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Review: The Three Body Problem

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The-Three-Body-Problem-Liu-CixinIf you read one Science Fiction book this year, make it the Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu. It is the first book in the Three Body trilogy, and an exceptional starting point for people interested in reading Chinese genre translations.

I really want to get into a thorough exploration of the work, but that’s going to tread into some spoilery territory, so what I’ll do is start with a brief review up top and then include the longer spoiler review at the bottom. I’ll provide ample warning, so if you haven’t read the Three Body Problem and want to be surprised you’ll get plenty of warning.

The non-spoiler review

The Three Body Problem starts with a gut-punch and never lets up from there. And that’s part of what makes this book so exceptional. Chinese fiction, especially, has a different pace and structure from western fiction. As a result, translations of Chinese novels often have issues with pace.

This is not the case here. Ken Liu has tread a very masterful line between preserving the cadence of speech and the structure of the story on one hand, while providing a book that flows correctly in English. If you’re familiar with works translated from Chinese it will still feel like a translation – but it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen, easily on a par with the Shapiro translation of Outlaw of the Marsh, which has long been my gold standard. In fact, Liu’s translation likely exceeds even that one.

The impeccably paced story starts in the throes of one of the most tumultuous periods of the Cultural Revolution, before jumping to the near future. It introduces us to a world populated by scientists an soldiers, plutocrats and police. One scientist, Wang Miao, is recruited to investigate an unusual rash of suicides among theoretical physicists. The extra-governmental cabal that recruits him hints darkly that these deaths are part of an ongoing secret war.

As Wang digs deeper into the mystery his whole world begins to fall apart. And then there is that tantalizing video game…

Themes

Exploring topics including cycles of history, chaos and order, the lasting impact of violence on the psyche of survivors, string theory and first contact, it would be an understatement to say that the Three Body Problem is an ambitious book. However it is not a book in which ambition outstrips ability, and Liu Cixin manages to keep several thematic balls in the air with apparent ease, deftly tying the suggestion  that, “other than Stable Eras, all times are Chaotic Eras,” both to mathematical problems in chaotic systems and to politics.

Madeline Ashby recently discussed how she would like to do away with the idea that there is a binary division between hard and soft SF. I think The Three Body Problem provides a valuable example for why she’s right. This story is a scientifically rigorous story about scientists. And that’s effectively the operating definition for the hardest of the hard SF. And yet this is also a story which is entirely driven by the internal lives of its protagonists (and antagonists), and one which is much more interested in the impact of a cultural movement on the world than the direct impact on technology. These are both hallmarks of soft SF. And being constrained by neither of these binary positions it’s a better novel.

Characters

A few characters stand out: Wang Miao is an interesting protagonist – at times sharp witted and incisive, at other times retreating and confused. We’re invited to empathize with his sense of awe with the circumstances he’s thrust into, his vulnerability in the face of something much bigger than himself, while still being able to understand why he is the central figure for much of the story.

Ye Wenjie is another example of a beautifully complex character. Sometimes a kindly grandmother, other times a stubborn intellectual, always somebody struggling with the remnants of post-traumatic stress that was never allowed to heal, she is the thread that connects the disparate times and themes of the book most closely and is wonderfully rendered.

Shi (Da Shi) Qiang would have been the hero of a lesser work. This morally suspect disgraced soldier and failing cop is a man whose main failing seems to be a total inability to keep his mouth shut. And yet his bluff charm, easy humour and impish ingenuity make him lovable, even when it becomes clear he’s pretty much a total psychopath. Positioning him as a foil to the cerebral Wang Miao helps to establish this story as happening in the world – and gives the story enough dirt under its nails to remove it from what might otherwise seem an ivory tower parlour mystery.

This is about all I can say without venturing into spoiler territory.

So be forewarned.

If you haven’t read the book and want to avoid spoilers turn back now.

The spoiler review

Chaotic systems and cyclical systems

Compare the Trisolarian statement that, “other than Stable Eras, all times are Chaotic Eras” with the thesis of the first Chinese novel, “a kingdom long united must divide, a kingdom long divided must unite,” and we can see a through-line in the idea of history as a cyclical process.

And yet, where Luo Guanzhong saw destiny and inevitability, Liu Cixin instead invites chaos and unpredictability. While it is true that history cycles between periods of relative stability and harmony, and periods of conflict, he proposes, we cannot know when such a period will end, or even the form the conflict will take.

The factional divides within the ETO mirror the previous factional divides in the Red Guard so closely. Both are born of idealism. Both invite the disaffected. Both fall first into fanaticism and then into nihilism and both are ultimately most vulnerable to internal divisions brought about by their own fanaticism.

What lends an air of cyclicality to this is the way in which Ye Wenjie is so effectively demonstrated as a victim of the Cultural Revolution. She watches her father be murdered for refusing to compromise his principles. She watches her mother morph into something she can barely recognize in order to survive. This is a relationship she is never able (or even particularly motivated) to recover. She learns second-hand of her sister’s death but we, as the audience, are given the opportunity to witness this otherwise disconnected event in almost lurid detail: the passion of the believer and the ultimate futility of her death presented in language more poetic than the rest of the book.

