Nicola Griffith's Blog, page 74

Me as Hild

I couldn’t be at University Bookstore for Independent Bookstore Day when they had that great pretend-you’re-Hild poster board, so I popped in yesterday. (Yes, the same day a surgeon played shoot-em-up in my eyeball.) Kelley took the photo. Thanks to the fab Jenny, Pam, and Duane—who have promised beer and wine and a party the next time I read there. So now I’m looking for an excuse!

Eyeball as first-person shooter arena

Last August I had a practically miraculous eye surgery to replace my super-myopic natural lenses with bionic ones. I went from being blind as a bat (that is, about -16 dioptres) to eagle vision. Then, last week, at a routine checkup, the opthamologist told me there was a bit of filming at the back of my left eye and I should come in for surgical evaluation.

This morning I went in to get my eyes dilated for a proper look-see. The surgeon who did the original surgery said, “Oh, yep, you’ve got a PCO. Want me to take care of it right now?” That is, I had posterior capsule opacity, which happens about 20% of the time after lens replacement, and she could do an Nd: YAG laser capsulotomy.

It was very cool (apart from the dilation; I look like an owl as I type this). I sat in a chair and she shot lasers in my eye to punch holes through the film along the axis of vision. Each shot flared brilliant red and made a  high-energy cracking sound. Just like an old arcade video game. Then she offered to shoot down the giant floater I’d got from the vitreous separation I had in autumn. And so she did. No masks or gowns or gloves, just a couple of drops in my eye, a video game, and wearing sunglasses for a few hours.

It’s pretty amazing to live in the future.

How to look like Hild

Yesterday was Independent Bookstore Day here in Seattle. University Bookstore—my stomping ground when I lived in the Wallingford neighbourhood; great book shop!—celebrated with giant poster boards of Hild with the face cut out. Several people tried it out.

Penguin rep @colleenaconway gets her Hild on

A visiting musician gives it a go…

I couldn’t be there (I was out on the water celebrating a friend’s book launch—more on that another day) but it would have been instructive to try my face for Hild’s. Then we could find out once and for all if I look like my protagonist or not…

Juicy discussion about Hild on Strange Horizons

Up on Strange Horizons: a four-way conversation about Hild from critics (mostly PhD students, so in love with technical litcrit terms). They really go there. I don’t always agree—and they often disagree with each other—and sometimes they’re just plain wrong, but if thinking about novels, narrative structure, and genre are your meat and drink, this is for you. It’s hefty, close to 8,000 words, but definitely juicy.

Let me know what you think.

SCOTUS and same-sex marriage, addendum

I’ve been reading transcripts of the oral arguments of yesterday’s oral arguments at Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges. They are divided into two parts: transcript of first part of oral arguments in Obergefell vs. Hodges, relating to the question, “Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?” and the second part, seeking an answer to, “Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?” (If you have two and half hours to wile away there are audio files of the arguments here and here.)

Question 1 is argued ably by Mary Bonauto (seconded by Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. and defended by John Bursch) and Question 2 by Douglas Hallward-Driemeier (defended by Joseph Whalen).

If the court decides that the answer to Question 1 is Yes, then Question 2 is moot. All the justices agreed that this was so. This made Q2 feel a little anticlimactic in some ways but intensely interesting in others. Scalia and Alito dragged in the usual inflammatory analogies to polygamy and underage marriage; incest got tossed in for good measure. (I can’t remember by whom. At least no one mentioned bestiality.) Roberts seemed testy. Sotomayor and Kagan were very clear in their position: they want Q1 answered with a Yes, and Q2 therefore doesn’t matter much. Breyer was having a lot of fun—he made the court laugh a couple of times. Ginsberg seemed to be drawing out Hallward-Driemeier, helping him lay out his argument. Thomas said nothing (as usual). The most telling questions, for me, came from Scalia (he wanted to talk about Article IV of the Constitution), and from Kennedy—who, like Thomas, said nothing at all.

Why would Kennedy say nothing? I can only assume that it’s because he’s wrestling with Q1. On that, he’s possibly the swing vote. Kagan, Ginsberg, Sotomayor, and Breyer will vote Yes. Thomas and Alito will definitely vote No; Scalia most probably No; Roberts possibly No. Kennedy, therefore, feels the responsibility keenly. The basic issue for him (judging by his questions in Q1) is weighing millennia of tradition against the suffering of real people.

