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[May. 23rd, 2012|09:51 am] |
Finished James S.A. Corey's Leviathan Wakes yesterday. I hadn't figured on getting so far so fast. Monday night was supposed to be spent relaxing and watching the Ranger-Devil game, but there was a blackout, so I curled up with a good ebook. And then I discovered that Leviathan Wakes is a fucking addictive page-turner and soon I was 500 pages in and it was 12:45.
As I mentioned in my last post, the book is as conventional as it gets. The author apparently willingly applies the term 'old-school' to it. I found a reviewer who tears into the book for its conventionality here, and... I can't disagree with any of this. Embassytown was much more enjoyable, much richer, just an overall superior work of space opera, because it builds on 20 years of expanding the space opera tradition by Moore and Eick, Lois Bujold, Elizabeth Moon, Charles Stross, Ken MacLeod, and numerous others. Leviathan Wakes reminded me of mediocre '80s fare like Ben Bova or Joe Haldeman, stuff that hovered between wanting to be full-blown space opera and wanting the street-cred of hard SF. It's regressive on gender politics, regressive on style (yet again, the SF noir detective makes his rote appearance), regressive on its ideas about heroism.
There's something attractive about that. With the cancellation of Caprica and SGU, we've had to endure the first year without a single space SF show on television since... since I don't know, at least the '70s. Leviathan Wakes is a callback to a time when it was okay to make mediocre space SF anchored by bad writing, wooden acting, and terrible special effects. And I miss shows like Andromeda, even though I know they were awful! I got invested in them for the way they blended camp and scientific aspiration. But at the same time that there's something attractive about nostalgia for the SF of the past, we have to recognize that there's a reason we put this stuff behind us. We can do better.
So there's, for example, a point fairly early in Leviathan Wakes where you realize that the main character's girlfriend has died, there's only one female character left in the book, and so the book is going to start pushing toward the main character getting together with the one female character. It is a tiresome and predictable storyline the book could have done without. It is rare in SF that we get female engineers as awesome as Naomi Nagata, and it is not necessary for them to boff the main character for them to be awesome.
That notwithstanding, the book is an addictive pageturner. The story is well-paced, full of great action and convincing science fiction. The characters are really full-bodied and deep, their reactions are convincing, and as I mentioned, Naomi is one of the best engineer characters I've read lately in anything.
The politics is... okay, now I have another rant. The SFF Chronicles review also touches on this briefly, but I don't quite line up with his conclusion. The novel's political plot revolves around an act of corporate sociopathy so immense as to be bewildering. It's hard to process just how evil this act is, it's just so vast and coordinated. Corey, recognizing this, attempts an Sfnal explanation: The corporation took all of its scientists and brainwashed them into sociopaths in order to allow them to complete their work. This is fascinating, and deserves a novel of its own to explore. Sadly, Leviathan Wakes is not that novel. Sadly, Leviathan Wakes is scared of that novel, so convinced it is in the value of heroism in the battle between good and evil.
What is it like to be a scientist brainwashed into completing a project an order of magnitude worse than the Manhattan Project? Do you volunteer for that brainwashing or are you conscripted? Is there ever a point where you realize what you've done? What kind of interpersonal relationships do the scientists on Thoth Station have? If you're the army charged with stopping Thoth Station, how do you handle processing and imprisoning an army of genius sociopaths?
That is the SF novel I wanted to read. Leviathan Wakes is just a good action-adventure in SF clothing.
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[May. 21st, 2012|11:29 am] |
The Hugo Voters packet arrived this weekend, which is awesome. I paid for my membership so I could go to the Con- to get a bunch of free ebooks as a bonus is pretty nifty.
I'm unlikely to read A Dance with Dragons by the voting deadline, and I need to read Feed before I try Deadline (Season McGuire seems to be following the goofy Cory Doctorow playbook of naming stories after past SF stories. For the longest time I didn't understand that her Feed was different from M.T. Anderson's YA cyberpunk marvel), but I started poking at Leviathan Wakes, and so far it's pretty excellent. Classy, action-packed hard SF space adventure. Nothing at all genre-breaking or genre-bending, which is among the many reasons I'm certain that when I'm done with it I'll still prefer Mieville's gloriously complicated space opera Embassytown, but it's a really gripping story thus far. Oh, and for whatever reason I didn't quite connect with Among Others the first time around, but will probably give it another shot.
