Author: Alex

Categories
charity

Strange Horizons needs our help!

Strange Horizons is doing their annual fund drive. They have less than five days left, and need at least another $3000 to keep providing wonderful fiction, poetry, and reviews. Plus you get prizes! Awesome, right?

I admit I’m biased, since they’ve bought two of my stories. Which because Strange Horizons is awesome, are available to be read for free. Remember Comes the Huntsman and Significant Figures? Having Strange Horizons buy the first of those from me was a huge writing milestone for me. I want to see them keep thriving and giving other new writers that same chance.

So let’s help them out! Every little bit counts. Call it a birthday present to me, if you like.

Categories
movie

[Movie] Nightcrawler

What if it’s not that I don’t understand people, but that I don’t like them?

Nightcrawler is… unsettling. But not in the same way as, say, Filth. It’s the kind of movie that makes you cringe into your seat in the theater, because there are awkward things, and things that go on that just are profoundly wrong, and you can see them all coming.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays Lou Bloom, a rather creepy man who is self-educated, loquacious, and desperate for work. As the movie opens, he’s stealing scrap metal to sell, and tries to ask for a job with an absolutely stunning display of memorized internet business-speak. The owner of the scrapyard turns him down cold, saying he won’t give a job to a thief. Lou happens across a freelance news crew (“nightcrawlers”) immediately after and concludes that it’ll be the job for him–which he sets out to do with not so much dedication as eerie intensity. He has no morals, no compunctions, and absolutely no boundaries, which sets him up to be king of if it bleeds it leads. He sells his disturbing and morally questionable footage to Nina, played by Renee Russo, and it escalates from there.

There’s not much question that something is seriously wrong with the amoral Lou, and Gyllenhaal disappears creepily into the role in the best way possible. But the ability of Lou to pull people into his vortex is still unnerving, as if he’s somehow finding and strengthening what is worst in them, all while being exceedingly pleasant. It’s an amazing acting job, really, and the way Nina and Lou feed off each other is particularly distasteful, which is to say the movie accomplished what it set out to do extremely well.

Nightcrawler works best as a character sketch of a manipulative man that’s probably a sociopath, and as an indictment of the manufacture of news stories. When Nina tells Lou what kinds of stories she wants–her viewers want–she emphasizes very plainly that it’s about “urban” crime creeping into the “suburbs” and ideally victims should be wealthy and white, while perpetrators should be poor and minorities. Graphic is better, and she does her best to hype up the fear of every news story she puts together. In her own way, she’s just as gross and amoral a character as Lou, motivated entirely by the self-interest of keeping her own job.

And there are still more disturbing things waiting beyond that, such as the relationship between Nina and Lou, and what happens to Lou’s hapless assistant Rick, a man who is simply desperate for a job and incredibly vulnerable because of it.

Nightcrawler is a movie where everyone is a shitty, horrible person, and they do shitty, horrible, creepy things. It’s interesting, and well-shot, and excellently acted, but you still have to be willing to roll with the fact that the character are all fucking terrible human beings. And this without even the protection of Filth‘s disturbing layer of humor and manic surrealism. It’s dark, and unavoidable. Character sketch with excellent acting, yes. But it’s definitely not for everyone.

Categories
movie

[Movie] Interstellar

I imagine a lot of people have been comparing Interstellar to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s not a bad comparison to consider, though Interstellar is definitely rather more action-oriented than 2001. Interstellar touches on a lot of similar themes, like the vastness of space versus the fragility of human life, man’s relationship with the greater cosmos, and the spiritual and evolutionary journey of the species. Like 2001, Interstellar has given us silent space, and used that silence to great effect much like Gravity did recently as well. And like 2001, sassy artificial intelligences do play a major role–and so does betrayal. (These two are not necessarily connected.)

In Interstellar, the Earth is a lost cause, torn by environmental disaster, and humanity must once again set its sights on the stars if there’s to be any hope of survival. This is made more difficult by the fact that the government of near-future America is now run by moon hoaxers. (And in a scene that alone would make me love Chris Nolan, Cooper reacts with dawning horror and then snarky anger when he’s confronted by people who want to punish his daughter for bringing books to school that talk about the moon landing.) The underground remnants of NASA have found a wormhole orbiting Saturn, generated there by some mysterious “others”, and discovered possible worlds that humans could colonize on the other side. Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, via his brilliant daughter Murph, receives the coordinates to the NASA base due to gravitational intervention by the same mysterious species that created the wormhole. He’s apparently been “chosen” and thus pilots the ship that is sent through the wormhole, to a system where habitable planets orbit the massive black hole Gargantua.

