Jim C. Hines's Blog, page 139

Hugo Speech

[image error] Jim’s brain is currently experiencing technical difficulties as a result of five awesome days of Worldcon, which culminated in winning a freaking Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer!

Normal mental service should resume shortly. In the meantime, please enjoy this transcript of Jim’s speech. (We’ve removed all of the nervous pauses and stumbles for ease of reading.)

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Growing up, I was never what you’d call one of the “popular kids.” Shocking, I know. It turns out that sewing a Star Trek patch onto your jean jacket is not the best way to get in with the cool crowd.

It wasn’t until I was almost thirty years old that I finally discovered fandom, first through conventions, and then online.

It felt like home. Like any home, ours isn’t perfect, but this was a community where I could geek out about the things I loved, and people would jump in to say, “Me too!” I feel so fortunate to be a part of that community, to participate and learn and explore and hopefully, from time to time, to contribute.

There are so many brilliant and wonderful fan writers out there. I don’t know if there are enough rocket trophies in the world to recognize everyone who’s written passionate, insightful, clever, funny, and flat-out awesome articles and essays about our community. But I’d love to see us honor as many of those diverse voices as we can, and for that reason, I’ll be recusing myself from the Fan Writer category from here on out to make space for those other deserving writers.

Thank you. Thank you to fandom for welcoming me, and special thanks to my family back in Michigan, who tolerate Daddy spending way too much time on the computer.

How Isaac Met Smudge

A while back, Literary Escapism invited me to participate in their School’s In feature, which has authors writing school-related snippets for their characters. I decided to put together a bit that showed the first time Isaac Vainio from Libriomancer met Smudge the fire-spider.

I might tweak a few details if I incorporate this into one of the Magic ex Libris books or a related short story, but the gist of that first meeting is at http://literaryescapism.com/30513/schools-in-jim-c-hines-isaac-vainio.

Enjoy!

Off to Chicon

Our internet is fixed! Just in time for me to leave the state tomorrow morning for Worldcon. I’m reposting my schedule here, mostly so I can find it this weekend when I manage to confuse myself.

8/30, 5:30 p.m., Dusable - Reading (Any requests? I’ll probably do something from Libriomancer, but I’m willing to reconsider. I read the Muppet Werewolf story at WFC a few years back, otherwise I’d do that one.)
8/31, 10 a.m. - Noon - Writers Workshop (Preregistered attendees only)
9/1, 9:00 a.m., Comiskey - SFWA Business Meeting
9/1, 10:30 a.m. - Noon, Columbus IJ - The Art of the Cover Pose (Jim C. Hines, Karen Haber, Steven Vincent Johnson, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Yanni Kuznia)
9/1, Noon - 1:30 p.m., Autograph Tables - Autographing (Charles Justiz, James Kahn, Jim C. Hines, Joan Slonczewski, Lee Martindale, Mary Robinette Kowal, Nancy Fulda, Robert Reed, Tony Pi)
9/2, 6:00 p.m. - ??? - Hugo Reception/Ceremony/Loser’s Party - In which Jim will wear … a suit! Just like a real grown-up! The ceremony begins at 8:00 p.m. Central Time. There should be live video here.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone! If you’re a regular reader/commenter, please say hi if you have a moment! (And if your real name doesn’t match your online handle, please throw me a bone and tell me who you are. I can barely remember my own name at these things.)

I’ll probably be posting random Worldcon-related miscellany on Twitter, and maybe Facebook.

Other things while I’m thinking about it…

Anton Strout’s book Alchemystic [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] comes out September 25. He and Penguin are donating $2 per preorder, up to $3000, to Worldbuilders. Details are on Pat Rothfuss’ blog.

Morgan Keyes has a new book out called Darkbeast [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], which sounds like a lot of fun. I’m hoping to have a guest blog post from her soon.

Finally, LEGO: The Piece of Resistance is a live-action and CGI LEGO movie, currently in development. It’s just been announced that they’ll be turning Morgan Freeman and Elizabeth Banks into minifigs for the film. The movie will also have Superman and Batman sharing the screen. (In minifig form, naturally.) I believe this is the point where I say SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!!

Internet Brownout

We lost our internet connection at home this weekend. I’m working to get this fixed, but in the meantime, email and such will be more sporadic than usual. I’m still seeing incoming email on the phone, but things like writing big ol’ blog entries or responses that require more than one or two sentences are going to be difficult until we get that up and running again.

Libriomancer Discussion Post

[image error]Libriomancer [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] has been out for two and a half weeks. My thanks to everyone who’s reviewed and talked about the book. My agent describes it as my best launch week ever, and says Libriomancer hit the top ten fantasy hardcovers list for Bookscan, which is pretty darn cool.

For those of you who’ve read it, I wanted to give you a place to talk about the story. What did you like? What didn’t work for you? What are you looking forward to in Codex Born? Any predictions?

