The City & The City by China Miéville

For China Miéville to name a novel The City & The City seems almost redundant, a meta-statement on his entire career. There is perhaps no other fantasy author who is as closely associated with cities as Miéville, and responsibility for the burgeoning popularity of urban landscapes in traditional fantasy (not to be confused with the urban fantasy subgenre) may very well be laid squarely at his feet. Cities, in Miéville's novels, have an existence that transcends their geography, inhabitants, and institutions. Their discovery, understanding, salvation or destruction is often at the crux of his plots. In his novels and stories, one encounters shadow cities, accessible only to a select, initiated few (King Rat, Un Lun Dun), cities disconnected from geography (The Scar, Iron Council), cities as living organisms, to whom humans are as barnacles on a whale's back ("Reports of Certain Events in London"), and, of course, the sprawling, dying metropolis of New Crobuzon, the love or hate of which is the driving emotion of nearly all the characters in the three Bas Lag novels. Every one of these elements turns up in The City & The City, which may represent Miéville's attempt at a definitive statement on fantasy cities, or even the fantasy genre.

The city and the city are Besźel and Ul Qoma, imaginary cities in the real world. Besźel is Eastern European, democratic but corrupt, and going to seed, its government desperately scrambling for American investment dollars with which to halt its slide into irrelevance. Ul Qoma is Middle Eastern, communist, and economically thriving, having leaped from the 19th century to the 21st in a matter of decades. They are the same place.

Sometime between two thousand and seventeen hundred years ago the city was founded, here in this curl of coastline. There are still remains from those times in the heart of the town, when it was a port hiding a few kilometers up the river to shelter from the pirates of the shore. The city's founding came at the same time as another's, of course. ... It may or may not have been Besźel, the we built, back then, while others may have been building Ul Qoma on the same bones. Perhaps there was one thing back then that later schismed on the ruins, or perhaps our ancestral Besźel had not yet met and standoffishly entwined its neighbor. I am not a student of the Cleavage, but if I were I still would not know.

Citizens of one city are taught from infancy to 'unsee' the other, until they can walk down 'crosshatched' streets, in which the cities intermingle, and sense only their own. Passage from city to city is permitted only through the Checkpoint Charlie-esque Copula Hall, and visitors and immigrants to either city must pass a weeks-long training course during which they are taught the fundamentals of unsight. This is all done to appease Breach, the all-seeing, all-powerful entity which enforces the separation between the cities. To acknowledge the existence of the other city, to cross over into it or pass anything to or from it, is to call on Breach, and those who do so are never heard from again.

The City & The City begins in Besźel, where inspector Tyador Borlú is tasked with solving the murder of a young woman. The case becomes a diplomatic hot potato when she turns out to be Mahalia Geary, an American archeologist based in Ul Qoma, whose presence in Besźel indicates that someone, either Mahalia or her murderer, committed Breach. When a technicality prevents Breach from taking over the case, Borlú must travel to Ul Qoma and partner with detective Qussim Dhatt. Together they discover that Mahalia, who was digging up mysterious and surprisingly advanced artifacts from the pre-Cleavage era, had alienated both officials and fringe groups--unificationists, who believe the two cities should be one, and nationalists, who espouse the supremacy of one city over another--in both cities in her pursuit of Orciny, the fabled third city which exists in the disputed zones between Besźel and Ul Qoma. Before long, other murders are committed or attempted, and powerful politicians begin to exert their influence on the investigation, leading Borlú to wonder whether Mahalia had indeed found Orciny.

Investigation, I wrote in my review of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, is "the exploration of the unfamiliar, and the detective, forced by his role to be both insider and outsider to his community, and to visit its various strata and subgroups, makes a perfect tour guide." In its first, Besźel-set segment, The City & The City, which recalls The Yiddish Policeman's Union in several respects, makes a similar use of Borlú, who teaches us his world, lecturing on everything from the procedure for invoking Breach to take over a criminal investigation to the methods of cross-city smuggling to the laws governing the licensing of vehicles for multiples passes through Copula Hall. Like many narrators of fantasy and science fiction stories, his narrative is peppered with opaque terms and references through which we learn Besźel's culture and norms. Those norms, however, are the norms of unseeing, and Borlú's goal as a tour guide is not to reveal but to obfuscate, to teach us, as tourists visiting Besźel or Ul Qoma are taught, to unsee. The more he tells us, the greater the blank spot at the center of his narrative looms--the nature of the two cities and the separation between them. The experience of reading the first part of The City & The City is therefore characterized by the disorientation that comes from trying to see beyond the narrator's deliberately narrow frame of reference, to look at the things he won't describe for us, to crane our necks at the things he turns away from.

This masterfully executed disorientation is Miéville's greatest achievement in The City & The City, and every time we become acclimated to it, he allows Borlú to see a little bit more of his world, and undermines the fragile understanding we had constructed of the novel's universe. In the Besźel segment, this happens when Borlú leaves the 'total' area in which Mahalia's body was found and moves into crosshatched streets, introducing us to the unique form the separation between the cities takes, but the disorientation is compounded even further when Borlú crosses into Ul Qoma. The deliberately limiting perspective of Borlú's narrative forces us to rely on real-world associations, so that despite Borlú's dismissal of comparisons between Besźel-Ul Qoma and separated cities such as East and West Berlin, it's hard not to imagine Copula Hall as a stopping point on one's journey from one geographic point to another. It is enormously wrong-footing, therefore, when Borlú, having made the crossing in Copula Hall, leaves by the same entrance through which he entered.

