Tag Archives: scifi

The Scifi List, Part Two

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Confused? Not sure what I mean by “Part Two”? Where’ve you been, man? Go read last week’s post first. We’ll all wait here for you.

Ready? Alright then.

The Scifi List, continued:

Andromeda Strain – Michael Crichton (1969)

Crichton, much like Stephen King, gets a bad rep for being “too pop.” But I enjoy his stuff quite a bit. Andromeda Strain is science fiction in the truest sense of the term. And, more than most of his other work, draws heavily on his training as a physician. Accuracy is important when talking about crazy killer space germs, I think. And there’s something a little more scary about his tone of clinical detachment, as well. As opposed to, say, The Stand, which is a more aftermathy, post-apocalyptic kind of story. (Fun fact: did you know that Michael Crichton was 6’9″? You do now.)

Others to try by Michael Crichton:
Timeline
Sphere

I, Robot – Isaac Asimov (1950)

I couldn’t in good conscience let this list go without any Asimov. Wouldn’t be right. I, Robot is pretty important in that it set the parameters for a lot of subsequent techy, roboty scifi. His three Laws of Robotics have become the Magna Carta for both scifi and actual AI research. Because they’re good laws. They make sense. And I’m practically Vulcan in my dedication to logic. But the breaking of those laws is equally exciting, isn’t it (ie, The Matrix, Terminator, etc)? Plus, I, Robot is set in 2010 (in the original edition) and I love saying, “Isn’t it cool that we live in the age of science fiction?” Because that’s fun.

Others to try by Isaac Asimov:
Foundation
The Gods Themselves

Contact – Carl Sagan (1985)

Sagan is probably more important to real space exploration than to fiction about space exploration (because hard science will always be more important than art, try as we might to change that). But he was an inspiration to scientists and writers alike. For the record I think that both disciplines benefit from people who do both. Rare as they are. Contact is another one of those books that shows us the flawed beauty in our perception of what it means to be human. If we found life in space, what would we want from it? What would we want it to see in us? That’s kind of the point of the Sagan record on Voyager, I guess, but the politics and psychology of that process is really well-illustrated in Contact. (And when you’re done reading it you should listen to this episode of Radiolab about the making of the Sagan record. Or before. Hell, I don’t care.)

Others to try by Carl Sagan:
Cosmos
Broca’s Brain
(both nonfiction)

The Time Machine – H.G. Wells (1895)

So, this one’s important not so much for its scifi cred, but because of the time period in which it was written. It’s an excellent historical look at extending existing social mores and customs and their accompanying metaphors and analogies into a new genre of fiction. Much like how a lot of newer scifi has become all guns and killing-the-bad-guy since we got all frothy over the war on terror. Plus, I needed at least one about time travel and this is an oldie but a goodie. Way before the hard science existed on the possibilities of time travel, Wells wrote a book about a scientist making a time machine. Which was nothing but a flight of fancy in his day. (Side note: how did that happen? That it became a part of human nature to consider being able to move through time?) And then when the character arrives in the distant future, we can see another example of xenophobia at work (much like in War of the Worlds). Fear is the best tool that any writer has at his disposal, honestly, and it can destroy you. Fear of the unknown, ignorance, destroys most quickly. Knowledge and strength of conviction have to go hand in hand. One can’t just rely on one or the other. (You hear me talking, Republicans?)

Others to try by H.G. Wells:
War of the Worlds
The Invisible Man

Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne (1864)

Congratulations to Jules Verne for having the oldest book on both lists. What an honor that must be for a dead guy with no internet. While really old fiction is somewhat difficult for me (mostly because I failed almost every history class I ever took and I need context, damn it, context!), I do enjoy Verne. And I can’t think of a better example of neonatal scifi. Most of his stuff reads like the travelogue-style writing popular in his day, which is always an interesting fictive device. And the lack of real scientific knowledge of the time makes for this wonderful, wide-eyed and hopeful tone that sucks the reader into the adventure completely. Plus? Subterranean dinosaurs. Bam.

More to try by Jules Verne:
Around the World in Eighty Days
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Tune in next week when we tackle The Fantasy List.

In Which I Make Lists

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Alright, kids. I’m super busy for the next couplefew weeks so we’re going to do something a little wacky here in blogland.

Lemme ‘splain.

A while back I got a comment from my friend Meg on a post. She and I used to be in a writer’s group together, but all of us are scifi and fantasy writers so we usually just ended up geeking out about what books we were reading. Much lively discussion ensued. Anyway the interesting bit of Meg’s comment was this: “I’m coming out of the closet as a speculative fiction (hateful phrase, but it’ll do) writer, and to that end I’m devising a ‘learning’ reading list for myself on the Big Stuff in scifi and fantasy.” Which got me thinking. Of course it did. Could I put together such a list? Damn right I could.

And I did. Basically, I just wanted to make a list of things I would recommend if someone asked me how to get into scifi and fantasy. What are the most important books? The ones you should read to really get a sense of the genres and figure out what you like and don’t like and what direction to go with your budding fandom? And since it’s really long and full of blah blah and I’ll be busy for the next few weeks, I’m going to chop it into four more bite-sized pieces. If I suddenly, through some tidal change in the cosmos, get unbusy I might change my mind and just dump the whole rest of the thing in your laps. There are ten books for scifi and ten for fantasy. I tried hard to keep it whittled down to just the books I felt were fundamental to the genres for one reason or another, and not just list off a bunch of books I really like.

A couple of things: I am by no means an authority on the subject of genre fiction. (Yet.) This list contains a healthy dose of bias because, while I am extremely well-read, I, like most humans, read mostly things I like. If this were a list of the most important books in post-colonial Western lit, it might be a little more expansive and inclusive. But it’s not. You’re in my wheelhouse now, bitches. Also, I may have mentioned some of these on the blog before and in those cases I’ll link back to the original post. And yes, I’m sure I forgot some that should be on here (although I’ll go ahead and give you the disclaimer that I’m not putting any kids’ books or comics/graphic novels – those are their own lists for another day). This is not the end of the world. Nor is it, by any stretch of the imagination, the end of my list-making compulsion. Feel free to leave comments about books I forgot or if you think some of these books don’t belong here. But don’t be a dick about it. I think if we can have a good comment thread everyone can walk away with their to-read list greatly enhanced and hopefully without my having to call anybody out for being a troll. Ok? Cool.

