Hugos: The Next Generation

Hugo nominations are open! I highly recommend everyone go vote; at the very least, you pay 50 bucks to boost your favorite creators and then get a tsunami of amazing novels and short stories in ebook format so you can read the short list and vote for the finalists. I’m going to put links at the bottom for signing up and for seeing what works are eligible.

In past years, voting was also a way to drown out bigots who tried to dominate the conversation. Happily, that really hasn’t been an issue for a while. But I will say this: It was once possible for people to read all the fantasy and science fiction released each year. And there were efforts to curate the “best” of the current offerings and classic works into a single canon. That canon was very straight, white, male, ableist, and neurotypical for a genre supposedly devoted to exploring the boundaries of human experience. Over the past few decades, the field has expanded massively and we’ve discovered that we’re engaged in multiple conversations with multiple canons. So what’s the point of the Hugos if those different groups can’t agree on what constitutes the best or the canon?

I think Hugos: The Next Generation isn’t about the winners. It’s about the short list. This is the one time of year when everyone gets in the same metaphorical room and gets to hear what everyone else finds exciting or groundbreaking or deeply moving, even if it’s not a story/creator you would normally try. Sometimes it’s not remotely to your taste, sometimes you discover new favorites, but either way, it’s a conversation worth having. Join me in the room. I want to hear what you love.

To nominate for the Hugos, get a $50 supporting membership to this year’s Worldcon. If, like me, you are TERRIBLE at remembering what was released this year, or whether your favorite short story had the wordcount for a novella or a novelette, I recommend this open source database to jog your memory (and write in any works you love from this past year that haven’t been mentioned yet, to jog other people’s memories!) https://bit.ly/hugoaward2021

Tear Them All Down

I’m regularly amazed at how politics in the science fiction community serve as a bellwether for politics in the larger world. Over the past few years, the SFF community has responded to criticism of awards bearing the names and likenesses of problematic figures in clear parallel to the current debate around taking down not just statues of Confederates but of other problematic figures.

 

Making physical or metaphorical icons of real people is always as much an act of erasure as it is one of commemoration. People are complex. Because no one is perfect, icon culture traps us in a zero-sum game: either the person’s work matters or their victims do. Pick one.

 

When the person is still living, this also means the community becomes complicit in and enabling of the person’s ongoing behavior. But even if the person is now dead, icon culture shuts down honest discussion of how that person’s problematic legacy continues to influence us and the systems within which we live.

 

Ideas and ideals can shift, can be interrogated. Icons are (sometimes literally) set in stone. A narrative of what our ideals are or have been, and how well different people succeeded or failed in furthering those ideals, is much more nuanced and able to weather challenges. It allows us to say that Isaac Asimov and JK Rowling are important writers who have had a huge impact on their genres and on the wider world while also acknowledging the pain they’ve caused. It allows us to say that Thomas Jefferson wrote the words that continue to inspire us towards freedom and equality for all, and also raped slaves, enslaved his own children, and planned the removal of indigenous people and the eradication of their cultures, a complex and contradictory mixture which impacted the systems we grapple with today.

 

We need to stop worrying that once we start tearing down icons, no icon will be safe. Icons aren’t history. Icons aren’t real people. We need to dismantle icon culture entirely so we can talk honestly about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

Build-a-Baraita

This semester has been intense, and I’m on my last of nine finals, but it’s also been fun, stretching my brain with different kinds of text study and writing. For my Talmud class, we had to write a Talmudic argument on the subject of theft, and with my background, intellectual property rights were a no-brainer:

The one who steals a character, story, or song from his fellow repays the value as at the time of the theft. If by stealing he has devalued the stolen items or damaged the reputation of the owner, he pays damages for lost income. But if the owner has died, behold it is ownerless, and he does not pay the inheritors. Mar Disney says, “You do pay the inheritors.”

At the time of the theft. We are taught in a baraita, “at the time the theft was discovered.” Whose is this? It is J”K bat Rowling’s. It happened that J”K bat Rowling discovered a thief selling her book. She said, “You owe me the value of all the books you have sold.” The thief said, “Only one was yours, and I paid for it.” She asked, “Is it that you have sold plain paper in the marketplace? You have sold my story. You took one book and made a thousand, and behold, they are all my work, and those who bought, bought because of my name, not yours.” As we stated elsewhere, “When a man stamps several coins with one die, they are all similar.”

