Author: Simon

Why these things matter

/ Simon / 3 Comments

I want to tell you a story. It’s about a life, and it’s true.

There was a boy. Teenager, in high school: bookish; liked magic cards and role playing games; he was into comparative theology and classical philosophy; he was good with computers. He didn’t like sports, other than martial arts. He knew he liked girls, liked them a lot. But he also liked boys, maybe not as strongly but enough to feel different. It’s hard enough being a weird kid in high school though without being a bisexual weird kid. And at this point he probably wouldn’t have even thought of calling himself that. So he didn’t mention it. He buried it deep. One person, somebody pretty close to him, guessed he was gay (he wasn’t) and used this as an emotional cudgel; this made him less inclined to tell anybody anything about it.

A few years later, the young man, now in university. He got into LARP and from there he found his way to the goth scene. Loved it. Dated a few girls. One was just wrong timing. Others didn’t work out for a variety of reasons. In this scene though he also kissed a guy for the first time. He liked it. But he was drunk, so was the guy, and he really didn’t know exactly how to process the feelings in the kiss so he said nothing and put it out of his mind. Mostly he still dated women, except for the occasional dalliance.

The young man graduated and moved overseas. His boss was openly bisexual and had taken some flack for it in the past. Things began to change in North America. Gays and lesbians were on TV enough that they weren’t oddities anymore. Canada was talking about legalizing gay marriage. Bisexuals were still kind of not talked about that much. Being not one nor the other seemed awkward. Like some people would hear bi and think, “It’s just a phase,” or alternately, “oh, you’re gay but not quite ready to come out.” And the truth is he wasn’t ready to come out. Not by a LONG shot. But it wasn’t the same thing. Around this time he met a woman, fell in love, got married. Being bisexual was, at that point a distraction, unimportant. It wasn’t that he’d changed. But having celebrity crushes of two genders instead of one wasn’t the sort of thing it was necessary to share, and since he was happily monogamous and very deeply in love he didn’t bother.

The man moved to Canada, got a dead end job and lost it. He moved to Toronto, his career started in earnest and his social circle exploded. He met all kinds of amazing people. Some were gay, or bi, or genderqueer or a variety of other orientations. He was married, to a woman and had been closeted for his whole life. It was easy to just play the good hetero ally. So he did that. He came close to telling a few close friends a few times, but always chickened out at last minute. He felt rather guilty for that, but he just didn’t see it as being anymore important to his self-identity than the fact he liked Jackson Pollack and Picasso, shirts with cufflinks or really spicy curry.

Time went by. His daughter was born. Around this time a young adult cartoon called Legend of Korra ended. He liked the cartoon a lot, he was a fan of wuxia stories, and the Avatar world captured many of the tropes of wuxia much better than any other western tv show or film ever had. The finale of the series closed with the titular character entering into a same sex relationship. She’d previously been in a heterosexual relationship, and unlike the Buffy dodge this wasn’t presented as a change in her orientation. She was a bisexual protagonist. She was the first one he’d seen on television. Now he was introspecting a lot about how he wanted to raise his daughter. The world was changing, and for the better, but it wasn’t there yet. He’d looked back over his past and regretted not having been more open about that one little quirk of his. After all, plenty of his friends knew that he liked Jackson Pollack and Picasso, shirts with cufflinks and really spicy curry. So why shouldn’t they know this too? It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them, there was just so much inertia behind the decision to keep silent.

So he started slowly. He told his wife, then his mother. Then a few friends, slowly, carefully. Mostly friends he knew to be bi or otherwise queer themselves, not even very many of them, because it was a little easier. It wasn’t that he was unsatisfied with his wife (she was still entirely the love of his life) nor was he likely to be signing up for Grindr or going out to bear nights; he was happily monogamous. When female co-workers at work joked about how cute Thor was and then apologized to him, he wanted to say, no, honestly, go ahead. I agree. He still hadn’t quite gotten that far.

But his wife accepted him, knowing he loved her.

And the friends he told didn’t make it a big deal, didn’t change how they interacted with him, which was good.

The one co-worker to whom it slipped out almost by accident felt him out for a week, possibly treating him more like one of her gay friends, and then they settled back into patterns of work and she seemed to forget all about it, which was just fine.

And the funny thing is that all of this really wasn’t any more important than Jackson Pollack, Picasso, shirts with cufflinks and spicy curries. But even though he’d been able to hide this little detail, this unimportant detail, from everybody he’d loved for nearly two decades, he couldn’t countenance living in a world where something like being not gay, but also not straight was a problem, a world where having two celebrity crushes was something you hid out of fear that somebody might use it as an emotional cudgel against you. He wanted her to live in a better world. One where a cartoon character could be allowed to love indiscriminately without “changing teams.”

It seems like such a little thing.

And then some jerk comes along and calls people like me “a sexual aberration.” He calls two creators whose only wrongdoing, even in his eyes, was to admit that bisexuality was something that existed, “disgusting, limp, soulless sacks of filth.” He calls them, “termites,” and expresses a desire to, “exterminate them.” That jerk is now up for five Hugo awards because a few conservatives with sour grapes didn’t like all the women on the ballot two years ago.