So, first up in the great blog experiment of 2012: The Scifi List (Part One – in no particular order):

A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick (1977)

Philip Kindred Dick was a wackjob. And I mean that in the most wonderfully loving way. He was a firm believer that we could bring about a sort of singularity, that we could experience harmony across all of mankind and all be one, through mind expansion. So old Phil did a lot of drugs. Fortunately we didn’t lose him to them (it was a stroke that got him in 1982), but he lost many others and that’s how we got A Scanner Darkly. It’s a really weird book about drugs, obsession, perception, deception, technology, conspiracy, and paranoia. And isn’t that just a bunch of words that should never be allowed to hang out together? And bonus, the movie they made from the novel is one of the few adaptations that I think actually does the book justice. It’s gorgeous.

Others to try by Philip K. Dick:
The Man in the High Castle
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Series (a trilogy in five parts) – Douglas Adams (1979-1992)

I’ve ranted about these books before, so I’ll keep it short here. The reason it made the list is that it’s a great example of both A) humor in scifi (or humour, if you want to be all British about it) and B) what I call the “Star Trek factor.” Yeah, that’s cheesy. It’s ok. Point is, it’s not just one long story. Without being too English majory about it: the books read like collections of short adventures, all tending toward the final goal. This lends a sort of frenetic quality to both the characters and the story, and also makes it seem jam-packed with action and wackiness. You know how 8,000 things happen in each episode of The Simpsons? Like that. But in space.

Others to try by Douglas Adams:
The Dirk Gently novels
Last Chance to See

Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert A. Heinlein (1961)

So far as I know (and really, let’s be serious – what do I know? I’m sure the internet will tell me when I’m wrong) Stranger in a Strange Land was the first book to tell an alien-coming-to-Earth story from the alien’s perspective. But it’s all twisted about because he’s actually a human who was raised by Martians. Both sides of that are important. It holds up a mirror to our purview, shows us that we can easily be seen as merely self-entitled monkeys. Apes, excuse me. I think we forget what we are. Particularly here in ‘Mericuh, we don’t know what we look like to outsiders. How beautiful and cruel can mankind be? And how difficult would it be to ever answer that question objectively? (For the record, my vote is “impossible.” It’s like asking a fish what “wet” means.)

Others to try by Robert Heinlein:
For Us, the Living
Starship Troopers

Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury (1953)

Bradbury is the unequivocal master of scifi and if you’re just getting into the genre his books are required reading. I just picked this one because as a book lover (junkie) it is both gorgeous and terrifying. And if we want to be 100% honest (and maybe a little ranty), I can totally see the anti-intellectualism in this country steering us toward this exact path. Fucking horrifying. Bradbury brings a kind of sanctity to the written word here by showing us the aftermath of its destruction. Maybe that’s me being too meta, but I can’t think of any better reason to kill myself than a world without books. So there’s that.

Others to try by Ray Bradbury:
The Martian Chronicles
The October Country

Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson (1992)

Despite having a hard time with some cyberpunk, I really enjoyed Snow Crash. And I felt like I should have at least one cyberpunk book on the list. Again, I think this is one of those books that can show us our flaws. If we become too dependent on technology, our technology can be used to destroy us. Or to help us destroy ourselves. Same thing, really, just one’s more embarrassing. Future archaeologists will be all “What do you mean they put microchips in their heads? That’s fucking ridiculous.” Also, Stephenson’s done some really awesome worldbuilding in this book. Love it.

Others to try by Neal Stephenson:
Cryptonomicon
The Baroque Cycle

To be continued…

 

 

In which I am confounded by literature once again…

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So, I don’t know if you guys have noticed my widget over there on the right side of the screen. There are several. Below my Twitter feed (@geekinacardigan – feel free to follow me, I still only have like 45 followers) is my list of what books I’m reading/have read? I’m having an ethical crisis about that list, you guys. Total first world problem, right? Absolutely.

See where it says Accelerando by Charles Stross? That there is a big fat lie. I couldn’t finish it. I tried. I couldn’t even get halfway through it. Which is super frustrating. I so rarely put a book down unfinished. It irks and nibbles. And on top of that, now I’m in this conundrum, having a torturous back and forth with myself. Should I delete it off the list? Because I didn’t really read it. That’s false advertising, promoting myself as more well-read than I actually am. On the other hand, I think it could have been incredible. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right space for it. Perhaps someone else will see it on the list and go read it and love it. That’s worth leaving it on there, isn’t it?

Urgh. So torn.

Although I suppose now I’ve posted this I can’t really delete it off the list, can I? Fuck.

Well, problem solved. False advertising or no.

Anyway. I don’t know why I couldn’t make it through the book. Cyberpunk is hard for me, for some reason. I think it’s really interesting, that relationship between people and computers, especially when you get into stuff like microchips in brains and the impending singularity. A few cyberpunk novels that I really loved: The Unincorporated Man (by the Kollin brothers), Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson), The Windup Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi), and Neuromancer (William Gibson). And of course Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly are both classics (by Phillip K. Dick – by the way, that K. stands for “Kindred,” isn’t that awesome?). And I even liked Stross’s book Glasshouse, even though it’s a little less cyber and a little more punk. Good stuff. Really, really good. So why is it so difficult for me?

