Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Sherif Girgis and Alex Worsnip Debate Same-Sex Marriage

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Ampersand

Sherif Girgis and Alex Worsnip are having an online debate about same-sex marriage, beginning here with Worsnip’s less-than-glowing review of Girgis’ book What Is Marriage?

Girgis responded here, and Worsnip has responded in turn, and at length, here.

In my view this same-sex marriage debate – concentrated as it is on rather rarefied philosophical concepts like if there could be said to be an invariable “essence” to marriage – is both fascinating and besides the point. Fascinating because both Girgis and Worsnip are smart people who have been trained to argue well (although I think Worsnip has the better argument), and irrelevant because the crucial arguments about same-sex marriage, for the overwhelming majority of voters, are “God is against gay marriage” versus “lesbian and gay couples should have equal rights.”

Posted in Same-Sex Marriage | 21 Comments

So What Is The Church For?

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Ampersand

Stephen Fry: The Church is very loose on moral evils, because, although they try to accuse people like me, who believe in empiricism and the Enlightenment, of what they call ‘moral relativism,’ as if it’s some appalling sin, where what it actually means is ‘thought.’ They, for example, thought that slavery was perfectly fine. Absolutely OK.

Anne Widdecombe: As did all societies of the time!

Stephen Fry: And then they didn’t. And what is the point of the Catholic Church, if it says, ‘Well, we couldn’t know better, because nobody else did’? Then what are you for?

This, to me, is part of why I’m an atheist. If there’s a God, and God is good and important, then shouldn’t we expect Churches – especially large ones that are run by people who have spent a lifetime intensely studying the question of what God wants – to be noticeably better at morality than the rest of humanity?

An hourlong video of the debate between Fry and Widdecombe (and also Christoper Hitchens and Archbishop Onaiyekan) can be viewed here. The debate is pretty good, but the moderator spent waaaay too much time on audience comments.

Posted in Atheism | 31 Comments

Why, After Jerry Sandusky and the Boy Scouts, is No One Asking “Why Boys?”

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

Author’s note: I have changed the title of the post so that the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church is not included. Even though the majority of victims in that scandal were, as far as I know, boys, girls were also victimized, and I don’t the focus of this post inadvertently to erase that fact.

Why boys? It’s a simple enough question, and it seems to me obvious that we should be asking it, especially since reputable statistics place the number of boys who will be sexually abused before the age of sixteen at one in six. Indeed, even if this prevalence rate were one in eight, or one in twelve, the population of boys it represented would still be large enough that, if we were talking about almost any other group, one of the first questions we’d ask would be why that group was being sexually targeted in the first place. When we talk about the sexual abuse of girls, we ask and answer the corresponding question–Why girls?–as a matter of course, mostly because the sexual abuse of girl “fits” the dominant heterosexual narrative of our culture, which says that men exist sexually to pursue women and women exist sexually to be pursued by men. How we understand that narrative and its relationship to the sexual abuse of girls will likely differ depending on whether we lean politically to the left or the right, identify as feminist or not, are conscious or not that girls are also abused by women–as are boys, but more on that later–but those differences do not change the fact that, as a culture, we understand girls to be potential targets of abuse in large measure because of the dominant heterosexual narrative.

The sexual abuse of boys, on the other hand, and it doesn’t matter whether they are abused by men or women, does not fit that narrative. When a boy’s abuser is a woman, for example, many refuse even to call it abuse ((In one study, 40% of the men who said they were sexually abused as children reported a female perpetrator; there is another study, the link to which I have not been able to find, in which that number is somewhere around 20%. Whichever number is more accurate, it’s still a significant percentage, and the usual caveats that apply to statistical research do not change the point I am trying to make here, which has more to do with our cultural response to boys who have been abused by women than with the prevalence of such abuse.)), understanding it instead as a fortuitous initiation into sex (which really means into manhood). In other words, because the idea of a boy being abused by a woman just doesn’t fit our idea of what sex between males and females should be, or our idea of how male heterosexuality ought to be embodied, we impose those ideas on the abuse, assuming that the boy wanted it, that he enjoyed it, maybe even that he had somehow engineered it. Indeed, as Keith Alexander wrote in his Washington Post article, “When a Boy is Sexually Abused by a Woman ‘People Do Not Often Recognize the Harm,'” even the law enforcement officials to whom such abuse is reported will often tell the boy in so many words that he should consider himself lucky.

Christopher Mallios of Aequitas, a District-based sex-crime victim advocacy group, said during his 16 years as a Philadelphia prosecutor he had seen police and prosecutors “high-five” teenage boys who had been sexually assaulted by women, saying that the boys were “lucky.”

This rhetorical sleight of hand, obviously, hides the boy’s experience of being violated behind the veil of what we as a culture want, and what we believe he should want, his experience to have been. In this way, we can reassure ourselves that our dominant heterosexual narrative remains firmly in place, while making sure the boy knows that any problem he might have with what the woman did to him is his and his alone. We replace, in other words–or at least we attempt to replace–any sense he has of himself as having been abused with the question of whether or not he will claim the manhood that the sex he had with his abuser ostensibly represents. More to the point, if he doesn’t claim that manhood, it can only mean one thing: he must be gay, and let’s not forget that there are still places in the United States where even the suspicion that you are homosexual can get you killed. For example, in one of the cases Alexander wrote about, the situation got so bad that the boy and his family felt they had to relocate. According to the official Alexander quotes, people “were teasing him, asking if he was a ‘punk’ [homosexual], and what’s wrong with him and why he didn’t like it.” The stakes, in other words, can be very high for a boy who wants to insist on the truth of his own experience.

Continue reading →

Posted in Men and masculinity, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 51 Comments

Dear Obama: Women Are People. Not just the Wives, Mothers and Daughters of People.

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Ampersand

In the State of the Union, Obama used a habitual rhetorical device for referring to women: “We know our economy is stronger when our wives, mothers, and daughters can live their lives free from discrimination in the workplace, and free from the fear of domestic violence.”

