Kate Elliott's Blog, page 37

The Appeal of SFF

Thanks, all. I found that really interesting. Lots of The Hobbit, Narnia (which I didn't read until I was an adult), a number of mentions of L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, and a surprising selection of Silverberg stories. Remind me to tell you my Silverberg story; it has two parts.

I know people who don't read science fiction and fantasy. It's not "real." Or it's too genre. I don't see anything wrong with this. I'm not much of a mystery reader, for instance, and I almost never read memoirs as the form doesn't generally work for me. So it makes sense that there are readers for whom sff has no appeal or even an anti-appeal.

It's an odd thing, though, the appeal of sff. For me it was like coming home. The stories spoke to me instantly, fully, and deeply. And yet I know how some describe sff as immature for its insistence on things that can't be true, not to mention its genre roots and wings.

But sff are the literature of marvels, myth, wonder, adventure, and the exploration of the unknown.

What do you think the appeal of sff is for those of us who love to read it?

First SFF Novel

What's the first science fiction or fantasy novel you remember reading?

I'll go first.

If we go by fantastical elements, then I would have to say Mother West Wind Stories by Thornton Burgess, which I read and re-read obsessively in my early reading days.

If we go by books that fall more canonically into genre, then Robert Silverberg's REVOLT ON ALPHA C, which I got as a Scholastic Book selection back in the fourth grade.

I should note that I was not a precocious reader. I read a lot, but I didn't move into adult books until I was in what was then called junior high school, so early teen years.

Cold Magic paperback. Global awakening.

Two things tonight.

First, I unexpectedly received my author's copies of the mass market edition of COLD MAGIC. Its official release date is August 1 but it will probably start showing up in stores before that. Obviously the ebook remains available, but now the mass market will be too. Orbit altered the cover somewhat for the mass market. You can see the old and new covers compared at this Tumblr post.

What this means for you is that the mass market will be available very very soon. COLD FIRE follows in September.



Second, read here an excellent post by Ghanaian writer Jonathan Dotse on "Developing Worlds: Beyond the Frontiers of Science Fiction."

there are more signs that we are at the beginning of a global awakening to the role of the developing world in the future of science fiction. My own novel-in-progress began as a cyberpunk thriller set in a future North America, simply because whenever I tried to imagine an African future I found myself having to deal with issues I wished someone else had already dealt with; having to answer questions I wished someone else already had. I realized that I had no groundwork; no foundation whatsoever, and that to imagine a future Africa I would have to begin from scratch.

In which I write about why I write about rape

I write fantasy and science fiction novels. I tend to write epic in length and scope, and would call myself a writer of Epic Fantasy.

Many have attempted to define "epic fantasy" as a subgenre, most recently in this extensive roundtable at Clarkesworld Magazine. Obviously I am not one who agrees with those who dismiss epic fantasy as "consolatory fantasy" or the last great hope and refuge of reactionaries secretly in love with the aristocratic system. I think epic fantasy ought to defy definition. Certainly, I see a great many differing sorts of "epic" being written, especially these days as I see a more diverse group of writers emerging who are playing with the landscape of epic.

With the understanding that I don't identify one pure and true definition, or think that epic fantasy can or should be boiled down to one thing, I do rather like Adam Whitehead's (The Wertzone) discussion of epic fantasy being an examination of power.

He writes: "At its root, a lot of the subgenre seems to be about the possession and distribution of power and authority, whether that is power over a family, another person, a business, a religion, a kingdom, an empire or a whole world. The clash of those people with different agendas seeking (or avoiding) power drives many works in the subgenre." [His entire post is well worth reading]

I consistently examine power and authority in my novels. One element in the "possession and distribution of power and authority" across the centuries is the predilection of human groups to engage in armed conflict and warfare to achieve their aims. Another is the way in which hierarchy supports entrenched power and in what circumstances entrenched power structures are overthrown or destabilized. Most of these societies historically are patriarchal, which I will simplistically define here as societies in which legally and by custom men have a superior societal position to women purely because of perceived or created gender hierarchies.

Like most people, I really don't like to read about rape.

I tend to dislike when sexual violence is portrayed as a vehicle through which the female protagonist becomes scarred and/or stronger because she survives it, or when a rape victim "just gets over it" almost as quickly as if she had stubbed her toe.

