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Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and his Supporters

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Although this post is not specifically funded by my Patreon backers, this site and my work in general would not be possible without their support. Also, if you want to further support my work, you might try the book version of this essay, which is revised, expanded, and accompanied by tons of other cool stuff.


Right. It’s probably about time to collect all the issues and discussion of the 2015 Hugo Awards into one big post that is, at least in terms of what I have to say, a definitive take on it. A long read, to be sure, but one that will hopefully manage to cover everything important and give a clear sense of the issues and their implications.

One note that is probably worth making before we begin – I am writing this with the assumption of a basically sympathetic audience who have heard bits of the disturbing story, but who aren’t clear on the whole picture. It’s meant to be persuasive to people who are, broadly speaking, left-leaning (or at least not far-right) fans of intelligent and literary science fiction, and who are not generally of the opinion that there was ever anything badly wrong with the Hugo Awards. This is not to say “someone who agrees absolutely with the Hugo Awards,” as such a person presumably does not exist, awards being like that, but it is to say “someone who thinks the Hugo Awards have gone to generally reasonable selections over the past five years.”

Correspondingly, it is not expected to be in the least bit persuasive to people who think Theodore Beale to be an intelligent and respectable figure worth taking seriously. It is not an attempt to argue with them. For reasons that will I think become clear as the post goes on, I do not think arguing with them is a particularly worthwhile pursuit. In any case, off we go, first with a primer on what we’re actually talking about here.

  1. What Happened with the Hugos
  2. What Puppies Want
  3. The Unbelievable Noxiousness of Theodore Beale
  4. On Fascism
  5. Trolling the Voice of God
  6. In Which Several Very Lousy Pieces of Science Fiction (And One Lovely Story About Dinosaurs) Are Analyzed in Depth
  7. Notes On the Proper Handling of a Rabid Dog
  8. God Will Bury You. Nature Will Bury You.
  9. I Want To Thank You For Dancing To The End

Part One: What Happened with the Hugos

For decades, the Hugo Awards have been one of the leading awards in science fiction. This year, the Hugo nomination process was effectively taken over by two related groups who employed a controversial set of tactics that were legal but had not previously been employed in the over sixty year history of the Hugo Awards due to generally being considered unsporting and in poor taste.

Hugo nominations are a fairly simple affair. You join the World Science Fiction Convention (this year called Sasquan, and held in Spokane) for the year, either as a fully attending member or as a non-attending “supporting member” (this year costing $40).…

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The Letters and the Law, The Meaning and the Cause (Super Mario World)

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The Super Nintendo Project, a sequel to my first major blog, The Nintendo Project, is made possible by my backers on Patreon. If you enjoy this project and want to support my work, please consider backing.

There are two ways to begin this.

I am, of course, talking about Super Mario World here and not The Super Nintendo Project, where there were an infinitude of ways I could have gone. No, I’m referring to the start of Super Mario World, where you are presented with a straightforward choice between going left to Yoshi’s Island 1 or right to Yoshi’s Island 2.

(Here’s a secret history for you.

The 1986 wide release of the Nintendo Entertainment System was one of the great marketing successes of 1980s American capitalism, a period with no shortage of contenders for that title. At the heart of the success is simply the sheer degree to which Nintendo triumphed over conventional wisdom. Following the shocking collapse of the Atari-led American video game industry in 1983, the American market was enormously wary of the entire idea of video games.

Indeed, it was in some ways surprising that Nintendo even had the opportunity to try, given that they very nearly allied themselves with Atari in 1983, just before the crash, an alternate history prevented only by a staggeringly unforced error in which Atari executives mistook a Coleco Adam running Donkey Kong at a 1983 trade show as evidence that Nintendo was making a deal with Coleco (formerly the Connecticut Leather Company), when in fact the Adam was simply playing the Colecovision release of the game via its backward compatibility. This resulted in Atari abruptly pulling out of its deal with Nintendo to distribute their successful Famicom console in the US.

Nintendo thus went it alone, initially trying to release the system as a personal computer akin to the still popular Commodore 64 or the Apple IIe, and, when this faltered, regearing the product as a straight video game console, and creating R.O.B., a console peripheral/toy robot that allowed Nintendo to situate the system not as a video game system in the mould of the failed Atari 2600, but rather as a toy.)