Mellisa at Shakesville comments:

That framing is garbage. It is reductive, it is misogynist, it is alienating, it defines women by their relationships to other people, it suggests that Obama is speaking to The Men of America about their “wives, mothers, and daughters” and not speaking to those wives, mothers, daughters, and any women who are none of those things and/or do not define themselves that way.

It is infuriating to continually hear my President use that framing.

To that end, I have started a petition at the White House’s We the People website, petitioning the Obama administration to stop using the “wives, mothers, & daughters” rhetorical frame that defines women by their relationships to other people. […]

We now have 30 days to get 100,000 signatures in order for the petition to be reviewed by the White House. Sign the petition. Pass it on. Share it on social media. Email it to feminist friends. WORK THOSE TEASPOONS.

I’ve signed the petition.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Language Politics, The Obama Administration | 13 Comments

The War On Sex Workers

Posted on February 14, 2013 by Ampersand

I wanted to recommend this excellent article in Reason Magazine, about how laws against prostitution and sex trafficking hurt sex workers. (This subject, like the war on drugs, is one that libertarians seem to do a better job of covering than liberals.)

The consequences of such arrests can be life shattering. In Louisiana some women arrested for prostitution have been charged under a 200-year-old statute prohibiting “crimes against nature.” Those charged—disproportionately black women and transgender women—end up on the state sex-offender registry. In Texas a third prostitution arrest counts as an automatic felony. Women’s prisons are so overloaded that the state is rethinking the law to cut costs. In Chicago police post mug shots of all those arrested for solicitation online, a shaming campaign intended to target men who buy sex. But researchers at DePaul University found that 10 percent of the photos are of trans women who were wrongly gendered as men by cops and arrested as “johns.” A prostitution charge will haunt these women throughout the interlocking bureaucracies of their lives: filling out job applications, signing kids up for day care, renting apartments, qualifying for loans, requesting passports or visas.

Not all people who do sex work are women, but women disproportionately suffer the stigma, discrimination, and violence against sex workers. The result is a war on women that is nearly imperceptible, unless you are involved in the sex trade yourself. This war is spearheaded and defended largely by other women: a coalition of feminists, conservatives, and even some human rights activists who subject sex workers to poverty, violence, and imprisonment—all in the name of defending women’s rights.

The author, Melissa Gira Grant, claims that the anti-porn activists of the 1980s and 1990s have transformed into anti-sex-trafficking activists, where they face far less pushback:

One architect of this shift is attorney Jessica Neuwirth, a founder of the women’s rights organization Equality Now. In a 2008 interview with Barnard College sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein, Neuwirth described the change as a move away from “an earlier wave of consciousness about exploitation that took both pornography and prostitution almost together as a kind of commercial sexual exploitation of women.” The rewrite was necessary, Bernstein explained in the journal Theory and Society, because the outright prohibition of porn and prostitution was not popular, putting feminists at odds with liberal allies such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “They got battered down by ACLU types,” Neuwirth told Bernstein. “By re-situating these issues in terms of the ‘traffic in women’ overseas and as a violation of international commitments to women’s human rights,” Bernstein explained, “they were able to wage the same sexual battles unopposed.”

I do have some nit-picks about the article; at times Grant seems to be so eager to condemn feminists that it’s hard to see how feminists could ever win with her. (Conservatives – a group far more likely to be represented among Reason‘s readers than feminists – are criticized with far less vigor and passion.)

A 2012 examination of prostitution-related felonies in Chicago conducted by the Chicago Reporter revealed that of 1,266 convictions during the past four years, 97 percent of the charges were made against sex workers, with a 68 percent increase between 2008 and 2011. This is during the same years that CAASE [the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation] lobbied for the Illinois Safe Children Act, meant to end the arrest of who the bill describes as “prostituted persons” and to instead target “traffickers” and buyers through wiretaps and stings. Since the Act’s passage in 2010, only three buyers have been charged with a felony. These feminist-supported, headline-grabbing stunts subject young women to the humiliation of jail, legal procedures, and tracking through various law enforcement databases, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

So in other words, during a time when the Chicago Police were increasing arrests of sex workers, CAASE was lobbying for legislation intended to “end the arrest” of sex workers. Wasn’t that the right thing for CAASE to do, under those circumstances? Unless there’s something more here that Grant didn’t tell us, it seems very unfair to blame CAASE for the arrests of sex workers.

I also suspect that there’s some elements of transphobia in “the war on sex workers,” which I wish Grant had discussed more directly. A disproportionate number of sex workers hurt by anti-sex-work laws seem to be trans people, and the activists of the anti-trafficking movement seem disproportionately drawn from conservative Christians and radical feminists, two groups who have been hostile to trans people. The old-fashioned concept of “false consciousness” – which becomes an excuse to not listen to trans people or sex workers when their accounts of their own lives, motives, and agency contradicts theory – may be the common factor. The phrase “false consciousness” has fallen out of favor nowadays, but the thinking behind it is visible in both radical feminist arguments and conservative Christian arguments.

Nitpicks aside, the article provides an important critique of the anti-sex trafficking movement. Grant also posted some supporting links in a post on her blog.

Posted in Sex work, porn, etc, Transsexual and Transgender related issues | 8 Comments

Why I Oppose The Petition To Have Orson Scott Card Canned By DC Comics

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Ampersand

So DC comics has hired Orson Scott Card, a famous sci-fi author, to write a couple of issues of Superman.

Orson Scott Card is also an activist who has said that “gay rights is a collective delusion,” and has called for revolution if gay marriage is legalized, has defended laws which make being gay illegal, ((1. In 1990, Card wrote: “Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.” Card has since attempted to walk back this statement. )) and has sat on the board of directors of the so-called National Organization for Marriage.

So it’s not surprising that DC’s hiring him to write their flagship character has been controversial. A petition asks DC to “drop Orson Scott Card”; the comic strip Gutters sarcastically imagined Card’s take on what really doomed Superman’s home planet Krypton; one Dallas comic book store owner has announced that he will not stock Card’s Superman stories.

Card himself argues that “it should be perfectly legitimate to fire somebody” for being gay. If that’s legitimate, then shouldn’t it also be legitimate for Card to lose a writing gig for his anti-gay views?