I spent twenty years of my life being a little dishonest with the people I cared about because I didn’t want everything in my life to center around ducking attacks from shit-sacks like him. When I became an author I CERTAINLY didn’t want my career to be defined by that anymore than it is by my fondness for Pollack, Picasso, cuff links and curry. Well congratulations to the Sad Puppies. Because what they accomplished was to make a man who was effectively silent on this part of himself finally build up the courage to say, “fuck you,” and to speak out, publicly, to whoever happened by.

I can tolerate that bigots still exist. The tide of history is against them and they’ll fade eventually. I’m patient.

But while they’re fading away, I can’t tolerate the community that I’m a part of honoring them. I want my daughter to grow up in a world where these things aren’t shameful, where people understand the only thing confusing bisexuals is a lack of role models reflecting our experience. And where even that is history. So, yes, I know that ultimately the Hugo awards aren’t much more than a popularity contest. I know they don’t confer much beyond bragging rights.

But it still matters to me. Because I’m through tying myself in knots just to duck the bigots. I owe more than that to my daughter.

The problem with Hugo – Assessing the work on their merits, a moderate approach

/ Simon / 6 Comments

So this was a thing that happened. Short form, after three years of concerted, non-stop campaigning, the sad puppies managed to game the system of the Hugo Awards sufficiently to stack the ballot to the point where there are some categories where, quite literally, there is no choice but Sad Puppy options.

Furthermore, in some of these cases (though not all) the options presented by the Sad Puppies are so obviously included just to stick one to the “pink shirts” that, even disregarding the inside baseball of the various cliques involved, “no award” is the best available option.

I don’t say that lightly. Now I’m going to break down the categories one-by-one and discuss what I know of the entries on them. And in the process, I’m going to act like I don’t know the Sad Puppies exist as a thing because I want it to become apparent how blatant ridiculous this ballot is. But before I do that, I want to talk about options.

The Way Forward

We have a few options going forward:

  1. Fully politicize the Hugo awards by forming an organized slate of candidates to counter the Sad Puppy clique.
  2. Abandon the Hugo awards to the Sad Puppies.
  3. Push for a complete redesign of the Hugo Awards

Now, of these options, I think 2 is by far the worst. I’m tired of ceding ground in public space to conservative interests, of seeing Overton windows constantly sliding right.

So let’s examine the other two options.

A fully politized ballot

Despite my previous (very public) comments regarding the inseparability of art and politics, I actually think this is not a good option. I’m no more interested in turning the Hugo Awards into a permanent battleground of the Culture Wars than I am in abandoning them to become the paleoconservative awards for genre fiction.

Unfortunately, I think that this is what probably will happen short term. Certainly, for the 2015 Hugos it’s going to happen, because, as I’ll show later, it’s effectively impossible to vote in the majority of categories in the Hugo awards without it being politicized.

Since I refuse to throw my hands up and abandon the awards to the Sad Puppies, any voting that happens kind of will end up being political.

And any changes to the structure of the Hugo Awards will require successful votes at two successive Worldcons, so we’re probably looking at the same sad fight next year. However, notwithstanding this stop-gap measure to prevent the Hugo Awards from honoring grossly inappropriate throwbacks, I think that the real fight should be to change the Hugo Awards structure so that it’s harder to game the system.

Changing the Hugo Awards

Ideally, the Hugo Awards should be honoring the best SFF has to offer, rather than the thing any one camp was able to push forward as the best avatar of their political vision. But with the current structure that’s hard to do. So what are some options?

Raise the price to nominate and vote

No. Unlikely to work, kind of jerky to boot. I only mention it because it’ll invariably come up as a suggestion.

Eliminate multiple nominations

When a single author has been spammed across every nomination in a category it’s clear that some rigging is going on. So I’d suggest this as a first measure: a single individual or organization will not be allowed to be nominated more than once for any given award, and not more than three times for all award categories. In the event that a nominee receives more than one qualifying nomination in a category, whichever work receives the most nominations is the one that goes on the ballot. The others are discarded. The same applies if a person is nominated into more than three categories. The strongest nominations stay. The weaker nominations are tossed.

I think this might be one of the easiest fixes for the problem we’re facing right now. It’d, at the very least, mean that a greater diversity of nominees would be on every ballot, and would slightly weaken the power of voting blocs aligning behind specific high-profile incendiary candidates.

Of course, nothing stops voting blocs from just finding five different names for each slate and pushing that slate forward just as strongly. But at least they’d have to work harder, and as my later analysis will show, when the voting bloc can’t lean on a single author to push their agenda, the situation becomes more difficult.

Make the Hugo Awards a juried award

Of course this’ll make the selection of the jury a matter of political contention. But if we switched the selection of the nominations list from an open pay-for-vote situation to a juried one, it would at least introduce some accountability. That’s something we don’t really have right now.

Something else?

Honestly, I’m looking for suggestions here, comments welcome.

A breakdown of the award categories

Of course, everything I’ve been saying is predicated on the brokenness of the current list. So let’s look at that in greater detail.

Best novel

  • Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
  • The Dark Between the Stars by Kevin J. Anderson (Tor Books)
  • The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette) (Tor Books)
  • Lines of Departure by Marco Kloos (47North)
  • Skin Game by Jim Butcher (Roc Books)

This is one of the two best categories on this year’s ballot. Frankly Ancillary Sword has been my pick for the 2015 Hugo award ever since I read it. Leckie is a genius and her book is a tour-de-force. And I say that as somebody who’s often bored by space opera.

