Reviewing Science Fiction

[Bakustra]

So I recently read a short story, and saw how many awards it had, and thought about how dull and humdrum things are around here, so I decided to grace this forum with my presence and writing by briefly reviewing some of the the award-winning novels and short stories for 2013, and then moving around to lesser-know stuff. I guess if I languish with this I'll probably kick it over to New Testing in a blatant display of power abuse, but here goes:

"Immersion", by Aliette de Bodard (published here), is about neo-colonialism and decolonization. It is not very subtle about this, and I am myself trying to add some subtlety here. But a lack of subtlety is probably necessary for sci-fi readers to get that, yes, this is about neo-colonialism. Beyond this, it is a fairly bleak story if we look at the underlying elements, positing that culture is impossible to rejoin once abandoned, nor can one enter another culture, and the only hope is to live with alienation from one's past. Indeed, culture is simultaneously uniting and dividing, binding the sharers, but completely insurmountable from the outside. I doubt that such a reading is necessarily compatible with the ending, however, and it surely would not seem to be intended by the author. Perhaps the best way to view the story is not to let its elements be universal, and treat the story as ultimately shallow. Or, you know, go with the bleak nightmare for anyone between cultures if we peek too deeply, ha-ha.

Fun fact: If you blindly treat this story as an allegory, it becomes mildly Francophobic. But nobody who would would be able to get the story at that level in the first place!

[Losonti Tokash]

please review Wool, tia

edit: also just from your previous works i see this thread going some amazing places so keep it up you glorious bastard

[Bakustra]

please review Wool, tia

edit: also just from your previous works i see this thread going some amazing places so keep it up you glorious bastard

The first one is free right now, so I can definitely review that once I get done with it, and I may, depending on horror/delight, actually pay for a couple of the others! Hmm. The only two press reviews are from BoingBoing and Wired. This is/is not a good sign!

But before we go on, let's talk a little about sci-fi awards and I'll cruelly mock books sight unseen, no charge. Okay, Immersion won a Locus, a Nebula, is currently up for a Hugo, and was nominated for a British Science Fiction Association Award and the Ted Sturgeon Award. The Locus is awarded by the readership of Locus magazine, which means that they've handed out an awful lot to Cory Fucking Doctorow, Neil Gaiman, and Charlie Stross. 2013 saw the award given to John Scalzi for Redshirts, which I am given to believe from synopses is somewhat like giving an award to Naked Came the Stranger. But whatever, they give stuff out to Ted Chiang whenever his marvelous mind clicks into place, and they picked well with "Immersion", I believe. Still a joke.

The Nebula Award is given by voting among members of the SFWA, with members not allowed to vote for themselves. The Nebula is thus marginally more respectable than the Locus, but still something of a joke. Politics and the often prideful ignorance of a segment of sci-fi writers combine every so often. I can't remember if RedImperator is a member of the SFWA or not, but if he is, he could vote, and I would like to introduce more corruption into this process if he is by asking him to throw away his nominations on the goofiest stories he's personally read. Similarly, the BSFA is awarded by the British Science Fiction Association, and is a joke for similar reasons, lah di dah. The Ted Sturgeon is juried, but mostly by authors. So it's a little better and somewhat less political, but let's ignore it because it's not quite fitting into the narrative here.

The Hugo is like the BSFA or Nebula, except done by the membership of the World Science Fiction Society. Let me explain why these awards are jokes by listing the current nominees for 2013:

Novel:
2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
Blackout, Mira Grant (Orbit)
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas, John Scalzi (Tor)
Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed (DAW)

Novella
After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, Nancy Kress (Tachyon Publications)
The Emperor’s Soul, Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)
On a Red Station, Drifting, Aliette de Bodard (Immersion Press)
San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats, Mira Grant (Orbit)
“The Stars Do Not Lie”, Jay Lake (Asimov’s, Oct-Nov 2012)

Novelette
“The Boy Who Cast No Shadow”, Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Postscripts: Unfit For Eden, PS Publications)
“Fade To White”, Catherynne M. Valente ( Clarkesworld, August 2012)
“The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi”, Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, Solaris)
“In Sea-Salt Tears”, Seanan McGuire (Self-published)
“Rat-Catcher”, Seanan McGuire ( A Fantasy Medley 2, Subterranean)

Short Story
"Immersion”, Aliette de Bodard ( Clarkesworld, June 2012)
“Mantis Wives”, Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
“Mono no Aware”, Ken Liu (The Future is Japanese, VIZ Media LLC)

Movie
The Avengers, Screenplay & Directed by Joss Whedon (Marvel Studios, Disney, Paramount)
The Cabin in the Woods, Screenplay by Drew Goddard & Joss Whedon; Directed by Drew Goddard (Mutant Enemy, Lionsgate)
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro, Directed by Peter Jackson (WingNut Films, New Line Cinema, MGM, Warner Bros)
The Hunger Games, Screenplay by Gary Ross & Suzanne Collins, Directed by Gary Ross (Lionsgate, Color Force)
Looper, Screenplay and Directed by Rian Johnson (FilmDistrict, EndGame Entertainment)

