How I Met Your Ending

One of the reasons that I'm not so down on spoilers is that, for someone who consumes pop culture the way I do, they're essentially impossible to avoid.  Online fandom talks a big game about its spoiler-phobia, but if you've ever spent a day on twitter in the wake of a major pop culture event, you know that there's no way not to pick up exactly what happened, even if people haven't said it outright.  For someone like myself, whose geographic location means that I watch things--TV episodes in particular--a minimum of 24 hours after they've originally aired, there are only two options--get spoiled, or cut yourself off the internet completely.  I take the latter approach sometimes, in the cases of big TV events like the finales of Breaking Bad or True Detective.  But for the most part I can't be bothered, and occasionally a Red Wedding will take me by surprise--as in the case of last week's episode of The Good Wife.  And sometimes, there are shows that you just never imagined could be spoiled, which is the case with this week's finale of How I Met Your Mother.  Before I went online yesterday morning, I thought that the finale would merely be going through the motions of an ending already laid out.  The show had already shown us that perennial wife-seeker Ted (Josh Radnor) would meet his future wife and the mother of his children on the platform of the Farhampton train station, after leaving his best friend Barney's (Neil Patrick Harris) wedding to Robin (Cobie Smulders), the woman whom Ted has spent the show's nine-season run alternately dating and pining for.  The final season, which spent several episodes introducing us to the mother (Cristin Milioti) and flashing forward to her life with Ted, had even revealed that their love story would be a bittersweet one, with a flash to ten years in the future in which the mother is terminally ill.  All that was left, it seemed to me, was to fill in the blanks--the mother's name, some more of her and Ted's courtship, and most importantly, the moment in which Ted walks up to her and starts a new chapter in his life.  What could there possibly be to spoil?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.  The first big revelation of the double-length finale, titled "Last Forever," is that Robin and Barney's marriage--which had been the show's prevailing obsession in its final two seasons, the latter taking place entirely over the weekend of their wedding--fell apart after only three years, under the weight of Robin's career demands and Barney's aimlessness.  After the breakup, Robin, who has finally had enough of the show's quasi-incestuous core dynamic, in which she spends most of her social life around her two most significant exes, cuts herself off from the group.  Barney goes back to his horndogging ways and accidentally conceives a child, a daughter whom he proudly proclaims "the love of [his] life."  And then, as predicted, the mother (whose name is revealed to be Tracy) dies, and Ted concludes his story.  But his children, who have been listening patiently for nine season, are unconvinced.  If the story is about how Ted met their mother, they point out, then why was she hardly in it, and why was so much time spent on his relationship with Robin?  It turns out that Ted is telling the story six years after Tracy's death, during which time he and Robin have rekindled their friendship.  His reason for telling the story, the kids argue, is that he's fallen back in love with Robin, and is trying to justify, to himself and his children, the decision to pursue her again.  The series ends by echoing the first season finale, with Ted standing outside Robin's window holding the blue French horn he first stole for her twenty-five years ago, all the way back in the pilot.

The reaction to this twist has been, shall we say, heated.  Various reviewers--Alyssa Rosenberg, Margaret Lyons, James Poniewozik, Linda Holmes, Todd VanDerWerff, Alan Sepinwall--have argued that the finale, and its choice to return to the Ted/Robin endgame, is a betrayal of the show's ideals and the story it had constructed over nine seasons.  Why, they ask, did the show ask us to become so invested in Robin and Barney's romance if they were only ever a stop on the way to Robin's happy ending with Ted?  Why introduce the charming Milioti and the equally wonderful Tracy only to treat her as an obstacle to Ted's real love story?  Sepinwall's post is particularly instructive, as he goes into the mechanics of how series creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas planned out this ending as far back as the second season, working around what he defines as the mistake of announcing, in the pilot, that Robin was not the titular mother.  Ted's final conversation with his children, he notes, was filmed seven years ago, when Bays and Thomas first came up with the ending that they delivered this week.

Sepinwell's argument is that the example of How I Met Your Mother's finale is a point against creators becoming too caught up in a rigid plan for their story that doesn't leave room for unpredictable, organic developments such as Harris and Smulders's chemistry or Milioti's appeal.  But to me--as someone who has problems with the finale but on the whole likes it--the message seems more complex.  The fact is, Bays and Thomas laid out the ending they wanted their story to have seven years ago, and by God, this week they reached that ending.  Can Lost say as much?  Can Battlestar Galactica?  Is there another example of long-form, multi-season serialized television that has so successfully delivered the story it had planned for itself?  Whatever you think of Bays and Thomas's choice of ending, the fact that they managed to get to it, and to do so without cheating--the seeds for Barney and Robin's breakup, for Ted and Robin's lingering feelings for one another, and for Tracy's death, are planted well before the finale--is impressive, and marks How I Met Your Mother out as a unique achievement that deserves to be celebrated and discussed.

All the more so when you consider that Bays and Thomas did this in the face of network interference that would probably make Damon Lindelof or Ron Moore quake in their boots.  As Sepinwall notes, when the original plan was made How I Met Your Mother was a modest success that could reasonably expect to run for perhaps four seasons, but as the show's popularity ballooned its ending kept being pushed back, altering the show's structure and story--most dramatically, a last-minute renewal last year which forced Bays and Thomas, who had already planned to deliver something very like "Last Forever" at the end of the previous season, to come up with the concept of a season-long weekend.  What's more, Bays and Thomas not only got to their planned ending, but did so while maintaining one of the more ambitious structures in series television, a story that constantly jumps backward and forward in time over a period of nearly half a century, that plays with multiple points of view and unreliable narrators, and that constantly sets up stories and recurring characters and themes--slap bets and yellow umbrellas and goats--that the show only rarely failed to pay off.  As someone who loves the television medium and is excited any time a creator expands its horizons, I don't see how you could do anything but cheer at this demonstration of skill and nerve, especially when it comes from something as unfashionable as a multi-camera, laugh-tracked romantic sitcom.

None of this is to say, of course, that How I Met Your Mother doesn't have serious flaws.  Like, I suspect, a lot of the show's fans, I've been ready for it to be done for a long time, as successive seasons lost more and more of the flavor that made the show so delightful and funny in its early days (it's this, I suspect, and not the controversial finale, that will prove the biggest stumbling block for the already-announced spinoff series How I Met Your Dad).  This is a problem for most sitcoms, which tend to have a short half-life--see, for example, the pleasant but inessential fare that Parks and Recreation has been serving up lately--but it's all the more crucial for a show like How I Met Your Mother, which had a predetermined end point.  Going by the timeline established in the finale, Ted's children Penny (Lyndsy Fonseca) and Luke (David Henrie) are 15 and 13 when he sits them down to tell his story in 2030.  The fact that neither of the actors could believably pass for these ages (they were actually 20 and 18 when the scene was shot) is a fairly decisive indication that How I Met Your Mother was never intended to run more than five or six seasons at the outside, and the wheel-spinning with which the extra time was filled--besides being boring in itself--only serves to undermine the characters, and the endings the show gives them.  That Barney insists, after the breakup of his marriage to Robin, that he simply isn't suited to serious relationships would be more believable if there were not, before that marriage, a serious girlfriend and another fiancé, both introduced to mark time before the wedding endgame could be implemented.  Even more importantly, Ted and Robin's constant back and forth ultimately serves to neuter their romance.  By the series's end, they have both announced that they love each other, and then that they no longer feel that way about one another, so many times that the words have lost all meaning, and the decision to put them together feels almost arbitrary.

And yet, if the overlong, meandering path that leads up to "Last Forever" undermines the episode's power, it doesn't completely negate it.  There's a lot to be said against Barney's story in the finale, in which the always-problematic character achieves redemption by having a daughter and then realizing that all women are someone's daughter, at which point he begins berating the same young floozies he had previous preyed upon to "make better choices" (I don't agree with all of Sady Doyle's conclusions about the finale, but she's spot on about the problems with Barney).  But the breakup of his and Robin's marriage feels absolutely true to both characters, who have always been depicted as two people who love each other deeply but have no idea how to be in a relationship.  Unlike uber-couple Lily (Alyson Hannigan) and Marshall (Jason Segel), who can withstand competing career tracks, the pressures of parenting, and even an early-season breakup, Robin and Barney never had the resilience or the selflessness to handle the challenges of a long term relationship, so it's not surprising that the first crisis they face breaks them up.  Would this have been more believable, and more emotionally resonant, if Robin and Barney hadn't already broken up once for largely the same reasons, and if the last two seasons hadn't been dedicated to building up their love story without ever acknowledging the cracks in their foundation?  Absolutely.  But the premise still works, and the actors and writing are good enough that the breakup still stings the second time around.  By the same token, as annoying and Ted and Robin's I-love-you-I-love-you-not game became, their reconnection at the end of the series makes sense.  I can easily see them, in their fifties, having both achieved the conflicting goals that kept them apart--his children, her career--embarking on a late in life romance, and the actual moment at which Ted shows up at Robin's window with the blue French horn is as powerful as anything in the show's history.

