Eleanor Arnason's Blog, page 9

SF (not sci-fi!) and Diversity

Another quote from facebook.

I am clearly suffering from Adult Oppositional Disorder today. I keep reading comments and thinking, "I don't agree." There is a lot of SF (not sci-fi!) that is not about diversity and still has a point. I think Frankenstein is about the industrial revolution and the French Revolution -- and technology, of course. It's also about huge male egos, which is something Mary Shelley knew about. You could argue that it's about diversity because it has (I would argue) a female vision, though all the women in it are dips. The Time Machine is about evolution and class warfare. War of the Worlds is about biology and imperialism. These are all interesting topics and worth writing about. Yes, diversity is important -- especially right now, when we can talk about human diversity, but not -- in any meaningful way -- about class warfare and revolution. SF (not sci-fi!) is a complicated field with more than two centuries of history. I don't like sweeping statements about it.

I also don't like what I hear as a heroic tone, as if the speaker is declaiming a brave and original opinion.

There were people writing about diverse characters and cultures long before the present, including the entire 1970s wave of women writers that hit the SF community like tsunami -- and met with a lot of hostility.

There are more writers doing diversity now. But the current generation did not invent diverse science fiction.

More on Writing

This is a quote from Amy Poehler, which I found on facebook.

I have mixed feelings about it. Everyone does not lie about writing. A lot of writers describe it as slow and awful, and it isn't always slow and awful. I've had stories that came quickly and with such ease that it seemed as if the muse had descended and handed me the manuscript. Other stories were difficult to write, and I was aware the entire time that I was chipping at granite. No muse. Just hard work. I would agree that -- for me -- writing is often boring. The story I'm working on right now is not boring, and I am pushing through it comparatively quickly, though I wouldn't call it easy to write. Writing varies. That's the end conclusion.

A lot of writers have rituals -- to ward off anxiety or to create the right mood. I often write in coffee shops. Right now I am writing in a notebook with a nice, rather fancy pen. The result is a godawful scribble. I am reluctant to move to a computer on this particular story, mostly because I don't want to input what I've written for fear I will realize it's awful. Better to keep scribbling.

Writing

I have gone back to my old way of writing: carry a notebook with me everywhere and write whenever I have time and the impulse. It seems to be working well, so long as I keep track of the notebook. I spend a lot of time thinking about stories, more than I realized, niggling at plot problems, revising scenes in my mind. I might as well write down what I'm thinking about. I don't how long I will continue doing this, but it's pleasanter than the formal sitting down in front of a computer, and it seems to be more productive.

Why not carry a computer with me everywhere? Even a light computer is heavier than a notebook. Setting up a computer and making sure I can find an outlet is more complicated than opening a notebook. Also, I have some really fine pens and ought to use them.

Review

My new collection got a very nice review from Gardner Dozois in Locus:

One of the most criminally overlooked and neglected of living science fiction authors, Eleanor Arnason has been producing a wide variety of first-rate stuff for decades, from the space opera of her Lydia Duluth stories, to the space age fabulism of her Big Mama stories, to her quirky and eclectic fantasy stories set in Iceland (recently collected in Hidden Folk: Icelandic Fantasies). In SF, though, Arnason has done most of her best work in her long sequence of hwarhath stories, unusual in science fiction for being stories told by aliens (the humanoid, space-travelling hwarhath) about aliens, with human characters rarely appearing and humanity often not mentioned at all. The sequence started with the unjustly forgotten novel A Woman of the Iron People in 1991 (one of the best SF novels of the '90s, and winner of the first James Tiptree Memorial Award) and has continued since through to the present day in novellas, novelettes, and short stories that have at last been gathered together in a collection, Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens. This is anthropological science fiction at its best, with only Ursula K. Le Guin rivaling Arnason in cultural insight and in the sophistication, complexity, and evocativeness of her worldbuilding. The hwarhath serve as a distorted mirror in which we can clearly see our own follies, foibles, peculiarities, and the inequalities of our society; the hwarhath, meanwhile, see humans as a distorted mirror in which they can see the peculiarities and inequalities of their own society. Arnason does her best work here at novella length, and I consider ''The Potter of Bones'' and ''Dapple'' to be among the very best novellas of their respective years, and as having an honorable place amongst the best SF novellas ever written. ''The Hound of Merlin'', ''The Actors'', ''The Lovers'', ''The Garden'', and ''Holmes Sherlock'' are also very strong; in fact, there's really nothing here that isn't worth reading. Coming as it does from a small press, you may not see Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales By Aliens included on many lists of the best collections of 2016 as the year comes to an end, but believe me, it's one of them. It may even turn out to be the best collection of the year.