There will be spoilers in the comments!

I’m happy to answer questions … some of them, at least :-)  But I’m also happy to stay out of the way and let folks talk.

One question that came up at several of my booksignings was how libriomancy works with ebooks. I said that was answered in the book, but I think I messed up. It looks like I touched on that in the second book. Short answer: it’s possible to perform libriomancy with ebooks, but Isaac can’t do it.

Let the Wild Booktalk Rumpus begin!

A Few Weird Tales Follow-up Links

Before I get into the links, I wanted to say thank you to everyone for your support and encouragement after Wednesday’s post. I’m declaring comment amnesty for myself because I just couldn’t keep up with them all, but I’ve read and very much appreciated every single one. Thank you!

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A number of people have reported that Weird Tales editor Marvin Kaye is responding to and defending himself in emails, but despite the publisher’s claim that Kaye would be making a statement shortly, I’ve not seen anything. That said, the publisher’s post went up five days ago. I know that businesses can’t always respond on Internet time. But I hope we’ll see some follow-up soon.

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I was very happy to see #ThoroughlyGoodBooksbyPOC show up as a trending topic on Twitter, at least briefly. Shaun Duke has compiled an alphabetical list of recommended books and authors here.

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I had caught Mary Robinette Kowal’s announcement that, in response to the Weird Tales mess, Shimmer was now paying pro rates. What I hadn’t realized was that Kowal was underwriting this rate increase herself. I therefore nominate her for the Golden Platypus Award for Awesomeness.

Depression Update

What if I don’t want to pretend to be happy today?

That thought ran through my head as I hung up the phone at work after helping another user with our applications.

It’s been just over four months since I started taking Zoloft for depression, and about two and a half months since I began seeing a counselor. Overall, I think my life has gotten better … but it’s certainly not perfect, nor is it ever going to be.

Release week for Libriomancer was amazing and wonderful and a lot of fun. It was also exhausting and at times incredibly stressful. I can’t wait for Worldcon, but I know it’s also adding stress and anxiety to my life.

A lot of what I’ve been working on during therapy deals with stuff at home, which I’m not going to get into here. Suffice it to say, some things have improved, while others are more of a work-in-progress.

I think that’s what I’m running into now: the “in-progress” part of it all. This isn’t an instant fix. And the early energy of “Yay, I’m Doing Something About My Depression!” has worn off.

And sometimes things slip. I woke up with low blood sugar at 2 a.m. the other night, which meant I was exhausted the next day at work, and the whole day just kind of steamrollered me from there. I give myself permission to have fun and spend an hour playing the Star Wars game we borrowed from a friend, and then feel guilty and more overwhelmed by the stuff I didn’t get done.

On a personal level, this week has pretty much sucked. And that’s going to happen. Nobody gets all good days. But it’s hard. In the back of my mind, I start thinking that maybe the meds aren’t helping as much, or maybe the therapy hasn’t done enough–

No, that’s not true. What I really start thinking is that I’ve failed. That if I were doing a better job of listening and understanding and working in therapy, the conversation that spiraled so out of control last night never would have happened. That all of the relationships and issues I’m struggling with would be better. But things that made sense in the doctor’s office get all murky and messed up when I try to apply them to real life.

Maybe it is my failure. Or maybe that’s just life. (And these are not mutually exclusive possibilities.)

What I think I need to do is remind myself that this is a long-term process. To recognize that things have improved, overall. To give myself permission to have bad days, and to cut myself some slack when things fall apart.

All of which is easier said than done.

Dear Depression,

You win this round of lightsaber duel. But next time I talk to the therapist, I’m asking her for the cheat codes, and when I come back I’m going to slice your giblets off.

Sincerely,

Jim

Good Books By/About PoCs

I was talking to author Saladin Ahmed on Twitter about the Save the Pearls mess, and the fact that all of the attention being paid to this racist book, particularly with the Weird Tales disaster, has undoubtedly led to additional sales of the book.

I’m skeptical as to how many extra sales the book has gotten — while there are a ton of Amazon reviews, the sales rank is nowhere near as good as I’d expected, based on the controversy. But that rank has still jumped up in recent days, so she’s getting some sales, if only from people curious to see what all of the fuss is about.

I don’t believe this is a reason to not talk about the book, or to not publicly and loudly challenge racism in the genre. I might not appreciate that my blog post yesterday could have given this author a few more sales, but I prefer that potential side effect to silence.

That said, it totally sucks that a hugely problematic book is rewarded with so much attention while other, far better books by and about people of color are overlooked or ignored.

Therefore, I’d like to open the comments to recommendations of better books to read.

I’ll throw out a few of my own to get things started.