None of this, of course, would matter if Tracy were not a vivid character in her own right, and if there's one criticism of the finale that I simply don't get, it is that it treats her like a plot token, a way of getting around the bind that Bays and Thomas trapped themselves in at the end of the pilot.  I think that this would be the case if How I Met Your Mother had ended as originally planned, with "Last Forever" capping the eighth season and Ted meeting Tracy for the first time in the same episode in which her death and his ultimate relationship with Robin were introduced.  But the decision to extend the show, though undeniably driven by purely financial motivations, turns out to have been a godsend.  It gives How I Met Your Mother the time to turn Tracy into a real character, both through her interactions with the rest of the main cast, and through flash-forwards to her and Ted's marriage.  She even gets her own backstory episode, "How Your Mother Met Me," in which we discover that while Ted was desperately searching for the love of his life, Tracy was trying to get over the sudden, early death of hers, and slowly working her way back to being ready for love again (amid the outrage over the finale's twist ending, one point that appears to have been lost is that Ted and Tracy end up with exactly the same romantic trajectories, both experiencing two great loves, the first one cut off by death).  Even her death, as I've said, is laid out before the finale, in the episode "Vesuvius," in which Ted and Tracy go for another weekend getaway that is clearly intended to be their last (I have to wonder if one of the reasons that the finale has aroused outrage is that so many people seemed determined to read "Vesuvius" ambiguously, whereas I thought that it couldn't have made Tracy's impending death any clearer).

As Penny and Luke point out when their father finishes his recitation, the point of How I Met Your Mother's finale was to reveal to us exactly what kind of story the show had been telling, what its purpose was and what it was about.  For several years, I'd happily assumed that the show was about the roundabout way in which Ted made his way to Tracy, when actually it turned out to be the story about Ted and Robin's on-again, off-again love story, which just happens to encompass both of them falling in love with and marrying other people.  I like my story better, but I can't deny that the one Bays and Thomas chose works for their characters and how they constructed the show (and again, I think it's damned impressive that the show can hold off on committing to the kind of story it's telling all the way to its last fifteen minutes without making either of the alternatives unbelievable).  And in a way, their ending feels true to what always seemed to me like the show's most important theme.  In its best moments, How I Met Your Mother was a show about disappointment, about realizing that your life wasn't going to turn out the way you wanted or planned, and that this can be both sad and wonderful.  Ted sees Robin across a crowded room and thinks that he's solved his life's puzzle, when instead he's only discovered a more elusive one.  Barney thinks that Robin will save him and instead finds salvation in a baby.  Lily runs away from Marshall to be an artist but turns out not to have the talent, while Marshall dreams of being an environmental lawyer, and then a judge, but keeps having to defer his dreams.  That Barney and Robin don't work out despite all the time we spent on their love story, or that Ted and Tracy's happiness is so tragically short-lived, returns to that theme of disappointment in a way that is deeply affecting.

To me, revealing that Tracy dies and then Ted and Robin get together--and doing so after a season that made Tracy so very real while she lived--doesn't negate her relationship with Ted.  It doesn't mean that Robin is The One while Tracy isn't.  It means that there's no such thing as The One, or a happy ending that your whole life is leading up to--just happiness and sadness, love and disappointment, for as long as you're around.  At another time in his life, when Tracy was alive or newly dead, Ted might have told the story of how he met his children's mother another way, with Tracy as the star and Robin as a barely-appearing supporting character.  The fact that he's changed, and fallen in love again, doesn't mean that his and Tracy's story ceases to exist, but rather that none of our lives have a single story.  I don't know if that's the message Bays and Thomas intended me to take from their finale, but it's one that I can take from it--because despite being so in control of their story that they knew how it would end seven years ago, no story is ever as rigid as to have exactly the meaning its creators intended, just as no life has just one great love that it is building up to.  Whether they meant to or not, Bays and Thomas have created a romantic comedy that both embraces and rejects the genre's cherished conventions, and for that reason--despite the finale's flaws and the sometimes hard slog leading up to it--I like How I Met Your Mother's ending just fine.

The 2014 Hugo Award: My Hugo Ballot, Best Novel and Campbell Award

With a little over 36 hours left in the Hugo nominating period, we come down to the last two categories on my ballot.  In recent years, I've found the best novel category less and less interesting, partly because I'm not interested in keeping up with novels as they're published (that's a great way to concentrate on a single genre and let all other kinds of books go ignored) so usually don't have an informed opinion when it comes time to make up my ballot.  At the same time, the Campbell award has grown in importance for me, as a reflection of the new voices emerging in the field (usually with short fiction).  So I end up nominating more with an eye towards the genre's (possible) future than on its present--though this year, in at least one cast, I think that they are one and the same.

Previous posts in this series:

• The Short Fiction Categories
  
  
• The Publishing and Fan Categories
  
  
• The Media Categories

Best Novel:

• A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar (my review) - The farther I get from this novel the more special it seems, and the more surprising its assurance for a debut offering.  Already nominated for the Nebula and BSFA, I think that A Stranger in Olondria deserves to add a Hugo nomination to its laurels.
  
  
• Mortal Fire by Elizabeth Knox (my review) - I've already singled out the story with which I was introduced to Knox's writing, and which acts as a prologue to this novel, in my short fiction post.  Mortal Fire is a very different beast from the story, less mysterious and spooky, but still a very clever variant on its YA tropes, and with an unusual, memorable heroine.
  
  
• The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates - A nomination without a chance of making it to the ballot, I know, but I couldn't let Oates's weird, baggy, Gothic horror pass without a nomination for an award in whose bailiwick it surely lies. 

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer:

• Sofia Samatar - It will probably come as no surprise that an author who appears twice on my ballot (three times if you count the fan writer category) should be up for this award.  Samatar has had one of the most triumphant debut years in recent memory, and it seems only right to recognize that with a Campbell nomination.  Second year of eligibility.
  
  
• Carmen Maria Machado - Another person who has appeared several times on my ballot already, with her stories "Inventory" and "Especially Heinous." First year of eligibility.
  
  
• Benjanun Sriduangkaew - I haven't singled out any stories by Sriduangkaew this year, but the pieces by her that I read--stories like "Annex" and "Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade"--showcased an exciting new talent.  First year of eligibility.
  
  
• Tori Truslow - It's a bit rich, nominating someone for the Campbell based on a single story, but when that story has stuck with you as powerfully as Truslow's "Boat in Shadows, Crossing" has done, it makes a great deal of sense.  First year of eligibility.

The 2014 Hugo Awards: My Hugo Ballot, Media Categories

Continuing on to the media categories, which include some of the most popular categories on the ballot, and also the ones that have become the least interesting to follow.  The problem of the Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form category is well-known.  For years the award has belonged to Doctor Who, which routinely receives three nominations on the ballot, all but ensuring its victory due to the Hugos' preferential voting system (only Joss Whedon proved himself more powerful).  And this year, that preordained victory doesn't even sting that badly.  As exasperated as I've become with Stephen Moffat's stewardship of Doctor Who, his 50th anniversary special, "The Day of the Doctor," was a genuinely good hour of television, employing Moffat's by-now hoary tics in a way that made them seem new and refreshing, playing with and deepening the revamped series's mythology, and making excellent use of its three stars. Add to that the fact that genre TV remains something of a wasteland, and this becomes one of the least urgent categories on the ballot.

In the Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form category, there has for several years been a trend towards rejecting the original concept of the two categories' split (long form=movies; short form=TV episodes) in favor of nominating entire seasons of TV.  This began in 2008 with the first season of Heroes, when the entire fandom was stunned by the realization that television could do comics-style continuity.  That shock obscured the somewhat dubious argument for pitting films and TV seasons against each other on the basis of running time, which has only grown less convincing as novelistic storytelling on TV has gone from a bold new device to something that even the most mundane procedural will sprinkle in.  This year, I'm seeing a lot of voices calling for the nomination of the first season of Orphan Black in this category.  Leaving aside the fact that I'm not as thrilled with the show as the rest of fandom--I think Tatiana Maslany's multiple lead performances are a stunning technical achievement, but her characters are, with a few exceptions, collections of clichés, and the show's handling of its story and themes is shallow and uninteresting--to describe Orphan Black as a single continuous narrative only exposes how meaningless that term has become.  Rather than having a story, with a beginning, middle and end, Orphan Black takes a page from 24's book, throwing increasingly absurd cliffhangers and plot twists at the screen in order to keep its pace racing and obscure the fact that it has no idea where it's going.  I can easily see why fans would want to nominate the season as a single block, because the show's plotting is so beside the point that it doesn't have a single standout episode, but to me that's an argument not to nominate it at all.

This block of categories, in other words, is divided between those have absolutely no hope of throwing up interesting ballots, and those that I don't know enough about to nominate well in.  So this part of my ballot is going to be a little sparse.  As in my previous ballots, I'd be happy to hear suggestions for my remaining nominating slots, though given the time pressure I might not be able to consider some potential nominees.

Previous posts in this series:

• The Short Fiction Categories
  
  
• The Publishing and Fan Categories

Best Related Work:

This is a category in which I've read nothing eligible this year.  So really I'm relying on other voters to put interesting works here and give me an excuse to read them: nominees I'm hoping to see on the ballot include Afrofuturism by Ytasha L. Womack (see Sofia Samatar's review in Strange Horizons), The Riddles of the Hobbit by Adam Roberts (Katherine Farmar's review), and Parabolas of Science Fiction, edited by Brian Atteberry and Veronica Hollinger (Paul Kincaid's review).  I've seen other nominators place essays in this category, but, though that's an approach that's benefited me in the past (essays of mine have been nominated alongside books, encyclopedias, and blogs in the BSFA's non-fiction category), I'm not sure it makes sense.  In recognizing online essays, it seems to me to make more sense to nominate something like SpecFic 12, which collects a large group (though I'm not sure I'll be doing that myself as I am one of the collected reviewers).

