Pixel Scroll 12/2 Have Rocket, Will Unravel

(1) SECOND OPINION. The President of Turkey is not a forgiving audience for social satire. So we learn from “Turkish Court to Determine if Gollum-Erdogan Comparison is Insult” at Voice of America.

The fate of a Turkish doctor is in the hands of experts who are tasked with determining whether he insulted the Turkish president by comparing him with the Gollum character from the “Lord of the Rings.”

Bilgin Ciftci could face two years in jail for sharing images on Facebook that seemed to compare President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the creepy character from J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels and film adaptations….

Turkish law states that anyone who insults the president can face a prison sentence of up to four years. Even stiffer sentences could befall a journalist.

Between August 2014, when Erdogan was elected, to March of this year, 236 people have been investigated for “insulting the head of state,” according to the BBC. Just over 100 were indicted.

 

Erdogan Gollum

(2) DIANA’S BOOK ON KINDLE. Now you can pre-order a Kindle edition of Bandersnatch, Diana Pavlac Glyer’s book about the Inklings. The release date is December 8.

You can also request a download of the first chapter at the Bandersnatch website.

(3) THESE THINGS COST MONEY! Destroying Death Stars is bad for galactic business. Or so claims a Midwestern academic. “Professor calculates economic impact of destroying ‘Death Stars’”.

Assistant professor of engineering at Washington University Zachary Feinstein recently published a study entitled “It’s a Trap: Emperor Palpatine’s Poison Pill” which posits that there would be a “catastrophic” economic crisis in the Star Wars universe brought on by the destruction of the Death Stars.

Feinstein’s research indicates that the two Death Stars constructed in the films cost approximately $193 quintillion and $419 quintillion respectively to complete. He calculated the cost of the planet-destroying space weapons by comparing them to the real life USS Gerald Ford.

According to Feinstein, the economic impact of both Death Stars being destroyed within a four-year period would cause an economic collapse comparable to the Great Depression.

Feinstein says the size of the Galactic economy would drop by 30 percent without a government bailout, which he doesn’t believe the Rebel Alliance would provide.

Well, there’s your problem. Rebel governments are notoriously reluctant to bail out recently overthrown tyrants.

(4) MONDYBOY TAKES STOCK. Ian Mond is “Moving Forward” at The Hysterical Hamster.

For the last three months I’ve had the nagging suspicion that I was a dead man walking when it came to writing reviews.  As much as I’ve enjoyed the process of reading novels on shortlists and then sharing my thoughts, the time it was taking to write a half decent review meant I wasn’t keeping pace with my reading.  And as the gap between reviews and books read widened that nagging suspicion became a cold hard reality.

I simply don’t have the time to produce reviews of a quality high enough that I’m happy to see them published.  Yes, I could try to write shorter pieces, limit myself to 500 words, but every time I’ve attempted this my inner editor has taken a nap and before you know it I’ve spent five days writing a 1,500 word ramble.  And, yeah, I could Patreon the shit out of this blog in the vain hope that asking for cash will compel me (more likely guilt me) into writing a review every couple of days.  But fuck that.  I’d rather enjoy the books I’m reading then feel weighed down by the responsibility of having to review them.

So I’ve made the mature decision to quit while I’m ahead….

Will it last?  Will I be back in eight months with a similar post talking about how I no longer have the time to turn on my computer let alone snark about the Hugo Awards?  Very likely.  (I mean, it’s taken me three days to write this blog post).

(5) ROOTS. SF Signal’s latest “MIND MELD: The Influential roots of Science Fiction”, curated by Shana DuBois, asks:

What genre roots have you found to be most influential and inspiring for you and your own writing?”

Providing the answers this time are Usman T. Malik, SL Huang, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Ferrett Steinmetz, Wendy N. Wagner, Kat Howard, Daryl Gregory, Amal El-Mohtar, Lesley Conner, and Jennifer Marie Brissett

(6) AH, THE CLASSICS. Cat Rambo says yes, the “classics” are worth reading, in “Another Word: On Reading, Writing, and the Classics” at Clarkesworld.

The point I want to make about my perspective on the “classics” is that I’ve read a substantial portion, both of the F&SF variety and the larger set, and made some of them the focus of study in grad school. (Again from both sets, since that focus was an uneasy combination of late 19th/early 20th American lit and cultural studies with a stress on comics/animation. You can see me here pontificating on The Virtual Sublime or here on Tank Girl. I’m not sure I could manage that depth of theory-speak again, at least without some sort of crash course to bring me back up to speed. But I digress.)

So here’s the question that brought me here: should fantasy and science fiction readers read the F&SF classics? And the answer is a resounding, unqualified yes, because they are missing out on some great reading in two ways if they don’t. How so?

  1. They miss some good books. So many many good books. At some point I want to put together an annotated reading list but that’s a project for tinkering with in one’s retirement, I think. But, for example, I’m reading The Rediscovery of Man: The Collected Stories of Cordwainer Smith right now (in tiny chunks, savoring the hell out of it) and they are such good stories, even with the occasional dated bit.
  2. They miss some of the context of contemporary reading, some of the replies those authors are making to what has come before. The Forever War, for example, is in part a reply to Bill the Galactic Hero; read together, both texts gain more complexity and interest.