I’ve heard good things about The Goblin Emperor though I haven’t read it. It’s on my TBR list, but, being honest, it’d have to be AMAZING to dislodge Leckie’s book from my top pick.

Jim Butcher has long been one of my guilty pleasure reads. I enjoyed Skin Game, with a big caveat that I thought Butcher leaned FAR too hard on the femme fatale tropes of noir in this outing, and there were small parts of the book that veered into straight-up sexism which I found jarring and which I SERIOUSLY hope he dials back in his next outing. Still I’ll be buying his next Dresden book because it’s an enjoyable read. Would I call Skin Game the best SFF book of 2014? No. Nope. Nooooooope. I would not. But, I wouldn’t really blame somebody who did – Butcher is a very competent and entertaining author.

I haven’t read, or heard anything about The Dark Between the Stars so this one’s a bit of a shoulder-shrug on my part. I have no problem with Kevin J. Anderson, and some of his Dune novels were entertaining reads. But I’m still going to stump for Leckie over him. Because Leckie is a freaking genius.

Lines of Departure puts the military in military SF. I don’t read much straight up military SF (Scalzi notwithstanding) so I can’t really comment. Scalsi seems to like Kloos. But it’s kind of the same situation as with Anderson, I’m more saying “not enough information to comment” than “don’t vote for this guy”

Conclusion: If I knew absolutely nothing about Sad Puppies I’d probably have absolutely no problem with the ballot for best novel. Vote for who you like. I’ll be voting for Leckie first because I REALLY like Leckie and I think she really did write the best science fiction novel of the year.

Best Novella

  • Big Boys Don’t Cry by Tom Kratman (Castalia House)
  • “Flow” by Arlan Andrews, Sr. (Analog, Nov 2014)
  • One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright (Castalia House)
  • “Pale Realms of Shade” by John C. Wright (The Book of Feasts & Seasons, Castalia House)
  • “The Plural of Helen of Troy by John C. Wright (City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis, Castalia House)

Ok so here’s where I do this:  (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

I’m going to start with John C. Wright. The man who, according to the Hugo ballot wrote three of the five best novellas of 2014. Wright called the creators of Legend of Korra termites for confirming that Korra was bisexual. He said they should be, and this is a quote, exterminated.

I’m sorry, but this falls back to my, “you can’t ever entirely separate the artist from the art,” statement and I could no more vote for anything this man wrote than I could one of Orson Scott Card’s paeans to the wonders of child soldiers. By using his author platform to spread hate, he has excluded himself from consideration.

Tom Kratman is also on the list of people who have excluded themselves from serious contention on the basis of the things they’ve said online. Look here and here to see what I mean.

And then there’s Arlan Andrews Sr. He’s on the advisory board for the Lifeboat Foundation. And they’re a rather… frightening… group of people.

So in the novella category we have three nominees: one who wants to exterminate the creators of a YA cartoon for daring to admit bisexuals exist, one who seems to believe affirmative action is more racist than the promotion of Rushton-style memes regarding “race” and genetic inheritance, and one who is involved with a trojan horse NGO whose advisory board also includes one of the most infamous anti-islamic radicals in the USA.

This grouping doesn’t include the best SFF has to offer. It doesn’t include the best any random grouping of people have to offer. There’s no way I could endorse any of these people.

So “No Award” carries in novella.

And the rest

This is going to take all day so I’m going to hustle things along. Novelette includes more John C Wright, somebody published in an Orson Scott Card branded publication, and a bunch of things I haven’t read. I’ll probably try to get around to those and report back on a future post.

Short story has more John C. Wright, more Castalia House (on why that’s a no-go zone read Stross here) and more I-haven’t-read-report-back-laters. (Of note, Lou Antonelli, on his blog, claims that “typical literary s-f is dystopian slipsteam pornography,” and not in the tee-hee, I love dystopian slipstream pornography sort of way, so I don’t have high hopes for him. But at least he isn’t as publicly awful as the novella contenders.

Related work: Oh hey, look, Castalia House again. What’s that? Patriarchy Press? That’s just straight up trolling now. In fact, considering Patriarchy Press seems to have no visible web presence, at all, I’m inclined to think it is a troll. Perhaps a self-pubber’s imprint name which he thought was droll or something. Regardless, not filing me with confidence here related work.

Graphic novel: An unremittingly awesome field. Possibly even better  than novel. Ms. Marvel? I love Ms. Marvel – anything related to the Inhumans really, but it’s a wonderful book regardless. Rat Queens, yes, yes, yes. Saga is the comic I haven’t read that is most frequently recommended to me by comic fans and non-comic fans alike. It probably deserves to be on this list. The other two? No clue. But with a minimum of three STRONG contenders out of five this is fine.

Dramatic Presentation – Long and Short: An uncontroversial list in both cases. When I first read the Sad Puppy slate when Torgersen released it, I shrugged and said, “they’re not doing any damage there.”  Haven’t seen Edge of Tomorrow yet, I don’t watch Grimm and I haven’t seen Orphan Black… YET… but everything on those two lists looks highly appropriate and all will be above “no award” on my ballots.

Best Editor: Hey look – Vox Day is on both lists. Well he’s going BELOW “no award.” Beyond that, I don’t know, need to do some research into what the others edited.