That’s really only the beginning of the plot. I can’t explain much more of it without getting into supermassive spoilers, and this is one where I think I’d rather avoid the spoilers. Which is shocking, for me. But so much of the first emotional impact of the film is created by the slow revelation of the story–and it is a bit slow at times. Interstellar clocks in at just shy of three hours, and there are a few pacing hiccups that feel more like snarls in otherwise smooth fabric than anything deal-breaking. The plot is pretty complex and twisted for a movie (at least one that doesn’t use unreliable narrators) and involves some timey-wiminess; it’s generally well explained, though at times a little over-explained by the characters. There could be fewer repetitions of the (to me) cringe-inducing phrase “we need to solve gravity” and the movie wouldn’t have suffered.

Interstellar is a movie about desperation, and love, and loss, and betrayal, and the commonalities of human experience that reach across insurmountable times and distances. And I think it’s very worth noting that it’s a movie about all kinds of love: the familial, and the romantic, the love for one’s people and even ideas, and the greatest love story in a movie shockingly full of love stories is that for family.

The film is absolutely gorgeous, and that cannot be emphasized enough. The visuals are just stunning, and largely done with practical effects, which is a thing we’ve come to expect from Chris Nolan. If you can find a copy of Empire‘s article about the movie, give it a read. For example, apparently a lot of the starscapes were projected on white screens outside the Ranger set during the filming, so that when the actors looked out the windows, they were actually seeing what we see. And many of the shots didn’t have to go to post-production for special effects because of that. That’s incredibly cool. That’s a reason to hope that perhaps special effects are looping back into a more practical realm, which still looks more real than even the best CGI. The visual effect on watching is just stunning. Vast, gorgeous, and awe-inspiring.

And also, worth noting, the movie contains the best simulation of a black hole ever done. One that will spawn papers for Kip Thorne, who generated the mathematical equations for it. Still not certain, however, about the wisdom of wanting to colonize planets orbiting said gorgeous black hole. (How does that even work?)

I honestly haven’t been the greatest fan of Matthew McConaughey, but he does brilliantly for this movie, going from world-weary and bitter to determined, visionary, and self-sacrificial. There wasn’t anyone in the cast I could complain about. And considering the multiple layers of untruths told in the plot, performance was absolutely key. They all stuck the landing, but Anne Hathaway was particularly good. There’s a lot of love and pain in this film, because the more vast the landscape, the more intimate the emotional framework becomes, and they all nailed it.

Special mention should be made of TARS and CASE, the rather monolith-esque modular robots. The idea behind them is very clever, but the best part is the sassy personality that particularly TARS displays. His humor setting is at 100% at the beginning and very dark; during launch he jokes to the crew, “You’ll all be slaves for my robot colony.” TARS was a highlight of an already excellent movie.

Which is not to say that the movie is without flaws. Already mentioned were the pacing hiccups and some rough parts with the plot. While the Cooper-as-the-chosen-one gets explained in a way that didn’t make me want to chew on things, there were some other moments that knocked me out of the film. One was Romilly, who is one of the scientists, saying “There’s some things that aren’t meant to be known.” Considering that the topic in question here was the inner mechanics of a black hole as opposed to, say, evil genetic experiments on humans, that made my inner scientist shriek in rage. And while the themes about love and distance were important, Amelia trying to justify her intuitive feelings fueled by love as valid or perhaps better than science was also pretty frustrating.

On a technical note, the score was Hans Zimmer good, because Hans Zimmer. But I’m not sure if it was due to me seeing the film in 35mm, or if there was something off on the sound system, but there were times when I could not hear the actors over the score. And perhaps that was intentional, and meant for dramatic effect, but man it was kind of frustrating because you could hear people speaking but not quite what they were saying.

The plot, while interesting, definitely has flaws that can be picked to ribbons the minute the movie lets go of your tear ducts and gives you a moment to breathe. Particularly if the picking is scientific in nature, it can easily go down to the bone. But this reminds me of the argument I had during the Skiffy and Fanty episode on Snowpiercer: it seems particularly unfair that movies that take chances (and there’s a lot about Interstellar that qualifies in this, from the lack of a main romance, to the scope, to the number of questions it asks) tend to get judged much more harshly than those that are just out to have a good time, so to speak. The sheer ambition and scope of the movie, the fact that it’s not trying to posit easy answers or simple concepts, is what makes it special and incredibly worth seeing. If anything, I’m forced to wonder if Interstellar would have benefited from offering fewer explanations to the questions opened by its plot and been a bit more like 2001, where it’s left up to us to draw our own meanings.

Go see this movie. Even if you don’t really like McConaughey. I still would have enjoyed it even if it had been Tom Cruise. If nothing else, it’s good to see the point made, and made beautifully, that space exploration is important, and not something that should be put off as frivolous.

Categories
convention

Help me find someone from MileHiCon!

Had a great time at MileHiCon, and talked to a lot of people. One of them is a mud logger, who gave me his e-mail address… which I promptly lost. Mr. Mud Logger, I’m sorry! Please contact me, I feel like such a jerk.