On our way there I had had the driver take us, to his raised eyebrows, a long way round to the Besźel entrance on a route that took us on KarnStrász. In Besźel it is an unremarkable shopping street in the Old Town, but it is crosshatched, somewhat in Ul Qoma's weight, the majority of buildings in our neighbor, and in Ul Qoma its topolganger is the historic, famous Ul Maidin Avenue, into which Copula Hall vents. ... I had unseen it as we took KarnStrász, at least ostensibly, but of course grosstopically present near us were the lines of Ul Qomans entering, the trickle of visitor-badge-wearing Besź emerging into the same physical space they may have walked an hour previously, but now looking in astonishment at the architecture of Ul Qoma it would have been breach to see before.

As the novel's plot and the investigation of Mahalia's murder progress, there are other wrong-footing moments of this type--Borlú pursuing a suspect who has crossed over to Besźel while Borlú is still in Ul Qoma, following him on crosshatched streets, seeing him only out of the corner of his eye; Borlú, having been taken by Breach and then sent back into the city to find Mahalia's murderer, realizing that he doesn't know which city he is in, and then that he is simultaneously in both and in neither. Each of these represent a leveling-up in our understanding of the city, another veil tugged aside to reveal the true nature of the city. And the more we learn about it, the clearer it becomes that that truth is entirely mundane, that there is no magic mandating the separation of the cities or the existence of Breach, but simply tradition and human perversity.

In their discussion of The City & The City, Niall Harrison and Dan Hartland felt that this mundaneness was a barrier to their enjoyment of the novel, as it forced them to read it as naturalistic, or at best allegorical, fiction. "[M]y argument with the book is precisely in the extent to which it is not fantasy or allegory. If The City & The City had been set in an invented world, or if it had created a secret, mythic world within our own, I suspect I would have found it (paradoxically) easier to believe in," Niall writes, and Dan says

The City & The City is [set in our world] ... For me, that’s where the book trips up — it situates its metaphor in a milieu too familiar. I didn’t believe in, as you say, the necessity of the separation because I didn’t believe the cities’ inhabitants would — not because people can’t be conditioned to accept something so absurd, but because people would never have made the separation, or sustained it, in the first place.

And in a conversation in e-mail, goes on to describe the novel's transition from suggesting the fantastic to suggesting the mundane as "confusion," an "inability [of the book] to define its own terms":

[The City & The City] wants to be read as fantasy some of the time and not at others, which ... makes a nonsense of at least one of its concepts. ... the rules by which the two cities operate, and by which their peoples perceive, are constantly suggested to be our own ... and yet it is frankly bonkers that human beings on planet Earth ever would behave - ever conceive to behave - in this way. Either, as you say, Mieville needed to make these cities Magic, or he needed to make them Make Sense by the rules of the world he chose to put them in - our own.

What Niall and Dan read as confusion, however, I see as a deliberate, and purposeful, dismantling of the fantasy genre and its core assumptions. As Dan points out, The City & The City combines elements of each of the four types of fantasy Farah Mendlesohn described in Rhetorics of Fantasy: "this fantasy is a portal quest (Copula Hall), yet it is also immersive (because we begin in the world and our POV character is part of that world); at the same time, it is intrusive — Breach and one city exist constantly at the edge of perception for inhabitants of the other — and liminal, since that gap between our world and the fantasy is never properly resolved." The better, I believe, to thoroughly undermine the genre when it's revealed that there is no border between the cities except in their inhabitants' minds, and that Breach is no more magical than any other civil authority (though Miéville cheats a bit by ascribing, and describing, near magical powers to Breach in the novel's earlier segments which aren't sufficiently explained by the organization's actual structure when we get a closer look at it). When Besźel, Ul Qoma, and Breach are revealed to be mundane or nonexistant, Miéville has not simply subverted fantasy but the specific fantasy archetypes he had encouraged us to identify in the novel's earlier segments, and so too has he subverted the fantastic city tropes he's made such memorable use of in his previous novels, each of which The City & The City, as I've noted above, recalls. This, however, does not make The City & The City a mimetic novel or even a novel confused about its genre--it is fantastic precisely because it is such a deliberate anti-fantasy.

In most fantasy novels, the very suggestion of a secret city is a guarantee of its existence, and Miéville gestures heavily in this direction by stressing the unusual nature of the pre-Cleavage artifacts Mahalia and her colleagues were uncovering--your classic wisdom of a lost age scenario. But though Borlú and Dhatt discover that Mahalia was in contact with Orciny, this turns out to have been a trick. There is no third city, and the identity of the novel's actual villains feels like the end of The Scar writ large. In that novel, the creatures pursuing Armada are assumed to have mystical, alien motivations--the retrieval of a holy and perhaps magical artifact--but their interest turns out to be purely economic, their quarry a spy who has stolen trade secrets. Similarly, in The City & The City the people who presented themselves to Mahalia as representatives of Orciny are using her to steal artifacts so they can sell them to American R&D companies, whose representative is flatly dismissive of the Besźel-Ul Qoma-Breach mystique.

"I'm neither interested in nor scared of you. I'm leaving. 'Breach.'" He shook his head. "Freak show. You think anyone beyond these odd little cities cares about you? They may bankroll you and do what you say, ask no questions, they may need to be scared of you, but no one else does." He sat next to the pilot and strapped himself in. "Not that I think you could, but I strongly suggest you and your colleagues don't try to stop this vehicle. 'Grounded.' What do you think would happen if you provoked my government? It's funny enough the idea of either Besźel of Ul Qoma going to war against a real country. Let alone you, Breach."

