Self-Promotion

My review of Sylvia Kelso's Amberlight and its sequel Riversend appears today at Strange Horizons.

Also, if you're not doing so already, check out the short story book club at Torque Control, now in its second week. Last week's monumental and contentious debate on Daniel Abraham's "The Best Monkey" (including a guest appearance by the author) is probably a one-time fluke, but there is already an interesting spectrum of opinion on this week's story, "A Tiny Feast" by Chris Adrian, which will probably warm up as people return from their weekend.

Defying Sanity

Alright, so it is summer. And there's nothing to watch on TV. And even if there were, it's too hot to concentrate on anything more challenging than fluff. And it's going on several years since there was any space-set science fiction on our screens that didn't have the word Galactica or Stargate in its title. Even so, there's no excuse for watching Defying Gravity, the new series about a six-year mission around the solar system billed as 'Grey's Anatomy in space.' It's not just that Defying Gravity delivers exactly what that none-too-appetizing pitch promises, but that it's not even as enjoyably trashy as Grey's Anatomy. It takes special skill to wring the tension and melodrama out of a scene in which the female lead has been blown out into space by a malfunctioning airlock door while wearing a leaky spacesuit and the male lead has to keep her conscious as he reels her back into the ship, but Defying Gravity's writers are still too busy charting its characters' tangled and semi-incestuous relationships--after a Meredith-and-McDreamy style hookup before she's accepted into the space program, the male and female leads spend five years dancing around each other, stymied by her neuroses and the fact that he feels guilty about leaving his previous lover to die on Mars; the mission biologist is married to the commander, who is replaced at the last minute by his alternate, her ex-boyfriend who is currently married to the deputy mission director; the flight surgeon is married to the on-board doctor; and the second in command bangs anyone she can get her hands on. This is all, by the way, while the characters are supposedly wearing libido-suppressing patches.

Despite, or rather because, of this inanity, Defying Gravity has quickly become must-see TV for the simple reason that it so frequently scales impressive heights of unintentional hilarity. I find myself wishing for Tor.com's Genevieve Valentine (who did such an excellent job skewering Kings and Eleventh Hour this year, as well as roasting the Defying Gravity and Warehouse 13 pilots) or someone at Television Without Pity (back when they were still mostly about mocking shows) to start a running commentary on the show, but honestly, it's hard to imagine how they would top Defying Gravity's own absurdity. A constant barrage a soap-tinged doctor, lawyer and cop shows has taught us, despite our own experiences to the contrary, that every workplace is fraught with sexual tension, forbidden love, secret pregnancies, familial dysfunction, and long-lost relatives, but when that same approach is extended to space exploration--to a tiny group of people living in total isolation and trying to operate and maintain a furiously complicated piece of machinery in the most unforgiving environment known to man--it highlights the extent to which professionalism has become an vanishingly rare commodity in modern television. When, in its absence, the characters make decisions based solely on personal considerations, the results are both surreal and hilarious:

• The ship's doctor is a war veteran whose PTSD has driven him to alcoholism, but his wife, the flight surgeon, clears him for the mission because she wants to get him away from booze. Not surprisingly, the first time the ship malfunctions he has a flashback, and when a fellow crewmember discovers him her first reaction is not to wonder why a key position was crewed by a dangerously unstable man, but to promise not to tell anyone.


• Upon discovering that he's being dropped from the mission at the last minute, the ship's engineer tries to commit suicide by spacewalk. On his return to Earth, he is shocked, shocked to discover that he no longer has a position at mission control--a decision made by the mustache-twirlingly evil mission director and which no one else agrees with.


• The ship's biologist, now separated from her grounded husband for six years, has decided to create her own test-tube baby, which she is growing in a petri dish next to her rabbit embryo experiments (said experiments are meant to test how cell division functions in zero gravity, which means that she doesn't even know what potential dangers her unborn child faces even at this early stage).

These elements alone would be enough to assure Defying Gravity a place of honor in the annals of profoundly dumb science fiction, but it's the final ingredient in the show's premise that elevates it to a brilliant, albeit unintentional, metafictional gag. Late in the pilot it's revealed that the mission profile and crew roster have been determined through communication with an alien known as Beta, who also manipulates events on its own--causing, for example, the health crisis which grounds the commander and engineer and places their alternates on the ship. Every single nonsensical, melodramatic aspect of Defying Gravity's setup can be traced back to Beta. The ship is crewed mostly by green astronauts who have never been to space? Blame Beta. One of the crewmembers has failed every single fitness test? Beta wanted him. The alternate commander on a six year mission has a wife and young child at home? Beta chose him. The entire crew is wracked with unresolved sexual tension and romantic jealousies? That's how Beta wanted it. If you look at these choices, the profile they paint is not of a wise and all-powerful alien intelligence but of a fan of melodramatic workplace dramas of the Grey's Anatomy ilk. In my wildest dreams, Defying Gravity ends with the revelation that the whole series has been the equivalent of the Futurama episode "Where No Fan Has Gone Before," and that the alien whose wishes and desires the characters have scrambled to accommodate is nothing but an overgrown kid who wanted their own live dolls with which to reenact their favorite stories.

On a more serious note, I find it interesting that the mini-trend towards space exploration stories set on spaceships capable of only sub-light speeds and whose crews are trapped together for years on end has been characterized by an inability to find the inherent drama of such a situation, and instead to veer off into other genres. Defying Gravity shares not only a premise but several plot points with Ron Moore's abortive pilot Virtuality--in both shows, a married couple's stability is endangered by the wife's attraction to the mission commander; both feature a woman who, only days into a years-long mission for which she has been training and preparing for years, decides that she wants to have a baby; both are narrated by a peppy young woman who relays events on the ship back to Earth (though Defying Gravity, thankfully, doesn't adopt Virtuality's moronic reality TV setup and instead plumps for the more sensible televised classroom), and the 2007 film Sunshine, though refreshingly devoid of soapy elements, instead transformed into a horror story in its second half.

What strikes me about this is that the soap opera is actually a very bad fit for the trapped in a tin can premise--there's no way to introduce new characters, no chance of new settings, no opportunity for the characters to make meaningful changes in their lives, and whereas a doctor or lawyer show at least has patients or clients of the week to provide some relief from the character's issues, in space the only way to distract us from the main cast is through technical glitches or unseen alien menaces, both of which wear out their welcome very quickly. Part of the reason, I think, that Defying Gravity and Virtuality are so similar is that there are only so many soapy stories one can tell in such a contained setting. If there is a present-day TV show that I think would suit the 'in space' formula it isn't Grey's Anatomy but The Office--a show about the petty rivalries, insignificant power struggles, and close friendships that develop amongst a group of people stuck in a place and situation they don't really care for but can't get out of.

What this brings us back to, however, is the fact that no one has yet figured out how to tell a compelling SFnal story about long-haul space missions. The most successful television series about space exploration, From the Earth to the Moon, had a deliberately documentary slant, prioritizing the process of the Apollo program's inception, success, and decommissioning over the personal lives of the people involved in it, and devoting whole episodes to, for example, the engineering team tasked with building the lunar lander, or the geologist who trains later Apollo mission crews to search for important samples on the lunar surface. The characters' importance was their contribution, as educated and experienced professionals, to the success of the program, and though their own lives and those of their families were featured in the series, this was a minor note, not the point of the exercise. As science fiction readers, we're accustomed to stories about characters who are defined through their knowledge and skills, but then written science fiction has the option of being the literature of ideas, downplaying character and even plot in favor of neat concepts and cool scientific puzzles. The question becomes, is the probable reality of space travel--long, monotonous months or even years spent in cramped quarters en route from one rock to another--inherently unstoryable, or are modern television writers so unaccustomed to telling stories about professionals and their professional lives that they have no idea how to make a story out of this premise?

