This was a nice surprise: I got an email from Strange Horizons the other day letting me know that I had won. Evidently there was some sort of prize involved. I had given some money to their fundraising drive back when they were having it, which entered me in a drawing for an incredibly awesome list of prizes. A few of the items were already claimed by the time I got to pick, but nonetheless I’m walking away with a brand-new copy of Twenty Epics edited by Susan Groppi.
Thanks, Strange Horizons!
There are days when you really want to listen to Rock Lobster.
Then there are days when you really want to listen to the heavy metal cover of Rock Lobster. Today is one of those days:
This week at Strange Horizons: Sex With Ghosts by Sarah Kanning.
This is the first story that I can recall reading whose protagonist is explicitly asexual–that is, not hermaphroditic or ungendered, but simply lacking any sex drive. And of course she gets paired with a robotic double who consists of nothing but sex drive, and hilarity ensues.
Well, not quite hilarity. The story winds up being an interesting reflection on the nature of sexuality and personhood and the interplay between them. There is a suggestion that the sexless narrator is lacking something, and that the encounter with her hypersexed robot twin is necessary to teach her about herself and humanity. There’s a more explicit suggestion that the woman and the robot are mirror images of each other, and are so equally equipped to do the job of interviewing the robot brothel’s clients–the one because she’s completely indifferent to the clients’ behavior, and the other because she’s pruriently interested in all of the clients’ needs.
I find that an intriguing idea, though I don’t know if I’d actually apply it to life. In particular, I have known one or two people in my life who were asexual or close to it, and I don’t think that they are incomplete for it. And if I knew someone who was suffered from monomaniacal nymphomania in the way the robot does, I’d consider it deeply unhealthy. The story was nonetheless thought-provoking.
A while ago, I got a rejection slip from JJR at F&SF for my story The Last Free Bear. However, the slip called the story The Last Free Beer.
Well, now at least I know what sorts of stories he’s looking for.
Transcriptase has been up for a few weeks. I meant to link to it a while ago, then put it off, then decided to say something substantial about it.
My first reaction was pretty negative. I wasn’t directly involved in the debacle or the ensuing debates, but it seemed to me that a lot of people had a draconian, puritanical reaction My feeling was, yeah, what he said was reprehensible, but I support the rights of people to hold ugly opinions without having to be drummed out of polite society. The reaction to the incident should not have been to brand Sanders with a scarlet R and purge him from sff-dom. Thus, Transcriptase seemed like a bad idea.
Then I read their “About” page and the accompanying author statements. This gave me a much broader view of the controversy, and a better view of the motives of the participants. The key was seeing Sanders’ reaction to the whole thing. It’s one thing to use insulting language in a private letter; it’s quite another to act like an asswipe in public. Plus, many of the author statements up at Transcriptase said basically the same thing I just did. With that in mind, my feelings shifted: whatever the proper reaction to the first incident was, the subsequent response was just asinine. The writers at Transcriptase have every reason to want to get their work away from that.
Plus: Transcriptase has an RSS feed, and Helix doesn’t. That right there makes me about 100x more likely to read it.
Hey, so it turns out that Meghan McCarron, who wrote Tetris Dooms Itself that I briefly commented on yesterday, also wrote The Magician’s House, which appeared a few weeks ago at Strange Horizons.
If I were to analyze McCarron based on these stories, I’d suggest that she has some issues that need working out. Tetris is a story about an icky, abusive relationship centered on violence and mutilation; The Magician’s House is about an icky, abusive relationship borne of an older magician’s ability to manipulate his student. Ick and abuse all around!
But I don’t actually think she has issues, mostly because (a) I’ve never met her and know nothing about her, and (b) writers are not their stories. Item (b) is the important one, here. I hate to think what someone would think who was diagnosing me based on the stuff I’ve written.
