Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Life

  • The Following Is Brought To You by the Slut Vote

    From the Department of the Chronically Clueless, we learn that Romney lost the election because of the Slut Vote.  I thought I’d heard everything, but this is a new candor I’d not quite expected.

    I’ve been saying for years that the major driver behind much of the deep core, far right, religiously self-identified GOP agenda is an obsession over Other People’s Sex Lives.  This past year and change, they’ve been making it explicit in surprising, sometimes funny, but usually jaw-droppingly amazing ways, and this is just a continuation of it.  If anyone is inclined to cut them slack over this anymore, it is an exercise in strained tolerance.

    As far as I’m concerned, we had this argument in the Sixties and in terms of how people actually live, it was settled in favor of personal choice and a rejection of what I term Levitical Law.  In other words, all that stuff about the evils of sex is just the neurotic shaming some people who are by virtue of nurture (they were raised that way) or even maybe nature (they are perpetually self-conscious and easily offended by, you know, personal stuff) insist on putting on the rest of us.

    For the record, I like sex.  I don’t think there is anything innately wrong with it.  As a friend of mine once said, “It’s all good, some’s better.”  (Also, for the record, I am talking about consensual sex, not rape, not coercive insistence, not child abuse, but mutually beneficial, consensual sex.)  I do not believe sex should be put in a box or straitjacketed by social convention born out of other peoples’ inability to be comfortable with it.

    In other words, it’s none of your business who I fuck or how and I refuse to accept guilt or shame you think I should feel because you can’t get past your own “Eww!” reflex.

    (Because also clearly, that’s not quite it either, since some of the biggest proponents of the anti-sex league are themselves congenitally indulgent.  As long as “no one finds out” they do everything they tell the rest of us we shouldn’t do.  Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, go down the list.  Also, apparently, the active anti-choicers who find personal redemption by parading in front of Planned Parenthood clinics seem not to understand the concept of other people having rights, as close to 20% of the women with picket signs seem to end up in those same clinics availing themselves of the services they so ardently wish to deny every other woman!  I abhor the politics of hypocrisy.)

    Many years ago I stood in line outside a theater showing an X-rated film.  An earnest young woman was handing out fliers decrying the awfulness of the sinful film being shown.  She got to me and starting haranguing me not to go in.  I asked her, what is it you find so offensive?  It emerged that she herself had never seen the film in question.  I insisted she do so, I would buy her a ticket, after all if you’re going to protest Speech you should know what speech it is you’re trying to suppress.  Scared her to death.  She ran away.  I have no pity.  It wasn’t the film she was protesting, it was, in my opinion, a compulsion to deny an idea—that sex is okay.

    People abuse sex all the time.  Hurting people to get your rocks off is never okay.  I do not for a minute excuse rape.  But I make a distinction between healthy sex and hurting people.  It is the hurting part that we should pay attention to.  Instead, it seems, some people can’t separate the two.  (It is unfortunate and sad that for some folks, sex is never anything but hurtful.  Something should be done to address the circumstances that lead to that.  But taking away the rights and abilities of others to engage in mutual, consensual, wholesome sex is not the way.)

    So I  think my response to the apologists for the GOP who have decided this is why they lost is—fucking right.  Fair, perhaps, is fair—the Right doesn’t want the Left to take away their guns, then the Right should stop trying to take away everybody’s sex.

    Maybe that should be a new Third Party—Sluts for Liberty.

    I think I prefer the Slut agenda to the Prude Platform.

  • Rolling Feast

    Fortune sometimes favors the impulsive.

    For years, we’ve been toying with joining PBS. The cycle of fund drives that present interesting specials on our local station (Channel 9, KETC) both annoys us for the interruptions and for the twinges of conscience triggered because we feel like we’re not doing our share to support it. The question has always been, when to do it?

    Because they always offer gift packages to sweeten the deal and we’ve been tempted. Last spring, though, they came through with something we couldn’t turn down—tickets for a dinner train.

    Both of us like trains, though we have ridden them fewer times than the fingers on one hand. There’s a romanticism about them that appeals to both of us, even though we don’t frequent them. (We took one train trip to Chicago, which was novel and unromantic, and I’ve taken the train from St. Louis to Kansas City twice—well, once, really, since one of those trips was during a time when the line was coopted by freight line after a flood and my ticket was fulfilled by bus—and none of those trips endeared us to the fact of train travel. But the idea lingers on and one day we may well do a cross-country in a sleeper.)  So for our pledge of X dollars, we found ourselves with a guidebook to such trains across America, a DVD about them, and a pair of dinner tickets for the Columbia Star.

