Tuesday News: The SFF and Speech Edition
Publishing News"hard" SF / Free Speech / gender / harassment / hate speech / Hugos / online speech / SFF / stalking / writing10 Comments
To the Hard Members of the Truthy SF Club – I readily admit that I am an outsider to the SFF community, although I have read within the genre since graduate school. I have read many discussions of the difference between so-called “hard” and “soft” SF, but I especially enjoyed this piece by research scientist and writer Athena Andreadis. Not only does she talk knowledgeably and extensively about the use (and abuse) of science in SF, but she also tackles the issue of pernicious gendering and the importance of storytelling as a function of scientific exploration. And it’s especially fun to watch her so adroitly and masterfully demolish the bullshit argument that only men can write “real” or “hard” SF.
Traditionally, “hard” SF is taken to mean that the story tries to violate known scientific facts as little as possible, once the central premise (usually counter to scientific facts) has been chosen. This is how authors get away with FTL travel and werewolves. The definition sounds obvious but it has two corollaries that many SF authors forget to the serious detriment of their work.
The first is that the worldbuilding must be internally consistent within each secondary universe. If you envision a planet circling a double sun system, you must work out its orbit and how the orbit affects the planet’s geology and hence its ecosystems. If you show a life form with five sexes, you must present a coherent picture of their biological and social interactions. Too, randomness and arbitrary outcomes (often the case with sloppily constructed worlds and lazy plot-resolution devices) are not only boring, but also anxiety-inducing: human brains seek patterns automatically and lack of persuasive explanations makes them go literally into loops. –Starship Reckless
On Internet “Bravery”: This is not Nazi-Occupied France, Folks – I have read this post at least three times now, hoping each time I read it that the argument won’t sound so dismissive of the real risks that women online face right now. I appreciate Hurley’s acknowledgement that her own position as an author insulates her from a certain kind of abuse, and I agree with her that many, many people speaking out online face, at most, some unpleasantness. But I also cannot find any recognition in the piece of the huge and real difference between having people who don’t like you yell at you online and being doxxed, harassed, stalked, threatened, and otherwise made unsafe by people who truly wish you harm. And I don’t even know where to begin with the World War II analogy.
Yes, change is incredibly terrifying, and there will be pushback and threats and dudes on the internet loudly declaring that you are a big vagina as if that is the worst possible thing a human being can be. But this is not yet Nazi-occupied France, my friends.
Are there ramifications for speaking up? Sure. Muting people can get tedious. But you’re still more likely to be hit by a bus than shivved by a sobbing internet mob.
We are made of tougher stuff than we can ever imagine. –Kameron Hurley
Hatespeech – I found Hurley’s post especially ironic given George R.R. Martin’s recent piece on hate speech, a term that has no legal foundation in American law, although it has become more and more embedded in our culture, especially with some of the current online harassment issues.
Martin’s basic argument is that death and rape threats, and related speech, should not be tolerated, and that it flourishes in environments where there is no check in the form of strong dissenting voices. He calls on both the left and the right to check this kind of speech, and in many ways he helped me understand my own thinking on the issue at this point. Namely that I still believe that the best antidote to bad speech is more speech, but in order to have more speech, you have to have an environment in which that other speech can be heard. In a public square, everyone must be there in person and stand up for/behind their words. Online, though, that is not the case, and I think this is where the argument for moderation becomes really important to the cultivation of safe discussion spaces. Of course, what feels safe for some people won’t feel safe for others, which highlights the importance of many different spaces, but we definitely seem to be at a point where no moderation means likely self-destruction.
Are there any limits to free speech?
That’s a question I have been pondering a lot of late, as the storms of Puppygate swirl all around me. My own politics are liberal… which means I lean left, but not way over to the fringe left. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to dissent, all of that has always been central to my political attitudes. The freedom of the artist to create should be absolute. I have always been against censorship, silencing, McCarthyism. (The McCarthy period, a particular fascination of mine, was one of the blackest eras in American history. The Time of the Toad, Dalton Trumbo called it; Trumbo was one of its victims). . . .
Of late, I have begun to fear that the Time of the Toad has returned. Only this time, thanks to the internet, the Toad is much larger. This Toad is Tsathoggua, for all you Lovecraft fans out there. And this toad is so huge and monstrous and venomous, and seems to have so many friends and fans and worshippers, that it has begun to shake even my long-held fervent belief in the sanctity of free speech… and the basic decency of human beings. –Not a Blog
Out of fracture – Speaking of safe spaces, this piece by artist Likhain (including book cover art) is as important as it is difficult to read. I don’t want to provide any translation for the message here, just a hope that you will read the piece and perhaps check out some of the links to works of SFF by authors of color.