I get tired of depictions of rape being endemic in much epic fantasy even though I myself argue in this post that there is a reason for its inclusion. I suspect my dislike stems from much of the sexual violence in epic fantasy being seen through a male gaze. While this can in theory and occasionally in practice be done well and realistically, it tends to define the victim as the object of rape rather than the subject of rape, which for me is a crucial distinction in terms of seeing women (especially) as people rather than as plot tools or sexual receptacles.

Obviously, men can be raped too, although I see such depictions far less often and am more likely to notice points where the writers chose, say, to beat up men rather than rape them (as in Battlestar Galactica the Reboot) whereas in a similar situation female characters would have been raped. I confess: I'm guilty of making this choice myself.

Despite my dislike and my unease, however, for me to write about war, slavery, and entrenched hierarchies maintaining their power and NOT to include how rape figures into that cycle and those institutions is to look away from, to make invisible, the horrifically real experiences of both living and long-dead people.

This doesn't mean I feel I have to or want to write about rape in every story I tell.

I don't, and I won't.

But when I'm writing about war and hierarchy, I feel I can't ignore the reality of how rape is used as a form of social and gender control, of terror in war, as a human rights violation in the specific context of war and armed conflict (something people are still struggling to get rape defined as), or simply unthinkingly in the dehumanizing shackles of slavery, where a person's body is property to be used as the owner wishes.

Rape remains persistent in most cultures, unfortunately, and as always the most powerless are most at risk.

Shadow Gate, the middle novel of the Crossroads Trilogy, deals in part specifically with rape as a tool of oppression and social breakdown. It's a grim book. I was driven in part by current events, the truly awful and heart-rending reports from regions broken down by civil war like the Balkans and the Congo. I can't bear to look away from these truths because they are so bitter and because we have too often shamed the victims, not the perpetrators or a system that leaves such perpetrators in power or lets them go unpunished.

The story of Liath in Crown of Stars begins with her inability to escape from debt slavery and the attentions of a man who intends to control her and her burgeoning power. I based my portrayal of the man in question, Hugh of Austra, in part on an account of an abusive, controlling husband whose behavior one of my sisters had witnessed because the wife in question was an acquaintance of hers.

I have on occasion been taken to task for writing about rape. It has been suggested or implied that I have written the story the way I do for the cheap dramatic punch rather than because I have something to say about the way hierarchies oppress those without the power base of kinship or wealth to protect themselves, or the ways in which people look the other way when abuse is going on because the structure of society protects the abuser, not the abused.

I posit that it is exactly this degree of assumptive judgment--the assumption that there can be nothing but lurid and shallow dramatic consideration behind such a choice--that is part of what creates lesser visibility for female writers in the field.

For one: Why are the larger thematic and analytical elements within the story ignored so easily in favor of seeing the shallowest level?

For two: Why should these stories remain invisible?

I think we can't get past the disjunction, the privileging of the male gaze and the unrelentingly patriarchal male vision of so much epic fantasy (not to mention other literatures as well as the visual media) when it comes to the portrayal of women and sexual violence, until the uncomfortable stories told from the women's perspective are seen as important and worthwhile and not as offensive or whiny or trivial.

With Liath in Crown of Stars, with Kirit/Kirya and the unnamed women in Shadow Gate, I am in part trying to give visibility to experiences we would prefer to look away from especially as we--and we do--glorify the nobility of war and warriors and the inevitability of violent conflict.

But I'm also trying to suggest that what has happened to these women (and children) is part of the fabric of the societies in which they live and therefore only one part of their greater lives as human beings. That is, the rape is not the story nor does it define them. Their suffering is not The Story. It is part of their story. It is something that happens to them, and there are reasons it happens and reasons it should never have happened in a more just world, the world they don't live in which is also the world we don't live in but which maybe we strive to move toward.

Book Talk: Should Authors Discuss their own Books Online?

Over at Book View Cafe, the fine novelist and essayist sartorias talks about "Book Talk," that is, the love some (many?) readers have of book discussion. She writes about how, as a teen, she took a long bus journey in order to get in book talk, and how reading the work of writers talking about reading was another form of book talk.

The literary criticism or analysis that I found myself responding to was more in the nature of exploration, someone recording their experience of reading—what they found (or did not find) in the text, and how it related to other books, to other experience.


