Pull the Trigger

The story thus far: On January 28th, Bitch Magazine posted a list of "100 YA Novels for the Feminist Reader."  The list is affiliated with Bitch Magazine's lending library, and was posted by Ashley McAllister, who is listed on Bitch's staff page as library coordinator.  Predictably, commenters began suggesting additions to the list and, in smaller numbers, objecting to the books on it.  On January 29th, commenter Pandora objected to the inclusion of Jackson Pearce's Sisters Red, a retelling of Red Riding Hood in which two sisters hunt werewolves, citing objections raised against the book in a post made last July on the blog The Book Smugglers.  In that post, the bloggers highlighted a scene in which one of the sisters scornfully watches dressed-up girls waiting to enter a night club and muses that they are inviting attack.  Both reviewers felt that Sisters Red didn't do enough to complicate or counteract this victim-blaming perspective.  That same day, commenter scrumby protested the inclusion of Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels on the grounds that a scene at the end of the book, in which one of the heroines subconsciously uses her magical powers to conjure beings who rape the five men who raped her mother, endorses the use of rape as a means of vengeance.

McAllister's response to both complaints was to admit that she hadn't read the two books (on Sisters Red: "While I read most of the books on this list, there were a few that I just researched"; on Tender Morsels: "This book came as a recommendation to us from a few feminists, and while we knew that some of the content was difficult, we weren't tuned into what you've just brought up") and that she and other Bitch staffers would read (or reread, as the case may be) them over the weekend with the objections raised in mind.  Yesterday, February 1st, McAllister posted a comment titled "Revisions to the list," announcing the replacement of Sisters Red, Tender Morsels, and a third book, Living Dead Girl by Elizabeth Scott, which is narrated by a girl who has been held as a captive sex slave for five years and is anticipating being murdered by her captor (no objection had been raised to Living Dead Girl in the comment thread until that point, but later comments from Bitch staffers indicate that they received comments on the list via e-mail).

A couple of us at the office read and re-read Sisters Red, Tender Morsels and Living Dead Girl this weekend. We've decided to remove these books from the list -- Sisters Red because of the victim-blaming scene that was discussed earlier in this post, Tender Morsels because of the way that the book validates (by failing to critique or discuss) characters who use rape as an act of vengeance, and Living Dead Girl because of its triggering nature. We still feel that these books have merit and would not hesitate to recommend them in certain instances, but we don't feel comfortable keeping them on this particular list.

(Emphasis in the original.)

Outraged reactions began pouring in.  Authors Scott Westerfeld, Justine Larbalestier, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Kirstyn McDermott, Maureen Johnson, Ellen Klages, Lili Wilkinson, E. Lockhart, Jeff VanderMeer, A.S. King, Penni Russon, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Alina Klein--possibly alerted by Margo Lanagan's tweet on the subject--chimed in with their disapproval, some of them asking for their books to be removed from the list.  The twitter hashtags #bitchplease and (when that turned out to have been taken) #speakloudly (an existing hashtag that protests censorship of media) played host to protests of Bitch's decision.  Blog posts from John Scalzi, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Colleen Mondor, and the blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books publicized the issue.  At present there are nearly 200 comments on the original Bitch Magazine post, nearly all of them condemnatory, many equating the decision to replace the three books with censorship and book-banning.

My thoughts: In a nutshell?  I don't think that anyone involved in this debacle comes away looking too good.

I think the fact that Bitch's editors recommended books they hadn't read is inexcusable.  When McAllister responded to Pandora about Sisters Red, I took her meaning to be that the list was compiled by several editors, each of whom contributed titles they thought were appropriate, but that no single editor had read all 100 books--similar, in other words, to how The New York Times, Amazon, and Locus compile their recommended reading lists.  Her reply to scrumby about Tender Morsels, however, indicates that the process was more informal, and that books may have been selected based on recommendations by people not affiliated with Bitch, and perhaps in an entirely ad hoc manner.  Nowhere on the list itself or on the blog post publicizing it is this noted, and that's simply not acceptable.  The responsibilities of librarians is a subject that has come up several times in this discussion, and surely one of the most basic of these is not to recommend a book without very good evidence--ideally the evidence of one's own reading--that it is worth the recommendation.

That said, I don't see anything wrong with Bitch's decision to review the list upon receiving objections to it.  It's true that in the case of both Sisters Red and Tender Morsels only one objecting comment was received, and that in the latter case both the tone and style of the comment do not inspire confidence in the opinions it expresses (though how many objections were received via e-mail, and how many such e-mails objected to Living Dead Girl, is unknown).  But McAllister quite clearly states that the decision to remove the three books from the list wasn't taken purely on the basis of these comments, but that they merely sparked the reading that led Bitch's editors to make that decision.  That reading should have happened before the list was compiled, but that doesn't invalidate its results.  It's true, reading the three books in light of the complaints raised against them would probably have predisposed the Bitch editors to look for those problems in the book, but is that a bad thing?  And does it follow that the editors were incapable of concluding that the complaints raised against Sisters Red, Tender Morsels and Living Dead Girl were groundless?

Nor is the decision to remove books from a recommended reading list in any way comparable to censorship or book-banning.  I don't even know how to expand on this point, which should be entirely self-evident and not worth making, and yet more than twenty comments on the Bitch thread call the editors' actions censorship, and several others accuse them of book banning, despite the fact that Sisters Red, Tender Morsels, and Living Dead Girl's availability has not been affected one jot by their removal from the list.

I also think that the failure to acknowledge, on the part of nearly everyone linking to the discussion and many of the commenters on the Bitch post, that the three books in question were removed for three different reasons, is at best irresponsible, at worst dishonest.  John Scalzi writes that the removal happened after "someone complain[ed] in the comments to the list that Tender and a couple of other books are "triggering"."  Smart Bitches, Trashy Books quotes McAllister's explanation in full, but stresses the triggering complaint, then later characterizes Bitch's reaction as "Oh, noes, it hurt someone's feelings, that scary scary literature."  Colleen Mondor gives a play-by-play of the comment thread, but leaves out the actual substance of the complaint against Tender Morsels (she also quotes McAllister's comment in full, however), and her post is accompanied by a cover image of Tender Morsels but not the other two books.  Tansy Rayner Roberts's post similarly focuses only on Tender Morsels.  The #bitchplease and #speakloudly twitter streams are full of statements like ""Protecting readers" under any guise is still censorship," and "Your job is not to protect us from literature."  Anyone coming to the discussion from these sources could be forgiven for assuming that Tender Morsels had been removed from the list because it was triggering, or because its subject matter was difficult, rather than for its handling of that subject matter (the sole exception is Kirstyn McDermott, whose post is impressively comprehensive).  The comments on the Bitch post reflect this confusion.  Of the twenty-three comments that specifically object to Tender Morsels's removal, only five address, in even the vaguest terms, the specific complaint that it doesn't critique the use of rape as revenge, while eight comments claim that it was removed either for being triggering or for being disturbing.  There is much less discussion of either Sisters Red or Living Dead Girl, and hardly any of the latter's potentially triggering nature.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the triggering accusation became attached to Tender Morsels.  As opposed to victim-blaming or rape as revenge, issues positioned rather firmly within the consensus of Bitch's readership, trigger warnings--the idea that discussions of rape and sexual assault can trigger traumatic reactions in survivors, and that it is therefore incumbent on bloggers and writers to post warnings when such subjects are discussed, and to avoid directing their readers towards potentially triggering material--are a contentious topic, even in feminist circles.  To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about them.  And the more general complaint that a certain book's subject is too difficult for young readers is a beloved bugaboo of the YA community.  These are the weakest arguments in Bitch's arsenal (so weak that the latter was not, in fact, part of it), and they just happen to have become attached to the most popular of the three books selected for removal even though neither objection was actually raised against it (in fairness, the Bitch editors do themselves no favors by spotlighting the triggering issue over the other two complaints in later comments).  Meanwhile, the book that was actually removed for being triggering gets hardly any discussion.