    We’d planned to do this in mid-August, but fate intervened in the form of a ruptured appendix and we had to delay until I could actually sit through a three-hour gourmet meal on a rolling vehicle. So it ended up in mid-October.

    Which was kind of ridiculous, really. After all, part of the novelty—we assumed—was the passing scenery. After seven in the evening in mid October, what exactly would there be to see? “Oh, we have floodlights mounted on the cars to light the way,” I was told by the charming scheduler when I asked. Hmm.

    In any event, we were getting special treatment. The tickets were time-limited and we’d delayed past their due date. I explained the reasons and pity was taken. We were slated for October 20.

    It’s a hundred and twenty plus change miles from St. Louis to Columbia, so we arranged to make a weekend of it and stay with out friend John in Jefferson City. The weekend turned out to be spectacularly beautiful, the drive down Highway 50 relaxed, and peppered with scenic delight.

    We ambled from Jefferson City up 63 to Columbia and found our destination easily enough (earlier, Donna had fun playing with Google maps on John’s iPad, finding the location). It was off in a combination of old farmland and industrial development that was still active but had seen more plentiful times. The Columbia Star terminal looked nicely restored and a large parking lot filled with cars and guests as the sun headed down for the day. (The range of vehicles ran from modest—older Nissans—up to opulent—a couple of new Lexus and Mercedes.) (The plural—would it be Lexuses or Lexi?) We walked around the train, admiring it like some great antediluvian beast brought back from a cloud-obscured plateau, uncertain of its provenance but impressed by what we thought we knew of it, both its power and its rarity.

    The dinner train phenomenon, as we learned from the PBS special that brought us to this place, is widespread and one of the chief ways many old, historic trains have been preserved. Some of them run quite a long distance and they are day-long excursions. This one runs between Columbia and Centralia, rumbling at a stately pace for about three hours, there and back, long enough for the repast on offer.

    People continued arriving after we parked, leaving ample time to inspect it. The gathering on the parking lot reminded me of scenes on docks, crowds facing the ships about to take them away. A line of track acted as psychological barrier—a steel rope in the tarmac—keeping onlookers safely separated from the docile beast until its handlers declared it safe to approach.

     

     

     

    But a few minutes before seven, people with clipboards began sorting us out, allowing us to board, directing us to tables within the finely-restored dining cars.

    The lack of scenery beyond the twenty or thirty feet the floodlights illuminated was ostensibly compensated for by the fact that people were placed at tables with strangers—unless you had a larger group—with whom you were forced to either engage pleasantries and become cordially acquainted or stoically endure if you’re not the gregarious sort. I admit to having difficulties in that department and were we to do this again we’d make plans with another couple at least.

    But to be fair, the couple with whom we were paired was pleasant, the conversation, while shallow, was not without moments of shared laughter and some interest. After fifteen minutes, though, it was also clear that we really lacked anything very much in common with them and while it was not awkward it was not the kind of experience one would necessarily wish to repeat.

    But the food!

    Our waitress brought our drinks and then took our opening orders (the main courses were already set in advance) and I decided that this was excellent training for them—serving on a moving platform that rocked (gently, yes, but nevertheless) and none of them spilling a bit, drop, or particle.

    There was a pulled-pork on cornbread appetizer, followed by an acorn squash bisque that…well, I’d never tasted anything quite like it. I could have done with a full bowl of it and been wholly content.

    That would have been a shame, though. The main course—there were several to choose from—was superb. Now, both Donna and I have high standards for prime rib. We were spoiled. All joking aside, the best prime rib either of us ever had was at the long-defunct St. Louis Playboy Club. I’m serious. The chef there could turn prime rib out like ambrosia. We’ve had close before, but never better. This was probably as good. It was wonderful.

    We trundled along through small town Missouri. After our trip to Chicago, I decided that contemporary passenger trains really take you through America’s back yard. That’s pretty much what you see, the back end of what is hidden from the highways and main streets. This was no different. However, some people whose houses stood along the line knew the schedule of the train and were outside, with fires going, a few barbecues still underway, waving as we passed by.

    Our table mates imposed on us to take a picture of them and we asked the same in return, something we almost never do. But I felt that this deserved a bit of commemoration. There was a moment of intimidation when I handed across my Canon 60-D, but I’d already set it up and pointed to the button. The picture was successful.

