Beyond Selidor

This is the obligatory Hugo Awards reaction post. I'll add more links as the appear, but at the moment most of the winners and nominees are probably feeling the aftereffects of last night's celebrations and haven't had time to write anything.

This year was different. There was a sense both of a tipping point, and of a real struggle for the soul of the speculative fiction community. And, as fozmeadows said, the awards results showed that the community turned a corner, and headed in the right direction.

Here is a full breakdown of the voting. I'm feeling particularly gleeful about the result for Novelette.

Here is the writeup by Hannah Ellis-Petersen at The Guardian, which quotes Best Short Story winner John Chu:

Other major winners included John Chu, who won best short story for his deeply personal work The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere, which grapples with questions of sexuality and tradition within a fantasy framework.

Picking up the award, a visibly overwhelmed Chu described the challenges he faced in getting his story published. "I can't begin to describe how much this award means to me," he said. "When I started writing, so many people's words were 'I'm not racist, but …', 'I'm not homophobic, but …' There were so many buts, and they all told me, sometimes in those exact words, that no one was interested and no one would publish anything I would ever write. So to win a Hugo, and for this story, I can't put into words how much that means to me."

John Scalzi's writeup makes some more good points:

[Larry] Correia was foolish to put his own personal capital as a successful and best selling novelist into championing Vox Day and his novelette, because Vox Day is a real bigoted shithole of a human being, and his novelette was, to put it charitably, not good (less charitably: It was like Gene Wolfe strained through a thick and rancid cheesecloth of stupid). Doing that changed the argument from something perfectly legitimate, if debatable — that conservative writers are often ignored for or discounted on award ballots because their personal politics generally conflict with those of the award voters — into a different argument entirely, i.e., fuck you, we got an undeserving bigoted shithole on the Hugo ballot, how you like them apples.

Which is a shame. It’s fine for Correia to beclown himself with Day, if such is his joy, and he deserves to reap the fruits of such an association. I suspect, however, there are others whom he championed for his “sad puppy” slate who were less thrilled to find themselves looped in with Day by involuntary association.

I am most happy about Ancillary Justice winning Best Novel. It's the best book I've read all year, and I'm thrilled that it swept the board of speculative fiction awards. A most deserved win.

I was also very happy about the nominees for Best Fan Writer, and to be honest, wished that all five could've won. But Kameron Hurley is a truly deserving winner, and her second Hugo for Best Related Work was just icing on the cake. (Speaking of which, if you haven't yet read 'We Have Always Fought', go out and do so now.

I'll leave you with a quote from Hurley's acceptance speech, which was read by kateelliott:

The conflict of narrative we’re engaged in online, in convention spaces, in stories, and in the wider world is a real one. It’s no less than a struggle for our inclusion in our own history. Not just my history, my future. But yours. Your friends’. Your colleagues. All of us, struggling together to write a better, truer story.

Tell them stories indeed.

I'm sorry I've been so quiet recently. I'm trying to get a full draft of my thesis in to my supervisor by the end of the week (eek!) and, as you can imagine, pretty much every waking moment is spent writing, writing, writing, and editing, editing, editing. But I read a recent post by Foz Meadows about her struggles with the SFF canon (and with notions of canonicity in general) that so closely mirrors my own thoughts and describes my own experiences as a reader that I had to post a link.

'If I’ve never read the Classics, then how did I get into SFF in the first place?

That last question is one I really have been asked – sometimes overtly, and sometimes only by implication, but always in a tone of genuine surprise, and always by men, as though my interlocutor couldn’t conceive of a journey into SFF fandom that didn’t involve neatly-spaced stopovers at Herbert, Lem, Dick, Matheson, Eddings, Feist, and Goodkind, preferably in that order.

By the same token, it’s also a question that tends to be linked to a lot of anxiety about SFF being forced away from its roots, and whether or not this constitutes progress or perversion. In some respects, this is an understandable question: whatever the genre, the stories that first draw us in are often the ones for which we feel the greatest personal affinity, and which, as a consequence, we not only want to emulate, but whose tropes and themes (we believe) aren’t just common to the genre, but actively necessary to it.'

Apart from Dune, my experience of the 'classics' is similarly limited. And, Redwall aside, my childhood and adolescent reading list was remarkably similar to Meadows'. (This is, perhaps, unsurprising, given the fact that we were both bookish Australians who grew up in the '90s.) She notes as formative the works of Jackie French, Victor Kelleher, Isobelle Carmody, Sara Douglass, Garth Nix, Philip Pullman, Whedonverse shows and Daria.