Mar Disney says, “You do pay the inheritors.” But note the contradiction: the inheritors of Disney took from Bnai Grimm and Rav Hans Ben Anders the Christian and did not pay. This is not difficult: Mar Disney ruled in a case where the inheritors are known, and there they did not know the inheritors and could not find them. Rav Tolkien asks, can the dead own their thoughts? Surely all who learn from a story are the inheritors.

Biblical fanfic

Let’s talk about midrash.

For those who don’t know, midrash is interpreting a (sacred) text, usually through storytelling techniques, to fill in gaps, draw connections, and creatively embellish that text. The classic example is that Chapter 1 of Genesis says God created male and female in God’s own image, seemingly equal and simultaneous, while Chapter 2 gives us the rib story, woman created after man, from man. So the ancient rabbis resolved the contradiction by inventing Lilith, Adam’s imagined first wife, who ditched Adam when he wasn’t okay with equality.

My favorite, which I only learned about this past year, is Serah, the daughter of Asher. She’s listed as going down to Egypt, and then mentioned again in the first census after the Israelites leave Egypt 430 years later, so the rabbis imagine her as an immortal who has first-hand knowledge of their history and can use it to solve mysteries and settle disputes about past events.

But in the last few weeks, I learned a Talmudic midrash that I found really problematic. There’s something called the conservation of biblical personalities, where the rabbis will say that minor character X is really the nickname of major character Y, so character Y is more present in the story. It’s also a way of resolving contradictions when a character like Moses’s single father-in-law has three different names at three different points in the story. In this case, they decided that Caleb’s two wives, Helah and Naarah (who are inconsistently named elsewhere in the Torah) are really both one woman, Moses’s sister Miriam. By this interpretation, both names are puns, the first meaning “sickly,” the second meaning “young,” and the reason given is that Caleb married her despite her being sickly, and because he married a virtuous woman regardless of how she looked, she became beautiful like a young woman.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any woman leader will have stories invented to denigrate or delegitimize her. I get particularly irritated by this in the Talmud, where it’s just about impossible to find a named woman who gets to be strong and smart without being torn down for reasons. Miriam is the rare counterexample, except for this moment where we need to both marry her off and prop up her husband’s masculinity by saying he deserved better.

So I thought about Miriam, and about Caleb. Miriam dares to approach an Egyptian princess to maneuver Moses’s mom into becoming his wet nurse. She dares to question her brother’s leadership. In a few midrashim, she talks back to her father, and is even the midwife who talks back to Pharaoh, both times ensuring the survival of the Jewish people. She is courageous in saying what needs to be said, regardless of the personal consequences. Caleb and Joshua are the only two spies who give an honest report of the Promised Land, encouraging the Israelites to trust God and keep moving forward, even when the other spies and community leaders are shouting them down with pronouncements of doom. He speaks out, even when he’s in the minority, because it’s the right thing to do. They’re remarkably alike. He’s younger than Miriam, so I can imagine if they were indeed a couple, other people would call her the biblical equivalent of a cougar and wonder what he sees in her, and she’d retort that sparring with him makes her feel young. All the previous midrashim can be true, and yet not be the whole truth.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

I-Con!

When I decided to do my first year of rabbinical school in Israel, one of the things I put on my bucket list was going to I-Con, the Israeli science fiction convention held in Tel Aviv during the week of sukkot. I wanted a chance to meet Israeli geeks, get some Hebrew SFF books and swag, and generally have an experience that was fully mine, not just retracing my parents’ steps. A couple of fellow CY students, both named Sam, agreed to go with me, and we rented an AirBnB near the convention to make things easier on ourselves.

Tel Aviv itself is bizarre, architecturally. Parts of it look like a mashup of a Ukrainian shtetl, a factory district, and the set of Bladerunner. The convention is held at the old cinematheque, which means different theaters for panel discussions and a huge open-air courtyard for the dealer’s room, or should I say, dealer’s shuk. There were a few crafty items (I got three geeky embroidery patterns), but the main draw for me were the ginormous tables of books and graphic novels. I had to restrain myself or I would have spent way too much on books I don’t have time to read in translation right now. Instead, I got four books by Patrick Rothfuss (Wise Man’s Fear in two volumes), John Scalzi (Redshirts), and Andy Weir (The Martian, translated as Alone on Mars).