Otherwise MHC was awesome. My favorite panel was definitely the Greatest Female Action Hero EVER challenge panel. I used the nuclear option right off the bat by claiming Ellen Ripley, and was undefeated despite being challenged many times. At the end, Ripley mostly won, but it was such a close race with Twilight Sparkle I suggested that Eneasz and I just share the win and agree that Ripley would ride Twilight Sparkle into battle with the Queen Alien.

Also, the steampunk group reading on Saturday night was awesome. A big thank you to David Boop for taking over as moderator, he did a fantastic job and I was more than happy to weasel my way out of it.

Sorry I haven’t blogged much lately. I’ve been busy doing Boring Adult Shit(tm). But hopefully there’s some excitement on the horizon!

Categories
movie

The Young Ones trailer makes me :/

Saw the trailer for this movie right before Dead Snow 2. (Which was AWESOME by the way. AWESOME, My review for that will be doing up on the Skiffy and Fanty blog too and I’ll try to remember to link it here.)

On its face, there’s a lot of stuff that I should like. Draught apocalypse! Climate disaster! Science fiction! Western genre cues! But… ugh.

“She’s a flower. Someone needs to appreciate her for more than cookin’ and sewin’.”

Wouldn’t that be revolutionary. Or wait, you know what would be even more revolutionary? If instead of men talking about how a woman should get to be so much more than her stereotypical qualities, she actually got to fucking be more than that.

The men in this trailer do stuff. They seethe with manpain and point guns at each other! The women are pretty much objects in the trailer. We get mom, who is literally tethered to some kind of mysterious device (looks interesting, I admit I’m curious), and sister, who is apparently there for the men to squabble over. She pretty much never speaks for herself, just shouts at dad about his dad failings and then says a line I couldn’t quite catch at the end, but the men certain talk about who gets to have a claim to her.

Obvious metaphor alert! Blonde girl in white dress (possibly pregnant) that men are fighting over while they simultaneously clash over bringing life to the barren land!

Barf. Barf barf barf.

I’m just… aggravated. Just this entire trailer aggravates me. You know what’s just amazing and revolutionary? Women exist in the world as people. We are not just sister or wife or mother. We’re fucking people. We have an existence outside of whatever proprietary relationships men can claim.

Women characters should also be people.

This isn’t a new problem. And you know, sometimes I could even be on board about the walking metaphor if it weren’t just one. More. Goddamn. Thing. I’m just so sick of it that my tolerance has hit zero. Maybe I’ll change my mind about Young Ones after I see another trailer where Elle Fanning gets to do more than stare blankly at the camera. As it is, I have a feeling I’ll end up leaving the theater pissed off because I’m tired of seeing white dudes having manpain wars over a metaphor with flowing hair and tits.

Categories
gender personal sexism writing

Too long for Twitter: I used to be a “strong female character”

I’ve realized that one of the reasons I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the whole you can tell she’s a strong female character because she spends all of her time rolling her eyes and threatening to punch the boys (as seen in The Maze Runner, for example) is that as a teenager I basically was that character. I spent a lot of my time threatening to punch people and hanging with the guys by being pretty aggressive.

You know what that got me told? You’re not like other girls. You’re cool.

And in a sort of chicken and egg feedback loop, that made me willing to laugh at and tacitly encourage some incredibly misogynist joking and “pranks.” Which also, by the way, apparently later fed into the idea that I was a butch lesbian and it was totally cool for guys to engage in some pretty sexist banter about various other women with me.

I’m ashamed of a lot of that in retrospect.

I obviously don’t think there’s anything wrong with being butch or having a masculine presentation. (Duh.) But the more I think about how that so often translates out into buying in to the most toxic aspects of masculinity:

  1. Casual violence
  2. Casual misogyny
  3. Belief that the masculine is on its face superior to the feminine
  4. Being not like the other girls or cool means abandoning other women and considering them inferior

…the more it really upsets me.

I’d like kids who were like me, struggling with being a girl while finding the feminine an ill-fitting societal construct, to be able to read about characters like them. I pretty much stopped reading books about girls/women at that age because I was reading adult SF/F and there weren’t a whole lot of female main characters to begin with, but also because in all honesty, reading about female characters putting on makeup and dresses and carrying their vampire killing guns in their purses—all of which are perfectly okay things, please don’t get me wrong here—made me feel inadequate and like an outsider. Like my books were telling me I was doing the whole being a girl thing wrong. And at that point, I generally defaulted to reading about men, because at least men got to wear trousers and sensible shoes.

(Nowadays, I do not have a problem with this any more. Probably because I’m no longer an adolescent, self-hating hot mess, and I’ve also developed a lot more empathy as a reader; I like reading about people who are very different from me.)