(7) This Day In History

  • December 2, 1939 – Laurel & Hardy’s The Flying Deuces is released, a movie without any science fictional content of its own (unless you count Oliver Hardy’s reincarnation as a horse in the final scenes), but figures strangely into an episode of Doctor Who. During “The Impossible Astronaut” (Doctor Who, S.6 ,Ep.10),Amy Pond, the Doctor’s companion, and Rory Williams watch the movie on DVD. Per the Wikipedia: “Rory sees The Doctor (Matt Smith) appear in the film running towards the camera wearing his fez and waving, before returning to dance with Stan and Ollie. This was achieved with Matt Smith dancing in front of a green screen.”

(8) BAXTER MARS SEQUEL. Gollancz has announced plans to publish Stephen Baxter’s sequel to Wells’ War of the Worlds.

The Massacre of Mankind is set in 1920s London when the Martians from the original novel return and the war begins again. However, this time they have learnt from their mistakes, making their attempts to massacre mankind even more frightening.

Baxter, who also co-wrote the Long Earth novels with Terry Pratchett, said it was an “honour” to write the sequel. “H G Wells is the daddy of modern science fiction. He drew on deep traditions, for instance of scientific horror dating back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and fantastic voyages such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. And he had important near-contemporaries such as Jules Verne. But Wells did more than any other writer to shape the form and themes of modern science fiction, and indeed through his wider work exerted a profound influence on the history of the twentieth century.”

It’s due to be published in January, 2017. This time, we’re told, the Martians have learned the lessons of their failed invasion: they’ll no longer fall prey to microbial infection.

(9) FASTER. Gregory Benford has posted John Cramer’s contribution to The 100 Year Starship Symposium, “Exotic Paths To The Stars.”

I was Chairman of the Exotic Technologies Session held on October 1, 2011, at the 100 year Starship Symposium in Orlando Florida.  This chapter draws on the talks given in that session, but it does not represent a summary of the presentations.  Rather, I want focus on three lines of development in the area of exotic technologies that were featured at the Symposium, developments that might allow us to reach the stars on a time scale of a human lifetime: (1) propellantless space drives, (2) warp drives, and (3) wormholes.  With reference to the latter two topics, I will also discuss some cautions from the theoretical physics community about the application of general relativity to “metric engineered” devices like wormholes and warp drives that require exotic matter…

(10) HINES DECOMPRESSES. Jim C. Hines has “Post-Convention Insecurities” after his stint as Loscon 42 GoH.

I understand the phenomenon a bit better these days, but it still sucks. Partly, it’s exhaustion. You’re wiped out after the convention, and being tired magnifies all those insecurities. And the fact is, I know I stick my foot in it from time to time. We all do. It’s part of being human.

But I spend conventions trying to be “on.” Trying to be friendly and entertaining and hopefully sound like I know what the heck I’m talking about. Basically, trying to be clever. And I trust most of you are familiar with the failure state of clever?

Sometimes a joke falls flat. Sometimes I say something I thought was smart and insightful, realizing only after the words have left my mouth that it was neither. Sometimes an interaction feels off, like I’ve failed at Human Socializing 101. Or I get argumentative about something. Or I fail to confront something I should have gotten argumentative about. I could go on and on about the possibilities. That’s part of the problem.

The majority of the conversations and panels and interactions were unquestionably positive. But there’s a span when my brain insists on wallowing through the questionable ones, and I keep peeking at Twitter to double-check if anyone has posted that Jim C. Hines was the WORST guest of honor EVER, and should be fired from SF/F immediately.

Whether or not Jim had any influence on the result, I think it’s appropriate that in a year when he was GoH Loscon put together its most diverse range of program participants, probably ever – substantive speakers from all kinds of backgrounds.

(11) HOW GOOD WAS GOODREADS CHOICE? Rachel Neumeier browses the genre winners of the 2015 Goodreads Choice Awards.

If it’s a massive popularity contest you aim for, then the Goodreads Choice Awards is ideal. I dunno, I think in general I am most interested in the results of awards like the World Fantasy Award, which has a panel of judges; or the Nebula, which requires nominations to come from professional writers. In other words, not wide-open popularity contests. On the other hand, there’s a place for pure popularity too, obviously, and it was really quite interesting seeing what got nominated in all the Goodreads categories.

Of course I read mainly books that have been recommended by bloggers I follow and Goodreads reviewers I follow and so on, so these awards don’t much matter to me — no awards matter to me in that sense — but still, interesting to see what’s shuffled up to the top of the heap for 2015…

(12) SEE TWILIGHT ZONE WITH HARLAN. Cinefamily’s December events at the Silent Movie Theater in LA includes a celebration of the 30th anniversary of CBS’ 1985 version of The Twilight Zone, with Harlan Ellison, Rockne S. O Bannon, Bradford May, Michael Cassutt, Alan Brennert, Paul Lynch, William Atherton, J.D. Feigelson, Martin Pasko, Rebecca (Parr) Beck & Steven Railsback in person. December 5, starts at 5:30 p.m., tickets cost $14 (free for members).

