SF Diplomat

(Orson Scott) Card-carrying Homophobe

With the kind of inevitability that accompanies only death, taxes and respected authors relaxing into middle-age with long running series of books, Orson Scott Card has decided to climb the barricades again and speak out against the terrible danger posed by gay marriage.

This is not the first, or the second time that he has done so.

Yonmei at the Feminist SF blog rightly takes him to task.

The article is interesting as it effectively dances around the point.  The issue of the roots of marriage, the nature of heterosexual relationships and the distinction between a Republic and a democracy are all smoke screens.  The issue is not  whether GLBT people should be allowed to get married, the issue is whether or not GLBT people should be treated equally in the eyes of the law.  As such, all arguments against gay marriage are in fact more or less convoluted arguments in favour of continued discrimination.

In this respect, Card is not doing anything that any of us have not done before when we have argued politics.  Because we live in a meaningless universe with no over-arching moral meta-narrative, all ethical discourse is effectively pointless.  Much like astrology and theology, ethical systems are closed loops with no truth-makers in the real world.  Unlike science, we cannot go out and test our moral theories any more than we can test our theories about how many angels can dance upon the head of a pin.  As a result, ethical arguments should not be understood as arguments over facts but rather as a form of diplomatic signalling between world-views.  It's saying "I believe X" and "I also believe Y and Z so people who support Y and Z should also be on my side".

For example, when Card says :

"When a heterosexual couple cannot have children, their faithful marriage still affirms, in the eyes of other people's children, the universality of the pattern of marriage."

He is making common cause with straight married people but, wary that some people cannot have kids, he adds a caveat in order to keep them onside.


Of course, the problem is that by trying to get people on his side to defend against the perils of gay marriage, Card is effectively making it clear that those of us in favour of equal rights are on the other side and as more and more of the SF community either are GLBT or GLBT-friendly or just civil rights friendly, Card is digging himself a nice little hole.

I see no problem in his doing this.  We all do it.

What I think is problematic is that Card keeps being given columns in which he can spout his homophobic hogwash.  Frankly, he is given these columns because he has a degree of fame due largely to the SF community.  Were it not for SF fans, Orson Scott Card would be just another hypocritical fascist with an axe to grind.

I don't generally hold with No Platform policies. I think that they're unhealthy and make martyrs out of people who deserve only to be held up for ridicule and contempt.  So I don't think that people should start boycotting conventions or professional bodies that are foolish enough to give him prizes, I think that a much better way of dealing with Orson Scott Card - Homophobic Talking Head is by engaging with him fully and refusing to allow him to talk about anything other than gay marriage.

If he speaks at a convention - Every question should be about gay rights.

If he picks up an award - The body making an award should be submerged with emails either questioning their decision to give a homophobe an award or praising them for making a stand against the homonazis.

In fact, the first person who gets into the Literary Boot Camp and spends the entire week making Orson Scott Card read and comment upon "My first time with Bob" stories will get a case of champagne from me.

Reader's Block : A 21st Century Ailment

According to Stuart Jeffries at The Guardian, Reader's Block is now a thing.

Amusingly, you suffer from this condition when you either cannot finish a book you are reading or you cannot get into any particular book resulting in you dipping into a number of books without really getting anywhere with any of them.

What amuses me so much about this ailment is that it so wonderfully encapsulates the 21st Century attitude to culture.  Traditionally, art was the thing that people did and culture was produced by the people who stood around talking about it.  But in order to actually talk about art, you generally have to consume it on some level. 

In Late-Stage Capitalism, to consume means only one thing : to spend money on something.  More and more, what we buy is not about what we need or even what we consciously want.  Instead it is an act of social definition and self-expression.  As our civil rights are slowly eroded and the markets are allowed to take over more and more aspects of our lives, purchasing decisions are increasingly the only tangible liberties that we actually have and which we are encouraged to use and so people have gleefully lept at the chance to define themselves not through what they do, or what they think and say, but rather through what they spend money on.

Culture is not about consuming and talking about art, but about spending money.  This means that even if all we aver actually read is Heat magazine and the instructions on our Marks and Spencer ready-meals, we can still be culture intellectuals.  You too can be the kind of person who follows the Orange and Man Booker prizes!  Just fill your shelves with certain kinds of books even if you don't actually read them.

Given this cultural climate, it is only natural that a failure to read any actual books should in no way stand in the way of you buying yourself to self-esteem and identity.  Such people are not self-deceiving pseuds who lack the self-awareness to realise that they are buying books that don't interest them out of a slavish desire to conform to some ridiculous ideal of what it means to be cultured or an intellectual, they are people who suffer from 'Readers' Block', and doesn't that sound an awful lot like 'Writers Block'?