I'm not sure I ever posted my review of Embassytown up here, but if I didn't, it's probably Mieville's best novel, and certainly his best novel since The Scar. I know people who were bothered by the implausibility of its central science-fictional conceit, but I just loved so many of the characters and I love the situation that the wonky linguistics put them in. There's a line between metaphysics and physics that Mieville skates maybe a little too thinly, but there was never a moment in the narrative where I didn't feel completely immersed in his world. I especially loved the immer, which could have just been a standard hyperspace drive but instead helped drive Mieville's theme that when we go Out There, there's no telling how we will be forced to cognitively reinvent ourselves as a species.
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[May. 18th, 2012|11:46 am] |
TV stuff
-I am no longer pissed that Firefly was cancelled when it was, when the travesty that is The Sarah Connor Chronicles being cancelled when it was exists in this continuity. No, I take it back, I'm pissed that Firefly was cancelled. But Firefly I'm pissed about because the more stories with those characters the better. If I'd had six seasons of Firefly I'd still be pissed because I'd want a seventh. With Sarah Connor Chronicles, the problem is that I want to know what they were going to do with the show SO MUCH. How did they not get a third season?
- I won my first pastrami sandwich bet, on the Quinn/Robin question! Sara and I have been watching How I Met Your Mother together since the second season, when I'd walk over to her apartment every Monday night to watch it with her. We've been betting pastrami sandwiches on HIMYM plot twists since then. And... we're in like the 7th season now. I've never won, until now! Collecting on that bet will be sweet. And tasty. (Pastrami sandwich bets are also an excuse to hang out after we haven't seen each other in a while. It's just a good system altogether. I used to do stuff like that more often. Maybe I should again.)
-Community finale minimarathon! Video game episode obviously the best thing ever. (Are we calling it the video game episode? Should we call it the 8 Bit Episode? I'm not sure.) The last two episodes were more uneven, though I loved them looking at each other and saying "Elaborate heist" back and forth more than anything in the world. I loved Troy fixing the A/C school (and I loved that the narrative of that storyline was "We recognize that everyone on this show is too loopy for words." because sometimes Community seems like a show captive to its own internal logic). I loved the return of Abed from the Darkest Timeline, but didn't love the timeline darkness meter or Evil Abed POV. Danny Pudi could have pulled that off without the gimmickry in a much more emotionally honest way. I was confused by the Troy/Britta. I was not as taken with the over the top Chang stuff as the show writers were. I... have no idea how I'm supposed to feel about Starburns. That moment at the end felt cheap.
But the best thing of all was Abed kissing the USB key and telling her "I promised I'd be back for you." Awwwwww.
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[May. 11th, 2012|12:23 pm] |
I saw Britten's Billy Budd last night at the Met. I'd had this plan in my head to read the novella ahead of time, but that went the way of most of my fiendishly clever plots. Britten's opera was written with a libretto by Auden. It is morose, brooding, difficult, and narratively taut and thoughtful.
Though I've not read Billy Budd, the opera strikes me as extraordinarily committed to respecting Melville's narrative instincts. The program notes kept commenting over and over how the kind of tone painting Britten used so brilliantly in Peter Grimes is nearly absent here, as if this were a shocking departure. And in a way it is. Like Grimes, Billy Budd is a dark meditation on the hazards of life at sea and the way those hazards are trumped by the even harsher dangers of human interaction. But that sort of imagistic composition would have sounded flabby and unnecessary tacked onto Melville.
I kind of liked the way the Met staging dealt with the Jesus stuff surrounding Billy's death. They acknowledged its existence, with a pure white light shining down on the crewmen after the hanging, but I sensed a self-consciousness and maybe even a little shame about it. It was a theme clearly present in Britten's music (and according to the program notes, in the original novel, where Melville describes Billy's death as a 'sacrament'), and thus a theme that a scrupulous company had to represent, but it seemed a theme the production designer was not fully comfortable with. The production note is very insistent that Billy be read as a human being. Billy is naive, unlearned, unambitious, overexuberant... he is charming and goodhearted, but he is not saintly. Which had me pondering a Billy Budd fic where Billy actually is guilty of scheming mutiny, but Claggart doesn't know it. How that would change the story's good/evil dynamic is fascinating to me.
I... didn't really connect with Nathan Gunn's Billy as much as I wanted. I saw Gunn last summer in a show tunes recital at the New York Philharmonic and felt similarly. Gunn's voice is incredibly impressive, but I find something emotionally elusive about it. Meanwhile, James Morris sang Claggart, a role he originated at the Met nearly 35 years ago. He's still got it. His Claggart is deliciously over the top but still heartbreakingly real, though never sympathetic.