Twilight zine new

You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension-a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas-you just crossed over into the Twilight Zone…

Rod Serling opened his beloved, suspenseful, witty, and social commentary-filled drama with the same intonation every time, before presenting each delightfully formulaic science fiction fantasy, from 1959 to 1964. Those episodes will never cease to be replayed, but in 1985 CBS gave fans some new material to latch onto… an 80s revival of the series, created with the participation of writers, filmmakers, and actors for whom the original was a beloved memory. Join Cinefamily and the cast & crew of the 80s Twilight Zone at this 30th anniversary marathon and celebration, showcasing our absolute favorite 80s style sci-fi!!!

 

(13) KUNKEL FOLLOW-UP. After last week’s post “Kunkel Awards Created”, I was able to ask some follow-up questions of the organizers. James Fudge, managing editor of Games Politics and Unwinnable, filled in some more background.

Most of the heavy lifting on this award needs to be credited to Michael Koretzky and the SPJ. Prior to AirPlay, Michael had talked to me about creating some kind of award to incentivize good games journalism. I thought this was a great idea. I also have a lot of respect for Bill Kunkel, and seeing how he is considered to be the very first “games journalist”  (and helped created the first publication dedicated to video games) it seemed right and fair that he should be honored by having an award named after him. I didn’t know Bill personally but we talked a lot about journalism, the industry, and wrestling on a mailing list dedicated to games journalists called “GameJournoPros.”

After the criteria for the awards was sorted out I reached out to the widow of Bill Kunkel to ask for permission, She kindly gave us her approval.

(14) THE YEAR IN AFROSFF. Wole Talabi lists “My Favorite African Science Fiction and Fantasy (AfroSFF) Short Fiction of 2015”.

2015 has been a good year for African Science Fiction and Fantasy (or AfroSFF, as seems to be the consensus abbreviation). The year saw the release of Jalada’s Afrofutures anthology, Issues 2, 3, 4 and X of the new and excellent Omenana and  Short Story Day Africa’s Terra Incognita. Still to come are AfroSFv2 (edited by Ivor Hartmann), African Monsters (edited by Margret Helgadottir and Jo Thomas) and Imagine Africa 500 (edited by Billy Kahora and Trine Andersen). So much good stuff to read and more to come….

So in the interest of fueling discussion and analysis of AfroSFF stories in general, here are my favorite AfroSFF stories of 2015 in no particular order.

(15) Filer Von Dimpleheimer has done some light housekeeping in the first two volumes of his Short Fiction Eligible for the 1941 Retro-Hugos series.

I uploaded version 1.1 of Volume Two. I fixed some minor errors, but the main thing is that I put in the disclaimer page that was in Volume Three. I’ll do the same for Volume One as well.

The links should all be the same and still work. They worked for me after I had signed out of that account, but if you or any Filers have any problems, just let me know and I’ll try to sort it out.

(16) Harrison Ford was hilarious on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

First, he tried explaining how he dislocated his ankle on the Star Wars: The Force Awakens set, using a Han Solo action figure.

Then, Ford and Jimmy downed Greedo shots and debuted a colorful drink created in honor of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

(16) IT’S ONLY ROCK’N ROLL BUT I LIKE IT. Bill Roper says an ancient filk mystery has been solved.

Over 40 years ago, at the Toronto Worldcon in 1973, a young man joined the filk circle, sang a song, and vanished without a trace. The song was a lovely piece based on Arthur C. Clarke’s story, “The Sentinel”. Anne Passovoy was there and ended up reconstructing the song as best she could and adding it to her repertoire, noting that the song wasn’t hers, but presumably was something written by the anonymous young man.

And that was where things rested until last weekend at Chambanacon, when Bill Rintz and Bill Furry pulled out a song at their concert.

It was almost, but not quite the song that Anne had reconstructed. It was clearly the song that Anne had heard. All of the bones matched.

And so, as it turned out, did the feathers. Because this song was on The Byrds 1968 album, The Notorious Byrd Brothers, and titled “Space Odyssey”.

You can hear the original here. The lyrics are here.

(17) CARDS AGAINST WHOMANITY. io9 will let you “Print out the Doctor Who version of Cards Against Humanity right now”

Cards Against Humanity is the hilarious party game for horrible people, and now you can mix the game’s political incorrectness with your knowledge of Doctor Who thanks to a fan-made edition called Cards Against Gallifrey.

Because Cards Against Humanity is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike, anyone can make their own cards for the game, provided they publish them under the same license and don’t sell them. The comedy group Conventional Improv performs a game show based on Cards Against Humanity at different conventions, and this fall, in honor of the Doctor Who 50th anniversary, they played Cards Against Gallifrey and have made their version of the game available to the public. Naturally, it’s crude, offensive, and imagines most of the cast naked.

(18) GREEN ACRES. Kind of like living in a Chia Pet. “This kit lets you assemble your own green-roofed Hobbit home in just 3 days”  at The Open Mind.

Magic Green Homes fabricates such structures using prefabricated vaulted panels and covers them with soil, creating flexible green-roofed living spaces with a Tolkienesque charm. And the kicker? They’re so easy to construct, just about anyone can build one.