The emotional arc of someone reading The City & The City should be a transition from the anticipation of fantasy to the recognition of mundaneness, culminating in this scene, which thoroughly skewers the genre and irrefutably places the two cities in the real world. Which means that a core flaw in the novel is that a reader who approaches it as a mimetic novel, or who takes the novel's real-world setting and mostly mundane trappings as an indication that it should be read as metaphor or an allegory, will circumvent that arc, which may result in an entirely flat reading experience. It's one of the pitfalls of novels that subvert genre tropes that they rely on readers having the expectation of those tropes to begin with, which is not a very safe assumption in the case of a novel that veers as far from the outer trappings of a traditional fantasy novel as The City & The City does.

I suspect that Niall and Dan's difficulties with the novel stem from this kind of expectation mismatch, but I also wonder whether they approached The City & The City as they did because they expected it to be a political novel. It's telling, I think, that their discussion touches on politics, whereas my reading leaves no room for it. And yet, given the novel's emphasis on borders, its obvious real-world parallels, and the fact that the man at the wheel is China Miéville, the expectation of a political subtext is by no means unreasonable. It's hard to imagine, though, what the novel's message might be unless it is this: that real-world communities often divide along lines of culture, religion, or ethnicity which seem as immutable as the Besźel-Ul Qoma split, and whose enforcers seem almost as difficult to gainsay as Breach, but that these divisions are often primarily in the mind. As Niall and Dan note, however, boundaries are necessary for maintaining a culture's integrity, and the novel itself seems to be aware of this, most particularly in the character of the American executive, whose above-quoted speech hints at the cities' future as wholly-owned subsidiaries of more powerful, more dominant cultures should they ever surrender their collective illusion that there is a force that sets them apart from the world. Certainly the novel's ending, in which Borlú joins Breach, suggests that he sees the value of the organization despite, or perhaps even because, he comprehends its mundaneness.

Getting back to my review of The Yiddish Policemen's Union, one of my reservations about that book is that for all the novelty of combining a noir-tinged detective story with an alternate history, the two elements, when considered on their own, were rather predictably drawn. "Chabon seems to feel," I wrote, "that the act of piling genre on top of genre forces him to color within the lines of both." A similar conservatism can be observed in The City & The City, and very much to its detriment. By this point in his career it's possible to argue that for China Miéville to dismantle fantasy tropes is coloring within the lines. He does so more brashly in The City & The City, however, than in his previous novels, and his execution is fine enough to make up for any predictability in theme. Sadly, no similar excellence characterizes the mystery aspect of the novel, which is slack and unengaging. Surprisingly for an author who has in the past written incredibly tense chase and action scenes, there are few pulse-pounding moments in The City & The City, and the closest thing to a chase scene, Borlú's pursuit of a man who is in a different city than him, is more concerned with establishing the weirdness of what is happening that with accelerating the readers' heart rate, though it could be that the novel is by its nature, and because of its focus on Borlú's narrow point of view, too muted and airless to sustain much excitement.

Even worse, however, is the absence of tension in the mystery itself. The plot is drawn along predictable lines: young, female victim in whom the detective becomes invested, political interference in the investigation, dastardly secret uncovered by the victim, which leads back to a conspiracy of the rich and powerful. It's pretty easy to guess the beats of such a story, which means that the pleasure of it is found in the execution, which in Miéville's hands is clumsy. In the first, Besźel-set segment the investigation is mostly concerned with finding out who the victim was and who she associated with, with Borlú and his officer, Lizbyet Corwi, pounding the pavement and chasing down leads. Miéville doesn't do a good enough job of filtering out the drudgery that makes up most of actual police work--probably because he uses that drudgery as a delivery method for Borlú's lectures about Besźel and the mechanics of unsight. Similarly, when Borlú and Corwi do come across a new piece of information, it's often buried beneath the exposition Miéville needs to establish the nature of the Besźel-Ul Qoma split--when the two interview a unificationist who knew Mahalia, he gives them a lot of concrete information about his movement, but only hints and insinuations about her. With no emotional hook to the investigation--Mahalia's parents don't show up until relatively late in this segment--the only thrill comes when Borlú makes a neat deduction about how Mahalia's body was transported from Ul Qoma to Besźel.

There a few more neat deductions of this type when Borlú continues his investigation in Ul Qoma, and the investigation does pick up the pace in this segment. What's still missing, however, is the very crux of a detective novel--a sense of urgency, the readers' need to know who, where, how and most especially why. In The City & The City, all that blood is flowing to the fantasy aspect, the question of what the cities are and why they are separated. Miéville does very little to invest readers in Mahalia or the injustice of her murder (the closest he comes is when her devastated father commits Breach in order to investigate the murder himself, but the Gearys are soon shuffled off the page), and even less to build up to the revelation of her murderer. The man in charge in the conspiracy is a faceless politician whom we meet once, very nearly in passing, before Borlú identifies him as the ringleader, and who is killed soon after. When this solution is revealed as a false bottom, with Borlú concluding that the dead man wasn't smart enough to have fooled Mahalia, we have to take his word for it. The actual murderer is revealed in an excruciatingly slow scene in which Borlú narrates every single detail of the crime to the person who committed it. For most of the novel, the weakness of the mystery is a minor concern because we're too busy figuring out the nature of Borlú's world, but Miéville wraps up the fantasy aspect twenty pages before he wraps up the mystery, and these leave a bad taste in the reader's mouth.

