Richly late, halfway through week 4, but here are the short stories reviewed in week 3 of my Short SF Marathon:
So we all know how Leonard Nimoy created that hand gesture from his memories of Jewish priests using the same signs, but how much else of his Jewish immigrant background was put into Spock, the half-Vulcan, half-human?
The “Reading Only X Writers For A Year” a challenge is one every person who loves to read (and who loves to write) should take. You could, like Lilit Marcus, read only books by women or, like Sunili Govinnage, read only books by people of color. Or you could choose a different axis to focus on: books by trans men and women, books by people from outside the U.S. or in translation, books by people with disabilities.
Science fiction readers responded to this with the openmindedness and willingness to explore new things for which they’re kno-oh gods who am I kidding:
Recently I wrote a thing which brought all the trolls to the yard. I’m used to it, but I wondered what it would look like if I just started saving the hateful tweets people send me in one place. Hateful being attacks on me personally, name calling, threats, etc.
The repeated chorus of how racist or sexist it is to not read white male authors is followed by racist, sexist slurs is …precious. Horrifying but unsurprising to see the slurs, but do these people actualy understand “racist” and “sexist” have an actual meaning?
Sady Puppy wrangler Larry Correia contributed his own very special brand of stupid (from File 770):
But the ironic thing about that picture? Tempest is wearing a Dr. Who shirt. A TV show about a white man and his white female sidekick, created by some white men, with episodes written by… Neil Gaiman.
Never mind that the good Doctor has also had a black British sidekick, or regularly has had adventures with a lesbian lizard woman from the dawn of time and her companion, the idea that reading only writers of colour or only women for a year meaning that you swear off all white men is just so incredibly dumb that you hope Larry doesn’t believe it himself, but you fear he does.
Professional kulturkampfers like Correira of course have to oppose anything that smacks of enlightment, but is it really too much to ask from grownups to stop being so incredibly defensive and be open to new reading experiences?
Chaos Horizon analyses the Nebula Award nominations for best novel and stumbles over Jack McDevitt:
Case in point: Jack McDevitt, who now has have 12 (!) Best Novel Nebula nominations. The constant McDevitt nominations are the strangest thing that is currently happening in the Nebulas. That’s not a knock against McDevitt. I’ve read two of McDevitt’s book, The Engines of God and the Nebula winning Seeker. They were both solid space exploration novels: fast-paced, appealing characterization, and professionally done. They didn’t stand out to me, but there’s never anything wrong with writing books people want to read. Still, I’m not sure why McDevitt deserves 12 nominations while similar authors such as Peter F. Hamilton, Alistair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, etc., are largely ignored by the SFWA voters. To put this in context: McDevitt has more Nebula Best Novel nominations than Neal Stephenson (1), William Gibson (4), and Philip K. Dick (5) combined.
Because the Nebulas are voted on by the SFWA membership and campaigning and voting for it therefore doesn’t happen out in the open as much as it does for the Hugos, it’s difficult to get to understand why McDevitt, out of all decent but not spectacularly good authors has so many nominations but only one win. If it was purely a block of voters liking a certain type of traditional sf novel, you’d expect other, similar authors to show up more, but instead it’s McDevitt year in, year out. Perhaps he just has a lot of friends in SFWA or campaigns well?
Annihilation
Jeff VanderMeer
208 pages
published in 2014
Last year Jeff VanderMeer (or rather his publisher) did something rarely done, releasing an entire trilogy in one year. Annihilation is the first of this Southern Reach trilogy and has gotten steady buzz as one of the shoe-ins for Hugo and Nebula nominations; it already managed the latter, in fact. VanderMeer is arguably the father of the American New Weird, that mid-noughties movement that came bubbling up from England and got codified across the pond, mainly through his and Ann VanderMeer’s contributions. I’ve only read one story of his before this, the deliberately confusing The Situation.
Annihilation is a much more straightforward story, of a four woman expedition into Area X, as told by the biologist through her field journal; the other three members are the anthropologist, the surveyor and the psychologist. Their names are never told: “names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were while embedded in Area X”. They’re the twelfth such expedition into the Area; the previous eleven all came to grief one way or another. What they’re setting out to discover is left vague; they themselves only know in general terms what they’re doing or what they can expect, though the psychologist seems to know more than she lets show.