(19) ZICREE. Sci-fi writer-director-producer Marc Zicree gives you a tour of his Space Command studio while shooting Space Command 2: Forgiveness — and shows clips

[Thanks to Hampus Eckerman, von Dimpleheimer, Alan Dorey, John King Tarpinian, and Steven H Silver for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]

237 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 12/2 Have Rocket, Will Unravel

  1. In the EU, post-RotJ, didn’t Luke almost immediately set up an academy out of sight on a moon somewhere? Made a lot more sense than doing nothing that we’re assuming happens in the New Canon Universe.

    Still not sure I’m prepared to let go of the whole EU. There’s a lot of world building and storyline to just discard which I think helped make the universe more interesting than just three movies.

  2. lurkertype on December 3, 2015 at 8:32 pm said:
    @redheadedfemme: Not, indeed. But then I think JCWrong read a book titled “Home Fires” by a Gene Wolfe from another dimension, since his review bore no resemblance to the autographed copy of a book given to me by this world’s Gene Wolfe (earlier Brian Z. link which I deeply regret clicking on).

    Is that argument by appeal to autograph?

  3. No, that’s bragging. Woo-hoo, I met a Grand Master! (I’ve met 16 of the 31)

    It’s appeal to actually having read the book without preconceptions and thus being able to understand the simple plot instead of making crap up.

    It’s not even close to his best, I probably wouldn’t have kept it if it wasn’t autographed. But even mediocre Gene Wolfe is worth reading once.

  4. I’m not able to comment on which preconceptions you read it with or without.

    But “able to understand the simple plot”? In this case, read it again.

  5. Stuart M on December 3, 2015 at 9:00 pm said:

    Still not sure I’m prepared to let go of the whole EU.

    At first reading ‘Expanded Universe’ as ‘European Union’ was an error on my part – now doing it deliberately and taking sentences out of context is a hobby.

  6. @Hampus: Lordy, that is one hyperactive freaking goat! Thanks for posting that; I LOL’d. I thought maybe it was training like horses who jump over strangely designed barriers.

    @Tasha: Agreed re. the point (as I understood it) of the “Destroy” issues. Methinks, at least, it’s not to make Being BGLT The Point Of The Story.* (Hmm, is being straight ever the point of a story? Maybe so; I’m drawing a blank.) I believe it’s combination of “queer creators” and “queer characters” and…etc.

    BTW I didn’t know the Lightspeed folks were going to do a PoC set next year – groovy.

    * Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That (TM) (I’m actually serious, occasionally I like that.)

    @Heather: And then some folks complain bitterly about being surprised by BGLT content that was hidden by evil marketers with agendas. (sigh) I think you’re right about the marketing – and in fairness, that’s all it is. Then therre’s marketing that glosses over it in mainstream info, but talks it up in Certain Venues where BGLT readers will hopefully find it. 😉

    @Camestros: I also read “EU” that one time as “European Union.” Now I like what you’re doing here. 😀

    I’m too lazy to type any full names.

  7. Lurkertype

    It’s a bit difficult for me to respond, especially since you don’t seem to have understood what was originally said; I also don’t have clue as to what you mean by Edinburgh, is it the 20th/21st century city, or another one?

    Actually, what is wrong with the books is that they are provincialist, isolationist, and insecure. It’s just that they are less provincialist, isolationist and insecure than other writers, and are a great deal less paranoid than the vast amount of their competitors.

    And you have still not grasped that someone born in Egypt, and subsequently tootled around the world, doesn’t regard London as their home and marker of all things that I and others should do. Why on earth should I? I know where I was born; Egypt doesn’t have much in the way of mountains so I suppose I’m grateful that whilst surrounded by deserts there was at least a small mountain in view. That knowledge certainly doesn’t make me slice up bits of Britain; why on earth should it?

    Equally, why on earth should I conclude that no city in the US is worth visiting? I really like New York, and it was very pleasing to go and pay our respects to Ground Zero, and then grab some lunch at a diner. It did upset me, but that was because the people running the diner were on the verge of bankruptcy, because virtually no Americans would come to New York, or visit Ground Zero.

    As a practical matter I have no doubt that there will be a lot of very good deals on the Med this summer; American tourists will cancel in droves. As John Scalzi has pointed out, behaving in a frightened and cowardly manner really doesn’t help, but from experience American tourists really don’t have any risk calculation skills. The only people who can alter the perception of American tourists is American tourists themselves, and the vast majority of those will perform true to stereotype.

    I wish they wouldn’t, since I greatly respect some people in the US, but they will, and I will derive the benefits of large reductions on cruises. Money is good, but stouthearted allies are a lot better…

  8. Lightspeed Kickstarter planned for January 2016 POC Destroy SF
    As with the other Destroy special issues, Lightspeed will be running a Kickstarter campaign for People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction! It will run January 18 – February 19, 2016. Again, as before, if we meet certain stretch goals, we’ll unlock the publication of Destroy Fantasy! and Destroy Horror! volumes as well.

    Submission information can be found at above link.

  9. The builders of DeathStar II probably got a good deal on materials too. After all they only had to fly to the system Alderaan used to be in, and if Alderaan’s composition was anything like Earth(molten core of mostly iron with transuranic elements further down), there would be a giant asteroid field made up of everything they would need, the for the taking. After all no one except rebel Leia is around to claim the land rights.

  10. Stevie, apparently you don’t realize you seem to be carrying around a great big chip on your shoulder. Your anti-American comments are getting pretty predictable. Your tsk-tsking over us dumb Americans canceling travel plans is downright nostalgic for me, though.

