Escaping the Trunk

Unless you’ve been on an Internet cleanse, you’ve probably already heard this news. Still, I feel like commemorating it here, mostly because I CALLED IT, and I get a healthy squirt of dopamine when the things I predict come true. Dave feels the same, and has a post on the subject with a snazzy photo from the ceremony.

Welcome Squid Overlords, indeed. Peter, come home soon.

NOTE: Mom, you can read the winning novelette here. I must confess I totally misread this story during its workshop stage. Luckily, Peter had the good sense not to listen to me.

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These are the guidelines for Tesseracts 15, a Canadian anthology of genre fiction that is focusing on YA stories this year. I was really excited about submitting to this anthology, until I read the guidelines. (They’re available as a PDF on the website linked above.) Snip:

If yours doesn’t fit, please don’t submit it.

Whatever other definitions of a story suited to a 13 and older reader you may encounter or hold, the only ones that matter to this anthology are ours, plain and simple.

* No torture or explicit acts of violence. (Action/fights/struggle are fine.)
* No explicit sex. (Be romantic.)
* No obscenities. (Be inventive. Yes, kids swear. No, we won’t buy your story if your characters do.)
* No shades of what’s already been done in YA speculative fiction, i.e. schools for magic or vampire boyfriends, unless you are presenting a markedly different and original approach.
* No flat, clichéd characters or character place-markers, i.e. the lost little girl, the unhappy dad, the sandwich-fixing mom.
* No stories without a strong speculative fiction element that drives the plot, i.e., mom and dad getting a divorce on Mars won’t cut it for science fiction, unless there is something more to be made of the setting’s effect. The same applies for fantasy and horror.

I like how editors Julie Czernada and Susan MacGregor have already anticipated a lot of the arguments, here. I think they’re right to draw the line at their editorial privilege: what matters isn’t what other editors allow, but what they allow. It is, after all, their anthology and not someone else’s. Remember when your mom used to say “I don’t care what you get to do at Jimmy’s house; this is my house and you have to follow my rules”? This is like that.

The trouble is that I like Jimmy’s house more than yours, Mom. That’s where the Hugo nominees play. And as everyone knows, the Hugo losers’ party is way more fun that the winners.’

Taking another look at those guidelines, I realized that one of my favourite books in recent years, Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, wouldn’t make the cut. Neither would M.T. Anderson’s National Book Award Finalist, Feed. Neither would either of Margaret Mahy’s Carnegie winners. And to me, that’s a problem. Because when your YA anthology excludes material found in award-winning YA novels, that’s like saying that you don’t want the best.

This isn’t to say that adult content makes a good story, or that all YA stories should dance on the knife’s edge. Heinlein, Bradbury, and LeGuin all wrote short stories that fit the guidelines outlined above. The book that won the Hugo last year, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, also fits the guidelines and is aimed at a YA audience. But I think those guidelines are stringent enough to stifle the writers who don’t have a “clean” story in the stable. There are only about two months to complete this story, if you’re starting from scratch. That’s not a lot of time to put down work that rivals Gaiman’s.

Say you want to submit, but you have to de-fang a story that might not make the cut in order to get it in on time. How would you do it? The line here seems to be explicitness. There’s a chasm between Holden Caulfield “feeling pretty sexy by that point” and Holden Caulfield being unable to get the image of underage prostitute Sunny’s nipples out of his mind. But these things happen by degree, and the terms “explicit” and “romantic” are inherently weaselly. One person’s explicit is another person’s romantic. This is the problem with all obscenity regulations. They’re deeply subjective and vulnerable to passing fashions, and they’re why even classic children’s literature is banned or challenged in multiple countries. The guidelines listed above (those that relate to language and depiction, not plot development) seem designed to make sure that T15 is never challenged, ever.

