First President!

So if in 100 years' time Europe is a single unified country and a major world superpower, are European kids going to learn in school that Herman Van Rompuy was their country's first president? Or will he be more a Peyton Randolph sort of figure - the first president of the Continental Congress in what would become the USA, who no one remembers?

35 Amazing Science Fair Projects!

Today, a lesson in contextualizing: 35 Amazing Science Fair Projects!

Now, I'm not going to pass judgement on any specific one of these fine science fair presentations. But I'm going to say that I strongly, strongly suspect that this set of thirty-five contains a mixture of sincere projects and deliberate jokes. (My fiancee says there's unmistakable signs of Photoshopping in at least one of the photos.) What's more, I suspect the deliberate attempts to be funny tend to be arranged near the top of the page, and the sincere attempts at a science fair project are clustered near the bottom.

This means that if you look at these sequentially, by the time you reach the kid concerned about the horniness of his/her mom's feet, you're already looking for signs of Photoshopping in case it's been manipulated, and you're trying to figure out the original context in case it hasn't been changed but was meant as a joke all along.

These kids - the ones who meant it sincerely - are going to have their hard work scrutinized by legions of Internet wankers who would have simply giggled and moved on if they'd come across their project in the context of, say, FailBlog. Poor kids.

Advertising hate

Maine's Question 1, which repeals the state's legalization of same-sex marriage earlier this year has passed by a small margin. That makes me very unhappy. I expected it to be defeated.

I can respectfully agree to disagree with people who disapprove of homosexuality for religious reasons. And I've come across secular arguments against same-sex marriage that are intelligent enough to make me think, even if I don't agree with them.

But from my perch here halfway around the world in Taiwan, I hear from the media and my parents that Mainers have been subjected over the past month to all sorts of nonsensical hatred via their TVs and radios, warning them of emboldened queers coming up from out of state to prey on Maine's schoolchildren.

Now, I can't read the mind and look into the heart of every Mainer who voted "yes" on 1. I don't honestly know what influenced them. But if Question 1 had to pass, why did it have to pass following such an offensive "yes on 1" campaign? I hate the idea that someone might think this kind of ad campaign has been validated.

On my fantasy wish-list for humanity, I think I'd like to propose a "no hate-spewing political ads" rule, whereby every political action organization across the political spectrum agrees that political advertisements that encourage hatred against a segment of society cannot possibly do good. Want people to repeal gays' right to get married? By all means you can run TV spots advocating your position, but you gotta do exactly that: advocate your position. Don't feature ominous music and dark lighting to make viewers afraid of the vile faggot lurking round the corner, waiting to pounce on and seduce some pure-hearted straight children.

Sure, scaring voters may be a more effective use of dollars (AAAH! GAYS!). But if my fantasy wish-list came true, we'd all realize that it's bad for society. It increases public ambient hate and distrust. Some people might actually think the ads are real.

This applies across the political spectrum. If some extremely misguided gay rights group decided to make an ad that depicted conservative Protestants and Catholics and Mormons as threats to the well-being of same-sex couples, and used all the standard advertising tricks to make the viewer afraid of the hypothetical hate-filled religious person who could be living right next door, that ad would help us all to hate one another just a little bit more. It wouldn't do a bit of good to anyone.

There's too much ambient hate out there. If you use the powers of TV and radio to stoke it and encourage it to grow, you're just making things worse for everyone - and shaming whatever your cause happens to be.

Labels

Apparently November 18 is International Science Fiction Reshelving Day.

Join us this November in a new and unique celebration of science fiction and fantasy literature. Many books from our fine genre are regularly placed in the wrong section of bookstores. This not only hides the books from us, but it prevents readers of those books from discovering the rich tradition to which they belong.

On November 18th that changes. We will go to bookstores around the world and move science fiction and fantasy books from wherever they might be to their proper place in the “Science Fiction” section. We hope that this quiet act of protest will raise awareness of this problem and inspire new readers to explore our thought-provoking genre.

It's on November 18th because that's Margaret Atwood's birthday, as she's the author to claim most infamously that her work isn't SF even though much of it obviously is (most notably The Handmaid's Tale). The probable reason is that she doesn't want to be pigeonholed into what many perceive as a literary ghetto.

