science fiction – Page 39

God’s War — Kameron Hurley

Published on July 31, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of God's War

God’s War
Kameron Hurley
286 pages
published in 2011

The main problem with God’s War is its setting. Kameron Hurley’s debut novel is set in an unspecified far future, on the alien planet of Umayma, featuring an unending, religious war between Nasheen and Chenja, Umayma’s biggest nations. The war has warped both nations’ societies, with each country’s men either dead or at the front, leaving only the very young and very old at home. Despite both societies’ innate conservatism that has left women to take up the slack, having to take on traditional male roles, resulting in what’s best called a violent matriarchy in Nasheen, with women in all positions of power and the men constantly being sacrificed at the front. Nyx, its protagonist, is a brutalised, aggressive, scary woman, a deliberate attempt by Hurley to create the female equivalent of somebody like Conan while the background against which Nyx plays out her story was meant to show how a brutal, violent hierarchical society doesn’t magically become better because women are now in power, how easy it is for women to keep perpetuating the same violence and abuse as the men, just with different people in the victim and oppressor roles.

It’s an interesting concept, but the execution is troubling. Because while it is set on another planet far in the future and the politics and religion that’s being fought about is fictional, the images that Hurley creates are very familiar, because the religion she creates looks a lot like Islam, veiled women, multiple daily prayers, holy book and all, with the war and the societies it has left in its wake familiar from what we’ve seen on the news from Iraq or Lybia or even Chechnya. The landscapes are all desert landscapes, the cities are Middle Eastern, with mosques and minarets, often broken, often bombed out. As Tariqk put it, it’s as if Hurley “took every stereotypical Arab world depiction & TURNED IT TO 11”. It’s this orientalism that fails this novel, this inability to do more than use orientalist stereotypes, that reduces it to just another grim and gritty adventure story when it could’ve been so much more.

Adrift on the Sea of Rains — Ian Sales

Published on July 4, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Adrift on the Sea of Rains

Adrift on the Sea of Rains
Ian Sales
75 pages
published in 2012

Ian Sales is a blogger and science fiction critic with strong options about what science fiction should and shouldn’t be and the conviction to put his opinions into practise. So for example, being dissatisfied with the lack of attention to women writers in science fiction and especially in the Gollancz science fiction Masterworks series, he launched the Sf Mistressworks blog to showcase overlooked classics by women writers. I don’t always agree with him, but he’s always interesting. Which is why I took a gamble on his fiction writing with Adrift on the Sea of Rains, a self published chapbook; normally something I wouldn’t bother with.

As he mentions in his biography page, Ian Sales was only three years old when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, but it clearly left a deep impression nonetheless. It makes him about a decade older than myself, of the right age to be impressed by the seeming inevitability of nuclear war in the late seventies and early eighties, a Third World War that like the first seemed destined to be stumbled into rather than actively desired, all the more difficult to stop because of this. Somewhere in the mid-seventies we crossed the threshold where any nuclear war could still be survivable and reached the point where it just meant the end of the world. That was also the point at which the space race, the symbol of early Cold War machismo, ended, not in victory or defeat, but in a stalemate. The link between a better space programme and nuclear war is an old one in science fiction, as writers like Jerry Pournelle or Ben Bova, both in their fiction and outside it, arguing that space was vital for American national security, honest enough to understand that the space programme they wanted was only possible this way. Adrift on the Sea of Rains shows what could’ve happened had they been right, a story of nine astronauts in the US moonbase, left adrift after nuclear war destroyed the world.

“Reporting Harassment at a Convention: A First-Person How To”

Published on July 3, 2013Leave a comment

Well known science fiction fan Elise Matthesen was sexually harassed at Wiscon and decided to formally complain to both the convention and the harasser’s employer.

Although their behavior was professional and respectful, I was stunned when I found out that mine was the first formal report filed there as well. From various discussions in person and online, I knew for certain that I was not the only one to have reported inappropriate behavior by this person to his employer. It turned out that the previous reports had been made confidentially and not through HR and Legal. Therefore my report was the first one, because it was the first one that had ever been formally recorded.

Matthesen was surprised to learn both that the person in question was long known to be a serial harasser and nobody had made a formal complaint about him yet, which is why she wrote about this and got it posted not just on John Scalzi’s blog, but also at the blogs of Mary Robinette Kowal, Seanan McGuire, Brandon Sanderson, Chuck Wendig and Jim Hines, who also reveals the name of the accused and confirms that this person had been reported before.

As to why this person hasn’t been named before or been formally complained about, Mary Robinette Kowal has some thoughs about her own culpability in this.

It is of course not uncommon that a serial harasser has long been known and warned about by their victims, but never taken direct action against, so not uncommon that the sex, feminism and BDSM blog The Pervocracy called this situation “the missing stair”:

Have you ever been in a house that had something just egregiously wrong with it? Something massively unsafe and uncomfortable and against code, but everyone in the house had been there a long time and was used to it? “Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you, there’s a missing step on the unlit staircase with no railings. But it’s okay because we all just remember to jump over it.”

Some people are like that missing stair.

When I posted about a rapist in a community I belonged to, although I gave almost no details about the guy except “he’s a rapist,” I immediately got several emails from other members of that community saying “oh, you must mean X.” Everyone knew who he was! Tons of people, including several in the leadership, instantly knew who I meant. The reaction wasn’t “there’s a rapist among us!?!” but “oh hey, I bet you’re talking about our local rapist.” Several of them expressed regret that I hadn’t been warned about him beforehand, because they tried to discreetly tell new people about this guy. Others talked about how they tried to make sure there was someone keeping an eye on him at parties, because he was fine so long as someone remembered to assign him a Rape Babysitter.