On the other hand, Dale Lazarov, a writer of erotic gay comics, ((2. Link is safe for work, unless your workplace is seriously uptight. )) doesn’t want Card to lose the Superman gig:

I’ve known Orson Scott Card is a raging homophobe since the early 90s. I refuse to buy or read his work. But asking that he be denied work because he is a raging homophobe is taking it too far. Asking for workplace discrimination for any reason is counterproductive for those who want to end discrimination on their own behalf.

I can see nit-picky grounds for disagreeing with Lazarov (there are circumstances in which workplace discrimination is legitimate – discrimination against workers who refuse to do their jobs, for example).

On the whole, however, I agree with Lazarov. I oppose attempts to deprive people of work because of their political opinions. ((3. There are a few obvious exceptions to this rule, such as political appointees. )) I especially oppose pressuring publishers to drop artists and writers, because of the obvious free speech implications. Demanding that someone be fired is too strong and too mean an approach; this is a weapon that has been used against lgbt folks for too long. A lot of the terror of McCarthyism was in the attack on people’s employability.

Pressuring employers to fire someone, or publishers to drop authors, is a technique that – like direct violence – should be avoided by people on all sides, because it’s simply too cruel to be a part of legitimate political debate. To oppose people being able to work or publish because they disagree with us is both anti-free speech, and anti-worker’s rights. Those aren’t positions I’m willing to take up.

A few pre-rebuttals:

1. Let’s be clear: Although this is a free speech issue, it’s not a First Amendment issue. Card has a First Amendment right to say what he wants, but he doesn’t have a First Amendment right to freedom from consequences for what he says. In fact, readers have a First Amendment right to refuse to buy his work, and to petition DC asking that Card be canned, and publishers have a First Amendment right to choose not to publish Card.

2. Obviously, no one is obliged to buy Card’s comics, or any DC comic. I think it’s perfectly legitimate for readers who oppose Card’s homophobia to choose not to support Card’s work, or to choose not to buy DC comics. ((4. Although DC, to its credit, includes a couple of high-profile gay superheroes in its lineup, including Green Lantern and Batwoman. )) I also think it’s fine for a store owner to choose not to carry Card’s work.

3. If the Superman script Card turns is anti-gay in any fashion, I think DC would do the right thing by refusing to publish it.

4. I’ve seen some folks claim that if Card were famously anti-Black instead of famously anti-gay, DC would never have hired him to write their flagship character (and Marvel wouldn’t have hired him to write Ultimate Iron Man). Maybe this is true, although I’m not certain – people like Ron Paul and Charles Murray both seem able to find work despite their past racist writings. ((5. Or, in Ron Paul’s case, past ghost-written racist writings. ))

But in any case, there’s a difference between views becoming socially and professionally limiting because there’s a genuine social consensus that those views are incompatible with decency, versus asking someone’s boss to have them fired because they’ve taken a side in a still-ongoing controversy. I’m not sure that either is good ((6. The social status of racism as a grievous sin, rather than as a common character flaw that most people need to resist, hasn’t eradicated racism, but it has eroded our ability to acknowledge racism and discuss it rationally. )), but they are certainly different.

5. Let’s not kid ourselves about which side does this more. A significant number of anti-gay Christian employers routinely fire people for being lgbt, or for having the “wrong” views on lgbt issues, and as far as I can tell no one on the anti-SSM side ever speaks out for the people being fired.

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc., Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues | 26 Comments

“It’s not something I would do, but…”

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Grace Annam

I am far enough into my public transition to start making notes of patterns. (It’s going well, as far as I can tell, thanks for asking.)

One of them is this. Someone is talking to me for the first time after they have become aware that I am trans, and they say, “I certainly support you in making this choice for yourself. It’s not something I would do, but …”

So far, I have always replied by smiling and saying, “Well, of course not. You’re cisgender.” And so far, in every case, that response seems to give them pause. They stop talking for a moment and look thoughtful.

I am coming to suspect that “It’s not something I would do” is highly correlated with the notion, probably unconscious, that transition is a bizarre thing which I chose to do for some incomprehensible reason that they can’t quite wrap their minds around, like moving to Antarctica to start a guava farm, or knitting a barbed-wire fence out of strips of soda cans.

In their minds, transition is entirely voluntary. And my re-casting of transition, however mildly, as a response to a stimulus, and specifically a response to a specific inborn characteristic, gives them pause.

Up to that point, there was an unspoken clause in that sentence: “It’s not something I would do if I were you but…”

Well, you know, it’s easy to look at someone doing the funky chicken after someone else drops an ice cube down the back of their shirt and think, “I would never do that. My response would be much cooler.” Yeah, okay. And I know people who meet that particular situation by calmly reaching under their shirt and evicting the errant ice cube, or by looking at the ice cube prankster calmly and saying, “Really?”

Fair enough. So, cool person. Let’s see you pull off that insouciance when it’s not a surprise ice cube, but a surprise wasp. Or a surprise gaggle of spiders. Not so full of ennui now, eh?

From my perspective, it’s as though someone said, “I totally support you in taking that analgesic. It’s not something I would do, but I totally support your right to do it.”

Yes, quite so. You don’t have a migraine. If you did, sooner or later you’d be reaching for this prescription bottle, old chap.

“I totally support you in turning on the heat in your house. It’s not something I would do, but…”

Okay. But you live in a well-insulated house in San Diego, and I live in northern New England. Let’s bring you up here in February and see how long it takes you to fire up the wood stove.

Trans people have a problem. They didn’t create it, but they solve it. You may not be able to see the problem, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. It just means that you’re not in a position to see it. And if you assert that it doesn’t exist because you can’t see it, you’re standing in exactly the same ethical position as someone who tells a person with chronic pain that it’s all in their head. Consider that for a moment… still feeling comfy about what you would do if you were trans?

Transition: It’s not a lifestyle choice. It’s a rational response to an affliction.