    We drove back in a state of satisfaction, heads filled with nothing but agreeable impressions and an unspoken decision to do this again. That’s as good recommendation as an establishment can get, the promise of repeat business. It helps that we think the idea behind it—preserving a bit of history—is a worthwhile one.

    But it is the food that makes it worth doing.

    Bon appetite!

  • Oh, And One More Thing…Or Two…

    Yes, yes, I said no more politics till after the election, but that just goes to show you the pitfalls of making promises you may be unable to keep.  But I didn’t actually make a promise, not like, um, a politician.

    The weekend is upon us.  Next Tuesday a goodly portion of the citizens of this country will step into voting booths and choose…the next four to six years of leadership.

    I have written about why I will not vote for Mitt Romney.  “Mitten” as he is affectionately known by those in Massachussetts glad to see him no longer governor, is not my idea of a president.  To reiterate what I wrote in that piece, my chief problem with him is that he is an advocate for a failed fiscal policy.  Trickle down economics did not work, has not worked, will not work, so it seems ludicrous—no, stupid—to assume it would work just because it’s Romney and not Reagan.

    But have Obama’s policies done much better?

    If you’re one of those still un- or under-employed, you probably don’t think so. All you have on your mind is “Where are the jobs?!?”  (Interestingly, Romney this week started talking about the unemployed who are not usually counted by the national labor board, a subject I’ve complained about in the past—actual unemployment is much higher than the number cited monthly, much higher, and always has been.  Do I think Romney has twigged to a deeper truth and might do something about it?  No.  It’s a tactic.  Someone whispered in his ear “Hey, boss, if we talk about these people we can make Obama look really bad.”  It’s bullshit coming from him.)  But for a lot of people who either were at risk for losing their jobs or have found employment in the slowly growing economy, no, things aren’t as bad or worse than they were.  Romney is citing the fact that this month’s unemployment went up—from 7.8% to 7.9%, which is higher than when Obama took office.  This is spin, of course, because Obama took office just when the real toll of the Bush recession (and why they keep calling it that, I don’t know, it was a depression and still it, because of all those folks Romney just discovered) was washing ashore.  It was over 10%, we must not forget, and has dropped.

    Now, the thing a lot of people are bitching about is how slowly the recovery is happening.  They overlook the fact that recovery is happening and is expected to continue steadily for the next four years (so much so that Romney has been taking advance credit for jobs that would be created no matter who wins next Tuesday).  It is frankly better in the long-run for this to happen slowly rather than do something to superheat it and blow up a new bubble that will burst in 10 or 15 years, but that doesn’t matter much to people who can’t find work. Fair enough.  But that begs the question as to why these same folks might vote for someone who has sided with policies that will only hurt them more.

    More?  The GOP as it currently exists is anti-union, anti-minimum wage, and anti-fiscal regulation.  If you work for a living any one of these runs counter to your best interests, but we have a trifecta here of antagonism toward the working class and a good chunk of the middle class.  Every state that has adopted Right To Work as law and busted the unions has seen standards of living go down.  Wages go down.  Quality of working conditions go down.  As for minimum wage laws, they barely raise the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of people in the first place—eliminate it and you drive those people even further down.  Those who have never worked for minimum wage may not realize that this is not for students anymore, but a lot of families are trying to get by on minimum wage.

    As for the demand to deregulate the financial sector further, pardon my directness, but just how stupid are you?  It was deregulation that allowed the practices of the banks which caused the 2008 meltdown.  So now you want to go back to those circumstances?  Capitalism is a wonderful thing if you put a harness on it and control it, but left to “the Market” it is a ravening beast that could care less about Bob Cratchitt and Tiny Tim.

    So given all this, just why in hell would anyone vote for these people?  It beggars the imagination.

    But—politics is like sex: when you get right down to it, it’s just a matter of what turns you on, what appeals. It’s a limbic system thing, and generally makes no sense.

    Which in that regard makes Romney ideal.

    Not many people have talked about his religion through the campaign, which for the most part I approve.  Religion ought to have no part in this.

    But that’s not the same as saying it doesn’t play on people’s minds, that it isn’t a consideration.  Sure, it bothered me when Jimmy Carter made a deal out of his evangelicalism.  Every time some politico mouths off about “putting god back in [fill in the blank]” I cringe.*

    In this case, I will remark on Romney’s religion as an aspect of his character.  He has campaigned diligently with unexpected agility.  He’s told a lot of half-truths, some outright lies, fabricated some stuff out of whole cloth.