Here, one stands on line in the hot sun to buy tickets for individual panels instead of getting a membership to the con as a whole. I mainly stuck to panels in English–Ann Leckie, Delia Sherman, and Ellen Datlow were guests of honor, which also meant this was a very queer friendly space. Ann Leckie and her Israeli translator talked about the challenges of rendering her gender-ambiguous characters in a very gendered language–the translater commented that even the word “hospital” had to be regendered. Then, Ann Leckie, Delia Sherman, and Ellen Kushner talked about gender and sexuality both in their own writing and in the SFF field as a whole. Kushner’s Swordspoint universe was groundbreaking when it came out: the gay couple actually survive to the end of the book. But as new writers have come along and pushed the boundaries further, adding more queer characters to the world, the universe is now predominantly gay and trans, which has interesting cultural ramifications. All three of them agreed on this advice to new authors: write what speaks to you, even if there isn’t a market for it. Getting publishers to take a chance on something strange but wonderful is far easier than trying to force yourself to successfully write things that don’t ring true for you.

At night, when we left for our AirBnB, but we discovered when we arrived that morning that many con attendees (mostly high school students), brought sleeping bags and slept under the stars in the dealer’s shuk.

All in all, a wonderful adventure.

2017 Hugos: What it means to be out of the woods

I don’t love all the 2017 Hugo Award winners. And that’s a good thing.

I’ve been a geek and a nerd and a lover of all things speculative my entire life, but until 2015, I’d never involved myself much with the Hugos. I knew they were important and prestigious, but I loved novels, not short stories, and in any given year, I was reading or rereading old stuff more than I was trying newly printed works. Why pay for Worldcon membership just to vote for one or two items in one or two categories and leave the rest blank? I didn’t feel like it mattered for me to force my way into the conversation if I didn’t have anything to add.

2015 was a rude awakening. When the Puppies managed to hijack almost every slot in almost every category for the Hugo ballot nominations, I was angry. The Puppies claimed that certain people didn’t belong in this community, and that touched a nerve: this was supposed to be the place where all the bullied and strange and lost are welcome. Where, when you had no place to go, they had to take you in. And through GamerGate and RaceFail and other incidents, the community was just starting to talk through the ways people had been made to feel unwelcome or unsafe, and bringing their actions more into alignment with those ideals. The idea that quality work that was beloved by a majority of fandom was not welcome because it was created by a girl, or a person of color, felt like a sickening step backward. I was angry. I was outraged. I suddenly had a lot of things to add to the conversation.

That first year was mostly about shutting down the Puppies, voting “No Award” over and over again. The second year, voting on the preliminary ballot, was about educating myself, reading more widely in the field, encouraging others to opt in as I had and start actively shaping the community. The finalist ballot was still a bit thin on non-Puppy material, but I read everything and voted my conscience, and was gratified by the victories of 2016.

This year, as I’ve written elsewhere, was huge, literally and figuratively: the first year since the rules change, which meant that there was way more to read in every category, all of it amazing and varied. The experimental “Best Series” category didn’t make the reading list any less daunting, either! There were a few Puppy choices still on the final ballot, but that was to be expected: like it or not, they are members of our community. So I made my way through the massive reading list, voted, then fretted, waiting for news of the results.

The winners’ list, announced on Friday, is pretty stunning: a lot of experimental fiction, a lot of challenging, complex stories that don’t usually get told. And their creators are almost all women or people of color. “Best Series” was a personal favorite of mine, the Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold, featuring a disabled hero. I’m delighted that Seanan McGuire’s “Every Heart a Doorway,” with its multiple queer and transgender protagonists, won, though if it could have somehow shared the prize with Victor LaValle’s “Ballad of Black Tom,” I would have been elated beyond all description. And for NK Jemisin to win “Best Novel” two years running feels like a nail in the Puppies’ coffin, since she’s been the target of so much vitriol for being a talented and outspoken black woman in the field.

In the end, everything that won a Hugo this year was exceptional work that pushed the boundaries of the genre. The 2017 Hugos don’t perfectly reflect my ballot or my tastes. But they do reflect the general consensus of a community I am proud to be part of.

A Female Doctor: It’s About Time

(This article first appeared at jwa.org.)

In the days leading up to the announcement of the new lead for Doctor Who, I had a heated debate with a male friend about who might be cast for the role. “I just don’t understand why they have to keep gender-bending and race-bending everyone’s favorite characters in these existing franchises,” he complained. “It ruins the characters I like, and isn’t it lazy writing, anyway? Wouldn’t it be better for them to leave Doctor Who and James Bond and Spiderman as they are and add diverse new characters instead?”