Grace

Posted in Transsexual and Transgender related issues | 16 Comments

Rachel Swirsky’s 2012 Novella Recommendations

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Mandolin

As noted in my previous entries, I read approximately 540 pieces of short fiction this year. I read all of: Asimovs, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Eclipse Online, Giganotosaurus, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Subterranean and Tor, as well as several anthologies. (I will probably continue reading during the next few weeks, and if I find anything remarkable, I will post about it.)

To begin the entry, I’m going to list, without reviews, the novellas that are on my ballot, followed by those I recommend. Below, I will post the reviews.

Ballot
“After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall” by Nancy Kress (Tachyon)
“African Sunrise” by Nnedi Okorafor (Subterranean)
“Katabasis” by Robert Reed (Fantasy & Science Fiction)
“Murder Born” (excerpt) by Robert Reed (Asimovs)
“The Emperor’s Soul” by Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon)

Recomended
“All the Flavors” by Ken Liu (Giganotosaurus)
“A Seed in the Wind” by Cat Rambo (ebook)

REVIEWS:

Ballot

“After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall” by Nancy Kress (Tachyon) – The earth is destroyed by an apocalype–the fall. This novella follows two timelines simultaneously: one after the fall and the other before. They intersect during the fall, as one might expect from the title. The story follows two perspectives. The first is a boy born after the fall to one of the few survivors, his body severely impaired from radiation damage. The aliens who saved the few survivors from the disaster (it’s unclear whether or not they caused it) have provided a time travel portal for him and the other members of his generation to go back in time to before the fall for short periods of time so that they can bring back resources and babies that they will be able to raise to strengthen their population. The other main character, who is a professor who lives in the before, notices a mathematical pattern to kidnappings and store robberies, the footprint of the time travel. The two characters finally meet when the boy travels back in time to a moment during the apocalypse, to where the professor is waiting for him. I really, really liked this novella, especially the bits set after the apocalypse. Kress is always a fine writer, but she’s pulled out some extremely good characterization here. Many of the characters are sharply characterized, but especially two in the after–one, the boy’s mentor who he is in unrequited love with, and two, the boy himself, who is a vivid portrait of an adolescent in troubled circumstances, his emotions volatile, his desires unquenchable, his beliefs and needs and wants shaped by his post-apocalyptic childhood. The thing I disliked about this novella is that there’s a strong hint at the end that the story is meant to be read as an “the earth will get you” magic environmentalism thing, and that really doesn’t work for me, because it’s just sort of random and it’s such an obvious fantasy element in a story that’s otherwise science fiction… meh. But “hard” SF writers sometimes pull that sort of weirdness, and I just kind of have a “ignoring that bit; it’s fairly minor anyway” receptacle in my brain, and the story is absolutely worth it for its many sterling elements.

“African Sunrise” by Nnedi Okorafor (Subterranean) – This novella expands on Nnedi Okorafor’s short story “The Book of Phoenix” that appeared in Clarkesworld in 2011. A genetically altered girl has been confined to a corporate building for all of her life, along with others who have been experimented on. After one of her friends dies, she decides to escape and discovers that she possesses phoenix-like powers of fire and regeneration. The life-giving energy that radiates from her body produces a fantastic growth of plantlife that crumbles the building where she was raised and reaches out to sprawl across the city center. The main character flies away, following her instincts, knowing that she has the ability to greatly improve the world if she can find her way. As always, it’s nice to see smart and well-written Africa-centered fantasy/science fiction of the sort that Okorafor so ably writes. There’s a sense of magic and hope in this story that doesn’t feel sentimental, but instead seems to suggest a radical re-imagining of the world. The detail of the character’s life and her interactions were more interesting to me than the fantasy plot itself; in particular, there was a lovely scene in an Ethiopian restaurant early on that’s stuck with me.

“Katabasis” by Robert Reed (Fantasy & Science Fiction) – This is one of Robert Reed’s Great Ship stories which I admit to being a total sucker for. They take place on an enormous ship that’s on an interminable mission through space. Passage is expensive; its inhabitants are nearly immortal. Humans run the place, but it’s full of life that is variously alien and artificially intelligent. Basically, this story has all the “ooooooo, awesome” of space opera without the boring bits; Reed successfully portrays an immersive setting that feels alien and unknown. In this story, there is a small planet-like habitat deep in the great ship, built by long-gone aliens to simulate their world. It has immensely high gravity, and it’s become a challenge for humans (and others who are not adapted to the high gravity) to take on trying to hike the “planet” without enhancements, as a test of mettle. They take along a single high-gravity-adapted porter. The story is about one such porter and the contingent that she ends up traveling with. The story of their journey is interwoven with the story of how she came to the ship. Alien weirdness abounds–if you like that sort of thing, it’ll probably scratch all the right itches, or at least it does mine.

“Murder Born” (excerpt) by Robert Reed (Asimovs) — Yes, Reed again. This is an Idea story of his which are hit-or-miss for me. I like this one less than his great ship stories, but it still worked for me. A new technique for execution is invented and, to everyone’s surprise including the inventor’s, it does something totally bizarre (and totally not actually science fiction at all, but rather a thought experiment in the vein of It Just Works, Shut Up And Let’s Go With It, which is fine with me, really)–when the murderer disappears into it, it brings back all the people he’s killed. The conceit isn’t totally logically consistent about what counts as killed and some other science things, but whatever, it’s a Thought Experiment, Just Go With It. The thought experiment bit is interesting. There’s also a kind of stitched on adventure plot that was readable but ordinary. It’s now been a year since I read the story so my memory of it has faded significantly; it’s marked with a quite high rating in my database, but mostly what I remember now is talking about its flaws with people, so that’s what’s stuck in my mind. I think what I liked about it was the way in which it examined a number of different situations within the thought experiment. I’m happy to engage with thought experiments on a purely intellectual level from time to time; it’s a long tradition; you don’t read Candide for the characters.