Bitch magazine made a lot of mistakes in creating and presenting its list of 100 YA novels for the feminist reader, but when it chose to remove Sisters Red, Tender Morsels, and Living Dead Girl from the list it laid a very specific complaint against each novel.  Even if you take their narrative at face value, and many commenters have questioned its veracity, these complaints are all debatable--personally, I don't think that Tender Morsels validates rape as revenge, though I agree that it edges around Urdda's responsibility for her actions in ways that aren't entirely palatable.  But what's happening in the comment thread at Bitch, and in other places on the internet, isn't that debate.  It's a pile-on, driven by misinformation and perpetuating that same misinformation, recasting the issue as one of censorship and babying readers, and focusing on the most contentious issue raised in the discussion as if it represented the discussion as a whole.  Whether you're writing a recommended reading list, or a blog post, or a comment thread, it behoove us all to ground our opinions in solid experience and in even more solid facts.  I don't see that anyone, on either side of this issue, has done so.

Five Comments on Caprica

• A few months ago, io9's Annalee Newitz called Caprica "one of the most literary scifi shows ever aired," and this strikes me as right, not necessarily because of the show's themes, as Newitz claims, but because the type of world Caprica was set in, and the story it told in that world.  It's a rather rich irony that the spin-off to a series whose core failure was its writers' lack of interest in worldbuilding, and their willingness to sublimate their SFnal world to a present-day allegory, had some of the best SFnal worldbuilding ever seen on TV, and the fact that Battelstar Galactica gained not only fannish but critical acclaim while Caprica received neither (a few blips notwithstanding, such as New York Magazine's Emily Nussbaum (no relation, alas), who seems both nonplussed and excited by the show's use of virtual reality) probably says everything that needs to be said about the current state of televised SF.  Caprica is set in a world in which the implications of technology--political, social, commercial--are not only thought out but are the crux of the story.  And those implications are often crushingly mundane.  Daniel Graystone stumbles on a way to upload human consciousness onto a computer, and immediately comes up with the idea of monetizing it in the most mawkish, and unprincipled, way possible (meanwhile, Clarice Willow decides to build heaven in a computer, then complains that her programmers have failed to capture the necessary awe and grandeur).  The avatars of Zoe Graystone and Tamra Adams decide to strike a blow against the depravity that runs rampant in the virtual worlds (a technology that, like television itself, was originally envisioned by Daniel as an educational tool), but find themselves turned into pop culture icons and plastered on hipster t-shirts.
  
  Just as interesting as the show's SFnal worldbuilding, however, is its non-SFnal variety--the ways in which Caprica is like modern Western culture but also unlike it.  Some things are familiar--talk shows, sports arenas, colonialism--but given a slightly foreign twist that keeps the show from descending into the kind of allegory that scuttled Galactica.  And then there are the aspects of the world that don't exist in ours--polytheistic religion (though this is glossed over too often; see the next point), gay marriage for mob enforcers, a schoolteacher in a polyamorous marriage, interplanetary travel that is as demystified as air travel--and which the show matter-of-factly inserts into a familiar setting.  Together they create a sense that Caprica is a real world, and that there are many other stories that could be told about it.  I was never entirely won over by Caprica's plotting, which also strikes me as literary, in the sense that the pacing, tenor, and tone of the show changed dramatically over the course of its single season, just as a novel might start with exposition and move towards a tense climax.  I'm not convinced that this style is a good fit for television in general (though it's become increasingly popular--Dexter uses is almost exclusively), but it certainly doesn't work in a twenty episode season broken up into two chunks which are aired months apart.  The five post-cancellation episodes, which aired on Syfy in a single chunk a few days ago, feel like a completely different show from the beginning of the season, and this gap (as well as the chronological one) makes it difficult to figure out how, or whether, the characters have grown and changed.  Still, whenever the story, or even the characters, let me down, there was Caprica's world, and its writers' obvious joy in exploring its complexity and depth.


• Caprica's handling of religion is simultaneously fantastic and horrible.  Fantastic because religion on the show is not a monolith, and people can share religious faith without sharing values, or even an understanding of what that faith means.  The depiction of the monotheistic church on Geminon, with its competing streams, militant and less militant factions, and political infighting, carries a definite and fascinating whiff of Medieval and Renaissance Catholicism, and though it's rather dubious that a marginalized sect in a democratic, secular society would develop these sorts of structures--why fight for power if there's no power to be fought over?--the implicit recognition that religion can become bound up with the quest for power without being the same thing as that quest is an unusually sophisticated one.  On the other hand, Caprica never answers the core question raised by its religious plotline, a question without whose answer none of the show's handling of religion can truly be trusted: why are the monotheists blowing themselves up in public?  What do they hope to accomplish by doing so?  Clarice's plan to use a terrorist bombing as a sort of lethal ad campaign for her virtual heaven is mustache-twirlngly absurd, and anyway isn't formulated until rather late in the season, at which point Barnabas has already carried out several bombings.  Zoe embraces monotheistic religion because she thinks that Caprican society is corrupt and degraded, which might have worked as a reason to commit mass murder, but no monotheist other than her expresses these feelings--not even Lacy, who is largely under Zoe's spell--and Zoe herself isn't a terrorist.  It's very hard to escape the conclusion that the monotheists on the show blow people up because Caprica's writers think that this is what people who believe in God do.
  
  An obvious response to this might be that killing dozens of innocent strangers in what is likely to be a futile and self-defeating attempt to advance your agenda is an inherently irrational act, and since characters like Barnabas and Clarice are, if not irrational, then at least intellectually dishonest, there doesn't need to be a reason for their terrorist activities.  But there's a difference between an irrational act and a motiveless one.  The terrorist who blows themselves up in Iraq or Tel Aviv may not have a particularly sensible plan towards achieving their political goals, may not be acting out of anything more thought out than anger and hate, may not even be particularly smart, but they do have a motive, even if it's just to strike out at the people they think are responsible for their suffering, or to make themselves feel, if only for a moment, less helpless and downtrodden.  At no point does Caprica establish the monotheists' motives.  They're not persecuted (at least not until they start their terror campaign), nor is there, as far as we can see, any systemic oppression or prejudice arrayed against them, and the notion of using terror tactics as a recruiting tactic is laughable.  If Taurons were blowing themselves up in the streets of Caprica City it would make sense (and in episodes like "Dirteaters" it's revealed that guerrilla and terror tactics were used on Tauron), and every episode in which characters like Joe and Sam Adama recal their persecuted past while apparently privileged characters like Clarice plann mass murder and send teenagers to paramilitary training camps only drives home the irrationality at the very heart of the show.  Given how central religion, and the issue of terrorism, are to Caprica, this unwillingness to even acknowledge the question of why the two are linked is a very nearly fatal flaw.


• By the same token, Caprica's female characters are alternately magnificent and disappointing.  Women's status on Caprica and its colonies is one of the points on which the show's worldbuilding flounders.  On the one hand, the show features the same kind of male dominance with increasing female presence that we recognize from our world--in the boardrooms of Graystone industries, in the offices of the GDD, and in the ranks of the Ha'latha.  But on the other hand, characters like the Guatrau's daughter Fidelia, who takes over the Ha'latha from him, or the soldier who kills Joe and Sam's parents, are accepted without comment in traditionally masculine, traditionally misogynistic environments (this is the same approach the writers took with non-heteronormative relationships, but it works less well, in part because despite their best efforts the show's background is still dominated by men).  But when the show stops trying to depict social change and just portrays complicated, strong, adult women who live in and navigate the real world, play by its rules and nevertheless manage to exert control over it, Caprica gives the current title-holder in the category, The Good Wife, a run for its money (which is even more impressive when one considers that Caprica comes from the genre that gave us the ass-kicking female character that shows like The Good Wife could be called a response to, and that Galactica gave us Starbuck, a character who both epitomized and exploded the action girl trope).  As central as men like Daniel and Joe are to the first season's plot, it ultimately boils down to a battle of wits and wills between Amanda and Clarice, and in the background there are other women with power and influence--Clarice's wife Marbeth, Fidelia, Joe's second wife Evelyn, the monotheist mother superior.  Most of them have several roles, both domestic and professional, and they derive strength and authority from both spheres--just like the male characters.
  