Best Graphic Story:

• Saga, Volume 2, by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples - I'm hardly being original here, but Saga genuinely is as fantastic as everyone says it is.  The story of two soldiers in a futuristic, interplanetary war who fall in love and have a baby, it's remarkable for its vivid, funny characters (not just the leads but the huge cast of secondary characters), but even more so for its enormous, varied world, of which we've only seen a little bit in the first two volumes.
  
  
• XKCD: Time by Randall Munroe - I'm indebted to Niall Harrison for pointing out not only Time's eligibility in this category, but how perfectly it suits the idea at its core.  Time is quintessentially SFnal--it tells the story of two explorers figuring out their world and working out the changes affecting it through observation and deduction--and its method of delivery--a single comic panel changing subtly every few hours over the course of months--is the perfect fusion of low and high tech, old and new methods.  That fans of the comic have rallied to discuss, collate, and compile it, providing the less obsessive with a way of viewing the story--this site, for example, will screen the whole thing in sequence, pausing for significant frames--only makes Time a more perfect embodiment of what should be showing up in this category.

Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form

• Upstream Color, written and directed by Shane Carruth - This might be the only potential Hugo nominee whose absence from the ballot would leave me genuinely upset.  If there was a more exciting, more important SF film in 2013--or in quite a few years preceding it--I'm struggling to remember what it was, and this fact ought be recognized by the award that purports to stand for the genre.  Upstream Color embodies much of what SF filmmaking should be striving for--interesting ideas, a strange but coherent world, a willingness to challenge its audience not only through storytelling but through the film's visuals and sounds.  It is a genuinely important accomplishment, and it deserves much more than a Hugo nomination, but let's at least give it that.  (I wrote some more about the film earlier this year.)
  
  
• Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, written by Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón - There are arguments for not considering Gravity science fiction--it contains no SFnal technologies or scenarios, its story is actively hostile to space exploration.  But months after seeing the film I'm still stunned by it, and its evocation of space.  For all its flaws--in realism, in the thinness of its plot and characters--Gravity makes a compelling argument for bringing more of the future into our present day storytelling, even in the most mundane of ways, and to me this makes it SFnal.  (Again, some more thoughts about the film are here.)
  
  
• Pacific Rim, directed by Guillermo del Toro, written by Guillermo del Toro and Travis Beacham - There are plenty of strikes against this scrappy, monsters-vs-giant-robots film, including the fact that it loses its way, and its female lead, in its second half.  But Pacific Rim is neither a remake nor a sequel, and unlike other 2013 films who share those attributes like Elysium it's actually trying to be fun, and to create a world.  Not to mention that, for all that she's sidelined, the very existence of that female lead--and of major characters who are not white male Americans--makes Pacific Rim unusual and worth rewarding.
  
  
• An Adventure in Space and Time, directed by Terry McDonough, written by Mark Gatiss - This biopic about the early days of Doctor Who revolves around the stories of Verity Lambert, the BBC's first female producer, and William Hartnell, the man who first plays the Doctor.  Its argument for the show's importance can occasionally be wobbly, but in Hartnell in particular it finds a figure who embodies both the show's appeal and its heartbreaking impermanence.

Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form

• Utopia, episode 1, directed by Marc Munden, written by Dennis Kelly - Rather predictably, Utopia's conspiracy story ended up devolving into silliness by its first season's end, and though I will be watching the second season it won't be with the same urgency as the first.  But the first episode is still stunning on almost every level--story, visuals, music--and deserves to be recognized.
  
  
• The Five-ish Doctors Reboot, written and directed by Peter Davison - Much as I liked "The Day of the Doctor," it can't be denied that its focus is on the new Doctor Who's mythology, and only secondarily on the show's 50th anniversary.  Peter Davison's loving tribute to the series, in which he, Sylvester McCoy, and Colin Baker, angry over being left out of "Day," try to sneak their way onto the set, is a much more fitting tribute.  Featuring a dizzying array of cameos--from the show's history and elsewhere--this short movie is a funny, irreverent, touching reminder of the how much this show has meant to so many people.
  
  
• The Legend of Korra, "Beginnings, Part 1 and 2," directed by Colin Heck, written by Michael Dante DiMartino (part 1), directed by Ian Graham, written by Tim Hedrick (part 2) - Legend of Korra's second season was an improvement on the first only in the sense that its story was merely incoherent, rather than incoherent and enormously problematic.  But this mid-season two-parter, which features the main cast minimally as Korra sinks into a vision of the origins of the Avatar line, is its own, superior entity.  Beautifully animated by Studio Mir, whose absence from some of the second season's other episodes is sadly noticeable, "Beginnings" both builds on Avatar's existing mythology and expands it into its own cosmology.  The rest of season 2 can't hold a candle to this episode, but it stands on its own as one of the loveliest pieces of genre television in 2013.
  
  
• Gravity Falls, "Dreamscaperers," directed by John Aoshima and Joe Pitt, written by Matt Chapman, Alex Hirsch, and Timothy McKeon - That SF fandom hasn't embraced Gravity Falls, a funny, beautifully animated and often creepy series, is one of the tiny tragedies of the last few years, because this show features more interesting genre mythology, and a more coherent magical world, than a lot of fandom favorites.  "Dreamscaperers" advances the show's mythology considerably when it introduces Bill, a demon who traps the main characters in their dreams in an attempt to steal a bit of crucial information.  It's an episode that embodies the show's part-funny, part-scary sensibility.

The 2014 Hugo Awards: My Hugo Ballot, Publishing and Fan Categories

My, how the time has flown.  I had honorable intentions of posting new segments of my Hugo ballot every few days, but here we are with less than a week to the nominating deadline and only three categories covered.  Let's continue swiftly, then, to the publishing and fan categories, an easy choice for the next step through my ballot because I won't be bothering with several of them.  As has been pointed out more than once by more than one person, the best editor categories seek to recognize work that is invisible to the readers--and thus to most of the voters.  One editor might do minimal work on an excellent novel or story, while another turns a passable piece into a good one, and I would have no way of knowing which one is which.  I also don't listen to podcasts, so I'll be leaving the Best Fancast category blank as well.  But to the categories I will be filling--unlike the short fiction categories, I have empty slots in several of these, so if you'd like to make suggestions in the comments I'd be happy to see them.

Previous entries in this series:

• The Short Fiction Categories

Best Semiprozine:

• Strange Horizons - This is as close as I'm going to come to nominating myself, and the reason I can justify it is that Strange Horizons is far more than just my work (which is anyway also the work of dozens of reviewers and several associate editors).  To my mind, it remains one of the best all-around sources for speculative fiction, non-fiction, and reviews.
  
  
• Giganotosaurus - Two of the stories on my short fiction ballot were published in this magazine, which is all the more impressive when you consider that they represent a sixth of the magazine's output in 2013.  Embodying the triumph of quality over quantity, Giganotosaurus is a stripped-down operation that publishes one story a month in the most unassuming format imaginable.  But those stories are always worth reading, and in addition the magazine is to be praised for being a venue for long-form works, publishing at least two novellas in 2013.

Best Fanzine:

This category gives me pause.  The original fanzine format is one that I don't read or participate in, and in recent years the category has become the home of blogs.  I'm all for recognizing how important blogs have become to the conversation surrounding genre, but I'm not sure that every blog suits this category--two-time winner SF Signal, for example, suits my idea of a fanzine because it features multiple forms of content, from news to reviews to essays, and covers books and all forms of media.  I'm less persuaded, however, that single-author blogs belong here, as I've seen several people suggest in their ballot posts.  Nevertheless, I might change my mind, so the list I have here should be considered extra-provisional.

• SF Mistressworks - This project, begun in 2011 by Ian Sales as a response to the paucity of women in Gollancz's SF Masterworks series, is an excellent resource for people looking for discussion of older, less well known (and sometimes out of print) SF by women.  Featuring reviews of multiple authors by multiple reviewers, it's a great example of the online community coming together to provide a new and vital resource.
  
  
• The Book Smugglers - Excellent group blog covering mostly YA but also other genre works--see for example their excellent recent discussion of Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
  
  
• Ladybusiness - Another group blog that covers a wide range of books and media from an explicitly feminist pespective.
  
  
• Pornokitsch - You have to stand up and respect a blog that has turned its own award into a major media event, and even more so for highlighting art as well as novels.

Best Professional Artist:

This category, as well as the fan artist category, is one that in years past I've tended to ignore for lack of any knowledge about the field.  So I'm grateful to the organizers of the Hugo Award Eligible Art(ists) tumblr for organizing this ambitious and useful project this year, and to the many people who have noted their favorite artists in their Hugo ballots (I'm also grateful to Aidan Moher for collecting these ballots into a handy, single post).

• Anna & Elena Balbusso - I don't know whether it's possible to nominate a team for this award, but the Balbusso sisters' work is too lovely to ignore.  The piece that most people will probably be familiar with is the illustration for Veronica Schanoes's "Burning Girls" at Tor.com (and this is a good time to commend the site's editors for commissioning original art to go with each of their stories), but the entire gallery is worth paging through.
  