My friend and fellow workshop member Mike Skeet reminded me that there’s a big difference between “adult” material found in YA novels and the same material found in YA short stories. Obviously the latter are more condensed, and anything you add has to be done with more grace and wisdom. But the classics of YA literature, genre or otherwise, aren’t known for their…safety. Bad things happen. All the time. That’s sort of the point. Holden Caulfield tries sleeping with a hooker and gets beaten up by her pimp. Ender Wiggin kills two kids. Jerry Renault winds up a in a boxing match with public masturbator Emile Janza. Leslie Burke dies. “Alice” drops acid. Charles Holloway’s hand gets crushed. It’s called conflict, and it’s what makes a story. But a writer spooked by guidelines like these might find herself conflict-averse in her attempt to make a sale and build a name.

When I talked about these guidelines with my workshop in an email thread, the thing that kept popping up was worry for the Tesseracts brand. One parent in the group said that the guidelines read like recommendations for ages 10 and under, not ages 13 and over. I understand that an editor’s first job is to give herself the time and space to read and think, and that one way to do that is to lay down the law and filter out unwanted content. But I wonder if opening up the field would have guaranteed more quality in and among the quantity, while simultaneously preserving the editors’ right to reject stories they found offensive. Would allowing racier stories have circumscribed that right? Would it have limited the editors’ right to have a “let’s tone it down” conversation with the writers they wanted to buy stories from?

The answer’s in the anthology, of course. If these guidelines guide in quality material that young readers enjoy, then mission accomplished. But if those young readers are anything like the reader I was, the last thing they want is content that comes pre-sanitized. At thirteen, I was reading Stephen King novels. At fourteen, I was reading Michael Ondaatje. At fifteen, it was Sebastien Japrisot. Are you seeing a pattern, here? Kids like texts that are actually above the level most adults think they can or should be reading at. They like to be challenged. They hate being talked down to. Every writer should know her audience. I’m just wondering who the audience is, here. Kids, or their uptight parents?

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One of the reasons I haven’t blogged very much recently is that I’ve been so damn busy. I went away for a while to a lake up north, where I worked on the story in this subject heading as well as a couple of others (I even did some foresighting work, if you can believe that). The good news is that all of the stories I was working on were requests from other people — this one came from Rudy Rucker. In his words on the story, Rudy called it “a profound and richly felt piece so closely rooted in reality that it barely feels like SF,” and “an important story-essay on women’s rights.”

This story actually came about as a consequence of my involvement in the Strategic Foresight & Innovation program at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Initially, I wrote a fictional essay about the fall of Shenzhen from a systems theory perspective, invoking Donella Meadows and Jamshid Gharajedaghi and Clayton Christensen. It was an interesting exercise, one that I delayed starting for too long because I was stymied and had been working on my novel re-writes. I was in desperate need to write some short fiction, so (as I have done before) I turned in some instead of turning in a straight paper.

The story linked above has been cut significantly from that first essay, and a new subjectivity has taken the POV position within the story because the footnotes and bibliography and conceptual framing for systems theory has been removed. It took me a long time to re-frame the story appropriately, but I finally settled on a woman in the Quiverfull movement. Quiver-minded people follow Psalm 127:3-5:

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed,
but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

I felt that a Quiver-minded woman would be uniquely positioned to speak to China’s only child policy, because while she eschewed any form of birth control, the women of China are legally obligated to embrace it. I’ve always been fascinated by reproductive policy, and I thought it would be interesting to bring this dichotomy into focus. I also knew it would mean delving into two worlds that I knew very little about: the factories of Shenzhen, and the farms and households of Quiver-minded families.

Conditions in both environments can be terrible.

The reasons for this should be obvious. In the worst of both cases, rigid patriarchy oppresses women who live almost barrack-style, endlessly performing the same tasks during their sixteen-hour days for very little reward and with little opportunity for open communication or self-expression. I recommend reading No Longer Quivering for insights into the consequences of the Quiverfull lifestyle, and this Fortune City post about working conditions in Shenzhen. (Or you could just read Cory’s latest, For the Win.)