Paul Kincaid interviewing Christopher Priest - A Field Report

The New Issue of Fruitless Recursion contains a Field Report I wrote about last week's monthly BSFA meeting/interview.

Apologies for the hideous, washed out photo. Clearly the camera on my phone is of little use... when taking photos in darkened rooms... of people sitting in front of sun-filled windows.

Issue 1 of Fruitless Recursion Goes Live!

(original image from Gadl here)

I have just finished uploading Issue 1 of Fruitless Recursion, my recently launched online zine devoted to the discussion of online criticism.

We have Alvaro Zinos-Amaro reviewing Barry Malzberg, Martin Lewis reviewing Roz Kavenay and Paul Kincaid reviewing David Hajdu along with a field report by your truly, so please go and take a look.

REVIEW - The Dark Knight (2008)

Here is my review of Christopher and Jonathan Nolan's The Dark Knight.

Ian Sales was kind enough to link to a critical reaction by the mystery author Andrew Klavan.  While I can see why he took what he did from the film (I can even point you to the scene he is thinking of in particular) I think that, interestingly, he's reacting to one of the blind alleys that the film wanders down in its search for a simple moral truth that would play well with summer blockbuster audiences, as opposed to the film's more central but admittedly subtle and transgressive theme.

The reason why I don't buy into Klavan's reading of Batman being George Bush is that the film concludes with Batman taking responsibility for the crimes of others.  If Batman were George Bush then presumably he would have spent the film telling Harvey Dent to murder people and then blaming him for everything in an effort to avoid prosecution.

Also, having just read it, I very much enjoyed Abigail Nussbaum's review of the film, which touches on some of the same ideas as mine but does so in different ways resulting in her seemingly being better disposed to the film than I.

On the whole, I think that The Dark Knight is a film 'for critics' in that it is a complete mess but it can be pieced together into something quite interesting if you're willing to go through it with the subtextual tweezers.

REVIEW - Martin Martin's On The Other Side by Mark Wernham (2008)

My review of Mark Wernham's debut novel Martin Martin's On The Other Side went up this morning at Strange Horizons.

Mildly amusing in its use of the phrase "Fuck off you trampy twat!", the book is otherwise unobjectionable.

Consider his youtube video.

Consider his over-designed website.

BG4 : The Life-Cycle of a Trope

Futurismic has just posted my fourth Blasphemous Geometries column : The Life-cycle of a Trope - Science Fiction's Tragedy of the Commons?

Some bright sparks may be tempted to see in the book's final paragraphs a dig at John Scalzi following our recent contretemps but I actually wrote the piece before that discussion really kicked off so the timing is simply a coincidence.

The column was great fun to write though.  I came up with the idea a couple of weeks ago and originally it was intended to be about the whole undead, old tropes home sub-genres but once I hit upon the idea of tropes as common land the article kind of re-wrote itself.

Is Online Book Reviewing Sustainable?

 As pointed out by Ron at Galleycat, there have been some interesting posts in the last few days about how viable online book reviewing is as an activity and a means of generating publicity.

As the article says, some bloggers feel that running a book blog feels less like a hobby and more like a second job, while some others are scaling back their coverage.

Even in the genre blogosphere, the strain has started to tell, with SF Signal's daily link round-up being temporarily out-sourced to the blogger and publicist Matt Staggs.

The article raises an interesting question about the sustainability of book blogging.

At the moment, despite newspapers cutting back on their book coverage, publishers are getting more coverage than they ever have before.  Aside from the various people operating as critics, there are also a host of bloggers who are happy to write up a short review of pretty much any review copies publishers decide to send them.  All it costs is a review copy, some postage and a bit of good will.  Even if a critic pans the book, the results can be good.  Consider my negative review of Scott Bakker's Neuropath, it generated some discussion on various forums and I'm sure that I'm disliked enough that some will consider my negative review something of a recommendation.  All it cost the publisher was an ARC and postage from Canada.

But in order to sustain this level of output, the blogosphere has to work quite hard.  In order to build up a successful blog it takes time and energy.  Not only do you have to keep on producing decent material, you also have to learn to write about certain topics in certain ways so as to pick up links from other people and increase your subscription rate by tapping into others' subscription bases.  As the article suggests, building that technorati rating can feel like working a second job.  With some book bloggers showing the strain and quitting, I think the time may come in the future when publishers will have to do more than send out review copies.

Yes, some blogs and sites are sponsored but some of us feel genuinely guilty when we a) don't read review copies and b) pan the books that we did get for free.  As a result, having a publisher or an author pay directly towards the upkeep of our sites may well be utterly intolerable.

However, there is a way around this.