I don’t know. It kind of feels like when I read super swords-and-dragons-type fantasy. The worldbuilding is fantastic, but I can either love it or just get completely lost and then I can’t follow the story. Which is probably why so many people don’t read science fiction in the first place. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately, why more people don’t enjoy scifi or fantasy. It’s an interesting question. All stories are just stories, aren’t they? Whether it’s people or aliens or monsters or animals, every story is somewhat anthropomorphized in our heads kind of by default. Therefore, all stories are just people stories. All stories are just interactions of one kind or another. Relationships. Actions and consequences.

But the trick is being able to get inside them, crawl around in there and live in that world for a minute. There must be something relatable for the reader or it’s all just blah blah blah. If you don’t care about the world, you’re not going to care about the people who inhabit it. Like how people who can’t understand Shakespeare’s language can’t get into the characters in the play. That’s actually probably a really great analogy for a lot of people’s dislike of scifi. And really, it’s not that I don’t follow the language of cyberpunk (even being as semi-computer-literate as I am), it’s more that I can’t get into a lot of the stories because they hide behind the language. That computery vernacular (or any sort of weird dialectical stuff in fiction), when it isn’t understood, tends to make people skip over those bits and then they miss important details. I’ve realized that I also do this with books with a lot of similarly weird names (like in any book by Dostoyevsky, for example) and then I forget which characters are supposed to be doing what. And I’ve heard folks say that they have this problem with Tolkien. Not surprising, but I think it’s really fascinating what will baffle one reader and not another. The way that each of our brains are so differently wired is just endlessly interesting.

And that’s a subject I could talk about for days and days, even if I’m not particularly well-versed in the actual science of it. I was almost a psych major in college, but a really fantastic professor told me that I’d never be able to get through the math. Which is totally true, and I thank her for that advice, but it makes me sad that I can’t talk about the brainy-pokey things I think are cool with a little more aplomb. Like dissecting this really weird cyberpunk book about people with the entire internet in their heads and the uploaded consciousnesses of lobsters that run a major corporation. That would be a lot easier if I understood brains. And computers. Maybe.

Anyway, if you read it, let me know how it is. I might pick it up again one day when I’m in the mood for something a bit difficult and dense. Meanwhile, it’s going to stay on my widget list, haunting me. Damnable conscience.

Always carry a towel.

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I love the British. For oh-so-very many reasons. They gave us ruff collars, the Black Plague, Doctor Who, an assortment of foods which are both bland and disgusting, right-hand drive cars, Australia, the Rolling Stones, Eddie Izzard, a weird appreciation for giant black umbrellas, The Sex Pistols, Pink Floyd, rugby, cricket, Alan Moore, Alan Rickman, Harry Potter, Mary Poppins, David Beckham, Hugh Laurie, and (probably most importantly) the original group of Puritanical zealots who came over and systematically eradicated the indigenous population of this continent upon which we bastardized democracy and built this great nation. Or something. Although actually I’m pretty sure that most of those people were Dutch. History schmistory.

So why do I bring up the Brits? It rather goes without saying that they’re literary badasses. And, bonus, no translator needed. But after reading a hundred million books by English speakers of all flavors I’ve got to confess that the Brits are still my favorite. (Of the modern authors. Let’s leave all that boring, period, Jane Austen crap out of this.) Because they’re just so…British. They’re polite and self-deprecating with a fucked-up sense of humor and an inimitable dry wit. (I don’t think I’ve ever used the word “inimitable” in earnest before. Hmm.)

See? If I just start out with the ridiculous rant you guys don’t have to read all the way to the end.

Ok, ok. But still. Point is…I really really really want to gush about my very favorite book and I needed an in. Alright? You’ve outed me as a hack with no good opening paragraph. Happy?

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is truly a masterpiece of scifi. And I say that not only as a completely biased Adams fan, but also as something of a self-made connoisseur of scifi. So, if you haven’t read it, here’s a little Hitchhiker’s Guide 101: Normal dude (Arthur Dent) gets caught up in some crazy galaxy-hopping adventures after the Earth gets demolished to make room for a bypass and he finds out that his best friend is an alien. It’s “weird shit happening to normal people” on a cosmic scale. With tons of fun aliens (two-headed alcoholic President of the Galaxy being probably the least interesting) and spaceships (unpredictable space/time/reality hopper that can read your mind but can’t make a cup of tea – comes with depressed robot for all your moody butler needs) and planets (up to and including a planet that’s a replica of Earth but also really a computer run by mice in order to find out the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. How awesome is that?). Of course that’s just the first book. It’s been called a “trilogy” since the beginning, but there are five books in the series. Six, if you count the Eoin Colfer epilogue that came out in 2009 (it’s awful, don’t even bother). Also there are a few related snippets in Adams’ posthumous collection, but I don’t know if those are necessarily considered canonical.

I suppose it may be one of those “you had to be there” sorts of things that’s hard to talk about to people who haven’t read it, but easy to blab about with people who have. Fun, but maybe a little pointless. When I talk about it I frequently find myself preaching to the choir. Which is unfortunate. The awesomeness of this book is just mind-blowing. There’s a scifi convention in which we suspend all disbelief and get transported completely (pardon the pun) to another world. There’s usually very little that’s relatable, you know? Few books that have a toe in our world, in our reality, as we know it (that’s what makes it scifi and not just fi). And Hitchhiker’s Guide is all about upsetting that convention. Sort of. Turning it around on us, maybe, is more accurate. Arthur Dent is the last survivor from our planet, so he embodies everything we love about it and becomes the only thing we have to cling to. Walking nostalgia, this guy. (Did you know that “nostalgia” means “agony for the home”? There’s something really beautiful about that.) So Dent makes us appreciate the human experience. It’s the “us vs. them” thing, but he’s the only “us.” Like the opposite of Stranger in a Strange Land. And I appreciate that, as someone who’s never really felt at home anywhere. There’s still comfort in knowing that we all have our place in the universe. That we can find one, even if it’s not the obvious or the expected one.