So basically what I’m saying is that I want to see female characters who are strong in a lot of different ways. And I want to see female characters who get to be “masculine” without doing it in a toxic, hurtful way. I want to see “masculinity” used as a character trait, not the marker that a character is different and better and strong.

Because as I’ve pointed out before, not threatening to punch people actually takes a hell of a lot more strength.

(Was going to tweet these thoughts. Realized I had way too much to say. Apparently 500 words of way too much to say.)

Categories
convention

[Convention] FenCon Schedule

A bit over a week until FenCon! Here’s where to find me:

Fandom after Dark (M): Friday 10:00 PM – 11:00 PM Live Oak

With the increasingly mainstream nature of genre entertainment and the internet savvy of children, gone are the days when graphic fanfics can only be seen in obscure zines. With adult fan content being produced for just about every series out there, does fandom have some responsibility to keep the overly dark or sexual fan works away from their canon counterparts?

You Got SF in my Mystery! (M): Saturday 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Addison Lecture Hall

There is a long tradition of mysteries solved by science in hard science fiction. Our panelists discuss some of the best ones.

Reading: Saturday 11:30 AM – 12:00 PM Pecan

I read something out loud. You know how this works. There will be cookies.

Getting the Geos Right: Saturday 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Live Oak

Geology and geography and how they should shape your fictional society.

Climate Change: Now what?: Sunday 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Red Oak

Assuming climate change is real, what do we do now? Can we stop it? Should we try? How bad can it get?

Why Worldcon?: Sunday 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Trinity I – IV

The World Science Fiction Convention was held in San Antonio last year. Our panelists discuss what you missed and if you attended, why you might want to go go another Worldcon.

Three Bladed Blaster Swords?!?: Sunday 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM Trinity I – IV

Some of the coolest weapons and fight scenes would never work in the real world. However, many stories wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without their crazy weapons. Let’s talk about some of our favorite bad weapons from movies, TV, games, and novels.

Categories
politics rants writing you need to do better

Why I parted ways with Authors United

As with so many blog posts, it begins thus:

Screen Shot 2014-09-17 at 4.09.49 PM

Storify: accomplished. Pissy blog post: engaged.

I haven’t made a big deal out of the Amazon v Hachette thing mostly because I do not have a LOOK HOW HUGE MY SALES ARE WHY ARE YOU NOT IMPRESSED BY THE SIZE OF MY SALES FIGURES BOW DOWN BEFORE ME dong to wave around, but back when the Authors United thing got started, I signed on to the first letter. Because I’m a slave to a corrupt and terrible system spineless sheeple teetotaler when it comes to Amazon kool-aide fucking human being who can make my own decisions, thanks. My reasoning is not the point of this blog post. (Really, just go read this thing Scalzi wrote or this thing Chuck Wendig wrote and basically yeah, what they said.)

The point of this post is why I ended up asking to have my name taken off the most recent Authors United letter. The letter you now see there is actually not the letter as originally conceived, which is what I read when I said no, thanks, I don’t want to be on this any more. However, after reading this new version, I still don’t agree, and I don’t put my name on letters with which I have disagreements.

The original point of contention was this line here:

Amazon has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler. We all appreciate discounted razor blades and cheaper shoes. But books are not consumer goods. Books cannot be written more cheaply, nor can authors be outsourced to China. Books are not toasters or televisions. Each book is the unique, quirky creation of a lonely, intense, and often expensive struggle on the part of a single individual, a person whose living depends on that book finding readers. This is the process Amazon is obstructing.

Which has been replaced with:

Amazon has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler. But books are not mere consumer goods. Books cannot be written more cheaply, nor can authors be outsourced to another country. Books are not toasters or televisions. Each book is the unique, quirky creation of a lonely, intense, and often expensive struggle on the part of a single individual, a person whose living depends on his or her book finding readers. This is the process Amazon endangers when it uses its tremendous power to separate authors from their readership.

Courtney Milan wrote an excellent blog post about the yick factor of the original paragraph.  And basically: word, sister. Her post was actually what prompted me to go and read the letter carefully in time and ask to have my name removed.

Though I do want to be clear here, that while Douglas Preston and I obviously have some disagreements (upon which I will expound shortly) he is operating very much on the up and up on this thing. He sent everyone involved an e-mail with a link to the proposed letter in it so we could give feedback and ask to have our names taken off if we wished, and when I responded negatively to him he was very polite and didn’t fight me. I’m just such a lazy piece of shit I wouldn’t have gotten around to reading the letter if I hadn’t seen someone else set their trousers on fire first and gone huh, I should probably look in to this.

Shame on me.