Trip Report

I'm back! And a mere 38 hours after walking through my front door (after 37 hours of wakefulness), feeling more or less recovered. Worldcon was, well, you name it--fun, exhausting, weird, illuminating, disorienting and invigorating. I feel very motivated to dive right into writing and talking about genre with a redoubled enthusiasm, and hopefully that feeling will last as I get back into the daily rhythm of work and ordinary life. I have a couple of writing assignments due by the end of the month, but I also hope to get the blog back on track, to which end the gigantic pile of books now threatening to cave my desk in will no doubt be a great help.

More thoughts:

• Montreal: quite lovely, and with a more European flavor than any other North American city I've been to. That presumably has something to do with the fact that the city's bilingualism is mostly an official thing--outside of the con, I heard French almost exclusively, but the Montrealers I interacted with also had excellent English and were more than willing to use it. Despite staying in the city until Thursday, we (I was at the con with Niall Harrison and Nic Clarke, both of whom are more familiar with cons and fandom than I am, and who did an excellent job of shepherding me along and introducing me to interesting people) didn't do a lot of touring, feeling more than a little exhausted after the con, but the highlight of what we did see was without a doubt the double whammy of the Biodome, situated in what was once Montreal's Olympic park, and the Botanical Gardens right nearby.
  
  


• The con: my impressions are foggy and no doubt colored by the people I hung out with and the panels I went to--you could probably pick any other Worldcon member at random and their experience would be completely different to mine--plus, never having gone to Worldcon or any other con before, I can't really say how this one stacked up. One thing, however, struck me very powerfully: the repeated, and quite disorienting, realization that all these people--kids half my age, people my age, those old enough to be my parents or even my grandparents--were at this place because they share an interest with me. Well, that and the guy dressed as a Klingon--there wasn't much costuming at the con (I skipped the masquerade), but seeing a guy dressed as a Klingon felt like a necessary rite of passage.


• The dealers' room: rather disappointing. Apparently this is a problem with Canadian Worldcons because American dealers don't want to deal with tax issues, and the pickings were thus quite slim. Happily, the (appropriately SFnal) Palais des Congres was not very far from Ste. Catherine street and its two mega bookstores, and I came back with a respectable haul.
  
  Not pictured: Flood by Stephen Baxter, The Steel Remains by Richard Morgan, and The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss, purchased during my 14-hour layover in Amsterdam (also quite lovely, though I was sadly too sleep deprived to do much touring).


• Panels I was on - I don't have detailed notes about these, obviously, and since they happened a week ago my recollection of specific points and who said what is quite spotty, so these are my not very detailed write-ups:
  
  
  • Handicapping the Hugos I: The Novels, with Paul Kincaid, Farah Mendlesohn, and Philip Nanson - Run in a style imported from Eastercon, in which the nominees are discarded one at a time until only the winner is left. The general attitude towards the shortlist was quite negative (Kincaid: "I thought Adam Roberts was too gentle") and even Anathem got a drubbing, though I was more pleased with the discussion of Little Brother, in which Farah and I went head to head, neither one doing much to convince the other but both, I think, making our points about why we hate or love the book quite clearly. This did not stop Little Brother from being the last novel standing (it also carried the audience vote, with several times more supporters than any of the other books including the eventual winner), though Anathem won the free vote.
  
  
  • I’ll Be Back - I was not originally scheduled for this panel about the Terminator universe, but was press-ganged into it when it turned out that of the scheduled panelists only Niall had turned up (we were joined by a helpful audience member, a Bostonian named James whose last name I have shamefully forgotten). Very lively panel with lots of contributions from the floor--in general I noted more audience participation in media-themed panels than in literary ones--which ranged in several directions but ended up focusing on the television series. Possibly the most interesting comment came from a well-informed audience member who suggested that Fox might be moving towards a new business model in which it produces cheap shows, airs the first season or two on TV, then produces following seasons direct to DVD. Certainly casts the recent Dollhouse renewal in an interesting light.
    
    (After the panel the three of us were approached by a reporter for a Canadian TV/online genre news show who asked to interview us. We gave him a lot of material and I doubt that, even if the item airs, all or even most of it will be used, but he'd apparently been around the con all day (and we saw him later on), mostly concentrating on media but clearly very interested and eager to get a wide range of material. It's a nice antidote to the perception that media coverage of science fiction conventions is always snide and superficial.)
  
  
  • One Season Wonders with Jeanne M. Mealy, Lee Whiteside, and Tara Oakes, who all seem to be long-time media fans (Oakes was wearing Jayne-hat hair clips, for which she had apparently received kudos from Adam Baldwin himself at Comic Con). Again, a very involved audience, and the discussion mostly turned around our impressions of the state of TV as an economic model, and the viability of televised science fiction (prognosis on both: not good). Plus, lots of name-checking of late, lamented shows, with both The Middleman and Pushing Daisies drawing much lamentations from the audience. Per the Terminator panel, there was also some discussion of alternate financing and delivery methods (cable stations, Chuck getting a third season by adopting Subway as a sponsor, the shorter, close-ended British model).
  
  
  • io9: Threat or Menace - About the effect of the internet on fandom and the fannish discourse. I was expecting a poorly attended panel given that this was set right before the Hugos, but hadn't expected that, once again, the other participants wouldn't turn up (with the exception of moderator Susan Forest). So I got my revenge by calling Niall to the front. Forest, though not very involved in internet reviewing, was an excellent moderator with lots of questions for Niall and I to bat back and forth, to which our perpetual response seemed to be that everything that makes the internet good (low threshold of entry, broad spectrum of opinion, immediacy) is also what makes it bad. An audience member (who later turned out to be Israeli SF author Nir Yaniv) asked the authority question--isn't the problem with the internet the fact that my opinion and that of a know-nothing kid who started a blog last week are equal? To which my response was first that we could have had an hour and a half discussion on that issue alone, but secondly and more importantly, that four years ago I was that kid, and that the fact that I have any amount of respect and recognition (it was utterly terrifying to have people walk up to me and say "You're Abigail Nussbaum! I love your blog!") is surely an indication that there is some selection mechanism at work (though obviously your opinion of its effectiveness might vary).


• Panels I attended - with much better notes:
  
  
  • From SF Reader to Economist - Paul Krugman's talk (Friday, 14:00) - this was apparently Krugman's second appearance at the con, following a Q&A session with Charles Stross on Thursday. I think I would have liked the former better (actually, what I really would have liked would have been to see Krugman talk with Paolo Bacigalupi, or, for added entertainment value, China Miéville). This session was mostly dedicated to questions from the audience, which were of a purely economic bent (surprisingly, no reference to Obama's stimulus package, of which Krugman was famously critical, but at least one question about health care). One SFnal question did come towards the end, when someone asked Krugman's opinion about currencies in virtual economies such as Second Life gaining real-world value, to which Krugman's first response was to note that all economies are to some extent virtual, and then to say that it wouldn't at all surprise him if in-game economies became meaningful economic players, and thus came under government regulation and taxation.
  
  
  • Archetypes Without Stereotypes, with Ben Jeapes, Patrick Rothfuss, Nalo Hopkinson, Doselle Young and Brandon Sanderson (Saturday, 10:00) - A very funny panel, and I appreciated the initial efforts to distinguish between a stereotype and an archetype (Rothfuss's definition of archetypes as something sought out by the author, whereas stereotypes are introduced unconsciously, strikes me as useful if perhaps a little too generous towards authors who indulge in stereotypes). However, the discussion quickly shifted to the safer ground of clichés rather than stereotypes, with much of the humor derived from the participants listing their favorite and least favorite character clichés (during which Sanderson did a passable Dalek impression). Hopkinson tried to move the panel back to the issue at hand by noting how readers from a culture different to the author can find stereotypes the author never noticed, but this wasn't picked up, or rather got the accurate but unhelpful response that 'if you write a character well, it won't be a stereotype.' Interesting question from the audience about writing non-stereotypical aliens. Jeapes: write from their perspective. Hopkinson: write more than one of them. Rothfuss: don't use them (his focus being on the fantastic, he was making the point that the Tolkienian races are overused).
  