It’s more of a choice than it might first appear. The sense of linear progression would obviously lean towards starting with Yoshi’s Island 1, but this undersells the degree to which movement from left to right is a fundamental part of the conceptual grammar of the side-scrolling platformer genre that Super Mario World is in many senses the apex of. Likewise, the world map as visible at the start of the game emphasizes the importance of going right – the path extending forth from Yoshi’s Island 2 has two nodes that are visible markers for where Yoshi’s Islands 3 and 4 will appear, as well as a castle, recognizable as the end-of-world objective.

Funnily enough, I don’t remember the exact circumstances of getting the system. It would have been somewhere in the vicinity of my ninth birthday, which was the official release date, although systems arrived in stores a couple weeks earlier.…

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“To Absent Friends”: Legacy

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You would think the moment where Star Trek: The Next Generation finally outlasts Star Trek would be a special occasion and cause for celebration. And yet “Legacy”, a morose, funereal affair that follows on thematically from “Remember Me” in taking a long, hard look at feelings of loss and the contemplation of that which we’ve left behind, is anything but. Surprisingly for a show that was supposedly more popular than it had ever been before, Star Trek: The Next Generation, for the first time, seems to feel apathetic, directionless and depressive.

Whose legacy are we looking at here? Is it Star Trek‘s? Apart from a requisite and hyper-obscure in-joke in the teaser about Camus II and archaeology, there’s nothing really about the Original Series here. Is it Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s? Isn’t that a little premature?

There is someone on everyone’s mind tonight. Of course, that person is Tasha Yar. Her absence weighs heavily both diegetically and extradiegetically: Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s long, dark season of discontent and introspection has finally forced it to come to terms with its biggest and greatest failure. The universe has long changed since the trauma of “Skin of Evil” and it’s going to change again, dramatically, in the not-too-distant future. But this doesn’t mean the ghosts from our past have entirely dissipated, and in order for that new universe to come to pass the show will have to somehow square away its remaining baggage and try to divinate some good from it. If we’re all about “facing our inner demons” now, it’s only fair that we should tackle the biggest one of all head on.

I’m not entirely convinced “Legacy” does that, though. It’s a definite theme to be sure, it’s certainly about this need on some level, and it’s telling Star Trek: The Next Generation is aware of this. But Michael Piller says that if you were to strip away all the backstory about Tasha, you’d be left with a perfectly serviceable, though middling, story about extracting Federation personnel from a crisis situation, akin to something like “The High Ground”. And he’s right: Far from engaging with the spectre of Tasha Yar one-on-one, “Legacy” uses her as window dressing to doll up a filler episode. Which, as much of a kick to the gut as that is, is probably actually more fitting. Piller does say that it’s a very good drama, because it hinges on the betrayal of an innocent (Data), which is always a gripping trope. Once again, Tasha’s story and positionality is rendered a subservient subset of Data’s. Just as it always has been.

Even “Turnabout Intruder” had the courtesy to at least be a fascinatingly hot mess of confused gender roles.

But Michael Piller speaks the literal truth. The man knew his drama, possibly better than anybody else. And “Legacy” is in fact a good drama. But being a good drama does not make it good Star Trek: The Next Generation: That is not, and has never been, sufficient.…

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The House of Black and White

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This review exists because of my backers on Patreon. Reviews of the full season of Game of Thrones are contingent on the Patreon reaching $300 a week, but I’ll do “High Sparrow” next week if it gets up to $290 by the time the episode airs, which is only a $5 increase. So if you want more reviews, please consider backing.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

The Lion, Tyrion Lannister
Lions of King’s Landing: Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister
Dragons of Mereen: Daenerys Targaryen
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Mockingbirds of the Eyrie: Petyr Baelish
Burning Hearts of the Wall: Stannis Baratheon,
Ships of the Wall: Davos Seaworth
The Snake, Elaria Sand
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Direwolves the Eyrie: Sansa Stark
Direwolves of Braavos: Arya Stark
Flowers of the Wall: Gilly
The Spider, Varys
The Chain, Bronn
Swords of Mereen: Daario Noharis
Butterflies of Mereen: Missandrei
Shields of the Eyrie: Brienne of Tarth
Coins of Braavos: No one

Winterfell is abandoned.