She suffers betrayal at the hands of a would-be friend because he is in a position to avoid punishment for daring to have a differing opinion by casting the blame on her. Her refuge is effective a prison overseen by the military – and by the time she arrives there, almost dead, she is more than willing to sign away any vestige of freedom in exchange for nothing more than security.

And so her decision that humanity is incapable of governing itself, and the extreme action she takes to ensure that the Trisolarians are able to discover the location of the earth are understandable as a person in the depths of powerful post-traumatic stress. The world stabilizes around her, but she doesn’t even notice because she’s so wrapped in her own pain.

And yet, the organization that grows out of her actions, the one she becomes the titular commander of (even if not so much in actual function) rapidly falls into the same factional in-fighting and extremism that informed the cultural revolution.

Out of her desire to save humanity from the destruction of its own Chaotic Eras, she sows the seeds for the collapse of the next Stable Era.

Wang Miao, on the other hand, is very much a product of stable times. When we first meet him, he tells a gang of police and generals to get lost, secure that his position of relative wealth and prestige is sufficient to protect him. And it works – they have to plead with him to come to a meeting with them. They can’t just compel cooperation from Wang like previous government forces did from Ye. Furthermore, though he might have been old enough to remember at least the end of the Cultural Revolution, we never learn much at all about what he was doing at that time. It’s the Deng era of opening up and stability that define his experience.

It’s unsurprising he’s reluctant to involve himself in a shadowy conflict when he’s got such a pleasant bourgeois life.

This makes his shock when the world starts twisting into something far weirder all the more intense and poignant.

While Ye, unable to recognize the arrival of peace, and unwilling to accept that the world has stabilized makes a terrible and portentous decision because she can’t accept peace, it is ultimately the idea that the world is descending into chaos that Wang struggles with most.

By the time he’s willingly stringing his monofilament lines across the Panama Canal, watching unflinchingly as it slices a sailor into several pieces, we realize how tenuous our sense of comfort is – how any time the world might descend into chaos.

Shi Qiang presents one final view of how people relate to chaos and stability. He’s not broken by chaos like Ye, nor must he learn to adapt like Wang. Rather he thrives off chaos.

This “demon” laughs, teases and boozes his way through situations that leave the people around him reeling. It’s Shi who sees something fishy in the “miracles” sent to confound Wang, Shi who suggests using Wang’s monofilament to take the Adventist base and  he expresses no remorse either at the deaths of all the Adventists, or of the limited civilian casualties the plan will cause. He even suggests attacking during the day to minimize the risk that sleeping Adventists might survive.

When the Trisolarians send their final message to Earth, declaring everyone there insects, Ye goes to watch the sun set on Humanity in the place where she doomed it. Wang descends into depression. And Qiang leads his allies to a town afflicted by locusts.

He points out that the locusts might be as beneath humans as the humans appear to be beneath Trisolarians. But the locusts still thrive, despite everything humanity does. Even though humans never had to deal with the madness of living on a planet in a trinary star system, adapting is something we’re adept at. Shi Qiang invites chaos. It’s his constant ally.

Science in the Three Body Problem

There are a few interesting branches of science discussed or extrapolated from in the Three Body Problem. Since it is science fiction I figured I should at least touch on them.

 The Three Body Problem

The titular problem is a classical physics dilemma. While two bodies act on each other in a predictable fashion, they move toward each other unless acted upon by an outside force, introducing a third body causes the system to become chaotic.

The near impossibility of the task occupies much of the Three Body game segments of the story – as Wang learns the history of the Trisolarian attempt to chart the behavior of their solar system sufficiently to be able to survive its Chaotic Eras and maximize its Stable Eras.

There’s also multiple instances of factions divided into threes within the book: Battle Command, the ETO and the Trisolarians for example, or within the ETO, the Adventists, Redemptionists and Survivalists. These allow this classical problem to both serve as a metaphor for the conflicts of disparate groups, and to be reflected by the chaotic actions of the various factions.

A solar antenna

I’m not certain how fantastical this is. But Liu’s description of Ye Wenjie using the sun as a supermassive antenna for trans-solar transmission is really cool. It made me want to learn more.

String theory

I’m still not entirely sold on string theory. It remains resistant to experimental verification and isn’t parsimonious. That said, the Trisolarian plot depends on unfolding protons from 11 dimensional string theoretical complexity into 2 dimensions in order to create proton-sized artificial intelligences. This leads to one of the most beautifully abstract areas of the text, which I loved every moment.

Nanotube Monofilament

These things are starting to exist in the real world. How long before we get Wang Miao’s weaponized version?

Wrap-up

The Three Body Problem is a tour de force of speculative fiction. It fluctuates frequently between wonder, humour and despair. Ultimately this is a story about how people break, and it breaks its protagonists beautifully. And yet, for all their brokenness it ends on a bitter note of hope.

This, when you consider the scope of Chinese fiction over the last 500 years, positions the story beautifully in the context of its antecedents.

If you regularly read translated SF you’ve probably already put the Three Body Problem on your to-read list.

If you don’t, this book is a perfect place to start, beautifully written and beautifully translated.

In praise of translated works

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Click here to access the publisher’s page.