  
  • We are the Knights Who Say Fuck, with Guy Gavriel Kay, David Anthony Durham, Marc Gascoigne, Patrick Rothfuss, and Ellen Kushner (Saturday, 12:30) - a panel about the use of diction in fantasy fiction, and whether archaic (but Earth-based and period-specific, and thus clearly alien in a secondary world fantasy) or modern (and thus even more alien-sounding than the archaic kind) diction should be preferred. Kay, the moderator, started off with a Le Guin quote in which she complains that fantasy novels whose diction and focus are mundane are leached of their numinousness, to which several panelists responded that some fantasy novels aren't trying to be numinous, but simply taking advantage of the freedom of a secondary world. The discussion veered into Rhetorics of Fantasy territory when Rothfuss and Kay started to draw a distinction between fantasies that rely on the numinous and those that reject it, then got into the question of mashing together high and low diction, or different kinds of diction, in order to create both the alienness of a secondary world and the archaic style that fantasy readers have come to expect. It was at this point that I lost the thread a little, as the discussion seemed to settle into the unsatisfying conclusion that anything will work if you do it well enough, and I really would have liked to have had some specific examples of successful and unsuccessful diction in fantasy novels, but I liked Rothfuss's comment that one way to achieve alienness in language is (as he apparently did in his novel) to invent new idioms. The brief question and answer period didn't leave me any time to point out that the most successful recent instances of writers creating fantastic diction come from television--Firefly, The West Wing, and most especially Deadwood.
  
  
  • Writing the Other and Other Assumptions, with David Anthony Durham, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Kate Nepveu, Wendy Pearson, and Jamie Nesbitt Golden (Saturday, 14:00) - this turned out to be more a discussion of discussions of writing the other, with Nepveu leading off by giving a potted history of RaceFail and other panelists talking about ways in which unconscious racism is expressed and the resistance one can encounter when trying to challenge it or to discuss the issue of race at all (Durham gave an interesting example from his first novel, a historical novel set in the 19th century, in which he described the difference in physical features, such as skin tone, between his various black characters. This apparently threw many white readers). It was an interesting discussion, but not the one I was hoping for. The actual question of how and whether to write someone of a different race (or ethnicity, gender, nationality, sexuality) is an incredibly complicated one, and discussions of it are often derailed by the very unwillingness to engage that the panelists here were describing. This panel, however, in which both panelists and audience seemed to already be on the same page (when Nepveu finished her RaceFail recap, it turned out that about 90% of the audience were already familiar with it, and when she mentioned the Avatar casting debacle the entire room gave a collective groan) might have been a genuine opportunity to get past the 101 stage and really talk about this thorny and sensitive issue.
  
  
  • Movements in Fantasy with Catherynne Valente, Michael Swanwick, and Maura McHugh (not sure about the last one) (Monday, 10:00) - surprisingly snarky about the very idea of movements in fantasy, with most of the panelists working from the assumption that self-described movements are usually somebody's pet project rather than a meaningful description of trends in the genre (this was Swanwick's take on New Weird, though of course it seems like an equally apt description of Mundane SF). Valente made several interesting if pointed points about steampunk--that she expects it to be a genre about alienation due to industrialization, but that a lot of its enthusiasts are simply there because "anything made of brass is cool" (this connected to her experience at steampunk conventions, where the focus is mainly on steampunk as an aesthetic sensibility, and many participants are surprised to discover that it has a literary aspect).


• The Hugo ceremony: very professional, if a little obvious in its attempts to emulate the Oscars. Paul Cornell won the award presentations hands-down by calling out "And the winner is: Doctor..." and then pausing for a long moment before announcing the Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form winner. David Anthony Durham won the acceptance speeches when he accepted the Campbell award and talked about finding his true home in genre. Weird Tales winning best semiprozine over Locus in one of the earlier presentations had a strange effect--it was such an unexpected result that for a moment it seemed that anything could happen, but then the ceremony slipped more or less back into its groove. Or, more precisely, there were surprises, but not very pleasant ones--I'm OK with Elizabeth Bear winning the novelette category, though I would have liked the award to go to Bacigalupi, but Nancy Kress's victory in the novella category is baffling, and though I can't really claim to have been surprised by Neil Gaiman winning best novel (and am at least glad that Little Brother didn't win instead), I truly did have hope that Anathem would beat it. The only satisfying fiction win is Ted Chiang's in the short fiction category, though you have to set the bar pretty low to draw satisfaction from "Exhalation" beating such an unimpressive slate of fellow nominees. As others have noted, the diversity of this year's slate of winners is heartening, but I don't think it's asking too much for the winners to be both diverse and good. Oh well, at least the dramatic presentation winners are right-headed.


• After the Hugos: oh boy. The story begins with the fact that Niall Harrison is very tall and knows Geoff Ryman, who is also very tall, and had, previously in the weekend, suggested to Geoff that they ought to take a picture with the similarly tall John Kessel, to which the not at all vertically challenged Scott Edelman was also added, and, well, one thing led to another, and before long they were all doing the zombie walk. (Yes, the picture is fuzzy, but you try holding a camera steady while four tall men lurch towards you.) From there it seemed like only a hop and a skip to leaving the building together, and I fell into a pleasant conversation with James Patrick Kelly, only to abandon him shamelessly when it turned out that Niall had been talking to Paolo Bacigalupi for almost a whole minute without calling me over so I could squee like a fangirl. And before we knew it we were in the Hugo losers party.
  
  We ended up having a very interesting conversation with Bacigalupi about his work in general and his upcoming YA novel. It's not an obvious step for a writer so closely associated with depressing, almost moralistic stories, but Bacigalupi's attitude seems to be that he feels more comfortable writing upbeat stories for children, who haven't, in his words, made the wrong choices yet, and that he hopes his stories will prod children, as previous generations of SF novels have prodded them to become astronauts and rocket scientists, to develop sustainable energy substitutes and solutions to environmental problems. Which led me to think about the current shift towards YA in science fiction, and whether it represents a general feeling among authors that YA allows them to do things--such as using SF for advocacy--which adult audiences consider quaint or even old-fashioned.
  
  Also had a nice chat with David Anthony Durham, who looked very fetching in his Campbell tiara but nevertheless completely shot down my theory that Acacia deliberately references The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, though in a very nice way. John Scalzi showed up, Hugo in hand ("Well, I did lose two"), and passed it around so we could all admire how lovely this year's base is. Meanwhile, Paul Cornell and Nic had their priorities straight, commiserating with each other over the cricket results while Jonathan Strahan crowed at them, and I made Gord Sellar, who apparently keeps being mistaken for Cory Doctorow, very happy by realizing that I'd mistaken Doctorow for him. I highly recommend this method of getting over the aggravation of lousy Hugo results, and am only sorry that I didn't get a chance to say hello to Neal Stephenson, though that may be a blessing as I probably would have babbled incoherently.


• Other stuff:
  
  
  • Extremely impressive (and long) fireworks display on Saturday as part of Montreal's annual fireworks competition.
  
  
  • On our way to the Biodome, I was stopped by a woman asking for help reading a map. At the same time, a man asked me whether a building with a men's bathroom sign was the bathroom. I said that it must be and looked back at the map, only to hear loud noises and see smoke coming out of the building (which now had a danger sign near the door). "If this were a particularly bad candid camera trick," I said to myself, "the guy would walk out of that building with Doc Brown hair." Guess what happened next? At this point, Niall and Nic, who had been approached by the film crew and asked to keep silent, obviously called over to me and we went on our way. I've never been a particular fan of this kind of show, but having been caught in one of their stunts I mostly feel annoyed at having my time wasted--do all the people who end up on the show really not care that their day has been disrupted?
  