Like Iron Council, I find The City & The City easier to admire than enjoy. Its thorough dismantling of fantasy tropes is an impressive technical achievement, but there's not much satisfaction to be wrung out of the revelation that there is no revelation. Though the weakness of the detective story isn't enough to scuttle the novel, it may be what's keeping it from true greatness--if the inventive, challenging premise had been matched with a genuinely rollicking plot, the latter might have compensated for Miéville's deliberate failure to pay off the expectations he himself raises. Miéville's adult novels have been moving towards a more reflective, solipsistic attitude towards fantasy, and there's a growing sense that he views subverting fantasy as a goal in its own right rather than a means to an end--as it was in King Rat, Perdido Street Station, and The Scar. The results have been impressive but chilly. One hopes, therefore, that even if The City & The City represents Miéville's definitive statement on fantasy and its cities, it isn't his definitive statement on storytelling.

Thoughts on the New TV Season, 2009 Edition

One of the blessings for the Jewish new year (and a happy 5770 to those celebrating it) is 'let the year and its curses end; let the year and its blessings begin.' There's a similar failure to learn from experience at work, I think, in the fall pilot season. Every year, producers and viewers alike line up excitedly to present or review the new crop of shows. And sure, there'll be a decent one or two in there, but also a lot of dross to wade through, most of it made up of clones of last year's success stories or remakes of the last decade's hits. Most of the heavy hitters (and the returning shows) won't begin their seasons until next week, but here are my thoughts on a few of the new shows which have had their premieres in the first half of the month.

• Glee - From Television Without Pity to The New York Times, everyone has lined up to crown this show, about a high school teacher who resurrects his school's glee club and the group of misfits and losers who join it, one of the best debuts of the fall. Having watched the pilot when it aired last spring, I was at a bit of a loss to see what the excitement was about. Partly this was due to the show's premise straining my suspension of disbelief--in my high school, the beautiful kids who could sing and dance were admired, not mocked, and though there are obviously some cultural differences at play (we didn't have football teams or cheerleaders, for one thing) I find it hard to believe that things are so different in the US. Mostly, though, the problem was that the show didn't seem to know what tone it wanted to strike. Was it a saccharine High School Musical clone for people too proud to watch the Disney Channel, or something sharper and more cynical? The pilot episode owes so many debts to Election that it borders on plagiarism, and yet repeatedly sugarcoats what in that film was coal-black comedy--the male lead's dimness, the female lead's ambition, their teacher's curdled aspirations and unhappy marriage. The result was a story that constantly reached for a clever subversiveness and then chickened out.
  
  The two episodes that have aired this fall represent a massive improvement, with the show shifting into absurdist, over the top humor (Jane Lynch, as the psychotic cheerleading coach who reminisces about her time in Special Forces as she plots to bring glee club down, is the show's greatest asset in this respect) which sits better with the sweetness of its plots and character arcs. With a bit of luck, Glee could settle into the fusion of earnest, wholesome emotion and surreal, occasionally raunchy humor that made Pushing Daisies such a delight. As others have noted, it's a shame that for an alleged ensemble show Glee is placing such an emphasis on the (white, beautiful, straight, able-bodied) leads and short-changing the (black, Asian, gay, paralyzed) supporting members of the club, but I'm hoping that as the season progresses these characters too will get storylines. Right now, my main complaint about the show is that the musical numbers are far too processed, often comprising twice the number of vocalists and musicians as are actually on stage. If you've got actual Broadway singers in your cast, why not let them, and not the production booth, shine? That and the fact that Victor Garber and Deborah Monk have appeared in guest roles, and yet neither one of them has sung a note. Fix that, show.


• The Vampire Diaries - Despite being a blatant, and by all accounts entirely successful, attempt to cash in on the Twilight craze (lousy as it was, one can't help but feel sorry for the producers of Moonlight--one year later and they would have had a surefire hit on their hands), The Vampire Diaries is best described as a supernatural version of Roswell--an ensemble teen soap led by a painfully wooden, diary-writing brunette who falls in love with a mysterious and dangerous alien/vampire, and who will no doubt drag her entire social set into his world as they negotiate their forbidden romance (the pilot hits the first few of these beats in a thoroughly perfunctory manner, spending most of its energy on long, lingering looks between the female lead and her equally acting-impaired love interest). So though I do feel that it's a little unfair to launch into a prematurely geriatric rant about how we had a better class of vampire show when I was a teenager, because clearly The Vampire Diaries isn't even trying to be as witty or as subversive as Buffy, even a comparison with Roswell--by no means a brilliant, well-written, or competently-acted series--isn't particularly kind to The Vampire Diaries. Roswell's characters at least had a bit of vivaciousness, through which they occasionally transcended the uninteresting stories they were handed, whereas the pop songs on its soundtrack are far more memorable than any of The Vampire Diaries's characters, even the supposedly charismatic, deliciously evil villain. The closest this show comes to being vivacious or even interesting is when its actresses are arrested for flashing motorists near their set.


• Community - There's nothing really wrong with this half-hour comedy about Jeff, a chronic, amoral liar who is stripped of his (fake) law degree and forced to go to community college to earn a real one, and in fact it gets a lot of things right. A true ensemble show, it puts together a group of memorable characters and gives each of them a chance to come to the fore, and as Jeff, Joel McHale pulls off the tricky feat of winning us over to his character's side through charm and sheer chutzpah, while making it clear that both conceal nothing but emptiness. Still, there's something off. The pilot is witty and at points quite funny, but like its main character, it is also slick and shallow. There's potential for a lot of uncomfortable humor in Community's premise--it's a story about a pathological liar who is finally being called on his bullshit--but the show never truly seems to commit to it, and instead of inviting revulsion at Jeff's soullessness, or schadenfreude at his finally being called to account for his lies, or even sympathy with his amoral stance, it remains flippant and sitcommy. The only moment of genuine emotion comes in the closing credits, which after an episode that makes a dozen or so references to The Breakfast Club dedicate the pilot to the memory of John Hughes. Community is funny, but it needed to be a hell of a lot funnier than it is for me to ignore its emotional flatness. In general, sitcoms take a while to grow on me, and an ensemble show like Community clearly needs more than 22 minutes to find its voice, so I'm willing to give the show a few more episodes before I make a final decision, but right now I'm not feeling terribly excited.