  On the other hand, the show's young women are woefully underserved despite being, initially, more central to its plot.  Zoe fares the best, but mainly because her arc connects her with the series's two best characters, Daniel and Amanda--the season, for her, is largely about her teenage rebellion, and coming to some sort of peace and understanding with her parents.  The only Zoe-centered storyline that doesn't revolve around that relationship, and treats her as a woman rather than a child, is her romance with Philomon, which is bearable only because of the way its tragic and ugly ending explodes the romantic expectations the show had encouraged us to develop.  Meanwhile, Lacy, for all of Magda Apanowicz's best efforts, is the most inconsistently written character on the show, simultaneously determined and tough-minded, and utterly subservient to the will of others--Zoe, Clarice, or whatever cult she happens to have joined this week.  There's a story to be told here, obviously--of a capable, strong person who nevertheless needs someone else to follow--but Lacy's devotion to Zoe and Clarice (and the degree to which the latter is feigned) are never explained, nor does the show reconcile the lengths to which she goes to help Zoe--which include participating in murders and terrorist bombings--with its insistence that Lacy is a moral, sympathetic character.  And the less said of Tamra, who appears and disappears, is made central to the plot and then ignored, according to the writers' convenience, the better.


• For the life of me, I can't understand the choice to make Zoe ignorant of the mag-train bombing.  With the exception of the Clarice and Lacy, who tell no one else and don't seem inclined to do so, everyone assumes that Zoe was a terrorist, and it is an integral part of Daniel and Amanda's journey over the course of the season that they have to deal with this colossal failure as parents and citizens.  On the other hand, a great deal of effort is expended to stress that the Zoe avatar is not Zoe, and isn't responsible for her choices and crimes, thus absolving us of the crime of sympathy for a suicide bomber.  So why not make Zoe a terrorist?  She could hardly be any more self-involved and megalomaniacal, and while it's true that there's no reason for her to have wanted to commit mass murder, as discussed above there's really no reason for anyone, including Ben, to have wanted this.  As the show doesn't really explain why Zoe, rather than Ben, is seized upon as the mag-train bomber, she might as well have been the one. 


• I've been trying to decide whether the show's connection with Battlestar Galactica helped it or hindered it.  Not in terms of survival--it's pretty clear that Caprica failed because it was too different from its parent show to draw in that show's fans (while hewing too close to Galactica's mythology for the comfort of people who hated it, like me), but at the same time I doubt that it would ever have been made if it hadn't been folded into the Galactica mythology--but in terms of its story.  The connection with Galactica, and our constant awareness of where the story is going, and the fact that characters like Daniel and Zoe are the architects of their own civilization's destruction, inevitably colors our reactions to both story and characters.  It creates a frisson, an ever-present sense of impending doom, that constantly elevates the story's level of tension and its grandeur.  It's an importance that the show doesn't quite earn, but more importantly, it changes the nature of the story that Caprica tells.  Without knowing where the creation of the Cylons, of machine sentience, and of personality upload, was leading Caprican society and the twelve colonies, we could watch Caprica as a story about the effects of technology, both positive and negative, and about the universal human tendency to exploit the weak and rush forward without understanding the consequences of our actions.  Knowing that the story has a tragic ending, however, not only forces the show into a wholly negative stance towards technology that isn't entirely supported by its scripts or characters, but turns Caprica into a morality tale, the kind of story about technological hubris leading to the apocalypse that SF TV loves to tell (see Dollhouse), which does something to negate the literary quality that is Caprica's strongest point.

The 2011 Hugo Awards: An Appeal to the Hugo Nominators

The year is a scant few days old, and yet Hugo season is already upon us.  Renovation, the 2011 Worldcon, started accepting Hugo nominations on January 1st (and will continue to do so until March 26th), which means that from now until August 20th we're all on Hugo readiness alert.  It's customary for fandom to spend the nominating period recommending works and people, pimping their own eligible novels and stories, posting their ballots online to inspire, and to be criticized by, others, and just encouraging them to nominate.  I'm not a member of Renovation and I don't plan to become one (if I do--depending on the ballot and the availability of the Hugo voter packet--it'll be after the nominating period closes), but I'd like to join in this tradition.  Not with a recommendation, though, nor with its opposite.  More like a request.

Dear Hugo nominators: please do not nominate Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear as a single work.

Some background: Blackout and All Clear were submitted by Willis to their publisher, Spectra, as a single work, a time travel novel about London during the Blitz, which takes place in the same universe as her previous novels Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog.  As reported to me by Niall Harrison, in an interview with Willis in Interzone 227 she revealed that the submitted book was edited down to its current, published length of nearly 1,200 pages.  It was then split (according to Willis's blog, because it "was too long to be published in one volume") into Blackout and All Clear, which were published in February and October 2010, respectively.  Nowhere on the front covers, title pages, or front matter of either book is there any indication that they make up two halves of the same story, and many readers reported being surprised when they turned the last page only to find an abrupt stop in the story and an invitation to purchase its second half.  Though both volumes are available as e-books, these are sold separately, and at full price.  Blackout/All Clear's reception has been generally positive, but nearly every review has stressed that neither volume stands on its own as a novel, and that the cutoff point between them is all but arbitrary.  Because they were published in the same year, the Hugo rules allow for Blackout and All Clear to be nominated in the best novel category as a single work, and almost as soon as Blackout was published I started seeing calls for Hugo nominators to do just that.

Before I get into the reasons why I think this a bad idea, let's get one thing out of the way: I am not a big Connie Willis fan.  I am, in fact, a big non-fan of her writing, and her rapturous embrace by fandom--and particularly Hugo-voting fandom, which has awarded her two best novel wins, eight awards in various short fiction categories, and thirteen more nominations--has never failed to baffle me.  As far as I can tell Willis is a limited writer whose creative peak is nearly fifteen years in the past, and whose career in the twenty-first century has been marked mainly by an ever-increasing descent into her worst writerly habits.  When Nick Mamatas complained, in his review of Blackout, that the book was slow, bogged down in minutiae, and unfunny, I had to check and recheck that had ever read anything by Willis before (it appears he has), because in my experience these flaws are universal to her fiction, and as a self-confessed admirer of it you would think that Mamatas would have known to expect them.  I mention this because this post could easily be taken as calling for Willis not to be nominated for the Hugo at all, which is not my goal.  Though I admit that as a reader, a reviewer, and a once and (probably) future Hugo voter I'd prefer it if Willis stopped turning up on the award's ballots (though in all fairness, I haven't read Blackout/All Clear, and for all I know it is a deserving work), I'd like to believe that I'd be making the same argument if the author and book involved were nearer to my heart.  I think that I would almost rather that Blackout and All Clear took up two spots on the 2011 Hugo ballot than just one, because the former would at least be an expression of overpowering love for the book, while latter seems to me to reward some very bad behavior--if not on Willis's part then on the part of her publishers--that I don't think an award given by fandom should be in the business of validating.

The voices I've heard calling for Blackout/All Clear to be nominated together have repeatedly argued that it isn't right to punish Willis for her publisher's choice to split the novel, which strikes me as wrongheaded on two counts.  First, because though it may be true that Willis was powerless to overrule Spectra's choice to split the novel (and their choice to conceal the fact of the split and effectively con their customers) she is by no means an innocent bystander.  Willis made choices that helped bring this situation about.  She wrote and submitted what was, by her own admission, a very long novel without, apparently, giving any thought to breaking it up into distinct chunks with actual stopping points.  And she signed off on an edited two-volume version without, again, trying to craft satisfying reads out of the individual volumes.  In contrast, I'm in the middle of writing a review of Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World, which is proving difficult because, like Blackout/All Clear, it's the first half of a story.  But though I can't call The Half-Made World self-contained, it does come to a stopping point that makes it a coherent reading experience in its own right, while everything I've heard about Blackout/All Clear suggests that it is an ongoing story that simply stops midway.  The frustration and disappointment that fans felt upon discovering that they'd have to wait eight months to read the next chapter in that story is at least in part the result of Willis's choices as a writer--the same choices that a nomination for best novel would celebrate.