“The Emperor’s Soul” by Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon) – In a world where it is illegal to do so, a woman wields the magic of forgery, able to produce soulstamps that will change the substance and history of an object, allowing it to become something other than what it is. An ordinary urn can be stamped with the essence of an ancient vase and become one, although the stamp will remain and, if it is removed, the urn will become ordinary again. After committing a series of forgeries of important artifacts, the main character is jailed, and offered her freedom and her life only if she will help the emperor’s advisers to achieve a dangerous, illegal, and excruciatingly difficult task — to endow the braindead emperor with a soulstamp that so closely approximates his own mind that his personality will be indistinguishable from the original. This is a fun and clever, straightforward fantasy, with all the pleasures of a rougish main character who is constantly trying to stay one step ahead of people who will kill her. The process of the magic is described in reasonable detail which I grooved on; it’s a fun magic system. It’s even better when Sanderson describes the process of simulating the emperor’s soul, merging the described magic with ruminations on memory and personality. Several of the main characters take on good dimensionality, including the emperor, who is only marginally on the page.

Recomended

“All the Flavors” by Ken Liu (Giganotosaurus) – The first thing you need to know about this novella is a total mess. It’s not actually a novella. It’s the notes for a novel. The next thing you need to know is that it’s the notes for a really *good* novel. There are moments of brilliance in this that rival or exceed any of the novellas I’m nominating. So: Bad Ken! I want to read the actual novel! Write the novel, Ken. Anyway, this is a story of an Idaho girl who is befriended by Chinese miners when they move into town, and how she learns their stories. I wrote a slightly longer review here.

“A Seed in the Wind” by Cat Rambo (ebook) – As I mentioned when reviewing one of her short stories for my 2012 recommendations, one of my favorite things about Cat as a writer is that she is able to paint really vivid, original world-building imagery with just a few well-chosen details. This novella is another excellent example of that talent. It’s set in a world that’s shaped like a tube, with all of its civilization built on outcroppings that protrude from the walls, and in tunnels that burrow into them. The main character, a boy who grows up next to the edge of the abyss, finds himself drawn into the lure of its unknown. As a small child, he watches an unusual natural event, in which the top of the tube opens to allow seed drifts to fall past their town and into the depths. The event moves him deeply and he becomes obsessed with watching things fall, and often throws objects that are dear to him into the darkness. The rest of his dissatisfied life is much like that of those seeds: he drifts, uncertainly, moving ever downward into a shadowed unknown. He leaves his home town to go and meet his grandparents, but is equally dissatisfied there, and then becomes addicted to various substances, spiraling further downward. The world-building detail is often exquisite, especially at its most disjunctive and surprising. There were also times when the story seemed to lose its impetus and become repetitive. I also felt unsatisfied by the ending; after following the main character’s life for so long, I wasn’t satisfied by leaving him abruptly, even on a strong image, especially when it didn’t seem to have either a clear implication for what would happen next, or create (as would work equally well) a poignant thematic resonance with the main character’s arc. My analysis of this may simply be too shallow, however. It’s a lovely piece that I strongly recommend reading.

Notable
“To Be Read Upon Your Waking” by Robert Jackson Bennett (Subterranean)
“The Weight of History, the Lightness of the Future” by Jay Lake (Subterranean)
“Let Maps to Others” by K. J. Parker (Subterranean)
“Sudden, Broken, Unexpected” (excerpt) by Stephen Popkes (Asimovs)

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Rachel Swirsky’s Novelette Recommendations, 2012

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Mandolin

As noted in my entry on short stories, I read approximately 540 pieces of short fiction this year. I read all of: Asimovs, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Eclipse Online, Giganotosaurus, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, Subterranean and Tor, as well as several anthologies. (I will probably continue reading during the next few weeks, and if I find anything remarkable, I will post about it.)

To begin the entry, I’m going to list, without reviews, the novelettes that are definitely on my ballot, those which I’m considering for my ballot, and those which I highly recommend. Reviews will follow, along with shorter reviews of recommended novelettes. At the end of the post, I’ll list other novelettes I found notable.

As always, there are many more novelettes that I read and enjoyed, and that deserve recognition, than I can list.

Definitely on Ballot
“Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous” (excerpt) by Dale Bailey (Asimovs)
“Fade to White” by Cathrynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld)

Possibly on Ballot
“Swift, Brutal Retalliation” by Meghan McCarron (Tor.com)
“The Finite Canvas” by Brit Mandelo (Tor.com)
“Aftermath” by Joy Kennedy O’Neill (Strange Horizons)
“Hold a Candle to the Devil” by Nicole M. Taylor (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)

Highly Recommended
“The Ghosts of Christmas” by Paul Cornell (Tor.com)
“Firebugs” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Eclipse Online)
“The Indifference Engine” by Project Itoh (THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE)
“Tattooed Love Boys” by Alex Jeffers (Giganotosaurus)
“Unsilenced” by Karalynn Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“The Waves” by Ken Liu (Asimovs)
“Golden Bread” by Issui Ogawa (THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE)
“Scry” by Anne Ivy (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“Small Towns” by Felicity Shoulders (Fantasy & Science Fiction)
“Static, and Sometimes Music” by David Schwartz (Unstuck #2)
“Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Giganotosaurus)
“Astrophilia” by Carrie Vaughn (Clarkesworld)

REVIEWS:

Definitely on Ballot

“Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous” (excerpt) by Dale Bailey (Asimovs) – I hadn’t heard of Dale Bailey before reading this story; when I was finished, I immediately looked him up and wrote him a fan letter. I read this very late at night when I had insomnia and it took me in completely and was unexpectedly intense and wrenching. In this story, a couple with a troubled marriage spend more money than they can afford to go to a resort in the Cretaceous. They are supposed to see the dinosaurs together, but the husband displays little interest, and the wife disconnects from him, finding more passion in the ancient sights. I found the characters and emotional journey extremely vivid and well-wrought. The science fictional backdrop intensified the emotional story. It’s not an original emotional journey–especially in lit-fic–but it was a very good treatment. This story doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of review love, perhaps because reviewers weren’t interested in the kind of emotional journey that is classically the domain of literary fiction. But I loved it. (Tolbert’s “The Yeti Behind You” which I published in PodCastle explores a similar thematic link between extinction and emotion, although from a less character-intense space.)