• Bored to Death - I admire the nerve of a writer who names their series Bored to Death, but I'm afraid the name hits too close to my reaction to HBO's newest comedy. Jason Schwartzman plays Jonathan, a writer and part-time gossip columnist who deals with a breakup, his inability to follow up his first novel, and his general ennui by placing an ad on Craigslist offering his services as a detective. But as the man said, the problem isn't being bored, it's being boring. It's not simply that Jonathan is, as a character in the pilot points out, "another self-hating New York Jew." He's also a neurotic, narcissistic man-child with verbal diarrhea, the attention span of a puppy, and not the slightest hint of a spine. If that weren't unappealing enough, his best friend is an unkempt, loud-mouthed slacker straight out of Judd Apatow's rejected ideas pile. Why anyone, much less the gorgeous, seemingly normal woman whose departure sends Jonathan on his path towards a life of crime-solving, would want to spend more than a few minutes in his presence is a mystery in itself, though it is telling that most of the characters Jonathan encounters are either high or seek to become so within seconds of meeting him. I think the only way for Bored to Death to become more appealing is for viewers to follow that example.

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.

Sarah Hall Roundtable

Not to be confused with the Lavinia conversation, in the last couple of weeks I've also been participating in a discussion of Sarah Hall's recent, Booker-longlisted novel How to Paint a Dead Man, organized by Ed Champion and including Frances Dinkelspiel, Sarah Weinman, Miracle Jone, Mark Athitakis, Peggy Nelson, Brian Francis Slattery, Kathleen Maher, Anna Clark, Jenny Davidson, Michael Schaub, Amy Riley, Traver Kauffman, Judith Zissman, and Anne Fernald. Ed has all five parts of the discussion up at his blog, including, in the last one, a response from Hall herself.

Also of potential interest: my review of Hall's previous novel The Carhullan Army (Daughters of the North in the US), part of my review of the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke Award nominees, at Strange Horizons.

A Discussion About Lavinia, Part 3

Earlier this summer, Niall Harrison organized a discussion of Ursula K. Le Guin's most recent novel, Lavinia, with Nic Clarke, Jo Coleman, Adam Roberts, and myself. The first and second parts of the discussion are up at Torque Control and Punkadiddle, respectively, and part four should be up shortly at Nic and Jo's blog, Eve's Alexandria (UPDATE: here it is). Here is part 3.

Abigail Nussbaum: I have to wonder just to what degree we're justified in calling Lavinia a fantasy. Jo and Nic both point out the natural magic of Lavinia's religion, but it seems just as valid to me to read these descriptions as being of Lavinia's worldview as they are of the actual world she is living in. What I liked about the descriptions of religion in the novel was that they depicted people for whom the divine is mixed with mundane, for whom gods are a constantly palpable presence whose influence intrudes on their lives through dreams and omens. But I don't think it's necessary for us to believe that those gods are real, even within the novel. One of the few things I really liked about the HBO series Rome was that it depicted, with complete respect and sympathy, people who walked with their gods, without ever asking us to believe that those gods existed, and I think that Lavinia does the same. What's important is that Lavinia sees the world in a certain way, and how that perspective affects her values and decisions. Obviously this reading becomes harder to support as the novel draws to a close, but it is also in those scenes that the metafictional aspect of the novel comes to the forefront, so again it doesn't seem completely clear-cut to me that we're dealing with a fantasy.

Niall Harrison: Gary Wolfe's review is interesting on the question of fantasy, I think:

What's even more shrewd is the manner in which Le Guin addresses the fantastical elements of the tale. Gods and goddesses, and Juno in particular, have their paw-prints all over the events of Virgil's epic, but as Le Guin reminds us in an afterword, she's writing a novel, and Ritalin-deprive meddlesome gods don't work too well in a modern novel, so she simply omits them (some might argue with her assertion about gods and novels, but it's certainly true of the novel she's written here). What she offers in their place are some surprisingly postmodern fantasy techniques that work to give her narrative a vibrant contemporary sensibility: Lavinia, the narrator, doesn't hear from the gods, but she does hear from the aging Virgil himself, dying centuries in the future, and more important, she's aware that she's largely Virgil's creation.

Jo Coleman: I'm interested by the question of Le Guin allowing ghosts, but no gods, into her novel. I think I'm less comfortable than the rest of you about Le Guin making the decision to eliminate the gods in the first place. Perhaps they would be unworkable in a novel format, and I certainly take Adam's point about Greco-Roman gods belonging in a lyrical and not a narrative form. And she is, after all, writing about a time pre-Rome where gods were not personified in the first place. I love Lavinia and the Poet's discussion about Juno, for example. Le Guin makes the distinction between the idea of gods as powers, as it would have been for Lavinia, and the idea of gods as people, as it was for the Romans, beautifully.