This isn’t to say that I’m some sort of moral authority on either subject. I’m typing this on a Mac, which means I’m a consumer of Foxconn products, products made in factories where conditions are so awful that suicide is a regular occurrence among employees. I also don’t think that the entirety of the Quiverfull movement needs to die. Mary Pride, the author who in many ways began the movement, has since spoken out against Biblical patriarchy. Some might see this as a reversal, but to me it’s a more nuanced understanding of one’s own opinion and its consequences. I felt that I hadn’t really nailed the voice of this story until I read Pride’s post.

I also think that there are a surprising number of connections between the Quiverfull lifestyle and the DIY maker/crafter one espoused at BoingBoing and elsewhere online by avowed atheists. Having a lot of children (some Quiverfull families can have more than twenty) means learning how to stretch a dollar (that’s putting it mildly) and learning how to make consumables as cheaply as possible. In particular, I was fascinated by the women of the West family, who have turned their DIY expertise into a profitable video series for the Christian market. (Their blog is great, too. Warning: music.) Here’s a taste:

This isn’t a lifestyle that I can see myself living, but it is one that I can respect, and it’s part of how I found my way into the story. Personally, I find the idea of life without birth control horrifying, in a screamingly awful “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream” kind of way. But part of being pro-choice is believing in the sanctity of the choice. Our bodies are ours to do with as we will. Anything less is slavery. And slavery takes more forms than we know.

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I saw Splice last night, and I’m glad I did. It’s not as shattering as District 9 (last summer’s surprise SF hit), but it is genuinely horrific without being visually explicit. It makes a lot of reference to the Frankenstein story, but it’s actually positioned somewhere on the Ira Levin/David Cronenberg side of the horror continuum. The most terrifying things happen offscreen, and but the violence you do see is both quick and intimate, and the creature effects are juicy. Despite some glossed-over science, it’s still a lot smarter than most of the dreck that bobs up in theatres and, as Peter remarked when we left the show, “At least it portrayed scientists as capable of meaningful relationships.”

The trailer would have you believe that Splice is a straight-up monster movie, an updated Universal feature from the days of Karloff and Chaney. It’s not. It’s one of those rare movies that centres on an intelligent but deeply troubled woman, and the consequences her obsession and lack of moral compass. We see stories like this all the time involving men, so it’s nice to see this one told about a woman. Women form the core of the story; in a reversal of traditional horror film conventions, the men are just there to get fucked and splattered when the plot calls for it. That doesn’t mean that the women do everything right all the time and the men don’t (far from it), but truly multi-dimensional characters have flaws and make mistakes. Main characters don’t have to be heroes. They just have to hold your attention.

In short, go see it, even if you’ve been waffling. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. I was.

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Warning: the following contains spoilers for the endings of Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Battlestar Galactica, LOST, Supernatural (current) and The Prisoner.

I’ve noticed an alarming trend in television finales, lately: God.

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Charles Tan was kind enough to interview me about The Shine Anthology, and you can read it here.

Snip:

CT: What made you decide to write science fiction?

MA: A lot of things. I was raised in a science fiction household. My dad had this copy of “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” under the bed, the one with Maureen doing her Birth of Venus thing on the cover. We also had the Dune and Foundation novels around, and we watched a lot of media SF on television. But I didn’t really want to write it until university, when I was studying it academically, and when I had already watched a lot of SF anime, which in my opinion is usually far better than live-action SF TV from the States or elsewhere. Plus, I knew it was an area where I could distinguish myself. There are throngs of women in their twenties writing about vampires and angels. But my thing is robots, and the humans who love them, right up until the moment their hearts are ripped from their chests.

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I had a really interesting meeting today. I talked with Justin Ferrato, a student of the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab, about a project that he and his fellow Media Lab students are working on for Nuit Blanche 2010.