  
  • Books read: the short story collection כתוב כשד משחת (Write Like a Demon) by the previously mentioned Nir Yaniv, whose collaboration with Lavie Tidhar, The Tel Aviv Dossier (which seems to take place in the same universe as Tidhar's story "Shira" from The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction) was launched at the con--very funny in a way that seems to me to be uniquely Israeli (or, to put it another way, that cements my belief that there's a kind of humor that works well in Hebrew and in Eastern European languages but doesn't translate into English--which is why Erich Kastner and Karel Capek crack me up in Hebrew but leave me unmoved in English--and which Yaniv is tapping into). Also The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale and Sunnyside by Glen David Gold.
  
  
  • Movies watched: Wolverine (hey, it was on a plane and I wanted to see if it really was as bad as all that. It is), Up (for the second time, with Niall, Nic, Farah and her partner Edward James, because the poor deprived UK routinely gets Pixar films six months after they're released in the States), and Moon. I was extremely annoyed that District 9's release date was the day after our departure, but happily it has now been announced as ICon's opening film, so kudos and a huge thanks to the festival's organizers.


• While I was gone:
  
  
  • John Scalzi drew attention to the faltering Strange Horizons fund drive by not only mentioning it on his blog but promising to match contributions up to $500. The result: nearly $10,000 donated in a single day, putting the fund drive at a whopping 177% of its target sum. Huge kudos, and remember that the drive is still open.
  
  
  • Several different slapfights seem to have exploded all over the internet. I haven't read it yet (my internet backlog is still terrifyingly large) but I'm sure Hal Duncan's reply to John C. Wright's descent into ranting homophobia will be quite the treat.
  
  
  • My Dollhouse post got Whedonesque-ed, which made for a satisfying spike in user stats.
  
  
  • Andrew Rilstone has returned, after five months' absence, to blogging. Or, at least, I think that's what he's done--he's posted a PDF, which once again I haven't had time to read yet, and which is apparently his response to Watchmen. Whether this means that normal service will be resumed is anyone's guess.
  
  
  • The Hugo nomination and voting stats have been released (PDFs in both cases). Interesting: Daniel Abraham came within eight votes of a nomination, which in next year's less competitive field (none of the big names have eligible novels) may mean that next to China Miéville he's the closest thing to a shoe-in for a nomination. Depressing: Mike Resnick came within three votes of having a story in each of the short fiction categories. Even more depressing: the closest The Sarah Connor Chronicles got to a nomination was seven votes for "The Demon Hand," no meaningful votes for The Middleman, and even counted together, all of Pushing Daisies's votes wouldn't have added up to a nomination. Meanwhile, not one but two Stargate: Atlantis episodes get multiple nominations, and Torchwood is all over the lower nomination rungs. Surprising, though possibly it shouldn't be: there are no 'compromise' wins--in all of the fiction categories and the Campbell, the nominee who got the most first place votes was also the winner.

So, how have you been?

Off to See the Worldcon

In a couple of hours, actually, but the time between now and then will be spent packing, remembering things I've forgotten to pack, repacking, and fretting about the other things I might have forgotten. As usual, I won't be receiving e-mails in my absence, and though I may see blog comments I probably won't reply to them. Expect me back some time next weekend, though possibly not in blogging form until some time later. I leave you with the following:

• Strange Horizons is having its annual fund drive. I'm obviously biased, but I think Strange Horizons is a fantastic magazine, and, my own contributions completely notwithstanding, my favorite source for online genre criticism. More details about the drive can be found here, and here's a list of prizes to be raffled off among contributors.


• Forget Avatar and District 9, the most exciting thing to come out of this year's Comic Con is the Middleman 13th episode table read, which some kind and enterprising soul has put online for the benefit of those of us not lucky enough to attend in person. Besides being a good episode and a fitting ending to the series, the recording is also a chance to see the cast and creator Javier Grillo-Marxuach having a hell of a lot of fun (Mark Sheppard and Mary Pat Gleason ham it up magnificently, and Matt Keeslar is 100% in character from the word go). I have to say, though, that if the goal was to get me to buy the upcoming comic book version of the episode, the recording backfired, because it just reminded me of how much I need actors to bring TV stories to life (which is also why I haven't felt the urge to keep up with Buffy and Angel in their comic form). Much as I enjoyed this recording, it also made me miss this show even more.


• My Worldcon schedule, for those of you who are attending and/or interested:
  
  
  • Thursday, 15.30
    Handicapping the Hugos I: The Novels
    P-511CF
    Farah Mendlesohn (m), Paul Kincaid, Phillip Nanson, Abigail Nussbaum
    Our panellists have read the Hugo-nominated novels: they tell us what they want to win, what will win, and why.
    
    (I'm a late addition to this panel, so my name isn't on the program guide.)
  
  
  • Friday, 20:00
    One Season Wonders
    P-511BE
    Jeanne M. Mealy, Lee Whiteside, Tara Oakes, Abigail Nussbaum
    What can we learn from shows like Firefly and Life on Mars? What makes good television, and why do good shows fail to find an audience?
    
    (I assume that's the American Life on Mars, in which case the lesson to be learned is: don't.)
  
  
  • Sunday, 19:00
    io9: Threat or Menace?
    P-518A
    David D. Levine, James Patrick Kelly, Moshe Feder, Susan Forest, Abigail Nussbaum
    The internet allows many more people to read more and more criticism about SF works...but what are the downsides, if any? In a medium which effectively imposes no word-limits, are critics becoming less used to the discipline of shorter forms? Are there other characteristics of online writing (the use of links, anticipation of comments) that make it different from print?
    
    (I hasten to point out that the title was settled on months ago with no input from me and has no connection to the recent fracas.)

That's it. See you in two weeks.

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.

Fetch My Smelling Salts

The Booker longlist is out, and to my great surprise it contains one novel I've read and liked (The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters, review here), one novel I own and am eager to read (The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt), one novel which I'm very curious about due to high praise from trustworthy reviewers (Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel), and one novel by an author whose previous novel I liked very much (How to Paint a Dead Man by Sarah Hall, returning to respectable literary fiction after a walk on the SF side with The Carhullan Army). This is very nearly unprecedented. The last time I actually cared about the Booker nominees was in 2004 when David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was nominated, and a heavy favorite to win. Of course, it lost to Brideshead Revisited 2: Revenge of the Tories, and both that upset and subsequent longlists and shortlists have repeatedly reinforced my feeling that the Booker is awarded in some alternate universe of readers who are looking for completely different things from fiction than I am, and I'd gotten used to ignoring the award. Though I wouldn't be surprised if most of the interesting nominees on the longlist got winnowed during the shortlist's creation, the very fact that I'm hoping otherwise is a huge step forward in my relationship with this award.

In less encouraging literary fiction news, Yann Martel is about to break his near decade-long silence with a new novel, coming in 2010. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether the author of Life of Pi really needed to grace the literary world with another work of fiction, much less get paid three million dollars for it, the actual novel sounds vile: "Like Life of Pi, it will be an allegory involving animals – this time tackling the Holocaust via the medium of a donkey and a howling monkey." It is taking everything I've got not to go Godwin all over this topic, but I honestly had thought that the twee Holocaust fashion had run its course with The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

Alpha and Omega

Hey, you know what show could really use a bit more online discussion? Dollhouse! "Echo," the original, unaired pilot for Joss Whedon's by no means triumphant return to television, and "Epitaph One," the shelved thirteenth episode of its first season, are now viewable through various and sundry means. Taken together, they paint a very different picture of the show from the one arising from the first season. Not simply because they are both well-written, engaging hours of television--hardly stellar on either count, but certainly head and shoulders above most of the season's conventionally aired episodes--but because they illustrate how wide the gap is between the show Whedon envisioned and tried to create and the show he was allowed to make.