The episode is in eleven parts. The first part runs five minutes and is set in Braavos. The opening shot is of Arya’s face, staring up at the Titan of Braavos.

The second runs eight minutes and is set in the Vale of Arryn. The transition is by hard cut, from Arya walking away after throwing her coin in the canal to an establishing shot of an inn.

The third runs two minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Podrick standing as Brienne rides off to Cersei.

The fourth runs three minutes and is set at Castle Stokeworth. The transition is by dialogue, from Jaime talking about Bronn to Bronn.

The fifth runs two minutes and is set in Dorne. The transition is by dialogue from Jaime and Bronn talking about going to Dorne to Dorne.

The sixth runs five minute and is set in Mereen. The transition is by hard cut, from Doran Martell to Unsullied marching through the streets.

The seventh runs two minutes and is set on the road to Volantis. The transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to an establishing shot of Varys and Tyrion’s carriage.

The eighth runs four minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Tyrion rhetorically asking if Cersei will be killing all the dwarfs in the world to her appraising the head of a dead dwarf.

The ninth runs eleven minutes and is in two section; it is set on the Wall. The first section is three minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Kevan Lannister storming off to the letter S in a book. The other is eight minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Shireen and Selyse talking about Stannis’s execution of Mance Rayder to Jon and Stannis talking about the same.

The tenth part runs two minutes and is set in Braavos; the transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Arya Stark.…

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Shabcast 4

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Normal shabcast service has been resumed after the unplanned emergency anti-fascist edition from earlier this month (though you may be hearing more from Phil and myself on the issue of the Hugos and the nazis).  

This episode of the Shabogan Graffiti podcast is the long-awaited continuation of my mammoth chat with the lovely Josh Marsfelder, writer of the ridiculously good Vaka Rangi blog.  A slightly disjointed episode this one, but you’re getting all the good bits.  The bits I chopped out are mostly me being inconsequential.  What’s left is mostly Josh being eloquent and passionate about TNG, Trek generally, Dirty Pair, aesthetics, fan fiction, slash, Mary Sues, singularity archetypes, and all sorts and manners and conditions of interesting stuff.  We also do a bit of violently malevolent hating on Wesley Crusher… which should be entirely acceptable to all right-thinking people.  

You’ll love it, trust me.  Hardcore nattering, with no fascism to ruin everything.  Paint a bulls-eye on your heart right now.

ADDITIONAL:  Umm, I’ve actually added the link to the new episode now. 

*

Also, here are links to all my previous audio stuff:

Shabcast 3 (the emergency anti-fascist Hugo-awards edition with Andrew Hickey and Phil Sandifer)
Shabcast 2 (First part of interview with Josh Marsfelder)
Shabcast 1 (Interview with Phil Sandifer)

‘Mind Robber’ commentaries (I join Phil)
‘The Rescue’ commentaries (I join Phil)
These are best listened to while watching the stories, as long as you’ve seen them once before.  If you’re very familiar with the stories, you can listen to them on their own.

Pex Lives Frankenstein podcast (I join Kevin and James, and Gene Mayes)
Pex Lives TV Movie podcast (Myself and Josh join Kevin and James)
…

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Saturday Waffling (April 18th, 2015)

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Right, so, we did get over $280 on the Patreon, first of all. That means that there will be a Game of Thrones review going up tomorrow around when “The House of Black and White” airs. “High Sparrow” will go up next week if it can cross $290.

Then on Monday starts the Super Nintendo Project, my magical ritual to destroy Gamergate, for which I’m very excited. And probably on Tuesday, though it might take until Thursday will be a related one-off that I wrote for my own pleasure, as opposed to for money. It’s called “Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and His Supporters,” and is about fifteen thousand words long. So that’ll be fun too.