I don’t want to give away the content of the project, but it sounds really interesting and I’m excited to see the final result. I was asked by a Media Lab faculty member, Susan LK Gorbet, (who I know from OCAD’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation program) to talk about SF anime, something that I’ve discussed at length at other blogs. It was one of the first times I’d been asked to share my expertise anywhere outside the contexts of academia or fandom. I realized this halfway through explaining the visual metaphors at play in a specific and beloved film clip. By that point I was really enjoying myself: my meeting felt like all the fun parts of teaching (which I really miss, sometimes) wrapped up with all the best parts of panel discussions at cons (without the sleep deprivation). I always forget how much niche data I have stored until I watch someone taking notes on what I say. It’s a nice feeling, like suddenly realizing that the ground underneath you really is solid after all.

At WorldCon in Montreal, I said that the best part of workshopping is when someone tells you that your suggestion is a helpful one. I hold with that sentiment. There’s something really affirming about alleviating someone else’s creative frustrations so they can go ahead and solve the rest of the puzzle on their own. It means that their own contributions make it into the public eye that much faster, enriching the community as a whole. Being part of that process — or being asked to be part of it — is really special. I hope I get asked again, soon.

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Recently, two separate posts have gotten under my skin and forced me to re-examine the book I’m trying to write. (I’m trying, I promise. Really. It’s just that everything I do looks wrong, and this is part of the reason why.)

The first is Jetse de Vries Christmas present to the genre: Should SF Die? Jetse distills his point here:

My viewpoint is that SF is becoming increasingly irrelevant, and that lack of relevance can be attributed to developments and trends already mentioned in the points above [SF is morally and ethically bankrupt; SF is monolithically angophilic; SF is commercially dead; SF has ditched science and become fantasy] and SF’s unwillingness to really engage with the here-and-now. That doesn’t mean that SF needs to die (actually, a slow marginalisation into an increasingly neglected and despised niche-cum-ghetto is probably a fate worse than death), but it does mean that SF needs to change, and that it needs to become much more inclusive of the alien (and I mean alien in ‘humans-can-be-aliens-to-each-other’ sense) and proactive, meaning it should not just shout ‘FIRE! FIRE!’ (and do almost nothing but), but both man the fire trucks *and* think of ways to prevent more fires.

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All I ever wanted was a world without maps. –Michael Ondaatje

This is footage from a flashmob snowball fight in Washington, DC that was organized via Twitter. During the snowball fight, a snowball hit the Hummer of an off-duty police officer, who proceeded to pull over and exit the vehicle before waving his gun around.

What’s interesting is that at first, the crowd just laughs.

They have every right to. This is ridiculous behaviour. It’s a temper tantrum. I saw less whining yesterday at Toys R’ Us. I’m serious — there were bored, petulant four-year-olds with better self-control than Detective Baylor displays here. Granted, we all speak out of turn on occasion. We all lose our temper. That’s a human failing. It happens to everybody, and almost always at the most inopportune time. We ask for forgiveness, we shut up, and we move on.

Most of us don’t happen to be carrying a weapon at the time.

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I’m not joking. Jetse de Vries, editor of The Shine Anthology of Optimistic SF is giving away free cognac, whisky, and wine if you guess the end of a sentence correctly.

No, really. How it works:

Below are fragments from all the stories that will appear in the Shine anthology. Each fragment has an ending sentence, for which four possibilities are given. Three are false (made up by me, or—in same cases—by the author), one is correct. Guess the correct answer. One point for each correct answer: so one can earn a maximum of 16 points with this.

Bonus points are given if one guesses the name of the author of the fragment correct. This way, one can earn another 16 points. So the maximum possible points one can earn is 32.

Example (this is from “Araby” by James Joyce):

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them,

A) gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

B) turned a blind eye to the boys’ noise.

C) kept on as usual, refusing to be distracted.

D) shuddered at the vibrant energy disturbing the quiet afternoon.

In this example, the correct answer is 1-A, and the author is James Joyce. So a competition entry would look like this: 1-A, Jane Doe; 2-B, Joe Sixpack, 3-C, Captain Nemo, etcetera until number 16.

So start clicking! Start reading! Start drinking! Start now!

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