Anyway, while I think the new draft of the letter is better, I still don’t agree with it, and I’m glad I asked to have my name taken off. My problem stems from the entire argument that books are not mere consumer goods because of the artistic struggle of the writer. (I’m also not a fan of that outsourcing writing to another country comment for reasons mentioned in Courtney’s post, even if we’re no longer specifically throwing shade at China.)

Now, trust me. I don’t for a second buy bullshit arguments that posit forcing book prices lower will cause people to buy more books. You know what’s stopping me from buying new books? Not having the time to read the ones I already own. I’m not going to consider two $9.99 ebooks interchangeable because they both have unicorns on the cover; they won’t be the same book. And let’s not forget that authors have followings; I’ll run out and buy something by Naomi Novik because I’ve read and liked her other books; I’m not going to pick up something with a dragon in the description just because it’s cheaper.

So books are arguably consumer goods that might resist quite the same models as toasters and candy bars, but they are still consumer goods. Writers, editors, and manufacturers produce the books so that consumers can buy them and read them. And we sure want to market them like they’re consumer goods, don’t we? It’s capitalism, man. Charge what the market will bear.

Arguing to a retail company that books should get some kind of free pass from their shitty, strong-arm tactics because books are special, artistic butterflies? You’re kidding me, right? Courtney Milan made this point in her post already, and better than I could, I think. I’ll just say in short that I think making a non-economic argument at a company that is acting purely out of economic self-interest (no matter what it claims) is a weak position that we’re ill-served by. And kind of makes us sound like assholes, besides. While I think art holds a unique and important place in culture, I’m really not comfortable trying to justify special treatment for books on the backs of the toaster makers. We all deserve to make a fair wage for our labor, whether we’re slapping “hamburgers” together behind the counter at McD’s or writing the Most Important And Transformative Novel Of This Century, and I will not support tacitly abandoning other workers under the suspiciously ego-wanky notion that my skill is way more special.

Anyway if you signed on to the original letter, make sure you read this one and see if you agree with it. It’s important, man. That’s your name on it. (And hey, if you read it and agree with Douglas where I disagree and are a published writer who hasn’t signed on to it, I’m sure he’d like to hear from you.)

I actually want to step past the entire Amazon/Authors United thing and address a much bigger issue, because this is really just another episode in the ongoing adventures of oh hey look we’re getting fucked by corporations again.

Being an artist in a capitalism-obsessed society like America kind of blows. Or really, no kind of about it. It blows. Even producing commercially viable art isn’t any guarantee of being able to make a steady living without a side job, and that makes it a hell of a lot harder to practice one’s craft. But frankly, appealing to the better natures of companies is not the way to fix this. Companies, with rare exception, don’t have better natures.

Now, I’m fond of pointing out that companies are composed of people, and run by people, and excusing corporate malfeasance by shrugging it off as “hey it’s a corporation, what do you expect?” is accepting the most banal sort of evil as part of life. We should expect more from our fellow humans. And hey, we know that it’s possible to have a successful company that doesn’t act like it’s run by total shitlords. (Hello, Ben & Jerry’s.)

Shrugging off corporate evil indicates a profound lack of responsibility and vision for society. It indicates either a conviction of helplessness or an unwillingness to expect better out of ourselves. But you know what? So does expecting corporations to fix our problems our of the goodness of their non-existent hearts. I don’t want to live in a world where corporations are our social conscience.

Capitalism is arguably one of the motors that run our society. But it’s not some kind of miraculous fix-all, and every time a politician (or anyone else) talks about how the magic of the free market is going to swoop in and save us (presumably while riding pillion on a unicorn with Jesus) I just really want to scream. And flip tables. And bite things. We’re not here to serve capitalism. It’s supposed to serve us, and we managed to lose sight of that somewhere along the way.

The real problem here is that we as a society treat artists like shit, and art like it’s widgets, and scorn what is ultimately skilled and important labor. Then those values get reflected back to us by the economy we supposedly own and we go wow that’s ugly could you please not?

Artists aren’t the only profession that gets offered either the shitty end of the stick or no end at all. We don’t even value what we claim to value, or else teachers, soldiers, and artists wouldn’t need government and community assistance in order to survive. Somewhere along the way we allowed ourselves to be convinced that there is such a thing as a person who does not deserve to make a living wage, no matter what their profession.

Companies are not going to value us or our work as long as we treat it as a thing without value. This is our problem to solve, because we let this happen. When corporations shit on people, that’s not because they’re corporations and that’s just what they do. It’s because we’re too fucking cowardly and blind as a society to smack them with a rolled up newspaper and say NO. And asking a corporation nicely to please just stop shitting on people is like asking the doberman with diarrhea to kindly not poop on your rug.

We claim that science is important, creativity is important, that teachers are important, that soldiers are important, and they are. Art is important too. Art is the heart of our society. It’s time we started acting like it instead of effectively praying to Zeus for help and hoping he kisses us before he fucks us and ruins our lives.