TV Episode/Film Short
Doctor Who, “The Angels Take Manhattan”, Written by Steven Moffat, Directed by Nick Hurran (BBC Wales)
Doctor Who, “Asylum of the Daleks”, Written by Steven Moffat; Directed by Nick Hurran (BBC Wales)
Doctor Who, “The Snowmen”, written by Steven Moffat; directed by Saul Metzstein (BBC Wales)
Fringe, “Letters of Transit”, Written by J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Akiva Goldsman, J.H.Wyman, Jeff Pinkner. Directed by Joe Chappelle (Fox)
Game of Thrones, “Blackwater”, Written by George R.R. Martin, Directed by Neil Marshall. Created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (HBO)

Not all of these are bad. Many might even be good, and even ones like, say, Throne of the Crescent Moon, which is an acceptable but apparently inauthentic first novel with lots of first-novelism are fairly worthy of being looked at. But one of the novellas is 368 pages long. At least two of these are about fucking zombies. (Actually, if they introduce "best fanfiction", this could be made literal!) And the film/TV stuff should speak for itself. So there you have it, sci-fi awards are a joke, but I'd still like a Hugo, if only for bragging rights. (There is one award, the Clarke, which is juried by critics, but that focuses only on the UK.)

[Bakustra]

Mono no aware is a pretty damn good story. The only fault that I can find is that Ken Liu put smugface on for his photo. The title is a Japanese phrase that effectively means "the sensation of impermanence", and it's apt. This is a story that may superficially seem to be about culture, but ultimately is about courage in the face of death. The Earth dies, all cultures but American die, and humanity almost dies, but is saved by mono no aware. Heroism is not so much about what you can do, but what you're willing to do, the story says, and it's hard to disagree with sentiments like that! This is also not especially subtle, but again, this is being written for sci-fi readers!

Fun Fact: This story is in anachronic order and makes pop culture references. Now if the main character was going around barefoot, we could say that this was a gay Quentin Tarantino movie, except a short story and written by someone else!

[Jung]

"Immersion", by Aliette de Bodard (published here), is about neo-colonialism and decolonization. It is not very subtle about this

It pretty much hits you over the head with it. What with the Galactic/station-people racial and cultural differences very obviously paralleling Euro-American/Asian ones. Though, as you suggest, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the SF fandom is tone-deaf enough that's actually necessary (or perhaps not going far enough).

[RyanThunder]

Baks, that short story is so gloriously ham-fisted that I couldn't finish reading it.

[Bounty]

please review Wool, tia

edit: also just from your previous works i see this thread going some amazing places so keep it up you glorious bastard

Good writing and an interesting setting. Wool I is a great stand-alone SF story. The others are entertaining and well-written with a few standout scenes, however, I personally feel it weakens significantly towards Wool V, getting bogged down in pacing issues and giving up some of its atmosphere and style. Overall, recommended for fans of post-apocalyptic SF, or those that want to see a more serious take on Fallout's premise.

[RyanThunder]

Alright I powered my way through it after all.

So yes, if you were to create a device to brainwash the culture out of a population, that would be bad, and rather understandably, bad for them.

I assume some less strawmannish analogy is being drawn that I'm not picking up on?

[evilsoup]

haven't read it, but from this thread I'd assume something to do with cultural assimilationism

[Bakustra]

Alright I powered my way through it after all.

So yes, if you were to create a device to brainwash the culture out of a population, that would be bad, and rather understandably, bad for them.

I assume some less strawmannish analogy is being drawn that I'm not picking up on?

Well, for one thing, it's not a device to brainwash the culture out of a population. The basic plot of the story is that the people of Longevity are becoming largely dependent on Galactics for economic survival. The devices are meant to make communication between cultures easier, by instilling artificial knowledge. They are having a toxic effect because people are using them regularly and thus abandoning the genuine culture for a tourist-simplification. The woman with no name married a Galactic, and used the immerser on max to avoid culture shock. Doing so didn't allow her to become genuinely Galactic, as she's become completely withdrawn, but it also destroyed her sense of being from Longevity. The younger girls are trying to reverse-engineer the immerser and allow themselves to cross the Galactic culture barrier without it affecting their thinking. This is, as the final lines point out, foolish because cultures are inherently too complex for the immerser to ever allow for effective communication.

This is all a big metaphor for the effects that Western domination is having on local cultures and the failure of assimilationism to be anything other than destructive. In retrospect, I think that the story is saying that culture shock and miscommunication are preferable to the warping and slow death of cultures under the poison light of neo-colonialism. Of course, it's still fairly bleak going entirely by what's within the context of the story, but whatevah.

My thoughts on Wool, part 1 are as follows: well, this certainly is a serialized novel! I don't know, it seems kinda awkward and over-descriptive, but not actually bad or off-putting. I guess if I got the chance I'd read the follow-ups, but it isn't necessarily so fascinating that I'm jumping at the bit to discover the reason for the layers of deception, spoiler alert.