"Echo," which hews closely, but is not identical, to the script leaked soon after the show's television premiere, confirms the suspicion that Fox executives who demanded that Whedon retool it created another "Serenity"/"Train Job" scenario, but in Dollhouse's case the pilot switcheroo (and the reworking of the show itself which apparently accompanied it) had a much more profound effect on the series as a whole. You can work your way back to Whedon's original plans for Firefly simply by unscrambling its episodes, but there is no way that Dollhouse's first season could follow from "Echo" instead of "Ghost." Too much of what was spread out over the entire season was originally condensed into this single hour--Sierra is already an active, Lubov's introduction and the revelation that he is Victor happen in quick succession, Ballard receives Alpha's message about Caroline, then meets and fights with Echo, and is shot for his troubles. This is not an unmitigated good--someone coming to the pilot cold would, I suspect, find it a little too frenetic, and certain characters, Adelle in particular, are lost in the hustle and bustle of moving the plot along--but especially when one considers how glacially the first season advanced towards stories that "Echo" deals with in a single scene, it's hard not to regret the season we might have gotten, which could have taken the story to the next level instead of stretching its first chapter over a dozen hours of television.

"Echo" is also a great deal better than most of the first season at dealing with some of the icky gender issues that Dollhouse has raised, and for whose treatment both the show and Whedon have come under near-constant fire. Sady Doyle, in what is still to my mind the most interesting bit of writing about the show, argues that in Dollhouse Whedon is examining, and dismantling, many of the thoughtless and often paternalistic assumptions that underpinned his previous work, and that the show is a metaphor for the pervasiveness of misogynystic thinking in our culture, of which even the 'strong female characters' of Whedon's previous work are a product. "Echo," even more than the examples she gives, bears this observation out. Its second scene, and our first introduction to Echo (Caroline is almost entirely absent from the pilot, which is frankly all to the good) feels like the dark reflection of Buffy's opening scene, itself famously a skewering of conventions when it reveals that the seemingly helpless girl breaking into the school with her date and starting at noises is actually a predator who devours him once he assures her that they are alone. In "Echo," Echo interferes with a man's attempt to coerce his girlfriend into becoming a party favor for his friends, chases him off contemptuously, and forcefully but not unkindly persuades the intended victim to take control of her life. It's a portrait of feminine strength, and (assuming we'd never seen a promo for the show, heard anything about its premise, or knew that Dushku was its lead) it comes as a shock when we cut away to another engagement and discover that this heroine was simply a figment of someone's imagination, and more of a victim than the girl she rescued.

After "Ghost" aired, I took the concept of the dollhouse as yet another attempt by Whedon to deconstruct prostitution, a la Inara in Firefly, but "Echo" makes it clear that the comparisons others were drawing to River were more apt. Like River, Echo is a superhero whose heroism only becomes possible because of her own destruction, which is instigated without her (in Echo's case, full and uncoerced) consent. But whereas Serenity tries to create a disconnect between the profound violation and mutilation inflicted on River and the abilities that it bestowed upon her, thus allowing us to view her heroism as something inherent to her, for which we can cheer unambiguously, Dollhouse doesn't give us that comforting space. Echo is never shown as a hero without the pilot stressing that that heroism has been achieved by stripping her of her volition. The image of the super-powerful woman is never allowed to distract us from the misogyny of the culture that created her.

"Echo"'s emphasis on free will or its absence has the effect of downplaying the sexual aspect of the dollhouse. My biggest problem with the seemingly endless barrage of criticism directed at Dollhouse for allegedly failing to acknowledge that the dolls are being raped is that it seemed fairly clear to me--especially from those episodes intended to move the overarching story forward like "Man on the Street" or "A Spy in the House of Love"--that in the story Whedon was trying to tell sexual rape was merely a specific instance of the greater act of rape being committed against the actives--the rape of their mind, the complete stripping away of their personality and free will. This is borne out by "Epitaph One," which flashes forward to 2019, a post-apocalyptic future in which doll technology has been weaponized and made wireless. People are stripped of their personalities in the blink of an eye, to become host bodies for the personalities of others, or mindless drones bent on carnage, or simply blank slates, and the characters who discover the dollhouse are darkly amused to learn that "the tech that punk-kicked the ass of mankind was originally designed to create more believable hookers."

This is not to say, however, that the complaints that Dollhouse downplays rape or even uses it for titillation are unfounded. That Whedon's real interest was in telling an SFnal story about the dismantling of the fundamentals of what it means to be human doesn't change the fact that sexual rape is a real thing that happens, and is downplayed, all too often, whereas brainwashing technology isn't, and that using the former as nothing but a prop with which to highlight the awfulness of the latter is problematic to say the least (Doyle's argument that doll technology is a metaphor for misogynistic culture seems weaker in the face of the all-out post-apocalyptic "Epitaph One"). It also doesn't excuse the prurience with which the first season treated Echo's sexual engagements, or the fact that in its standalone episodes in particular the show seemed to be inviting us to tut sanctimoniously over the terrible things being done to Echo while enjoying her sexy shenanigans. Despite "Echo"'s emphasis on depersonalization rather than rape--Echo's engagements in the pilot are functional rather than sexual, and even the date she goes on is primarily intended to give the client someone awesome to show up with at his ex's wedding--it does a better job facing up to the fact that the actives are being raped in a single scene than the first season does in whole episodes, when it shows us Sierra coming back from an engagement, her forehead gashed, her gait unsteady, the shattered expression on her face leaving no question as to what has happened to her. Though it could be argued that this scene is, perhaps intentionally, drawing a distinction between a sexual act which Sierra's imprinted personality clearly didn't want and Echo sleeping with the wedding guest (and though it's more than a little disturbing that Sierra is apparently the go-to character when it comes to rape), this short, wordless scene delivers a more powerful punch than any number of Ballard's lectures.

If "Echo" is the ghost of the show Whedon wanted to write, "Epitaph One" is a glimpse of the story he is trying to get to. Though well done, it is, in itself, not much to get excited over. Its plot feels much like a retread of the mercenary plotline in Whedon's Alien: Resurrection, itself a rehash of many films that came before it, including the original Alien, and which Whedon had already cannibalized when he created Firefly--a rag-tag crew of misfits in an unfriendly future happen upon a piece of extremely dangerous technology and discover that it has been/will be used by the government against its citizens. The episode's opening scenes feel almost like a parody of Mad Max-type films, with the characters spouting dense 'futuristic' jargon at each other--"Green room is open but the party is crashed." "Any wielders?" "Negative. Just butchers and dumb shells, but it's pretty thick."--which only seems more ridiculous when one recalls Whedon's established skill at crafting believable patois. Things settle down a little once the group happens on the dollhouse and the characters are given a little room to stretch out, and the episode has some genuinely surprising twists, but this is still, at its core, a story in which people in a creepy location are picked off one by one by an unseen menace, interspersed with flashbacks to the previous decade that tell us something about the steps that led up to this situation but mostly give us more questions to ponder.

That "Epitaph One" is so striking, then, is mainly to do with the fact that though it is part of the Dollhouse continuity, it also seems to be the beginning of a completely different story, one which shares Dollhouse's premise but uses it for different ends. More than anything else, "Epitaph One"--which ends with the surviving characters leaving the dollhouse, guided by Caroline, to find a way to combat the wiping technology--feels like a pilot for its own show. As Dollhouse's first season finale, it is a profound statement about the story Whedon wants to tell--of the transition from controlled use of doll technology, through greater and greater violations of human agency, and finally to a nightmare realm in which the human consciousness and the human body are distinct, separable entities which one can mix and match. Though it should be noted that the use of flashbacks which reveal the current cast's future has the distinct whiff of Lost about it, and carries the risk of reducing the show's narrative to a quest for the connective tissue between different plot points--how did Claire lose her scars? Why did Victor and Sierra break up? What did Adelle do with Dominic's body?--this is by far a more interesting story than either the personality of the week stories or the season-long investigation which characterized the first season.