I’ve been thinking about translated books a lot lately. There’s a few reasons for this. First, and foremost, is because the book I’ve most anxiously awaited this year is The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu. It’s currently sitting at the top of my to-read pile. I will write about it more in detail after I’ve, you know, read it.

The second reason is as part of the ongoing discussion of privilege within the genre community. Our understanding of what is normative is so closely tied to that issue, and comes across in the media we consume.

And, finally, I just really happen to like a lot of translated literature and, as part of my own personal process of fannishness I think about this stuff.

Cultural exchange and normativeness

I’ve been thinking a lot about privilege this year. I mean, if you’re a decent person and you haven’t been living in a cave it’s kind of hard not to. There’s been a massive cultural transformation going on in various media sectors for the last few years. As any major shift in culture it has led to some substantial tensions which have largely flared up in circumstances like the WFA trophy controversy and Gamergate.

Of course, there’s also been the controversy surrounding Jian Ghomeshi, who surrendered to police and was charged with five counts as part of a serious collection of sex assault accusations. And there have been several situations in the United States, the latest and one of the most egregious being the refusal of a grand jury to bring Darren Wilson to trial for shooting an unarmed teenager twelve times, killing the boy basically just because he had dark skin.

If you’re a white middle-class male in a wealthy country you probably should be examining your own privilege.

Now I like to think that my parents raised me right. I’ve always been open and accepting of people in all their diversity. But here’s the thing, and it’s something I’ve really tried to confront in my own life lately, privilege goes beyond whether or not you act like a bigot. Because you can control that. I can choose not to be an asshole. But I can’t choose not to be a white man. And being a white man gives me the opportunity to be seen as normal.

It’s the assumption that boys won’t engage female protagonists but girls will engage males.

It’s the assumption that your video game avatar is going to be a tough-looking white dude with blue eyes and short brown hair. Even if you can change your avatar to look more like yourself, they will not be standard, they won’t be the face on the box.

It’s the ability to walk through a crowd without being shouted at, to be invisible and ignored if you want to be.

It’s the ability to not be judged for how you dress, for what you eat, for how you sound.

It’s the assumption that your opinion will be listened to.

And I can’t turn any of that stuff off. It’s not stuff I control. At least not directly. This stuff is culturally coded.

Now in sociology there’s a core concept called “material culture” – simply put, material culture is the parts of culture we can see, touch, interact with. It’s our food, our toys, our books, our music. And to certain schools of sociology almost all of our culture is coded in material culture.

But of course, cultures don’t exist in a vacuum – despite our compartmentalized mythology, masquerading as history, they never have (though that’s a rant for another day).

Cultures interface with each other all the time. They export bits of themselves. They import things from other cultures. Thinkers from one place talk to thinkers in another place. Early Buddhists in India and Nepal traveled to China, met Taoists, formed ch’an. More controversially they probably encountered Hebrew culture (either via the Persians or in the aftermath of the Macedonian conquest) and may very well have helped influence the development of Christianity (records for that are much spottier, we know the Buddhists got as far as Afghanistan, and were influential enough there to build monumental structures, and the roads through Afghanistan eventually made their way back to the Mediterranean, and there are a lot of similarities in doctrine and dressing between early Christianity and Buddhism, but a lot of that is circumstantial at best).

But the English speaking world has, for the last three centuries or so, been AWFUL about resisting the import of culture. This grew out of imperial attitudes of both the British Empire and American manifest destiny. It led to the creation of things such as “illegal immigration,” which didn’t really exist as a concept until the 1800s. On a more recent front it has made native English speakers much more likely to be monolingual than native speakers of other languages. And we don’t consume media from other cultures very often either.

Horace Engdahl famously despaired that Americans ” don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature” he called this ignorance and said it was restraining.

Now, to be entirely fair, I don’t agree with even half of what Engdahl says. He enjoys courting controversy and frequently posits opinions that are difficult to say the least. But, on this, I think he’s right. And it’s not just the Americans. It’s English Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand too.

We don’t read translations. We buy books from American and British publishing houses, written in English, by native English speakers. Mostly white. Mostly men. And this reinforces our view of the world – that white, English speaking, men are the default.

We buy fantasy stories and every one is set in a thinly veiled England. Hell, Westeros even LOOKS like England. We buy science fiction stories and they’re populated entirely by space Americans. Think about that for a second, our fiction of the fantastic is bound into our cultural context to the point where the best other cultures can often hope to have within them is a position of respected Other. Never the hero. Never the focus.

The arrow of causation on this doesn’t point just one direction. We consume media that reinforces our ideas of normativeness, and those in turn strengthen the subconscious idea we have that this is normal.

So how can we begin to break this cycle?

Learn about somebody else’s normal.

Now it’s not a perfect process. The market for translated literature is small and the selection is limited. Generally you’ll only find works if they:

  1. have a large fanbase to either provide a financial incentive for translation or to do the grunt-work of translation for free
  2. have a significance to canon (IE: were highly influential to later works or won international awards).
  3. are from cultures with either current or historical global power.

As a result you’re much more likely to find books translated from Latin, Greek, German, French and Chinese than from !Kung or Hungarian. You’re also much more likely to find OLD literature than new.

