David Erik Nelson's Blog, page 42
June 27, 2012
Steampunks, we've got some 'splaining to do
In a nut-shell: An author named Lavie Tidhar (with whom, incidentally, Poor Mojo's Giant Squid and this fair weblog's core editorial staff share billing in the upcoming Steampunk III anthology) tweeted this the other day:
I see Steampunk as “Fascism for nice people”.
Hoo-boy did *that* piss folks off! There was the wailing and the groan and the gnashing of teeth and the boycott-threatening and the etc.
For context: Lavie is the author of at least three steampunk novels and more than few noted short stories, as well as non-fiction on steampunk as a genre. This specific tweet was kicked off by his brain while he was drafting "A Lexicon of Steam Literature of the Third Reich
" (scroll down to see it; the top of the page is Lavie's response to the teeth-gnashing wails, etc.) Now, Lavie didn't precisely go so far as apologizing here, but that strikes me as perfectly appropriate, because he doesn't really have anything to apologize for.
Listen: Steampunk sits on precarious moral foundations, and if you believe that part of the point of fiction is to write *moral* fiction--to speak to how humans *do* behave vs. how they *should* behave--then this is maybe sorta important. Science fiction/fantasy (and especially urban fantasy) notoriously have a Race Problem, which is that they kinda fail to acknowledge our real-world Race Problem. In terms of any *specific* story this is fine; no one wants every damn space opera to be a Very Special Episode of Diff'rent Strokes. But when you add it up, the general absence of an accurate treatment of race across the genre becomes as glaring as the sea of pasty white faces hunched over their keyboards.
*Pause.* Yes, I know, there are tons of counter examples viz. race in SF/F, even from the squarest, least offensive, most middle-of-the-road SF we've made. But, seriously, if someone says "You know, we're kinda all writing stories that somehow ignore the Western World's central conflict for the last several hundred years" and your reply is "What about Uhura! Star Trek had the first interracial kiss on television!" then you're sorta saying that the biggest accomplishment white male writers could imagine for an African-American woman in the distant future would be to get to voluntarily kiss a powerful white guy, which is . . . um . . . I mean, that's sort of insanely offensive. Or, more to the point, that's sort of *exactly what I'm talking about.*
All of this is magnified x100 in Steampunk, because we're *grounding* our stories in an America and Europe that was miserable to folks descended from Africans, crumbling for folks descended from Conquistadors, basically all but collapsed for the Native People of the Americas, contemptuous Asians and the Muslims responsible for the maintenance and advancement of human knowledge throughout the European Dark Ages, and on the verge of launching an unprecedented campaign to rid the world of every living Jew.
Which, in a way, brings us back to Lavie's little dieselpunk faux encyclopedia entry, linked above, which I urge you to read because it is *wicked* and *fun*!
In the end, no one is asking any of us to dwell on *any* of this. As readers, that's your prerogative. You work hard, and you just want to relax and read something fun. I get that. Lavie gets that. Everyone gets that. That's totally cool; go buy a different book.
But how in the world can you expect a human with a shred of conscience to dwell in that world for weeks, months, years--as a writer must--kitted out with a 21st century notion of justice and equality, and *not* address it at all, ever? And not even *acknowledge* it during his or her writing breaks? Why is the response to lash out and threaten that writer's livelihood, and that of other authors who happen to write for the same house? What is the terrible thing that Lavie is saying that shouldn't be permissible to say? That it might be a little gross to unquestioningly lionize a period where progress for the self-appointed "ideal" few was fueled by the blood of the "degenerate"?
I bring all of this up because I write fantasy and SF and steampunk in part *because* I can't help but talk about race and religion, and these are great places to talk about it. Most pale 21st Century Americans get super squicked out and quiet if you try and talk about the racial disparity in modern prison populations, but they can really dig in and talk a blue-streak if we talk about made-up persecution of androids. It might seem nuts, but doing the latter makes room in the conversation to talk about the former openly. I've spoken at steampunk conventions and always been shocked and gratified by how open fans are to talking about just these very uncomfortable topics. Meanwhile, I've often been *shocked* by the things humans will write in a letter or email, or will post online *right next to their actual name and photograph.* This isn't about anonymous trolls or drive-by haters. There's something else that happens when we code our feelings into words, and when it's gloomy and I'm down, I start to worry that the whack shit people tweet to the world is what's in their heart, not the thoughtful things they say to my face.