    Back in the 1980s, and I might be off a bit because no, I’m not googling it at this hour, there was a series of bombings in Europe that targeted American tourists. Americans who were traveling purely for tourism started changing their plans in droves. Large enough droves that it was a bit of a problem. Ted Koppel, who was a pretty major American news figure at the time, and who had spent his childhood in the UK, used his late news & info show one night to address how low the risk really was, and to encourage Americans to keep European travel plans. As part of this, he had on some guy who apparently had a popular travel show in the UK. And this guy, clearly a genius of staggering proportions and a model of the class, charm, and insight to which Americans can only aspire, proceeded to blather on about how Americans were stupid, rude, and classless, and “like cheap red wine, they don’t travel well.” AND all this canceling of planned travel was an inconsiderate, inexcusable inconvenience to Europeans, who as far as I could tell from his ranting, were absolutely entitled to all those American dollars, even though it would mean tolerating and even being polite to those crude, inferior Americans. How dare we cancel our travel plans!

    Poor Ted Koppel made several attempts to salvage that segment, and get the idiot to talk constructively about why Americans shouldn’t worry about what was really a low risk, but the idiot was quite determined on just telling us how stupid and undesirable we were.

    I think quite a few more travel plans got cancelled the next day, and not because people were afraid. Rather because if you didn’t have a compelling business reason to do so, why the hell would you want to spend your money on people so eager to tell you how inferior you were but that you owed them your vacation cash and business anyway?

    And, this is important, Ted Koppel had one of the most popular nighttime shows in the US at the time. He tried to use his ratings to counter the sharp decline in American travel to Europe, and got instead a degree of obnoxiousness he could hardly believe.

    I wonder if that dumb Brit was drunk at the time, or if that was just the natural level of charm and class necessary to have a popular travel show on UK TV in the 1980s. In any case, the jerk can be proud: I’ve never forgotten that spectacle, and I’ve been to Germany and France, but not the UK.

    Yeah, people may cancel travel plans to Europe for a while, or some will. At least vacation travel–and why not, when there are plenty of nice places to vacation, international travel is getting to be more and more of a hassle, and there is apparently no shortage of Europeans, or at least Brits, to tell us we’re really not welcome anyway; we should be grateful we’re allowed to spend our money.

    So, you know, good job, Stevie.

  11. @Camestros Felapton

    At first reading ‘Expanded Universe’ as ‘European Union’ was an error on my part – now doing it deliberately and taking sentences out of context is a hobby.

    Princess Angela Merkel approves but I’m not sure the Sith Lord David Cameron does.

  12. Princess Angela Merkel approves but I’m not sure the Sith Lord David Cameron does.

    Jar-Jar Farrage surely doesn’t.

    (I agree he looks more like Ackbar, but behaviour wise….)

  13. @Lis

    Hmm, there are only two realistic possibilities for “British 80s travel show”, both of which simply used career presenters (i.e people with news or talk experience), not people with specialist travel knowledge. I’d suspect that whoever you saw was, they weren’t an expert in anything except talking (and from your account they didn’t even do that very well).

    There are various parts of the UK where tourism is vital to the economy, and fears about loss of overseas visitors world have been very real. Those places tend to prefer saying nice things to potential tourists in public.

  14. I remember in 2004, there was a terrorist warning against Zanzibar about the same time I was going there. This was at a time when everyone was so paranoid after 9/11 that every possible rumour was sent out on highest alarm because no one wanted to be the person that had ignored the warning. I remember I thought “Great! Much lower prices!”. And it was true, no americans dared to travel there, the tourism was halved and prices were low.

    But it wasn’t something to be happy about there, because they were people who, in contrast to us europeans, really needed the tourism money.

  15. @Kendall, (Hmm, is being straight ever the point of a story? Maybe so; I’m drawing a blank.)

    Um, well, quite a lot of classic romance novels seem to be about a woman and a man overcoming obstacles in order to fall in love and get married. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre…

    In that a male/female pairbonding is the focus, I’d have to state it’s at least one of the points of the story. But then, I suppose it depends on how you define “the point of a story”, honestly.

  16. Kendall

    Is being straight ever the point of a story? Maybe so; I’m drawing a blank.

    In Lucy Sussex’s story collection A Tour Guide in Utopia, all the main characters (in varied SF and fantasy stories of varied themes) are either queer or unspecified in a way you could assume they were if you wanted. There is one story in which the begetting of biological children is the main subject, and in that one the protagonist is a sraight woman, who has been unable to conceive with her husband.

  17. I’ve read Willie Rushton’s one, also Christopher Priest’s The Space Machine (Time Traveller vs Martians) also some others, but they weren’t coming out again at the same time as mine by a more famous writer….sob.

  18. @Simon Bucher-Jones Wasn’t the Goat Police on Jethro Troll’s Heavy Ruminants album?

    “Who’s that tripping over my bridge? Oh it just the Goat Police”

  19. Mark-kitteh, yes, it was a jaw-dropping spectacle because yes, normally people who want the tourist dollars (or other currency) will be polite and friendly in public, whatever they might be saying to each other in private. Poor Ted Koppel; he knew the drop-off in travel to Europe was both unnecessary and economically costly, and he was trying to calm fears and encourage travel. He never expected that his guest would decide to further discourage that travel.

