In the upcoming fall semester, I will be teaching an upper division modern science fiction course on American space opera. That's right. A whole entire course just on American space opera. Though I have a few ideas for texts to teach, I realize that space opera is a massive field and that I would be remiss not to poke the infinite knowledge of other science fiction fans for works I might otherwise have missed or which might serve my needs better than the things in my head.
With that in mind, I'm looking for space opera recommendations! As of right now, I'm strongly considering teaching E.E. "Doc" Smith, Joe Haldeman, Tobias Buckell, Alfred Bester, Samuel R. Delany, Lois McMaster Bujold, and C.J. Cherryh. I have a lot of titles, but I'm not sure what I will choose to focus on just yet. Given the scope of the course, I may be limited in how much I can actually explore.
So what am I looking for?
Friday, April 10, 2015
Thursday, April 09, 2015
In the Duke's Sights: Speakeasies, the Brooding Octavias, Tax Kings, Sorrows, and Machines!
It's time to create a new semi-regular column where I talk about things that I'm eyeing for whatever reason and things that I'm currently enjoying (also for whatever reason). Because what could you want more than anything else in the world than my haphazard thoughts about random pieces of upcoming (or old) sf/f literature, film, and so on? Assume you can't have pie as an alternative, because I can't compete with pie.
So here we are: on the cusp of discussing exciting new and old and time-indeterminate things!
So here we are: on the cusp of discussing exciting new and old and time-indeterminate things!
Wednesday, April 08, 2015
5 Reasons I Won't Read Your Work
Having reviewed books somewhat spottily for over half a decade, I've developed a mental checklist to use when deciding whether I will read or review a book. Most often, I just don't have the time to read 159,997 novels in a year, so I turn down a lot of reviews because I know I won't be able to get to it. Otherwise, I usually reject a novel for one of the follow reasons:
My #HugoAwards Final Ballot (To Be Submitted in the Future)
Over the weekend, I explained why I intended to use No Award and Blank Spacing as a response to the Sad Puppies / Rabid Puppies campaign to manipulate and take over the Hugo Awards. Since I am fundamentally opposed to slate-based voting measures, I can't in good conscience support works which appear on this year's ballot as a result of the SP/RP slates. And so I won't.
Others, of course, may have different views. TheG intends to give most things on the ballot a fair shake under the guise that voting No Award would unfairly punish those that are on the ballot but are otherwise not really part of the SP/RP world. He admits, though, that this is hardly a strong response. Where we do agree, however, is that there are some problematic cases here. Some folks are on the ballot who didn't know they were included in the SP/RP slate and would have declined if they had known. However, I'm of the mindset that support for anything on the ballot may be perceived as tacit support for the entire campaign -- a point on which Abigail Nussbaum and I agree.
With that said, voting will be rather easy for me, since the SP/RP folks have taken almost every slot on this year's ballot. Here's what my ballot will look like when I'm allowed to submit it (feel free to lob your disagreements or what have you in the comments):
Others, of course, may have different views. TheG intends to give most things on the ballot a fair shake under the guise that voting No Award would unfairly punish those that are on the ballot but are otherwise not really part of the SP/RP world. He admits, though, that this is hardly a strong response. Where we do agree, however, is that there are some problematic cases here. Some folks are on the ballot who didn't know they were included in the SP/RP slate and would have declined if they had known. However, I'm of the mindset that support for anything on the ballot may be perceived as tacit support for the entire campaign -- a point on which Abigail Nussbaum and I agree.
With that said, voting will be rather easy for me, since the SP/RP folks have taken almost every slot on this year's ballot. Here's what my ballot will look like when I'm allowed to submit it (feel free to lob your disagreements or what have you in the comments):
Tuesday, April 07, 2015
10 Reasons I'm a Feminist
What's that? I'm a feminist?! Yup. A wicked awesome feminist who wears Feminist Cannons on his shoulders and shoots Holy Feminist Balls at sexism. Or something like that.
Something I've never done before is provide some kind of explanation for why I am a feminist. Hence this post.
Here are the ten reasons I am a feminist. Feel free to list yours in the comments!