And yet -- I think for me, I am still missing a true sense of the gods as powers as a "historical" Lavinia would have experienced it. Whilst I, like Adam, praise Le Guin's portrayal of Lavinia's Being-in-the-world, I can't see being in the world, and being in the world with gods/spirits in it, as mutually exclusive. Or at least, perhaps I can, but I am not convinced that the ancient Italians would have been able to. And therefore it seems to me entirely arbitrary to portray the inner world of a woman to whom gods and spirits are an integral part of daily life, as Le Guin does so well, and avoid portraying the gods and spirits within that daily life -- if, after all, you're going to have a ghost turning up there.

For us now, to encounter a ghost is not impossible, it's supernatural that belongs on the edge of natural. But to encounter a god, to have a chat with one while spending time in a forest, that's something thoroughly out of natural. This, for me, is a contemporary mindset that Le Guin maintains -- gods in the dreams, fair enough, and ghosts in the world. But I don't believe it's a distinction that would have occurred to the ancient Italians, and that's where, for me, the novel falls down. It's as if Le Guin attempted to keep the novel closer to history than fantasy in keeping the gods from the action, but for me, it has the opposite effect -- it becomes less historically accurate and more of a fantasy, but a fantasy created from limitations.

As Abigail points out, Lavinia shows us people for whom gods and spirits are a presence in their lives, but doesn't demand that the reader believe in them. But doesn't it demand that the reader "believe" in ghosts, at least to a certain extent? It demands that the reader take ghosts seriously. I suppose the problem that I'm trying to articulate is that I can't accept a literary ghost would have been the core or essential guide to an ancient Italian woman interacting daily with her own ancestors and nature spirits.

Nic Clarke: You make several very good points. I agree that the distinction between ghosts and gods is overplayed; everything I've read (albeit about later periods) suggests that different elements of the supernatural were viewed as equally possible, if not equally common. I liked Abigail's point about the way the novel shows us a society that believes in gods, without expecting us to do the same. I can completely understand why Le Guin chose to remove the gods. I have two problems with this, however. (Actually three, but Jo already expressed one of them very well: Abigail's point notwithstanding, I'm sceptical about trying to separate the natural and supernatural realms if we're seeing the world through the eyes of a pre-modern character, because there was no such distinction.) The first -- and I accept that it's a very personal one -- is that I was thrown out of the narrative in the places where I knew the gods had been excised. For example:

But Turnus himself was nowhere. After killing Pallas, he disappeared. No man I ever talked to knew what became of him during the long hour that Aeneas stalked him through the battlefield, challenging him, calling out to him to come fight. No doubt he was resting, catching his breath somewhere up the hill in the shade, but he chose a strange time to do it. (143)

This is clearly the incident in book X of the poem, where Juno petitions Jupiter to let her rescue (her favourite) Turnus. Likewise, a later reference to Aeneas' "uncanny" escape from Diomedes at Troy is Aphrodite's intervention on her half-divine son's behalf in the Iliad; it strikes me only now, writing this, that removing the gods removes some of the most important and active female players in the original story.

Which takes me to my second, also rather personal, problem: I missed the gods. I enjoy them in the original both for the interplay between them -- an extra layer of human drama, albeit mostly up in the sky, mirroring the emotions and conflicts down below -- and for the insight their presence gives us to the conceptual-world of those who told and retold these stories. So much of the surviving literature of this nature shows an intense interest, even a fatalism, about the operations of fate and/or chance -- whether a hero lives or dies on a given day, whether he is remembered -- and I think that ditching the gods sacrifices some of this. Although, clearly, Le Guin seeks (and finds) her tale's joy and pathos elsewhere, in the much more fully developed (and rather lovely) relationship between Lavinia and Turnus.

Niall Harrison: I don't think the relationship of Lavinia and the fantastic is straightforward; I think we're more forced to ask "to what extent is this fantasy?” than "is this fantasy?”, because there are several different levels at which the fantastic can be perceived within the story. First, you have the characters' belief in their gods. I'm with Abigail, in that I don't think it's necessary for us to believe said gods are real within the novel; yet despite Le Guin's afterword, I think you there is space for a reader to believe they are acting within the world of the novel if they want. Second, you have the overtly magical occurrences within the story, of which the most obvious is Virgil's shield. Third, you have Virgil's appearances. These raise the question of exactly what world Lavinia is existing in, and I'm not absolutely certain the book delivers a clear answer. Lavinia's world is not historically realistic; but it's not purely the world of Virgil's imagination, either; it's something in-between.

Jo Coleman: I agree that the world of Lavinia lies somewhere in between historical accuracy and the world of Virgil's imagination. I think that for me, what is historical about the novel -- the day to day life, as we have said, the vivid details of food and love and war and work -- are wonderfully effective. What is more fantastic -- the idyllic portrayals of nature, Virgil in the forest, isn't, because it seems to me to be rooted in thoroughly modern fantasy. In other words, I suppose what I'm trying to say is the following paradoxical statement -- I simply don't find the fantasy elements of the novel historically accurate.

Abigail Nussbaum: I'm interested in Niall and Jo's observations about the different kinds of fantasy in the novel, since in my reading it never occurred to me to describe the novel as drawing a distinction between gods and ghosts. At the risk of sounding like the worst sort of literal-minded genre reader, I never thought of Virgil's presence in the novel as being an aspect of the fantastic (which is why I have trouble calling Lavinia a fantasy). Rather it seemed to me like the sort of metafictional game that is by no means uniquely fantastic (Karen Joy Fowler used something similar in her recent Wit's End, a quasi-mystery novel). Lavinia is a person, but she's also a character in Virgil's story. The tension of the novel -- at least in its first half -- is derived in part from the gap between the character Virgil created (who wasn't, as he himself realizes, a character at all, and certainly didn't capture the real person's complexity) and the real woman.