I guess I have a really big, important soft spot in my heart for these books because they are so different. And so fucking funny. “Laugh out loud funny” is one of the things that, if I see it on a book jacket, will make me put the book back on the shelf. Seriously. I’m kind of a blurb snob. But in this case it’s true. That unreasonably wry British kind of hilarity. I think part of the reason it’s so funny is because it started out its weird little life as a radio play. The banter was actually banter at one point. I don’t know. The dialogue just reads differently than other dialogue. When I first read the series (in high school, maybe? Or college? I’m not sure) I don’t think that I’d ever laughed out loud while reading. Seriously. That’s kind of sad, isn’t it? For me, at least, it’s rare that a book will make me laugh so hard I have to keep it down so I don’t wake up my housemates. I chuckle. I smile. But I hardly ever laugh. Maybe that’s just because I read so many books about heavy scifi stuff – galactic takeovers and government conspiracies and epic laser battles. Not a lot of giggles there. Hitchhiker’s Guide is so terribly funny that even now when I reread it (which I do about once a year), knowing full well what’s coming, I still have to put the book down and laugh and laugh and laugh. The only other author that makes me laugh like that is Terry Pratchett, but I still find myself comparing his books to Adams’ books. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, I guess.

Besides writing my all-time favorite scifi series, he wrote some other great stuff. The Dirk Gently books are an awesome send-up/homage to pulp detective fiction. He was a rabid, old-school Whovian and wrote a bunch of episodes during the Tom Baker years. He did a lot of environmental conservation stuff in the UK. Check out his book Last Chance to See, about the trip he took around the world to try to find endangered species. After Adams died, the BBC also made a documentary series about it with his buddy Stephen Fry (as a point of interest, does it seem like Stephen Fry knows bloody everyone? He pops up in the strangest social circles).

Adams was an interesting guy. I wish he hadn’t died at such a young age. Heart attacks are like that, though. At least he got to make us all laugh before he went. And I’m consistently baffled by the way he tied absolutely everything together. Each time I read it I find a new connection. Everything, every little detail, it all means something. Everything’s a part of a system. We are all cogs in a machine. That’s astounding, isn’t it? To know that you’re a piece of something, tiny but not insignificant. It’s a great way to look at life. And laugh.

“We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.”

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Ray Bradbury died. I’m not sure what to say about that. I mentioned him a couple of weeks ago in my blog about Neil Gaiman, said that there wasn’t better company that Gaiman could be in amongst the living. I feel really weird about that paragraph now. What a new and peculiar corner I’ve painted myself into. So, by way of a sort of posthumous retraction: There’s not better company one could be in. Period.

So of course I started thinking about the other greats that we’ve lost. My first brush with this sort of dead hero experience was when Freddie Mercury died. I know that seems weird. I was nine. But I had a really strange childhood and I knew every word to every Queen album. I just remember being sad about it and listening to A Night at the Opera on vinyl with my dad. More recently, when Hunter S. Thompson died I definitely had a little come-apart. I was in the car with my sisters when we heard it on the radio. I started bawling and the older sister said “You going to be ok?” in a non-sympathetic, non-fan kind of way. I nodded and sobbed. The younger sister said “Who’s Hunter S. Thompson?” And I sobbed some more. For completely different reasons.

But worse than that is thinking about the ones we will lose. Do you guys realize how old some of these people are? We are going to have to deal with the deaths of Stan Lee, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Queen Elizabeth, Hugh Hefner, Woody Allen. And those are just the ones we can see coming. Nevermind some out-of-nowhere River Pheonix/Heath Ledger/Kurt Cobain shit.

Urgh. How depressing. Sorry I’m being a total downer, guys.

I don’t remember which was the first Bradbury book I read. I think it was Fahrenheit 451, which is still my favorite. I was going through a dystopian scifi phase at the time, but that one blew Brave New World and 1984 out of the water. And always will. I’m way more scared of books being banned than Big Brother taking over. (That’s already happened and I’m getting along just fine.) The thing about Bradbury that makes him stand out among the writers with whom he’s usually grouped is that his work doesn’t focus so much on whatever wacky shit is happening, but more on the people involved. The characters seem to take the weirdness as a matter of course, and we get lost in their reactions, in their humanity. There’s something really profound about a writer who can make the world just fall away, you know?

I was recently in the used bookstore in Arcata and I found a copy of Green Shadows, White Whale. I’d never heard of it. Bradbury’s one of those authors whose stuff has so permeated our culture that you think you know all of their work. So I bought it and was completely shocked that it wasn’t scifi. Not even close. It’s the most lovely and weird book about Ireland and Moby Dick, of all things. A great exploration of obsession, of culture, of writery pain and finding beauty where you thought there would be none. And fifteen years after becoming a fan I thought, Holy shit, Ray Bradbury. You, sir, are incredible. Because it doesn’t always have to be the odd or the alien that draws us in and makes us remember what we’re made of. As a rabid scifi/fantasy consumer I tend to forget that. I forget that there are things all around us all the time that can hold up a mirror and make us think about what we are, and drop us on our ass when we realize what we’re not. That seems important. Worth holding on to.

I’m just babbling now. I’m sad. When I’m sad I don’t articulate well. This doesn’t really seem like a good time for a review or a critique anyway. On the upside, I haven’t exhausted Bradbury’s catalogue yet. There are quite a few of his books I haven’t gotten around to. So I’m not left hanging in that horrible void of author love that exists in the space after the last book is finished. For now, that’s comforting.

Some quotes from Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). May you rest in peace.

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”

“You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.”

“Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.”

Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Stuff

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I finally started watching Doctor Who. And then I didn’t stop for a solid week. It is totally obsession-worthy. Once again I’m pitifully behind the curve on the Doctor Who love. But there’s a good reason for it this time, I swear. I’ve wanted to watch it for a really long time, but I’m a hopeless perfectionist and wanted to start at the beginning. Almost impossible, let me tell you. The show is British, right? One of those quintessentially British things. They don’t number their episodes like we do, and their seasons run differently. Doctor Who also has special episodes between regular seasons that aren’t part of either season. All of which adds up to a huge, confusing mess, which is then further compounded by the DVDs being released out of order and taking a million years to come out here in the Colonies. And then there’s the extra added bonus fact that this show has been on since the sixties and half of the old episodes are not on DVD and are probably lost to time altogether (haha, time – get it?). It’s really daunting and frustrating. Putting all of that behind me, I bit the bullet and A) got Netflix and B) started with the new episodes. I can watch the classic ones later when I get a region-free DVD player.

Whovianism is relatively new in the US, pretty much blowing up with the new Doctors. Sure, we got some of the old ones on PBS back in the day, but I was just a kid back then and I checked out of PBS programming as soon as Fraggle Rock was over. I do remember watching a few of the Tom Baker (the 4th Doctor) episodes. But it’s practically been a religion in Britain since the get-go. And I can totally see why. It’s terribly funny. The writing is great. It’s cheesy, but not hard-to-watch cheesy. Hey-those-rubber-masked-aliens-are-super-fun kind of cheesy, which may just be because so many plot points had to carry over from an era of television that was camp before camp was camp. Most British scifi is as corny as Adam West’s Batman, but that accent makes it seem so much more sophisticated. Weird, that. But cheesy scifi is great, because the humor of it makes you love the characters, so then when something awful happens you have a genuine emotional response.

The space ship vs time machine convention of scifi is that usually the vessel is either one or the other, barring some horrible accident or unavoidable natural phenomenon. But the Doctor’s ship, the TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space – a horrible acronym) is both! All the time! It’s fantastic. Which is probably the thing I love most about this show, honestly. That great big “fuck you” to the rules of scifi. He’s the Doctor. He does whatever he wants. So there. Take that, universe. And besides the occasional dark or serious moment, the Doctor himself seems to be having an absolute blast all the time. Almost reckless, his time-and-space-trotting fun. How can you not love that? So yeah. Now I’m hooked. I don’t know how long you have to have watched to say that you’re a huge fan of something, but I feel like I’ve definitely crossed that line. When you find yourself wondering which bills you can blow off so you’ll have the money to buy a t-shirt that says “The Angels Have the Phone Box”? That’s fan territory, for real. Also? I want a sonic screwdriver. I want one. I do. The 10th Doctor’s, though, not that weird pinchy one that the 11th Doctor has. I don’t care how over-the-top geeky that is.

I did have one pretty traumatic moment. There was a particular episode that made me sob and sob and sob. And this is selfish and somewhat unrelated to my otherwise pure enjoyment of the show. I was just going along, digging my marathon, cruising on a really great Doctor Who high, when all of a sudden this episode comes on and the first two minutes or so is (and I’m not even kidding) the entire fucking plot of my novel. My husband looks up at me and grabs my arm and he’s all bugeyed, not sure whether I’m going to cry or scream or what. I chose crying. It’s usually safer and more effective. That damned collective subconscious, man. I didn’t steal the idea from them, and obviously they couldn’t have stolen it from me. We probably all saw the same movies or read the same books and jumped to the same conclusions. Christ, that really hurt. I know I can still write it, the basic idea can still be used. But in the back of my head I’ll always wonder if people think I just copied that one episode of Doctor Who. They’ll call me a hack. They’ll say I have no original ideas. Let me tell you something, folks. There are no original ideas. Every single story that has ever been told by mankind is either a good-vs-evil story or a love story. That’s all we’ve got to work with. That is the human condition. All we are is our words. Make them good ones, right?

Story Time!

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Alright, kids, I hate to let life get in the way of my blogging responsibilities, but sadly it does happen from time to time. I’m in the middle of moving so I’ve got to keep this short and sweet this week. No deep insights! Very few ridiculous analogies! Plain old ordinary anecdotes! Possibly even typos. It’s so haphazard and exciting. Sorry. Next week I’ll try to be a badass. If I’ve got my shit together by then. Onward and upward. (Cue campfire ghost story voice. Ahem.)

Our story begins in a dim and dreary bookstore in the rainy depths of coastal California. This particular bookstore has pretty damn satisfactory scifi and fantasy sections (Tin Can Mailman in Arcata – I always leave happy and broke, check it out if you’re close and need a bookstore, plugplugplug). And the scifi section faces the front door so everyone who comes in has to walk right by you, right? I was standing there with (I’m not even fucking kidding) Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Piers Anthony, and Frank Herbert in my hand. In those great old 1970′s-looking mass market paperbacks? I love those. I looked like a walking cheapskate scifi 101 class, though, for real.

In walked these two gentlemen who were clearly on a mission to find a particular book. Which should’ve been right where I was standing. But wasn’t. Of course. And it’s a used bookstore and they’re usually kind of busy and they’re by nature a little disorganized so I usually look two or three times and try random leaps of logic to try to look in other places that it just might have possibly ended up through some twist of fate. But these two gentlemen were being extremely thorough, even by those standards. And they were all up in my space, you know? I suppose at some point my comfort bubble got a bit bent because myopic, fucking overly polite me, I stepped back and started squinting at the books from afar so as to give these dudes the prime scifi section real estate, goddamn it. Because clearly they felt that their used bookstore experience was of a higher priority than mine.

One guy gave me the thank you nod (manners props to Dude #1!) and the other guy. Ooh, the other guy. Homeboy looked like Comic Book Guy’s, geekier more UV avoidant cousin (can you make fun of Simpsons characters for being pale? Does that even work? Fuck, I’m brainfried, just let it go). And you know, I don’t give a shit what people look like, I really really don’t. But sometimes you can just spot them from a mile away. Those haughty kind of LARPier-than-thou sorts of guys. They fall within a bell curve. They usually resemble the bell curve, as a point of interest. So this walking fucking stereotype, this caricature of a human being, gave my books the “I’m obviously being nosy about your books but it’s ok because we’re in a bookstore” head-tilt eyeball situation. And giggled. More of a giggle/scoff, really. A gloff, if you will.

