Fantastika

It’s never pleasant when puppies project

Published on June 3, 2015Leave a comment

This really is a disgusting accusation from Brad Torgersen:

Mr. Sandifer, if you truly believe that a book like ANCILLARY JUSTICE or a story like “The Water That Falls On You From Nowhere” did not benefit from a tremendous groundswell of affirmative-action-mindedness, you’re not paying attention. Please phone me when you’re interesting in discussing diversity beyond a skin-deep level. Quote Larry Niven: there are minds which think as well as yours, just differently.

Especially when you remember the drek Torgersen democratically choose for his supporters to put on the Sad Puppy slate. Which turned out to mainly function as cover for the Rabid Puppy slate run by a serial failure to promote his buddy John C. Wright and his new vanity press.

But it’s a good example of the sort of rightwing projection the Pups are prone too and all too familiar for anybody who was around for the heyday of warblogging –remember that– or the 2008-now freakout after a black man got elected president. I’m not sure at this point if this is done deliberately, or whether it’s completely subconscious on Torgersen’s part to accuse his enemies of behaving like, well, himself. It’s coupled to that other rightwing trait of just refusing to believe people can like other things than you, in its purest form best seen whenever proper football (ie soccer) is making inroads in America again as some pundit pops a gear and start sputtering that surely nobody truly American can enjoy this and it’s all a liberal plot to undermine the moral fabric of the country?

Speaking of projection, here’s Sarah Hoyt showing some rare self knowledge:

We’ve seen the same effect over and over again with people who comment on blogs (clears throat) both cultural and political, and even historical and that, no matter how often they’re proven wrong, keep coming back and stating the same thing they said in different words, as though that would make it true. They seem incapable of processing challenges, doubts, or even factual disproof of their charges.

Or wait, my bad, she actually meant people like the commenters at File 770. Because after all it was they who put forward ridiculous conspiracy theories about why their favourite sf writers didn’t win Hugos, engaged in an organised ballot stuffing campaign, invent their own jargon of “glittery hoohas” (completely misused), Social Justice Warriors and “whole word readers” to sneer at anybody asking questions or noticing inconsistencies and seem incapable of evaluating any sort of science fiction in any way other than as political propaganda, right?

Sterrensplinters — Eddy C. Bertin

Published on June 2, 2015Leave a comment

Cover of Sterrensplinters

Sterrensplinters
Eddy C. Bertin
222 pages
published in 2013

Eddy C. Bertin was an important author in my personal Golden Age of science fiction. A Flemish author, he was one of the few science fiction writers writing in Dutch back in the late seventies & eighties. Dutch language science fiction has never been particularly abundant and most that was published was not very good. Bertin was one of the few exceptions, an author who could’ve found an audience in English as well (and indeed, has had a couple of stories published in English). Still active, Bertin has written everything from hard science fiction to dark fantasy and horror, often mixing genres and with a tendency towards the Lovecraftian end of horror.

Sterrensplinters (Star Splinters) is a 2013 anthology collecting some of his best stories taken from his 1970s and 1980s collections. These are all long out of print, so a new collection of them is very welcome. The short introduction doesn’t tell much about why exactly these stories were chosen, or why the collection had to be divided into two parts: Membranen and Splinters, other than that the first set of stories takes place in a shared universe, while the remainder are standalone. That second set of stories feels as an afterthought, even if it includeds one of Bertin’s most famous stories.

The Gemmell Awards shortlist is out

Published on June 1, 2015Leave a comment

I’ve added the shortlist for the David Gemmell Awards to the 2014 noticable SFF novels list:

Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel:

Half a King — Joe Abercrombie
Valour — John Gwynne
Prince of Fools — Mark Lawrence
Words of Radiance — Brandon Sanderson
The Broken Eye — Brent Weeks

Morningstar Award for Best Debut Fantasy Novel:

Traitor’s Blade — Sebastien de Castell
The Mirror Empire — Kameron Hurley
The Godless — Ben Peek
The Emperor’s Blades — Brian Staveley
The Age of Iron — by Angus Watson

Interesting to see that Joe Abercrombie, Kameron Hurley and Brian Staveley all made it on both the Locus and the Gemmell shortlists and no other so far and that this is the only overlap the Gemmell has with any of the other major awards. Both the Locus and the Gemmell are of course open awards that can be voted on through the interwebs. I had expected more critical appreciation of Hurley’s novel though.