For those not in the know, when ill health forced actor William Hartnell to step down from his lead role in Doctor Who in 1966, the producers of the show declared that the Doctor, being an alien, had a unique ability to “regenerate” at the end of his life, reincarnating himself in a new body. This enabled them to continue the show for more than five decades with new actors who each brought out different aspects of the Doctor’s character, and led to interesting moments where the Doctor got to interact with past and future versions of himself as he gallivanted across time and space. But over the past decade, some fans (as well as former stars of the show) have commented about the fact that while the infinitely curious and adventurous Doctor can regenerate into any body imaginable, somehow the actors that get chosen for the role have been uniformly white and male.

Until now.

With the announcement that the new Doctor would be played by Jodie Whittaker of Broadchurch fame, some fans have delighted that they can finally imagine themselves as the Doctor instead of just one of the Doctor’s companions. Others have voiced frustration that this iconic BBC character still doesn’t look like any of the people of color who make up vast swaths of the British population. And, predictably, a vocal group of white male fans have complained that their beloved Doctor suddenly has girl cooties (or, put more politely, that the Doctor now reflects more than just their own experiences).

I am all for introducing diverse original characters. And I have zero fear that all white male protagonists will vanish overnight from existing franchises. But the advantage of race-bending or gender-bending an iconic character is that they change both the kinds of stories we tell about that group and the ways in which we perceive that specific character.

Katee Sackhoff’s performance as the hard-drinking, roguish pilot Starbuck in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica gave us a female action hero who was both amazing and incredibly flawed in ways women don’t usually get to be. When John Watson has been portrayed by male actors, he’s been a foil, meant to highlight Sherlock Holmes’ contrasting brilliance and eccentricity. Lucy Liu’s portrayal of Joan Watson on Elementary has emphasized how problematic the character’s subservient enabling of Sherlock Holmes is when the character is played by an Asian woman. The writers were pushed to give Joan Watson a richer backstory to explain why she might stay with Holmes despite his treatment of her, and Liu’s Watson started pushing back against Jonny Lee Miller’s Holmes, becoming his apprentice and later a detective in her own right. While I can think of other actors who played marvelous Watsons, seeing Watson through the lens of Liu’s performance raised questions that ultimately transformed the character.

Which brings us back to Doctor Who. For five decades, the Doctor has been a quirky, chaos-loving explorer, saver of planets and destroyer of worlds, cheerful and dark in equal measure. How are those qualities going to read through the lens of Jodie Whittaker’s performance? How will established supporting characters react to the change? And what about the next companion, the sidekick character who gives the Doctor someone to explain things to, banter with, and rescue? If the show seeks gender balance by making the new companion male, how will the audience feel about identifying with a guy who is out of his element taking orders from a centuries-old, hypercompetent woman?

Time will tell.

So say we all

Going through the Hugo finalists to vote on the ballot is looking to be a strange experience this year. It took two years for the rules change to kick in and close the loophole the Puppies had exploited, so for the last two years, as the Puppies stacked the deck with a mixture of racist, sexist drivel and just plain crap, I felt like I was often simply voting to deny them a victory, instead of actually rooting for things. Meanwhile, I waited on tenterhooks to see whether the rules change would really make a difference. It did, more than I could have imagined. This year, finally, I’m spoiled for choice and dealing with the agony of deciding which of my absolute favorites to put in second or third place.

That feeling is not just about the rules change. Before the Puppies mess, there was a stretch of a decade where I didn’t bother voting for the Hugo awards because I rarely read books the year they first came out, and I hardly read short stories at all. The winner was often something I’d never heard of, and which was not to my taste; I felt divorced from the process, so why bother voting? But now, I’ve spent so much of the past three years fighting for change and reading up on what was new and important in the field that I had strong opinions on the nominating ballot, I know at least half the finalists in every category already and I am looking forward to reading the remainder and making an educated choice. The rules changed, and I changed, and together, that changed everything.

You probably see where I’m going with this.

For good and for ill, fandom is a bellwether for trends in society at large: the same problems arise, but everyone in fandom communicates much more rapidly about the issues, and we have a lot of smart people who get their kicks from both breaking systems and fixing broken systems through a mixture of technology and social engineering. And then those tactics trickle down into mainstream culture. On the one hand, this means women in gaming were complaining about Gamergaters doxxing them for two years before Bernie Bros started posting the home addresses and phone numbers of female superdelegates online for harassers to use. But fandom has also given rise to the trend of guests of honor boycotting conventions that don’t have enforceable harassment policies (and conventions having to work out practical, enforceable policies), something I think is going to profoundly affect mainstream trade shows and academic conferences in the next couple of years.