The only weirdness in Semiprozine is the presence of Lightspeed, Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceasless Skies on it. I’d have counted them as prozines. Loved Women Destroy Horror though. And I know someone over at Apex & Abyss who I wish nice things for. So, yeah, lots of reasonable choices here once you get past the oddness of how they seem to be defining semipro.

Fanzine: I don’t care, as long as it doesn’t go to Revenge of the Hump Day. As far as I’m concerned this “equal opportunity offender” repository for racist, sexist, anti-islamic, anti-atheist and anti-liberal jokes and editorials has no place being lauded by the Hugo Awards.

Other fan categories. I don’t know any of them. Research will be needed before voting. Or I might just leave those sections blank since time is at a premium and I already have a fair bit of research to do in the pro categories.

John W. Campbell Award: Oh, I LOVE Wesley Chu (which reminds me, I have to get around to getting to reading The Rebirths of Tao – it’s been sitting in TBR basically since I finished The Deaths of Tao, despite not being out yet at that time.) So I know who my #1 will probably be. I don’t know the rest of the authors on this list, so if anybody wants to shout out a favourite book of any of them in the comments I’ll happily give it a peek.

Wrapping up this mess

Between Novel and Graphic Novel on one end – which look like proper and appropriate spreads for the Hugo awards, and the unrelenting shit-show that is the Novella category, most of the professional categories of the Hugo awards show tampering from the Sad Puppies, and Vox Day’s more militant Rabid Puppies. (I’m not making that name up.) And this tampering is to the detriment of SFF.

Specifically, the frequent insertion of one small press with an overtly Christian Dominionist mission over and over and over again is a problem. It’s not just “problematic” in the culture wars sense of the term, no, it’s a fucking major problem, one that needs to be solved.

Ultimately, literary awards should be about good literature. But what we have here isn’t a list of good literature. It’s a manifesto of a world where SFF answers to Christianity, fears other religions, hates gays, sidelines women. (Oh yeah, out of 80 nominees, only 21 were created, in whole or in part, by women.)

So we can’t treat this year’s Hugos like a normal year. Because they’re not. And so some collective action might be necessary. I think, ultimately, some people who were stuck on Sad Puppy lists don’t deserve to be excluded just because the Sad Puppies liked them (looking at you Lego Movie) but what I’d say is this: make sure anybody you put above the “no award” line is somebody you know to be worthy of winning an award. Best case: read them first. At least make sure they’re not a bigot before you give them your vote. And don’t put anything from Castalia House above that line.

Because seriously, Vox Day needs to go away.

Puppies in Stasis

/ Simon / 5 Comments

Brad Torgersen writes most honest article about the Sad Puppies movement to come out of their camp

Sad puppyWhen I delivered my presentation at the Toronto SpecFic colloquium at the beginning of march, I put forward the hypothesis that when you got beyond the arguments about politics, the disputes over SFWA membership, and the arguments about literary merit at the awards, what the Sad Puppies really wanted was for SF/F/H to never change from what they believed it to once be.

And now Brad Torgersen, one of the key organizing influences behind the Sad Puppies has written this.

I have to say, as much as I might violently disagree with pretty much everything he said, and his entire premise, it’s at least more honest than I have come to expect from the Puppies. Gone are the claims of trying to de-politicize SF/F/H. Gone are the rallying cries of: “censorship!” “pink shirts!” “reds under the bed!” Gone is the defense of Vox Day’s purulent behaviour or complaints that SFWA is being unfair to the Real Men of SF/F/H.

And that’s good because what Torgersen has provided is a basis for discourse, a reason to actually engage with him and his fellow Puppies, rather than just to dismiss them out of hand as sour grapes.

And that is, in turn, good because I do think he’s misguided – and through that process of engagement perhaps some of those Puppies can be peeled away from what is largely a toxic movement.

The cereal metaphor

Torgersen describes SF/F/H as being a box of “Nutty Nuggets.” He describes himself as a fan of the taste of these hypothetical nuggets, who has, seemingly overnight, found the flavour to have transformed entirely. It’s the same package, the same brand, but it’s not the same nuggets.

He describes trying box after box: some are more like his beloved memory of cereal and some are less. But none of them are his dearly departed nuggets of nuttiness.

Now this is a flawed premise.

First off, SF/F/H was never a homogeneous brand. Even if you go aaaaallllllllll the way baaaaack to the pulps, the gulf between say, Lovecraft and Howard was vast.

But, ok, perhaps Torgersen was raised on a steady diet of Robert Howard, Doc Smith and Robert Heinlein. Does that mean that SF/F/H should never grow beyond a barbarian swinging an axe and a space ship flying past a mysterious planet?

Think for a moment on Moorcock, his Elric stories built upon the traditions of Howard (and of Tolkien) but challenged them. He interrogated the work of the people who came before him and made something new and different in the process. And Elric was a product of the 1970s!

I was born in 1979. To me, there has never been a world where SF/F/H didn’t include both Conan the Cimmerian and Elirc of Melniboné. These two diametrically opposed ideas of what sword and sorcery stories could look like were available to me, from birth and I’d be shocked if literature hadn’t evolved in the meantime.

To me, SF/F/H literature isn’t a box of cereal. It’s the Grand Magic House Buffet. Yes, there are some fried foods there that you KNOW aren’t any good for you but taste SO good. And there’s the old standards: the roast beef and bean salad of the book world. But this buffet is huge, and the chef who runs it can become easily bored. So in addition to the standards there’s an ever-changing, ever-growing abundance of dishes to try.