I am focusing on building — on creation, on doing work — because it is what I can do. There was a time when I had more energy to write posts ripping racist arguments to shreds, critiquing oppressive power structures. No longer. But, truly, this work is no less difficult, requires no less courage — in fact, it requires more. I say this to the voices in my head telling me I have gone soft and weak, and to voices I have seen saying that to put one’s nose to the grindstone is to acquiesce to silence, a form of surrender. But this is my form of speaking out; this is my resistance. Every time I sit down to create art or to try and cobble some sentences or lines together, that is my battle. To create, to build, to love; this isn’t soft. I think of Perelandra manifest: “fiery, sharp, bright and ruthless, ready to kill, ready to die, outspeeding light…” I believe in love. As shield and sword, as song, as revolution and resistance, as defiance. –Awitin Mo
Kameron Hurley’s piece doesn’t surprise me. She is a supporter of Requires Hate whose main claim to fame was toxic, threatening behavior, death and rape threats.
Thank you for the link to the piece by Likhain. It is a powerful reminder that the pain and damage from the Requires Hate fiasco is still a daily reality for many. The links within that article are going to take me a while to work my way through, but I want to strongly recommend the wonderful collection of short stories by Zen Cho, Spirits Abroad. There is a link to The House of Aunts, one of the stories in that collection, at the end of Likhain’s piece. Zen Cho wrote The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo, which I also highly recommend.
Let me second Aoife’s recommendation of Zen Cho’s short story collection, whose beautiful ebook cover was done by Likhain. Some of the stories are previously published (like “The House of the Aunts”), but others are new. And Cho is very generous about sharing links to free versions of her stories at her website. I’m a huge fan of all Cho’s work (I reviewed Jade Yeo here at DA) and I’m really looking forward to her new full-length Fantasy novel, Sorceror to the Crown, which is releasing in September.
And men can definitely write “soft” scifi too. All these debates hard v soft scifi do confuse me to a degree, because while I always loved science fiction based on science (hard,I guess?), scifi I have read while growing up, always *always* included social critique in addition to fun scientific extrapolations. The best of those stories did anyway. Thats because the writers could not critique the communist regime in plain language unless you wanted for your work to never be published. Scifi writers could get away with it sometimes if censors did not catch their metaphors (because you know, fictional society in the future!). Anyway, what I am trying to say my favorite scifi included the mix of both, always.
I have no idea how well these writers are known outside of Russia for example, but their stories were one of my all times favorites when I was growing up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strugatsky_brothers.
I never realised before I started to follow the debates in scifi community that “soft” scifi (again, whatever the hell that means) is a prerogative of women and vice versa.
But I will grant you this – if I were to call something scifi, I want to see a future society and some science at the minimum and good story too, for sure. So I do not really agree with Athena Adreadis that “hard scifi” means not good stories and characters either.
I mean I know she did not say *all hard scifi* but thats the implication I got from her piece. For me I guess good scifi always had both.
@Sirius: But I will grant you this – if I were to call something scifi, I want to see a future society and some science at the minimum and good story too, for sure. So I do not really agree with Athena Adreadis that “hard scifi” means not good stories and characters either.
I didn’t read her piece as saying this; I read her piece as saying that some so-called “hard” SF (the school of “truthiness,” frex) has marginalized the importance of storytelling, privileging science (whether or not it was “true”) over story. I could be mistaken about that, of course.
My first in depth contact with SFF beyond reading casually in the genre was in grad school, where I TA’d a class on the genre. I don’t think, at the time, I appreciated the novelty of having this kind of course in a highly respected graduate program, but I sure as hell learned a lot and gained a tremendous respect for the genre as a whole. And even though the professor (a dedicated scholar in this area) was old school in certain ways, he never diminished these so-called “soft” stories or elements. He talked in terms of subgenera and themes and the broad and diverse purposes of SFF. And I am now even more grateful for that immersive education, because I always hate trying to negotiate new knowledge of something in the midst of a major controversy.
I always thought the point of science fiction was it was based on science. Otherwise it’s fantasy.
The issue I have with the science fiction erotic romances I write (and an issue I think every science fiction writer struggles with) is how much of that science to put in the stories. It is a delicate balance between adding to the world and interrupting the story (taking away focus from the romance).
@Janet: you are probably right. I also have not realized that the article is from five years ago. Does seem to be as relevant as ever.
Thank you for highlighting my article! “Hard” and “soft” SF are really totem-pole distinctions. Science, like all else, is best seamlessly incorporated in a narrative. Otherwise, it’s a gimmick (a clumsy one, at that). If people are curious, this is a bookend piece in which I discuss science in SF wearing my scientist’s hat: SF Goes McDonald’s: Less Taste, More Gristle, http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=1169.
I discussed Kameron Hurley badass-wannabe act in my most recent blog entry.
@Athena Andreadis: I thought your post was particularly relevant given the Hugo controversy and all the posturing over “quality” in the genre.
Re. your current post, especially your comments about personal information as anecdata, I unfortunately think you’re about the vulnerability that sharing creates, especially in those circumstances where it’s most relevant and important. On the flip side, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how the “personal as political” has become inverted, and about all the important political discussions we’re *not* having publicly because it’s so difficult to engage the political issues without seeming to impugn the personal (or vice versa). I don’t know what it’s going to take to push past that, but it definitely seems to be entwined with the pattern of hegemonic appropriation you describe.