We shouldn't, however, be too quick to allow ourselves to be swept up by the double whammy of "Echo" and "Epitaph One." Just as the original pilot casts a light on the compromises Whedon had to make in order to get Dollhouse's first season on the air, the fact that "Epitaph One" was never aired makes it clear that there is serious resistance to the story Whedon wants Dollhouse to be. The finale's title suggests that there will be--or that Whedon planned for there to be--other epitaphs (the tomb is presumably humanity's), possibly revisiting the same characters, possibly flashing forward to other periods. Will they too be quashed? Will "Epitaph One" be cannibalized for scenes and plot points as "Echo" was? How can the second season cater both to viewers who have seen it and those who think of "Omega" as the season finale? It's pretty clear at this point that Dollhouse is by far the strangest, most challenging thing Whedon has ever tried to do, but that ambition doesn't excuse the fact that, whether due to network interference or inability on his part, what he's actually producing is sub-par, and unlikely to get any better, or move towards the strangeness Whedon is after, if Fox has its way. It's hard to believe that Dollhouse will ever be the story Whedon wants it to be, or that it will survive long if it is. Its unaired episodes, which have for the first time piqued my interest in the show, also leave me extremely dubious about its future.

The 2009 Hugo Awards: The Best Novel Shortlist, Part 2

[part 1 here]

By the time I got around to reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother I'd developed something of a complex about the book. That'll happen when every single thing you read about a novel that is, by any yardstick of critical exposure and fannish attention, the genre novel of 2008 only deepens your conviction that you're going to loathe it. Little Brother's positive reviews stress everything that I hate most in fiction--its preachiness, its naked, political didacticism, and the sublimation of plot, character, and all other literary attributes to this end. Its negative reviews question whether Little Brother, whose action is frequently halted so that it can transform into an instruction manual for fomenting revolution, ought even to be called a novel. Having conquered my fear, I'm pleased to report that Little Brother is, in fact, a novel. It has a story, and a rather engaging one at that--following a terrorist attack on San Francisco, teenager Marcus Yallow and his friends are rounded up by Homeland Security for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, held without cause or access to an attorney, interrogated and tortured. When they're released, one of their number is missing, and as DHS tightens its grip on the city Marcus, using his hacker know-how, dedicates himself to undermining it. It's a simplistic plot, to be sure, and carries more than a whiff of the self-righteous fantasy of suffering for a good cause, but it's also an effective one. For all of Little Brother's frequent infodumps, and despite the fact that Marcus's burgeoning political awareness comes neatly packaged in lesson plan-sized chunks, the relevant soundbites all but highlighted for our convenience, it's hard not to get caught up in Marcus's adventure, in the intensity of his hatred for DHS and the risks he runs trying to outsmart them. I found it possible to enjoy Little Brother despite its didacticism and despite the frequent infodumps (which are anyway quite easy to skip, as they contribute nothing to the plot of the novel). What I couldn't get past was Marcus himself.

The consensus seems to be that like Zoe Boutin, Marcus is a thinly veiled version of his own author. Perhaps because I'm not a regular Boing Boing reader, the similarity between Marcus and Doctorow's voices didn't strike me as strongly as it did in Zoe's case, and though some of Marcus's interests seem suspiciously adult, on the whole I think he makes a persuasive teenager. Which is to say that he's an arrogant, self-absorbed dickhead. This actually works in the novel's favor in its early chapters, which contrast Marcus mouthing off to his vice principal (who knows that Marcus has committed a crime but can't prove it) and getting away with it, with Marcus giving the DHS agents who have picked him up in a random sweep some attitude, and ending up sleep-deprived, starving, and lying in his own waste. It's precisely because the first scene depicts Marcus as something of a punk, who could maybe stand to be taken down a peg (I leave it as an exercise to the reader whether Doctorow intended for us to have this reaction), that the second scene, and Marcus's complete disintegration in its wake, come as such a shock. The problems start when Marcus, and his friends Vanessa and Jolu, are released and realize that their other friend Darryl is missing. An incensed Marcus vows:

It happened to me, that's the point. This is me and them, now. I'll beat them, I'll get Darryl. I'm not going to take this lying down.

Which is a rather neat summary of everything that's wrong with Marcus Yallow, and of why it's so completely messed up that Little Brother tries to sell him as a hero. Only moments after realizing that his friend is still in hands of kidnappers and torturers, Marcus makes the entire ordeal about himself. Though he pays lip service to the notion that he's going to rescue Darryl, what's important to Marcus is that he be the one to effect that rescue. Marcus's next move is to convince Vanessa and Jolu to lie to their parents about their kidnapping and Darryl's whereabouts so that Marcus can launch a campaign to get back at the DHS unimpeded (thus allowing Darryl's parents to believe that their son was killed in the bombing). This choice collapses Little Brother's plot into a sort of corollary to the idiot plot--a story that only works if the majority of its characters don't know that anything is happening--but it also paints Marcus as the sort of person who genuinely cares more about avenging a blow to his pride than rescuing his friend. For all its carping about justice and liberty, what Little Brother boils down to is revenge. The DHS shamed Marcus, and took away his power. What he wants, and what all his actions over the course of novel are aimed at achieving, is to humiliate them in retaliation and thus get his power back. That's a normal, understandable reaction, but it is not, as Doctorow would have us believe, an admirable one, and in its own way it is no less reflexive and destructive than that of Marcus's father, whose liberalism collapses into an us vs. them, security first conservatism in the wake of the bombing. Both he and Marcus are lashing out at the people who have hurt them without any real consideration of the consequences of their actions.

Little Brother does, eventually, get back to the issue of rescuing Darryl and the others like him who have been held, by that point for months, without charge or even acknowledgement of their detention, but not before Marcus becomes the founder and leader of a new youth movement and makes it with a hot chick (a Girlfriend so Perfect that it is mind-boggling that any author with even an ounce of self-awareness would allow her out of his sight unedited). When he finally does remember Darryl for more than a few consecutive minutes, Marcus does what he should have done in the first place--tell his and Darryl's parents the truth, and get the media involved. This, however, is not depicted as Marcus coming to his senses and realizing how childish and self-centered he's been, but as a culmination of his heroism, despite the fact that Marcus's anti-establishment activities have done nothing to hasten Darryl's release. Darryl and his suffering--by the time Marcus finds him, he's psychologically shattered--are nothing but a means to Marcus achieving fame, fortune, and the loss of his virginity. For all that it is exciting and engaging, Little Brother is as tone deaf a portrait of social activism as I've ever encountered, and I'm quite baffled by the commonly voiced argument that it is a worthwhile novel because of the lessons it teaches children about liberty and civil rights. Is this really what kids ought to be learning? That it is more important to look cool than to help people, and that real heroes put their own hurt feelings ahead of the well-being of others?

One reason I am glad to have read Little Brother is that having done so finally allows me to draw an informed comparison between it and Anathem. In a lot of ways, Anathem and Little Brother are the same book--the narrative of a clueless, emotionally illiterate teenage boy who becomes embroiled in world-shattering events (in the process gaining status, acclaim, and the love of a cool and sexy girl) and whose narrative is half story, half infodump. Of course, Stephenson lectures where Doctorow preaches, but on the other hand there's so much more lecturing in Anathem than there is preaching, or in fact anything else, in Little Brother, and given that the books share other faults--mainly the flatness of their characters and the utilitarian and often befuddled treatment of women--it does bare pondering why I had such different reactions to them. The reason, I think, is the narrators themselves. Unlike Doctorow's mouthpiece, Anathem's Erasmas is a good kid. Like Marcus, he's spurred to action by the misfortunes of a loved one, his teacher Orolo, but unlike Marcus what interests Erasmas isn't getting even with the people who hurt Orolo but actually doing something to help him. One of my favorite scenes in Anathem comes close to its end, when Erasmas talks to Lodoghir, one of Orolo's philosophical enemies. In their previous meeting, Lodoghir subjected Erasmas to a grueling public humiliation as a way of discrediting Orolo's theories. Marcus Yallow would turn this blow to his pride into the crux of his existence, and dedicate himself to getting back at Lodoghir. Erasmas, realizing that there are greater issues at stake, gets over himself, and when Lodoghir becomes part of the effort to save their planet, he and Erasmas treat each other as allies. They don't like each other and they don't agree with each other, but they both realize that they are not the most important person in their story. For all of Little Brother's this-is-happening-now hysteria, that's something Marcus, and Doctorow, never grasp.