Show and Tell

This is from a facebook discussion. The original comment was:

Genre fiction is always seeking to spell it out, more or less clumsily. From bad fantasy to World Fantasy Award winners, the tendency is to tell the readers what they have just been shown.

I replied:

I always tell young writers to both show and tell. Showing isn't enough, at least in my experience. I got so tired of editors not understanding what I was saying in my fiction that I spent 50 pages at the end of my second novel having my characters explain what they thought the meaning of their experiences was. Nobody ever objected to that discussion. And since it was the characters talking, I felt no responsibility for the explanations...

Terry Carr never got any of my stories. I used to think I ought to underline key sentences or put arrows in the margin. "Here. This is what this story is about."

Anyway, always show and tell...

One difference between literary and genre fiction is -- literary fiction is often set in the real world. There is a lot the reader already knows about the setting and the social rules. If it's a classic work of fiction, written in a previous era, there is a foreword and footnotes to help. SF readers are trained to figure out a setting from hints, but they are not trained to tease out meaning. This is the advantage of a genre plot, a space opera or murder mystery: the meaning the reader wants is built into that kind of plot. The author doesn't have to worry about explaining and can working on the interesting parts of the story.

Maybe the meaning isn't built into a genre plot, but there is a satisfying ending: the murder is discovered, the bad guys are defeated. There is a solution.

Review

I have a story in a feminist anthology titled Sisters of the Revolution, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer. It came out in June of 2015. The idea for the anthology came from Jef Smith, an anarchist and very sweet guy who handled the PM Press table at Wiscon every year. He did a kickstarter to raise money for the book, hired the VanderMeers to edit and got PM Press -- an anarchist publisher in the Bay Area -- to bring the book out. Jef had chronic health problems and died recently, way too young. I think of the book as a memorial to him.

This brings us to a review of my story, "The Grammarian's Five Daughters," which came out in Jonathan McCalmont's blog Ruthless Culture. I don't know how he liked the anthology in general, since I did not read past his review of my story. He really didn't like it.

I'm not going to defend my story, except to say it's a fable or fairy tale about parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions.

Instead, I am going to list the things McCalmont said he didn't like in the review. All of these are apparently connected to my story in some way, though I am not always sure how.

1. He doesn't like the VanderMeers as editors.

2. He doesn't like deconstructed fairy tales. (I don't entirely understand this, since I don't really know what deconstructed means, though I checked several online dictionaries.)

3. He doesn't like stories about the magical power of stories.

4. He doesn't like creative writing programs.

5. He doesn't like the term 'mundane' and the slogan 'fans are slans,' both of which (according to him) are derived from the A. E. van Vogt novel Slan, serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940. (The slogan clearly comes from the novel. I am less sure about 'mundanes' and 'mundanians.')

6. He doesn't seem to like science fiction fandom much.

7. He doesn't like books that flatter the readers or fiction that tells ordinary people they are special. (I would argue here. I think ordinary people are as special as anyone, and fiction should always say that all people are important. The culture all too often tells folk they are third rate and deserve the crap they get. Flattering the reader is another question. I would probably be against that.)

8. He doesn't like stories that say authors are special because they tell stories.

9. He doesn't like adverbs.

10. He seems to have problems with language, literacy and literature, which he sees as tools of capitalism and imperialism. (Yes, they can be. They can also be tools used in the struggle against capitalism and imperialism. I'm not willing to give them up.)

11. He doesn't like capitalism.

12. He doesn't like imperialism.

13. He seems to have problems with SFF feminism.

14. He doesn't like fantasy.

I feel like the person who handed Mr. Creosote the fatal after-dinner mint.