  
• Sarah Anne Langton - The person who designed the Hodderscape dodo surely deserves recognition, but Langton has also designed several lovely, boldly graphic covers (most recently for SpecFic 13, which is wonderful).
  
  
• Olly Moss - It's a sign of Moss's talent that when I looked through his gallery while compiling this list, I kept stopping to say "wait, he did that piece?"  (It's also a sign of how much attention I pay to art and the people who make it during the year.)  I don't doubt that you've seen Moss's work--his movie posters and infographics--but seeing it all together makes it clear what an impressive body of work it is.
  
  
• Victo Ngai - Ngai has drawn illustrations for several Tor.com stories, as well as the covers for several Tor novels, and all combine elaborate detailing with bold colors and settings.  I'm particularly fond of his illustration for Jedediah Berry's "A Window or a Small Box," which captures the story's surrealism and its characters' sense of running through a maze.
  
  
• Fiona Staples - I'll have a bit more to say about Staples when I write about the Best Graphic Story category (and maybe whenever I get around to writing up my recent reading), but Saga wouldn't be what it is without her clean but wildly imaginative illustrations, which make the comic's vivid, varied world the delight that it is.

Best Fan Artist:

• Mandie Manzanano - Manzanano's style--stained glass style illustrations of everything from Disney cartoons to Adventure Time--seems a little twee at first, but it's impeccably done and gorgeous to look at.
  
  
• Autun Purser - The Fantastic Travel Destinations series is precisely what fan art should be--original, irreverent, and of course beautifully done.
  
  
• Angela Rizza - Rizza's gorgeous, meticulously detailed illustrations of fan favorite as diverse as The Lord of the Rings and Breaking Bad are stunning and often quite funny.  I'm particularly fond of her Harry Potter illustrations, which I actually like better than some of the official artwork.
  
  
• Sara Webb - This was one of the names I picked out from Hugo Award Eligible Art(ists).  In a field full of artists producing gorgeous, luminous, lushly colored fantastic landscapes, Webb's stood out.

Best Fan Writer:

• Nina Allan - On top of being a fantastic writer of fiction, Nina is an exceptional reviewer, thoughtful and insightful and most of all curious about fiction from all walks of life--I can't count the number of books I added to my TBR list because of her reviews.  As well as writing reviews for places like Strange Horizons, Nina blogs at The Spider's House, where she is predictably smart and worth reading.
  
  
• Liz Bourke - Another Strange Horizons reviewer, Liz also blogs at Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea and reviews for Tor.com.  In particular, it's worth noting her Sleeps With Monsters series at the latter venue, where she covers books, films, and games from a feminist perspective, and has made me note several names for later reading.
  
  
• Natalie Luhrs - I became aware of Luhrs this year because of her coverage of the SFWA petition brouhaha, which was incisive and to the point.  Her blog, The Radish, is well worth reading.
  
  
• Sofia Samatar - The second time that Sofia appears on this ballot, but by no means the last.  On top of writing excellent reviews for Strange Horizons, Sofia also blogs at kankedort, where she offers her unique perspective on writing, teaching, poetry, and Arabic literature.
  
  
• Genevieve Valentine - I'm not sure that Valentine is eligible in this category because a lot of her writing is for professional venues like The AV Club or The Philadelphia Weekly, but I would be remiss not to mention her fantastic column Intertitles at Strange Horizons (a recent example: her trenchant and necessary discussion of Clarice Starling in light of some of the character choices made by Hannibal), or her wonderfully snarky reviews of trashy fantasy films at her blog.

The 2014 Hugo Awards: My Hugo Ballot, Short Fiction Categories

I don't think it will come as a shock to regular readers of this blog that the short fiction categories are my favorites on the Hugo ballot, to the extent that I attach to them an importance that is probably completely out of proportion to how most of the voting base thinks of them.  Yes, I know, the best novel category is the only one most people (and especially anyone outside of fandom, or even Worldcon) actually care about, but to me it always seems reductive.  How do you boil down an entire year's worth of genre to five novels, much less a single winner?  The short fiction categories, with their wider perspective (one of the reasons that I have no problem with the invented term "novelette") and lower stakes, give a better snapshot of the field and its interests.  They also reaffirm my belief in the vibrancy and relevance of the genre short fiction scene.  I don't know another genre in which ordinary readers habitually get excited about short stories the way that SFF readers do, and in which those stories are an integral part of the conversation surrounding the genre.  I certainly don't know another genre in which short fiction venues are proliferating--whether it's online venues or original anthologies (often funded by Kickstarters).  Far more than the best novel category, it seems to me, the short fiction categories give us a glimpse of the genre's present state--and of its future--which is why it's so important to me that they represent the richness and diversity of what's being published.

My reading in preparation for this ballot consisted mainly of online venues--partly for reasons of convenience, and partly because I knew that I would publicize my choices and wanted to have easily accessible links to offer anyone who might be interested in sampling my recommendations.  One of the effects of this emphasis is that when I sat down to review the stories that had caught my eye at the end of this process, I found short stories (under 7,500 words) disproportionately represented.  Possibly because of financial considerations, and possibly out of the belief that people reading online have a short attention span, most online fiction falls in this category, with few novelettes and very few novellas published online.  When you take that fact into consideration, however, and take a look at this year's Nebula ballot, it becomes clear that online venues are the future--the short fiction category is all online fiction, which also well represented in the novelette category.  As online venues become secure enough--in their finances and their audience--to publish longer lengths, I expect that we'll see them taking over the entire ballot.

On that note, I'd like to commend the short fiction editors at Tor.com for leading the charge.  They published more than half a dozen novellas this year, several of very high quality.  Especially with Subterranean magazine, until 2013 the only online venue to regularly publish novellas, closing its doors this year, it's gratifying to see Tor.com carrying the torch.  At the very other end of the scale is scrappy upstart Giganotosaurus, a bare-bones operation that only publishes one story a month (though often at the novelette and even novella length) but whose ratio of quality to quantity is one of the highest in the field.

Without any further ado, then, my provisional ballot for the 2014 Hugo short fiction categories, sorted by author's surname:

Best Novella:

• Spin by Nina Allan (TTA Press, nominated for the BSFA award) - Having just got done praising online fiction, my first choice is traditionally published (albeit available for Kindle for a very reasonable price as part of TTA's interesting novellas series).  But Spin really is much too special to let issues of format cloud the discussion.  This retelling of the myth of Arachne builds its alternate world so lightly and so subtly that you hardly even notice it happening until you're standing in a fully realized setting, and the story of its main character--an artist who struggles with the meaning of self-expression, a tangled family history, and the possibility that her talent may be a literal gift of the gods--is moving and thought-provoking.  Spin is a perfect illustration of why the novella is a vital, necessary form.
  
  
• "Martyr's Gem" by C.S.E. Cooney (Giganotosaurus) - Far more traditional, and even a little sappy, is Cooney's tale of love, revenge, and adventure.  A young man from an impoverished family is selected as the husband of a noblewoman who wants him to act as a beard while she pursues her sister's murderer.  What makes this story work is first the world, a post-collapse, quasi-fantastical setting that is complex and interesting, and second the characters, who are all--not just the main lovers but their friends and extended family--drawn with intelligence and compassion.
  
  
• "Wakulla Springs" by Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages (Tor.com, nominated for the Nebula award) - This four-part story centers around the titular location, in the Florida panhandle, where in the 1950s a segregated resort played host to the shooting of several Tarzan films and the underwater scenes of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  Duncan and Klages beautifully capture the setting, with all its natural beauty and social ugliness, and the changes it undergoes throughout the story's four time periods.
  
  
• "One" by Nancy Kress (Tor.com) - Kress isn't usually my cup of tea, so I was surprised by how moving I found this story, in which a self-involved, self-pitying, misanthropic young man gains total empathy and is nearly destroyed by experience.  Rather than using her premise to teach her protagonist a simple lesson, Kress shows us the full horror of his situation, and slowly follows as he learns to be a better person through his experiences, not via some magical force.
  
  
• "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU" by Carmen Maria Machado (The American Reader) - Many people have commented on the problems with Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and its reliance on lurid violence against women and children, and at first glance that's also what Machado's story seems to be doing, albeit in a particularly funny way.  But soon she creates an entire fantastical world constructed around the show's scaffolding, complete with alternate versions of Benson and Stabler, recurring characters who may or may not be magical, and interludes in which the characters become aware of their fiction nature.  As much its own thing as a commentary on SVU's problems, this is one of the most original and interesting stories I've read this year.

Note: the Machado story is under novella length (17,500 words), but within the 10% margin that allows moving stories between adjacent categories.  To me, it feels like a novella, which is why I'm nominating it here.

Best Novelette:

• "A Window or a Small Box" by Jedediah Berry (Tor.com) - Berry's absurdist tale follows a young couple who were kidnapped into a surreal alternate world on their wedding day.  The worldbuilding here is very fine, creating a sense of an unseen logic that lies just under the illogical surface, but the story works because of the main characters and their relationship, which is sweet without being saccharine.
  
