best of el

I just drove an hour in a fucking hellish snowstorm and am in no shape to do all the typesetting on Last War in Albion, so that’ll be a day or two later in the week. For now, I’ve had a couple of old Twitter threads get a lot of renewed attention on the back of some debates about current trends in SF/F literature. A couple of these are things I reworked into what I called “tiny essays” for Patreon a while back, and if my views are going to get cited and thrown around I may as well put them up in a durable and lightly edited form. So here’s four tiny essays on recent aesthetic trends mostly around SF/F, to publicly stake out some positions.

The Tor Wave

For three years running there have been precisely zero white men nominated for the Best Novel Hugo, and the last one to actually win was John Scalzi all the way back in 2013. This suggests a clear aesthetic shift in how sci-fi works—one on the scale of the rise of the New Wave in the 1960s or the sudden arrival of cyberpunk in the mid-80s. However nobody has formulated a take on how this movement functions.

Part of this is undoubtedly the nazis. The Sad Puppies attacked this style before it had gotten a chance to self-codify. Their attacks were farcical and largely not even wrong—the claim that this “wasn’t science fiction” remains pure historical erasure. But like any propaganda there were just enough truths mixed in with the lies to make things difficult.

Core principles.

1. Diversity as an underlying assumption. Fantasy that isn’t medieval Europe fetishism but starts from international perspectives. (Rebecca Roanorse, N.K. Jemisin) Overt queerness (Charlie Jane Anders, Tamsyn Muir). This isn’t diversity for diversity’s sake, but rather focused exploration into the options that the white male default precludes.
2. A massive dollop of fanfic and romance influence. Tamsyn Muir and Charlie Jane Anders are at the front line of this, so it clearly overlaps substantially with queerness. But let’s not forget that Naomi Novik’s breakout series was a reskinned Master and Commander fanfic.
3. It’s stylistically a big tent, with the lyrical and allusiveness of Piranesi sitting comfortably alongside the cyberpunk reconstructionism of The Murderbot Diaries. Put another way, this is by a generation for whom SF/F has always had lots of different traditions, and who grew up reading all of them. Post-factionalization, although in practice this is still a faction.

Within this, the New Wave clearly has a ton of influence. Its innovations—SF/F conceits as tools for exploring interiority, the foregrounding of different cultural perspectives, stylistic experimentation—are all very, very internalized here. No longer controversial or innovative, just the way things are done. These are writers who grew up with library book sales where cheap copies of Dragonriders of Pern and Left Hand of Darkness abounded. More to the point, these existed besides Rendezvous with Rama and Neuromancer, all in a single “Science Fiction/Fantasy” genre.…

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There isn’t any promised land. This is just… it’s a superstition that you have picked up from all the humanity you’ve stuffed inside yourself. – Doctor Who, “Deep Breath”

I’ve been on a weird media kick for the past month. It started with that HBO Max West Wing reunion, which sparked a nostalgia for a show whose impeccable craft of writing is matched only by its absolutely dire sense of politics. That led to rewatching some favorite episodes in the lead-up to the election, a carefully tailored medial junk food to wash out the obvious taste. Then, in the wake of the election, as Donald Trump’s idiot coup meandered onwards, I found myself reading Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land. And around that time Season 4 of The Crown dropped, which Jill and I watch, so obviously I sat down with that, and by the time it had roughly caught up with Earthshock I’d well and truly fallen down a very strange rabbit hole of ritually fetishized liberalism. 

Consider this essay my climb back up.

Let’s start with The West Wing, which has aged more strangely than any other critically acclaimed TV show I can think of. On the one hand, its sparkling dialogue and immaculately precise construction stands up as one of the finest writing lessons out there—one that you can tell Steven Moffat studied intently. On the other… woof. Its most rightly acclaimed stretch of episodes features a plot in which it’s publicly revealed that the President has repeatedly lied to the American people (in his case, concealing the fact that he has multiple sclerosis). The result of this, which can in hindsight safely be called breathtakingly optimistic, is a concrete process of accountability in which transparent investigations take place and there are clear public consequences. These admittedly do not ultimately involve the President losing his reelection campaign (which plays out as a repudiation of a thinly veiled George W. Bush, culminating in a debate in which Martin Sheen’s bookish yet folksy New Hampshire scion Josiah Bartlett roundly humiliates the dunderheaded governor of Florida), but the fact remains that The West Wing portrays a world in which the President lying to the American people matters.