*

Patrick reminds me often that I can't let go of things that upset me. He is right. However -- and this is an example -- two things about the review really angered me. The reviewer accused me of defending capitalism and imperialism. No. Really no. And the reviewer kept saying my story was about stories and story-making. NO. It's about parts of speech. In particular, it's about prepositions. Grammar is not literature.

Cleaning More Bookshelves

I finished cleaning the Icelandic bookshelves. That ended me close to tears due -- in part -- to all the books inscribed to me by my father. So many of the books are old and fragile, books Father must have bought in Iceland during WWII. My passion for Iceland is kind of a joke, but also real -- and a fantasy. I am a Midwestern American, who grew up surrounded by Scandinavian Americans. That doesn't make me in any way an Icelander. My Iceland is a dream, as the Old Country is for many Americans. There's a lot wound up there, including a sense of loss and distance.

Fortunately I am moving on to science and dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs, but they don't bring me to tears.

Income

I am posting a lot. It must be the end of winter's darkness.

This is off facebook, in response to a new study of income from writing:

Like most surveys of writing income, this one seems inadequate. But my own experiences, and those of my friends, suggest that there is little money in art. Most writers I know either have a day job or a spouse with a day job. Most are not making a living from writing. I have made very little from writing. It's a catch 22. I have always had to work close to full time, because my writing brought in little money. (I once told an editor that the money I got from writing was enough to keep me in SF conventions and Laura Ashley skirts.) (It certainly did not pay the rent.) The day job sucked my time and energy, making it difficult to publish enough to make a living at writing. And so it went in a circle...

I think I could have done better, if I'd had more determination and discipline and paid more attention to the business aspects of writing. But I'm not sure. I know writers who have been far more determined and practical than I am and who still saw their writing careers hit a wall. (I need to remember this when I get angry at myself for not working harder at being a writer, not paying enough attention to business, not learning to be popular...)

It's not too late. Maybe I could write a wish fulfillment epic fantasy in one month in November... But I think I'd need to turn my sense of humor off. Could I do that?

Cleaning Bookcases

I have finished breakfast. (Bread toasted with butter and marmalade. Coffee, of course.) Now it's time to get back to work on cleaning the book shelves. I figure it will take five days to finish all the bookcases, working at an easy pace. Then I plan to devote five days to cleaning up the stacks of paper I have, also my files. If I put in three or four hours a day, I will have time for writing.
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I'm onto my second shelf, which is literary criticism and then politics. I'm not finding books to get rid of. Either the books are something I may want to read again or they have emotional content -- books by friends, books my mother gave me, books that were important to me at one time.
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I am finding a fair number of bookmarks. Most of them I understand. They are from the World Wildlife Fund or ones I bought as souvenirs. One shows four turkeys crossing a road in southern Minnesota. Clearly a souvenir from a day trip. But I don't know why I was using a leaflet for Lifestyle Condoms as a bookmark.
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I found a book of Mona van Duyn poetry mis-shelved. There is one poem in it I really like, so I was happy to find it. Another book my mother gave me.
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I have now found a notice of attempt to deliver mail to me, which I have used as a bookmark. It's for an address in Detroit. I can't make out the year on the date stamp, but it has to be 1968 or 69.
My whole life is in these books, and I haven't even gotten to science fiction.
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I found a photo of Captain Kirk, obviously off a TV screen, tucked into Vol. 1 of Spenser's Faerie Queene.

Things to Be Encouraged About

There are things to be encouraged about right now: Black Lives Matter, the campaign for a $15 minimum wage, Moral Mondays in North Carolina. Rev. Barber correctly describes the new NC laws as a "race-based, class-based, homophobic and transphobic attack on wage earners, civil rights, and the LGBTQ community...” And he says the NAACP will not put up with it.

There is movement on global warming, though not enough. The Sanders and Trump campaigns show that many Americans are really tired of politics as usual. Whether the populace will move left or right is still in question. But the center is not holding.

I still often feel discouraged. Living in end stage capitalism is wearing.