“Fade to White” by Cathrynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld) – Like Valentine, I think Valente is having an amazing year. This story just dropped me flat. It was probably my favorite piece of fiction published this year. Read it. Read it. Read it. In this novelette, Valente creates a dystopian world that might have occurred if the world had ended in the 1950s. Its retro feel–enhanced not only by the character development and setting, but by cleverly placed interludes that contain scripts from commercials–allows Valente to comment on the cultural heritage of the 1950s, both in our everyday lives and, particularly, in science fiction. By looking at the breakdown of that world–as so much classic SF does–from a modern perspective, she deconstructs the assumptions of the era and of its stories in an intelligent, striking way. The story isn’t easily reducible to its politics, though; Valente clearly establishes the characters within her world and follows their unsettling stories with a relentlessly clear eye.

Possibly on Ballot

“Swift, Brutal Retalliation” by Meghan McCarron (Tor.com) – This exquisitely well-written story is about two little girls whose brother has just died of cancer. His ghost appears when they play pranks on each other. Like many of the other novelettes I’m passionate about this year, this story thrives on its intricate characterization and the way in which its speculative content highlights the characters and emotions. The family in this story is described intensely and unflinchingly with finely woven POV shifts and sharply observed family dynamics. It’s a chilling, bitter story in many ways, and reminds me of the work by an MFA classmate of mine, Jenny Zhang, who created obsessive, clear-eyed family portraits through fragmented POVs. It also has shades of Klages’s clear, non-nostalgic eye for the good and bad of childhood, as well as shades of Kelly Link’s use of mystery in the voice.

“The Finite Canvas” by Brit Mandelo (Tor.com) – A woman who was exiled from her home in space has ended up on earth where resources are scarce and people live without modern conveniences. She works as the local doctor, barely able to scrape together enough money for medicines, let alone to cure her worsening breast cancer. Her circumstances worsen when another refugee comes to earth, an assassin who is being chased by the government, and who recently killed her partner. The assassin promises money to the doctor if the doctor will scarify her arm in memorial of her last kill. “Finite Canvas” weaves both women’s stories with the present as they’re falling in love. Mandelo is a writer to watch, I think. Her stories are incisive and her characters have an unusual edge. She’s exploring themes of gender, but also themes of passion–its tangles, its brightness, its viciousness. Of writers I enjoy, I think her writing most reminds me of Nicola Griffith’s.

“Aftermath” by Joy Kennedy O’Neill (Strange Horizons) – O’Neill is another writer who’s new to me, and this is one of the few zombie stories that I’ve really liked. It’s about the process of reconciliation that occurs after the zombies recover and how they reintegrate into society. The novelette intelligently references and builds on real-world situations like the post-apartheid recovery in South Africa. Mending the sociological rifts left by genocide or other atrocities requires a sort of willful social blindness, a denial of what has happened. In the novelette’s case, the zombies did not have control over their actions, so the story necessarily removes the question of responsibility for the atrocities, which does make the reonciliation process less intense than it is in real life. Nevertheless, I think O’Neil intelligently explores the ways in which people act to protect themselves psychologically: denying what has happened, denying what they did, the ways in which the socially mandated silence creaks and cracks. There is a sentimental element here, but it didn’t overwhelm the story for me.

“Hold a Candle to the Devil” by Nicole M. Taylor (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) – Another writer who is new to me. This is a story woven through multiple POVs of a woman who is inheriting the bawdhouse where she works from the woman who took her in as a young child. She is learning the craft of protecting her workers with magic, which she must use when one of them is attacked by a client. The story doesn’t tread any new conceptual ground, but I quite liked the voice, and particularly the way that the unusual but careful structure allowed it to develop with a vivid emotional tone, which has now (months after I read the story) distilled for me into a mix of melancholy and dread.

Highly Recommended

“The Ghosts of Christmas” by Paul Cornell (Tor.com) – A woman develops the technology to project herself mentally backward into the past or forward into the future, but only to watch from her own perspective what has happened. On the day when she is about to give birth, she is the first person to test the new technology, and she witnesses a string of her past Christmases, and another string going into the future as she divorces her husband and uncovers her uneasy relationship with her daughter. This story felt deeply endowed with personal emotion (which makes sense since Cornell recently became a father) and I was particularly struck by the kinds of details that Cornell employed in establishing the characters’ relationships.

“Firebugs” by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (Eclipse Online) – A future in which clone groups are raised with established personality patterns, e.g. a group of six Chloes who are all raised with the same personality profile, and in which the clones are kept together as closely as possible so that they will develop as few diverging experiences (and thus traits) as possible. The main character is part of an experimental clone group that would establish a new personality. Consequently, they’re under close supervision to see whether they will be approved. The main character turns out to have a propensity toward arson that would scuttle her group’s chance and so she has to figure out how she can proceed without endangering her sister/twins. I usually find Hoffman’s work charming, and this was no exception. It’s a fun plot to follow and an interesting world/question posed.

“The Indifference Engine” by Project Itoh (THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE) – After a truce is declared in a war-torn African country, the two factions from the civil war are unable to reconcile. Child soldiers who have never known anything but the conflict are unwilling to stop fighting. An American NGO experimentally treats many of them so that they can no longer visually tell the difference between their tribe and the other, but this solution proves simplistic and inadequate. I thought this was an interesting and politically intriguing way of engaging with contemporary political situations that are often ignored in western literature (although I have no idea how they’re treated in Japanese literature).

“Tattooed Love Boys” by Alex Jeffers (Giganotosaurus) – A tattoo artist is able to change a person’s sex, desires, and life story by engraving them with different tattoos. The main character, who starts out as a discontented girl who is attracted to gay men, eventually is turned into a man, and her whole relationship with her brother changes. Really smart and weird play with gender. Fun, strange experiments, written lightly, with tongue a bit in cheek, the kind of thing you want to watch because you want to see where the author is going to dart next.