Tetris Dooms Itself by Meghan McCarron, currently up at Clarkesworld.com, reminds me a lot of Kill Me by Vylar Kaftan. Aside from the themes of sadism and masochism, they both left me feeling icky. Stories about extreme sadomasochism just don’t work for me. In the case of Tetris Dooms Itself, there’s the bonus of not understanding much of what happened in the story, even at the literal level.
On the plus side, Blue Ink by Yoon Ha Lee was awesome.
So I finished it last night. The last quarter of the book doesn’t really address the things I griped about yesterday, but it makes them less relevant by virtue of being more exciting. Once the Department of Homeland Security has been established as a gang of jack-booted thugs, for better or worse, it’s hard to feel bad about seeing them get squashed.
I still wish the book had had a little more nuance, or perhaps had encouraged the reader to think about the difference between civil disobedience and mere vandalism. As it is, it’s not the sort of thing that I’m going to recommend to people.
I haven’t read all the way to the end yet, so perhaps I should withhold comment, but my reactions to Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother are very similar to those of this reviewer:
If only we lived in a world where the people who work for the Department of Homeland Security were transparently one-dimensional and evil, if only DHS were massively more invasive into every facet of our lives instead of just having useless airport security checks, and if only Doctorow were a hacker who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time during a terrorist attack. If only all of those would come true, then Doctorow would save the day….
It’s not that I disagree with any of the ideas put forth in this novel. For the most part, I strongly agree with them. It’s that the package in which they are wrapped is poorly considered, poorly argued, and poorly written. The ideas herein are important and absolutely must be discussed, but the execution of those ideas is so heavyhanded as to make the book near-unreadable.
That’s pretty much it. I really, really wanted to like this novel, and I really, really identified with the central concerns of the protag. But the actual execution was heavy-handed and graceless, and Doctorow seems to be oblivious to the vices of techno-rebellion that he transparently advocates.
[Spoilers!]
Take the “jamming” that the characters describe in the first half: randomly cloning the RFID chips of passersby, and swapping them out with other ID’s on the fly. The goal is to confound the data-mining software that the DHS is using to seek “terrorists”, which is superficially admirable. But they scramble credit cards and transit passes, doing permanent damage to the financial records of hordes of innocent people, and costing them thousands of dollars! It’s hard to see how this is morally different from the DHS’s wide net of harassment. At no point do the protags reflect on the fact that their pranks have real costs for innocent, uninvolved people–the only motives entertained for not going along with the scheme are cowardice or conformity.
Then there’s the ridiculous slogan “Don’t trust anyone over 25”, cribbed (with explicit acknowledgment) from the 60’s counterculture, then subjected to “slogan inflation”. This is just plain dumb. Sometimes adults know things; sometimes adolescents are stupid and pig-headed. The worship of youth and distrust of age were two of the worst aspects of the old counterculture, and they were two parts that didn’t need to be revived for the current generation. (Doctorow himself, who is in his thirties, seems to regard this as a joke–but the characters in the novel are awfully serious about it.)
And finally, as much as I hate to agree with the lame discussion-squashing civics teacher, the First Amendment really isn’t a carte blanche, as the protag tries to argue in one particularly cringe-inducing scene. There are legitimate restrictions on speech, and the right way to argue against the stupid, destructive, and illegal restrictions are to point out that they’re stupid, destructive, and illegal. Thumping your copy of the Constitution like a fundamentalist (a comparison made in the book itself) only makes you look like, well, a techno-libertarian fundamentalist.
As I’m reading, I keep hoping that these conflicts will eventually get some traction in the narrative, maybe giving way to a viewpoint that’s more nuanced and less adolescent. But I’m not seeing it. The protag is always vindicated and never chastened, and the viewpoints other than his own are always revealed to be stupid and wrong.
(For contrast, read LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, which both praises and subverts its anarchist society.)
Yesterday, Wikipedia taught me about corn smut (a fungus, not a fetish) and maggots as a medical treatment. The internet is a weird and wonderful place. So is Earth.
J.S. Bangs 