At this point I should’ve asked him “What the hell, bro?” And just intimidated the shit out of him with my meaty social prowess and skillful altercation-starting skills. But those things aren’t real, you see, so I was left in this weird state of not knowing what had just happened or how to feel about it. Which is how I feel most of the time when I deal with other humans. Also why I moved to the middle of nowhere to a county that literally has more bears than people. That’s statistics. Look it up.

Because that gloff had the stink of superiority to it. And I don’t know why. I’m bothered by this not knowing (grammar what?). Are these four really important scifi classics not good enough for Dude #2? Because that’s bullshit. Maybe he was just a fantasy geek who scoffs at scifi in general, but then why the rudeness trying to get past me to the scifi books? Or was he laughing because he assumed I hadn’t read them (three of them I had, I just didn’t own my own copies, for the record)? In which case the proper etiquette of nosy bookstoreness would be to say “Hey, those are really good books” not “You mean you’re in your thirties and you haven’t read those yet?” Or maybe (because we need at least one optimistic prospect) he was thrown off by my being a girl in the scifi section at all and couldn’t think of anything to say that was polite so he opted for the idiot gloff instead. Any of these things is possible.

Anyway. I guess it’s just a mystery. Damn, there’s really no good way to end that story. It was a frustrating nerd moment, you know? I’ve let it roll off my back. After I stopped myself from chasing him down the street screaming “Why?! Why?!” Then I let it roll off my back. I’m not particularly good with people. So, if we need to find a moral here: be nice in bookstores, ok?

Me Getting All Worked Up About Scifi Again

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Long ago and far away I wanted to go to graduate school. There are surprisingly few things that one can do with a non-terminal English/Literature degree, so most of  us end up as retail shlubs, possibly in horrible corporate bookstores because it‘s something nominally connected to our field and we think it’ll make us happy but then it doesn’t even though we get a bomb-ass discount and then we have epic breakdowns and move to California to be farmers and live off the grid. Sorry. That’s just my whole life story. Anyway.

At first I wanted to be a librarian, but libraries are dying (no offense, librarian friends, you do good work, I just didn’t want to end up a hybrid between an IT person and a museum curator). And you have to be really quiet in a library so I wouldn’t be able to talk about books all day anyway. Which made me think maybe I could teach. I’m not particularly good with little kids and teenagers are demons so I’d have to teach college. And colleges are rife with bureaucracy and self-righteous young people. They wouldn’t let me talk about the books I want to talk about all day either, probably. Them and their galdurn curricula.

So I decided not to go to grad school. Because clearly all I want to do is talk about books all day. I just want to own a bookstore. Is that too much to ask?  And I don’t have to go to grad school to do that. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s the worst possible time to try to start a small business. Worse still to hang all one’s hopes and dreams of possibly achieving a glimmer of happiness on owning a store in an industry that’s on its way out. But still. You gotta have goals. Amazon and e-books have killed off all the big chain stores (except that one, you know, the Evil Green-signed one) so used bookstores will probably have a small boom before society kills them off completely. Right around the time Americans forget what books are and stop reading anything. Maybe I can still have a shot. Don’t step on my dreams, man! (Quick side note: if you bought an e-book reader because you thought it would be greener than buying paper books, look seriously into the fucked up electronics production industry vs just buying used books. If we have to use a buzzword, I’d rather “repurpose” old books than contribute to the pollution caused by making new microchips and batteries. Just give it a thought.)

What was I saying? Grad school. If I did go, I’d want to major in science fiction. Wait, hear me out. I’ve yet to find a program that exists, besides those schools where you can build your own major. There aren’t many of those with anything past a bachelor’s. (But if you know of a super obscure one that I might have missed, let me know.) Because scifi is important. Not in a curing-cancer-and-ending-poverty kind of way, obviously. If entertainment had that kind of power, America would still rule the world. (Sorry kids, but the tech nerds in Asia own our asses because we’re lazy and watch too much reality tv. Ooh, harsh.) No, in an anthropological, sociological kind of way, science fiction has shaped our culture. We have ion drive engines because of Star Trek. Our space program was started and run by people who read pulp scifi novels at the height of their cheesy popularity in the 1940’s and 50’s. You can’t tell me with a straight face that people who work in laser labs don’t ask themselves, at least once, if Greedo shot first. Because it’s really interesting stuff. That’s the definition of scifi, isn’t it? Technically? “Really interesting stuff”? I could look it up in the dictionary, but I’m pretty sure that’s verbatim. Urm.

Why, then, is scifi so frowned upon? Maybe not “frowned upon.” Thought less of? I got a BA in literature and the only scifi books I had to read, out of hundreds, were War of the Worlds and Brave New World, and those only because they’re political satire. Not that that distinction counts them out of being scifi, per se, but if Huxley could see the world after Prozac he’d go into a soma coma, is all I’m saying. Also, Wells was an anti-Semite, if that’s worth anything to anyone. We could use scifi, especially literature, to our advantage, if it wasn’t looked at as stupid fluff by most people. You know, like the way I look at romance novels. Snob.

But as a book person, let me tell you, having a genius IQ counts for exactly shit in this country if you can’t do math. (I was good up until tenth grade chemistry. Then I started feeling dumb. At this point if I can balance my checkbook I call it a win.) Mathy-sciency people rule the world, whether we acknowledge it or not. Every redneck mouthbreather in the world has a smartphone in their pocket, right? All those little things add up. So booknerds are kind of left behind, stranded in our useless piles of archaic paper history. I can’t say “Oh, well, Aristotle tells us that society can be saved with grammar” and be taken seriously. But one astrophysicist brings up Asimov and it’s all “Fuck yeah! Robot revolution!” Because science matters. More than that, science is cool. Science got us to where we are. Science will save us from ourselves. But what are we, really, but our words? We have no history without documentation of one sort or another. They even say “before written history.” The history of science is a kind of historical record of the ways in which we view the world. There are some old ideas that we now look at as quaint, but at the time those people were working just as hard and were just as strong in their convictions as any surgeon or engineer or chemist doing cutting-edge stuff today. Quarks may be just as bogus as the flat-earth model, but it’s the ideas that keep us going. Where reality and imagination meet, you get some really important, innovative ideas. The world, culture, society – it’s all based on “what if?” That’s science. That’s literature. That’s art and music and technology. That’s being human, right?