Niall Harrison: There are many ways in which I like Virgil's appearances. As I've already said, I think they're an extremely elegant way of getting through to people who don't know the source material, like me; and part of me responds strongly to the sense of Story itself as a fantastical intervention, occasionally touching on and shaping the world in which Lavinia lives. I respond very strongly to those lyric moments, just as I respond very strongly to Lavinia's foreknowledge, how that gives her at various times both power and uncertainty. Yet in the end I wonder whether the novel wouldn't have been better without Virgil, whether he doesn't just take the place of the gods that Le Guin deemed to have no place in her story; whether his explicit presence, rather than an implicit presence, doesn't limit the whole just a little.

But of course, Lavinia without Virgil would be a very different book, and I don't know that I'd enjoy it as much.

The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing: Sense and Sensibility Thoughts

I've been promising myself to write something substantial about Sense and Sensibility since before I even had a blog, and one of the reasons I've taken so long getting around to doing so is that it tends to fall through the cracks. It's not a perennial favorite like Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion, nor a work I didn't get along with in my teens, and which I can set myself the goal of reengaging with as an adult as I did with Mansfield Park and Emma (and really, it is time to try to do the same with Northanger Abbey as I promised I'd do only two years ago). I liked Sense and Sensibility when I first read it (though at least some of that affection is due to the transcendent Emma Thompson/Ang Lee adaptation which I watched soon after finishing the book for the first time) and I come back to it every now and then, but not so much with the enthusiasm one feels when returning to a beloved work as with a grim determination to finally, once and for all, work the novel out. This is to sound rather negative about what is, after all, as fine and well-observed a work as any of Austen's novels (though stylistically I think it may be her weakest--the humor is a little belabored, and the plot flags in the middle segments) but my problem with it is simply that I'm not sure what Austen is saying, and have a sneaking suspicion that I wouldn't like it if I did.

Sady Doyle, in a characteristically thoughtful and insightful post about Sense and Sensibility (as part of a series about books by, for and about women, which also encompasses Little Women and Valley of the Dolls) calls it "a comedy about sadness, and how to get through it intact." This strikes me as an accurate but incomplete observation. Doyle is right to point out Austen's deliberate contrasting of the ways in which the Dashwood sisters, pragmatic Elinor and romantic Marianne, deal with their romantic disappointments--Marianne weeps and wails and takes to her bed and in general gives as much trouble as she can to the people who love her; Elinor conceals her pain and tries to medicate it with activity and concern for others--but the comparison between the two sisters' temperaments and outlooks is in place even before these disappointments occur. Long before she gets around to prescribing the correct way of dealing with heartbreak, Austen is prescribing the correct way of being in love. While Elinor reveals only the barest hints of her affection for Edward Ferrars, Marianne cries her love for the roguish Willoughby from the mountaintops, and whereas Elinor has other activities and interests to occupy her in Edward's absence, for Marianne, love is as feverish and all-consuming as grief.

When Marianne, in the novel's moral climax, having survived not only Willoughby's abandonment but a near-fatal illness to which her surrender to grief left her vulnerable, compares her behavior unfavorably with Elinor's, it's easy to conclude that Sense and Sensibility is, as Doyle says, a story about the choice between controlling your emotions and wallowing in them. This is not, however, the only axis on which Marianne's behavior is found wanting. As central to the novel as the question of whether to control emotion is the question of whether to display it. At first glance, it may seem that the two dilemmas can be folded into one, but to do so, we have to ignore the novel's historical context, in which the finding and getting of husbands is not simply a romantic pursuit, but a business, and sometimes a necessity of survival. In this context the question of whether to reveal, conceal, or even feign, emotion is not simply a moral one, but a matter of calculated pursuit.

It is a calculation which very nearly every character in the novel but the Dashwood sisters makes at one point or another, and which the sisters themselves find deeply mortifying. Early in the novel, the girls' mother haughtily exclaims at a neighbor's joking assertion that Marianne has Willoughby in her sights. "I do not believe ... that Mr. Willoughby will be incommoded by the attempts of either of my daughters towards what you call catching him. It is not an employment to which they have been brought up. Men are very safe with us, let them be ever so rich." So that when Marianne rejects Elinor's criticism of the uninhibited display of her affection for Willoughby, she's doing so not simply because of her self-absorbed determination to impose her feelings on her general surroundings, but because she takes Elinor's reproach as an admonition to stick by the Regency version of The Rules--play hard to get, make the guy jump through hoops of gold before you show any affection. Similarly, Elinor's growing closeness to Edward, and later on her friendship with Colonel Brandon, are perceived by both her friends and enemies as an attempts to draw the two men in and land herself a wealthy husband. With romantic and mercenary considerations so intimately linked, it's no wonder that both of the Dashwood sisters find it difficult to know just where the happy medium between too demonstrative and too reserved is.

Against Elinor and Marianne's struggle to behave honorably in the unforgiving arena of husband-hunting, Austen sets the character of Lucy Steele (or, more precisely, she sets Lucy and her sister Nancy, who like the Dashwood sisters make up a duo of one observant, controlled sister, and one demonstrative, unheeding one). To the unsuspecting observer, Lucy preforms the role of the perfect fusion of the two sisters--romantically overcome by Edward's charms like Marianne, and cautiously concealing their attachment and planning for their future like Elinor--and this is only one of the many performances--of helplessness, gratitude, self-sacrifice, generosity, and regard for others--that Lucy puts on in order to secure the affections and support of everyone she meets in her single-minded pursuit of financial security. And the thing is, I love her. She is Austen's most fascinating villain, and may well be one of her most interesting characters.