Growing up, I do not recall having anyone to discuss books with except my high school English teacher Charles Sullivan (later a president of IAFA). The idea of a book club still leaves me cold, not because I have an inherent objection to book clubs -- quite the contrary -- but because I don't understand how to negotiate them. I learned early to identify reading as a solitary activity, and yet one of the great pleasures I find when attending the few conventions I can make it to is book talk.

I do not discuss books, especially novels, online as much as I suppose I might wish to because I feel a genuine sense of reluctance to express, shall we say, the fullness of my opinion. I'm very aware of how interconnected the community is. I'm far more likely to discuss film in a wide-ranging way because it seems distanced from me; I am merely a consumer of film/tv.

Yet I noted that one of the commentators to the "Book Talk" post had a strong opinion on writers discussing their own work: "I think authors should be banned from discussing their own books."

I asked for a clarification, so will update when I have it, but there are many ways of looking at this statement. I'll note three.

One is through the lens of promotion. I admit, I think it's a little harsh to expect writers never to mention their own work in the context of any promotional content whatsoever, i.e. my book is out today or here is a review of my book I'd like to share. On the flip side, if 90+% of a writer's social media communication is blatant promotion, I too will stop listening.

Two is through the lens of responding to talk about one's own work. The old wisdom prevails: Never ever argue with a bad review. But these days it all gets so much more complex. Should a writer thank a reviewer for a favorable or particularly insightful review? Should a writer enter discussions of their own work at any point? At a convention, of course, or a talk or reading, writers are often interviewed or encouraged to discuss their work; it's often the point of the panel or event. Is online a different space from this? Do readers want the space (quite reasonably) to discuss books without writers looking over their shoulders? As a reader entering a discussion, I would want that unless the venue was specifically a place in which readers asked writers questions and engaged them in discussion, but once you've entered that venue, the sort of book talk you're having changes, it seems to me.

Third is through the lens of a writer who reflects, discusses, analyzes, and reports on their own work, either that which they have already finished or works in progress. As a writer, I have a hard time thinking I ought never discuss my own work on my own blog or, to expand the definition, anywhere online. I don't say this to suggest that commentator above meant that writers should never discuss their own work in public or online; I'm just saying it seems odd to ME if that were the proposition.

I know that social media have changed the dynamic profoundly, and that there is a huge variety of responses to and reactions with the new online networking, not to mention the increasing reliance publishers have in using social media as promotion and publicity and especially in encouraging writers to do a lot of their own social media work.

As I have said before, I find the explosion of book blogging to be really exciting; book talk is all over the place these days in a way I could not have imagined when I was a teen reading reading reading in my solitary way.

So what do you think about book talk online and whether the presence of writers in social media helps or hinders it? Where is the balance? What are the issues?

Why I Write Epic Fantasy

Jeremy L. C. Jones at Clarkesworld Magazine has put up the first part of what I believe will be a two part extensive and multi-author interview on the subject of Epic Fantasy. He interviewed 26 writers (13 female, 13 male), an editor, and an agent/former editor. It's a diverse and interesting roundtable, and Jones did an impressive amount of work to put it together.

You can find Part One here.

Part Two comes out in August.

COLD MAGIC: the mass market release

The mass market of COLD MAGIC releases on August 1, 2011.

Over on Tumblr, where I find it easier to post photos than here, I've posted the mass market cover and the trade paper cover for you to compare the differences and discern the similarities.

I believe this is the final, but I have to tell you honestly that I'm not entirely sure.

Taye Diggs' DAY BREAK and the vexed question of spoilers

Two things recently have caused me to contemplate yet again the vexed question of spoilers.

One was an online discussion that took place long enough ago that I'm not going to link to it. The other was watching the Taye Diggs' produced-and-starred-in miniseries DAY BREAK.

I don't like spoilers.

I say that not to take a belligerent stance. I know there are people who don't mind spoilers and that seems to me as valid a stance as mine; it's just a different stance. So when I say I don't like spoilers, I don't mean that I have a moral objection to spoilers or that I think no review or critical essay should include spoilers out of respect for delicate sensibilities like my own or that people who put spoilers in their reviews are horrible thoughtless wankers, I just mean that I PERSONALLY don't like spoilers and I avoid them.