 

Soul Mountain

Seriously, go read Soul Mountain, right now if you haven’t yet. It’s just brilliant.

Hell, I seek out translated work, and I’ve probably read a dozen Plato, Aurileus or Confucius age works and half a dozen of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s vintage for every one Gao Xingjian. And partially that’s down to availability. It’s just not that often you run across something published in the last 30 years translated into English.

But translated books give you a valuable gift. They give you a chance to experience somebody else’s expectations of what constitutes normal, without having to take the time and effort to become literate in other languages to the point you can manage their literature. It gives you a chance also to see what other cultures consider fantastical.

And this gives us a paradoxical understanding both of the beautiful diversity of the world and its fundamental humanity.

It’s NOT a magic bullet

Fixing the privilege problem, if it can happen at all, isn’t going to happen overnight, and it isn’t going to happen just by watching fansubs of anime and reading the Witcher books while listening to Mongolian throat singing. Consuming culture is not the same as engaging it.

But it teaches a valuable skill. If we immerse ourselves in worlds from outside our privileged bubble we can learn a bit about the experiences of the people we’ve spent the last three centuries othering.

We can read to prime ourselves to listen. And if we learn to start sincerely listening to diverse voices, not just in our media but in our daily lives, maybe we can eventually make some progress toward a more equitable world.

At least I hope so. Because I don’t want my daughter to have to grow up in the one we’ve got right now.

No, Amazon isn’t doing the world any favours

/ Simon / 1 Comment

stupidburnsA rebuttal to Matthew Yglesias

I haven’t written here in a while. That’s largely for three reasons. 1) My wife was pregnant and I was spending a lot of time just figuring out how to Dad. That process is ongoing now that my daughter is out in the world, but it was kind of a big deal around here. 2) There was also the most fraught municipal election in the history of the amalgamated city of Toronto going on basically for the last six months. Being a municipal politics nerd (yes, that’s a thing) I was a bit preoccupied by that. 3) The ongoing culture wars in genre were becoming exhausting to write about. Seriously, this particular SJW just needed a break from fighting in that battle because it’s a neverending cavalcade of misogyny, homophobia and racism that we seem to be dealing with. The Gamergaters and their ilk need to go away, and never come back. But, hey, The Amazon / Hachette thing is making the rounds of authorly social media once again and this article on Vox is just about the dumbest defense of Amazon I’ve ever read! That has almost nothing to do with the culture wars, but I can still get a chance to dust off the old snark. I’ll rebut it point by point.

Yes, publishing is big business, so what?

I’m not going to waste too many words on the first point because it’s a straw man argument plain and simple. There’s nobody sane criticizing Amazon because major publishers are mom and pops. Everybody even tangentially connected to publishing knows otherwise. This is simply not a significant part of the argument .

Amazon having competitors doesn’t mean it doesn’t have monopsony powers

Paul Krugman’s argument that Amazon, as the main buyer of goods, has the ability to manipulate the market as a monopsony is actually a very strong one, and more correct than those who have argued that Amazon is effectively a monopoly.

After all, Amazon HAS driven down prices. In fact, the opening volley of open conflict between the big four and Amazon happened when the big four (then five but there was a merger afterward) colluded with Apple in an effort to slow Amazon’s race to the bottom on book prices.

So, yeah, the big four tried to threaten to withdraw their products from Amazon if it didn’t stop pricing them into the ground. Amazon’s response was to cry to the courts that Apple was being unfair. Amazon derives its power in the market from being the dominant buyer and reselling the product, often at a loss, in order to grow at the expense of other companies. It’s a little bit insane, and it’s bad for the market in the long run.

And now for the obligatory self-publishing-or-bust section

I’ll lay this out simply: Every author needs an editor, cover art and marketing. Some authors are very good editors. They still need an editor. You just can’t edit your own work as well as another person can. You can’t. You’re too close. You miss things. Hell your brain infers details that aren’t on the page. And I’m talking both macro-level stuff (the setting looked fine in my head) and grammar level stuff (typed teh, never noticed even during proofing). Not every author can afford to hire an editor. Few authors are also cover artists. Many authors have day-jobs and don’t have time for the day job plus writing their books plus marketing their books, even if they know how. Some writers are not marketers by nature.

If you get rid of publishers you’ll turn writing into an art reserved for the wealthy and the deluded. I’d rather not see that.

Some publishers not being good marketers doesn’t make what Amazon does right

That much stands on its own. But furthermore books are more like commodities than you care to suggest. With the exception of a small cadre of “name” authors and the very different academic press market (which has its own set of pricing problems completely separate from Amazon’s) authors are sadly interchangeable. For the most part, for the mid list authors, their books get sold or some other similar authors books get sold instead and no consumer is likely to get too concerned. They want to read horror. If they can’t find horror book A they’ll find horror book B.

Frankly 99% of the working authors out there aren’t George R.R. Martin. If they don’t sell their books everywhere books can be sold they don’t get to influence the market. Instead they just lose money.

And, as I mentioned, some authors have no time to market their books. Even shabby marketing is better than absent marketing.

And what about authors who have no inclination to marketing? Should they just be excluded from their art? Honestly, there’s a deeply problematic misunderstanding of the lifestyle of the author in this section.