In my first rereading of Sense and Sensibility as an adult, I was bowled away by Lucy, and by the impression she creates of there being a shadow novel, a sort of proto-Vanity Fair starring Lucy in the Becky Sharpe role, stomping over broken hearts and ruined lives on her way to respectability. Lucy plays the game that Elinor and Marianne are too proud to acknowledge like a pro, taking advantage of vanity and honesty alike in her manipulations of everyone she meets. The scene in which she confides with Elinor about her engagement to Edward is a tiny masterpiece of psychological torture, with Lucy, always simpering with deference and feigned simplicity, hammering in one proof after another of her claim on Edward while subtly sowing doubts in Elinor's heart as to Edward's feelings for her and his character. In so doing, she places Elinor in the position of having to not only impassively listen to accounts of Edward's engagement to another woman, but to assist in that engagement's consummation, for fear of giving away her true feelings and compromising her honor. Though it's probably giving Lucy too much credit to say that she engineers the Ferrarses' making a pet of her as a way of slighting Elinor, whom they believe to be the object of Edward's affection, she certainly doesn't fail to take advantage of the situation, and when her engagement is revealed and Edward is cast off by his family with nothing, she leverages even that debacle to her advantage, and ends up married to his now independently wealthy brother Robert. We never get a glimpse of Lucy's internal monologue, and her external one is deliberately insipid, but given this virtuoso performance it's hard not to suspect that that placid exterior conceals a sharp intellect and keen powers of observation--Elizabeth Bennet on her meanest day, or Mary Crawford at her most designing, except much coarser (though that coarseness probably has something to do with having had to claw her way even to the genteel poverty that Elinor and Marianne take for granted)--and even Elinor, though despising Lucy's methods, acknowledges her skills, calls her "better than half her sex," and envisions Edward's life with her as comfortable and well-managed, albeit loveless.

Alone among Austen's villains and romantic rivals, Lucy triumphs, and not only does she triumph, but so complete is her victory that she can afford to be magnanimous in it, and let small fry Edward go while she enjoys the bigger fish she's landed. The letter in which she releases Edward from their engagement is, once again, a tiny masterpiece, and in its own way may very well be the most honest piece of communication between men and women in any of Austen's novels:

Being sure I have long lost your affections, I have thought myself at liberty to bestow my own on another, and have no doubt of being as happy with him as I once used to think I might be with you; but I scorn to accept a hand while the heart was another's. Sincerely wish you happy in your choice, and it shall not be my fault if we are not always good friends

You don't love me any more than I love you, Lucy is saying, and we both know it. And since I've found someone better, I feel free to behave dishonorably, secure in the knowledge that such behavior will make both of us very happy. And the fact is, Lucy may very well end up the happiest of any of the novel's characters. Or rather, she ends up with exactly what she set out to have, and is about as happy as a woman whose greatest aspiration is wealth and position could ever hope to be. Elinor and Marianne, meanwhile, are forced into compromises. Elinor marries a man she loves, but their style of living will always be pitiful compared to the expectations they both grew up with. Marianne marries a wealthy man whom she respects and admires, but whom she does not come to love until some time after their marriage (and it's never sat very well with me, the way Austen describes the growth of that love--it's hard not to see it, as the Emma Thompson version paints it, as a flight to safety by someone who has been grievously wounded and finds themselves more in need of a parent than a lover). Willoughby, meanwhile, is miserable in his choice, but not forever--"His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable! and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in porting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity."

Sense and Sensibility ends, therefore, with a complete rejection of the romantic ethos. There is not a single traditionally romantic couple to be found at the end of the novel, unless one counts Elinor and Edward, who from the get go are described as unusually unaffectionate, and whose courtship and infatuation happen entirely off-page, so that the readers' romantic gratification is denied even by their union. This is clearly deliberate, and sits well with the raw, uncompromising nature of many of the plot elements Austen employs. The Dashwood sisters are the poorest of Austen's heroines, their situation the most desperate, their prospects the grimmest. The specter of premarital sex and illegitimate children, which haunts several other of her novels, is here on full display in the person of Colonel Brandon's lost love and her daughter, who is seduced and ruined by Willoughby. Marianne very nearly dies. There's an undertone of anger at the very notion of a romantic disposition, which seems to prioritize the mercenary aspect of husband-hunting over the romantic one.

Which is why I find it difficult to accept Doyle's reading of the novel as an admonition against being mastered by emotion. It seems to me to go much further, and caution against being guided by it at all. In all of Austen's novels, there's a tension between the romantic text and the decidedly unromantic subtext, but in Sense and Sensibility the two seem to be almost at war. This is probably in keeping with Austen's own character, which was likely much closer to the cynical, money-obsessed spinster from the miniseries Miss Austen Regrets than the starry-eyed romantic she was made out to be in Becoming Jane, but also makes for an uncomfortable read in the early 21st century. Though I certainly wouldn't say that money no longer plays any factor in courtship, or that games of control and manipulation have disappeared in the wake of feminism and the sexual revolution (the very existence of The Rules, and more recently of seduction manuals, gives the lie to that claim), Sense and Sensibility's moral feels more of its own time than any of Austen's other novels. It's hard not to feel that when Marianne says to Elinor that she compares her behavior "with what it ought to have been; I compare it with yours" that what she's saying is that she should have played hard to get and waited for an engagement ring. That's a little more unromantic than I can comfortably stomach.

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.