More than that, however, it portrays a world in which the President lying to the American people is something that can be straightforwardly handled by the existing system of structural checks and balances. Where, in fact, this system is a reified and beautiful thing, certainly not blind to whomever is in charge of it, but fundamentally capable of handling the prospect of those empowered within it engaging in egregious misconduct. To put it mildly, this was an extremely strange thing to watch in the leadup to an election that Donald Trump came very close to winning and, at the time of writing, may yet manage to stage a coup to overturn. 

Thinking about it, I realized what the experience most obviously resembled: watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its easy and woefully unexamined confidence in the utopian potential of post-scarcity capitalist imperialism.…

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I promised myself I wasn’t going to be the trans girl who wrote some stupid fucking essay about being trans in her first year of public transition. So happy anniversary to me.

The Butterfly Conservatory is very probably the greatest band never to actually play a single note. Instead it exists in hypothetical and implication; an almost that never quite resolves into being. A band under that name played a pair of songs at the 2012 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival—a folk supergroup consisting of Tracy Grammer and a phalanx of other musicians to honor the ten year anniversary of the sudden passing of her musical partner, Dave Carter. But this is not The Butterfly Conservatory—merely a marker of what could have been. The real Butterfly Conservatory would have been Grammer along with a woman who’s never going to have a name—the woman Dave Carter was in the act of becoming when she died.

Of course, this divide is complex and problematic. Transition does not straightforwardly make you a different person. And yet at times the divide between before and after is at times a stark chasm. An honest accounting of transition requires that we embrace a both/and approach. For instance, when I remember my adolescence I can both remember the leering and toxic sense of sexual entitlement of a sixteen-year-old boy and the sense of rapturous and uncanny possibility of a sixteen-year-old girl listening to Ani DiFranco’s “Untouchable Face” for the first time and getting to the chorus. I am both—a boy named Phil who was, but is no longer (even as a person who is self-evidently the same person as him exists) and a girl named Elizabeth who always was, but only just became. The trans scholar Grace Lavery has written movingly about this on Twitter, describing how “trans narratology teaches us that neither a singular narrative of becoming, nor the laying out of life as a causal sequence, will do justice to the complexity of trans identification. Trans lives slip and slide, forward and backward in time.”

So instead of The Butterfly Conservatory we have the career of Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer, who worked together for five years starting with the release of When I Go (credited as Dave Carter with Tracy Grammer)  in 1998 and ending with Carter’s fatal heart attack in 2002, a few months after she started hormones. By this time they had released two further albums, Tanglewood Tree andDrum Hat Buddha. The canon has posthumously swelled with two further albums, one recorded prior to Carter’s death, one created by Grammer taking some vocal demos and expanding on them, and two EPs, one a collection of holiday songs recorded across their career, the other releasing a couple more expanded demos. Adding to this body of work is a solo album by Grammer,Flower of Avalon, which consists of her takes on songs that Carter had written but that the duo had not recorded prior to her death.

That Carter and Grammer would have recorded as an entirely new band instead of simply rebranding as _______ Carter and Tracy Grammer speaks to the degree to which Carter, at least, saw this as a disjunct.…

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Let’s give the Proverbs a week off and talk about Secret Empire. For those who haven’t followed, this was Marvel’s annual shitty summer crossover, this time with the premise that history has been rewritten to make Captain America a Hydra sleeper agent who has now taken over the US. So basically, “what if Captain America were secretly a Nazi?” This has been widely panned, even moreso than Marvel’s summer crossovers usually are. On the one hand, this is entirely appropriate, as Secret Empire is not only one of the worst-written crossovers in superhero history but also one of the most flatly evil. On the other, relatively few people have actually articulated this, with an alarming number of critiques of the comic instead being exercises in point-missing far almost as epic than the crossover itself.