And so, when we get past the identity politics, when we get past the inside baseball bickering over use of SFWA accounts and how people self-select to vote for awards, when we push that all aside, what do we find?

People at the buffet of genre, who really only want to eat roast beef and bean salad, upset because they put a bit of a new confection on their plate once, didn’t like the taste, and erroneously believe that because they’ve been coming to the restaurant for umpteen billion years, that dish should be expunged and replaced with more roast beef, more bean salad. In fact, anything but roast beef and bean salad must go! The buffet must serve nothing but roast beef, bean salad.

And that’s just kind of sad.

Review – Silence by Michelle Sagara

/ Simon / 1 Comment


Ok, so it’s a new adult novel.

— Alright, I like those.

An urban fantasy.

— Cool.

Set in Toronto.

— Good

On the topic of how the support of a strong community can help somebody cope with grief.

— Nice, I like it.

And it’s all about psychopomps and necromancers.

— Shut up and take my money.

Silence is the first book in the Queen of the Dead series by Michelle Sagra. I’ll be honest, I do enjoy reviewing books by local authors, because I like reading books by local authors, and so when I recently came across Sagara’s first book I jumped at the opportunity much faster than some much more well known new adult books that I’ve not gotten around to.

The fact that this book was not a dystopia also played into my interest in reading it. As much as I like dystopian fiction (I do read a fair bit of the stuff) it is nice to see a book that took a different approach.

Now for the most part I want to talk about what’s good with this book, because it’s mostly very good. I do have one tiny little complaint though, so I want to get that out of the way up front.

The middle of the book has a small problem: the protagonist is largely in the dark, and a character shows up who knows precisely what’s going on. But he straight up refuses to provide any exposition for several chapters, with repeated conversations where the protagonist says, “tell me what’s going on, because this situation makes very little sense,” and him replying, “no,” or alternatively finding a fortuitous distraction to avoid having to disclose any exposition.

This carries on somewhat too long, and by the time the weirdness around the edges of the story boil over to the point that OTHER characters start providing the exposition that Mr. Mysterious straight up refuses to, I kind of wanted to punch him. A lot. And he’s supposed to be one of the good guys.

But that’s a moderately minor quibble, and with a good setup, a solid third act and, Mr. Mysterious aside, an exceptional cast, I’d definitely recommend this to anybody interested in new adult fantasy fiction.

So let’s talk about why then.

Finally a book that isn’t about how awful cliques are

A common feature of a lot of new adult books lately seems to be clique as source of tension. Whether it’s the Cullens against the other vampires in Twilight, the various factions of Divergent or the districts of the Hunger Games, social organizations of more than three people almost always seem to become engines driving conflict. Of course, considering the preponderance of love triangles in new adult fiction, even social groupings of three people can become engines of conflict, but that’s another issue altogether.

Now high school wasn’t wonderful for me. I was a weird kid. I read a lot, was wordy, played with religions the way other kids played with musical identities.

At school I gravitated in loops and whorls toward a small collection of drama, music and English kids who became the core circle of friends I had within school. There was occasionally tension between some of our number, but in general having people to sit with at lunch, to hang with on slack periods and to drink with after grad dance was how I coped with a lot of the pain that comes with being a weird kid.

They were, effectively, a clique. And they were, in retrospect, awesome. (Kaitlyn, Jeremy, Scott, Jim, Farah, Danny, Colin, and the rest, you guys rock. Even those of you I haven’t seen in over a decade.)

Furthermore, the conflict I had in high school wasn’t some grand battle between cliques, because these social circles were generally loose, and even if some kids in one circle enjoyed tormenting the weird kid, that didn’t mean that their friends even cared enough to do likewise.

In Silence, the protagonist is, in a special kind of way, saved by her clique. She has a loose circle of friends who have woven together through the organic connections that tie one person to another and even when they’re very different, they’re there for her.

This is reflected in the story in two ways: first, in the willingness of her friends to believe and support her when her life starts getting strange; second, by establishing what differentiates herself from other people with necromantic ability. Because necromancers are usually disaffected loners, antisocial and distant from human connection. And Emma isn’t like that. She has friends who care about her and who she cares about. And those human connections are what allow her to come to terms with her new capabilities without losing touch with her fundamental humanity.

So we have a story that celebrates friendship among teenagers, and shows how the ties we form in our formative years can help us to become better people. I find this a wonderful antidote to the pseudo-tribalism of so many other new adult entries.

There’s no love triangle

Emma’s boyfriend dies prior to the opening of the novel, and she’s grieving as the story begins. She’s certainly not looking for a new love. Sagara handles this with deftness and humour when Mr. Mysterious shows up and starts acting interested in Emma (because of her developing powers).

Her friends warn him off, let him know she’s not interested. And he’s like “oh god no, I am not trying to hook up with her,” and that’s the end of that.

Seriously, not every relationship has to be about romantic love. By deliberately, and pointedly, sidelining any romantic subplot right out of the gate, Sagara clears the stage to tell a story that’s instead all about the importance of friendship, and the bonds of family.