    And apparently believes every word of it.

    He’s a Mormon.  As such, he must be facile at accepting nonsense as truth.  (Disclaimer: my parents were Mormons, I am more than passing familiar with Mormonism.  While never one myself, I’ve had many a conversation with visiting teachers.  I’ve read the two principle books—yes, there are two of them, The Book of Mormon and A Pearl of Great Price—and I considered joining, so allow me to claim I know a little something about it.)  We have the documentation, the history, and can weigh the claims of Mormonism.  This isn’t some ancient thing of which most of the pertinent texts are missing and the civilization that invented it lies in ruins over which archaeologists must pore to reconstruct.  It’s a recent advent.  It is very much like Scientology in many ways.

    It is a compendium of the improbable, the fantastic, and the patently false.  In order to believe it, one must be willing to suspend all credulity, divorce it from critical thinking, and pretend the world is different from what it clearly is.  One must ignore evidence, be willing to cut off friends and family who dare to speak ill of Joe Smith and Brigham, accept a cosmogeny created virtually from whole cloth by a man fleeing New York ahead of creditors and charges for fraud.  It is so obviously bullshit, that it is the perfect mirror of the mindset of a politician willing to front for things he or she might never accept outside of the arena.

    I will therefore also not vote for Romney because he is so utterly gullible.

    Okay.

    So am I gleefully and whole-heartedly casting my vote for Obama?  I will vote for him because I do not want a GOP-dominated government.  But it is far from whole-hearted.  He has disappointed me in many things, but I can’t in clear conscience vote my choice and risk seeing Romney win.

    (In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a very partisan post—not so much partisan for anyone as against.)

    I’d like to vote for Jill Stein.  Not so much because I agree with everything she touts, but because she’s so utterly despised by all the folks I despise.  She would be a refreshing change.

    Look, under ordinary circumstances, the two parties we have dominating our politics are not really that different from each other.  These are not ordinary circumstances but the divide is over things that are normally at the margins.  If you want to fix the core, both parties need to be overhauled completely.

    We need a viable third party, one not funded by corporate money or tied to the people with the biggest mouths.

    But until someone like Jill Stein can garner better than the paltry percentage she does, most of us see our choices forced.

    So this coming Tuesday I’m voting against Mitt Romney…and against just about every Republican candidate on the slate, because they are all of them espousing nonsense in my opinion.  They’re not even good Libertarians, not that I’d particularly want them to be, but that way they’d at least keep their opinions about peoples’ private lives out of the public arena.

    But come 2016 I’d love to see a viable third option.

    VOTE!

    ________________________________________________

    * Let me explain.  It’s not god per se that I object to (how can I when I don’t believe he exists?) but the fact—the fact—that all this sanctimony is pretty much, in this context, Show.  Nothing but an act to parade piety in front of people and mask the fact that serious problem solving is not going on.  Putting god back in city hall will not stop the corruption.  Putting prayer back in school will not fix your failing educational system.  The public lip-service to a religiosity especially not embraced by the political actions of the people demanding it the most is a massive distraction.   Many of the same people most vociferously demanding this nonsense wouldn’t know “christian spirit” if it visited them on Christmas Eve.  What it really is, to be clear, is a song-and-dance to make their opponents appear curmudgeonly, evil, and on the wrong “side.”  I’m tired of people professing their christian values from one side of their mouths and then defending the death penalty out of the other.  Hypocrisy is a poor way to advocate for your country.

     

  • All Hallowed Eve Is Upon Us

    Drink

    So…be careful out there.

    Bwahahahahahaha!

  • Mountainous Majesty

    Colorado, 1984

     

    Just ’cause.

    And I didn’t want to put up something predictable, like a full moon or a werewolf or blood spatter.

    Happy Hallowe’en.  Be safe.

  • Okay, I Couldn’t Resist

    I know, I said no more political posts till after the election, but I couldn’t NOT put this one up. Before you freak out, watch all the way through. Then, I’m sure, no matter who you’re voting for, everyone will have a reason to freak out.

    Oh, and one more thing. Check this post by P.Z. Myers. This pretty well sums up my feelings as well. I’ve had a low-level concern about the congressional elections longer and more consistently than the presidential campaign, but really, we ought to be worrying more about local elective offices even more—offices which traditionally get the lowest voter interest.