Categories
movie sexism

The one truly creepy thing in Ghostbusters

Happy 30th birthday, Ghostbusters!

I saw the 30th anniversary rerelease of Ghostbusters last week and man, that movie is still freaking gold. It’s hilarious. Catch your chance to see it on the big screen while you can. I’d even go so far as to call Ghostbusters one of the formative movies of my life. It’s had a very definite effect on the development of my sense of humor, for sure. I watched it when I was still young enough to think the ghost in the library was the scariest thing in the world, but it was just. So. Funny. My whole family still quotes lines from it at each other. My older brother’s ambition was once to attain a coffee mug that said Back off man, I’m a scientist.

There’s one thing bothering me about it now, though: the way Venkman just creeps on Dana. Venkman basically makes it clear from moment one (“I’m going to go to Ms. Barrett’s apartment and check her out. I mean check it out.”) that he is trying to get up her skirt. Dana throws him out of her apartment, (“Mr. Venkman, would you please leave.”) and is very obviously not interested… at first. And then, inevitably, she ends up finding him charming as he refuses to go away and by the end of the movie Venkman basically assumes she’s his girlfriend and there’s no indication to the contrary.

I think it says a lot about the amazing timing Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver have that it’s all pretty darn funny and charming. And really, there’s a lot of creeping that goes on in that movie, to hilarious effect. Louis also creeps (very unsuccessfully) on Dana. Janine, frankly, creeps on Egon.

But Venkman gets the girl.

I mentioned how I felt icky about this to my housemate as we left the movie, and she said “Yeah, that didn’t age so well.” Except it’s not an age problem for Ghostbusters. The creeper model of relationship development is still a mainstay in film. I’d almost argue the average creepy relationship in movies has, if anything, only gotten creepier.

Ghostbusters was always like that. The movie didn’t change, I did, and now it just bothers me. Now I can’t help but think, Jesus, if someone was that resistant about leaving my house after I told them to go, they’d get pepper sprayed or put in an armlock. It’s not okay behavior. It’s creepy. And yeah, you can excuse a lot of this stuff as comedy. Except for this: I remember how I felt about this movie when I was a kid. I thought Dana and Venkman were super romantic (as super romantic as you can get in a comedy movie that involves a giant, evil, marshmallow man at least) and an amazing couple.

Confession: I was a total creeper, in high school. I basically tried to hang around guys (because I didn’t realize or admit girls were an actual option, not that I would have been less creepy at girls) and refused to go away under the belief that if I just stuck around long enough they would suddenly realize just how wrong they were to not want to kiss me. I even complained about how boys only wanted to date bitches instead of nice girls like me. No really.

Movies aren’t reality. I get that. They’re art. They’re commentary. They’re a reflection. They’re wish fulfillment. They’re a lot of things. Movies—stories—also have a lot more meaning than we like to admit. Stories instruct, and stick with us, and in ways we don’t necessarily realize. In reality, you do not obtain a significant other by refusing to go away until they decide that maybe they do like you. Relationships are not created by erosion.

So why do we keep telling ourselves stories where they are?

Categories
writing

Writing Utopia isn’t impossible, maybe we’re just lazy.

I keep complaining that I’ve got serious dystopia fatigue. All the big popular properties right now—particularly in film—tend to be set in dystopias. I’m still intensely upset that Star Trek, which arguably had utopian elements in it, has been rebooted as more of a dystopia. You know. Assuming you could pull a coherent plot out of the hot mess that was the second movie I’m still totally pretending didn’t happen except for the bits with Simon Pegg.

It’s come up a couple of times recently, the question why there aren’t more utopias in writing these days. David Annandale linked to this article on Twitter a couple weeks ago. Andrea Phillips mentioned utopias and the intense difficulty of writing them on (I think) this week’s The Cultures podcast. Personally, I took a stab at trying to write a utopian shot story a couple years ago. It didn’t go well. Which is why I’m sort of shame-facedly admitting it on my blog rather than humblebragging about it.

The thing is, the more I think about it, the more it kind of pisses me off that we’re having such problems coming up with utopian fiction. I think part of the problem is the way we’re defining a utopia. If it’s a perfect society where everyone is absolutely perfectly happy and nothing ever goes wrong then… yeah. That would be a pretty tall order when it comes to trying to come up with a decent, gripping story. There’s a lot more dramatic tension you can easily harvest out of a complete hellhole where everyone is constantly fucking miserable.

I think dystopias are also really tempting because a lot of the suffering faced by real people right now, and a lot of the problems we have are based upon societal failings becoming less and less easy to ignore, thanks in part to social media. If what happened (and is still happening) in Ferguson doesn’t make you want to run out and start writing cautionary tales about the militarization of the police, you have not been paying enough attention.