In a way, then, I'm grateful to Cory Doctorow for writing a novel as bad as Little Brother, because it's caused me to regain some of my appreciation for Anathem, which has otherwise proved effervescent. I liked it very much when I read it this winter, but the farther away I get from the novel the more significant its flaws seem, and the harder it becomes to recapture the pleasure of reading it. That pleasure seems to have been rooted in the slow learning of Erasmas's world, an alternate Earth in which the scientifically inclined are sequestered in monastic orders for their, and the general population's, protection. Erasmas's continent-spanning adventure, which is sparked when Orolo is the first to detect an alien ship in planetary orbit, and ends up taking Erasmas into space, is nothing but a delivery method for this world, for Stephenson's potted history of Western philosophy, and for the novel's neat-as-hell final twist (in a way, Stephenson is as fond of Stuff as Stross, but the difference between Anathem's elegance and Saturn's Children's diffuse messiness is that Stephenson's Stuff is introduced with a goal in mind, each infodump a stepping stone on the path to the novel's central revelation). Anathem is a puzzle book, but once the puzzle has been put together there's nothing to stop us noticing just how flimsy its plot and characters are. Ultimately, Anathem really is a more humane, more intelligent, more interesting, significantly less preachy version of Little Brother, but that's not exactly high praise.

Meanwhile, there's a persuasive argument for favoring Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book for the win. I was underwhelmed by Gaiman's latest, a children's novel which retells The Jungle Book with a twist by having its protagonist, Nobody Owens, raised by the ghostly inhabitants of a graveyard he flees to after his parents' murder. Like most of Gaiman's work, The Graveyard Book is polished and technically superb, but it is also somewhat weightless--beyond the neat central concept, there's really not much substance to the book. It's a cute, well done novel, but far from Gaiman's best and with nothing to distinguish it as deserving of a major award. That, at least, was my feeling last winter, before the Hugo odyssey began. Taken alongside the other nominees, The Graveyard Book starts to look very good indeed, if only because Gaiman is alone on the shortlist in actually having written a novel--a work of fiction whose primary concern is the telling of a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and the exploration of its characters' personalities and inner life. (Is it a coincidence, one wonders, that The Graveyard Book is the only fantasy on the ballot?) What's more, unlike Scalzi, Doctorow, and Stephenson, Gaiman actually writes persuasive children, or for that matter, persuasive people. Gaiman's characters, and his world, have depth, whereas all the other nominated novels are nothing but surface--flat, unrealistic characters, and settings created to make a point or cobbled together from other, better writers' scraps. The sheer pleasure of immersing oneself in a world that feels emotionally real is almost enough to make up for the fact that Gaiman does so little with that world.

Almost, but not quite. In the end, I placed Anathem above The Graveyard Book in my Hugo ballot. Though both novels are flawed, I think that The Graveyard Book's flaws would come to seem more irksome in later years if Gaiman were to win. It's the better novel from a technical standpoint, but Anathem is the one that does something new and different and uniquely SFnal, as well as being the novel that engaged me emotionally when I first read it. If I had managed to read all five nominated novels before July 3rd, I still would have voted No Award in the third slot (followed, in case you're interested, by Zoe's Tale, then possibly another, more emphatic No Award vote, then Little Brother and Saturn's Children). I think Anathem has a good chance of winning, though Doctorow and Gaiman also have strong fanbases among Hugo voters, and both of their novels have had a lot of buzz (Scalzi, meanwhile, is a long shot, and Stross probably doesn't have a chance). It's hard to work up much pleasure at that thought, however, as this year's ballot has me rooting against the nominees I dislike rather than for the ones I like. I think it's safe to say that my first experience reading all five Hugo nominated novels has not been a positive one. I'm going to hold on to the hope that 2008 was an aberration, both in the quality of books published and in the tastes of the Hugo voters, but I'm suddenly very pleased that this experiment in being a Hugo voter is unlikely to recur for some time.

The 2009 Hugo Awards: The Best Novel Shortlist, Part 1

I have a shocking confession to make: I did not read all of the best novel Hugo nominees before the July 3rd voting deadline. I have an even more shocking confession to make: this was not because I didn't have the time to read these novels, but because of a lack of inclination. I'd read the two nominated novels I was actually interested in--Neal Stephenson's Anathem and Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book--long before the nominations were announced, but whether because of previous experiences with their author, or because of reactions from people whose opinion I trust, or because of the impression I'd formed of their topic and tone, none of the remaining three nominees--Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi, Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, and Little Brother by Cory Doctorow--appealed to me. I'm used to grumbling through Hugo reading when it comes to the short fiction categories, but committing myself to three novels I had not the least expectation of enjoying was a bit more than I could stomach, and if it weren't for this blog and the commitment I'd made on it to write about the best novel nominees, I probably wouldn't have made it through.

I wish I could say that at least some of these novels surprised me, if only because I'd come to them with such low expectations, but though one or two turned out to be not nearly as bad as I'd feared, on the whole this year's best novel shortlist is really, really disappointing. I'd happily trade at least three, if not four, of the nominees, and even the remaining novel--the only one I consider remotely worthy of the award--is deeply flawed. Perhaps the most notable attribute of this year's best novel ballot is how thoroughly dominated it is by YA genre fiction. Zoe's Tale, Little Brother, and The Graveyard Book were written and marketed for the YA audience, and Anathem, though ostensibly an adult novel, is also written in the YA mode, centering around a teenage protagonist who finds himself at the epicenter of a world-altering event, and ends up becoming a hero. In general, this seems to me like a reasonable reflection of the state of the genre. The shift towards YA-oriented writing has been several years in the making, and a sizable portion of the most talked-about genre books of the last few years have been geared, at least in theory, towards young readers. It follows, therefore, that the Hugo would also be dominated by these novels.

Though it might be tempting to conclude that the shoddy state of this year's shortlist is the result of the infantilization of the genre, to my mind the problem isn't that YA books are being nominated, but that the wrong YA books have been. How much stronger would this year's best novel shortlist have been if Terry Pratchett's Nation, Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels, or even Allegra Goodman's The Other Side of the Island had been on it? (This is not even to mention books that have received a great deal of critical attention, but which I haven't yet read myself, such as Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go, Kristin Cashore's Graceling, or Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games.) In adult publishing, we have Ursula K. Le Guin's Lavinia, Iain M. Banks's Matter, David Anthony Durham's Acacia, and Felix Gilman's Thunderer. Understand, there isn't a single one of these novels that I consider exceptional, and I have serious problems with most of them--for all that I think that the Hugo voters were asleep at the switch, there's no denying that 2008 was simply not a very strong year for genre novels--but each and every one of them would have made this year's best novel ballot stronger, and, quite frankly, less embarrassing.

Zoe's Tale by John Scalzi is a companion volume to The Last Colony, itself the third volume in Scalzi's series of novels about John Perry, and preceded by Old Man's War and The Ghost Brigades. Coming to Zoe's Tale cold, as I did, makes for an odd reading experience not only because I haven't read the previous novels but because Zoe's Tale itself is a story that takes place in the interstices of another story, with which I'm unfamiliar. Though Scalzi goes to some lengths to clue newbie readers into the events of The Last Colony (one assumes that the novel was intended, at least in part, as a introduction to the Old Man's War universe for young readers), it's easy to guess where he's eliding over scenes which in the adult novel were fleshed out, and where he's relying on the reader's familiarity with The Last Colony. The result, though nominally self-contained, feels very much like half a story, but what's more, it creates the impression that The Last Colony was itself an incomplete story. As Scalzi notes in his afterword, he was inspired to write Zoe's Tale because of complaints from readers of The Last Colony who felt that that novel ended with an unearned last minute save--Zoe turning up in the nick of time with just the right alien technology to save the colony. Zoe's Tale does tell the story of how Zoe was able to achieve this, but it's hard not to feel that we're reading Scalzi's make-up work, his retroactive justification for a piece of lousy plotting that ought not to have made it out of the editing stage, for which he's been rewarded with a Hugo nomination.