And Catherine Jinks.

Oh, my heart.

My department is on Tumblr. If you like medieval geekery, and are on Tumblr, you should check it out! In related news, my boyfriend and a friend of ours have started up a blog where they translate Old English riddles and write commentary about them. (For those of you so inclined, Tolkien probably had these kinds of riddles in mind when writing the famous scene in The Hobbit.)

I'm reading The Iliad. I thought it was about time, considering how many adaptations and reworkings I've read (let us not speak of That Travesty of a Movie), including studying a course call The Literature of Troy as a undergrad (which looked at the medieval and Shakespearean versions of the story of Troilus and Cressida). I knew the basic shape of the story, I knew what happened, and yet I still found it extremely confronting to read. The problem was, I inevitably latched onto Briseis. That got me thinking about my whole way of reading/interacting with texts these days. I'm much more alert to issues of agency and voice, which characters are given words and which remain silent. So while I wasn't surprised by the presentation of Briseis, I feel very protective of her as a character, and I want very much to read adaptations of the Iliad that give her a voice. (My first port of call was fanfiction, but I found nothing, other than some stuff based on That Travesty of a Movie. Inevitably, Iliad fandom is all about the Achilles/Patroclus slash, and even more inevitably, Hector/Paris.) In any case, I need to think more about these things, and possibly write something more than these rambly musings.

Horrible Histories author Terry Deary wrote a diatribe against libraries. Foz Meadows wrote a powerful response:

And then, of course, there’s the moral/historical angle: “Because it’s been 150 years, we’ve got this idea that we’ve got an entitlement to read books for free, at the expense of authors, publishers and council tax payers,” Deary moans. “This is not the Victorian age, when we wanted to allow the impoverished access to literature. We pay for compulsory schooling to do that.”

The bolding above is my own, and it’s there for a reason. Take a good, long look at that sentence – specifically, at the crucial use and placement of the word wanted, whose past tense indicates that allowing the impoverished access to literature is something we don’t want to do any longer; or rather, that Deary believes we shouldn’t. There’s so much wrong with this statement that I hardly know where to begin. With the fact that, under Deary’s ideal system, the poor are only entitled to literature while they’re of school age, perhaps? With the fact that most of the literary benefit one experiences while a student comes, not from English class, but the school library? Or how about the novel idea that treating support of literacy in poverty as a quirky Victorian prerogative rather than an ongoing social necessity is not only morally repugnant, but incredibly shortsighted when one depends for one’s living on the existence of a literate, interested populace?

John Scalzi also responded:

I don’t use my local library like I used libraries when I was younger. But I want my local library, in no small part because I recognize that I am fortunate not to need my local library — but others do, and my connection with humanity extends beyond the front door of my house. My life was indisputably improved because those before me decided to put those libraries there. It would be stupid and selfish and shortsighted of me to declare, after having wrung all I could from them, that they serve no further purpose, or that the times have changed so much that they are obsolete. My library is used every single day that it is open, by the people who live here, children to senior citizens. They use the building, they use the Internet, they use the books. This is, as it happens, the exact opposite of what “obsolete” means. I am glad my library is here and I am glad to support it.

Every time I publish a new book — every time — the first hardcover copy goes to my wife and the second goes to the Bradford library. First because it makes me happy to do it: I love the idea of my book being in my library. Second because that means the library doesn’t have to spend money to buy my book, and can then use it to buy the book of another author — a small but nice way of paying it forward. Third because I wouldn’t be a writer without libraries, hard stop, end of story. Which means I wouldn’t have the life I have without libraries, hard stop, end of story.

I am, in no small part, the sum of what all those libraries I have listed above have made me. When I give my books to my local library, it’s my way of saying: Thank you. For all of it.

My own library story is similar, but different. What I will say is this: libraries gave me words. They gave me the words to understand myself, my space in the world, the people around me. They opened doors, they opened my mind, but it all comes back to the words. They gave me my voice.