Even more problematic to my mind is the notion that to deny Willis a joint nomination for the two volumes is somehow unfair.  For one thing, it seems to imply that an award nomination is something an author is due rather than something that they are, well, awarded, as a gift.  More importantly, as far as I can tell there's only one group here that's been treated unfairly, and that's the fans.  They're the ones who have gotten one book for the price of two, and who have had an eight-month-long wait inserted, without warning, into the middle of a story they had already waited nine years to read.  Willis and Spectra may suffer negative consequences to their prestige and reputation because of their behavior, but they've also reaped rewards.  It's only the fans who have experienced exclusively negative consequences as a result of a choice they didn't make and weren't informed of until it was too late.  For the Hugo, the award given by the fans, to now validate this kind of behavior, strikes me as an affront.

This post is not directed at Hugo nominators who share my opinion that Connie Willis is not a good writer, or even at those who are her fans but didn't care for Blackout/All Clear.  It's directed at nominators who truly believe that Blackout/All Clear represents one of the best genre novels published in 2010.  I'd like to argue that there's another principle at stake, one that might be more important than artistic merit--that of fair dealing.  The Hugo reflects the fans' judgment, but that judgment doesn't have to be, and hasn't always been, purely artistic.  At its worst, the Hugo has been used to reward well-liked people regardless of the actual value of their work, but at its best it has also been used to rebuke bad behavior--perhaps the most recent example is Locus's loss of the Best Semiprozine Hugo in 2009, which has been widely regarded as a response to the decision to change the vote-counting mechanism of the magazine's annual award after the ballots had been counted.  I think that there's a chance to do that again in 2011, and I think that fandom should take that chance.  There's been a lot of talk about fair and unfair in this discussion, but from where I'm standing there's no fairer way of behaving than this: Blackout and All Clear were two books at the checkout counter, and two books in their publicity material; they should be two books on the Hugo nominating form.

Now All Doctor Who Until the End

Syfy has not only canceled Caprica, but has pulled it from its schedule, promising to air the first season's remaining episodes some time in 2011.

Look, it's not as if you couldn't see this coming.  Hell, you could see it coming the moment the idea of a space-adventure-less, soap opera prequel to Battlestar Galactica was bandied about, and Caprica's pilot pretty much confirmed that this was not a show interested in wooing either Galactica's fans or Syfy's traditional viewership (which Syfy is now trying to with the just-announced, and hilariously-titled, Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome).  Nor, to be honest, can I find it in my heart to grieve too much for a show that seemed already, in its last few episodes, to be veering towards Galactica's mythology in an all too familiar way.  I liked some things about Caprica, and thought that it had serious problems, and if I ever manage to watch the entire first season I might write about both, but the one aspect of the show that kept me coming back was that it seemed disconnected from Battlestar Galactica, and a lot more thoughtful and interesting about issues--religion and religious fundamentalism, prejudice, terrorism--than Galactica ever was.  In the episodes aired this fall, however, the handling of some of these issues verged on Galactica-esque ham-handedness, and one character was even revealed to be in contact with Six-esque projection.  Which means that even if the second season had happened, I might not have tuned in. 

So what's frustrating to me this morning isn't so much the news of Caprica's death as the fact that that death is just the latest in a long line of flawed-but-interesting science fiction series (with, incidentally, meaty and prominent roles for women)--The Middleman, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Dollhouse--that have been killed off over the last few years, leaving science fiction fans with a pretty barren TV landscape populated mostly by shlocky Spy Fi, feather-light monster of the week series, and third-rate Galactica and Lost imitations.  There's a reason that every single show that I've written positively and at length about in the last year has been a mainstream series--because no one is doing interesting, or even particularly watchable, work in TV science fiction, and though things are slightly better for fantasy (I may not like True Blood but I can respect its accomplishments, and I'm looking forward to HBO's Song of Ice and Fire) and horror (please let The Walking Dead be good), I'm not seeing much hope on the horizon for science fiction.  Right now, the only show that approaches decent science fiction on TV is Doctor Who, and that should be a sad commentary even for people who love it.

The 2010 Hugo Awards: The Winners

The results are already available from many different sources, for those of you who weren't following Cheryl Morgan and Mur Lafferty's live coverage from Melbourne, which did an excellent job of building up excitement and anticipation for the results.  Some thoughts:

• It's almost inevitable for any results to feel like a letdown at first, especially if, like myself, your taste diverges more than a little from that of the Hugo voters, so that even the best results feel like compromise choices.  Nevertheless, once that kneejerk reaction of disappointment wears off, this year's fiction winners are really quite heartening.  The only real disappointment is Doctor Who's win for "The Waters of Mars"--the worst of the three Who specials, none of which were particularly good--in the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form category, but that's more than made up for by Moon's triumph in Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.  I haven't read most of the nominated novellas, but I can think of worse winners than Charles Stross in that category.  And though I would have chosen different winners in the novelette and short story categories, both Peter Watts's "The Island" and Will McIntosh's "Bridesicle" are good stories and worthy winners.  Finally, I'm immensely pleased by the unprecedented and entirely unexpected tie between China Miéville's The City and The City and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl for the best novel Hugo.  Between them, these two ambitious, interesting, flawed but fascinating novels have split the genre award scene--Bacigalupi won the Nebula Award, Miéville won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and both won Locus Awards in different categories--and I was at a loss to choose between them or to imagine how the Hugo voters would do so.  To give them both the award is, I think, a perfect way of acknowledging what a remarkable achievement each represents, and how remarkable 2009 was for seeing the publication of both.


• Patrick Nielsen Hayden, winner of the award for Best Editor, Long Form, has asked Hugo voters not to nominate him in this category for the next two years.  In this, he follows in the footsteps of former winners John Scalzi (Best Fan Writer, 2008), Cheryl Morgan (Best Fan Writer, 2009), and David G. Hartwell (Best Editor, Long Form, 2009) who have made similar appeals, some from the winner's podium.  I understand and applaud their motivations, and indeed when Scalzi first announced that he would decline any further nominations for best fan writer I thought that this was entirely the way to go, but now I'm having second thoughts.  I share the distaste that many Hugo voters have developed for perennial winners.  While one's first Hugo in the fan or editor categories might be thought of as a lifetime achievement award, in subsequent years I think that voters should take a "what have you done for me lately?" approach, and vote according to the nominee's activities in the award year.  Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to happen.  Instead, one gets the sense that the awards are given for personality, popularity, overall career achievement, and sometimes just inertia.  That said, I think that this is a change that should come from the voters, not as a gift, however well-intentioned, from the winners.  At this point, with a consensus building against perennial winners, it might be time to consider a change to the Hugo rules, making winners ineligible in their categories for two or three years after their victory.


• The Aussiecon 4 website reports 1094 voting ballots.  During the ceremony, awards administrator Vince Docherty revealed that 40% of the convention's membership had voted in the awards, but given that Australian Worldcons tend to be more sparsely attended than North American ones (~1,500 attendees in the last two conventions) and that Aussiecon's attendance numbers were reported to be in line with this, I assumed he meant that 600-700 ballots had been received.  The large number of voting ballots (in line with the number of ballots received last year in Anticipation, a much larger convention) suggests that many came from associate memberships, presumably purchased for the express purpose of voting.  For this, I suspect, we can thank the Hugo voter packet, a great project that has proven itself a real boon for the award, but I think it also helped that this year's nominees captured fandom's interest--that the best novel category included some of the most talked-about novels of the year, and that 2009 was such a banner year for SF film.


• Aussiecon has also posted the voting and nomination statistics (PDF) so let the Monday morning calculations and obsessing begin!  Last year I noted that nearly all the Hugo winners took their categories outright in the first round of counting.  This year is the reverse.  In best novel, The Windup Girl and The City and The City started out neck and neck, but the latter quickly took the lead and held it until the final round.  The best novella nominees played pass the Hugo, with John Scalzi holding it for the first three rounds and passing it on to Kage Baker, before it settled with Charles Stross.  In contrast, Stross was the lead in the best novelette category right until the final round of vote distribution.  Only Will McIntosh won his award for short story right from the get-go.
  
  Other interesting revelations include Avatar coming last in the Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form race, cementing my feeling that this was a film more beloved by non-geeks than geeks.  Also, the Doctor Who block vote triumphed once again: Dollhouse's "Epitaph One" held the Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form Hugo all the way to the last round, but when the votes for "The Next Doctor" were redistributed, they went predominantly to "The Waters of Mars."