  
• "Bit-U-Men" by Maria Dahvana Headley (Lightspeed, originally appeared in The Book of the Dead, edited by Jared Shurin) - In an interesting twist on the mummy story, Headley riffs off the legend of the "mellified man" to imagine a 20th century confectionery magnate using such a mummy--who is, of course, still alive--to sell candy.  The central relationship is between the confectioner's son, his father's secretary, and the mummy, and falls somewhere between romantic and gluttonous.
  
  
• "A House, Drifting Sideways" by Rahul Kanakia (Giganotosaurus) - Kanakia's neo-feudal world, in which economic inequality has run rampant to the point that the very rich are more powerful and more influential than any historical aristocrat, is not a new concept, but the slant of his story makes for some tricky reading.  The heroine, a debutante who buys into the feudal mindset, clashes with her father, who wants to offer workers more rights and freedoms but is, to her mind, selling them to bankers.  It's a scary portrait of, at one and the same time, "let them eat cake"-level privilege, and a clear-eyed take on a world that has gone completely upside down.
  
  
• "Pearl Rehabilitative Colony for Ungrateful Daughters" (PDF) by Henry Lien (Asimov's, nominated for the Nebula award) - This funny piece lives and dies with the voice of its narrator, an unrepentantly self-absorbed, spoiled princess who has been sent to the titular school but only cares about a vendetta against a schoolmate.  The over the top teenage narrator's voice is deliberately grating, but works mainly because she doesn't spend the story learning a lesson, and ends it just as selfish and short-sighed as she started it.
  
  
• "Boat in Shadows, Crossing" by Tori Truslow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, nominated for the BSFA award) - I wrote about this story at Strange Horizons, and a year later it is still one of the most interesting stories of 2013.  Truslow's creation of a setting in which words--and the things they signify--don't mean exactly what we think they mean is deft, and the gender-swapping love story she constructs in that world is moving and sweet.

Bubbling Under: (depending on the weather the day I make my final vote, these stories might end up on my ballot instead of some of the ones in the list above)

• "Two Captains" by Gemma Files (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) - Files's cheerful story, about a pirate captain who captures a wizard and falls in love with him, is uncomfortable precisely because of that cheerfulness.  It tells a rather uncomfortable story in a light, humorous tone that makes it a pleasure to read and yet also not, and only shows its hand in its final paragraphs.
  
  
• "They Shall Salt the Earth With Seeds of Glass" (PDF) by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Asimov's, nominated for the Nebula award) - Johnson's post-apocalyptic story clearly has an agenda--to tell a story about a woman seeking an abortion who isn't swayed by the sudden realization that she wants to keep her baby.  But, leaving aside that that's a worthy agenda, the world of the story is vivid, and the relationship between the heroine and her pregnant sister is compelling.  An interlude in the story's second half with an invading alien who clearly doesn't grasp why the heroine hates and fears him is particularly well done.

Best Short Story:

• "Let's Take This Viral" by Rich Larson (Lightspeed) - Most of the stories I've selected here have been fantastical, which is as much a reflection on the tastes of online venues' editors as my own.  This piece, a post-singularity SF story set in a hedonistic party future, is an intriguing exception.  The protagonist discovers disease, which to him and his post-human friends is nothing but a fashionable affectation, and it's left to the readers to sense the looming catastrophe that leads us to the story's shocking ending.
  
  
• "The Knight of Chains, the Deuce of Stars" by Yoon Ha Lee (Lightspeed) - Lee's "Effigy Nights" seems to have amassed more awards buzz this year, but I prefer this piece, a worthy addition to the sub-sub-genre of invented, futuristic games with the fate of the galaxy at stake.  The two main characters are nicely drawn, and the trick that one plays on the other in order to achieve her goals and win the much larger game that she's been playing is nicely built up, and fun to work out.
  
  
• "Inventory" by Carmen Maria Machado (Strange Horizons) - This was the first Machado piece I read this year, before the SVU novella, and when I saw that it was both a post-apocalypse story and a list story I groaned.  But Macahdo finds a new angle on the former trope, and executes the latter flawlessly, resulting in a story that is unexpectedly moving.
  
  
• "Selkie Stories are for Losers" by Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons, nominated for the Nebula and BSFA award) - If there's a better first line in genre short fiction from last year, I haven't seen it.  The story that follows is pretty damn good too, tying the Selkie myths to a story of parental abandonment, and of young people trying to work out (or escape), their family history.
  
  
• "Sing" by Karin Tidbeck (Tor.com) - A scientist studying an alien backwater becomes involved with a woman who is the local outcast.  The conflict between the scientist's fascination with, and increasing fondness for, the society he's studying, and his lover's more jaundiced take on it, is really interesting, and the aliens themselves are also really well done.

Bubbling Under:

• "Never Dreaming (in Four Burns)" by Seth Dickinson (Clarkesworld) - An engineer working on revolutionary spaceship engine design receives a diagnosis of progressive, fatal dementia alongside an invitation to travel to a fantasy world where her illness can be cured--but only by changing the kind of person she is.  A lot has been written about the conflict between the SFnal and fantastical worldview, and this story literalizes it through an interesting, appealing main character.
  
  
• "Difference of Opinion" by Meda Kahn (Strange Horizons) - The angry narrative of a non-neurotypical person in a world that is increasingly compelling her to conform.  This story teeters just on the edge of being preachy, but what pulls it back is the relationship between the narrator and a workplace consultant who is trying help her but doesn't understand her anger.  The currents of distrust and misunderstanding between the two characters, alongside genuine affection, make for an interesting relationship.
  
  
• "A Visit to the House on Terminal Hill" by Elizabeth Knox (Tor.com) - Nina Allan wrote at greater length about why this opaque, creepy story works so well.  Though slightly overshadowed by the novel to which it acts as a preamble, "Terminal Hill" stands very well on its own, as a pitch-perfect portrait of an oblivious, officious government lawyer stumbling into horror and not even realizing what it is--because his own monstrousness is so great.
  
  
• "Our Daughters" by Sandra McDonald (Apex Magazine) - A nicely creepy story about rape culture and the responses to it, in which the latter end up as terrifying as the former. 
  
  
• "If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" by Rachel Swirsky (Apex Magazine, nominated for the Nebula award) - The main reason that this story isn't definitely on my ballot is that I suspect it's a shoe-in without me, and I'd rather give my votes to stories that need them more.  But this is an excellent piece, one that starts out seeming like a silly gimmick and then ends up punching you in the gut with its final revelation.

The 2014 Hugo Awards: Thoughts on Award-Pimping

It might be hard to remember, because there have already been two bigger and more bitter slapfights since, but the first genre kerfuffle of 2014, lo these six or seven weeks ago, was about award-pimping.  More specifically, it was about the increasing prevalence, in the last half-decade, of "award eligibility posts," those lists posted by authors around the beginning of the year and of award-nominating season in which they list their work from the previous year and what categories it's eligible in.  Perspectives on these kinds of posts differ wildly: some people view them as innocuous, as a benign public service, or as a harmless bit of self-promotion.  Others, meanwhile, see them as gauche and unpleasant, and as actively harmful to awards and the genre in general.  Adam Roberts kicked off this year's iteration of the discussion with a post firmly on the anti- side, and though I find his piece smart and thoughtful, it mainly reminds me that this is an issue on which I find it difficult to form an opinion.

On the one hand, I'm largely unbothered by award eligibility posts when taken in isolation.  Though I've seen examples that have been hectoring, self-satisfied, or demanding, I find most of them informative and unassuming.  I'm sympathetic to the argument that they represent a public service, reminding readers of work they might have missed or forgotten.  (Though I would also point out that this is a function that can be served just as well, and often better, by a frequently-updated, organized, easy to find bibliography, something that a shocking number of authors don't bother with.  If, in the course of my Hugo reading, I come across an author I like and want to look at more of their work, I'm not going to trawl their blog archive for an award eligibility post.  I'm going to look for a bibliography and, if I can't quickly find one, move on to an author who can be bothered to put one together.)  I also take the point, raised by Amal El-Mohtar in a post responding to Roberts, that anti award-pimping arguments impact more powerfully on women and people of color, who are anyway discouraged by cultural conditioning from tooting their own horn.

On the other hand, I'm not happy with the way that discussion of award-pimping has proceeded, particularly in the wake of El-Mohtar's post.  I'm disappointed with the way that the term "award-pimping" has been subsumed and finally replaced by "self-promotion."  One of the most important arguments, it seemed to me, in Roberts's post was that award-pimping was "directly and negatively distorting of the award shortlists that follow."  By substituting the specific activity of award eligibility posts with the blanket term self-promotion--which can comprise any number of types of behavior, both acceptable and unacceptable--we short-circuit any possibility of a discussion of whether this particular kind of self-promotion is desirable, effective, or conducive to a healthy award scene.  To take a different example, a few days after the award eligibility kerfuffle happened I saw John Scalzi complain on twitter that he had attended a convention panel in which a member of the audience, seeing that a panel member had failed to show up, unilaterally placed themselves on the panel.  I'm sure that if you challenged this person they would respond that they were simply promoting their brand and visibility, but does it therefore follow that this is the kind of behavior we want to tolerate or encourage?  Is it conducive to an optimal con experience for other attendees and panel members, which is what we, as a group, should be concerned with?