Last night, this popped up on my Livejournal friends page, via Jo Walton, whose book Among Others is reviewed there. It's a review by Ursula Le Guin of several books, and it's a good example of the rather rocky relationship I have with Le Guin: I love her books, and yet I find her a frustratingly wrong reviewer and critic. 'Wrong' might be too strong a word; 'wrong in her approach' is perhaps better. So she writes things like this:

Since publishers are feeling terribly unsafe these days, and since YA is a big, solid market, and fantasy is a big, solid part of it, publishers feel safe publishing fantasy as YA. And so writers of fantasy may find they’re expected to have kid protagonists and discouraged from writing about adults. Harry whatshisname and the teenie werewolves and the young gladiators have locked the fantasy/YA combo tight, at least for now. Retro macho “epics” of war-and-violence with nominally adult protagonists may escape the YA label, as they reach teen-agers through tie-ins, games, movies.

It's pretty obvious which books she means, and while I have no problem with her disliking Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games or A Song of Ice and Fire, and while I also feel genre boundaries can be somewhat arbitrary and an impediment to reading, and that adults can get things out of books with child protagonists and children can get things out of books with adult protagonists, the things they are getting are different. There is a fundamental difference in how you read a book as a child, and how you read it as an adult. (For a good example, I read Wuthering Heights when I was 14 and again when I was 22 and it was as if I had read two different books.) You have to take into account all these things, like how a person sees the world and his or her place in it, because they do have an effect on your perception of, and reaction to, a particular story. I do think there are some books which have a more powerful effect if you read them at a certain age. (I feel, for example, that ages 12-16, which is what I was when I read the His Dark Materials trilogy, was exactly the right age range to be for that particular story. Victor Kelleher's books, on the other hand, while ostensibly aimed at teenagers, seem to me all the more powerful when read with adult eyes.) And some authors are better than others at capturing the way teenagers think, the way they see the world, the things they dream about and fear. Yes, the YA label is a marketing decision, but sometimes genre distinctions are meaningful. The important thing is to work out what you like, and ignore the genre labels when you need to.

One author who seems to me to be particularly in touch with the feelings and thoughts of her teenage self is Foz Meadows. I really like this interview she did with Tansy Rayner Roberts.

[M]y own experiences as a teenager make me somewhat less than neutral on the subject of both school and the ever-present love triangle. I find it incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible, to write about high school as a background event rather than politically, as an institution to be challenged or subverted, because of the amount of effort I expended as a student arguing against curricula, grading, subject structure, the allocation of resources, conformity and scare tactics. Similarly, and while I have no objection to other people enjoying them, I have a pathological skepticism of romanticised love triangles, because as a teenager, I was in a love triangle – and believe me, the experience was anything but romantic. The combination of unrequited love angst and profound frustration at the institutional mechanics of education left me severely depressed, routinely insomniac (my last year of school, I survived on an average of four to six hours sleep a night, six days a week), flirting with self harm and regularly contemplating suicide. Somehow, I managed to get through it, but it’s not an experience I’d wish on anyone – and as a consequence, I don’t think I’m capable of writing about school, or love triangles, or especially the two in combination, in any sort of neutral or romantic way.

Finally, There Is No Alternative has written a good post about the perils of criticising A Song of Ice and Fire online. It was in response to an article by Laurie Penny on the series, but I've observed it happening several other times, and it always follows a similar pattern. As TINA writes,

Sadly, I have not yet seen any refutation of Laurie’s points which doesn’t itself indulge in the fundamental attribution error of considering her understanding “superficial”, rather than the brevity of her piece to require superficiality, or which doesn’t simply set up straw women to tilt at, claiming that Laurie wanted to watch “Sweden with wizards“, rather than maybe considering whether it might be possible to address those themes with just a little less triggering rape culture and normative violence. Pointing out that these things are still damaging of themselves is not the same as calling for censorship.

I say this as someone who actually reads and enjoys the ASoIaF books: nothing should be free of criticism. It's hard when people criticise your favourite things, because it feels like they are criticising you, personally. But saying that there is a lot of (gratuitous) rape in ASoIaF is not the same as accusing its fans of being rapists, and saying that when you take away the backstabbing and intrigue, the story is basically the standard swords-and-sorcery epic about the need for a just ruler is not the same as saying its fans are simplistic or conservative. ASoIaF fans need to stop reacting as if someone's taken away their favourite toys every time the series is criticised online.