The magic is cool

It’s pretty much obvious from the moment that Emma hears the word “necromancer” that she’s going to end up a psychopomp. Where necromancers treat the dead as metaphysical batteries to fuel their honestly frightening array of powers, she treats the dead as people, and shows the same compassion to them that her own friends have to her in the wake of her own grief at the loss of her father and boyfriend in quick succession.

So we’ve got baddies with interesting powers, a protagonist who has a well-defined character-driven reason to use those powers differently and a strong connection between the theme of the story and the nature of the magic inserted into the world.

Simply put, it’s very well done.

If you like new adult urban fantasy and if the idea of a story that centers around the bonds that form within families and friends, about how we’re strengthened by bringing people close, by compassion given and received, this is a book you will enjoy. Minor quibbles regarding pace in the second act aside, it’s a strong series start, and I’m looking forward to reading more books with this delightful group of friends.

The post in which I count fucks

/ Simon / Leave a comment

Bleep Gentle reader, as you likely know as a subscriber to my blog I am an author. I write things, make, to a certain definition of it, art with my words.

And now these fuckers over at Clean Reader want to go in and change my words with ones they find less objectionable.

So let’s talk a bit about my book, the Black Trillium. It’s a new adult novel. That means I’m gearing it toward an audience basically from 16 to 25, with the possibility of people older than 25 might also like it.

The Black Trillium is 117,100 words long. Here’s how I swear:

  • Shit: 15
  • Bitch: 11
  • Fuck: 10
  • Asshole: 2
  • Ass: 1
  • Dick: 1

Total instances of foul words: 40, or roughly 0.034% of my words, probably somewhat less than the foulness of the average late-teenager.

And most of the alternate words I could think of don’t occur, although the word “witch” appears twice.

So you might say, it’s unlikely that anybody would get confused by the word replacements, your story will remained intact.

Except…

I write in multiple first person. The language I choose throughout the entire book is designed to reveal something about the character of the narrator for that chapter. These revelations of character include things like the circumstances under which the characters swear and the sort of swear words they use.

The character who castigates two other protagonists for “waving their dicks around” wouldn’t be the same if she instead criticized them for “waving their thoughts around,” or whatever else Clean Reader decided was less objectionable.

Likewise it’d be a substantial change to character if somebody always cursed by saying “poop.”

Characters are central to story. The story can’t exist without them. And when you mess with the characters you are fundamentally altering the story.

Now recently I delivered a discussion regarding Gamergate and Sad Puppies where I pointed out that all art enters into the realm of political discourse by way of being public speech.

When Clean Reader interferes with the characterization of my characters, and thus muddies my themes, they are making a change, no matter how subtle, to the nature of that public speech.

It’s not censorship, not from the definition I use of what constitutes censorship, but it is academically dishonest, blatant and deliberate misquotation; and that’s a dangerous garden path to dance down all of its own.

Writing a book is a deliberate process.

So is reading one.

And I’ve always been of the opinion that one should think carefully about what they read and why. Certainly the language the author uses is a fair consideration.

When you let people bleep the fucks out of stories you are facilitating a lack of deliberateness in reading, a laziness regarding content.

So what do we have?

Laziness, dishonesty, political interference, interference with the artistic vision of the artist.

Clean reader: go fuck yourself.

Maybe start painting bras on all those old paintings by Titian. Oh wait, I mean “Mammary”ian. I wouldn’t want to swear.

Retro Review: Consider Phlebas

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I first heard of Iain M. Banks when the Hydrogen Sonata was released in 2012. I know, I know, I was a few decades late to the game there. Anyway, I read the glowing reviews of the Hydrogen Sonata and thought, “perhaps I should read this guy.” Then I took a look at the length of the Culture series, 10 novels of weighty length and said, “maybe later.”

Fast-forward two and a half years and a Culture book finally came up to the top of my TBR pile. Thus me posting this review nearly thirty years too late. (Also, being fair, Consider Phlebas would have been a challenging read for me at age eight. I didn’t even start on Asimov until I was about 11 or 12.)

Ok, enough with apologia, I read this book and I have thoughts! Thoughts and opinions! Fair warning, this review will include spoilers. I know, shock, spoilers for a 28 year old novel.

Life at the edge of utopia

I do want to like Consider Phlebas, and I will probably read other Culture books in the future, and the way it explores ideas of utopia is key to that. The universe of Consider Phlebas is one at war. On one side, a giant species of tripedal religious fanatics and on the other a vast network of human-like and post-human (but interestingly, not Earthling) species and subspecies who have formed what is effectively a post-scarcity communist utopia.

The tripeds believe that it’s their relgious and moral duty to subjugate lesser species, while the utopians of the Culture have been engaging in a much gentler form of subjugation, contacting younger species and occasionally manipulating their development in order to increase the likelihood that these species will see the light of AI mitigated utopia.

I find it very interesting that Banks makes it evident immediately that there is a moral grey zone here. Our first encounter with the Culture is a diplomat who has detected and outed a spy serving the tripedal Idirans. He’s going to be executed in a truly vulgar and awful manner, and she makes a half-hearted attempt to commute his sentence.

But when his spymaster comes to rescue him, she’s found to be bristling with weapons and seems to be every bit as much of a spy as he was. She turns out to be an inveterate survivor, and in the later scene handily manipulates this same spy, and the team of mercenaries he’s managed to wrestle control over into accomplishing her goals for her while she stands back and watches.