I suppose I can try to muster up some small amount of sympathy for her, by assuming she wants people to see her in particular literary tradition rather than another. If you write General Fiction you get shelved here and attract one group of people, if you write Science Fiction you get shelved there and attract a different group of people, and so on.

For instance, one recent book I read was Amy Tan's Saving Fish from Drowning, which is marketed as and universally accepted to be General Fiction. The novel's POV character dies suddenly at the beginning (not a spoiler) and for the rest of the book she's a ghost, able to narrate the events of the story but not able to influence them directly, except that a few times she plants thoughts into key character's minds during dreams which then have a real influence on how events develop. If a short story with the same ratio of the fantastical to the realistic were to appear on, say, PodCastle, I don't think there would be much "Not enough fantasy!" grumbling in the discussion forums. But it would seem somewhat weird to see Saving Fish from Drowning shelved in the "Fantasy" section of the bookshop, rather than "General Fiction".

Why is that? I think it's because we don't see Amy Tan as following in the literary traditions of the books that generally do get shelved in the "Fantasy" section. Tan is seen as a General Fiction author. Atwood wants to be seen as a General Fiction author as well, and she's prepared to say cynical and dismissive things about SF in order to stay there. That's because we all know you can't be both General Fiction and SF/Fantasy, unless your name happens to be Iain M. Banks, and for all we know he's got super powers or something.

This is usually symbolized by the subdivisions within brick-and-mortar bookshops, where each book can be given one and only one classification (General Fiction, SF/Fantasy, Mystery, Romance, etc). You can avoid this to a degree with online booksellers, where each book can be given a variety of tags, but aren't actual physical bookstores that you can go and hang out in more fun?

But when each book can only be marketed as one thing, some arbitrary decisions have to be made. Markus Zusak's The Book Thief usually gets marketed and sold as Young Adult fiction, but if it were shelved under General Fiction instead, I bet it would cause not even a single grown-up reader to end up shaking their head in dismay thinking "This is a kid's book!"

I'm surprised there's not more controversy coming from the fact that many bookstores have separate sections with names like "African-American Fiction", "Gay/Lesbian Fiction," and so on. Can you draw a line separating "General Fiction that happens to be about gay people" from "Gay/Lesbian Fiction"? How do you quantify that?

And I'm wondering if this will be an unsolvable problem for as long as we have brick-and-mortar bookshops where books are physically lined up on neat shelves. Unless people are willing to tolerate having one great big "Fiction" section where the authors are sorted only in alphabetical order.

In spittle news

As everybody who watches American cable news knows, the way to discuss politics and society in America is to park your face four inches from your opponent's, scream utter nonsense at the top of your lungs, and the way you know you've won is when the other person flinches and wipes the spittle off their face. No wonder so many Americans don't watch the news and can't name a single Supreme Court justice.

Here in Taiwan, the English-language Taipei Times publishes a Quote of the Day on page 2, and yesterday it was taken from coverage of anti-Obama rallies in Washington DC:

"[US President Barack Obama] is a traitor. He's either a Marxist or a Communist ... I think Saudi Arabia is behind him."

And the Maryland resident who said that got rewarded for their stream of words by getting their name printed in a newspaper in Taipei. Oh good lord. I'm all in favor of letting people speak their mind no matter what weird stuff their mind contains, but maybe the media shouldn't be rewarding nonsense at the expense of actual discussion. I read the actual article on page 7, and the only anti-Obama people who got quoted were the nonsense-spouters. Were there really no anti-Obama protestors at that rally with constructive things to say?

Think of the Non-Gender Children

A highly intriguing photo from FailBlog:

Now, I'm sure there's a reasonable and boring explanation for whatever the heck that sign's supposed to mean.

But I'm more interested in the possibilities of what it could mean. If I were the editor of a fiction magazine, I would put up that photo and invite contributors to send in their tales of the society that produced it.

Why are non-gender children numerous enough to make the sign necessary? Why aren't there three sorts of public restrooms: Men, Women, and Null? Probably because the introduction of non-gender children in large numbers is a relatively new development. How will society adapt as the non-gender children grow and mature? In twenty years, will non-gender adults be common enough that every building will require a non-gender public restroom?

Genre

We divide fiction into genres. Usually you can tell from a glance at the cover whether it's General Fiction or Crime or Science Fiction or Fantasy or Romance or whatnot. And we all discriminate.