• In the nominating statistics, what's notable is that in nearly every category there is a wide gap between the works that made it onto the final ballot and the next most-nominated work.  Helen Keeble's "A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc; or, A Lullaby," which I had been championing for a best novelette nomination, got twelve votes--less than a third of what it would have needed to make it onto the ballot, but still nice to see.  The series finale of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles was just below the cutoff point for a Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form nomination, which is saddening.  On the other hand, it scored two more votes than the Battlestar Galactica finale.  On a personal note, I received 19 votes for best fan writer, ten short of a nomination and, which is more important to me, the first time that I can't name each of the people who nominated me.  Congrats also to Niall Harrison for his 22 best fan writer votes, and for the ten votes for Torque Control in the best fanzine category.

Inception: Further Thoughts

Between them, Niall Harrison, Adam Roberts, and, in the comments to my post about it (starting here), Brian Francis Slattery, have talked me over to their reading of Inception--the film and the concept at its core--as a metaphor for storytelling and the artifice of filmmaking (which probably means that my original take on the film, as an SFnal story about learning the world, is, if not off-base, then probably no more productive than obsessing over whether Cobb is still dreaming in the last scene).  As I say to Brian, however, I think that as an analogy to storytelling, dreaming is a very poor fit.  Niall is right to point out that most of us don't dream as vividly and imaginatively as the more common filmic represenation of dreams--vividly colored surrealist landscapes--would have us believe.  My dreams, the ones I remember at least, usually feature familiar settings and actions (though I did once dream that I was investigating the murder of Kermit the frog--I'm still pissed about being woken up before getting to the bottom of that mystery) that have been scrambled into illogic by my sleeping brain.  If it's unfair to condemn Inception for not being The Cell, however, it still seems valid to me to compare it to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or the Buffy episode "Restless," both of which feature dreams that are entirely mundane in their settings and events (or, in the latter case, as mundane as settings and events in Buffy get), and whose strangeness is derived from the illogical manner in which the characters move within those scenes, and their atypical reactions to them.  Inception's dreams, meanwhile, are entirely linear and entirely logical, and though I accept that this is because storytelling, and not dreams, is actually the film's focus, the discrepancy only serves to highlight how strained the film's central metaphor is.

Niall, Adam and Brian argue that Inception is drawing our attention to the similar actions we perform in dreams and when consuming a story--accepting illogic as logic, filling in the interstices between 'scenes' in order to create a coherent story in our brains.  But to my mind these are actually two distinct and very different acts.  I mentioned the second season finale of House in one of my replies to Brian.  In the opening scene, House is shot, and spends the rest of the episode trying to diagnose a patient from his hospital room.  In the climactic scene, he has a revelation about the patient's illness while talking to his fellows, and the next scene shows them in a stairwell continuing to talk.  House turns around and asks: "How did I get here?  I was just in my hospital room," and realizes that he's still in a coma following his shooting.  It's a very neat and wrongfooting moment because it draws attention to an action that the audience performs automatically--filling in the gaps in a story so that it can form a coherent, lifelike whole in our minds--but it also draws our attention to the difference between dream and story, and the reason that reading Inception as a metaphor for storytelling strikes me as empty.  When House realizes the illogic of his experiences, he ceases to believe in his perceived reality, in the story happening around him.  I'm sure that most people have had the experience of being immersed in a dream and, as they draw closer to consciousness, realizing some logical flaw in it, at which point the dream dissipates.  Consuming story isn't like that.  Momentarily wrongfooting as it is, the metafictional gag at the end of House's second season doesn't cause the audience to stop believing in the show, because the audience was already aware of the story's fictionality.  Unlike dreams, we know that a story is unreal and accept that unreality.  We know, even if it's not something we think about very often, that we are active participants in the creation of the story, and that we are lending our intellectual and emotional faculties to something unreal.  It's a knowing, conscious act, not the unaware acceptance of the illogic of dreams.  Dream isn't a parallel for story; it's the opposite of it.

The other reason that I don't like this reading of Inception (besides, as I say to Brian, that I'm really not sure what Nolan is trying to say when he compares storytelling to what is essentially a mind-rape) is that it reduces the film to this metaphor.  The substance of the film ceases to matter because its purpose is merely to call attention to its own artificiality.  The experience of watching the film is not the point, and therefore it doesn't matter that this experience is so leaden, because the purpose of the film is the realization that comes hours or days after one has finished watching it.  This doesn't have to be an unsuccessful approach--once again I'm moved to compare Inception to Primer, which so completely avoids delivering anything like a satisfying viewing experience that it's almost necessary to watch the film twice in order to get anything out of the experience--but it does require more courage and intelligence than Inception seems to possess.  I agree with Niall, in other words, that an intellectual exercise can be thrilling in its own right, without appealing to the emotion, but Inception, to my mind, isn't.  That said, it's precisely because Inception is so substance-less that I'm growing more charitable towards it as I move away from it.  Like a dream, the experience of watching the film has faded away almost entirely, while the interpretation offered by Niall, Adam and Brian--so much more palatable in a few, well-written paragraphs than in a two hour film--lingers on.

Making Yourself Heard: You're Maybe Doing it Wrong?

Quoting from the most recent issue of Locus, Sean Wallace reports on the voting statistics of the Locus Awards (results here), which, as we discussed a few months ago, have for the second year running persisted in their policy of counting non-subscriber votes as half of subscriber votes.  The language is muddled (and continues to spin the unequal vote-counting policy as a response to alleged "ballot-box stuffing" in 2008), but a quick calculation gives us the following results:

Year	Total Votes	Subscriber Votes	Nonsubscriber Votes	% of Nonsubscriber Votes
2008	1012	385	726	62 72
2009	662	357	305	46
2010	680	306	374	55

The good news is that the overall number of votes has remained low, and that the significant drop in nonsubscriber votes between 2008 and 2009 has not been reversed.  The bad news is that there were more nonsubscriber votes in 2010 than 2009, and that their percentage is creeping back up to its 2008 levels (though this is also the result of the steady drop in subscriber votes over the last three years).  I'm not sure that this sends the right message to the award's administrators--the short passage Wallace quotes certainly suggests that they think this year's numbers are something to be celebrated.  If they believe that participants in their poll will tolerate being treated like second class voters, they'll have no reason to reverse this misguided and insulting policy.

All Votes Are Equal, But, Well, You Know the Rest

This whole thing started in the summer of 2008, when Neil Clarke reported the results of that year's Locus award poll, as published in the July 2008 issue of the magazine, and noted with alarm a retroactive change to the award's vote counting system.  "Non-subscribers outnumbered subscribers by so much," the magazine's writers explained, "that in an attempt to better reflect the Locus magazine readership, we decided to change the counting system, so now subscriber votes count double."  The new weighting system (which was only disclosed in the print version of the magazine) changed the winners of at least two categories and unleashed a flurry of angry and resentful reactions, both for the system itself and for making the change only after the votes had been cast and the results tabulated.

The backlash was not long in coming.  As reported, again, by Clarke, the 2009 Locus poll (which continued the vote-weighting system) saw a dramatic drop in participation, from just over a thousand votes in 2008 to 662 in 2009--a drop attributable directly to a 50% reduction in the number of non-subscribers voting in the poll.  "We inadvertently alienated a lot of the online community last year when we decided to double subscriber points last year--particularly by doing it without notice," the Locus writers admitted.  It also seems likely that the award controversy played a part in Locus's losing the 2009 best semiprozine Hugo to Weird Tales--an award it has failed to win only five times in the twenty six years that the category has existed (prior to 2009, the two most recent losses--to Ansible in 2005 and to Interzone in 1995--were both to UK-based magazines in UK-based conventions).  In light of this reaction, and of their own recognition of it, I expected the Locus staff to quietly roll vote-weighting back in the 2010 poll.  Instead, as the fine print in the recently posted poll page says, they have quietly continued it. 