Redemption in Indigo [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] by Karen Lord. (Reviewed here.)
Who Fears Death [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] and Zahrah the Windseeker [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] by Nnedi Okorafor. (Reviewed here and here.)
Throne of the Crescent Moon [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] by Saladin Ahmed. (Reviewed here.)
Shadow Ops: Control Point [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] by Myke Cole. (Reviewed here.) ETA: Charles Stross disagrees with me about this one in the comments here.
Crystal Rain [Amazon | B&N |  Mysterious Galaxy] and sequels, by Tobias Buckell. (Reviewed here.)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] and sequels, by N. K. Jemisin. (I recommended book one for a Nebula, and reviewed book two here. A review of book three will be coming soon.)
Bone Game [B&N | Amazon], by Louis Owens. (I read this one a long time ago, and it impressed me a great deal.)
Anything by Octavia Butler. I’ve never read a book by Butler that I didn’t like.

Also, see the Carl Brandon Society Resource page for reading lists.

Your turn. What other books by and/or about people of color would you personally recommend? What authors do you believe deserve more time and attention?

ETA: I’ve started a Twitter Hashtag for this conversation as well: #ThoroughlyGoodBooksByPOC

Thoroughly Nonracist Nonsense

Synopsis: Weird Tales was planning to publish the first chapter of Victoria Foyt’s Saving the Pearls: Revealing Eden, a novel which editor Marvin Kaye described as a “Thoroughly Non-racist book,” calling it:

…a compelling view of a world that didn’t listen to the warnings of ecologists, and a world that has developed a reverse racism: blacks dominating and detesting not just whites, but latinos and albinos, the few that still survive of the latter are hunted down and slaughtered.1

Revealing Eden is a science fiction novel, which is not what Weird Tales usually published. I.e., Kaye was going out of his way to promote this book, which is totally not racist.

Kaye condemned those who criticized the book as lacking in “wit, wisdom and depth of literary analysis to understand what they read.” I like to think of myself as someone who rolled reasonably well on those stats, so I figured I’d download the sample to my phone and give it a read.

Excerpts from the first chapter are indented. My thoughts are italicized.

EDEN JUMPED at the sound of approaching steps. They must not see.

Black people are “them.” There’s totally nothing racist about setting up a racial us vs. them dichotomy in the very first line of your book.

Eden shot to her feet, her heart racing, as a plump, dark-skinned lab assistant appeared on the other side of the partition. It was only Peach, who wasn’t as cruel as the rest of them.

From the fourth paragraph. Our heroine is named after the garden of paradise, while our heavy and not-quite-as-bad-as-the-rest black woman is named Peach. Totally not racist!

Had Peach forgotten that Eden’s skin only had a dark coating? Maybe she was passing, after all. Wouldn’t that be nice. Eden almost enjoyed pointing out the truth.

Eden wears totally-not-blackface both to protect her from the sun’s radiation and to make herself look beautiful. Also, Peach is apparently an idiot, despite being Eden’s supervisor.

In that quiet, treasured space, [Eden] allowed herself one small but true thought: I hate them.

To sum up so far, we have a white protagonist in a world where black people are cruel, idiot overlords, and she hates them. But maybe the author is going to do some clever and totally-not-racist inversion.

That bitch Ashina was now fifteen minutes late and Eden wanted to take her break. She glanced around the lab, hoping for a sign of the haughty Coal.

Black people are Coals. White people are Pearls. Also, the second Coal we meet is a haughty (uppity?) bitch.

Eden flinched. One of them was touching her. White-hot light exploded in her head. Before she knew it, she blurted out an incendiary racial slur.

“Get your hands off of me, you damn Coal!”

“Coal” is an incendiary racial slur … which our protagonist is constantly using in her narrative. Also, I’m a little curious why the author uses and defends the term in interviews. I’m sure there’s a totally-not-racist reason, though!

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I only read the sample, so it’s possible that Foyt manages to use the reversal of traditional U.S. racial dynamics to produce an insightful and important work that goes beyond nasty, bullying, caricatured Coals and the brilliant-but-persecuted Pearls. But the first chapter that I read doesn’t move beyond these simplistic dynamics and one-dimensional portrayals of a heroic white girl in a world dominated by nasty, dull-witted blacks.

And that first chapter is what Marvin Kaye was going out of his way to showcase in Weird Tales, a magazine which had earned a place on the 2010 Hugo ballot under the leadership of former editor Ann VanderMeer. That is what Kaye defended as a Thoroughly Non-racist book.

I’m more than willing to grant that the author probably did not deliberately and intentionally set out to write a book based on racial caricatures and stereotypes, that she intended no offense when she hypersexualized black men or described Eden’s black love interest as a “beast man,” that her premise, which relies on Eden and her white father being smarter than all of the evil blacks, was not meant to be hurtful. I accept that she didn’t try to write a story which takes place in a world almost identical to the paranoid fear-rantings of a lifelong KKK loyalist. (”This is what will happen if you let them darkies take over!”)