What I'm saying right now will sound trite--especially after the twitter freakout by white folks who read the Hunger Games then flipped when they realized Prim is black--but I firmly believe that for every sub-literate tweeter there are a dozen white people whose hearts are turned when they mourn that made-up little black girl. That few degrees of twist will be the seed for a racial conscience that will guide them when they are hiring, when they are firing, when they are voting, when they are purchasing.
And that's the business we're in, me and Mojo and Fritz and Lavie. And so I want to draw your attention here and point you to Lavie's fake encyclopedia entry, salvaged from an alternate Now in which both he and I would be unconcieved ash, if even that. It really is a neat little romp (I say that without irony or sarcasm) and includes little runs like this:
. . .
DICK, PHILIP K. (KINDRED)
American author of pulp fiction. His novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) posits a world in which Germany lost the War (see also FALSE REALITY, HITLER LOST). All known copies of the novel have been destroyed. The author perished in a rehabilitation camp shortly after.
GOLEM
A JEW creation, born out of OCCULT PRACTICES and DEGENERATE SCIENCE. A mechanical man.
BLACK RACE, THE
Devolved race, mostly extinct – some are kept (alongside JEWS, GYPSIES, SLAVS, CHINAMEN etc. etc.) in specialized zoos. Perhaps the best way to see them is at the Berlin Zoologischer Garten, where many rare examples of near-extinct lower races can be seen in their native habitat, including such rare specimens as PYGMIES, AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES and the IRISH.
. . .
FACT: "Nothing is sexier than a topless girl making a fishface."
I hate to feed the BuzzFeed Monster, but several of these gags LOLed me, sitting here in the tattoos-and-facial-piercings-atheists coffee shop situated in downtown Dutch Reform Christian Village (I'm working on "vacation"!)
41 Regrettably Tacky Photos Of Famous People
Photographer: "Nothing is sexier than a topless girl making a fishface."
June 24, 2012
OMFG! Hoverboard Lightsaber Portal Gone Fight!!!
I'm getting mad-crazy sea-sick just thinking about it!
Hoverboard Lightsaber Portal Gun Fight - CollegeHumor Video
June 22, 2012
On Schooling, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Career Readiness, &c.
I continue to write a monthly column for the Ann Arbor Chronicle. This month's column kicks off a Summertime Fun in the Sun Series on Education! It goes like this:
The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Getting Schooled
Sadly, this is increasingly how we want to talk about schooling: What are the grades? The test scores? The graduation rates and matriculation rates? How many go to four-year universities? How many finish those programs? Who’s got a job and how much is he or she earning?
Of course you can fudge scores and graduate a class of functional illiterates – and public schools are accused of such skullduggery all the time by right-wing pundits. But even when we move away from dumb numbers and into fuzzier, but more reasonable questions of “career readiness” and “marketable skills,” that move doesn’t really change the metric. We’re still saying that the point of schooling – the point of our children’s lives, as they spend at least a third of each day on schooling – is to make more money.
Pardon me for playing to type, but that seems like a pretty goddamn shabby lesson for our kids, and a pretty shitty life goal.
“Hey, kid, what do you wanna be when you grow up?”
“Rich!”
If I heard my boy say that, it would turn my guts. . . .
June 18, 2012
Is Yglesias arguing that Kickstarter might undermine tax revenue, or that government is crappy at assessing non-fungible benefits?