All told, I enjoyed it a lot.
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[May. 10th, 2012|10:50 am] |
Last night the Knicks played a playoff game, the Rangers played a playoff game, the Yankees and Mets played... and the New York Red Bulls played the Houston Dynamo. Guess which game I went to? Hint: it was one of only two where the New York team won, and I don't go out to Queens on work nights anymore after the tornado fiasco of ought ten.
It's my first time in the new Red Bull Arena, which is now a couple years old. It's fairly nice. It's also strangely annoying to get to from where I live. Harrison's a big commuter stop on the PATH now, so the time people would drive to the game is also the time when hordes of commuters are leaving the parking lots. Apparently it's a mess, and the Red Bulls site encourages people to take mass transit to the game. But the timing of train schedules didn't work out nicely for me to park in New Brunswick, take the train to Newark, take the PATH to Harrison, and be there before the game starts. So I decided to park in Newark and take the PATH to Harrison, which was annoying. The parking in Newark part, I mean. The PATH was fine.
Kenny Cooper scored a nice goal 7 minutes into the game. The rest of the game was scoreless, and a little dull in places, but the Red Bulls' aggression picked up in the second half and there were a number of nice scoring chances. Ryan Meara is every bit the ridiculous fan favorite I would have expected, too, and he had a very solid game in goal. My only other complaint was that beer was kind of on the high side. I expect to pay 9 bucks for a drinkable beer at a Yankee game, but between it being New Jersey and it being a soccer game, I thought it'd maybe be a little less.
Meanwhile, the Knicks lost and the Rangers lost. The Knick game I was pretty reconciled to. It's been a strange season for the Knicks- I remember I posted on Christmas day about my surprise that I might actually be rooting for a decent Knicks team this year. Then there was a freefall, and then there was Linsanity, and then there was the aftermath of Linsanity, and D'Antoni's firing, and the rise of a quasi-defensively oriented Woodson team that was entirely oriented around 'Melo. This time has had a dozen different identities this year, and given the injuries and the crazy schedule, I have to say I'm not that disappointed with only taking one win from the Heat.
The Rangers, on the other hand... I'm really only a Rangers fan during the playoffs. I tend to keep enough of an eye on the team during the regular season that when playoffs roll around I know the names of the players so I don't sound like an idiot. But I like this Rangers team a lot, and I feel good about their chances against the Devils. But Game 7s are strange and wondrous things. Who knows what happens in this one?
And let's make this the quasi-weekly baseball post, too, by observing that if such things had existed, I would have bought Mariano injury swaps before the season. The kinetics of that high velocity pitching motion, over an 18 year career... something like this was going to happen.
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[May. 9th, 2012|08:59 am] |
It's possibly worth bumping the comments section from the last post up into a post of its own. ![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) zandperl made the observation about "Every Hero Needs an Origin Story" that I specifically call attention to the fact that two characters are black, whereas I never explicitly say that any of the characters are white. It's a valid point.
One of those characters is Nick Fury. Fury was racebent in the Ultimate Marvel universe, and since the movie versions of the characters are mostly inspired by Ultimate Marvel, Samuel L. Jackson was cast to play him in the movies. Prior to Ultimate Marvel, Fury was white, and past representations of Fury on film include David Hasselhoff. In the story, I describe him thusly on Casper's first meeting, "The bald, black man who has somehow entered Casper's locked office is immense and the first clothing Casper notices after the eyepatch is not the heavily modified army general's uniform but the black leather jacket that covers his broad shoulders."
None of the other characters in the story have that kind of complicated racial history. Only one other character in the story has any history at all prior to the story- my hero, Mike Casper/Phil Coulson, who is white. The rest are original characters I invented. Of those, the characters who speak the most are Agent Richardson, who is African-American and is described as "A short black man at the back of the table" and Agent Molly O'Bannon, who is described as "a tall brunette with round cheeks, a sarcastic leer, and a slight limp." In fact, the only three characters in the entire story who are given any physical description at all are Fury, O'Bannon, and Richardson.