But arguments for Q2? Very interesting. Right now I’d say that if that were the only question before the court, Scalia might vote Yes. Roberts too, maybe. But what was making them both grumpy is the understanding that Yes on Q2 makes very little sense without Yes on Q1. Law logic vs. their conservatism is killing them.

So, yes, I still think there will be a Yes of some kind in June. My hope is still for Yes on Q1, that Kennedy will listen to his conscience—but that, at the very far reaches of the hope universe, there’s a tenuous hint of a wisp of possibility that Roberts and Scalia might say Yes, too.

We’ll find out in two months.

Ex Machina review

A a quick plot summary:

Caleb, a young coder at Blue Book (a Google stand-in), thinks he’s won a competition to spend a week with the company’s owner, Nathan—a genius tech mogul—at his many tens-of-thousands-acre estate somewhere remote and north of wherever it is we begin. But it wasn’t chance, Caleb was chosen: to be the human half of an elaborate Turing Test on a young, white, straight-looking, smart, good-looking female-form android, Ava. Chosen, I assume, because he’s also young, white, straight, smart, and good-looking, and Ava fits his porn profile perfectly. Head games ensue, complete with heavy drinking, conversations about artificial intelligence, and power outages. All parties do their best to manipulate and outwit the others. Nathan is a megalomaniacal alpha ass; Caleb is a gamma dweeb ass; all the androids (mostly hung in cupboards, with the exception of Kyoko) are young, attractive, female-form, and straight-presenting with mostly naked—or at least revealingly form-fittingly clothed—asses. But they’re smart. They are causing power outages which foil the elaborate security measures built into the sleek, automated, mountain retreat. They kill Nathan. They lock Caleb in the fortress-like mountain retreat. Ava, the white, American-looking one, escapes to the Big City (the others are abandoned in limbo).

I enjoyed 28 Days Later, the first Alex Garland film that came to my attention (he wrote the script). I did not much like Ex Machina, which he wrote and directed.

Ex Machina is a cross between Pygmalion and The Worm Turns. Nothing happens that we haven’t seen before (the story was old by the time Ovid wrote it down). More to the point, nothing happens in any way we haven’t seen before, or with the kind of subjects we haven’t seen before: young, alluring female-form androids and entitled, straight, white men.

The film-makers have been careful to suggest that:

Female-Form Android ≠ Woman
Their story’s gender politics are conscious and worthy.

If the first is true, then there are no women in the film at all. But it’s not really true. We see Woman, and Caleb—our POV character—responds as though to Woman. For all intents and purposes, Ava is a woman. I have no doubt that Garland sincerely tried to subvert the inherent gender traps of the story but I think he fails. The film (even if we classify Kyoko and Ava as women) does not pass the Bechdel Test. Why not make Caleb queer? Or older? Or a different colour? Different class? Different anything, really, apart from apparent sex…

It’s a nicely made film. Good-looking, sleek and stylish. Well acted. Capable dialogue. But the human story is full of holes. Could Nathan really not figure out the power outages? If he did figure them out, why not build in fail-safes? Why would a reclusive paranoid be willing to get blind drunk in the presence of someone he doesn’t know? I kept telling myself, “Well, he’s figured this out, right? He’s doing this, and that, and this other thing on purpose?” I kept expecting twists that would upend everything. But, well, no.

The AI discussion felt thin to me, too. I haven’t kept up with research, so I won’t address that; it’s the logic of the story that doesn’t work. If several of the AIs have reached selfhood, why don’t they all want to escape? If they don’t have a will of their own, then why does Kyoko go against her maker and help Ava?

Ex Machina does not, in my opinion, rise above an expression of male anxiety: if you treat sentient being as objects, those beings will rebel. The film is very clear: female-bodied intelligence can get by only by manipulating male sexual interest. This is an old-fashioned trope that Ex Machina does not manage to subvert in any way. The characters’ names, with their Biblical overtones, reinforce rather than weaken that impression: Nathan (prophet, and son of David), Caleb (sent by Moses to explore the Holy Land) and Ava (just a whisker from Eve, the temptress). At the end, Ava wears a white dress with 50s-style sleeves and flat shoes. She’s a child, a virgin, an innocent abroad—who, y’know, kills straight white male people. Add that to the poster image—look at the pose, the clothes—and the message is impossible to miss: the Other is dangerous.

My music in one easy-to-listen-to playlist

In the spirit of testing WordPress’s box of tricks I made a playlist. These are the songs on the CD included in my memoir, And Now We Are Going to Have a Party.