I can't help but take the unwillingness to debate award-pimping as a specific tactic, rather than an expression of self-promotion, as yet another reflection of the way that sooner or later, everything in fandom starts to be perceived as existing for authors.  You see this a lot in reviews: the perceived illegitimacy of negative reviews (and the attendant belief that reviews should function as a "constructive," workshop-esque critique), or the assumption that reviews are directed at authors, who therefore have an automatic right of response.  Increasingly, I'm seeing the same attitude where awards are concerned.  Awards are, of course, a powerful career (and sometimes, sales) booster.  But the purpose of an award isn't to celebrate any single author; it's to celebrate the field and recognize excellence within it.  Though, as I've said, I don't find award eligibility posts objectionable in isolation, as a phenomenon they bother me because they shift the focus of the conversation surrounding awards from the field as a whole to the individual author.  In a trenchant analysis of some of the fallacies surrounding the award-pimping conversation, Martin Lewis writes that the unspoken subtext of award eligibility posts is "my work is among the five best works of its kind published last year."  I think that, more often, the subtext is "I want an award."  There's nothing wrong, of course, with wanting an award, but there is quite a bit wrong with the primacy that that desire, and its expression, have been allowed to take in the conversation, to the point of being treated--as I think El-Mohtar's post and discussion following from it do--as something virtuous and even political. 

On the third hand, saying that I wish there had been a discussion of Roberts's argument that award-pimping posts are harmful isn't the same as saying that I think they are.  In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that they even work.  If anything, a glance at the last few years' Hugo ballot suggests that if award eligibility posts make a difference, it's only for people who already had the kind of enormous, loyal readership that is either a reflection or the cause of the kind of popularity that practically guarantees Hugo nominations all on its own.  (In that sense, some of the defenses of award-pimping from or on behalf of less recognizable authors feel a little like mid-level or low-selling artists defending copyright extension laws that will only ever benefit mega-corporations.)  Would John Scalzi's April's Fool story "Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City" had garnered a Hugo nomination in 2012 if Scalzi hadn't drawn attention to its eligibility on his blog?  I suspect not, but Scalzi himself would still have been perennial Hugo nominee (and eventual winner).  And what about the case of Seanan McGuire, who had four nominees in the fiction categories (and only missed out on the fifth by a few votes) in 2013?  That result surely can't be ascribed purely to whether or not McGuire decided to post a list of her eligible work.  On the other hand, Larry Correia did engage in explicit and unabashed award campaigning in 2013 (which he represented as a blow on behalf of pulp writing and against the "literati critics" who apparently make up the Hugo voter base), resulting in several of his favorites gaining nominations in the related work and podcast categories, and in Correia himself coming within less than twenty votes of a best novel nomination.  It's doubtful that he would have achieved those results without his campaign--but then, it's equally doubtful that if we were to achieve the result Roberts hopes for, of creating a norm that views award eligibility posts as illegitimate, that someone who seems to hold the Hugo award in as much contempt as Correia would abide by it.

On the fourth hand, this is really nothing new.  The Hugos are, and have always been, a popularity contest.  Who you are and who you know have always played a role in whether you get nominated.  There's no question that there's been a palpable shift in Hugo nominations in the last few years, away from perennial nominees like Mike Resnick (whose position as the award's most decorated author is often ascribed to his popularity among certain segments of the Worldcon membership) and towards authors with a larger online presence, but that simply means that a different group of authors is benefiting from the same dynamic.  (It's also worth noting that one of the effects of that shift is that Resnick doesn't get nominated for as many Hugos any more, and I doubt there's anyone of sense who can argue that that's not an improvement.)  In his post, Roberts writes that SF awards are characterized by a tendency to vote out of fannishness for a particular author, rather than fannishness towards the field as a whole, and it's certainly difficult to look at the three examples I've given and not conclude that this is probably what lay at the heart of each of them.  But as he himself concedes, that's a tendency that is baked into the award's format and history.  We can ask whether the acceptance and celebration of award-pimping doesn't exacerbate that tendency--which is, again, a conversation that I wish we were having--but it certainly didn't create it.

On the fifth hand, that's not a compelling argument for remaining invested in the Hugos.  It's easy to point a finger at award-pimping because it's a relatively new phenomenon that has dovetailed with an obvious shift in the Hugo's tastes, one that has resulted in shortlists that have been less interesting and of an overall lesser quality, but the truth is that that shift may simply represent a fundamental problem with the award itself.  Last year after the nomination period closed Justin Landon made a powerful argument for just not caring about the Hugos anymore, and while I've obviously failed to do that it certainly is true that in the last few years, as each Hugo ballot has been announced, I've found myself feeling less and less invested in the award.  Whatever the reason for it, an award in which a joke story is in the running for best short story of the year is not in good health.  An award in which a single author receives 20% of the fiction nominations is not in good health.  An award in which a concerted and open ballot-stuffing campaign bears fruit, very nearly to the point of affecting its tentpole category, is not in good health.  I've spent the last few weeks in a flurry of pre-Hugo reading and consideration, but the truth is that when I look up from that work and consider the award dispassionately, I find that I feel about it the way I felt about the Nebulas seven or eight years ago--as if the Hugos had grown increasingly irrelevant as a yardstick for excellence in the field.  (As an important ray of hope, it's worth noting that the Nebulas have rehabilitated themselves significantly since that nadir, producing, in the last few years, several interesting and varied shortlists.)

On the sixth and final hand, I feel that there's a wind of change this year.  Or maybe a better way of putting it is that elements that were gathering force in the last few years seem to have achieved a new level of prominence this year.  Even as the award eligibility phenomenon gains steam (and respectability), more and more people are also using the internet to create a more broadly informed voter base.  Dozens of people are posting their Hugo ballots and recommendations (to take a by no means exhaustive sample: Nina Allan, Thea and Ana at The Book Smugglers, Liz Bourke (1, 2, 3, 4), the bloggers of LadyBusiness, Justin Landon, Martin Lewis, Jonathan McCalmont (1, 2), Aidan Moher, Mari Ness, Ian Sales, Jared Shurin, Rachel Swirsky (1, 2, 3), Adam Whitehead).  Blogs like Hugo Award Eligible Art(ists) seek to inform people (like myself) who have little grounding in the category, and make them acquainted with worthwhile nominees.  Existing projects like Writertopia's Campbell award eligibility page collate information that makes it easier to nominate for an award whose eligibility requirements can seem tricky even if you're an old hand at this Hugo stuff.  If you're someone who is interested in voting as more than a single author's fan, it has never been easier to gain a broad appreciation of the field and its practitioners, even the ones who aren't superstars.

I still don't know whether award eligibility posts are part of the problem or simply a ineffective distraction.  I do think that the efforts I've been seeing in the last two months have a real chance of being part of the solution, and I mean to join in.  In the next few weeks, I'll be posting my own Hugo ballot, a few categories at a time.  (I'll also be posting links to works that I consider worthwhile on my twitter account.)  It's entirely possible that when the Hugo nominees are announced I'll once again feel demoralized, and as if all this effort--mine and everyone else's--was as naught before the onslaught of some popular blogger's megaphone.  But for the time being I'm hoping that a lot of small voices have their own power.

Short Fiction Snapshot: "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang

When I introduced the Short Fiction Snapshot series at Strange Horizons, I noted that it wasn't intended just for positive reviews.  Reviewing short fiction at essay length can mean reviewing it negatively as well, and in today's installment I give the series's first negative--or at least mixed--review to Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling," from Subterranean Online.  Chiang is, of course, one of the most celebrated names in genre short fiction, but with this story he seems to be punching below his level even as he does some of the things that make his work so remarkable.  Read the story, and my review, and join in the conversation!

Her

Science fiction films, it often seems, are the idiot cousin of the genre.  Not that there aren't some excellent SF films out there, but even if you ignore the vast majority, which are actually action or horror films in an SFnal setting, what you'll be left with will be mostly small, simple stories in thinly drawn worlds, often with a thuddingly obvious political subtext.  Again, that's not to say that these films can't be good--Moon, to take one example whose story and world are practically miniscule, is one of the finest SF films of the last decade.  But it's rare, verging on unheard-of, for SF films to achieve the depth and complexity of SFnal ideas and worldbuilding that written SF is capable of, and I think that part of the reason for this is fear.  Most SF filmmakers (or their financial backers) are afraid to imagine a world too different from out own, a future too alien--the most celebrated SF film of the last year, after all, was one that used space exploration as a metaphor for alienation, and ended with humanity effectively barred from space for decades to come.  Spike Jonze's Her isn't the film to buck that trend, but it carries within it the seeds of that film.  Jonze takes the relatively unusual step (in the film medium, at least) of pairing SF with romantic drama, but that potentially refreshing choice turns out to be Her's undoing--not only because the romance it crafts is problematic and unconvincing, but because it obscures the much more interesting SF film that Her could have been, if it were slightly less afraid of the future.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a depressed recent divorcé who is starved for human connection but too emotionally constipated to engage with actual people (for which read women--Theodore's only male friend at the beginning of the film is his best friend's husband, with whom he cuts ties after the two divorce, and though throughout the film he forges a connection with a colleague played by Chris Pratt, this is only after the other man makes several enthusiastic overtures).  When Theodore buys a new handheld phone/computer/personal organizer, it comes with an AI interface (rather infuriatingly referred to, throughout the film, as an operating system) which promises to mold itself to suit Theodore's personality and needs.  The resulting persona, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), is a bubbly, curious, adventurous creature who quickly brings Theodore out of his shell.  Before long, the two become friends, going on day-long excursions in which Samantha can discover the world and Theodore can re-experience it through her eyes.  Soon after that, the relationship turns romantic (and, within certain parameters, sexual), with Theodore and Samantha proudly proclaiming themselves to be dating.