Your writer’s group would not be angry with this

Published on May 29, 20153 Comments

Kate Paulk lays down her rules for Hugo worthy fiction:

Early immersion – I read a hell of a lot, and I find it very easy to become immersed in a piece. The earlier it drags me in, the better. If I don’t get the immersion, the interplay of the technical factors (prose quality, characterization, plotting, foreshadowing, etc.) isn’t handled well enough to do it. I’ve read pieces where I liked the premise and characters, but the craft wasn’t good enough to generate immersion. I’ve also read pieces that I hated but were well enough done to hold me despite that.

It goes on for a while like that, going through such controversial demands like “there is a plot” and “there are characters”, but it’s all a bit anodyne, a bit obvious, a bit dull and unchallenging. If that’s your standard for Hugo worthy science fiction, there’s a lot of it out there: it’s not exactly a high bar to clear. But there’s more:

The prose is invisible. This needs some explanation: the prose needs to be polished enough and reflective enough of the content and pacing that it helps maintain reader immersion instead of having clunky phrasing that throws a reader out of the story. The only really viable exceptions I’ve come across are in shorter works where the prose can sometimes serve as a character in itself.

That’s the sort of bollocks you hear a lot of science fiction readers talk about, that they want prose that’s transparent, “doesn’t get in the way of the story”, doesn’t demand any attention paid, doesn’t challenge. There’s of course a huge inferiority complex running through parts of science fiction, resulting in the dismissal of everything that smacks of the literary and difficult. That’s what you see here. It’s not bad persé, it’s just a bit unambitious.

And to be honest, the Hugos too often have been that already. There are plenty of middle of the road novels that have been nominated and won it. Do we really need more of that, or do we rather have something a bit more challenging? Certainly the Puppy nominees aren’t the answers: by all reports they mostly fail even Paulk’s rather low standards.

(Title courtesy of Gabriel F. in comments over at File 770.)

Ms. Marvel — Best Graphic Story Hugo

Published on May 26, 2015Leave a comment

Ms. Marvel talks smack

I already looked at Ms Marvel back in February:

Put it all together and you have a comic that is a decent, well crafted superhero comic that puts its focus firmly on what Marvel has always done better than anybody else, showing their heroes’ complicated home lifes inbetween the battle royales. But the main significance of Ms. Marvel is who she is and that Marvel is comfortable publishing a Muslim written comic starring a Muslim superhero, that’s respectable about the culture Kamala Khan comes from and represents, but not afraid to show conflict either. It doesn’t devolve into cliches about oppression and Islam and all that while still showing a teenager chafing at the rules laid on her by authority figures — parents, teachers, religious leaders. It is essential Marvel teen hero stuff, reinvented for the 21st century.

If you don’t mind classifying a superhero comic as science fiction, this is the best of the lot, a 21st reinvention of Spider-Man and the Marvel teen hero. Remember, the original Marvel series from Fantastic Four #1 onwards were rooted in a spirit of rebellion, from the moment Reed set out to steal that moon rocket despite the authorities warning him about it. Then of course there was Spider-Man, hated and feared by the people he saves, branded an outlaw by The Daily Bugle and still doing what is right because “with great power comes great responsibility”. Marvel heroes have always had a bit of a tense relationship with official authorities, not entirely in opposition but not blindly trusting them either, not in that godawful libertarian sense that outsiders might want to spin it as, but with a healthy dose of skepticism and faith in their own judgment.

Ms Marvel used to deface Islamophobic bus ads in San Francisco

That sort of disappeared after 2000, in the Bush era, as Marvel allowed itself to be swept up in the War on Terror hysteria and a new generation of writers bought into that semi-fascist view of superheroes as enforcers of the status quo, unfettered by due process, culminating in the hideous Civil War crossover which saw Iron Man run his own Abu Ghraib style gulag in the Negative Zone and in which Captain America lost because he didn’t know about Myspace. Suddenly every superhero was now part of SHIELD or similar paramilitary organisations and it went against everything Marvel used to stand for.

Kamala Khan and family at dinner

Ms. Marvel is a refutation of all that idiocy, somebody whose background gives her good reasons to be skeptical of authority even before gaining superpowers, who chafes at the restrictions her parents and culture put upon her but who also is keenly aware that her family loves and cares for her. She’s a teenager growing up and testing her boundaries, but like Peter Parker before her, she has a good head on her shoulders and knows her right from wrong.

Now for the most part I don’t think superhero comics should be nominated for the Hugos, as I consider superheroes to be a separate genre from either fantasy or science fiction. But since it has been nominated, I’ll vote for it and put it first on my ballot, as of the four entries it’s the best and most important for its own story and for what this series says about Marvel in 2014/15. G. Willow Wilson is a great writer, a non-traditional writer for Marvel and Adrian Alphona is a brilliant artist for a series whose hero has mighty morphin powers.