Advances are business, so what?

Yes, an advance isn’t a charitable contribution. Again arguing this is a strawman. Advances are more akin to futures stocks than to charity. A publisher is gambling that the future earnings of a book will be greater than the outset of cost for the advance on the book.

In exchange authors who dependably move copy get a slightly more stable income. It’s actually kind of win-win. And frankly it is NOT a loan. So to suggest that authors should take on debt (whether or not they can) to live while they wait for their royalties to roll on in is perverse.

Cheap books aren’t necessarily good for anybody

Amazon’s manipulation of the market does drive down costs for consumers. But books weren’t that expensive to begin with. I mean seriously, I read more than most consumers, and I buy print frequently. I buy hardcover and trade paperbacks when I buy print almost exclusively – IE: the expensive options – and you know what? \

It’s not an expensive hobby.

I don’t need to pay pennies for my four books a month, and most consumers can afford their one or two even at $10 for an e-book.

Yes, publishers profit from book prices. So what? They’re a business. We covered that at the top.

Authors ALSO profit from book prices. How do you think publishers can afford to gamble $50,000 or more on an unknown product that might or might not pay off? They do it through scale. It’s a sad truth big publishers can afford big advances. Small presses, as much as I love them (and I DO love small presses) can’t afford big advances.

Amazon’s reckless growth without profit model is harmful to everybody. It hurts publishers, it hurts authors, it hurts competing distributors and ultimately it hurts consumers.

Because when the choices remaining are un-edited and un-curated chaff and the vanity projects of the wealthy consumers will find their options for alternatives extinct.

99 little bugs in the code

/ Simon / 1 Comment

99 little bugs.
Take one down, patch it around…

127 little bugs in the code.

I really hope it doesn’t go that way. I just sent off the latest draft of the Black Trillium to my editor. There are few experiences more nerve wracking. I’m just going to be over here… Not-drinking because I’m still at work.

Did Disney Listen?

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Starwars.com reported today that Lupita Nyong’o and Gwendoline Christie have been added to the cast of Episode VII.

If they wanted to quell concerns regarding the dearth of people of colour and women in their initial casting announcements there are very few people who would be better choices.

Between Nyong’o’s academy award for Twelve Years a Slave, and Christie’s performance as Brienne of Tarth on Game of Thrones, these two women could signal an actual commitment to presenting a universe much broader in scope than we feared on May Fifth.

Now the question remains whether they will be given roles of substance. For one, I am hopeful that this casting choice reflects Disney genuinely listening to criticism from the fanbase and endeavoring to improve. Because it would be nearly as bad to have Nyong’o and Christie in this movie, relegated to background as to not have them at all.

What he said

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I’ve been banging my head against a bit of a wall in some fandom related discussions for the last few days. Was planning on writing yet another longish piece about prejudicial behaviour and why it needs to stop.

But then I saw this piece from Jim Hines that quite effectively encapsulates everything I really needed to add and hadn’t added in my last post on this topic. So I’m just going to leave it here and say, yeah, what he said.

Oh, with one addition, “But Bob always tries to be colour-blind” doesn’t mean Bob isn’t behaving prejudicially. Colour-blindness would oppose affirmative action programs; and yet affirmative action is a good tool for fighting racism.

Edit: Check out Angry Astronomer’s blog for more details if you’re interested.

Yes, Racism is Still a Problem in SFF

/ Simon / 3 Comments

I’m feeling pretty ill today – a weekend long bout of insomnia culminated in me not getting a wink of sleep pretty much at all last night and I’m in a foul mood. As such, fair warning, but there’s going to be some snark in this post and, unlike yesterday, probably very few extended tongue-in-cheek Shakespeare allusions.

I made the mistake of blundering down the rabbit hole of comments sections on SFF Fandom blogs last night and this morning. What I found sickened me. There’s big problems with discussions of race, ethnicity and, yes, racism in SFF. And what’s more, it’s not just restricted to certain well known agitators with pseudonyms that rhyme with Smocks Smay.

 Down the Rabbit Hole

My first mistake was reading into the comments of an article talking about the recent departure from SFWA of John C. Wright. I know, I know, don’t read the comments. Never read the comments! But I couldn’t help myself. Things took a turn for the surreal when Wright himself appeared in the comments thread and accused another person in the comments of being one of the Pod People from “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and speaking in “Newspeak” because of that person’s membership in ” a faction known as Political Correctness.”

Now, a note, this particular conversation had nothing to do with race. It largely centered around Wright’s characterization of SFWA when he said: “Instead of men who treat each other with professionalism and respect, I find a mob of perpetually outraged gray-haired juveniles.”

So, yeah, it was a gender thing. And the gender thing is also a huge thing. But if this particular privileged white male is going to take jabs at the community when it gets sexist, I have an equal obligation to point out the racism I am becoming increasingly aware of, and uncomfortable with, within fandom.

Swarthy Cult-Fiends and Sallow Easterlings

In some ways one of the most difficult realizations of my early adulthood was recognizing the racism inherent in some of my favorite authors – notably H.P. Lovecraft (who was REALLY concerned with ideas of racial purity as demonstrable by “The Shadow over Innsmouth”) and J.R.R. Tolkien, who created a war in which tall, heroic, white (in the case of the Elves, super-white) people fought a war against sallow Easterners and dark orcs.