And science fiction is the artistic representation of that. It’s the place where those groups can come together, that liminal space that’s open to anyone. Where ideas are born. There’s beauty and terror there. Nightmares and dreams in equal parts. Maybe we’re deluding ourselves. Maybe science fiction makes us think we’re better than we are. Maybe someday an After Common Era scientist will find a copy of The Matrix and say “Awww, how precious. They thought they could win.” But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Too much hope is better than not enough. Science fiction gives us hope (man, I tried really hard to work around that sentence, but I couldn’t find a way to do it). There’s a lot of fear and destruction to be had, as well, but that’s just human nature. We’re scared little mammals, at heart. I think the awesome thing about scifi is that we, as a human race, can look ahead together at what we could accomplish. Maybe that’s just me being sappy because I’m a fangirl, but that’s ok. I’ll take it. An intellectual sap, me. I’ll just be over here reading Contact for the fifth time, wishing I could do calculus in my head.

Wormhole Deliciousness

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I know I’ll lose a lot of credibility for saying this (ok, let’s be real – I didn’t have any fucking credibility to start with) but man, do I love me some Stargate. It’s one of those things you know you shouldn’t love but you just…can’t…help it. Like that one-hit-wonder song that you turn way up when it comes on and sing at the top of your lungs. But only if no one else is in the car. Guilty pleasures. And I’m a total fangirl about it. I’ve got every season and every spinoff and all the movies on DVD. I’ve watched all the special features and every episode with the commentary on. I know every character’s whole fucking life story, every alien race, every planet, every contradiction, every hanging lantern (look up that writery term, non-English majors, mwahahaha). I’m probably more of a geek about Stargate than I am about anything else. Except books, but that doesn’t count. Booklove is an overarching, penetrating-every-aspect-of-who-I-am kind of obsession. Scifi fandom is way more focused. It’s the difference between breathing air and loving a particular smell. I’ve really got to stop talking in analogies. Or just find better analogies.

Anyway, Stargate’s underrated. It’s cheesy. Like, really cheesy. But not hammy, like Farscape. And it doesn’t take itself too seriously, like Babylon 5. Admittedly, I like both of those as well. The thing about Stargate is that you get really sucked in by the characters. Each episode is different, more or less, because the story arc follows the people, not the people chasing the story arc (like X-files, say, or Lost). It’s a scifi show running almost entirely on a soap opera dynamic. Which can create massive amounts of cheese, but works really well. In a crack-addict kind of way.

I’ve caught a lot of shit for my Stargate fandom. From geeks and nongeeks alike. Nongeeks (civilians, I call them, which is terribly exclusive and offensive but whatever)  make fun of me for my fangirl gushiness. About all this stuff, not just Stargate. Other scifi fans make fun just because it’s Stargate and not something else. And that, to me, is what’s most interesting. How can someone wearing a Starfleet uniform find any leg to stand on to make fun of me or Stargate? Seriously? (Not that there’s anything wrong with cosplay, don’t send me hatemail.)

At the bottom of it, there are two ways to see this phenomenon:

1) People are viciously protective of the things they love and will defend them as better than other things that other people love. It’s an interesting point of modern human nature and can’t be avoided, so why analyze it? Or,

2) there really is some invisible underpinning of scifi hierarchy. Maybe some things really do mean more to geekdom than others. This could be totally made up, and I’d have to leave my abandoned little corner of the world and venture out into civilization to examine it further. If anyone wants to buy me Comic-Con tickets, I’m totally down for a research trip.

But think about it. When you think “scifi geek” what comes immediately to mind? Star Wars and Star Trek, right? There’s a big beef between these groups of fans, which I plan to dissect another time. Coming soon to a blog near you. Point is, everything else kind of falls below and between these two megaliths of nerdism. But why, damn it, why? There’s structure here. I just can’t quite figure it out. For the record, I love Star Trek and Star Wars equally. But they’re very different. And they’re related. It’s like loving your creepy identical twin sisters the same way even though one’s a goth and one’s a jock. (True story.)

I feel like the things we love in the scifi universe (multiverse?) are more like a spectrum and less like a Venn diagram. Or should be, anyway. Maybe a color wheel. Something less dividey, is what I’m saying. None of them is, intrinsically, any more or less silly than another. We think they are, but they’re not. If we’re talking about production value or acting, some things are definitely “better,” but only in technical terms. Some shows have more money or better marketing or a worse time slot or they’ve been rendered absurd just by virtue of time having passed. But that doesn’t change the content or the intent. It doesn’t change the love of the fans. Scifi is all about suspension of disbelief. If I can buy that a Federation of planets would send out multiple ships to peacefully explore the far reaches of the universe, why would I then turn around and not believe that a telekinetic dictator would want to rule a galaxy far, far away with a Nazi-like iron fist? I wouldn’t. I don’t. Equally ridiculous and fun. So don’t tell me that it’s out of the question for a bunch of American Air Force officers, a clueless linguist/archaeologist, and a rogue alien soldier to go through an ancient wormhole device every week for ten years and explore new planets, under presidential order via a big fat government conspiracy. It could  totally happen.

 

Also, just as a fangirl side note, if you did want to start watching Stargate, for whatever reason, a few points:

- Watch the original movie first. The show picks up right where it leaves off.

- The first season and a half or so is the cheesiest. But it gets way better, and their budget gets bigger. Plus you need those episodes to get a few key story points.

- There are some contradictions in the rules. Ignore them. All the characters do.