Here's why I personally don't like spoilers. It matters for ME ONLY, and is not meant to reflect badly on sensibilities different from my own.

When I experience a work for the first time, I want to experience it with as few preconceived notions as possible. I say that because I do bring in preconceived notions to every fictional work I read or view. I can't help myself. I just do.

The more preconceptions I haul in, the less likely I can interact with the work in the way I best like: that is, in which I am discovering what the work is about and how I am reacting to what I am discovering the work is about. Much of the pleasure for me is not "surprise," but rather "getting to know" the piece. I prefer to do that unmediated by outside opinion and influence beyond what I already bring because of the cultural baggage, and knowledge, I drag along as part of my daily existence. I'm also an emotional reader and viewer; the experience of my emotional interaction with the story is a great part of the enjoyment for me. I should note here that I can have an emotional interaction with intellectual content as well as characterization and plot and landscape.

I have discovered that I can increase my reading and viewing enjoyment by deliberately going in with as little knowledge of a specific work as possible. Oddly, this enhances the experience. It's as if the less I know about the work, the more I can enjoy it for what it is to me because I am less likely to walk into it tainted by expectations.

Alas, I am obliged to add here, lest someone believe otherwise, that by this I do not mean I value ignorance and think ignorance makes books and films better. I value being well read and well educated and make myself as well read and educated as possible, so when I say that I go into a work "knowing as little as possible" I don't mean in the larger sense of my general attempts to be knowledgable about the world and current events.

I will also tack on a brief paragraph to note that I am not an uncritical, I-just-go-in-with-low-expectations viewer and reader. Just ask my children how much they like to go see a film with me. When the lights come up, they look at me and say, "Well, Mom?" and brace themselves for the usual torrential criticism of the writing, characterization (or lack thereof), and stupid plot idiocies. I shall always fondly recall their befuddled expressions after the second X-Men film, in which they asked, and I said, "Gosh! I enjoyed that!" Please do not ask me what I thought of the third X-Men film as to even think of that abomination still makes my blood to boil.

DAY BREAK is a series starring Taye Diggs and an unusually diverse cast (for mainstream Hollywood) including three major female characters. He plays a cop in LA, but the story has a spec-fic element. I didn't even know that much when Spouse and I watched the first episode. What I knew was that it starred Taye Diggs, and I'm sorry to have to tell you that the reason I stumbled across it at all was that I was wasting time online one day "fantasy casting" Cold Magic by checking out handsome black male actors to see if any of them had the kind of look I have in my head for Andevai.

As we watched the show (13 episodes that tell a complete story), I reflected how much I was enjoying my dearth of expectations. Nothing got in the way between me and my idiosyncratic experience of the show. Each night as we watched another episode or two via Netflix, Spouse and I speculated over possible directions that the story might take characters and plots, a pleasant diversion we could not have enjoyed had we known the story in advance. Indeed, I think the shows I've most enjoyed in the last few years have been the ones I've known the least about when I started watching them, including the iconic and superb The Wire (HBO, 5 seasons). I'm thrilled I knew as little as I did about the The Wire when we watched it--all via Netflix--and that I avoided reading about seasons we hadn't yet seen because I didn't want to read spoilers.

Let me be blunt. In some conversations about spoilers I sometimes sense a kind of condescension from people who are sure that anyone who objects to spoilers is a lesser sort of reader compared to, oh, them.

I just don't see the utility of making a hierarchy out of ways in which people read.

Because not only is creating such a hierarchy a suspect exercise, it also closes off the possibility that people may have more than one facet, more than one set of tools, more than one strategy and approach. In other words, I don't want to be told that I OUGHT NOT be the kind of reader/viewer who prefers no spoilers before reading or viewing a work.

Likewise, at times I sense an implied or stated idea that if "you" don't like spoilers, then you must also by definition not ever want to engage critically with anything you read or view. Is it really so difficult to imagine that someone might dislike spoilers but like critical essays? My personal dislike of spoilers does not mean I ALSO do not like critical essays. I like them just fine (and I believe that critical essays by definition will and indeed must contain spoilers, in contrast to reviews which may or may not contain spoilers depending on how much the reviewer described the plot)

However, I don't want to read critical essays until I've also read/viewed the work in question (or in those cases where I am pretty sure I am never going to read the work in question). Indeed, I get a great deal of enjoyment out of seeking out critical engagement with works I've particularly liked because it's not only interesting and occasionally enlightening but it also creates a re-engagement with the work through analyzing and examining it, akin to re-watching or re-reading. In fact, I wish there was more critical engagement in the sff field and that it ranged farther afield: that is, I wish what critical essays there are would not roll over the same set of works and authors that get considered multiple times while rafts of other works and authors remain ignored.