All of which led Dustin Kurtz to wonder whether Sf fandom’s inclusiveness makes this problem worse and concludes that it should not:

The SFF community, of which conventions are a vital distillation, was, historically, populated by outsiders. The entire idea of genre is of course predicated on a readership that consciously sets itself apart, and no genre made that as much a point of pride as skiffy readers. That has the glorious result that outsiderdom predicated on other criteria—transgendered fans, for instance—is welcome within the community, even when that might be less true in society generally. But some, particularly men of an older generation, seem to mistake a spirit of permissiveness for individual permission.

Whatever the reasons, harassment is rife at these things. But maybe now, in the twenty-first century—the goddamned future—after a year of truly infuriating misogyny from some of the old guard in the genre, maybe now things will finally reach the point where even the most loutish of fans realize that an inclusive community need not include them, that a safe space for geeks doesn’t mean they themselves are safe from repercussions, and that, oh yeah, we all know their boss’ phone number.

As one of the people in science fiction with a big megaphone, John Scalzi took the first step to stop tolerance of harassment, by insisting any con he is a guest of has a proper harassment policy.

Women to Read Wednesday 03: Tricia Sullivan

Published on July 3, 2013Leave a comment

Yeah, so I’d forgotten I was doing this and it was only thanks to a Tricia Sullivan post calling out the lack of support from blokes for female writers that I remembered about it. I could make excuses but I won’t. It clearly wasn’t important enough to me to keep in mind. Nevertheless I do think this is important enough to restart, one of the ways in which I can make my own little contribution to making science fiction/fantasy slightly more equal.

Because, as Tricia Sullivan notes, it clearly isn’t at the moment. Taking her as an example, we have a critically acclaimed writer, who has won the 1999 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Dreaming In Smoke and who was nominated again in 2004 for Maul, yet she doesn’t have a book contract at the moment, having to write her next novel on spec. This is hardly an unique situation for a female writer, especially an UK based one, to find herself in and things aren’t made any easier by the slow collapse of science fiction publishing in the last few years. As there’s less room for science fiction in publishers schedules, the unfair advantages of the old boys’ networks matter more and it’s a minor disaster that a talented and interesting writer like Sullivan is passed over for yet another mediocre male mil-sf writer.

Since 1995, Tricia Sullivan has written seven novels, most of which are now out of print it looks like. I’ve read two of them, her latest one, 2010’s Lightborn and 2005’s Double Vision. Both are novels in which the normality of the world as we know it has been upset one way or another, with the protagonist in each having to deal with the challenges the new reality brings with it.

Lightborn:

What Tricia Sullivan has done with Lightborn is create a concretised metaphor for growing up, that long drawn out moment when you’re a child on the edge of becoming an adult, looking out over the abyss to the incomprehensible horrors of adulthood. Both Roksana and Xavier are young teenagers, forced by circumstances to become more mature, but also kept from being fully adult. It’s no coincidence that all adults in the novel are unreliable or downright dysfunctional, Shined or not Shined; they have to make their own decisions and every time they want to trust an adult, it turns out to be a mistake. Yet Sullivan doesn’t glorify childhood: her heroes do have to grow up, make compromises, without being overtly dramatic about it.

Double Vision:

As a science fiction reader you’re obviously biased towards the strange, the potential hallucination to be real, even if there’s a long tradition to use this against the reader. In Double Vision you start off with the default assumption that what Cookie experiences is real, only for Sullivan to sow doubt in your mind as certain inconsistencies become clearer. For example, if the scouting she does in the Grid is so important, why is it that her boss is only interested in which brands she heard mentioned by the soldiers? What is she really used for?

Fandom really should clean our act up

Published on June 29, 2013Leave a comment

So sick and tired of this shit happening in my fandom:

3. Moments later, another guy, a fellow writer, hugs me tenderly from behind, though I do not know him. When I turn, startled, to protest, he says “You have the greatest smile. It just makes me want to hug you.” I’m doomed to avoiding him for the rest of the con, because he’s always wherever I am, charging at me with open arms, hugging me in elevators and moving at me to hug basically just wherever I go. It’s gross. He becomes known to my swiftly formed girl posse as The Hugger in the Hat. And when I say hugger, I mean full body contact with erect bits against my thigh. I don’t report him. I’m new to the scene. I feel awkward. I’m used to being harassed in the world. This is bad, but it’s not insane in terms of how much wrong attention I get from creeps in cities. So, I don’t report.

4. What Cherie Priest says in her post on this is true. We form protective posses. Descriptions of creepers are traded like cards. Women say things such as “Do you need back up when you walk through that room?” “What color is his shirt?” “Oh, I saw The Hugger In The Hat in there – I’m getting between you and him.”

5. Conversely, when I complained about The Hugger anecdotally to men, most of them said he was just clueless and didn’t mean to creep me out, and that if I was clear that I didn’t want to be hugged, I wouldn’t be, because The Hugger was a nice guy. Don’t get me wrong. Most men are great. But I think most guys have also not been witness to a lot of this. Creepers wait til you’re with your girls, or alone. Because Creepers calculate.

Both the actual harassement Maria Dahvana Headley experienced and the dismissal/justification of it should not happen. It’s 2013, not 1973 and even in fandom, even when you are a famous science fiction writer, this sort of behaviour is beyond the pale and we should not put up with it any longer. Nobody should have to worry about how and whether to file a formal harassement report against an editor when going to a con.

For those of us who aren’t douchenozzles, nor likely to be the victim of harassement, what we should do is watch out for it and be supportive, not dismissive, of those who do suffer from it. This can be hard, but that’s no excuse not to.