  20. Kendall:

    is being straight ever the point of a story?

    It’s been long enough that my memory of it is a little vague, but I recall this being my major impression of Sheri Tepper’s Grass — not only were all the characters (except for one minor villain, IIRC) heterosexual, but in every case, a heterosexual desire or romantic history was their primary motivation. This was true across a large enough cast that after a while it started to pull me out of the story.

  21. I’m not sure being straight is the *point* of ALL m/f romances, though I would take it as a likely indicator. But I’ve seen some m/f romances that could be m/m or f/f with surprisingly few changes (and the m/m or f/f romances that demonstrate it), as well as some that would absolutely fall apart.

    (and time period and culture are less a barrier than you’d assume, though that’s partly based on the question of how shallow are the trappings of the time period in question. Romance can be as bad as fantasy for “quasi-medieval setting and 21st century minds”, without as much excuse.)

    Similarly, in modern, historic and many (but not all) fantastic worlds, child-bearing as a plot point tends to increase the pointedness of the characters’ sexuality, whether het or not, because of the question how the child will or has come into the scene, but with SF or sufficiently advanced tech (and by that I mean they’re working on it NOW in some cases) it quickly vanishes again.

    I just feel being the default state (though problematic in ways that are arguably worse) doesn’t equate to being pointed.

    Or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

  22. redheadedfemme:

    In other words: Not.

    All that could be true, and the book still read like a hardboiled crime novel. As some of JCW’s work tries to – but I’m sure Wolfe could achieve the effect better.

    It seems to me that this book is generating more enthusiasm than any work of Wolfe’s since, um, whatever came before An Evil Guest, so it will definitely be worth checking out.

  23. Um, well, quite a lot of classic romance novels seem to be about a woman and a man overcoming obstacles in order to fall in love and get married. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre…

    In that a male/female pairbonding is the focus, I’d have to state it’s at least one of the points of the story. But then, I suppose it depends on how you define “the point of a story”, honestly.

    Yeah, I wouldn’t define “the point of a story” that way at all.

    The point of PRIDE & PREJUDICE is that first impressions can deceive, that both pride and prejudicial feelings can blind one to the truth. That the characters are straight is part of the context. One could write a story about the same point featuring gay characters (or bi, or whatever points on the spectrum you like), and that wouldn’t be a story in which being gay was the point; it would be part of the context.

    Admittedly, had Austen written her story that way, it wouldn’t have been published, but that still doesn’t make straightness the point; it’s context and content and characterization, but it’s not challenged, defended, examined or subjected to some other kind of argument within the work. It’s part of the foundation, part of the story by axiom, not by being a decisive moment, the thing that characters and story wrestle with.

    If straightness is the point of P&P, then so is Englishness or dress-wearing-ness. I’d say those are all attributes, part of the world and social structure that is then used as a stage on which to make its points about struggling with first impressions.

    I would assume that the difference between a story in which LGBTQ-ness is the point versus one where it isn’t is that if the fact of LGBTQ-ness is the issue — someone coming to terms with their feelings or getting someone else to come to terms with them — that’s the point, but if LGBTQ-ness simply is, as part of the foundation, and is a component of some other issue, then it’s not.

    “The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere,” for instance, is about a gay character, but the issues are about honesty and family dynamics more than it is that the lead is gay. His gayness and people’s reactions to it are so central to the story that I can see people saying that it’s one of the points, but I can see people saying otherwise. The fact of his gayness isn’t wrestled with, merely how he should handle it within the family. And the actual turning point realization at the end has nothing to do with his gayness, but with his lifelong relationship with a family member that would be a struggle whether he was gay or not.

    But nobody in P&P struggles with being straight, or with how people think of straightness. It’s not the point, it’s the terrain.

  24. Oh wow, a Gene Wolfe take on the hardboiled genre? Be still my beating heart! That just bumped it way up on my check-it-out list!

  25. a Gene Wolfe take on the hardboiled genre? Be still my beating heart!

    Ha. Different people’s reactions to different books are really interesting. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy hanging out here.

  26. A little bit different way to look at Goodreads Choice Award Results. Top 15 vote-getters. Threshold 30K votes (rounded) or better. No book in the Horror category got close to 30K so it isn’t listed.

    Rank – Title – Author – Vote – Category – Place
    1 Girl on a Train – Paula Hawkins – 106K – Mystery – 1st
    2 The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah – 57K – Historical Fiction – 1st
    3 Red Queen – Victoria Aveyard – 47K – GR Debut Author – 1st
    5 Sword of Summer – Rick Riorden – 43K – Childrens – 1st
    6 Queen of Shadows – Sarah J Mass – 36K – YA Fantasy – 1st
    7 Confess – Colleen Hoover – 35K – Romance – 1st
    8 Trigger Warning – Neil Gaiman – 34K – Fantasy – 1st
    9 Finders Keepers – Stephen King – 32K – Mystery – 2nd
    10 Golden Son – Pierce Brown – 32K – Sci-Fi – 1st
    11 Why Not Me – Mindy Kailing – 32K – Humor – 1st
    12 All The Bright Places – Jennifer Niven – 32K – Young Adult – 1st
    13 Darker Shade Magic – V.E. Schwab – 31K – Fantasy – 2nd
    14 Go Set a Watchman – Harper Lee – 31K – Fiction – 1st
    15 Carry On – Rainbow Powell – 30K – YA Fantasy – 2nd

  27. I’m not sure when this was done, but someone with some Photoshop skills decided to do a run on “police goat”:

    Police Goat

    (E-w-w-w-w Alert/trigger warning: If you do a Google image search on “goat police”, one of the images that comes up is a dismembered human body in a box. Nope, no idea why, didn’t want to find out.)