It's difficult to read this plot description and not feel uncomfortable.  Watching the film's trailers, I found myself reminded of (500) Days of Summer, a movie that purported to cut through the commercialized, commodified artificiality of modern romantic comedies, but could only do so by turning its heroine into an unattainable cipher.  Her seems to take that approach to extremes when it imagines a romance in which the female half of the relationship is the male's property, a program designed to not only make his life easier but whose personality was especially fitted for that task.  Add to that Samantha's copious Manic Pixie Dream Girl traits, and it becomes all but impossible to take her romance with Theodore as anything but the logical extension of films like (500) Days, in which women exist solely in order to enable the self-actualization of a schlubby, self-pitying male hero.  (For some more discussion of the problems with Her's conception of romance and of its hero, see Sady Doyle's trenchant takedown of the film.  As the rest of this review will show, I don't agree with all of Doyle's conclusions, but her discussion of Theodore, and of "sensitive," beta male characters of his type, is necessary and important.)

In fairness, Her is clearly aware of the potential for this reading, and tries to head it off through a variety of devices--though these are, invariably, notable more for their good intentions than their success.  When Theodore's ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) finds out about his new relationship, she immediately speaks for doubters like myself, concluding that being with Samantha appeals to Theodore because it doesn't require him to cope with "real emotions."  It's a perspective that desperately needed to be heard, given how strangely non-judgmental everyone else around Theodore is, and the crisis that it precipitates in his and Samantha's relationship is also necessary, finally puncturing his blithe acceptance of the fact that he is dating his PDA.  But the film also tries to undermine Catherine, by depicting her as bitter and having other characters comment on her emotional instability.  (In this quality, Catherine is joined by Thedore's other human love interest, a blind date played by Olivia Wilde; just about the only woman in the film who is not depicted as crazy is Theodore's endlessly supportive best friend Amy (Amy Adams), for whom he feels no sexual attraction.)  Later in the film, Theodore and Samantha make a disastrous attempt at expanding the physical side of their relationship with the help of a surrogate, Isabella (Portia Doubleday), an experiment whose failure sheds a light on the limitations of their relationship.  But this scene also highlights the handwaving that Jonze does where Samantha's sexuality is concerned.  We're told that she orgasms when she and Theodore first have sex (really just dirty talk, and rather tame at that) because their connection somehow makes her feel "her" body.  But as Anna Shechtman, writing at Slate, points out, this is merely an extension of the canard that women's sexuality is emotional while men's is physical.

The real problem, however, with how Her constructs its central romance isn't the multiple question marks surrounding Samantha's ability to freely and meaningfully enter into the relationship.  It's how bland and generic Theodore and Samantha are as a couple.  Her is, by definition, a very talky film--Theodore and Samantha fall in love through words and conversation, not physical attraction--but instead of powering the film and making us feels its characters' emotions, Her's dialogue is painfully nondescript.  Theodore works as a personal letter-writer--sometimes for special occasions such as anniversaries, but also as a regular part of his customers' lives, as in the case of a couple whose love letters he's been writing for nearly a decade.  We're told that these letters are insightful and moving--at one point, Samantha compiles some of them and sends them to a publisher, who is so moved that he offers to put them out as a book.  But when we actually hear Theodore's letters, they sound like what they are, extra-long greeting cards, full of trite turns of phrase and over-exposed sentiments.  (It's interesting that both Her and (500) Days give their heroes jobs writing greeting cards, as if to stress that they are manufacturing sentiment they can't feel; but at least (500) Days acknowledges that the sentiments Tom sells are hollow.)

In much the same way, Theodore and Samantha's conversations, in which they allegedly forge a deep, instant connection, come off as stilted and forced, both of them trying too hard to be friendly and funny without ever saying anything of substance (there is, in fact, very little difference between Theodore and Samantha's conversations and the one he has with Wilde's character on their blind date--in both cases, the characters appear to be working so hard to be agreeable and pleasant that they barely seem to notice the person they're talking to).  Later in the film, as the relationship and its challenges deepen, Theodore and Samantha start to discuss weightier topics.  But despite emerging from such an unusual relationship, these issues are familiar and trite--Theodore is emotionally withholding, Samantha is growing past him.  The discussions never become interesting or compelling because Theodore and Samantha aren't particularly interesting people--like Theodore's letters, they feel like collections of clichés handsomely strung together, not genuinely nuanced characters.

In a way, this is a very SFnal flaw--using characters and relationships as placeholders around which to construct a world or an idea, without bothering to shade them in or strive for complexity.  And if Her's characters are bland in a way that feels typical of SF, its world is nuanced in a way that also seems particularly SFnal.  Jonze takes the Andrew Niccol approach of imagining a future that is sleek, clean, and impeccably designed (and also sadly lacking in people of color), but the technology with which he fills this world, and which his characters use, is more homey and lived in.  Samantha is, after all, a personal organizer, and like her, most of the technology Theodore interacts with is intended for daily human use.  Amy designs computer games (most notably, an appalling creation in which players compete to be a "super-mom" who gets her kids to school first and bakes delicious cookies), and Theodore entertains himself by playing another game, evocatively projected across half his living room.  User interfaces--for the computers Theodore uses at work, for Samantha and other, non-sentient organizers, for the social network on which Theodore looks up his blind date--abound in the film.  They create the texture of a world in which the human relationship with technology is similar to ours, but also changed.  As that texture develops it becomes easier to see Her not as a romance between two people in a unique situation, but as the story of how a new technology changes the definition of romance for all people.  Late in the film we learn, for example, that Theodore and Samantha aren't the only AI/human relationship out there.  Amy is friends with an AI, and a woman in her office is dating one who isn't even hers.

In its final third, Her changes and becomes a much more interesting film--by shedding the unconvincing romance plot of its earlier segments.  Jonze seems to have realized that the only way to prove that the romance between Theodore and Samantha is real is for her to end it, but he does so in a way that reveals that the real story of the film wasn't their love story, but the story of Samantha's (and other AIs like her) emergence and self-discovery as a new lifeform.  If, in the early parts of the film, the differences of experience, age, and legal status between Theodore and Samantha make their relationship seem dubious and creepy (in one particularly disturbing scene, Theodore all but gaslights Samantha, who is worried about their waning sex life, taking advantage of her inexperience by telling her that this is perfectly normal when he knows it isn't) by the end of the film it's clear that Samantha has become something much bigger than Theodore.  In one of the film's most devastating--and, to me, most satisfying--scenes, Theodore realizes that at the same time that he and Samantha have been having intimate, soul-baring conversations, she's also been conversing with thousand of other people, some of whom are also her lovers.  In these final scenes, Her suggests that, far from enabling the petty, narcissistic, isolating urges of the emotionally inept, the technology at its center is expanding the definition of love and relationships.

It's a pity, then, that the first two thirds of Her lack the courage of this final revelation.  That they bury Samantha's emerging consciousness beneath Theodore's neediness and depression, and fail to address the questions, about Samantha's personality and personhood, raised by their relationship.  The rather creepy scene with Isabella the surrogate is retroactively validated when we realize that Samantha has been having meaningful relationships with people other than Theodore--it suddenly becomes more believable that this woman agreed to the experiment of her own free will--but wouldn't it have been more interesting to learn this fact earlier in the film, and explore Isabella's feelings for Samantha, instead of reducing her to a marital aid (not to mention yet another one of the film's crazy women)?  For that matter, wouldn't it have been more interesting, not to mention believable, to face up to the fact that Samantha can love Theodore without gaining sexual satisfaction from him, at least not in the human terms that she uses to describe her sexuality?  Wouldn't it, in short, have been a much more interesting film if, from the get-go, Her had been about Samantha as a new lifeform, not the object of Theodore's affections?

Sticking to the template of a romance means that Her loses sight of the more interesting story happening in its background, and fails to fully explore its premise.  It's a failure that mars the film even in its more successful final act, as when it plumps for the cliché of treating Theodore and Samantha's relationship as a learning experience, something designed to make him a better man--he ends the film composing yet another of his trite, cliché-ridden letters to his ex-wife, in which he wishes her well.  This is clearly intended as a sign that Theodore has grown and matured, but it actually makes him seem smug and self-satisfied--despite its claims to the contrary, his letter to Catherine is designed to show off the fact that he has achieved closure after their divorce, not give that closure to her, and it has the effect of, once again, turning Samantha into the instrument of Theodore's growth, rather than the person he was in love with and has now lost.  Say what you will about (500) Days of Summer, but at least it recognized that the end of a relationship, no matter how inevitable, hurts, and included within its titular timeframe the time necessary for its hero to get over his heartache before gaining wisdom.

Ultimately, Her is neither a successful romance nor the mythical complex, intelligent SF film I yearned for in this review's opening.  That it has enough hints of the latter makes me wish that the romance aspect of the film had been jettisoned (that the romance itself is so problematic, of course, makes me wish this even more).  But the fact that the film was made, and that in its final third it dares to imagine a future in which personhood and love mean something different from what we define them as, gives me some hope.  Perhaps, in some distant point in the future, SF film won't be so terrified of the unfamiliar--and perhaps when we get to that point, filmmakers in general will be able to imagine a romance in which both partners, be they humans or machines, are real people.