By the time the story ends it becomes very clear that she could have wrestled control of the spy’s team and his vessel away from him at any time, but chose instead to provide a finger on the scales, reserving her hidden capacity for violence until the most opportune moment.

By contrast, the theocratic Idirans are booming, loud, overt, petulantly destructive and strangely impatient for a species Banks makes such a point of repeatedly reminding the audience is effectively immortal.

And this gets to where Consider Phlebas falls down worst – its treatment of religion.

Religion’s Bad, Mmmkay


Parts of Consider Phlebas come across as a castigation of religion every bit as severe as His Dark Materials.

This point is driven home with jackhammer subtlety during an episode in which the protagonist, the Idiran-serving spy from the beginning has become stranded in a freshwater ocean on a three-million kilometer diameter ring shaped space habitat due to be demolished as part of the war.

For some reason the administration of this satellite have allowed a cult of cannibals, ruled over the most cartoonishly “monstrous because he’s fat” character since Baron Harkonnen who somehow has convinced all of these people to murder any passers-by or each other in an orgy religiously motivated self-degradation.

Meanwhile a Culture shuttle with an artificial intelligence sits there, blithely ignorant to what’s going on literally right next to it. Apparently the AI which is tasked with flying the ship doesn’t bother switching on external cameras when it’s on the ground.

The takeaway from the misadeventure is that religion brings people to make irrational and destructive choices that harm both themselves and everybody around them.

Later, we encounter two Idirans whose names I’ve chosen to forget in favour of calling them Dumb and Dumber. These two collossal assholes have managed to sneak onto a world which is believed to hold a highly advanced AI belonging to the Culture. The protagonist of the story has been sent, by the Idirans, to recover this AI and bring it in for interrogation.

However the Idirans, woefully ill-equipped to complete their mission have decided, against all logic, that it’d be better to destroy the AI and lose its intel. Furthermore, when the spy turns up, claiming to be working for them and with a Culture agent rather obviously his prisoner, they decide, for religious reasons, nope, gonna just kill everybody instead.

Irrational, self-harming, destructive.

Dumb forces the mercenaries to keep him as a prisoner and promises to be a bad one, despite repeat assurances from the spy that he’ll be brought home alive and successful in his mission, if he just cooperates.

Instead he makes two escape attempts, killing people each time.

Dumber decides to kill everybody, including himself, with a giant fusion powered armored train. Because religion. Yeah!

The good, the bad and the ugly

It’s interesting that Banks could manage so successfully to, with only a few characters create a nuanced, interesting view on what impact a post-scarcity technologically mitigated utopia would have on the universe, while failing so wholly to provide the same nuance about religious civilizations occupying the same milieu. On one hand the Culture, its agents, and the mercenaries who occupy its periphery are crafted with loving detail. These are intricate characters with complex inner lives beautifully rendered.

Even the stock tropes (the reluctant spy who must One Last Job during which he discovers camaraderie with his enemies, the smart-ass robot who is too useful to be discarded for his attitude, the decadent space casino, the mystery world)  are done with the loving detail of pinhead’s puzzle box.

And then the Eaters and the Idirans stomp all over chewing scenery and being cartoonishly evil because their religions tell them to. And it makes for a jarring juxtaposition.

I understand this is one of Banks’ early works, and the things he does with the Culture are interesting enough that I’ll probably pick up another of the books in that series in time. It’s fine to be critical of religion in fiction. I am very fond of Pullman. But to treat most characters with such delicacy and then to have a bunch of stock religious zealots crash the party (literally) makes for a disconnect in tone and structure which wounds an otherwise engaging read.

Updates – and a brief review

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Ad Astra

Ok, so first off I’ve got a tentative schedule for my panels at Ad Astra:

• A Merciless Deconstruction of Things that Other People Like: The Panel
• Dystopian YA Cliches
• Fantasy in Translation
• In Defence of the Evil Empire, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Brother
• Late Night Bad Fiction Reading
• Late Night Drunken Gurus
• Late Night Slash Fiction Readings
• New Weird, Spec Fic and Uncanny Literature
• The Shadow Over Lovecraft

This is not a final panel list and is subject to change – but it does give you all a sense of where I’m going to be and what I’m going to be talking about.

I’m especially excited about the Fantasy in Translation panel since, as anybody who reads this blog knows, I’ve got a big thing for translated fantasy books.

SpecFic Colloquium

A reminder that the SpecFic Colloquium is this weekend. And tickets are very limited. So you should buy a ticket. I’ll be there doing my presentation: From Guernica to Gamergate.

And a review

Speaking of the SpecFic Colloquium, the guest of honor this year is Nnedi Okorafor, delivering a presentation titled Resident Alien. 

Recently, by happenstance, I picked up a copy of her book Lagoon and I just have to say… Wow.

I mean Wow.

Where even to begin? Aliens land in the ocean near Lagos where they begin talking to the local marine life, and making changes. They take three humans, seemingly random, a marine biologist, a soldier and a Ghanian rapper and then return them along with an ambassador.

She comes in peace, but Lagos begins tearing itself to pieces around her. And when the old gods of the city become involved everything becomes even more complex.

This is a challenging book. Large passages are written in pidgin English, the PoV changes frequently, some sections are first-person and others third. The objectives and motivations of the aliens are obscure.