Obviously, it’s about the Hugos, which raises our question for the weekend: of the many worthy things kept off the Hugo Ballot by Theodore Beale and his supporters, what are you saddest didn’t make it? What did you nominate, or would you have nominated if you’d had a ballot?…

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All Coppers Are Rascals (The Last War in Albion Part 92: Raoul’s Night Out, and Later Tales)

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This is the fourth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Following their initial two-part story, Moore and Parkhouse wrote a second two-part Bojeffries Saga strip for Warrior entitled “Raoul’s Night Out.”

“All Coppers are Rascals.” -Ol’ Bill, Dodgem Logic #3

Figure 702: Sheena, a clear parody
of Vyvyan Basterd. (Written by
Alan Moore, art by Steve Parkhouse,
from “Raoul’s Night Out,” in Warrior
#20, 1984)
The story also marks a subtle evolution to the underlying format of The Bojeffries Saga. The plot is still basically that of a farce, but instead of focusing on one character in a traditional “idiot” role, he layers together a set of absurd misunderstandings incorporating several characters, all of whom are, in their own ways, complete dunces. But what’s in many ways more important than the change in comedic structure is the nature of the characters involved.  The first story was, at the end of the day, essentially a Hogben story transplanted to working class Britain, with the focus firmly on the eccentric family and Trevor Inchmale as an intrusion from the mundane world. But “Raoul’s Night Out” is a story about working class Britain into which a single werewolf has been inserted. This allows Moore to engage in a fairly direct satire of the working class. For instance, among Raoul’s coworkers is Colin Council Estate, who introduces his girlfriend Sheena,to Raoul by saying “society’s rejected ‘er because she’s got ‘**** off’ tattooed on her forehead” (a fairly straightforward homage to Vyv of The Young Ones). 
Figure 703: Cops beating a black man. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Steve Parkhouse, from “Raoul’s Night Out,” in Warrior #20, 1984)
The move to looking at the larger culture in which the Bojeffries exist allows Moore a considerably sharper sort of satire. The main thrust of “Raoul’s Night Out” is a night out with Raoul and his coworkers that goes wrong for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Colin consulted his diary to tell Raoul that it was a new moon without bothering to mention that, as Sheena puts it, his “***** diary is four ***** years old” and that he hasn’t “bought one since the *** Pistols disbanded.” This, rather awkwardly, results in Raoul turning into a wolf in the middle of dinner, which causes further deterioration in a situation already made fraught by Raoul’s passing on a pamphlet given to him by his coworker Stanley to another one of his coworkers, George, completely unaware of the fact that Stanley’s neo-Nazi propaganda (“Did Himmler Discover Radium,” one article asks) might go down poorly with George, who is black.
…

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“I’ll never forget you”: Remember Me

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As is is befitting a show contemplating loss and nostalgic regret, “Remember Me” plays quite knowingly and powerfully over our own memories of that which we have left behind. In our case, memories of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season: A year that, while comparatively speaking not all that distant from us all things considered, given recent events feels like a whole lifetime away.

Most obviously, of course, this manifests in The Traveller returning to play a pivotal role in the episode’s resolution, bringing with him all the provocative concepts of thought-form magick, reminding us there was once a time when Star Trek: The Next Generation would not be so quick to run away from such things. But it’s not just “Where No One Has Gone Before” that is invoked, but also “11001001”, though the re-use of most of that episode’s iconic effects shots, most notably the Enterprise approaching and mooring inside Spacedock. It’s bittersweet that these, two of the most vividly iconic, haunting and defining visual landscapes of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s inaugural year, would be the ones to be revisited now. I already feel a pang of nostalgic sadness and yearning for the feelings I associate with those images, even though the part of me that recently wrote a whole book on the historical era they’re from remembers how even then the show had its slew of bungled opportunities and bad decisions. And even though I know what’s just around the corner.