“Unsilenced” by Karalynn Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) – This is a strangely beautiful story wherein an empress whose father has just died makes a deal with a mage so that she can take over her father’s power along with his throne. In order to accomplish this, the mage steals the voice of another magic-worker for her, and with the voice comes the gift of prophecy. The story’s not entirely coherent which is a point against it, but it’s particularly lovely, and has the sense of being longer than it is, not in terms of feeling boring or overdone, but in terms of feeling as if you’re experiencing so much that it must be longer. Imagistic loveliness reminds me of Tanith Lee.

“The Waves” by Ken Liu (Asimovs) – Humanity reaches a post-human state–but it’s not without complications. On a generation ship where the stores are calibrated carefully to support only a certain number of people, is it moral to choose immortality when you know that means your kids can never grow up? When the generation ship lands, they find that uploading is possible, and enhanced consciousness, and traveling through space in waves. The story documents the different choices that people make. Mostly an idea story, but I was willing to let the ideas and the images wash past.

“Golden Bread” by Issui Ogawa (THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE) – A soldier from a colonial empire lands on an asteroid where people attempt to live without significant expansion or consumption. He is convinced that the differences between their cultures is caused by genetics, but eventually, they demonstrate that it is not. There’s some (a lot of?) heavy-handedness in the theme here, but I really enjoyed it a lot, partially because of the description of the asteroid, and the characters who people the story. While the writer tilts his hand to force the theme, the characters’ reaction to living in that world seems true to me, and the main character’s reaction to the epiphany seems emotionally real.

“Scry” by Anne Ivy (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) – A wife has always scried for her husband and served him well, but nevertheless, when he is sieged, he abandons her to the enemy because he has no way to hide her acid-burned face. Rather than committing suicide as her husband no doubt wants, she goes to the alien enemy and offers to serve him in return for a stay of execution. The character and world here are nice and it’s a fast-paced, well-rendered epic fantasy that, like “Unsilenced,” feels fuller than its word count would seem to allow. However, it didn’t quite transcend its well-worn territory for me. A fully enjoyable, well-done story.

“Small Towns” by Felicity Shoulders (Fantasy & Science Fiction) – A miniature girl (a Thumbelina analog) is born to a seamstress during a war. After the seamstress dies, the miniature girl is sent to the mother’s hometown; however it was recently destroyed by a natural disaster that killed her grandparents. The girl discovers a miniature town that was built by a toymaker to look like the one that was destroyed. She moves into the model houses and eventually meets him. I just thought this was charming, imagistically, and I really enjoyed the voice that Shoulders used to tell the story.

“Static, and Sometimes Music” by David Schwartz (Unstuck #2) – Schwartz is another writer I’m starting to watch. This surrealist novelette places a corporate building under a literal siege by its creditors. The story wanders between genres, swinging from contemporary satire to surrealism to epic fantasy. Schwartz has a disarming ability to establish the reader on what seems like solid ground and then break it down, changing the rules completely, and building up another seemingly stable space which he then also breaks down. The rules are constantly changing and yet the disorientation is never unpleasant; there’s always a sense of being tossed about by a confident, playful hand. There are shades of Vandermeer here (“Secret Life“) but as I write this review, I realize that what it really reminds me of is absurdism as it manifests in playwriting, e.g. Ionesco’s The Chairs.

“Woman of the Sun, Woman of the Moon” by Benjanun Sriduangkaew (Giganotosaurus) – In this piece, Sriduangkaew rewrites a story from Chinese mythology, casting the hero Houyi as a woman. I really grooved on this retelling, both because of the way that it developed as a story, and also because of the interesting gender plays.

“Astrophilia” by Carrie Vaughn (Clarkesworld) – Set in the same world as Vaughn’s Hugo nominated “Amaryllis,” this is the story of a love affair between a weaver who has been adopted into a new house after her old one has dissolved, and a would-be astrologer. Vaughn is very good at these peaceful, almost pastoral science fiction stories, and I like their quietness and character development.

Recommended

“After Compline, Silence Falls” by M. Bernardo (Beneath Ceaseless Skies) – A colony of ascetic monks confronts hunger as their supplies drain. Each sins by eating more than his share, but only nettles himself with his sins, rather than trying to resolve them communally. The story is complicated when a wraith made from hunger begins attacking the monks’ stores. This is well-written and well-structured. The monster story doesn’t do anything surprising for me in itself, but I liked this for the voice, setting, and the emotion behind the conclusion.

“The Stone Witch” by Isobelle Carmody (UNDER MY HAT) – A woman who hates kids is seated next to a young girl on an airplane. When the plane crashes, she’s pulled into an alternate universe where, in order to save the girl’s life, she takes her as a familiar. Honestly, I read this story near the beginning of last year, and I have strikingly little recollection of it. My notes suggest I really liked it a lot at the time. I think it was one of those fun, let-it-all-go adventure stories.

“Join the High Flyers” by Ian Creasey (Asimovs) – A former runner is genetically modified so that he has wings and can fly. He joins a clan of other bird-men and ascends into the sky, revealing the competitive culture of the bird-people. This was really just intense and strange, and it was a lot of fun to discover the unusual imagery and world-building. I also like stories about flying people; sue me. But seriously, it was pretty and fun.

“Close Encounters” by Andy Duncan (Pottowatomie Giant) – One of the original “alien abductees” has been trying to hide from reporters ever since the moon landing has made his story seem like a joke. He still believes it is real, though, and is forced to interact with the outside world again when a reporter coaxes him into talking about the old days. The character is interesting, with Duncan’s wonderful skill for voice, and I was mostly happy to go along with an interesting read. I didn’t like the way that it resolved–which I’ve seen several times before and which seems indulgent to me–but I’m not sure what ending would have managed to avoid cliche of some sort.

“Hive Mind Man” by Eileen Gunn and Rudy Rucker (Asimovs) – The funny story of a woman who takes in a deadbeat boyfriend who has endless projects that he wants to accomplish with new technologies. This is another story about the anxiety produced by changing technology (there were a number of these in Asimovs this year, and generally speaking, they don’t speak to me), but it’s also just charming and very amusing and full of fun eyeball kicks. The story feels light and energetic and just sort of runs along at a jovial speed, grinning.