But that’s because the aliens are secondary. This is a story about people – and one that attempts to take it all in, the good and the bad, the wrathful and forgiving. This story, with its extreme Christians and secular Muslims in the principal cast, but rumours of Muslim massacres of Christians and Boko Haram around the edges, dripping with the symbolism of old ways not wholly subsumed, and of the universality of spirit that flows through all religion, is difficult to pin down at the best of times.

Lagoon may very well be the most challenging book I’ve read in 2015. And everybody should read it. Okorafor is a masterful author and her story here, which blurs the lines between Science Fiction, Fantasy and Fabulism until they barely exist anymore, is one of the most engaging and original I’ve read in a very long time.

A must for anybody who loved Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, and a strong recommendation for anybody who enjoys literary genre.

This is a good one folks.

SpecFic Colloquium 2015

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March 7 marks the 2015 Toronto SpecFic Colloquium. This yearly event is really significant to me because it was my introduction to the Toronto genre community. Prior to moving to Toronto I’d lived most of my life in Hamilton, London or (later) China. I’d seen commercials on television for Toronto Trek when I was a kid, but was never able to persuade my parents to take me.

And London doesn’t host cons. As a result, even as I began working on my craft, and as I burned through basically the entirety of the London Public Library‘s genre collection, I didn’t know many other genre fans.

When the collapse of 2008 left me without work and with dismal prospects in London, Pam and I decided to take a risk and move to Toronto. We managed to get ourselves established and were relaxing into our life in the big city right around the time the first SpecFic colloquium was getting off the ground.

I googled “Speculative Fiction Events Toronto” one day on a lark, and registered for the colloquium immediately.

It was amazing. And it opened my world to the people who made up the Toronto genre community. Through the wonderful people I met I learned about readings and conventions. I got a chance to meet and socialize with other fans, other authors. This, in turn, let me meet the people with whom I eventually formed a critique group, and eventually, my editor.

I’ve always felt like I owed a bit of a debt to the SpecFic colloquium. Some years I’ve volunteered, manning the registration table or helping set up. Other years I’ve just attended, happy to have a chance to listen to some truly exceptional authors, editors and critics discuss issues of relevance to the genre community.

The guest of honour at this year’s colloquium is the World Fantasy Award winning author,  Nnedi Okorafor, and her participation helps to indicate just how amazing the programming is for this event.

The 2015 SpecFic colloquium also represents another first for me – as it’s the first event I’ve been invited to speak at. I’m incredibly humbled to be included in the company of many authors who I’ve looked up to for the last half-decade, as I’ve learned about this amazing community: people I’ve considered role models and occasional mentors.

I really hope you will join me for this exceptional day. Tickets are available online. See you on March 7.

Fighting ourselves – The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley

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It’s good to see speculative fiction authors playing with gender as a concept within their work. It’s been far too long that The Left Hand of Darkness has been the touchstone for fiction on that topic.

And if the way in which The Mirror Empire explores concepts of gender, gender expression and sexuality were the main thing this book offered I’d still give it a heart-felt recommendation based on that alone.

But it does so much more. And as a result, Kameron Hurley has not just written an eminently recommendable book; she’s also set a very high bar for other books I read this year to reach.

So what is The Mirror Empire? Set in at least two iterations of a world where people draw power from arcane satellites, it’s a fantasy novel full of enough recognizable tropes to allow a reader to feel comfortable. But watch out, it’s a trap! Hurley seems to delight in balancing these tropes with subversions of themselves.

The utopian semi-pacifists who comprise half of the protagonists of the story? They might also be the villains. The genocidal general, seemingly blind to her own monstrosity through her love for her monarch? She might execute a face-heel turn. Or will she?

This book establishes two of many possible worlds, and they are grinding closer and closer together as the portentous Oma rises in the sky, heralding catastrophic change. People blessed with Oma’s power can sometimes open gates between these worlds, and anyone whose double is dead in one world can cross into it.

The first of these worlds is a fantasy continent divided between three main nations. One, a nation of escaped slaves, is egalitarian and isolationist. The other two are various forms of slave state and both are very warlike.

But, as time goes by it becomes increasingly clear that the utopians haven’t always been peace loving, and may have only become slaves as a result of a failed campaign of aggression against their neighbors. Meanwhile, in the other world, they never lost, but their world is dying.

Ultimately this story focuses around a girl from the other world – Lilia. Fearing how her people would use her, her mother sends her away from the dying world and she grows up hidden and unremarked, a servant in a temple.

But as Oma rises, and the need for the newly powerful people who can channel its power becomes pressing, people begin looking for Lilia, wanting to use her for their own various ends.

Nobody stops to consider that she might have her own objectives, and an implacable will to achieve them.

Hurley uses multiple close perspective characters effectively to hide details from the audience, allowing us to learn about her rich world as it unfolds. She’s demonstrated the ability to efficiently build worlds in the Bel Dame Apocrypha and she’s only become more effective at doing so as time goes by.

She also has a talent for injecting humanity into her characters such that you can uncomfortably find yourself actively rooting for monstrous people because you understand both what led them to monstrosity and that what makes them broken doesn’t necessarily make them wrong, all the time.

Bottom line, if you want a fantasy novel that understands its tropes well and applies them deftly enough to subvert them surprisingly, a story with exceptional world building and complex characters, a book that says something interesting about the nature of self, you would be well advised to read this book.