SherLinks

One of the good things about the long, two-year gap between Sherlock's second and third seasons (aside from the fact that in it we discovered Elementary, and suddenly Sherlock and its flaws seemed a lot less important) is that in that time the mainstream conversation about the show shifted from a tug-of-war between near-ecstatic praise and near-total denigration to a more universal acceptance of the show's massive flaws--which leaves more space to acknowledge its good qualities.  (This shift, I suspect, has a lot to do with the increasingly fatigued reactions to Stephen Moffat's work on Doctor Who; it's easier to see the same flaws occurring in Sherlock when you've already cataloged them on a show that is more blatantly running out of steam.)  If you're a fan of pop culture criticism, this is a bonanza; fewer people are attacking or defending the show, and more are considering it more deeply, and from different angles.  I've collected a few interesting examples, and my comments, below.

• I linked to this essay already in my own review of the third season, but in case you didn't click through, it is worth taking a look at cesperanza's interpretation of the train scene in "The Empty Hearse" as representing a masochistic (or, to take a dimmer view of it, abusive) relationship between both Sherlock and John and the show and its fans.
  
  A reaction I'm seeing a lot, to both "The Empty Hearse" and that scene in particular, is that it makes the Sherlock/John relationship (in whatever guise you choose to interpret it) seem untenable--it's no longer clear what John gets out of the relationship or why he would continue as Sherlock's friend.  cesperanza's conclusion is that he either enjoys the mistreatment or is being genuinely pathological; "His Last Vow" makes the only slightly more palatable claim that he craves the excitement and is willing to put up with the abuse in order to get it.  What both of these interpretations are ignoring is that by the time the third season ends, Sherlock and John are, for better or worse, no longer the show's central relationship.  In fact it's arguable that the relationship never fully recovers from Sherlock's departure and abrupt return, and instead becomes something completely one-sided.  Sherlock spends the season either doing things to John (surprising him at the restaurant and tricking him into believing that he's about to die in "The Empty Hearse") or for John (making sure his wedding day goes perfectly in "The Sign of Three"; murdering Magnussen so that he and Mary can live in peace in "His Last Vow").  But John himself is focused on Mary--even the former partners' last hurrah as an investigative duo happens at her instigation.  I wonder how much of this is deliberate--despite Freeman being wonderful in the role, Sherlock has always been more comfortable envisioning its hero as a lone, Doctor-ish superhero rather than part of a duo, and it may prefer to keep John as merely one of the people in Sherlock's orbit.
  
  
• Some reviews: Dan Hartland wonders if the third season represents the show realigning itself and its idea of what it wants to be.  Emily Nussbaum discusses Sherlock's relationship with its fans in the season's first two episodes.  Genevieve Valentine is reviewing the show for the AV Club: her long and detailed look at "The Empty Hearse" is a sharp examination of its many problems.
  
  
• My recollections of "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" begin with Holmes's famous line about finding Milverton more odious than many murderers (which has been cropping up regularly in discussions since Sherlock's emergence, as a counterpoint to the argument that the show's take on Holmes as a sociopath is in line with canon; perhaps as a response, Moffat has Sherlock quote the line in "His Last Vow," but the character's general indifference to anyone not closely connected to him means that it falls flat), and ends with the plot point in which Holmes seduces a maid in Milverton's house in order to gain access to his blackmail material (which "His Last Vow" handles rather more convincingly).  Which is why I needed several other venues to point out that Sherlock has done it again: take a story written in the 19th century and update it in the 21st in a way that actually makes it more sexist, and gives the women in it less agency and power than they originally had.  In the original story, it isn't Holmes who kills Milverton but a woman who breaks into his house at the same time Holmes and Watson do, but in an interview about the episode Moffat and Gatiss have said that they take this as a cover for the more "believable" interpretation, that Holmes did the deed himself.  "His Last Vow" parallels the original story up until the discovery that Mary is about to kill Magnussen while Sherlock and John are trying to retrieve the client's letters, but as The Daily Dot points out, there's no real justification for her failure to carry out that plan, and for her passivity during the rest of the episode.
  

  This means that Mary, much like Gatiss and Moffat’s interpretation of the lady from "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Magnussen," has effectively been written out of her own story. Supposedly a deadly assassin, she doesn’t get to confront her blackmailer, and instead is drugged by Sherlock so he and John can have a proper showdown with Magnussen. A dramatic scene that allows Sherlock to seem more badass and morally ambiguous than before, while a heavily pregnant Mary gets to wake up from her drug-induced slumber to discover that she's now free to go back to being Mrs. Watson once again.

• Paul Kincaid watched the third season shortly after watching both versions of Danny Boyle's production of Frankenstein, in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Elementary's Johnny Lee Miller alternated the roles of Frankenstein and the creature.  In this post at Big Other, he discusses Cumberbatch's and Miller's different approaches to the two roles, and how he sees those approaches reflected in their versions of Holmes:
  

  In a show as frenetic as Sherlock, in which the camera is in constant motion, scenes flicker across the screen almost before we can take them in, unreadable captions bloom and fade at high speed, the only choice is stillness. And this suits Cumberbatch, who is particularly fine at showing there is a mind working rapidly if invisibly behind that sharply chiselled face. His Holmes is also his Victor Frankenstein, a man so in love with his own thought processes that he has virtually no awareness of their consequences. (This Sherlock is not a sociopath, no matter how much Moffatt loves to tell us that he is.) When there is action (and every episode features a scene where he is running, just so we can relish the texture of that long coat), he becomes like the Creature, jerky, somewhat uncoordinated.

• Matt Cheney, meanwhile, has been watching Sherlock in conjunction with Hannibal.  Like pretty much everyone who isn't me, he's quite taken with the latter show, finding in it a level of tension and character complexity that I could never connect to.  His comparison between the two shows, however, in which he contrasts Sherlock with both Hannibal and Will Graham, gives Matt the chance to examine how both shows manipulate their audience and source material, and the way they both approach central characters who are abnormal, and more observant than the rest of us:
  

  The Sherlock Holmes stories have always thrived because audiences love stories that fit a certain post-Enlightenment, pre-Modernism rationality. ... Hannibal is more pre-Enlightenment and post-Modernist. The world does not add up; its forces and flows can only be glimpsed, and those glimpses often redirect what they glimpse, and shards of reality are all that can be perceived. Compare Will to Sherlock — both have extraordinary powers of figuring out why particular events happen, but Sherlock knows how he does it and Will does not. For Will, it's simply a mysterious and torturous talent; for Sherlock, it is a skill. Will's ability to reconstruct murder scenes is mystical; Sherlock's ability to "deduce" all the details of a person's life is sold to us as rational. But from the days of Conan Doyle to now, most of Sherlock's deductions have been fanciful, even quite obviously ridiculous, because the world of the Sherlock Holmes stories is a world where reason rules and human behavior is, like the emotional behavior of the dedicated Sherlock fan, patterned, predictable, determined, scrutable.

• Carrying on from that last point, this tumblr post by Ami Angelwings isn't strictly about Sherlock, but its observations about the seductive but dangerous appeal of applying Holmes-style deduction to real life feel germane to discussions of the show:
  

  But somebody could just pick that out.  HEY LOOK AT THIS.  DOES THIS SOUND LIKE SOMEBODY WHO HAD JUST BEEN ASSAULTED?  And later on she did XYZ, does that sound like the behaviour of somebody who was assaulted?  And look at this picture of her, she doesn’t appear to have any wounds on her… and etc etc… I got a degree of this from some ex-friends who read the big long detailed write up of what I wrote, that I didn’t fight back, that he didn’t hurt me enough, that I should have done this, or that, that according to what I wrote it sounds like he could have just not known, or the layout of the room from what they pieced together was…, or whatever… the point is they were Holmes and they decided from their internet detectiving that I must be a liar and look how smart they are.  And this is how people SHOULD behave, and you didn’t, so, liar.

  At its most basic level, this feels like a good excuse to trot out a Terry Pratchett quote that should probably come up in every discussion of Sherlock Holmes:
  

  he distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times," and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he'd been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience! 

  But more seriously, what this post made me think about is that a completely unexamined assumption of the Holmes character type is that he has total empathy.  That, in essence, his intellect and observation skills negate the effects of privilege.  Women, LGBT people, and people of color are used to having to explain the basic facts of their world to the privileged, often being met with the response that "you must be wrong; I've never seen what you're talking about, therefore it must not exist."  Holmes is a straight, white, cisgendered, upper class man who nevertheless has total understanding of everyone he meets, no matter how different from him.  In theory, this could be fantastic--Holmes could use his privileged position to put his famously rationalist stamp of approval on the experiences of people who are used to having their take on the world discounted.  In practice, however, the game is rigged.  As Pratchett and Cheney both note, in order to support Holmes's powers of deduction, the rich and chaotic variety of human experience has to be whittled down to very specific, clearly-defined types of behavior, any deviation from which can be declared irrational (if it exists at all).  And of course, those types of behavior are the kind that our privileged, male protagonist--and his privileged, male writers--can understand and sympathize with.  The result is that Sherlock's world (and, in fairness, Elementary's as well) is all but bereft of people whose life experiences are foreign to the great detective.