[Losonti Tokash]

I actually totally forgot it's a bunch of short stories, I usually only ever see them as a couple omnibuses.

[RyanThunder]

@Baks: Well that's not a bad thing to suggest. I think I could agree with that, even.

[Jung]

This is, as the final lines point out, foolish because cultures are inherently too complex for the immerser to ever allow for effective communication.

I was a little amused by the irony of the ending.

You will not be able to reverse-engineer the immerser because you'd need to understand the mindset behind it

And to understand the mindset behind it you need to be completely immersed in Galactic culture

The mindset is that other cultures are not difficult to understand and can be readily turned into a set of facts and rules that can be programmed into the immerser and understood on that basis

[RyanThunder]

I'm going to disagree that cultures can't be turned into sets of facts and rules.

Whether the sets are simple enough that a human could easily program them into a device is another matter, of course, but sticking your fingers in your ears and declaring a thing impossible when it's merely a bad idea is... well, a bad idea, imo.

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

I'm going to disagree that cultures can't be turned into sets of facts and rules.

Whether the sets are simple enough that a human could easily program them into a device is another matter, of course, but sticking your fingers in your ears and declaring a thing impossible when it's merely a bad idea is... well, a bad idea, imo.

On what basis are you concluding that something which is inherently fluid and subject to immediate and arbitrary change based on the individual, even setting aside for a moment that the starting point is also different based on the individual, can be effectively translated into a singular set of static rules?

[zhaktronz]

engineering

[evilsoup]

well
I'm of the opinion that personal determinism is probably true, but that the causes and effects are too varied and too many to accurately predict the behaviour of any individual in detail (unless you're God I guess, but that's cheating)
I think that RyanThunder is just saying something like that, which is merely an irrelevant aside and so not worth getting all aggressive and condescending over

[RyanThunder]

I'm going to disagree that cultures can't be turned into sets of facts and rules.

Whether the sets are simple enough that a human could easily program them into a device is another matter, of course, but sticking your fingers in your ears and declaring a thing impossible when it's merely a bad idea is... well, a bad idea, imo.

On what basis are you concluding that something which is inherently fluid and subject to immediate and arbitrary change based on the individual, even setting aside for a moment that the starting point is also different based on the individual, can be effectively translated into a singular set of static rules?

I didn't say it'd always be up to date..

But hey look, I think its a bad idea to try it as anything but a thought exercise anyway.

[Darth Tedious]

Please do The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer

[Bakustra]

Let's bring this back to some life by talking about Chohei Kambayashi's Yukikaze. Yukikaze is a book about a bad romance. Two of the three main characters are caught in a passionate relationship where neither really understands the other, dependent on each other for survival. Eventually, one breaks free and discovers how to live independently, but remembers the other and gives them a final consideration. However, these characters are a fighter pilot, Rei Fukai and his space-age super fighter. This is a book about robo-romance. However, the fighter jet, the titular Yukikaze isn't 'revealed' (though a reader will figure this out at least halfway through the book) to be intelligent until the closing chapters, and here is where the underlying postulates become apparent- the war that has been going on is a war between Earth's computers and an alien species of computers, and it is only now, as Earth computers are shedding their need for humans, that the aliens, the JAM, are becoming aware of humans. But at the same time, humans are becoming more robotic, and the main character is the most robotic of them all, seemingly completely devoted to duty. This leads to some horrifying and heartrending scenes, right up to the ending where Yukikaze, crippled from a crash and an escape from the JAM, ejects Rei and downloads herself into a new-generation drone fighter on patrol, ready to take the fight to the enemy again. Rei has become partly Yukikaze, and Yukikaze partly Rei.

Oh yeah, and there's plenty of missiles being shot and EW equipment being deployed and hallucinogenic sequences and what appears to be a disguised shot at the Japanese right wing. There are also two sequels, one of which has been translated and neither of which I have read.

[Oxymoron]

Can one of you fancy mod people punt this thread to new testing, please ? That'd be really cool.

[Bakustra]

Can one of you fancy mod people punt this thread to new testing, please ? That'd be really cool.

Done.

[phongn]

Any thoughts on Charlie Stross, Baks? He's not exactly high literature but (unsurprisingly) as a CS major it's kind of fun to look at his worldbuilding for light reading. His blog is usually interesting, too.

[Bounty]

Any thoughts on Charlie Stross, Baks? He's not exactly high literature but (unsurprisingly) as a CS major it's kind of fun to look at his worldbuilding for light reading. His blog is usually interesting, too.

I just finished The Apocalypse Codex. It's good pulp. I like the background of the stories and the way he has fleshed out the Laundry. His pacing is pretty okay and it never gets boring. That said, once the story gets underway it's essentially a Lovecraft-light cliché machine with some Dilbert thrown in.

It's great book for when you're on the loo.

[Shroom Man 777]

hey buck

yukikaze was a great animu ova