  28. Jack Lint, etc—

    Baa! Baa!
    That’s the sound of goat police.
    Baa! Baa!
    That’s the sound of the beast.

  29. @Tasha T.: Thanks for the additional info & link. 🙂

    @Cassy B.: Heh, I thought about romance novels! But as you say, how to define “the point.” I was thinking (fair or not), well, you could swap in two men or two women and have the same story (and many writers of same-sex romance do so). So I left it out as not being quite the same as what Greg H. has put forth in the past as examples of gay stories where it’s about being gay (from my hazy memory) or was expecting now (though he was vague on this point, granted!). Versus a story with gay characters you could swap out for straight ones (which seemed like what disappointed him in Queers Destroy SF – the characters could’ve been straight and no big diff).

    Er, if I’ve built a StrawGreg in my head, apologies to Greg H., by the way. I’ve kinda created a tangent and am wandering along it anyway, perhaps. 😉

    @Vasha & @Lenora R.: Okay, this works a little better for me than just all romance, though I’d probably be pretty liberal in the “meh, you could swap those for M/M or F/F and it’d still totally work” in some cases.

    @Andy H.: LOL at this pulling you out of the story.

    @Kurt Busiek: I disagree re. “The Water…” – I mean, yes, honesty and family dynamics, but IMHO his being gay is so central, it falls apart without it, so it is one of the, er, “points.” At least, I feel it’s more a gay story than P&P is a straight story, if that makes any sense. You’d need a significant issue to replace it beyond just having the boyfriend in “The Water…” be a woman.

  30. redheadedfemme on December 4, 2015 at 2:33 pm said:
    a Gene Wolfe take on the hardboiled genre? Be still my beating heart!

    Ha. Different people’s reactions to different books are really interesting. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy hanging out here.

    Even JJ didn’t actually believe that a Gene Wolfe take on hardboiled would suck. He selectively pretends to believe things like that whenever he thinks it scores points for the winning team in his pocket filerverse.

  31. I’d like to contrast two stories by the same author, Megan Arkenberg, to show the difference between a story where it matters that the main character is queer although this is not the subject of the story, and one where they could be straight and it would make no difference whatsoever.

    “All in a Hot and Copper Sky” centers on a woman whose girlfriend, years ago, did something dreadful and headline-grabbing and then died; it’s about how continued media attention and questions have disrupted her grieving process. Perhaps surprisingly, said media is not represented as making any point of them being two women; it’s all about the crime, period. There was nothing in those backstory events that depended on the participants being women, and nothing in the present; so the characters could be any gender.

    In contrast, “And This Is the Song It Sings” is a very feminine and feminist story. (Coincidentally or not, I think it’s a much better story too.) I don’t want to say too much about this story for those who haven’t read it; however, suffice to say, the main character is a woman who drives up and down a lonely highway picking up hitchhiking women and asking them to tell her ghost stories. The stories all involve women too; there is a whole lot of tapping into fears and dangers that is very gendered. Central to the story is the main character’s intense identification with the women she picks up. And there is one who is different in a number of ways, including that she and the narrator share sexual attraction; this encounter is the culmination of increasing confusion of identification, and sexual attraction is an ingredient that matters, but is in no way the point of the story.

    ———
    As for stories where straightness is the subject… there are ones where a man’s heterosexuality (and thus manliness) is threatened or questioned and must be reestablished, most famously Tea and Sympathy.

  32. @Kendall:

    I disagree re. “The Water…” – I mean, yes, honesty and family dynamics, but IMHO his being gay is so central, it falls apart without it, so it is one of the, er, “points.” At least, I feel it’s more a gay story than P&P is a straight story, if that makes any sense. You’d need a significant issue to replace it beyond just having the boyfriend in “The Water…” be a woman.

    I agree with Kurt that something being central and being a “point” are different things, since I’ve said this talking about Water myself in the past: that “it is central…so it is one of the points” is poorly formed.

    ?Think of it this way: a point of a story is something we arrive at. Managing gay identity in a homophobic culture is central to “Water” because its where we start from and the terrain the characters must cross. But the points we arrive at are places like “When lies are impossible the only way to deceive is remaining silent;” “Even when it’s no longer possible to fool others you can still fool yourself;” and “Knowing for certain you love and are loved wouldn’t actually solve all your romantic problems.”

    I’m not saying “Water is not a gay story, because it’s themes are universal.” That amounts to saying, If we (straight people) like it it’s no longer yours (gay people), and that would be obnoxious. It’s a gay story. It’s a gay story and its themes are universal.