    Anyway, I just wanted to share. See you on the other side.

  • Meanwhile

    Hard upon the heals of my previous panegyric, a placeholder.

    Last week Donna and I enjoined our first dinner train, the Columbia Star out of—you guessed it—Columbia, Missouri.  Here’s a photograph and a promise that I will shortly be writing about it at more length. Meanwhile, have a pleasant next few days.

    Walkin’ Down The Line

  • At The Risk Of…

    Another GOP candidate has stirred the hornet’s nest of women’s rights and abortion by making one of the most blatantly absurd statements— no, that’s inaccurate, mainly because there is no way to gauge “most absurd” in this context. So many of them have come out and said shit everyone knew they were thinking but till recently had managed to either not say or have couched in more sophisticated and euphemistic language.

    Richard Mourdock said that any pregnancy resulting from rape is “God’s intent.”

    How to delicately respond to this…?

    Oh, fuckit. This is bullshit.

    The basic assumption of Biblical literalism these asshats have been using is a compendium of tribal law no one would approve across the board anymore because we don’t believe that shit anymore!

    Did you know that, per the Old Testament, if a woman is raped and does not immediately scream and accuse the man, she is presumed guilty of adultery and is to be stoned to death? (All the various sexual rules related to this can be found in Deuteronomy 22.)

    What is wrong with this is that it all—all—reduces a woman to property. I don’t care how you dress it up, interpret it, or reconstitute it, the reason we no longer regard Old Testament morays as valid is that they treat so many categories of people as property. It condones slavery, chattel bondage, the rights of fathers to kill children. They are rules, sure, and it does not give categorical rights to the father, but that doesn’t matter because it is all based on a construction of human rights we no longer support.

    At least, most of us don’t.

    Here is the basic problem and the reason I have always supported a woman’s right to choose.

    It is her body, her life, her choice. Period. It’s not yours, it’s not the state’s, it doesn’t belong to the man who fucked her or her father or her husband and certainly not her rapist. It belongs to her, to decided what to do with. If people did not own their own bodies, then we wouldn’t have to get permission from them as individuals for organ donations (even after death).

    So at what point does this cease being true? How does becoming pregnant alter that fundamental fact, especially if said pregnancy was not her choice?

    I’m sorry if you think that embryo/zygote/fetus is a human being, it does not by its simple existence trump a woman’s right to decide if she is willing to serve as incubator to it. It does not trump her right to determine how she wants to live her life from that moment on. It does not trump her right to be able to say yes or no to a situation that will irrevocably alter any course she may have set or predetermine what options she may have in the future, regarding career, partners, and personal matters having nothing to do with other people.

    Because it doesn’t trump any of these things for a man, who can walk away and have nothing further to do with what he has left behind.

    The argument that, among certain seriously neurotic types, that if she didn’t want to be pregnant she should not have had sex is nothing more than a different set of constraints to tell her what she can or cannot do with her own body. Besides, she invited him inside, she never said he could leave any relatives behind.

    I base my support on a lifetime of privileged autonomy, knowing that this was not something I, as a man, would ever have to deal with, so any pronouncement on my part would be at virtually no risk that my life would ever have to change. Realizing that, I knew that I rather liked that autonomy and would never deny it to anyone else. I see it as the epitome of hypocrisy for men to dictate this to women. They would have to enforce a situation on women that they themselves would never be subject to. This is the basis of discrimination.

    I, were I a woman, would damn well insist on being able to live the life I want to live and determine my procreative future entirely for myself. No one should insist, through law or any other means, that a woman do something not of her choice.

    But we have been seeing the naked assertion of male privilege in all this, of men insisting that women should not have the same choices they do.

    Well, to be perfectly blunt, fuck that.

    Unless you are willing to embrace all of the rules in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, your presumption of speaking for Biblical morality is a sham. If you do embrace all that nonsense, then you have no place in the government of a democracy, because all of it is born out of an autocratic mindset that has no problem predetermining what people are—master, chattel, slave, outcast.