The Science Fiction Ghetto is well-known enough that it's got its own page at TV Tropes. Some well-known authors, fearful of being shunted from Serious Literature to Science Fiction, will deny writing SF even while quite blatantly doing so. (Margaret Atwood's probably the most infamous example of this). But Iain Banks quite cheerfully and profitably writes both SF and mainstream fiction, so it's obviously possible for an author to live a cross-genre existence without compromise.

And we all discriminate. I discriminate. I never pick up novels specifically marketed as Romance or Erotica, even though I have no aversion to romance or sex in my reading. I'm not greatly interested in the genres of Military Fiction, Mystery or Crime, although I'll make exceptions for certain authors (like Carl Hiaasen) and for books I've heard are good. And I have a complex algorithm for determining what science fiction I'll sample. I don't like media tie-ins, I don't like overly long series, and I'm not terribly fond of "space opera"-type SF, although any and all of this can be disregarded if I hear a book seriously, totally kicks ass.

And then there's Young Adult. I pay so little attention to YA that I don't even have an opinion on it. It's just a big blind spot.

Maybe that needs to change.

I'm midway through Markus Zusak's The Book Thief. I picked it up in a used bookstore (to be more honest, my fiance did) and brought it home. I'd never heard of the author or the title, even though the cover proclaims it "The Extraordinary New York Times #1 Bestseller" and is covered with praise from critics and various accolades the book has received. Why hadn't I heard of it? Well, it's YA, and YA goes under my radar. Or over it. Or something.

It's set in Nazi Germany. It's the story of a young girl who lives with foster parents in Bavaria, who finds herself sheltering a Jewish man in her basement. The novel is narrated in the first person by Death Personified.

Unless the quality of the writing somehow catastrophically plummets in the book's second half, The Book Thief is as good as any book for adults I've read in the past year.

Why is The Book Thief considered YA, instead of general fiction for adults? Because it's somehow juvenile?

Ha. Anyone who thinks YA = juvenile needs to read The Book Thief and then write "I will not call YA novels juvenile" on a blackboard one hundred times.

Because it's written in a style that often gets playful, with the narrator addressing the readers directly, which some might feel is reminiscent of children's books?

But there have been plenty of accoladed novels in the past decade that do that; Yann Martel's Life of Pi and Zadie Smith's White Teeth are two well-known examples I've read.

Because the protagonist is a teenage girl? But plenty of general-fiction novels have young protagonists.

If The Book Thief were published as general fiction, no one would ever think of saying "But this is clearly YA! It's a kid's book!"

The Book Thief is YA because it was published as YA. No other reason. Oh, I'm sure Markus Zusak wrote it with the YA market in mind, so the book probably reflects that. But I only get to see the finished product, not the writing process that produced it, and I say this is a book that could have easily been published as general fiction without raising any eyebrows.

So am I saying that the book was somehow done a disservice by being marketed as YA? No. No no no. Then I'd be no better than people who say "Book X isn't science fiction because science fiction is CRAP but Book X is GOOD!"

The Book Thief is totally suitable for readers in the 12-15 age range. Yes, it's dark and disturbing. So's the world.

It's also suitable for ages 16 and up. I'm 29, and I think I can handle it.

Tor.com's got a smart post up about YA by author Mary Pearson. Highly recommended.

Delicious Awkwardness

The Lyttle Lytton Contest is a variant of the better-known Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The aim of the Lyttle Lytton is to create snippets of deliberately awkward or stilted prose. My favorite of the 2009 winners is this, from Adam Box:

I have the ability to go through time, he suddenly remembered while at a bus stop near a tree.

That sentence is only nineteen words long, and yet there's so much delicious awkwardness there. The human brain can't take it in as a unit, because it doesn't form a cohesive whole. Instead, you focus on one part of the sentence, smile, then focus on another part of the sentence, and you start giggling at how it doesn't quite go together. Then you look at yet another part of this nineteen-word sentence, and you giggle still more, but now the first part of the sentence has been pushed out of your mind, and you have the pleasure of re-discovering it.

The whole sentence is a thing of beauty. I also like Deborah's walking adventures and Peter's lack of passion for surfing, but they can't beat suddenly remembering you have the ability to go through time. While at a bus stop. Near a tree.