Every so often, I'll come across a new blog that is so good, that lines up with my own tastes and beliefs and interests so perfectly that I'll scream its praises to the sky, fling links and quotes about with abandon and generally behave like an excitable toddler hyped up on sugar. 'This is what the internet should be like! It should be like this all the time! And now I'm going to READ ALL THE POSTS! INTERNET! FOREVER!' I shout excitedly when I encounter a blog like this.

Foz Meadows' blog is one such blog. I can't believe I didn't discover it sooner. Hers is one of those voices that has been floating around the same circles I frequent (SF/F and YA online literary communities and commentariat, social justice sites that focus on pop culture), and from time to time, someone I follow has linked to one of her posts. But I never sat down and read her blog (or her books) in any focused kind of way until today.

And what a treasure trove I was missing out on! Here she is on the problems with the current crop of YA dystopian novels:

It’s the Ferris wheel effect: a nostalgia for the present day rooted in being grateful for what we have, rather than in asking where we’re headed. It’s dystopia with the safeties on - and that is, to me, an alarming inversion of how the genre should work. I have nothing against stories being written purely for escapist purposes, but dystopia is not the ideal genre for it. Of course, as in all things, your mileage may vary, in which case you’re wholly entitled to disagree. Yet I’d ask that you ask yourself: what, exactly, is escapist about an uncritical dystopia? While critical protagonists set out to change society, allowing us the fantasy of being world-altering revolutionaries, uncritical protagonists remain wrapped up in themselves, dealing with immediate, personal obstacles rather than tackling their root causes. Such characters can still change the world, of course – or rather, be instrumental in its change – but the difference is one of intention: their rebellion stems from a desire to be left alone, not to combat injustice, and this difference shows in how the story treats them. They are kept safer than their critical counterparts – exposed to action and loss, rather than danger and consequence – because if something sufficiently bad were to happen or be realistically threatened, then their stories would no longer stand as purely escapist fictions: the audience would no longer want to share in their experiences.

To which I say, yes, and yes!

Like me, she's an Australian living in the UK (in fact, she's only a year younger than I am, and her time at Sydney Uni overlapped mine by at least two, and possibly three years, so I'm sure we knew people in common). Like me, she finds being IDed at UK supermarkets annoying.

She writes with eloquence about the frustrations of being a teenager, of not having your voice heard (and although I loved most of high school, her words resonate):

High school students of the world: you are not prisoners. You are not stupid. You have rights. You have opinions. You know what you feel. The rest of us have either forgotten or are in the process of forgetting, because where you are now? It’s about survival. Once you’re out of the jungle, you don’t go wading back in to fight the tigers and tame the lantana. But that’s why those things persist. You get out, and you’re safe, so you forget. You see the little tweaks and changes on the news, and you forget how bad it really was. You grow up. You start to doubt your teenage intelligence. You wonder if it was just because you were seventeen and an idiot that you hated your creepy geography teacher, the one who knocked the girls’ pens off their desks so he could peek down their shirts when they bent over to pick them up, or that you couldn’t find any practical or intellectual application for what you were asked to do, or that nobody would listen to you or had the power to do anything when you told them you were depressed or being bullied.

Her social justice awakening was almost identical to mine:

[W]hat I’m coming to realise is that being white and well-off is like living in a bubble, and that racism – and sexism, and homophobia, and all those other terrible creeds and isms – are like a raging river on which you float, unaffected. And if none of the river’s attendant perils threaten you personally – if you are not really interested in what goes on beneath your feet – then you will never notice the un-bubbled masses dashed against the rocks; or see the snares which threaten so many others; or worry about a shifting sandbank changing the course of the river; or spare a thought for those who drown, unable to fight the current. And even if you inflate your bubble with a spirit of kinship, love and charity, without that further awareness, you will be a lesser person than might otherwise be the case.

Her words about growing (up?) are taken from my mouth, where they lay heavy like stones, and given an eloquence I couldn't possibly manage:

Nobody ever grows up. We just grow. But our language, which betrays so much of culture, suggests otherwise: hierarchies are linear, top to bottom: growing up means growing better. Nobody grows down. And yet up connotes even more than that. It makes us think of a fixed destination when there is none; it makes us want to not only cast off who we were, but disparage it as unnecessary, as though the very notion of ever being someone else is embarrassing, taboo; as though that prior person were utterly unrelated to every single subsequent incarnation.

Hello, new internet hero! Where the hell have you been all my life?

ETA: We also both used to write for the ABC Book Show's blog. Can't believe I didn't remember that!