    Now. This is all, ultimately, a major distraction. The GOP was never serious about rolling back Roe v. Wade—why would they give up such a wonderfully effective campaign issue by fulfilling the implied promises they’ve made since the 80s and actually outlaw abortion? Furthermore, they know very well the shitstorm that would create. Most of the antichoice movement is leery of discussing legal redress—punishment—for what they claim is murder. Most don’t want to talk about it. The leadership very well knows why—because the fervent hope of most of these folks is that abortion simply go away. If you punish people for it, it will never go away. It will be in the courts forever, until one day the tide reverses again and it is once more legal, and maybe after that it will remain so because we will have really locked down this argument over who owns a woman’s body.

    But now all it does is serve to obscure other issues and delude a large segment of the voting population into thinking this is something that will really make any difference. By this tactic, they have you all voting for people who while touting “family values” have just been picking your pockets and diverting your real power into the hands of oligarchs.

    I have one parting question for all you people so bent on ending abortion. How come none of you advocate mandatory vasectomies, not even for dead-beat dads? I never hear anything like that, even as a theoretical argument, from any the antichoice folks. Nothing that would shift the focus to the man. You don’t want people getting shot (pregnant) don’t take their guns away, just the bullets.

    That was rhetorical, yes, but the question is legit. Why is this all put on the woman, every time?

    I think I may write nothing more political till after the election.

    Vote!

  • Some Thoughts On SF, Nostalgia, Words

    This past weekend I attended our local convention,  Archon.  It’s a St. Louis convention that’s not actually in St. Louis, for many reasons too convoluted to go into here, and this one was number 36.  Which means, with a couple of exceptions, I’ve been going to it for three decades.  (Our first con was Archon 6, which featured Stephen King as GoH, and thus was something of a media circus.  I met several writers, some whose work I knew and loved, others of whom I just then became acquainted—George R.R. Martin, Robin Bailey, Charles Grant, Joe Haldeman, Warren Norwood. Some have passed away, others are still working.)

    I go now to meet up with friends of long acquaintance, in whose company we have spent relatively little actual face-time, but who by now have become touchstones in our lives.  It’s odd having people who feel so close that you see at most one weekend a year.  Granted, the internet has helped bridge those gaps, but it’s still a curious phenomenon, one which I kind of dealt with this weekend on at least one panel.

    This year, the novel that seems to have garnered the most awards was Jo Walton’s Among Others. It won both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, both times beating out what I considered the best science fiction novel of perhaps the last decade, China Miéville’s Embassytown.  

    Now, please don’t misunderstand—I thought Among Others was a marvelous novel.  I enjoyed it thoroughly, was, in fact, delighted by it, and certainly being delighted is one of the chief pleasures of reading.  I do not here intend any slight on the work.

    But it took two awards that are supposed to honor the best science fiction of the year, and Among Others was barely fantasy.  (One of the things I admired about it was the line Walton danced around separating the fantasy from actual occurrence and simple perception on the part of the characters.)  It is in the long tradition of English boarding school stories, written as the diary of a girl who is somewhat isolated, who has run away from her mad mother (who may be a witch) after a tragic loss of her sister and a crippling accident.  Living with her father now, she is placed in a boarding school where her love of science fiction is one of her chief methods of coping. The novel then chronicles the succession of books she reads over a year or two, many of which were exactly the books I was reading then and loving.  It is in that sense an overview of a particular period in SF, one I found myself reliving with immense pleasure.

    Embassytown, on the other hand, is solidly SF built on a very meaty idea that plays out with intensity and provokes a great deal of thought—everything SF is supposed to do.  It is also marvelously well-written and to my mind was hands down the best of the year, if not, as I said, the last decade.

    But it lost to the Walton.

    Why?

    So I proposed a panel at Archon to discuss the power of nostalgia in a field that is presumed to deal with cutting edge, next level, philosophically stimulating ideas.  It’s supposed to take us new places.  Granted, most of it no longer does—instead it takes us to some very familiar places (after eight decades of definably “modern” SF, how many “new” places are there really to go?) and in the last couple of decades, it’s been taking us to some very old places, alá Steampunk and alternate history.  I’d never given much thought to this before as a nostalgic longing because in both cases the writers are still proposing What If? scenarios that ask questions about the nature of historical inevitability and technological destiny.  The story might well be set in 1890, but it’s not “our” 1890 and we have to come to grips with the questions of why “our” 1890 has preference in the nature of human development.

    But Among Others didn’t even do that.  It was just a recapitulation of one fan’s love of a certain era of fiction.

    Again, absolutely nothing wrong with that and I say again, Among Others is a fine novel, I unhesitatingly recommend it.