It should be said, in the strongest possible terms, that my problem with this choice has nothing to do with perceiving it as censorship, or with being angry that Locus isn't interested in the online community's input, or with the belief that they have somehow deprived online voters of their rights.  The question here isn't whether Locus had the right to change the poll's vote-weighting system in favor of its subscribers, which of course it did, but whether in doing so it did the right thing.  There's nothing wrong with wanting the Locus award to reflect the tastes of Locus subscribers.  If the decision had been to close the poll off to non-subscribers entirely, I would have had no complaints.  It would have been disappointing--as Niall Harrison says, "The big selling point of the Locus Awards is, or always has been to me at least, their representativeness, precisely the fact that anyone can vote and that they are thus the best barometer of community-wide opinion that we have."--but most popular vote awards, in and out of genre, limit their voter base in some way--the Nebula awards are voted on by members of SFWA, the Hugos and other convention-based awards by members of the convention--and it would have been entirely valid for the Locus award to follow suit.

That's not what the Locus staffers did.  Instead of politely telling us that we are not welcome in an award that doesn't seek to reflect our tastes, they've made the far more insulting choice of giving us half a vote each--we're welcome, in other words, but not equal.  A slightly cynical reading of this policy would be that Locus wants to hold on the perception that its award is the most open and representative in the field, and to the cachet that comes with that perception, without actually being open and representative, and that its staffers are hoping that by not drawing attention to the vote-weighting policy, it will be quietly forgotten, and eventually accepted as the new status quo.

I don't think that should happen.  With apologies to the authors I would have voted for, and particularly the ones I would have given write-in votes to, I don't plan to vote in this year's Locus award, and if you're not a subscriber, I urge you not to vote either until its administrators agree to give every ballot its equal weight.  I hope that the Locus staffers will take a long, hard look at what they're doing, and make one of two equally valid choices--open the award equally to all voters, or close it off to magazine subscribers only.  But as it stands, I see no reason why we should invest our time and energy helping to legitimize an institution that considers our opinions to be less legitimate than others'.

Ah, L'amour

I don't know why there's been such a tizzy about the messages that the Twilight films pass along to their young, female viewers.  Or rather, I understand the tizzy; I just don't know why the people at the center of it are treating Twilight as if it's in any way anomalous instead of a mere intensification of an industry-wide process.  At the same time that more and more energy and talent are being poured into romantic comedies for and about men (which seem to invariably treat women as killjoy moms whose job it is to force the man-child lead to grow up), the ones Hollywood produces for women just keep getting more toxic.  In the last year alone, we had films whose messages can best be summed up as 'women!  Isn't it hilarious how they desperately want a man and yet no one will ever love them!,' 'if only you file away every last bit of your personality, wants and desires, you too can land an obnoxious misogynist!,' and 'a WOMAN?  Proposing to a MAN?  Who ever heard of such a thing?'.

And now we have The Bounty Hunter, in which, according to the trailer, Gerard Butler kidnaps his ex-wife, played by Jennifer Aniston, stuffs her in the trunk of his car, laughs when she tearfully begs him to let her go, block-tackles her when she tries to run away from him, handcuffs her to a hotel room bed, threatens her with his gun, and talks about wanting to kill her.  The only thing you'd have to do to turn this trailer into one for a woman-in-peril film would be to change the background music.



No wonder that romantic comedies like (500) Days of Summer, which 'only' reduces its female lead to a personality-free, over-romanticized blank, are treated like a brave, intelligent alternative.

Why I Won't Be Watching Inglourious Basterds

Quentin Tarantino is in Israel this week to promote his Holocaust action-comedy-exploitation film Inglourious Basterds, and this afternoon he gave a press conference. Film blogger and critic Yair Raveh live-blogged the event, including Tarantino's response to the inevitable question of whether there are red lines in filmmaking, and whether the Holocaust lies beyond them. (It should be noted that this is my translation from Hebrew of Raveh's no doubt hasty translation of Tarantino's English answer, so I may be losing meaning and nuance. The gist, however, seems quite clear.) (UPDATE: Raveh has posted a video of the press conference.)

I've been asked why I didn't make a Holocaust film. Well, I did make a Holocaust film. But I think that in the last twenty years Holocaust films have been very depressing [the literal translation of Raveh's text is 'bummer,' and I'm not sure what Tarantino's original word choice was] because their focus was on victimization. I came at it from another direction. I didn't work in the Holocaust film genre but in the adventure film genre.

Since watching its trailer several months ago it's been my goal to ignore, as much as possible, the existence of Inglourious Basterds. I had much the same reaction to the trailer and to the film's basic concept as I did to Becoming Jane several years ago--a dull, incoherent rage--but felt that to speak with any authority on the film I would have to watch it, which I most fervently did not want to do. Better just to leave it alone, I decided. Which means that I have no one but myself to blame for even reading Raveh's report from the press conference. Having done so, however, the rage is back, as incoherent as ever. It's a happy coincidence, therefore, that Sady Doyle should choose today to discuss Inglourious Basterds (in an aside to a post about Michael Moore) and in so doing hit on some of what makes me uncomfortable about the film's premise:

Tarantino seems to have moved from flat-out nihilism to nihilism disguised as empowerment, in recent years. ... the thought of [him] applying this to World War Fucking Two was really not appealing to me. I’ve heard there’s not even that much violence in the movie, that it’s all talk-talk-talk, that it’s mostly about a girl, and you know what? Super. Great. Did you get the requisite foot fetish scene in, QT? Oh, you totally did? Awesome. But here’s the thing I can’t get around: the feeling that it’s using World War Two as a setting and Nazis as villains, not so that Quentin Tarantino can actually deal with the sobering realities of genocide and the human need for revenge and resistance, but so that literally anything the good guys do will be considered justifiable. Basically, I think he’s using the Holocaust to write himself a blank check.

Which is an important point, but honestly doesn't even come close to covering all the ways in which Inglourious Basterds makes me uncomfortable. There's the stark, either/or choice the film presents between victimization and monstrousness. There's the apparent assumption that the dourness of previous Holocaust films is a bug rather than a feature. There's the triumphalism of the film's premise and particularly its ending, which seems to implicitly criticize real-life victims of the Holocaust and minimize its horror. Most of all, there is, as Tarantino himself says, the use of a Holocaust setting to tell an adventure story. To hear him tell it, the 'Holocaust film' is a genre, and he's simply taken its tropes and transplanted them to another genre. Even ignoring the fact that this genre does not suit the history it's appropriating (Tarantino is, after all, hardly the first filmmaker to twist history to fit a story it doesn't support) I find this notion, of the Holocaust as fodder, not a story in its own right but the raw material from which other stories can be constructed, utterly risible.

Perhaps even more aggravating than any of these issues, however, is the fact that it is so obviously a mug's game to criticize a Quentin Tarantino film on ideological grounds. You have to be prepared to be called a humorless killjoy for overanalyzing a humble action film, and then, if you point out that fun is being wrung out of the systematic murder of six million people, to be told that the triumphalism and empowerment of the film's plot justifies its exploitation of that history. It's a film, in other words, that defeats criticism first by asking us to ignore its historical associations, and then by trading on them. All the while, of course, it basks in a coolness so arctic that simply to suggest that it might be problematic is to distinguish oneself as hopelessly uncouth. Tarantino films are all about ironic distance--from violence, from emotion, from the campy trash he loves to imitate and recreate. To take them seriously enough to criticize on moral grounds is to relinquish that distance, and therefore to be Watching It Wrong--you've lost the game before you even started playing.

There are some huge caveats that need to be made here, and the first is, once again, that I haven't seen Inglourious Basterds. This post is about the impression I've formed of it from its promotional material and the critical response to it, and that impression may be partly or wholly mistaken. The second, and more important, is that I'm drawing the boundaries of acceptable depictions of the Holocaust much closer than I would for other historical tragedies because it has a personal association for me. To be honest, I'm comfortable with this attitude, and can at least claim that I'm not a Johnny-come-lately to it. Even back when the entire state of Israel seemed united in a collective plotz over Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, I was eying it dubiously, and though, once again, I haven't seen the film, I suspect that critic Kobi Niv is on to something when he suggests, in his polemical and probably over-argued book Life is Beautiful, But Not For the Jews, that the reason for its popularity is simply that everyone, no matter their religion, loves a good crucifixion story. Still, the fact remains that there is a broader question of how or even whether to glorify or enjoy violence, whether in blatantly fantastical action films or in straight-faced historical films. Though I make no apologies for treating the Holocaust as a special case, it may be that I need to take a closer look at my reaction to violence in other films, and particularly ones that trade on real world tragedies that aren't part of my history.