“Remember Me”’s central themes about people and memories tending to fade with age if we’re not careful and letting people know you appreciate them while you have the chance are fairly obvious. Textually overt, even, what with the fact the whole warp dimension was conjured up out of Beverly’s thoughts as she was going through those particular emotions, as multiple characters take care to point out for us. And yet there’s real synchromystic power and resonance in doing this story now, at ground zero in the aftermath of the Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s traumatic exorcism of its past self. You may think it odd that a show currently in the process of trying to essentially reboot itself would suddenly become so backwards-thinking, what with how much “Remember Me” seems to be desperately trying to grasp at the spectre of the dearly-departed first season. But I actually think it’s entirely to be expected, and welcomed, for that matter: The strength of memory is what it can remind us about our own past lives, both positive and negative. Ideally, we should want to learn not to repeat the mistakes of our past while trying to reconnect with things we might have known back then, but have since forgotten.

Put that way, “Remember Me” is also a re-evaluation of “The Battle”, and maybe even “The Neutral Zone”: The past cannot truly remain the past, because it is always with us guiding our actions in the ever-unfolding present.…

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Reviewing Doctor Who Episodes Without Having Watched Them: ‘Listen’

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This is, of course, another episode that all the usual Moffatistas praise to the skies.  Well, that’s fair enough.  All the Moffaty things they love are here.  Again.  And what on earth could possibly be wrong with wanting to watch exactly the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again?  I mean, Moffat makes lots of money writing the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, so obviously repetition is good, right?  Stands to reason. 

Also, such is the religious devotion that certain people have to this man that nothing thrills them more than yet another episode where Moffat sticks his hand up Doctor Who‘s arse and rearranges its guts to his liking… or (perhaps a better metaphor) meticulously works his way through a library of classics, scribbling ‘Steven Moffat is cleverer than the person who wrote this’ over every page.  And he is, obviously, because he gets big viewing figures and makes lots of money from being a Whovian capitalist.  The definition of artistic success, clearly.  …

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Orphan Black

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This is the monthly bonus post voted on by my Patreon backers. Voting for next month’s post just opened on Patreon. Orphan Black Season 3 begins on BBC America this Saturday.

There’s an expectation, with these sorts of things, that I’m going to review the show. This is not entirely helpful for Orphan Black – leading with the question of its quality is putting the focus in the least interesting places, in some ways. This is because it’s not a great show. It is, to be sure, a good show. But greatness stubbornly eludes it, due, if we’re being honest, to the fact that the writing isn’t really all that. It’s been up for a Hugo in both 2014 and 2015 (in the latter case it, along with Doctor Who’s “Listen,” were the two non-Puppy nominees in the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category), and in each case you look at the episode that was nominated and find yourself thinking “which one was that again?”

It’s better binged than serialized, I suspect. Certainly I found my desire to watch another episode to be quite intense following the cliffhanger, and relatively middling twenty-four hours later. It can spin its wheels frustratingly. There is not a clear sense that the overarching mythology has a point and is not being made up as the show goes along. Blah, blah, blah.

It would probably be happier on Netflix, where its compatibility with binge watching would be a strength instead of a problem. Likewise, I suspect I’ll pick up Season Three at the end of its run and marathon it instead of tuning in week to week, simply because I think my attention will wander. But the three nights over which I marathoned the existing twenty episodes were terribly fun.

What holds it together – what makes the show extraordinary, in fact, is Tatiana Masalany. It’s perhaps worth mentioning the show’s premise here. Basically, there are clones. Tatiana Masalany thus plays, over the course of the first two seasons, five major characters and an assortment of more minor ones. She acquits herself with the same sort of distinction that marks Patrick Troughton’s performance in Enemy of the World – one so good that you can go long stretches not thinking about the dual role. Each of her characters is bracingly distinct: British grifter, soccer mom, scientist, homicidal Ukrainian religious fanatic, CEO, and so on, and she makes them feel different.

The show is also pleasantly aware of its own best trick, which it hits upon early in its run and wisely never lets go of. It consistently crackles when it contrives to have Masalany play one of her characters pretending to be another. This, thankfully, is the early premise of the show – Sarah, the grifter, starts by impersonating Beth, a Canadian cop who commits suicide at the start of the first episode, and in the process gets pulled into the mystery Beth was investigating, namely “what’s up with all these clones?” Before long Sarah is impersonating other clones, and the show is having other clones get in on the impersonations (most notably, and, satisfyingly, the housewife Alison).…

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