Though the point also cannot be made strongly enough that if you turned down the hyperbole on dystopias just a little, you could point to that being the every day reality of a great many people in so-called “first world” countries. They just don’t tend to look like the people who write the YA novels and get sweet movie deals out of it.

Maybe that’s why dystopias have become the easy write and the easy(ish) sell at least until the market became glutted. It’s not hard to look around and imagine “this, but a million times worse.” Every dystopian book has its evil, mustache twirling, despotic leader, but the ultimate villain is the society itself. And the attraction of reading dystopian books is also pretty clear, because for the most part the message ends up being that yes, everything is total shit, but a few brave souls going through an admittedly rough heroic journey can still fix it.

It makes great escapist fiction for modern misery, because we’d all really like to believe, say, that climate change could be stopped by a single young person with perfect skin if they just get pushed hard enough. It’s a much nicer idea than the incredibly depressing reality. Society is the evil dragon, and a hero will rise to slay it, and then we can handwave off the question of what happens next because our hero’s personal journey is complete and presumably everything that follows is boring.

One would hope the boring bit that happens after is the utopia. But you never know, because no one ever writes one. And I’m starting to really think that’s a problem, because we’re writing over and over and over again about slaying the dragon of the broken and malicious social order, but not coming up with anything to fill the resulting vacuum.

And I think it’s very important that we try. I’m with Charles Stross on this one:

We need — quite urgently, I think — plausible visions of where we might be fifty or a hundred or a thousand years hence: a hot, densely populated, predominantly urban planetary culture that nevertheless manages to feed everybody, house everybody, and give everybody room to pursue their own happiness without destroying our resource base.

So now that I’ve bitched about why I think we’re here for 700 (sob) words, what do I want to do about it?

I think the first thing is, we need to stop saying that the utopias have to be perfect. At this point, I’d settle for a society that’s pretty darn good but still has some cracks in it. Like Starfleet in old-school Trek. Or even what we saw in Her, which was not explicitly a Utopia, but you get the distinct feeling that certain things just aren’t problems any more and at least everyone has enough to eat.

How about instead of imagining a society where everything is somehow perfect, we just imagine a society where everything is better. Where the society is not actively malicious and hurting its citizens? A society where everyone has enough to eat and somewhere to live and doesn’t have to be afraid of getting randomly shot by the police. How about that? At this point, those things sound quite Utopian to me.

I think perhaps because of the dystopia glut, we’ve gotten into this mindset that the society needs to be the story, when we’re writing social fiction. Because yes, The Hunger Games is about Katniss, but her antagonist is the fucked-up dystopia. In a utopian story, the utopia by definition is not and cannot be the antagonist. Hell, maybe it should even be the hero! But at the least it can be the backdrop for the story you do write.

But if the antagonist isn’t the society, where does the conflict come from?

Just a bit of brainstorming:

  • There’s always the threat from outside. You shouldn’t assume that the utopia is global, right? Though this is one that would need some real caution and deep thought, because utopia deserves better than bullshit that boils down to they hate us for our freedom. Barf. Forever. But maybe the threat is economic. Maybe the threat is a nasty colonial power that wants your resources.
  • Go for the threat from way outside and have an alien invasion? How is a utopian society—one that has presumably been at peace for a while—going to deal with suddenly needing a defense budget and soldiers? Or has your utopian society been at peace?
  • Non-sentient exterior threats also exist. There will still be diseases. Utopia doesn’t mean they will be instantly cured, or even that the resources will exist for immediate, excellent research. What kind of sacrifices will people have to make in order to come up with the necessary resources?
  • Environmental disasters will still happen. Global warming will probably still be a thing. Extraterrestrial objects might still wander into our orbital path. How will utopia deal with refugees? (Lots and lots and lots of refugees.)
  • Does curing a lot of the malignancies in society mean that there will be no crime whatsoever? Will there still be thievery, or serial killers? I have no idea, really. But unless your utopia is also a perfect surveillance state (yet still a utopia), I’d argue there might still be room for a murder mystery. And crime might be even more shocking because presumably a lot of the criminal activity that isn’t motivated by pure sociopathy will have ended once people have enough to survive and thrive.
  • Or heck, what about less violent crimes, but things motivated by ego? What about corruption and fraud? (Particularly scientific fraud!) Will there still be charlatans? Remember, sometimes the worst medical charlatans are people who believe their own dangerous nonsense. Even if money is no longer in the pictures as main motivation, what about the lure of fame and praise? In a densely populated world, I can’t help but think there’d be a big draw to feeling special and respected and well-known. Because I don’t honestly think utopia is going to cure the desire to feel special.
  • If your utopia is one with minimum basic income but money still exists, wealth can also still be a motivator for malfeasance. Why just live in your small, shitty, free apartment and eat normal food when you could get better digs and have meat that’s not grown in a vat! That stuff’s for plebes, man.
  • Is the economic system still going to be nominally capitalist? Are companies going to suddenly stop trying to be dicks to their employees just because society is awesome? Hey libertarians, here is your opportunity to write me a convincing libertarian utopia that doesn’t involve saying fuck everyone else, let ’em crash.
  • And in that vein, there’s always the threat to society from within. Not because someone is politically opposed to no one starving, say, but because maybe people still have a tendency to be vain, selfish, and cruel. Or at the least corruptible. Just skimming a little off the top won’t hurt anything, will it? So how is your utopia going to combat that creeping threat? Who will watch out for it, and who will watch the watchers?
  • Are there sentient machines in your utopia? Genetically engineered, sentient non-humans? How does your utopia treat them? Or how does your utopia deal with other nations that aren’t utopia developing those things?
  • Will your utopia still have religion? Will there still be political disagreements? A lot of utopias seem to posit that everyone will believe the same things, but is that really the only path to utopia? Is that even possible?
  • And as a continuation of that, you see so many utopias where in many ways people have all become the same. (They even dress the same in Future Society Jumpsuits.) Can you make a utopia that’s entirely about accepting and celebrating differences? How will that even work? Will distinctive cultures survive and still be passed on between generations? Will old ways of doing things be preserved, yet still fit in to utopia?
  • Will there still be prejudices? If your utopia is completely perfect, maybe not. But if you’re going for a society that has a minimum basic income, housing for all, and good education, would those things necessarily combine to root out the shitty human desire to be mean to others who aren’t in their in-group?
  • What about the arts? What about music? What about parties? Are people still going to get drunk and end up in a field without their trousers? Oh god what if you drunk-called that appealing person of indeterminate gender from work and now they think you’re an idiot god why do you always listen to Jen, they have the worst ideas.
  • What about roadtrips? What about discovering yourself? Wouldn’t it be great to get to go on a journey of self-discovery when you don’t have to simultaneously worry about the specter of crippling credit card debt?
  • What about drugs? Will addictions still exist at all? Is everyone suddenly going to become super healthy? Is everyone going to suddenly agree on the best way to be healthy?
  • What about disability? Is the utopia for all of the able-bodied people still going to be a utopia for anyone who isn’t? Is trying to avoid this issue by waving your hand to cure all genetic conditions and fixing or preventing all injuries not only cheating but also a bit evil? If disability is incredibly rare, what is it like to be the only person, say, with amazing robot legs in utopia? Even if in utopia people aren’t shitty about it, it’s still going to be a different experience, isn’t it?
  • What about teenagers being teenagers and asserting their independence in the most frustrating way possible?
  • How about population control? Will there have to be some kind of limiting factor on population? Can you manage that without creeping toward dystopia?
  • I’m pretty sure people in utopia will still want to explore space. Or if they don’t want to, you’d better explain yourself.
  • You’ve got to be kidding me if you think people aren’t going to still feel alienated or lonely or insignificant or like no one in the world understands them.
  • Even if much of the above is invalidated because the culture is perfect, people are still going to be people. There will still be interpersonal conflicts, and romances, and just not knowing what the hell you want to be when you grow up. Are those stories worth telling? I would argue yes. Ultimately all of our stories are about people and their journey. Utopia isn’t stasis.
  • Your suggestion here. Let’s keep brainstorming about conflicts in utopia in the comments! (And please, if I have screwed up anything horribly, feel free to chew it up there.)

The conclusion I’m coming to is that it’s not that conflict can’t exist in Utopia, it’s just that maybe we’re all too damn lazy as writers. Or lazy might be too mean. I think there is a certain mental groove we get caught in, when we’re getting exposed to the same kinds of stories over and over again across the media, it’s hard to convince ourselves that other kinds of stories can be interesting.

It kind of reminds me of the profound shift in thinking I experienced when I started writing original fiction. I wrote fanfic for years and years, and as is common, I wrote fanfic about the male characters in the various series I liked, because let’s be honest. For the most part there are more male characters, and they get the interesting backstories and development. So when I first started trying to write more original fiction, almost all of the characters I wrote were male, I think because that’s what I had been so exposed to. Sometime in my second year of writing mostly original fiction, I had this epiphany that holy shit, you can write interesting stories about women too. (And then a couple years later, I had a similar holy shit moment when I realized that not everything has to have a massively explodey, action-packed finale.)

So maybe we’re not writing Utopias because they’re hard, and we’re complacent, and we’ve bought into the poisonous idea that it’s not a story worth 90,000 words if no one gets shot. Maybe it’s time we all get the dystopia out of our system, take a deep breath and say okay, now that I’ve screwed up the world, how am I going to fix it? And not just fix it, make it better.

Challenge yourself as a writer. You don’t even have to write us a book about perfect utopia. I’d settle for you telling us how to get there.