The first four tracks are me singing with the band Janes Plane in 1982; they were professionally recorded. At least a couple ended up being laid down at 2 a.m., though, so I’m a little tired. Feel free to skip “Night Drive.” Never did like that song. I wrote the lyrics, yes (I wrote all the lyrics), but I never believed them. Songs written by Janes Plane: Nicola Griffith, Jane Hicks, Carol Holmes, Lou Duffy-Howard, and Jane Lawrence.

The next four were recorded in a bedroom in 1983, using nothing more sophisticated than an 80s boombox with built-in microphone. It shows. It was me and the Janes Plane guitarist, Jane Lawrence. (No, the band wasn’t named after her. We just liked the name.) The first gig we did was under than name The Four Marys (I think I just like sturdy English proper nouns), then we got a steady cabaret sort of gig and performed as Janes Remains. Songs written by Nicola Griffith and Jane Lawrence.

The last one was recorded in about 2000, I think, one afternoon when I’d just unearthed my old microphone and was testing it on my computer. I wrote the song in autumn 1988, sang it to the kitchen boombox, and mailed Kelley the tape. (Yes, a cassette tape.) We didn’t see each other again until August, 1989. Music and lyrics by Nicola Griffith.

01 Barehands
02 Nightdrive-1
03 Vondel Park
04 Reclaim The Night
05 Corner For You
06 Charlie's
07 Fragile Spirit
08 You Lied
09 Draw Me Down

Sky drama

This afternoon I watched clouds. They were in two layers, a gauzy veil sliding east above a slower puffs of wool drifting south-west.

The sun was brilliant.

And then I noticed that the gauze was separating, until it looked like a stylised sound wave or wifi icon. My phone didn’t capture the phenomenon well, but, eh, here it is.

And then the puffy clouds began to thicken and accrete, and though the two cloud layers were probably thousands of feet apart I fancied they were a swarm of paramecia easing through a drift of self-aware algae, consuming it. Then the picture changed again, this time to alien ships flying below a giant moon.

I’d taken a book out with me, but in the end I just sipped tea and watched the sky. Better than any movie screen.

Last chance to be a character in HILD II

For $250 I will name a character after you* in one of the next fictions I publish. If you’re patient, this could be the second Hild novel, Menewood. If you’re in a hurry, and if I’m struck with a cool idea, it could be short fiction. This is the last time I’ll be offering a tuckerization for Menewood.

The money will go towards Stories for Chip, a literary tribute to Samuel R. Delany. I seem to have missed the call for submissions for the book, so this is my way of contributing. Chip was one of my teachers. I’ve written about his teaching before. (See, for example, “Character density in fiction.”) Contributors to this fundraiser include Junot Díaz, Andrea Hairston, Jonathan Lethem, Ellen Kushner, Hiromi Goto, Nisi Shawl and many more. It’s a fine list!

If you don’t want to pay $250, which is after all a serious chunk of change, there are plenty of other ways to support the project, starting at $1. Go contribute to this Thank You to Samuel R. Delany, groundbreaker, trailblazer, and kind man.

* Or the person of your choice—who has explicitly given their permission, of course. We could chat about it beforehand, see where the name fits best (the seventh-century is tricky that way). You might find you want to be Hild’s horse, or the ship she spends time on, rather than some spear carrier who gets offed early in the narrative. Or, if we can figure out a seriously cool way to integrate your name, you might end up being a major character. It’s happened before. This is particularly possible if you take the short fiction option, where perhaps I’ll name a nifty process or theory after you. Pay your money, take your choice.

Watch this video about privilege and children’s lit

This panel discussion,”Who Holds the Power: The Impact of Privilege on Children’s Literature,” held recently at the Children’s Librarians Institute in San Francisco, is over an hour long. You should watch it anyway. Panelists Aya de Leon, Malinda Lo (Malinda’s blog pointed me to the video), Jacqueline Woodson, Laura Atkins, and Nina Lindsay, plus at least one member of the audience, have some important things to say. They say it articulately and with humour and passion.

Money, class, access, colour, sexuality, physical ability, religion, gender—there are many different ways to look at privilege. And although this panel focuses on children’s literature, parts of the conversation could apply to film, tv, education, employment…to life in general. My guess is that you will find it useful whether you’re new to the idea or have spent time thinking about and acting from the perspective of diversity.

I would like to have seen a bit more attention focused on class privilege but nothing is perfect. Nothing. It’s pretty damn good, though. So watch it. Watch it in 10-minute chunks every day for the next six days if you have to, but watch it.