Zoe is Zoe Boutin-Perry, the fifteen year old adopted daughter of John Perry and Jane Sagan, who in The Last Colony are asked to lead the colonization effort of an uninhabited planet. On their arrival, the colonists discover that the planet is in a zone disputed by an alien alliance which has made--and made good on--the threat to violently uproot any human colonies. The colonists are therefore not only living under the threat of imminent death, but have to maintain strict radio silence and do without any EM-generating technology for fear of giving away their location. This is a dubious premise to begin with (why, despite knowing about the EM restrictions before dispatching the colony ship, and despite the existence among the colonists of a contingent of space-Amish whose equipment is purely mechanical, is the majority of the colony's material computer-controlled?), and it only becomes more so when it turns out that the colonial government is not simply stupid but actually evil, attempting to orchestrate the destruction of the colony as a means of starting a war (this, however, may be a complaint best laid at The Last Colony's feet). Zoe's Tale only becomes closely involved with this story towards its end, when it gets to work plugging the hole in The Last Colony's resolution, and most of its action is concerned with describing Zoe's acclimation to her new home and her coming of age under extremely unusual circumstances. Far from being an average colonist, Zoe is a messianic figure to an alien race, whose peace treaty with humanity stipulates that she be accompanied constantly by two alien bodyguards, who also report on her every move to their entire race (which means that the colonial government's decision to place Zoe on a colony they plan to sacrifice to an invading alien horde makes perfect sense). The crux of Zoe's Tale is Zoe's struggle to decide just to what degree she's justified in taking advantage of the aliens' devotion to her, and whether she's willing to continue in her role as their goddess despite having done nothing to earn it.

Zoe's Tale is, therefore, a novel driven by its narrator's interiority and her personal growth, and though Scalzi is to be commended for stretching himself beyond the space-adventure format of the Old Man's War books, in trying to write a character-driven novel he's bitten off a bit more than he can chew. Zoe is entirely unbelievable as a teenager--too self-possessed, and all too apt to spout platitudes about teenage behavior that make her sound like nothing so much as an adult talking about teenagers from a vast distance of years. Actually, what Zoe really sounds like is Scalzi himself--but for its events, her narrative reads like your average Whatever entry, and her voice and sense of humor are all but indistinguishable from his. This is not entirely a bad thing--Scalzi's sardonic humor is a big part of his blog's appeal, and in Zoe's Tale it translates into several extremely funny sequences. As unrealistic as Zoe is, she is more often amusingly unrealistic than annoyingly so, and the novel moves at a fast enough clip that her, and Scalzi's, tendency to become too pleased with their own cleverness is rarely given time to grate. The novel's emotional climaxes are blatantly telegraphed and arrive with all the subtlety of a meteor impact, but they never fail to hit their mark, and despite there never being any real doubt on this count, by the end of the novel you do find yourself rooting for Zoe to take charge of her own life. Zoe's Tale is an enjoyable novel, and so unassuming that to stress its flaws--the silly premise, the unbelievable narrative voice, the predictable and manipulative plot--feels a little like kicking a puppy. If I were discussing it in any other context but its having been nominated as one of the five best genre novels published in the last year I'd probably be happy to cut it some slack. But it has been nominated for the Hugo, which is to say that someone took that puppy and entered it in the Kentucky Derby. Whether or not that's fair to the puppy, it sure as hell isn't fair to the people who came to see a race.

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross is the only novel on the shortlist written for and about adults (though one might argue that its central character arc, which sees the narrator from a meek, unquestioning acceptance of her fate to self-directing kickassness, has something of the YA about it). So wouldn't you know, the main character is a sexbot. Freya is one of a line of robots whose emotional template was designed for sex and, in the right circumstances, for complete, slavish infatuation. She's doomed, however, to spend her life in unfulfilled loneliness, as it's been more than a hundred years since the humanity died out. Freya and her fellow sexbots and servants are a society of slaves, still hard-wired to serve an extinct master race and struggling to cope with freedom. The premise, of course, borrows a lot from Asimov and makes several overt references to Heinlein, most particularly Friday, but Stross's emphasis on agency and free will is all his own.

If Zoe Boutin is an unbelievable teenager, Freya is an unbelievable person. Her narrative voice amounts to little more than a litany of the events she experiences--mostly crisscrossing journeys across the solar system, as she first becomes the employee of a shadowy cabal attempting to smuggle biological organisms into the inner planets, and then the target of several factions who want control of a fabled reconstituted human--with no sense of a personality underlying them. This is partly in keeping with the novel's depiction of Freya as an unformed person, who still defines herself through her model's purpose and her inability to fulfill it, but Stross's method of infusing Freya with personality is for her to absorb the memories of an older and more experienced model, who was employed as a spy and an assassin. So that not only does Freya lose what little self she once had, the person she becomes is spy thriller cliché, indistinguishable from the hundreds of timid girls turned tough who came before her. Other characters in the novel suffer from a similar flatness, which is compounded by the presence of different yet psychologically identical iterations of the same model. Again, this is clearly an extension of Stross's premise, but it amounts to an emotional deadness in the novel's heart, with no characters emerging as fully-formed people for us to care about or even take an interest in.

It's not simply the characters' sameness that breeds a deadness in Saturn's Children. Stross's tendency to simply fling Stuff at the readers--sociology, physics, fashion, eroticism, philosophy, architecture, a couple of daring escapes and fight scenes--all viewed through Freya's undiscerning, unfiltered gaze, leaves the novel all but shapeless. For a novel that is clearly informed by the thriller, Saturn's Children is too flabby, too weighted down by all this Stuff, to work. The thread of plot is almost impossible to discern, and with Freya such a passive protagonist for most of the story the novel feels like nothing more than a lot of events strung together. Between Freya's flatness and the novel's flabbiness, it's hard to tell where the twists are supposed to come, the emotional climaxes, the funny bits. I think, for example, that Stross expected me to be surprised when Freya, a couple hundred pages into the novel, copped to being a robot. I wasn't, of course, because I'd known the novel's premise going in, but in most novels you can tell where a revelation was supposed to be even if you see it coming. In Saturn's Children I'm just not sure. There's no shift in the novel's tone, in Freya's voice, in the things she says or doesn't say--beyond actually saying the word robot--to signal that this was supposed to be a major turning point in the story, or if there are they have been so thoroughly snowed under by Stross's beloved Stuff that I can't make them out. And yet the word itself is so heavily signposted that I can't help but wonder if I was supposed to be shocked by it. Similarly, I think that Saturn's Children was intended as a raunchy sex comedy, and there are a few lines and scenes that drew a chuckle out of me, but there's so little sense of the narrative's ups and downs that in most cases I couldn't pick up on the laugh cues until they'd sailed past.

Saturn's Children is littered with moments like these, in which you stare at the text and wonder 'was I supposed to feel something here?' It's a novel that turns its readers into robots. It concludes with a climax so anticlimactic that I was shocked to turn the page and find myself confronted with an epilogue, but even worse than that, I have no idea what Stross was trying to accomplish with it. There's clearly a dialogue here with Asimov and Heinlein's ideas about personhood and the feasibility and morality of intelligent, mechanical servants, but beyond the obvious point that slavery is wrong and free will is good (and what I assume is a corollary point about religion, as Freya's devotion to humans is frequently described in terms that recall religious ecstasy), I'm really not sure what Stross was trying to say.

[to be continued]