Saturday, April 04, 2015
"No Award" and "Blank Spacing" the #HugoAwards -- The Only Response I Can Make to What is to Come
The Hugo Award ballot has been announced, and if you've been paying attention to Twitter, it's certainly controversial. Not controversial because a novel everybody loved didn't make it. Not controversial because a novel a whole lot of people didn't love did make it. Controversial because some people have taken it upon themselves to game the system in order to create and relish in political chaos.
That last sentence would certainly sound melodramatic if not for the fact that the proponents of a certain ballot-to-be-copied hadn't already publicly stated that one of their guiding purposes for last year's rendition of this political fiasco was as follows:
As a result, the ballot has been flooded by Sad Puppies.
If this whole thing had begun simply as people sharing their love of X, I would not have to write this post. I would not have to think of my ballot as a political tool, either. I could look at what was there and make a judgment about the works, not the intent behind their inclusion. Voting is already political enough, even in something as seemingly innocuous as the Hugo Awards. I don't appreciate being put into a position where "intent" actually matters, since the only thing that should matter is the work.
But that's not how this began. It was and remains a political campaign to game the system for personal and political gain. It's not the same as Wheel of Time fans realizing they can all nominate their favorite fantasy series and then doing so. It's not the same as fans who love X nominating X. It's people with a political ax to grind taking advantage of that system to make a point. This action shifts the voting process from small-p political, whereby one's everyday politics organically produces certain taste values or perspectives, to cap-P Political, whereby voting itself is treated as a political act separate from the preservation of small-P political interests. That's the difference between "I love this thing because it's about the kind of stuff I enjoy" and "I'm nominating this thing to make a point to people with whom I disagree."
I take the Hugo Awards seriously as an award and as a process, and so I can't offer my support for any campaign of this type, whether it comes from liberals, conservatives, anarchists, socialists, feminists, capitalists, etc. I don't care about the particulars of the politics. I do not believe the Hugos should be a battleground for sf/f's infighting. For that reason, I believe that if your intent is to use the Hugos to make a political point first and foremost, then I am obligated and justified to use my ballot to make a clear statement about the works which will be nominated as a result. In this respect, I view the Hugos in much the same way as Abi Sutherland:
This year, however, it is clear that there is no reasonable way to treat the ballot as a reflection of what people loved in the sf/f field. It is a manipulated ballot. A broken ballot. And I suspect that it will result in a lot of bad blood within sf/f for years to come. Nobody should relish in this projected future; unfortunately, I suspect a few might.
None of this is preferable. I don't want to do any of this. There are people who are on the slate who I actually like as people (and think are decent writes, too). But I don't feel as if I have any other reasonable choice. In my mind, preserving the Hugos as a worthwhile award means preserving its spirit. Bloc-voting, etc. does not serve that interest regardless of its origins.
So that's how I intend to proceed from this point on. If your intent is to manipulate the ballot for political gain, I will "blank space" the ballot in response.
Nominate what you love. Leave your political agendas at the door. That is all.
That last sentence would certainly sound melodramatic if not for the fact that the proponents of a certain ballot-to-be-copied hadn't already publicly stated that one of their guiding purposes for last year's rendition of this political fiasco was as follows:
"We got in [7 or 8] Hugo nominees [out of 10 or 11 that we pushed]...and ah man, all hell broke loose. It was the end of the world. So we had a lot of fun with that. We made our point. I said that if people who are not politically acceptable to these clicks are nominated for an award, the other side will have a come apart...and then, they pretty much did exactly what I said in a very public manner. And we had fun with it."In short: they sought to create chaos and unrest in order to make a political point. And when they succeeded, they relished in it. Perhaps this is all facetious dribbling, but it does illustrate a clear contradiction: this whole thing has never been about the quality of the work. If it were, the intent would not be so blatantly political and so blatantly at odds with the spirit of the awards. That any of these folks can utter something like the above in one breath and claim to respect the Hugo voter and the Hugo nomination process in another is a supreme sort of cognitive dissonance. That some involved in this campaign can also claim that the act is not capital-P political is like courting madness with Cthulu.
As a result, the ballot has been flooded by Sad Puppies.
If this whole thing had begun simply as people sharing their love of X, I would not have to write this post. I would not have to think of my ballot as a political tool, either. I could look at what was there and make a judgment about the works, not the intent behind their inclusion. Voting is already political enough, even in something as seemingly innocuous as the Hugo Awards. I don't appreciate being put into a position where "intent" actually matters, since the only thing that should matter is the work.