There's been a lot of talk in reader/writer circles I frequent about reader defaults. If I don't tell you what skin color a character is, many people will make some assumption in their head. For many readers, that default assumption is that any unmarked character is white. Similarly, if I don't tell you what gender a character is, many people will make an assumption, and for many readers, that assumption is that unmarked characters are male. I've been trying to work against those assumptions in my writing, for a couple of reasons. First, ![[community profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png) 50books_poc has exposed me to a lot of fiction where defaulting to white is wrong, or where default assumptions are cleverly challenged, and I've found that stories that do those things open me up to new worlds. I like reading stories without a white default, so I aspire to write the same. Second, more generally speaking, the better I am at keeping readers from making assumptions, the more vivid my writing is. This is the difference between a thug with no description beating up the hero and a thug with a scar across his face beating up the hero. As a writer I'm always looking for new techniques to build compelling detail into my narrative as quickly and easily as possible.
So as I wrote this story, I was thinking about this. I was especially worried because Phil Coulson and Mike Casper fit the movie stereotype of the government agent: white, straight, male, and wearing a dark suit. I knew that if I wrote Mike Casper sitting around with his team, and didn't give any descriptions of anybody, it would be very, very easy for someone to imagine a table with ten white guys in suits sitting around and talking. This is a problem, but also an opportunity. The nice thing about this is that every little detail you provide is working against a premade image in the reader's head. As soon as you introduce a woman, you're working against it. As soon as you introduce someone who isn't white you're working against it. And each time you do that, you make the scene less of a stock trope and more of a dynamic environment.
So for example, Richardson says, "I'm working with Agent Casillas on the money trail. She's found a few leads in, of all places, the Guatemalan National Bank." That second sentence, in a very minor and subtle way, explodes a default. Casillas never appears in the story again. There's nothing Casillas does that relates to her gender. I couldn't tell you anything about Casillas other than that she's an agent and she's female, and in my head she's a forensic accountant. But in that moment, any person who imagined this table as a bunch of male G-Men in black suits has to recalibrate their imagination, surrender a little bit more control to me. That's not why Casillas exists in the story. She's there to paint a little piece of the picture, to suggest that Casper is a man with a whole team working under him of competent, skilled people who move all around the world hunting down leads. She's there to show why SHIELD would want him, even before Fury lays it out for us. But I had no reason for her to be male, and I had no reason for her to be white, so I gave her a female pronoun and I gave her a hispanic-sounding name. And for that little effort, I've made the room that much less predictable, and I've worked against the white male default as a bonus.
But zandperl is right, so I'm wondering how to do it better. I DON'T think the answer is to mark white people. I had several other characters in the story that in my head weren't white, who I didn't mark. As I discuss, most characters in the story don't get any physical description at all. This isn't the kind of story where that matters all that much. Getting tied up in description would slow down the action. These characters, at best, are stereotypes. A bit of dialect, a style of quip, sometimes just a hair color or type of hat, that's all a reader needs to wrap their head around the differences in background characters of an action story.
One thought I mention in the previous thread is to use culture and ethnic background as proxies for race. When Molly O'Bannon reveals that she's a short, fiery BU graduate working at the FBI, that's a lot of signals that she's Boston Irish Catholic, in a small amount of exposition. Just as there are many white cultures, there are many black cultures. If Richardson drops that he's a Howard University graduate who volunteers at his local AME Church, it's different than if he's a City College graduate from the Bronx who used to go to underground rap battles, yet both signal black cultures that might produce FBI agents. This is an easy, cheap way to build more complicated stereotypes, to stop specifically marking for race, to invest a little more individuality in characters while still resisting a white default.
It's also a hellishly more fraught paradigm. If Richardson were a Harvard Law Graduate from a wealthy suburb of a major city, he could just as easily be white as black, but the reader with only that information would likely assume that he's white. There are lots of these cultural markers we can use that don't signal a particular culture because the culture is itself a melting pot of different cultures. On the other hand, if his mother served fried chicken with collard greens, I play into the ugly, lazy, nasty side of stereotyping. Marking characters as white or black doesn't make any assumption about backstory and lets the reader discover the characters as they are today, not as what made them. That's why it's a bad thing to do; it's also why it's safer.
I don't know how I'll end up. At the moment, I'm not going to change "Every Hero," but I'm not going to write any more stories using the techniques I employed there until I have thought about it some more. I'm still thinking about this, and still experimenting in my writing with different approaches. I'd love to hear what other writers think.
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| new fic |
[May. 6th, 2012|09:34 pm] |
Title:We'll Rebuild, Stronger
Fandoms: West Wing/Avengers (2012)
Author: seekingferret
Length: ~800 words
Sequel to "Every Hero Needs an Origin Story", built around a major spoiler from Avengers. I posted it this morning, but didn't make an announcement here because I get a kick out of the way my Avengers stories get relatively high hitcounts on AO3 superfast even without an announcement.