“Old Paint” (excerpt) by Megan Lindholme (Asimovs) – The story of a family and its sentient car. After a virus gives independence to the AIs in cars, a woman lives vicariously through her old station wagon. Good detail and characterization; the whimsy of the premise ameliorates the serious tone. I enjoyed it despite being divided about the story: on the one hand, the “what if cars could be sentient” motif felt stale… but on the other hand, I liked the way that it created an effect of nostalgia for the past, and I also liked the relationships between the characters.

“Possible Monsters” (excerpt) by Will McIntosh (Asimovs) – A failed minor league baseball player returns home after his father’s death and discovers that an alien monster has taken up residence in his childhood home. He makes an uneasy home with the creature, only to discover that it has given him an unwanted gift–the ability to see his possible future selves walking, like ghosts, through the town. Nothing profoundly new here, but McIntosh is a very talented writer, and it’s interesting to watch his take on this unfold.

“The Contrary Gardener” by Christopher Rowe (Eclipse Online) – In a world that has reacted to environmental devastation by enacting strict rules limiting consumption, a woman has broken all the social rules by figuring out ways to increase her yield above the government-mandated subsistence level. Her father who is part of a group that hates the current government–and its artificial intelligences–tries to recruit her and her gardening skills to their cause. The main character’s acerbic personality and love for gardening come through in the story, and the world itself is interesting.

“Mirror Blink” by Jason Sanford (Interzone) – Sanford writes science fictional worlds that have really striking, unusual imagery, so that there’s a sense of combining surrealism with hard science fiction with metaphor that I really love. This story–about a post-apocalyptic world wherein humanity is ruled by capricious alien beings that limit their knowledge and periodically burn whole towns–had many of the signature Sanford elements; my favorite was that one could look into the sky with a telescope and discern moments from history, strung up like stars. For some reason, it didn’t transcend itself for me; I did like it a lot, but I felt something was missing.

Notable Novelettes
“Juggernaut” by Megan Arkenberg (Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
“The Sweet Spot” by A. M. Dellamonica (Lightspeed)
“Fake Plastic Trees” by Caitlin Kiernan (AFTER)
“In the Library of Souls” by Jennifer Mason-Black (Strange Horizons)
“Golva’s Ascent” (excerpt) by Tom Purdom (Asimovs)
“Missionaries” by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimovs)

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If there is no Objective Moral Truth, how do you know that it’s bad to be unkind or unjust?

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Ampersand

As I understand it, an “objective moral truth” would be a morality that exists outside the human mind. In this view, a moral statement like “theft is wrong” has a truth independent of human belief, like “the moon orbits the Earth.”

In comments on a post by Brad Wilcox at Family Scholars Blog, I wrote:

Brad, I don’t believe in an Objective Moral Truth, partly because so many people who do believe in such things have acted in ways that seem to me to have been unkind and unjust.

In that thread, Schroeder responded:

However, when you say, “I don’t believe in an Objective Moral Truth, partly because so many people who do believe in such things have acted in ways that seem to me to have been unkind and unjust,” it strikes me as self-contradictory (at least by implication). If there is no Objective Moral Truth, how do you know that it’s bad to be unkind or unjust?

Brad Wilcox agreed with Schroeder, writing:

Barry – Based on what you blog about and the way you blog about it, I think you are strongly committed–in practice, if not always in theory–to objective truth and to a moral law that binds all of us. And that’s why you rely on thoughtful arguments, persuasive evidence, and a spirit of civility to engage others, including me, in an effort to find common ground for the common good.

This is all highly flattering (thanks, guys), but also bad logic.

If there is no Objective Moral Truth, how do I know that it’s bad to be unkind or unjust? I don’t “know” it, any more than I “know” that Peanuts is artistically a better comic strip than Hi & Lois. It’s my opinion that it’s bad to be unkind or unjust, all else held equal. That opinion – like my opinion of Peanuts – is informed by a great deal of thought and experience. It’s an opinion I’d be willing to argue for, and it’s an opinion that I think most other thoughtful people who have put time into thinking about morality (or about the relative artistic merits of American comic strips) will readily agree with.

But it’s still an opinion, and it is therefore not objectively true the way that “the moon orbits around the Earth” or “two plus two equals four” are objectively true.

Brad’s reasoning contains the same basic flaw. He is correct that someone could decide to use “thoughtful arguments, persuasive evidence, and a spirit of civility” [1. I blush! I blush!] “in an effort to find common ground for the common good” because one starts from the premise that there is a “moral law that binds all of us.” But his argument falsely assumes that a moral law binding all is the only premise that would lead us to value persuasive evidence, civility, etc.

In this case, my premise is that it’s preferable to treat people as I’d prefer to be treated. [2. We could develop that and make that more complex – For instance, if I know someone is hungry, do I give them a bacon sandwich, under the theory that I’d prefer a bacon sandwich? I’d say that it would be better to first determine their preferences (maybe they’re vegetarian, maybe they keep kosher, maybe they’re on a hunger strike, etc) before acting, under the theory that I’d prefer others to determine my preferences before trying to help me. And so on. Even the golden rule is complex in application. But for purposes of this post, I’m ignoring those complexities.] That premise is not, in my view, a universal, objective truth that exists outside of people’s minds. Indeed, I don’t think that it can exist independently of people’s minds; without people, there is no such thing as “prefer.” It’s merely an opinion I hold – and, obviously, an opinion that many people share with me. Because it’s a commonplace opinion, it can often provide common ground for discussion, which is useful.

But doesn’t the fact that the Golden Rule is so common, prove that it’s an Objective Moral Truth? I don’t think so. Objective Truths are not determined by opinion polls. Even if 99% of people believed that the Earth orbits the moon, for example, it would still not be true.

Nor is the existence of an independent Objective Moral Truth the only possible reason for a commonly shared belief. The Golden Rule arises fairly naturally from the human trait of empathy, which in turn may have come about through the amoral process of evolution.

Finally, let’s remember that although Schroeder and Brad believe that an Objective Moral Truth exists, they can’t demonstrate its existence to a skeptical observer. That makes their belief in Objective Moral Truth… just another opinion.

Posted in Atheism, Civility & norms of discourse | 61 Comments