But that's not how this began. It was and remains a political campaign to game the system for personal and political gain. It's not the same as Wheel of Time fans realizing they can all nominate their favorite fantasy series and then doing so. It's not the same as fans who love X nominating X. It's people with a political ax to grind taking advantage of that system to make a point. This action shifts the voting process from small-p political, whereby one's everyday politics organically produces certain taste values or perspectives, to cap-P Political, whereby voting itself is treated as a political act separate from the preservation of small-P political interests. That's the difference between "I love this thing because it's about the kind of stuff I enjoy" and "I'm nominating this thing to make a point to people with whom I disagree."
I take the Hugo Awards seriously as an award and as a process, and so I can't offer my support for any campaign of this type, whether it comes from liberals, conservatives, anarchists, socialists, feminists, capitalists, etc. I don't care about the particulars of the politics. I do not believe the Hugos should be a battleground for sf/f's infighting. For that reason, I believe that if your intent is to use the Hugos to make a political point first and foremost, then I am obligated and justified to use my ballot to make a clear statement about the works which will be nominated as a result. In this respect, I view the Hugos in much the same way as Abi Sutherland:
My Hugo nominations and votes are reactions to that broadening-out of my mental universe. As such, they’re intimately, intensely personal. And that’s part of the visceral reaction that some fans are having to the Sad Puppies’ slate: it looks like the institutionalization of a private, particular process in the service of an external goal. It comes across as a coarsening and a standardizing of something that should be fine-grained, unpredictable, and unique to each person participating. It seems like denial of variety and spontaneity, like choreographed sex.As such, I suspect I will leave a good number of items off of my ballot in protest. Since the Hugo Awards use a preferential voting system, any item which appears on your ballot will receive a vote of some kind when the ballots are counted. Putting No Award as the last item on your ranked list means anything left off the ballot doesn't get any "points." This is not preferable, since the "No Award" should be used to say "I don't actually think this is good enough." Last year, I mostly used the "No Award" for its intended purpose; in fact, some of the works on last year's ballot from people who I'm sure are part of the "evil liberal conspiracy to destroy science fiction" didn't make it far on my ballot because I just didn't enjoy them. Because that's how I normally vote: based on my subjective sense of the quality of the work, which is, to varying degrees, influenced by my small-P political values.
This year, however, it is clear that there is no reasonable way to treat the ballot as a reflection of what people loved in the sf/f field. It is a manipulated ballot. A broken ballot. And I suspect that it will result in a lot of bad blood within sf/f for years to come. Nobody should relish in this projected future; unfortunately, I suspect a few might.
None of this is preferable. I don't want to do any of this. There are people who are on the slate who I actually like as people (and think are decent writes, too). But I don't feel as if I have any other reasonable choice. In my mind, preserving the Hugos as a worthwhile award means preserving its spirit. Bloc-voting, etc. does not serve that interest regardless of its origins.
So that's how I intend to proceed from this point on. If your intent is to manipulate the ballot for political gain, I will "blank space" the ballot in response.
Nominate what you love. Leave your political agendas at the door. That is all.
Thursday, April 02, 2015
A Story Out of Time and Place and the Escape Hatch of Fantasy: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005) -- Retro Nostalgia
With the monumental success of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (dir. Chris Columbus; 2001), Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (dir. Peter Jackson; 2001), and their immediate sequels, Hollywood perhaps hoped to capitalize on the epic fantasy feel of Tolkien's narrative and the young adult/children's audience that so fervently devoured the Harry Potter books. Naturally, they turned to The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis.
If I'm honest, I'm quite a fan of the Narnia films even as I'm critical of their structure. There's something deliciously joyous about portal fantasies wherein children are whisked away to save the world, hanging out with talking beavers and every fantasy creature under the sun. Narnia was wish fulfillment for me in so many ways. Adventure? Check. Epic scale? Check. Kids becoming greater than themselves? Check. It is a deeply hopeful series of films (and novels -- though I suppose The Last Battle might be perceived as rather "doomsday-ish" today). Sometimes, one needs a little optimistic, no? The first of these films, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (dir. Andrew Adamson; 2005), is perhaps the strongest as a narrative, but it also has its problems. Granted, these are problems which make more sense in a certain perspective, even if they don't quite work in film.
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