As time goes by it becomes more difficult for me to ignore the tones of yellow peril implicit in that construction.

But, even though these two authors probably did more to shape fantasy and horror than any others in the twentieth century, it’s easy for us to put them firmly in the past. Sure, there are race issues in those old books. But that was the time and it’s not like we’re racist. Right? Right?

The Yellow Peril Never Went Away

And yet, there exists, in print, a long series of novels set in a future wherein China has overrun the world. Africans have been exterminated by the heavily othered Chinese conquerors and Europeans are forced to integrate or face expulsion into a stygian hellscape of cannibalism and darkness.

Though lip-service is paid to putting antagonists and protagonists on both sides of this sprawling series of novels, it is made abundantly clear that the European characters stand in for change and dynamism. The Chinese characters for stasis and tradition.

In the first volume of this series, the author wrote an afterword in which he stated that his decision to use the laughably outmoded and inaccurate Wade-Giles transcription for the Mandarin speakers in the novel over the much more accurate Pinyin transliteration was because he found the former “far more elegant” to the latter which he refers to as having “harder forms”.

It’s worth noting that Pinyin was developed by Chinese people for the transcription of Mandarin in the second half of the 20th century, while Wade-Giles was the product of a British diplomat who served as part of the diplomatic corps to China during the Second Opium War.

This series is an especially egregious example, but let’s face it. Despite the high-minded rhetoric of exploring the bounds of the future many SFF narratives boil down to the same sad story.

The others are coming.

They have no cause to love us.

They will destroy what we hold dear.

Because they think differently from us.

And no two ideologies can ever exist side by side in peace.

(Note: I’m not calling all of these racist. However each of these examples depends upon an enemy who is entirely other and effectively uniformly antagonistic. There are many, many more.)

 Back to the Rabbit Hole

But this all serves mainly to contextualize my thoughts when I continued down the rabbit hole. Because I did a bunch more clicking, and a bunch more comment reading, and then I found this gem:

These two vast, {India and China} ancient societies withstood the centuries by keeping down innovation, so life was much the same from one millennium to the next. Centuries slid by with little to mark them beyond the feuding of maharajahs.

The evidence given for this sweeping generalization was a highly simplistic interpretation of the dismantling of the treasure fleet of Zheng He.

One could just as easily say of Europe that this vast, continent spanning and ancient society withstood the centuries by keeping down innovation through the application of religious persecution. After all, look at the Spanish Inquisition.

This view disregards that there were progressive and conservative governments in China and in India over the five thousand years of their recorded history. It disregards the Chinese invention of the compass (~1040 AD), gunpowder (9th century AD), the printing press (~220 AD) and paper (8 BC). It disregards the advanced state of classical Indian mathematics (the use of Zero, the development of Brahmagupta’s theorem, and a host of others). It is based on a Eurocentric view of the decadent east that has more to do with the effective deployment of European military power in Asia during the colonial period than anything legitimately from the history of either place.

One of the two authors of this work has also been criticized for writing a novel in which the protagonist, a woman of colour, “has inherited a mistrust of Afrocentrism, a profound and much-rehearsed disbelief in the significance of racism in shaping her career, and a deleterious approach to the various tokenistic women’s and minorities’ committees and functions that bedevil her academic life. ”

This, to me, reads altogether too much as, “there’s no racism here, and anybody who says otherwise is just one of those free-speech suppressing PC Pod People.”

I’ve written before here about the need to treat art as operating within the context of both the creator and of current culture. If our art is created by a person who, on one hand, advances a narrative that places an Eastern other as inferior to a progressive West; if that person then creates a protagonist who appears to exist to challenge the validity of affirmative action and to push forward the hackneyed belief that we live in a post-racial world, we should look at the latter through the lens of the former.

The only reason that we live in a world where racism isn’t as powerful as it was fifty years ago is because of fifty years of hard-fought battles and hard-won victories. Leaving the battle half-way to won and declaring racism is over doesn’t make it so.

There’s a huge debate about the place of politics in SFF right now.  A lot of it is predicated on a disagreement about the difference between free speech and consequence free speech.

More than a few people in Fandom would be happy for the debate to go away. After all, we want license to love the things we love. There is nothing harder than to look at something as dearly loved as the Lord of the Rings and to admit it has a race problem. This doesn’t mean that these individuals in Fandom are racist; it does mean that they would rather not feel forced to examine the racism that exists within the field. Doing so would invariably interfere with them loving the things they love. I still like reading Lovecraft (well, some Lovecraft) even though I know how truly disgusting his views are. I have to live with that – and it does interfere with my own comfort with those parts of my own fannishness.

I still like Star Wars.

But I like to think that the aspiration of the SFF community is to BE the future; to uphold an example of a better possible world. We do live in a more pluralistic world than fifty years ago. And Roddenberry was a part of that – SFF was a part of that. But we shouldn’t stop. We shouldn’t allow the conservatism of progressing age to distract us from the angels of our better nature. We have to improve ourselves. And self-improvement can be painful.