- Don’t get attached. Everyone dies at least once.

- Let me know what you think. We can gush together. Or not. Whatever.

Long-winded Thoughts on Nomenclature

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So this is a nerd blog, right? And of all the species of nerds, I’m undoubtedly, unquestionably, first and foremost, a booknerd. Books. Mmm. Books, booky book books. I could talk about them all day. And I have. And I probably will again. True to type, though, I read mostly science fiction. Some fantasy, some horror. Right now I’m trying to work my way through the whole list of Pulitzer winners. You know, just for giggles. I quite enjoy historical nonfiction stuff, too, lots of biographies and science books and things about abandoned hospitals (don’t ask). But I’ll read whatever. If it’s been collated, I will probably at least peruse it.

However.

I’m deeply irked by the label Speculative Fiction. There’s a lot of wiggle room on the term “speculative” in the first place. Isn’t all fiction, by its very nature, speculation? Isn’t that what the whole thing is about? In a meta-sense? In an it’s-humanity’s-duty-to-tell-stories kind of way? The Speculative Literature Foundation (I’m not even kidding) defines the genre as “Any piece of literature containing a fabulist or speculative element.” Could they just go ahead and make my point for me? It would save you guys a lot of reading.

I worked for a huge chain bookstore for a long time. And (disclaimer) I’m bound to say some nasty shit about them so I won’t name names, but it’s the only one still standing after the Amazon and e-book revolutions. The one with the green signs? And the shitty coffee? And the & in the middle? You know the one. Anyway, they sell tons of scifi and fantasy, so they put them off to one side in their own little section. With the graphic novels. Between self-help and romance, which seems either really insensitive or just outright mean. What a weird cross-section of humanity. Walking past those few aisles is so fucking pitiful I can’t even stand it. So ten thousand times I’d get some college freshman standing lost and confused in the scifi/fantasy aisle asking me “Where are Dracula and Frankenstein? I need them for a class. They should be right here.” And I’d say, “No, no, come along, moron. Let’s go to the Literature section.”

First of all, as a point of etiquette, don’t wait until the last minute to buy your books for class from the only bookstore in town. They will not be prepared for forty kids to come in all on one day. Just so you know. Secondly, Dracula and Frankenstein are both horror novels and do not, by any stretch of the imagination, belong in scifi/fantasy. And finally, what the fuck does “Literature” even mean in this context? Comparatively speaking? Does that mean that scifi/fantasy or romance or mystery aren’t good enough to be Literature-with-a-capital-L? What do you call them then? Books? Stories? Tales? Yarns? The term Literature carries this onus of heady intellectualism which is completely arbitrary and made up. It’s an invalid connotation of some sort of classicism, one that can be used against people. Note the two different reactions I usually get in the following situations:

I have an English degree.

- Oh. That means you read a lot, right?

vs.

I have a Literature degree.

- Wow, that’s really interesting. Tell me about Shakespeare.

Sigh. Yes, I read a lot. Also, fuck Shakespeare. I’ll get crucified for saying that, but the guy was a hack and I stand by my statement. But you see my point? It’s the word. Not even the whole word. The capitalization of the word. You can hear it when people say it out loud. Drives me batshit crazy. So when I capitalize these somewhat subjective categories, please know that I’m doing it in the Big Evil Green-signed Bookstore Chain way and not in an I-have-a-literature-degree sense. I’m bitter, not pretentious. For the record.

Here’s the thing: I’ve always had a problem with these labels, specifically “scifi/fantasy.” It’s that slash. These are two separate entities. This is not an and/or/if/then slash-worthy situation. When you say it out loud, it’s different. It’s like a pause: “I read scifi, fantasy, horror, computer manuals…” You see? But when you write it down it becomes amalgamated. That’s the issue here. And I understand that this is trickle-down vernacular. It comes straight from the marketing imps of Satan who lump scifi and fantasy together because of the fan base overlap. Like how Velcro gets put in the same category as all the other lowly hook-and-loop tape. Urm. Sort of. For the most part, the bottom line is that bookstores don‘t want to split up an author‘s work. They want to be able to put everything in one category so that shoppers only have to look in one place. Take Stephen King. (And let me preface this part of my little rant by saying that I have a deep and abiding love for Mr. King that borders on unnatural. But that’s a whole different blog. We’ll get to it, friends. Fret not.) So Stephen King has written mostly what would be conventionally labeled horror. With a few really notable, important exceptions: the seven books in the Dark Tower series, Eyes of the Dragon, and the graphic novels all fall squarely into the fantasy category. But one has to file all of these under Literature so as to keep them all together on the shelf. Because some fuckwit can’t be bothered to walk two aisles over and find the K’s again. This is why America is obese, people. Because those tricksy marketing bastards are calling all the shots.

I digress. Speculative-Fiction-seekers want to further confound this whole situation by just shoving everything somewhat wacky into one big mushy mess. A mess where Twilight seems to be invited to the party. And that, frankly, is not a party I want to go to. I like my categorical language neat and tidy, right? Science fiction has to have some science in it. Or something remotely science-y. I want robots and spaceships and lasers and germ warfare. Get it? Fantasy is a little more ethereal. Fantastic, if you will. Maidens, dragons, quests, swords, magic. Horror has all the delicious gory bits and the occasional ghost, possession or serial killer. Possibly a demon (but not a daemon, those go in fantasy). There are a few things that successfully cross the line. Star Wars had a princess, right? Albeit one who was apparently from some futuristic braless utopia. And the Force seemed like magic until Lucas fucked up and explained it all away with science (which is a bullshit maneuver to pull in a prequel, George – yeah, I said it). Blurry lines aside, to put everything in one big honking category is simply not ok. But if we’re going to conflate, let’s just go whole hog and really conflate, right? Screw mystery, scifi, classics, romance, Literature, and especially Speculative Fiction – get rid of them all. Label everything Fiction and be done with it. With a capital F.