With those caveats in place, let me just reiterate the reason I won't be watching Inglourious Basterds. It seems to me that Tarantino's answer to the perfectly legitimate questioning of his choice to make a Holocaust exploitation film is to fall back on artistic freedom as the highest possible virtue, to essentially ask "Can't I use the shape of the Holocaust, devoid of its truth, its horror, its moral lessons, to tell any kind of story I want?" To which my answer--and you may very well have a different one--is: No, you can't.

Journalism: Are You Doing It At All?

If you've visited io9 any time in the last week, you'll have noticed banners, sidebar ads, and the revamped title bar all bearing the by-now familiar images of an alien spaceship and an alien-shaped gun range target, which are only part of the gargantuan promotional effort for Neill Blomkamp's upcoming film District 9. The advertising blitz was directly tied to io9's coverage of Comic Con, with most of its con-related articles accompanied by an individual banner reading 'San Diego Comic Con - Presented by District 9' (you can still see the individual banners if you go back a page or two on io9's history, and though the main site's title bar has returned to normal, it's still in its District 9 version on the individual pages of several of the Comic Con-related articles).


If you've visited io9 any time in the last week, you may also have noticed that on July 24th, site editor Annalee Newitz gave District 9, which she saw in an advance press screening at Comic Con, a rave review, and that on Tuesday, news editor Charlie Jane Anders, in an article ranking the con's biggest buzz generators, gave District 9 the top spot.

Commenter oliverkirby, who suggested, albeit not very diplomatically, that District 9 triumphed over James Cameron's Avatar in the latter article because of the advertising buyout, was told by Anders that "that's the most ban-worthy comment we've had in ages." I commented yesterday, saying that the film's sponsorship of io9's Comic Con coverage represented a clear conflict of interests. The comment appeared some time during the night, was replied to by commenter zenpoet, and has since been deleted (comment permalinks don't appear to be working. Click on 'show all comments' at the bottom of the page to see oliverkirby's comment and the reply to mine). Both user accounts are now banned from commenting on the site.

On the one hand, I feel more than a little silly getting worked up about this. To rant that I've lost all respect for io9's journalistic integrity is to suggest that I had any in the first place, which is very much not true. There's a wide spectrum in culture journalism between delivering news and delivering hype, and io9 has always tended towards the latter end. And to be honest, even the most conscientious, independent blog or news site will inevitably bump up against the problem of distinguishing journalism from advertising. Is it alright to accept an ARC from a publisher or editor? Should you go to an advance press screening of a movie you've been eager to see? Should you accept memorabilia and tie-in merchandise from PR agents? For that matter, should you go to Comic Con, which is ground zero for this kind of targeted, swag-laden advertising?

I have different answers to each of these questions, and am by no means of a Jonathan McCalmont-esque purist persuasion. I recognize that it's impossible to interact with the product of an entertainment industry--particularly one like Hollywood, with money to burn--without becoming complicit in the marketing of that product on some level, and that there are many shades of gray when it comes to deciding just how deep that complicity should run. What io9 did, however, does not fall in a gray area. io9's Comic Con coverage was brought to us by District 9, and as part of that coverage io9 informed us that District 9 was "One of the Best Movies of 2009," and that it had won the convention's "buzz wars." There is no way to make this kosher, and if there were, deleting and banning commenters who questioned this choice is clearly not it.

Bear in mind, also, that this isn't some newbie blogger excitedly running a promotional book giveaway from their den because they're just so stoked that a publisher actually talked to little old them. io9 is run by Gawker Media, a half-decade old company running some of the most highly visited blogs on the net. There is no way its editors aren't savvy enough to understand what they were doing. Advertising on the site isn't the equivalent of some blogger activating Google Ads in the hopes of getting a couple of bucks to defray the costs of blogging part-time. Like traditional newspapers, io9 is in the business of selling eyeballs to advertisers. The District 9 sponsorship-rave combo makes it look as though the site has made the transition to selling customers, and only serves to blur the difference--already not that easy to discern--between io9 the science fiction news site and io9 the promotional brochure.

This is not, by the way, to be taken as a comment on the film itself. I've heard good things about District 9, including from sources other than io9, and the trailer is very promising. I'm looking forward to seeing it--it is incredibly irksome to me that I'm leaving Montreal the day before its release--though I have to say that io9's behavior also reflects badly on the film's PR team, who, one would think, were already paid up in the snafu department. I'm even prepared to believe that both the review and the buzz ranking article were written in good faith, but whether or not they were, it simply doesn't matter. You can't review your own sponsor and expect to be taken seriously as a news source, though of course it remains an open question whether that is a state that io9 has ever aspired to.

The Weekend's Films 2

Last minute Hugo reading is keeping me both busy and quiet, though I hope to have some more Hugo-related stuff by the end of the week. In the meantime, here are a couple of films.

• Virtuality - Not a film per se but what was to have been the pilot for Ronald Moore and Michael "Unfinished Business" Taylor's follow-up to Battlestar Galactica, it aired this weekend as a standalone movie (which was quite unfair of Fox as the pilot by no means stands alone). Taking place aboard the spaceship Phaeton as it approaches the point of no return in its journey outside the solar system, Virtuality's chief virtues are its looks--Phaeton's interiors and its CGI exteriors, some nicely done action scenes, and the judicious integration of surveillance footage into the show's traditionally shot scenes. Other than that--and the fact that space-set television has become an endangered species--I see no reason to lament Virtuality's early demise. The pilot feels several drafts short of completion--or, to be less charitable, it feels lazy, as though Moore and Taylor didn't feel any obligation to hook their audience with a coherent story or a discernible direction for their show. Instead, they seem to have written the first chapter of a story, which makes gestures towards several different plotlines and takes it on faith that viewers will tune in next week to see which one of them the writers are actually interested in telling.
  
  Virtuality is telling at least four different stories. At its most fundamental level, it is the story of an isolated, multi-racial, multi-gender, multinational crew on a years-long mission towards what may be humanity's last hope of survival (in its presentation of this story the pilot steals quite shamelessly from Sunshine, though not when it comes to visuals, which is really the only aspect of Sunshine you'd want to imitate). The mission, however, is being funded in part by a media conglomerate, and crewmembers are made to participate in a reality TV program, complete with a confessional chamber and cheesy promos interspersed with the show's action (besides being over the top, this storyline completely ignores both the transmission lag once Phaeton leaves the solar system and the strain that time dilation will place on program scheduling). Meanwhile, crewmembers entertain themselves in VR simulations, but one by one these programs are corrupted, turning violent and traumatic. Finally, frequently voiced suspicion of the mission's sponsors boils over when one of the characters is killed and another becomes convinced that they were murdered. Virtuality gets so bogged down in establishing each of these stories that it forgets to tell a story in its own right. When the credits roll, all we're certain of is that weird shit is going on. Between the proliferation of plotlines and the sheer size of the cast, the characters are given very short shrift--most of them are types (the tough as nails female pilot, the scientist who is grieving for a son he neglected for his work, the oily psychiatrist slash reality show producer) and those that aren't are simply tough to get a handle on--the mission commander careens unexpectedly from dourness to euphoria without ever letting us see his center, all while we're being told that he's a natural leader and the only person who can keep the crew together. There are one or two nice exchanges between the characters, but no exceptional ones, and hardly any really cool moments of any kind. These are all problems that might have been dealt with had the series gotten a season order, and it is true that odder and less coherent pilots, by which I mean Dollhouse, have been given that chance. The difference, of course, is that Dollhouse is made by someone who has earned my indulgence whereas Virtuality's creators are the main point against it, and in order to have developed any investment in the series, much less tolerance for its faults, I needed the pilot to be exceptional, not busy and underdone.