At the same time, I understand that people who don't mind spoilers can get frustrated by militant anti-spoiler readers and comments. Spoilerphilics don't want to get scolded or accused of being snobs or killjoys. Why should they want that? They're reading and viewing in a way that works for them. As far as I can tell, some people really want to know more about a work before they invest time and/or money in reading or viewing it, or they want to make sure the work will not contain triggering plot elements that they have good reason to prefer to avoid, or they just don't care, or some other of many possible reasons and ways of reading and viewing.

As for DAY BREAK, both Spouse and I really enjoyed it, so that would constitute a two thumbs up. With no spoilers.

If I ran Hollywood: rebooting with race and gender

Imagine a cool science fiction show with an ensemble cast. The lead and captain is a black guy (stick with me here, it could happen) and the XO is female. There's another competent female, and two more male PoCs. The most prominent white guy is not a hunk but a good character actor who happens to be married to a woman of Asian ancestry, and the two obvious "aliens" in the main ensemble group are disguised white guys, also not hunks.

Now imagine that show was on the air in the 90s, and perhaps you will understand why I am getting discouraged these days, since it seems we have slid backward and that the sliding is getting worse.

It seems to me that the reboot of Battlestar Galactica was an attempt to revision the old show, complete with a far more diverse cast and a new thematic angle. I grant you that the new BSG had flaws, but only five years on even its problems look, well, like ones I could almost wish we were having now, especially after the reboot of Star Trek which, as far as I could tell, was probably a true reboot in that it just restated the computer with the same program only with better CGI and young actors.


Don't shake your head. I know what the answer to my question is. But I have to ask it anyway:

There are so many much more interesting stories to be told that why do we still keep getting the one we're getting? The one that must be told through the lens of the white guy?



If I had had a hand in X-Men First Class, I might have suggested the filmmakers--eager to tackle racism only of course through the lens of white guys standing in for PoC--really tackle it. For instance, they could have made it explicit that all the non-Anglo mutants, and all or most of the women regardless of ethnicity or race or religion, are so discriminated against in the institutional milieu of the time that they really can only function and be accepted if they join "the bad guys." Or how about a major character who has the same role Jackie Robinson took on in major league baseball, and see how that plays out? Memo: It is not hipster ironic to have the black guy die. How about not introducing female characters as strippers (or prostitutes) or (as in the tiresome Iron Man II) party-girl hangers-on? Or just put clothes on the women unless there's a really good reason not to? Or don't kill almost all of th powerful women off (as per the appalling X-Men III)? And what about exploring the idea that there should be as many female as male mutants? And the obstacles placed before the girls/women even though they are powerful and different?


I know . . . I know . . .


So what would you do? How would you reboot your classic pet peeve rebooted film or tv show if you had a hand in it?

"But after reading it, I realised that I liked it because it was like Northanger Abbey."

I adore this review of Cold Magic.

I particularly love reviews that make me out to be clever, and this one hits several elements of the book that I'm very pleased to see noted. It's not particularly spoilerific, but if you haven't read the book and hate any manner of spoiler, then I would skip it until after you've read the book.


At this point, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with Northanger Abbey. Cat isn't the romantic dreamer of her family: her cousin Bee is. Cat is practical and sensible, self-deprecating and intelligent. She does not appear to have ever been in love or even had a crush before Andevai whisks her off to be his wife.

And it is for precisely this reason that Cold Magic is like Northanger Abbey. I'm going out on a limb here, but I have the feeling that Elliott wrote this book with certain assumptions about her readers. She assumed that most of them were readers of romance novels or at least romantic fantasy novels and were fans of (or at least familiar with) stories where good girls and bad boys fall in love. She assumed that we would read Cat and Andevai in this manner. And then she gleefully toys with our expectations for the remainder of the book.