me as I write.
And Jim Hines’ post with lots of links.
I’ve always felt that J.K.Rowling’s revelation about Dumbledore’s being gay was a comment on the fact that, in most situations, being gay or straight, shouldn’t matter. Lately, there seem to be fewer stories about teachers losing their jobs once someone finds out that they’re gay, but when the Potter books first came out, it seemed to be happening a lot. I agree that representation matters, and I’m all for more gays everywhere (my daughter just married her partner! Yay! More representation for everyone!), but I also think it’s important to occasionally point out that one’s orientation is not relevant to one’s ability to do one’s job.
Seconded.Thirded (I’m too slow posting). Shawl and Ward are a couple of great people who really know their stuff.Incubus. That certainly triggers memories. It certainly is a vehicle for Shatner to Shatner his lil’ heart out, but if the wigs were solidly in use during Star Trek, I doubt we saw Shatner scalp au natural there, either.
*shudder* Incubus.
Fifthed-minus-one on Writing the Other.
@ robinreid: Wow, great links!
@ andyl
That matches my own experience so precisely that I seriously wondered if we were at school together!
Then I thought a bit and double-checked, confirming that I’m approaching 9 years older than JKR. 🙁
One of my problems with the series was that, from my own experience, I didn’t think a school (particularly a boarding school) could possibly function properly if it were run on the lines depicted. The blatant House-partisanship of the teachers seemed particularly unreal.
Yeowtch. >.O
I sure hope they rehabbed their photo policy afterwards to make sure campus photographers occasionally caught a minority student on film so they wouldn’t have to fake it again.
Did you see the Onion’s satire of the story? Pretty coldly spot-on: http://www.theonion.com/article/black-guy-photoshopped-in-1433
I particularly liked
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan on November 17, 2015 at 2:16 am said:
And seriously, people: read Dave Hutchinson. I need somebody to talk about these books with.
I recently finished Ancillary Sword, I’m reading a Neal Asher now, and will choose between Europe at Midnight and Ancillary Mercy for what follows (I’ll probably have a fantasy or non-fiction between those last two). This process will not be made faster by Man in the High Castle imminently dropping…
Lots of those books seemed unreal, and not just the magic parts. While enjoyable enough, plenty in them seems there only to yank around the emotions of the main characters and is made of what one of my friends calls 100% pure plotdevicium.
I’ve had discussions with young persons who love the books but consider the worldbuilding to be cardboard: the slightest poke and it all falls apart.
You know, I’d like to download that Future Visions anthology, but it seems to not be available for download; instead, you’ve got to go through the Amazon, Kobo, or iBooks stores, and I haven’t got access to any of those. Does anyone know if an ePub is available someplace?
@ Peace Is My Middle Name:
On the other end of the spectrum, there are law professors who write scholarly articles about due process in the Ministry of Magic.
@Xtifr
When I saw Stories Inspired by Microsoft I admit my first thought was “A BSOD stamping on a human face forever huh?” On the other hand it was free so it could be seen as costing them money…
You know, I get the desire to incorporate diversity on more than a skin-deep level, but I also know that one of the most strangely moving things I’ve ever experienced was the casual, unremarkable kiss between between two gay characters in that Battlestar Galactica spinoff that didn’t last more than a handful of episodes. One, if I recall, was a gangster, and you see he and his husband greet each other with a kiss. No other characters react, and the relationship is never seen or spoken of as anything but normal. The implication is that this is just something that humanity has gotten over. I remember feeling this strange relief, and longing to live in a world absent this particular bigotry. There’s something to be said for presenting the likely possibility that our ugliest hangups are not necessarily forever.
* That said, I thought the Dumbledore reveal would have benefited from a bit more background. And that Harry Potter could have benefited from a bit more diversity in general.
Just finished Vurt and I kind of want to write a review from an alternative universe where Burroughs, Burgess, and Dick are considered to be the Big Three of the Science Fiction Golden Age so I can say it was a very good book but a bit on the traditionalist side.