    My question in the panel had to do with the potential for exhaustion in SF.  Paul Kincaid talks about this here in an examination of two of the best Best of the Year anthologies, Dozois’ and Horton’s.  In my own reading, I’ve noticed a resurgence of old models—planetary romance, space opera, etc (Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey for instance)—where we’re seeing writers take these comfortable, familiar forms and rework them with more contemporary sensibilities, broader perspectives, certainly in many instances more skillful prose.  But the “cutting edge” seems to be occupying narrower slices of the collective SF zeitgeist.  (William Gibson, to my mind still one of the most interesting SF writers, has all but given up writing SF in any concrete fashion and is now doing contemporary thrillers from an SF perspective.  Is this cutting edge or an admission that there simply isn’t anywhere “new” to go?  Likewise with Neal Stephenson, who opted to go all the way back to the Enlightenment and rework that as SF—taking the notions of epistemology and social science and applying them to the way a period we thought we knew unfolded from a shifted perspective.)

    Kincaid’s piece talks about insularity in the field, which is not a new criticism—arguably, the recent upsurge in YA in the field is a direct response to the ingrown, jargon-laden incestuousness of the field in the 80s and 90s, where it seemed that if you hadn’t been reading SF since the early Seventies you simply would not understand what was going on—but I’m wondering if a new element has been added, that of an aging collective consciousness that unwittingly longs for the supposedly fertile fields of a previous Golden Age in publishing, an age before Star Trek and Star Wars and cyberpunk, when it was easier (supposedly) to write an almost pastoral kind of science fiction and you didn’t need a degree in physics or history or cultural anthropology to find your way.  (I suspect the tenacity of iconic worlds like the aforementioned Star Trek and Star Wars can be explained by a very common need for continuity and familiarity with a story that you can access as much through its fashions as its ideas.)

    Having just turned 58, and feeling sometimes more behind the curve both technologically and culturally, I’m wondering if, in a small way, the accolades given to a work of almost pure nostalgia is indicative of a wish for the whole magilla to just slow down.

    (The trajectory of my own work over the last 20 years is suggestive, where I can see my interests shift from cool ideas, new tech, stranger settings, into more personal fiction where the internal landscapes of my characters take more and more precedence.  And many of them are feeling a bit lost and clueless in the milieus in which I set them.  Not to mention that I have moved from space opera to alternative history, to more or less straight history and into contemporary…)

    The panel was lively and inconclusive—as I expected, because I didn’t intend answering my own question, only sparking discussion and perhaps a degree of reflection.

    SF goes through cycles, like any other art form, and we see the various subsets rise and fall in popularity.  There’s so much these days that I may be missing things and getting it all wrong.  The reason I brought it up this time is a response to the very public recognition of a given form that, this year, seems to have trumped what I always thought science fiction is about.

    I confess, there are many days I look back to when I first discovered SF, and the impact it had on my adolescent mind (and the curious fact that when I go reread some of those books I cannot for the life of me see what it was about them that did that—no doubt I was doing most of it for myself, taking cues from the works) and when I first thought about becoming a writer.  It does (falsely) seem like it would have been easier “back then” to make something in the field.  Such contemplation is a trap—you can get stuck in a retrograde What If every bit as powerful as the progressive What If that is supposed to be at the core of science fiction.

  • Yes, It Is My Birthday

    I take partial responsibility.  After all, my parents had more than a little to do with it.

    I usually forget my birthday until the week before, when everyone starts reminding me.  This year, though, I’m paying a bit more attention because, well, I’m here to have one.  That was, for the first time ever, more than an academic question recently.  So for that I am grateful to many people, most of whom I do not know and may never see again—doctors and nurses and even some folks who thought good thoughts without my knowing—and for the love of my friends.

    I have pretty much everything one could ask for out of life.  The one thing that would make this just super cool would be to have some publisher offer me a significant amount of money to publish one of the books I have on offer.  I trust that will come eventually.

    I’m most especially pleased that I have Donna.  Still.  Always.  She’s one seriously wonderful human being.  I love her and I am still baffled that she loves me.

    So, to everyone, thank you for your birthday wishes.  You strangers out there who read this, if you want to do something more than wish me happy birthday, go buy one of my books, read it, and rave about it on your own blog or on Amazon or wherever. (If you choose REMAINS, you’ll make my publisher happy, too.) But even so, thank you, thank you, thank you.

    I’m going to a convention now.  Have a great day.

    Celebratin’