May the Fourth be With You – But also some hard truths

/ Simon / 1 Comment

May the 4th be with you

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s been a lot of discussion regarding the Star Wars casting announcement recently. Adam Shaftoe has an excellent take on the issue over at Page of Reviews, and for something a little more light-hearted check out Max Gladstone’s blog.

I grew up with Star Wars. When I was four I used to un-ironically introduce myself to strangers as “Luke.” (I left the Skywalker part with the baffling innocence of children, leading to much consternation for my parents who had to explain that I was actually named Simon.)

When the new trilogy came out I was even more forgiving than most. After camping out for hours to buy tickets for Phantom Menace I was disappointed. I was uncomfortable with the broad racial stereotypes of the Trade Federation and the Gungans, but, even at the age of 20 I was willing to give George Lucas a pass “just this once,” because Star Wars.

As such, I feel a bit like Marc Anthony when I say that I’m very disheartened about what the recent news coming out of the new trilogy reveals.

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The recent casting announcement included a grand total of two women (one new and one returning) and one person of color. On the other hand we see a lot of old white guys.

There are all kinds of reasons, from the perspective of culture and politics why this is disheartening. And Adam addressed those perfectly so I’ll leave that for now. But there’s another reason that I’m concerned with this casting choice.

It’s just bad storytelling.

The excuse I heard first to excuse the cultural and political concerns (and it took all of a picosecond for this excuse to rear its head on my Facebook wall) was that Star Wars is not set in this world. There are different rules for the Galaxy Far Far Away than there are for Earth. Perhaps the birth rate of women is just much lower. Perhaps the human-analogue species of Star Wars displays substantially reduced melanistic diversity and consequently people of colour are rarer too.

That’s grade A bullshit right there.

The fact of the matter is that Star Wars is a story created on earth by humans on earth and for humans on earth. Building characters is a deliberate process, and the choices we make about the characters we build always reflects some element of OUR world and our place in it.

Kameron Hurley knocked the ball out of the park with her article ‘We Have Always Fought‘ – which is currently nominated for the Hugo for Best Reated Work. I would like to strongly encourage anybody eligible to vote in the Hugo Awards to cast their vote for this article. It’s simply the best work of critical analysis I’ve seen specific to genre to the last decade.

Hurley’s argument, and it’s an exceptionally good one, is that our expectations regarding history are shaped by the narratives we create surrounding it.

Applying this to Star Wars, J.J. Abrams’ decision to return to 1980s style tokenism in Star Wars casting is structuring a narrative which isn’t reflective of the reality of modern western culture (which has become substantially more pluralistic and diverse over the intervening twenty years) and which frames a narrative strongly in line with the “history is made by white men” model.

This isn’t just bad politics. It’s bad storytelling.

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones

Of course, there’s another problem. And that problem is J.J.’s marketing strategy. It’s possible that Star Wars will pass both the Bechdel and Mako standards with flying colours.

Really JJ?

Possible, but not very likely.

However we’ll probably never know until the film comes out, because of the god-damn mystery box. The same insufferable, click-baitey, pretentious marketing strategy that refused to admit that the antagonist in a Wrath of Khan remake was going to bee freaking Khan!

While Godzilla provides trailers and clips that let us know the broad strokes of the plot structure (that Godzilla will be called upon to fight other Kaiiju, that the movie will be a reflection upon the arrogance of humanity to believe we are the masters of nature), while Marvel lets us in on enough juicy tidbits of their films to build excitement for gambles like Guardians of the Galaxy, J.J. hides everything behind a wall of secrecy. He insists on details as simple as the names of characters counts as “spoilers.”

And so we only have his past work to fall back on for details. ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness’ white-washed the primary antagonist, turning him into a white British man. It did THAT (above and to the right) to Carol Marcus. It turned Kirk, Spock and Uhura into broad caricatures of their original series roles and it wrapped up this in a story that made no logical sense.

J.J. Abrams failed to understand Star Trek. He was tone deaf to what the Star Trek story meant. He was unable to understand what the story of ‘Wrath of Khan’ meant, for that matter.

We have his word that he is a fan of Star Wars. And, who knows, perhaps he’ll at least understand Star Wars. But with his childish insistence on secrecy we won’t know until it’s far too late.

You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him?

In some ways George Lucas got very lucky with Star Wars. It was the right film at the right time to inspire a lot of people. It became a touchstone for imaginative adventure for a generation and without it cinema would be a very different place.

Because of this, it’s very easy to give Star Wars a pass. We want license to love the things we love. And a lot of people love Star Wars; and not without reason.

But the truth is that we should also have the courage to say when the ambition of the things we love out-steps their value. We should have the conviction to call out the things we love when the falter and fail. And ultimately, though I hope it isn’t necessary, it may be necessary to put a knife into some of the things we loved in recognition that, regardless of what they once did they now cause more harm than good.

And if it comes to that, I know how I’ll eulogize Star Wars.

My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Amazon, Books and Bubbles

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Sad AmazonAccording to Melville House the investment luster is wearing off of the never-make-a-profit elephant in the room of publishing, Amazon.

The thing with Amazon is that it made a decision early on to forego profits in exchange for continuous, rapid growth.