For visual representations of the sort of awkwardness the Lyttle Lytton is all about, I recommend Awkward Family Photos. But while the Lyttle Lytton is all about intentional awkwardness as comedy, Awkward Family Photos is full of (presumably) unintentional comedy.



That's a startling picture. Like a Lyttle Lytton sentence, there really isn't all that much to it. But the human brain simply can't take it all in as a cohesive whole. You can only focus on one aspect of it at a time, while ignoring everything else.

Imagine you had to describe that picture in words. Where would you begin?

I'd probably describe the woman and the baby and the bright pink rifle and the "peace" symbol on the pants and how the baby's hand is on the trigger. And then I would describe the woman and the baby and the rifle in ever-increasing detail, much as some mentally disturbed patients draw intricately detailed mandala designs because they crave a feeling of order and centeredness in a universe that's fundamentally chaotic and alien. Everything else would get pushed to the side. Forgotten about. My mind can't integrate all that.

There's a weird, sublime beauty here.

A moment of clarity

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, David P. Barash says We Are All Madoffs:

Make no mistake: Our current relationship to the world ecosystem is nothing less than a pyramid scheme, of a magnitude that dwarfs anything ever contemplated by Charles Ponzi, who, before Madoff, was the best-known practitioner of that dark art. Modern civilization's exploitation of the natural environment is not unlike the way Madoff exploited his investors, predicated on the illusion that it will always be possible to make future payments owing to yet more exploitation down the road: more suckers, more growth, more GNP, based—as all Ponzi schemes are—on the fraud of "more and more," with no foreseeable reckoning, and thus, the promise of no comeuppance, neither legal nor economic nor ecologic. At least in the short run.

Read the whole article. If you think he's wrong, try to be able to explain why you think he's wrong. I think the only flaw is that he's long on criticism, short on solutions; he offers no pointers on how we can escape eventual collapse.

And it struck me, in a moment of clarity, that if there's one idea that needs to be the basis of all my political views, it's this: I don't want the world's economy or the Earth's ecosystem to collapse in my lifetime. I don't want it to collapse, ever. I don't want the human race to be thrown back to pre-industrial conditions. I don't want the people of the 22nd century to be screwed over by decisions made in the 20th century.

I want civilizational collapse to be put off indefinitely. Maybe we can do it by achieving truly sustainable industrial practices, or maybe we'll only be able to do it through some currently-undreamed-of technological singularity. And in the process of getting there, I want to see as little human misery as possible.

That's what I want to see. That's my mental long-term goal for the future of this planet. Everything else is details. Wish I had some clue as to what the details should look like.

Zombies! (the smart kind)

Zombieeeeeeeeees!

Postmodern ironic horror lit is going through something of a Zombie Renaissance right now. I'm going to come right out and admit I find it mystifying. I don't find zombies compelling. I never have. Now, part of it is that I'm not a big horror fan, whether it's horror movies or horror lit. But even so, there are horror tropes I find far more compelling than zombies. Vampires, for instance. I am not and likely never will be a fan of Anne Rice or Stephanie Meyer, but it seems like there's a lot more to vampires than zombies. Same goes for werewolves, things that crawl out of meteorites, and Lovecraftian horrors. They all seem like they have more storytelling possibilities than corpses that stagger about at one mile an hour looking for tasty gray matter to eat.

That said, there is one specific sub-genre of zombie stories that I find compelling: zombies who have died, been zombified, but somehow keep their wits about them, know they're zombies, and are the same person they were before zombification. And they still have free will. I guess it's because it somehow speaks to my fear of being struck down in my prime by a terminal illness or a terrible physical disability. But I'm sure most people have the same fear, and yet the self-aware zombie with free will doesn't seem to be a terribly common zombie trope. TV Tropes has no mention of this particular subclass of zombie, although they go into a respectable amount of detail on zombie classification.

As I've mentioned, I'm not all that into horror, but I've got some knowledge of the genre through my addiction to podcast fiction. Here are the instances of sentient, self-aware zombies that I've come across:

My Friend Is a Lesbian Zombie by Eugie Foster, on Escape Pod. I love that title. It's been a long time since I listened, so I'm blanking on the details, but I remember the title character is realistically freaked out to find she's a zombie (instead of being all blase about it) and if I remember right, they get a happy ending by pumping her full of antifreeze.