    I think in some ways, Water is more annoying to homophobes because the story’s gayness is not the end-point it drives toward but the starting point that enables it. The story doesn’t arrive at the idea that gay love is valid and interesting as a conclusion from argument. It just assumes these things – it demands we accept them as premises at the point of entry. It doesn’t even grant homophobes the stipulation that these premises are worth arguing about.

  33. As someone whose fiction deliberately presupposes queer characters, I find it interesting to see how the topic gets discussed. For example, I would argue that heterosexuality and its concerns is very much the point of Pride and Prejudice, starting from the way that compulsive heterosexuality and its structures construct the need of the Bennett sisters (and their female friends) to achieve marriage as the only viable economic path, to the extreme focus on virginity culture (a concern specifically of particular aspects of procreative heterosexuality) such that transgressions of that culture can taint people’s social standing at several removes. Heterosexuality is the point of P&P, not because P&P is a romance novel, but because the majority of its conflicts and character motivations would not exist except for the social rules around ritualized heterosexuality.

    I get a slight feeling in this discussion that some people think that it’s more socially progressive to perceive queer themes as being “not the point” of a story, even when central. A story can have more than one point. Sometimes one of the points is “I am not erasing this aspect of reality.”

    Let me offer up a conundrum for consideration, taken from my current work in progress (the 3rd Alpennia book). I’ll do my best to avoid any spoilers. In the course of this book, someone in Alpennia writes and publishes a thrilling gothic romance whose plot is very obviously a roman a clef of the story of the protagonists of Daughter of Mystery…except that the character corresponding to Barbara has been made male in this novel. This fictional novel (entitled “The Lost Heir of Lautencourt”) is quite conventional and traditional in its plot and characters and in how the relationship of the protagonists is depicted. It is functionally equivalent to Pride and Prejudice in terms of whether heterosexuality is the “point” of the novel.

    But because everyone (or at least everyone who listens to gossip) is perfectly aware that the characters in The Lost Heir of Lautencourt are meant to refer to two women, the existence of the book is a scandal, public discussion of it becomes a deadly insult, and it would be difficult to argue against the position that the true “point” of the novel is the lesbian relationship (that appears nowhere in the book itself). Knowing that, is it plausible to assert that the novel in its superficial form is not, in some essential way, “about” heterosexuality?

    Books can be “about” something that is so normalized that it has become invisible.

  34. @Heather Rose Jones:

    I get a slight feeling in this discussion that some people think that it’s more socially progressive to perceive queer themes as being “not the point” of a story, even when central.

    I specifically disclaim this. Perhaps some people do feel this way, in which case perhaps they’ll say so.

    ETA: Ultimately, I think this is semantic wrangling over the meaning of “point.” Some people think centrality equals “point” while others don’t.

  35. Heather Rose Jones:

    Sometimes one of the points is “I am not erasing this aspect of reality.”

    Okay, yeah. And I went too far in using the words “would make no difference whatsoever.”

  36. Jack Lint on December 5, 2015 at 6:01 am said:
    When they butt down your front door, how you gonna come?

    – Goats of Brixton

    I totally thought this was going somewhere else.
    Who you gonna call? GoatBusters!

  37. Heather Rose Jones on December 5, 2015 at 9:23 am said:

    … Let me offer up a conundrum for consideration, taken from my current work in progress (the 3rd Alpennia book). I’ll do my best to avoid any spoilers. In the course of this book, someone in Alpennia writes and publishes a thrilling gothic romance whose plot is very obviously a roman a clef of the story of the protagonists of Daughter of Mystery…except that the character corresponding to Barbara has been made male in this novel.

    Oh wow, oh wow.
    I am just thrilled with this snippet.
    I won’t go into the whole write-faster-what-are-you-doing-blogging-here-go-write-yer-book thing, but, hot damn, I can’t wait to see this one come out.
    Have I mentioned how entirely I love both your existing perfect books?
    Sorry, I have my fangirl squeeee back under control now, but third book hints just made me very happy.

  38. Lauowolf:

    Who you gonna call? GoatBusters!

    Whether or not you win the entire internet for that, you surely win this corner of it….

  39. Lauowolf on December 5, 2015 at 10:40 am said:

    I totally thought this was going somewhere else.
    Who you gonna call? GoatBusters!

    Oh very good – if I may:

    A sort of sheep with beard, in your neighborhood?
    Who you gonna call? GoatBusters!
    It’s eating something weird and it don’t look good?
    Who you gonna call? GoatBusters!

    baah-daa, baah-daa, da-da
    baah-daa, baah-daa, da-da
    I ain’t feeding no goats
    I ain’t feeding no goats

  40. Camestros Felapton on December 5, 2015 at 11:30 am said:
    Lauowolf on December 5, 2015 at 10:40 am said:

    I totally thought this was going somewhere else.
    Who you gonna call? GoatBusters!

    Oh very good – if I may:

    A sort of sheep with beard, in your neighborhood?
    Who you gonna call? GoatBusters!
    It’s eating something weird and it don’t look good?
    Who you gonna call? GoatBusters!

    baah-daa, baah-daa, da-da
    baah-daa, baah-daa, da-da
    I ain’t feeding no goats
    I ain’t feeding no goats

    Got a nice beat.
    I could totally dance to it.
    I’m giving it a ten.

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