Perhaps the most spectacularly off-base thing to be frequently said about the comic is that its premise is an insult to the legacy of Captain America co-creator and avowed Nazi-puncher Jack Kirby. It is difficult to entirely grasp the value system under which making a fictional character he drew forty-three issues of into a fascist is an insult to his legacy but the basic existence of Marvel Comics as a corporate entity built on the systematic exploitation of his labor is not. Certainly it is not a value system worth taking seriously. But it is a commonly expressed one, in a way that is revealing about what superheroes, as a genre, have decomposed into over the seventy-six years since Captain America’s creation.

The second spectacularly wrongheaded objection to Secret Empire is closely related, namely the idea that its premise is anything short of brilliant. Of course Captain America as a fascist is a sensible story idea. He’s a blonde-haired, blue-eyed “super-soldier” named Captain America. The concept has always flirted with fascism, as has the superhero concept in general, with its fantasy of puissant men in uniforms who will protect us from danger and change. Exploring that tension has often been brilliant, whether consciously and carefully as in Alan Moore’s Miracleman and Kieron Gillen’s Uber, or with reckless overenthusiasm as in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Steve Ditko’s Mr. A. As premises for crossovers go, it’s far better than “a superhero civil war over the ethics of predicting the future,” “heroes and villains switch places,” or “Secret Wars again.”

But premises aren’t everything, and Nick Spencer, the writer of Secret Empire, is spectacularly the wrong man for the job. To knock down one last bad argument about the series, this is not because he’s a borderline fascist. He was a centrist who ran for Cincinnati city council as a Republican in 2005 and drifted to the Democratic party in the wake of the Tea Party and Trump. His politics are shitty in almost the precise way you would expect from that, and indeed slightly shittier given that he’s a thin-skinned Twitter bully to boot. In most regards this is considerably preferable to being a fascist, but unfortunately not when it comes to writing Secret Empire.…

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An excerpt from my book Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

One measures a circle starting anywhere, so let’s pick up where we left off. Vox Day, who got in on the ground floor, back when it was still called the Quinnspiracy, begins his description like this, in the first of two chapter fives:

In 2012, a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings decided to play at being a ‘game designer’. She plugged forty thousand words into the Twine engine, a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programing to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977, combined it with a ten-second piano loop, and called it a game.

It is ironic that the book should be called SJWs Always Lie, because he lies right there. He lies when he uses the same disaffected tone of factual declaration for “a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programming to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977” and “a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings,” as though these are both straightforward truths in the same way. He lies when he shifts the definition of game throughout; one moment she is a faux “game designer,” the next the not-games she not-designs are defined straightforwardly in terms of an iconic piece of gaming history. (And he gets it wrong for good measure; Zork was a parser game, not a hypertext.)

Day tears into the game at length –  a critical savaging. “It’s even less fun than it sounds”; “soul-drainingly boring and more than three decades technologically out-of-date”; “I have never played a less entertaining computer game.” He brings a gun to a knife-fight, eviscerating the game with a level of contempt that raises the question of why he even gives a shit about it if it’s so self-evidently unworthy of attention. Of particular note; his citation of its 1.8 score on Metacritic, based on 308 ratings.

Eventually he reaches his point, saying that the game was a complete irrelevancy until “August 2014, when an upset young man who had finally broken it off with his cheating girlfriend created a WordPress blog called The Zoe Post that documented, in excruciating detail, his experience of having loved and lost.” Apparently the designer of this game cheated on a guy with some people who wrote for some websites that had mentioned the game in articles at some point. From this he casually spins out a conspiracy theory; “Given the very poor quality of Depression Quest, it seemed readily apparent to casual observers that the unusual amount of media attention garnered by the game must have been the result of the developer’s liberal distribution of her sexual favors.”

At this point, three pages into the chapter, entitled “Counterattack,” Vox Day makes a stunning reversal, admitting that “this does not appear to have exactly been the case.” And no wonder.…

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