The Skull-Faced Boy by David Barr Kirtley, on Pseudopod. A horde of zombies is organizing themselves into battle formation to march on the living, and the viewpoint character is freaked out. Even though he's also a zombie.

American Nightmare by Lilah Wild, on Well Told Tales. As the Zombie Uprising commences, a high schooler freshly killed in an accident gets revenge on those who wronged her. Then she seeks out her still-living best friend, who kills her (for good). This is treated as a semi-happy ending: If she was fated to be killed, at least it was by her best friend.

And finally, in the realm of novel-length fiction, Neil Gaiman's American Gods has a major character who is clearly an intelligent, self-aware zombie, although the actual "Z" word is only used once, for ironic effect. The protagonist's wife Laura, after losing her life in an undignified manner, dedicates her undead days to crisscrossing the country killing bad guys who stand in her widower's way.

No matter how happy they might have been while alive, once they're zombies it's usually taken for granted that they're better off dead (and not moving). Two of the four examples above ended with the zombie character being permanently rendered an unfeeling, unmoving corpse, and in the context of the stories it's accepted as a Good Thing.

And of course, once you're a zombie, there's no going back to being a living human. At one point in American Gods, Laura drinks a potion that restores her, but all it does is revert her to pristine zombie condition; afterwards her decomposition starts all over again just like before.

That's why I find the idea of intelligent zombies who know who they are to be so wonderfully horrifying. How come we don't see more of them in fiction?

America! Fuck yeah!

Is it the USA that's screwed up, or the human race as a whole?

I'm not a big fan of talking about politics. I've been ruined by my bad experiences. When you (impersonal "you" here - it's a big chunk of humanity I'm talking about) talk about politics, you're not trying to convince the other person, and you're not trying to describe the world the way you perceive it. All you're trying to do is score points, like it's a game. What you say doesn't have to fit a larger context, or even make sense. You might as well be lobbing "yo momma" insults back and forth. And a fairly large part of humanity seems to think that's the only way to discuss politics and social issues. No wonder half the population thinks politics sucks and doesn't bother following the news.

Nothing in the paragraph above is specific to the United States of America. Based on what I know of the political cultures of other countries, the urge to score meaningless points rather than to say something constructive is pretty universal.

So I've always thought that the USA is not inherently worse than the any other country in the world. It's just that our flaws get magnified due to disproportionate American influence. If Norway has a screwed-up foreign policy, it doesn't affect Africa or South Asia to the same degree as if the USA has a screwed-up foreign policy. That doesn't mean Americans are stupider or eviler than Norwegians. It just means that America acting all fucked-up has wider consequences.

Now here we have Charles Stross' intelligent rant on American culture and how the health care debate reflects it. I would read around the part on Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, since it's a bit of a red herring; Stross' true target is what he sees as a general lack of mercy towards the weak and helpless endemic in American political culture. Ebenezer Scrooge may have been a Brit, but his spiritual descendants are wielding disproportionate influence in the USA.

Of course, Stross is a foreigner born in England and living in Scotland and full of condescending judgement aimed at us Americans. It's too bad he's right.

In fact, about the only issue I have is (as many of his commenters pointed out) that while the negative qualities Stross identifies are indeed endemic in American politics and political discourse, the USA is a huge country, immensely diverse and multicultural, and saying "Americans believe X" is fraught with peril. Granted, Stross never actually says anything as simplistic as "Americans believe X", but it's always good to be reminded that Country Y is not a big homogeneous pulsating mass. For any value of "Country Y".

So, is the USA just as bad as other countries, and no worse? Or is there a distinctly vile strain of thinking in the American mentality? I don't know.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

Every week Tor.com presents two animated short films as its Saturday Morning Cartoon series. And every week I am impressed by the extremely and consistently high quality.

Some of the more recent computer-animated ones are startlingly well-animated - as good as a Pixar short or better in terms of technical quality, but not always meant to appeal to the mass audience Pixar depends on. I'll admit that at first I was provincial enough to be somewhat surprised at such technical accomplishment coming from French or German production companies I'd never heard of, but I'm over that now.

Some shorts are several years or decades old, but beautifully made.