• Coraline - Once again, this is a film whose chief virtue is its looks, though in this case that's clearly intentional. The stop-motion animation is stunning, and the use of 3D only intensifies its beauty and its creepiness (though on a personal note I have to say that 3D gave me a headache so bad that I was barely able to make it through the film's 100 minutes. I certainly won't be able to put up with it for 2+ hours of James Cameron's Avatar, so sign me up for the 2D version). The film sticks rather close to the plot of the original novel, but for the addition of a boy in the real world whom Coraline befriends (this is only annoying at the very end of the film when he rescues Coraline at the last minute). This faithfulness, however, is actually a problem, as much like the novel Coraline has a lot of dead space, moments whose purpose is merely to show off Gaiman's odd inventiveness. These work better in the novel where they take less time to get through (though the cumulative weight of their tweeness does get a bit wearying). In the film, we end up with several set pieces which do nothing to move the plot. This is where I think the decision not to make Coraline into a musical a la The Nightmare Before Christmas (according to IMDb They Might Be Giants had already recorded several tracks for the film before the change was made) serves the film ill, as the songs could have filled up this dead space. On the other hand, songs would certainly have undercut the creepiness of the second half of the film, in which the true nature of the other world is revealed. I never found Gaiman's novel particularly scary, but the film really is, both in its depiction of the Other Mother and in the way it captures the enormity of the danger and challenges that Coraline finds herself facing. The strong second half, and the beautiful animation, mostly make up for the film's slow buildup, but in the end I find myself having roughly the same reaction to the film as I did to the book--nice, and with occasional flashes of excellence, but ultimately too enchanted with its own weirdness to be much of a story.

The Weekend's Films

Isn't it just the way: months can go by without me seeing the inside of a movie theater, and then two films I want to see open on the same weekend. Here are my thoughts on both of them.

• Terminator Salvation: As everyone has said, this is better than Terminator 3. It's not, however, so much better as to matter. Christian Bale is a plank of wood as John Connor, which allegedly shouldn't matter as he's not really the star of the film. That would be Sam Worthington (who is decent enough even if he can't seem to keep his Aussie accent in check) as Marcus, the secret Cylon, and of a secondary importance is Anton Yelchin (the best of the three, but also the one who's been given the worst lines) as Kyle Reese. The problem is that despite all the post-Judgement Day window dressing which suggests that Salvation is about the war with the machines, what the film actually does is regurgitate the previous two films' plots: a temporal threat to John Connor's existence--in this case, to the teenage Kyle, whom Skynet now knows to be John's father (probably because John mentions it at the drop of a hat)--which is forestalled by a friendly cyborg who also becomes a mentor, in this case to Kyle (and thus down the line to Sarah and John himself).
  
  So, once again, the film is about saving John Connor, which seems like a less worthy goal when John Connor has all the charisma of day-old bread and seems to have bought into his own myth so completely that he only challenges the order to destroy a Skynet base in which hundreds of prisoners are being held (orders from his evil superiors, of course) when he realizes that Kyle is one of them. Other than that, the plot is so dumb and contrived as to make Star Trek seem coherent in comparison, and the action scenes are frankly dull, completely lacking the excitement and terror of similar scenes in Terminator 2--perhaps because we're never in any doubt as to which of the three leads will live and which will die. The women are completely perfunctory--Bryce Dallas Howard as Kate Brewster has so little to do that she makes the character's role in Terminator 3 seem nuanced and rich, and Moon Bloodgood, though allegedly the tough action chick, is really just a love interest for Marcus. The only bright spot is Helena Bonham Carter as the deliciously twisted Skynet designer and later the face of Skynet, who sinks her teeth so readily into her small role that you don't even care what a huge retcon this is. If number 5 happens, count me out.


• The Brothers Bloom: It was hard not to feel nervous about Rian Johnson's follow-up to Brick, not simply because the bar had been set so high but because Brick was such a precarious masterpiece, constantly on the verge of collapsing under the weight of the seriousness with which it took its central gimmick--a danger from which it was spared mainly through Joseph Gordon-Levitt's searing performance. The Brother Bloom doesn't scale Brick's heights, but it does at least give the impression that Johnson is aware of his predicament, as he's chosen to tell a story about artifice, and the attempt to transform it into something more than a clever performance. The titular brothers, Stephen and Bloom, are not simply con-men but storytellers, criminal therapists who identify in their marks a need for narrative--revenge on an abandoning spouse, adventure after long years as a shut-in--and enact it, as melodramatically as possible ("Have at you, you fiend!" Stephen exclaims at one point). Despite its deliberate recalling of heist films such as Ocean's 11 or The Sting, the double crosses and reveals in The Brothers Bloom have less to do with money and more to do with whether or not the characters are actually feeling what they pretend to be feeling, and whether they can pretend their way into something real.
  
  The Brothers Bloom is therefore a film that draws attention to its over the top storyness as a way of defusing it, with only partial success--when the depressed, perpetually one con away from retirement Bloom says of Penelope, an heiress with a hidden talent for grifting, that she feels like a character, he is only partially successful at getting us to ignore the fact that Penelope is far too precocious and adventurous to be true (and at time too much the perfect girlfriend). There's also the fact that Johnson's total commitment to style works less well in a comedy than it did in the grim Brick--or at least, it makes him seem like nothing more than a Wes Anderson imitator (an impression which is not dispelled by Adrien Brody playing a very similar character to the one he played in The Darjeeling Limited). Still, for all its conscious artificiality it's hard not to be won over by The Brothers Bloom--it is, for one thing, an extremely funny movie, with several clever visual or verbal gags, and the characters are very winning. For all her precociousness, Penelope is a hell of a fun character, but it's Rinko Kikuchi as the brothers' demolition expert sidekick Bang Bang who steals the show. The silent Asian sidekick sounds like a disaster waiting to happen, but Bang Bang is so clearly her own person, and has such a huge personality, that she completely tramples the stereotype, and to top that she and Penelope forge a friendship that transcends their roles as, respectively, Stephen's accomplice and Bloom's love interest, which is enormously gratifying. The Brothers Bloom is by no means a perfect film, but it does demonstrate that Johnson has more in him than clever gimmicks, and makes me very curious to see what he does next.

Seasonal News

Right on the heels of this weekend's announcement that Dollhouse has been renewed for a second season comes the sadder but slightly less surprising news that The Sarah Connor Chronicles has been canceled. (Also, Chuck gets a third season, but, you know: formula + the geek equivalent of frat humor + half-naked ladies = not a terrifically long shot.)

This is, of course, very upsetting, but unlike Niall I'm not convinced that, if the decision actually did come down to only one of these two shows, the wrong choice was made. It's true, Sarah Connor is the better show (though this says more about Dollhouse's problems than Sarah Connor's strengths), and you don't need to work very hard to read an uncomfortable statement into the fact that the show about scantily clad, brainwashed sex slaves has been renewed while the one about the difficult warrior woman who only takes off her clothes to treat one of her frequent bullet or stab wounds has been axed. But it seems to me that after two seasons, Sarah Connor has had the chance that Dollhouse has now been given to find both its footing and its audience, and has, for the most part, squandered it. Yes, the second season finale was excellent, and raised the possibility of several very interesting future plotlines--John making his way in a future in which his destiny no longer hangs over him, Sarah and Ellison on the run in the present, Savannah Weaver as an intermediary between the two periods--but it did so by razing the structure of the second season to the ground, and in so doing acknowledged how problematic and, frankly, how boring and listless that season was.

Both Dollhouse and Sarah Connor are shows with interesting concepts and deeply flawed executions, but the creative team in charge of Dollhouse has a proven track record of not only producing excellent shows but of producing excellent shows with deeply flawed first seasons. Whereas when the Sarah Connor writers were given the chance to take their show to the next level, they buried it in the mud, getting mired in navel-gazing and drawn-out, poorly plotted storylines that didn't do nearly enough in terms of character development to justify their running time. If you're going to gamble on either one of these shows making the transition into excellence, it seems to me that Dollhouse is clearly the one to go with.

Of course, in an ideal world I'd have liked to see both shows get the chance to improve, as even deeply flawed SF has become a rare commodity on our screens. And really, the true shame isn't that one of these shows was chosen over the other, but that they both have to scramble to survive while Heroes, whose vaunted return to form fizzled into something only slightly less disappointing than its previous two volumes, has got a seemingly endless lease on life.