If you choose an incredibly narrow definition of racism as intentional, deliberate, fully conscious harm, then an argument could be made for Kaye’s defense of the book.

It would be a very poor argument. And it’s yet another incredibly problematic example of a white man in a position of power standing up and lecturing people of color, in a most condescending fashion, about how they don’t understand what racism is, and that he is declaring this book officially Not Racist.

I see now that Kaye’s piece has been pulled, and the magazine is apologizing for any pain and offense it caused. Kaye is traveling and hasn’t responded yet. While I appreciate the apology from the higher-ups at Weird Tales, I remain highly disturbed that the editor ever thought this was in any way a good idea, that he was so supportive of this novel that he was going out of his way to defend  and support it … up until the Internet landed on his head.

I’m sure Marvin Kaye, like Victoria Foyt, had absolutely no intention of causing harm. But lack of intent doesn’t undo or negate the harm caused by ignorance, and Kaye’s actions have been harmful indeed.

ETA: And it sounds like Kaye and the publisher were told months ago that this was a bad idea. (From Jeff VanderMeer - also includes a screenshot of Kaye’s post.)

ETA x 2: N. K. Jemisin - This is how you destroy something beautiful…

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Kaye’s original post has since been yanked from the Weird Tales site. ↩

The Last Airbender Movie and Cultural Appropriation

Last week I talked about the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Well, my son had been curious about the live-action movie, and when I saw it was on TV this weekend, I recorded it so we could watch it together.

I had heard some of the controversy about the casting choices. (I’m not going to rehash the racebending fail here, but seriously, Hollywood - WTF??? And every time we saw Katara and Sokka or their grandmother, I kept wondering why M. Night Shyamalan thought this movie needed white people playing Inuit dress-up.)

Overall … I’m just going to quote my son, who said, “Well, I guess there were some parts I kind of liked.”

This was almost a beat-for-beat imitation of the first season of the cartoon, but with all of the magic and wonder and brilliance sucked out of the story. I did like a lot of the visuals, the way the movie brought to life the images from the cartoon. There were some good set pieces, and I liked seeing live-action bending. But all in all, this movie perfectly demonstrates that there’s more to telling a good story than just an idea or an outline of plot points.

As I was watching, my thoughts kept going to some of the more egregious instances of cultural appropriation in storytelling, by which I mean those stories where an author takes the “shiny bits” from other cultures and uses them in his or her story without any real understanding of that culture. This was driven home again and again as I sat through the movie, particularly by the fact that they couldn’t even pronounce the main character’s name right.

Shyamalan had some shiny bits: the big fire-nation ships, Sokka’s boomerang whipping around, Aang’s glider, nifty scenery pieces like the water tribe city, and of course, lots of bending. And it all somehow managed to be both flat and hollow (which I would have sworn was a physical impossibility).

What makes Aang work in the series isn’t just his responsibilities and his pain; it’s his joy. Aang plays. He creates fun and joy and delight, even in the midst of tragedy. That’s part of his power. When that Aang tells Zuko he thinks they could have been friends, you feel it. Dang, do you feel it. But when Noah Ringer says it, it’s empty and boring.

It was interesting seeing Appa and Momo brought to life, and there were one or two vaguely amusing scenes with Appa, but once again they were just there. You don’t see Aang’s love for his animal companions. You don’t get any sense that Appa is Aang’s one remaining connection to his past. You could erase Momo entirely from the movie, and absolutely nothing would change.

And then there’s Zuko and Iroh. Oh, M. Night Shyamalan, no. We see hints of Zuko’s depth and conflict, but they’re fleeting. Momentary flashes to torture us with what could have been. And Uncle Iroh … such an amazing character in the cartoon. Confident and strong, at peace with his tortured past, so incredibly protective and loving of his nephew. He’s amazing. Like Aang, he has learned to find joy. Having lived through war, he’s learned the value of peace, but push him too far or threaten his nephew, and he will end you.

And for Iroh, M. Night Shyamalan brings us … some guy sprawled out getting a foot massage from a girl. A man who stands there and watches the moon spirit get stabbed, and then lashed out with impressive but utterly ineffectual firebending, which only makes him look more useless.

Shyamalan has said he’s a fan of the show, that his daughter dressed up as Katara for Halloween, and that he and his family used to watch Avatar together. During development, the creators of the show talked about how Shyamalan respected their material (source).

Maybe he is a fan, I don’t know. All I can say is that watching this movie gave me flashbacks to college and that white kid who filled every wall and surface of their dorm room with Native American stuff they bought from the mall.

Stealing shiny bits isn’t enough. Sure, it might look pretty, but when you don’t understand or respect the source of your story, you’re left with a shallow mockery.