This also my first attempt at Josh/Donna. I can see the appeal. It's probably worth observing that if this story had really been a West Wing storyline, there would have been about three or four scenes of Donna trying to draw Josh out and Josh stoically rebuffing her. It felt good to take those scenes as assumed and go straight to the Josh awkwardly and self-consciously spewing feelings at Donna part.
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[May. 6th, 2012|01:45 am] |
Ok, so I saw Avengers tonight. And it's 2AMish and I should go to sleep, but I wanted to set down the fic priorities:
- Josh Lyman goes to [spoiler]'s funeral as Matt Santos's chief of staff
- Robin Scherbatsky and Sandy Rivers cover the destruction of New York.
- Erik, Tony, Bruce, and Jane have all the science adventures ever. Reed can join in, too.
That last one is possibly longfic. The other two are drabbles I will try to knock out tomorrow so they get off my list.
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[May. 3rd, 2012|09:18 am] |
I saw Janacek's Vec Makropulos at the Met Wednesday night, with Karita Mattila singing Emilia. It was pretty thrilling. starlady saw her sing the role in a different production of the same opera at SFO last year, and she raved about Mattila, so I was looking forward to it. She didn't disappoint. Mattila was funny, charming, devastating, tragic, all as required. Her Emilia was Callas and Violetta and Kleopatra all rolled into one.
The Met's staging was maybe a little tired, but it was functional and really never wrongfooted. In some ways, Vec Makropulos is not a very big opera. It only has a few significant arias, the story takes place in settings like a law office and backstage after an opera, and mostly the opera moves forward on the strength of recitative.
But it's got such a neat set of characters. Moody Kristina, the diva in training, and nerdy Kolenaty who inherited from his father not money but the job of representing someone who is owed money. And absurd lover Janek, such a glorious parody of people like Rodolfo or Alfredo, and his father Jaroslav Prus, who is probably the best human in the play and gets one of the most beautifully devastating arcs. And at the center of it all, Emilia, who I described to tealdear as "a manic pixie dream girl who's a nihilistic bitch." She comes into these peoples' lives in a whirlwind of beauty and song and sexuality and totally alters their lives in her wake, her motives are elusive and invisible and somewhat magical. And she teaches them about themselves and what they can be. And what they learn is that their miserable, ordinary lives which they desperately want to overcome are better than the alternative. Gregor is better off not getting his inheritance. Kristina is better off not mutilating her soul to become a diva. Prus is better off going gracefully into old age, not seeking some emotionless sexual escapade.
What's so fascinating about Emilia is how little she cares about the havoc and misery she creates. When she manipulates someone to get what she wants, it's a rote, mechanical process. She only puts in as much effort as she needs to. Her lies and put-ons to Janek are tedious and obvious, because he's a young fool and doesn't deserve or require any more attention than that. There is no joy in her machinations, only a mechanical, methodical motion toward her goal... even as the play's motion convinces her that the goal she seeks is not what she actually wants. I think that might be the true magic and genius of Janacek's story, that he gives the manic pixie dream girl an arc of her own, mysterious and inscrutable but in the end decipherable.
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[May. 2nd, 2012|11:52 am] |
Obligatory baseball post time that nobody reads time.
Yankees lost Michael Pineda for the season with a torn labrum or something like that. I think it's something in the shoulder. The economics of injuries and sports are really dissimilar to anything else. Where else do you commit millions of dollars to an employee who, if they get even a minor injury, could be unable to work for you for a year or more?
There are ways in which the free agent market resembles a junk bond market. You buy risky assets, betting on their growth potential. If you get caught in a bubble you end up overpaying for those assets. Even if you don't get caught in a bubble, you're still risking a lot of money on something that could end up losing your whole investment, but you try to mitigate that risk with insurance policies and with diversificat... err.. bench depth.
And this takes me to a fascinatingly ghoulish idea I have. Fans love having an investment in their teams. Teams loving mitigating the risk on an investment. In the subprime market risk was mitigated using an instrument called a credit default swap, an insurance policy against default that was then securitized and sold to investors...
Why couldn't teams buy injury swaps on their players? The fans would love it, getting a chance to profit from the fluctuating risk of an injury to Johan Santana. Make lemons out of lemonade. Yes, it's ghoulish, and utterly morally bankrupt, but other than that, what objections do you have?
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