You know what else grows and grows without deriving any benefit for its hosts? Cancer.

Ok, I know, that was an easy shot, but with the recent closure of the World’s Biggest Bookstore I’m in a grouchy mood. World’s Biggest was just about the original big-box bookstore. And it’s not the only large bookstore closing its doors in Toronto. If even big boxes can’t survive in a post-Amazon world that bodes poorly for anybody who ever wanted to walk into a bookstore, browse for an hour and come out blinking in the sun with an unfamiliar book.

This quarter Amazon reported a profit of $108 million; but off a revenue of $20 billion that’s well below where any other company of its size would be expected to be. And Amazon is poised to lose as much as $455 million next quarter. But they’ll continue growing!

Investors have been willing to allow this mass expansion for a long while. Now they’re finally departing, and investor reluctance over Amazon has splattered over onto other major online ventures like Netflix and the big-three of social networking.

Frankly, a lot of these companies may be over-valued. The behaviour of Facebook and LinkedIn post-IPO surely points to that. But here’s the thing, Wall Street has long gambled that Amazon will eventually have All-The-Market and will thus be able to return them All-The-Money (or at least all the money in he lucrative selling physical objects or their electronic reproductions to people market).

This reckless backing has done massive damage to the book market. It was the death of Borders and Barnes and Nobles. In Canada it led Chapters Indigo to downsize its operations and to aggressively pursue integration with Kobo.

Other writers are concentrating on the risk that Amazon’s change in fortunes might pose for the tech sector – warning signs indicate it might perforate the wall of the new tech bubble. As much as I don’t want to see Netflix go the way of Pets.com, this isn’t my core concern.

What worries me is not what damage might be done by slowing Amazon’s growth, by investors forcing a change in practice where the giant is required to make a profit (you know, by doing something shocking like raising the price of books to something near what they’re worth).

What worries me instead is the damage done.

Heady investors gambled on the idea that they could promote a monopoly with Amazon. They’ve very nearly got what they wished for. And it gutted an entire industry. Melville House points out that Amazon is very likely in the “too big to fail” category of business now (and how I wish that was a concept that we could expunge from our collective consciousness). But while I can’t count on Amazon to be allowed to collapse under the weight of its own hubris, I can hope for a receding Amazon – an Amazon that doesn’t undercut the very publishers whose books it sells.

And I can hope that this will be yet another cautionary tale about the toxic nature of an economy built on the backs of naked gambling, devoid of care for the end products, the users or the content creators.

Ye Olde Blog Hop

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Mutation you say?

Mutation you say?

Last Friday, Adam Shaftoe tagged me in a Blog Hop. Basically it’s like a chain letter for writers but with the added benefit of mutation (sweet, sweet mutation). In a nutshell, each author writes a blog answering four writing related questions and then tags three other authors. The author doing the tagging then composes four new questions which those authors answer before tagging their own.

Since Adam was so kind as to make me his next victim in this literary ponzi scheme… er… I mean willing participant in this important literary endeavor, here are my questions:

1 – If you could time travel and steal somebody else’s novel/short story/film for yourself, what would it be?

Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Some things are just so perfect at being what they set out to be that they can’t be bested. There has never been a better novel on the topic of revenge than this one. Later works, like my least-favourite Tarantino film, poked at the idea of revenge as a cyclical process in order to explore the moral complexity of their protagonists.

However they were infants fumbling in the dark next to Dumas, who builds us up for the whole novel to cheer for Edmond Dantès as a moral avenger. Then, in the final meeting with Valentine and Maximilien, everything we thought we knew is thrown subtly into doubt.

The book is both a work of bold action, and simultaneously a subtle and incisive look into the hearts of its principals.

2 – What writing sin do you actively have to struggle against in your own work?

Laziness disguised as efficiency. I’m a fan of Hemmingway and generally try to put the minimum number of words on the page necessary to communicate what I find important. This, unfortunately, frequently helps to disguise my laziness when I write 2,000 words to communicate what should have taken 10,000 words.

3 – Pick three writers, past or present, that you would want to have dinner with. Why those writers?

Jin Yong – He is one of the greatest living authors in the world and possibly my one most significant influence. His stories shaped the literary landscape of a whole freaking continent, and together with a few of his peers he launched a whole literary movement. I would like to think I could learn a lot from him.

Ernest Hemingway – The true master of craft. But beyond that, Hemingway lived a truly interesting and varied life. He was a complicated man who carried many troubles until his untimely death, but I think, especially a few beverages in, he’d probably be an amazing person to just have a conversation with.

Ursula K. Le Guin – Earthsea was another huge influence on me as a writer. In addition to one of the best fantasy series ever written, Le Guin is also one of my top-three favorite Science Fiction authors of all time. I’d be honored to be able to sit at a table with her.

4 – You have forty-two words, write a story.

It was hot south of the river. He’d come looking for work. It’d been a con. Slavers. What they’d really offered were chains. He’d done for them. Now he squatted in the dirt and wondered where his next meal would come from.

Ha! And I bet you thought I was going to go all Douglas Adams on you.

Next up I’m tagging David Blackwood, Hugh A.D. Spencer, and Charlotte Ashley.