The title to this article is *almost* at odds with the actual thrust of his observations. Short, and worth mulling over:
Unfortunately, economic growth—gross domestic product—is made of money, not dreams. A sudden shift in the share of labor and capital that are devoted to dream-following would show up in national account statistics as a large fall in productivity. The psychic rewards would go unmeasured. We thus might mistake an outpouring of creative energy for a collapse in wages and incomes, leading to some potentially serious policy errors. . . .
June 15, 2012
Recommended Reading: Clockers by Richard Price #FridayReads
A long book, and in some regards the template for THE WIRE (Price wrote for Season Five, and it shows; you'll see some dialogue that he lifted directly from CLOCKERS for his episodes); well worth the read for all of us, essentially mandatory for fans of that HBO series, though.
On the surface CLOCKERS is a gritty mystery procedural set in Jersey. A dozen pages in, and you realize it's the dark mirror of GATSBY, in that GATSBY is a slim book about a man who was really only limited by what he imagined he could be, and CLOCKERS is a long book about a species of men who are fundamentally trapped by the limits of what they can imagine themselves to be. (I.e., for better or worse, CLOCKERS argues that we're all and every one of us folks who "arise from the platonic conception of ourselves".)
That said, more deeply CLOCKERS is a really stunning exploration of what is knowable, of how we know things, and in how terribly our Beliefs will obstruct our simple capacity to observe and understand concrete Facts. The mystery at the heart of CLOCKERS is that there are no Mysteries.
June 14, 2012
How the people of Troy, MI, used playful performance art to save their public library
Reminds me of the Diggers--and thus also reminds me that if your political action isn't fun and funny, you're probably doing it wrong. Put aside hysteria, and play a game with the Game.
Bonus points to these folks for getting all available goats.
Save the Troy Library "Adventures In Reverse Psychology" - YouTube
June 13, 2012
I guess I just never realized what great dads stormtroopers were . . .
I'm *really* not feeling good about the finales of Episodes IV and VI right now.
Stormtrooper pic's - a set on Flickr
(Incidentally, I really *do* feel like there's a legitimate argument being made about war and "bad guys" here, but I also fully acknowledge that I have a slight tendency to over-thinking basically every tiny thing I stumble across.)
June 12, 2012
"Here Lies Ray Bradbury, Who Loved Completely"
(amen to that, incidentally)
What I like about this is that it's for the Big Read and nominally about books and literature and writing and Ray himself, but when you listen to his answers you discover that, throughout, he's really talking about Love; over and over and over again he invokes Love:
June 11, 2012
Shameless Self-Promotion: Are You Prepared for Father's Day?
A gentle nudge: If you're looking for a Dad's Day gift for a fella with school-age children, you can do worse than dave-o's book SNIP, BURN, SOLDER, SHRED: Seriously Geeky Stuff to Make with Your Kids. Fully certified dads have said stuff like:
This is the stuff that magic and dreams are made of in childhood, at least for those kids who have the idea that magic can be handmade. Snip, Burn, Solder, Shred is a seriously cool book.
and
This book is full of great innovative ideas to engage you and your kids for quite some time. What I loved most was that this book provided step-by-step directions that left nothing to chance. Instead it spelled everything out making it simple, even though your kids will simply think that you are cool! I mean how many dads can say that they built their own electric guitar? I don't know many that is for sure!
and
Seriously: order this soon.
(That last one's from Rob Malda, founder of Slashdot.org, and really nice cat.)
If you really want to stick it to The Man, you can always order directly from the publisher (you can also download a couple free sample projects at that link). You'll get the ebooks (including a Kindle version) *FREE*, and if you use the coupon code SHRED you'll save 35 percent.
Order soonishly from whoever and the book is sure to arrive in time for Father's Day.
Alternately, if your dad or hubby is into clockwork sex robots, maybe try this steampunk novella on Kindle--or the supercool, handmade print chapbook.
So, that's my pitch. Thank you, and have a marvelous morning! (My own morning is going to be spent soothing a baby will nice, large gentleman tear up the floor of my basement office in order to replace a collapsed sewer line so, please, have as marvelous a morning as possible. We need to bring up our average, folks!)