What I’ve seen in the last few years in fandom was a sudden resurgence of racist, sexist spew from a segment of the community that felt unheard and undervalued. The shock of that caused a large portion of the voting public to educate themselves, get more involved, and close the loopholes that allowed that segment of the population to dominate. And the result of all that was a ballot that still allows that segment of the population to make their voices heard, but not to dominate the rest of the (now more active and informed) voters. As this solve works its way into the larger American conversation, my guess is that the rules change is going to be about gerrymandering and voter ID laws, and my hope is that the next couple of years will bring us to a point where that bigoted segment of the population still gets to be part of the conversation through senators and congresspeople who represent their interests, but don’t get to dominate the larger (and now more active and informed) public.

 

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s a Feminist!

(This article first appeared at jwa.org.)

I admit, I am woefully late to the party on Supergirl. I tried the pilot episode when it came out last year and found it a little campy and contrived next to my usual superhero and science-fiction fare. And by the time I gave it another try, late in the season, most of the previous episodes weren’t available online anymore.

But to drum up enthusiasm for Season Two, Season One is finally available on Netflix, and bingeing it hasn’t just been a guilty pleasure, it’s pushed me to look at massive blind spots I still have in my assumptions about feminism and pop culture.

I wanted to talk about how the stories that get told change when the cast is predominantly female, but I can’t do that, because when I actually tally up the cast, it’s exactly 50/50, men/women. After pointing indignantly (and repeatedly) to statistics that people perceive women as dominating the conversation when they take up half the space, I’m embarrassed to realize I’ve fallen into the same trap.

Then I thought about the fact that the parental conflicts on Supergirl are with mothers rather than fathers. I’m on more solid ground here: there are about as many dads on the show as moms, but the dads tend to show up in one-shot episodes while the mothers play more integral, ongoing roles. Usually, television heroes seem to spring full-grown from nowhere, and if a parent does show up partway into the story line, it’s generally an estranged or disapproving dad. But over time, Supergirl has to work through her relationships with both her long-dead biological mother (who turns out to be more problematic than Supergirl’s childhood memories of her) and her still-living foster mom. Meanwhile, her boss, powerhouse media mogul Cat Grant, struggles to mother her two sons while locking horns with her own critical and success-driven mom. Having so many varied mother-child relationships on one show changes both the dynamics between the characters and the range of possibilities for what it means to be either a bad or a good-but-flawed mom.

Tying into the mother-daughter dynamic, one of the most important relationships of season one has been Cat Grant’s mentorship of both Supergirl and her mild-mannered alter ego, Kara Danvers. I’ve snarled for years about the trope that whenever you have a super-powerful heroine with a special destiny to change the world, she needs to have an older male mentor to keep her in check: think Buffy, or Alias. The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that (male) writers following the model of the Hero’s Journey know that all heroes need a mentor and, thanks to millennia of male-centric stories, imagine men in that role more easily than women. Here, finally, the heroine has a strong, smart woman to look up to, one who talks to her about dealing with power, anger, and even failure, all from a distinctly female perspective.

Which brings me to the realization of just how blind I’ve been. What I really wanted to talk about turns out to be how this show explores what it means to be a mother or a daughter, to struggle to figure out what you want to do with your life, how to be recognized for your worth, and how to define yourself despite pre-existing social expectations.

I wanted to say that Supergirl is ultimately about what it means to be a woman. But I’m realizing that I’ve always thought of Superman shows like Smallville or Lois and Clark as being about what it means to be human, not about what it means to be a man. Supergirl is also about what it means to be human, just examining that question through a female lens instead of a male one. And that’s a subtle but hugely important idea to normalize in popular culture. As the show switches networks from CBS to the CW, with all the upheaval that might entail, I am hoping Season Two (premiering Monday, October 10th) lives up to (and surpasses) the achievements of Season One.

Golden Anniversary

When I was a kid, occasionally my dad would wake me and carry me in my nightgown to the end of the block to watch fireworks.

One night, he woke me and said, with that same excitement and urgency, that there was something I had to see. Downstairs, he showed me my first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, starting an addiction I never outgrew.

 

Happy 50th, Star Trek.