Strange Horizons reviews three books a week and is a paying market for all of its reviews.  It is not funded through sponsorship but by donations from the public.  I think it would be a good idea if genre publishers donated money to community resources such as Strange Horizons or any of the other paying review venues.  I suspect that this may be happening already but if it is then it should be spoken of more so as to encourage others to do the same.

By putting some money back into the institutions that help make publishers' products visible to the community, publishers would be helping to maintain discussion levels as well as, in the case of Strange Horizons in particular, investing in the next generation of writers by supporting a paying short fiction market, one of the places many writers learn their trade.

And because it is a donation model, it is just throwing money in the pot.  Not plastering websites with reminders of how much is owed.

This model could also be exported to the newspapers with publishing companies effectively clubbing together to pay newspaper publishers for guaranteed coverage not of their books but of books in general.  At a time when less and less people are reading for fun, every book read is a gain for the publishing industry.


EDIT : Upon publishing this post, I attached a picture of one of the World Trade Centre Towers collapsing.  This was not out of any desire to reach for hyperbole or to make a political point, it was simply one of the first things that came up when I googled for an image of a building collapsing.

Upon being informed of the cultural insensitivity of this particular choice of picture, I changed it.  I apologise  unreservedly for any offense I might have caused as it was in no way intended.




EDIT THE SECOND : There have been a couple of nice follow-ups to this discussion -

• Collen Mondor at Chasing Ray suggests that we all get ourselves removed from the unsolicited ARC mailing lists
• TadMack at Finding Wonderland talks about the "guilt thing" and how it can lead to self-censorship.  "None of us wants to come across as snobs or people who are vicious and mocking" made me laugh.  I think TadMack pretty much encapsulated my online persona with that one sentence :-)

Watch the Sighs!

 Apparently Tor publishing has pushed out the boat and decided to spend some money on some online infrastructure for the fan community.  Watch The Skies will apparently be a blog, an art gallery, a social networking site and will contain some actual content such as reports from various conventions.

As Jacques Barcia correctly asks, so what?

Had this happened two or three years ago it would have been a great idea but now, everyone has a blog, everyone has a social networking presence.  I can easily spend three or four hours a day reading the feeds, answering emails, micro-blogging, actually blogging participating in discussions in the comment sections of various blogs and that is without mentioning the actual content that I produce and put up online in different places.

I put it to you that this community (which has been admirably quick in adapting to new technologies) is as connected as it can possibly get and that this connection is (aside from a few existing forums) nicely decentralised and organic.

In fact, I put it to you that this community is getting dangerously close to the saturation point.  As more and more bloggers jump the fence and start doing PR, it's getting to the point where it is actually quite time consuming to wade through PR in order to find serious content.  Just look at SF Signal's daily link fests; for ages they contained all of the serious content that we as a community produced every day but seemingly the SF Signal boys can't keep up and have cut back their coverage to little more that free books and interviews.  If we are not careful, there will come a point where wading through profile-raising fluff will take so long that people will no longer bother to look for the serious content that goes out in blog form.

What we need is not more connection, it is more filtering and more paying venues for the serious content that many of us put out for free.

A white elephant hybrid of time sink and PR sludge-pump that pays hugely exposed writers such as Stross and Scalzi for content in the hope of sucking in our marketing eye-balls strikes me as precisely what online SF does not need, right now.

REVIEW - In the Valley of Elah (2007)

I have just put up a review of Paul Haggis' In The Valley of Elah.

I was blown away by it when I saw it in the cinema but, after watching it a second time, my views on it have cooled as the film's flaws become more obvious.

Interestingly, I blame the book's DVD extras for this because as shot the film allows a lot of blanks in the narrative that I interpreted quite sympathetically.  However, upon watching the extras and realising that my interpretation of the film was not the same as the director's intended meaning, I realised that I was being overly charitable and that the scathing critique of American foreign policy I perceived in the cinema was in fact largely in my own head.



This raises a couple of interesting questions :

Firstly, I recently completed editing Martin Lewis' review of Roz Kavenay's From Alien to The Matrix (2005) for Fruitless Recursion and Kavenay seems to think that the arrival of DVD extras and Director's Commentary tracks marks a "thickening" of the film texts but I'm not sure.

Secondly, after attending The Kawakita Centenary Symposium at the BFI Southbank, I was surprised by the extent to which film critics are still very much all about the director as 'auteur' and there has definitely been no death of the author for film critics who continue to pay attention to the backgrounds and politics and intentions of directors.

These two points kind of come together into the following idea : Is a text not 'thick' in so far as it contains possibility?  Some texts are thicker than others because they can be read in different ways and so stuff like DVD extras and commentary tracks do not so much 'thicken' a text as 'thin' it of its semiotic possibilities.