Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Is A Terrible, Awful Film

Warning: total spoilers.

Today, a friend and I made the questionable decision to see Jurassic World: The Next One – sorry, Fallen Kingdom – a film whose relentlessly trite and overdone orchestral scoring made my fingers twitch throughout with the urge to mute the music. The only other film to ever provoke a similar tic was Eragon, which frankly does not make for a great comparison. Granted, I aggressively dislike both Jurassic World and the smugly punchable personage of Chris Pratt With Abs, but I loved the original Jurassic Park films (the first two, anyway) and am generally fond of trashy action spectacle. Had Fallen Kingdom been remotely good, these biases would have neatly cancelled each other out; instead, I was forced to sit through a film so bad, it made two hours feel like four.

Fallen Kingdom is, in every respect, an aggressively terrible movie. The music is bad, the direction is bad, the script and acting are terrible, and the plot is recognisable only inasmuch as it constitutes an immeasurably shitty, unfeeling knock-off of Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World. The dinosaurs themselves, which ought to be the sole redeeming feature, are a constant and heinous visual offence: not only are the designs all slightly weird, but their proportions in relation to their environment are constantly, maddeningly inconsistent. A brachiosaurus that looks two stories tall in one shot looks half as big in the next; the carnivores are in constant flux, not only with regard to height, but also in terms of bulk and proportions. The fact that there’s zero sensawunda to their portrayal despite the fact that we’re meant to care about them is one nail of many in the film’s flamboyant coffin: it’s very hard to understand why any of the characters, having spent the whole narrative on the brink of being eaten, trampled or mauled, wants to save the dinosaurs even at the finale.

The film opens with a team of unknown dudes rescuing a bit of indominus rex bone from the bottom of Isla Nubar’s harbour. A massive crocodile-dino-thing eats three of them and escapes in the process, while the bone is taken away to have Evil Science done to it. This serves as a prologue of sorts, as the title card comes up after it.

As the movie proper starts, the premise – and I’m using that word generously – is established thusly: it’s three years after the events of Jurassic World, and now the dinosaurs left on Isla Nubar are in danger of re-extinction because IMMINENT VOLCANO. The logic of this volcano is not overly probed, presumably because this would mean explaining why the original theme park was built on a site that was in potential danger of blowing the fuck up; nor is it explained why the question of whether to rescue the dinosaurs or let them be obliterated was left to the last minute. The possibility that some might, in fact, survive the volcano, on account of how volcanoes aren’t an automatic death-sentence for whole ecosystems, isn’t mentioned either; so now the US government is debating whether to let them live or die. They are aided in this decision by Cameo Jeff Goldblumm, who talks a bit about chaos and genetic power and life correcting itself, thereby convincing the relevant senators to let nature take its course.

Opposed to this belief for reasons that would appear to belie her entire character arc in the first Jurassic World, inasmuch as she had one, is former park director Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). Working with her two Tired Millennial Sidekicks, Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) and Franklin Webb (Justice Smith) – both of whom deserved a better movie – Claire is now a lobbyist to save the dinos; so when she’s contacted by Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell), an ageing scientist who apparently worked on the original Jurassic Park with John Hammond, she thinks her prayers are answered. Acting as the executor of Lockwood’s estate is the obsequious Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), who promises that the dinosaurs will be rescued and taken to a new island habitat. However, in order to pull off the operation – and specifically to save Blue, the caring velociraptor – they need both Claire and animal behaviourist Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to go to the park in person: Claire because her biometrics are needed to activate trackers in the dinosaurs (and this can only be done on site, for some reason), Owen because he’s the only one who can get close enough to Blue to bring her in.

Also, Lockwood has a young mysterious granddaughter, Maisie (Isabella Sermon), whose mother is dead and who lives with him. This will be relevant later, so hang onto that.

So: Claire goes out to where Owen is hand-building a Manly Wilderness Cabin to try and convince him to sign on for the mission, largely by appealing to his feeling for Blue. From this point on, we are treated to a camera-gaze which is – and there’s really no other way to put it – Super Hella Thirsty for Chris Pratt’s Owen, who we are meant to see as the Manliest Toughest Hot Manly Man On Earth. The camera does not just capture Chris Pratt; it models him like a spandex jumpsuit. Barely a minute passes without an intense, brooding close-up of Pratt smirking while staring into the distance, as though he’s still Andy Dwyer of Parks and Rec pretending to be Burt Macklin but without the self-deprecating playfulness. Franklin is the only character not impressed with Owen, and is therefore alone in being remotely tethered to reality: for saying sensible, reasonable things like “Why are we doing this?”, “Do we really have to?” and “No,” he is summarily ignored as the comic relief.

Once everyone is on the dinosaur island, whose soon-to-explode volcano apparently isn’t being tracked or monitored by anyone because honestly, why bother, we’re introduced to Eli’s right-hand man, a game-hunter dude who is butch and sneering and fucks up Blue’s capture by ignoring Owen’s directives, which leads to Blue being shot. There’s a lot of yelling, and Zia is conscripted to try and save Blue because she’s apparently a dinosaur doctor despite never having seen one before. It’s also revealed that the game-hunter and Eli have – shock horror! – lied to Claire about their intentions, and are in fact Bad Guys Who Do Not Value The Sanctity of Dinosaur Life, Not Even A Little Bit. This means they tranq Owen and leave him to the mercy of the oncoming lava while trapping Claire and Franklin in a radio tower, and now everything’s in a rush because the volcano starts exploding.

Listen: I like ridiculous action sequences as much as the next person, but having your characters run from both flaming lavaballs and dinosaurs at the same time is kind of gilding the lily. A bunch of Action happens, Claire makes a lot of breathy vocalisations, Franklin screams because he’s a normal person and Owen saves the day by being cool and manly and also having a knife. There’s a weird transition where Claire, Owen and Franklin go from being bedraggled on a shore to perched on a clifftop overlooking a different beach without any explanation for how they got there while the volcano is still exploding, we’re shown game-hunter guy stealing a dino tooth for a souvenir – this, too, is Important Later – and then, somehow, nobody on Team Evil notices when our heroes steal a truck and jump it onto the back of their fleeing boat, just in time for everyone to watch a brachiosaurus die tragically at the water’s edge.

Stuff happens on the boat, including Claire disguising herself by cunningly wearing a hat. Zia needs blood from the captive T-rex to do a transfusion to save Blue’s life, which Claire and Owen get for her. Zia gives Blue the blood and removes the bullet from her torso, all without stitching or sterilising anything, and then pronounces Blue saved, because that’s obviously how medicine works. Meanwhile, back at the mansion, little Maisie overhears Eli’s plans to sell the dinosaurs to the highest bidder and runs to tell grandpa Lockwood, who claims not to believe her and then sends her to bed. Maisie responds by sneaking down to Eli’s Sekrit Underground Lab, where she sees videos of Owen raising Blue, learns more about Eli’s plans, and encounters an engineered dinosaur called an indoraptor, which is apparently just, like… living there? And nobody upstairs noticed?

Eli finds Maisie and locks her in her room for Knowing Too Much, and is then summoned to see Lockwood, who apparently does believe Maisie, after all. For some reason, Lockwood’s genius plan as an ailing, bedridden man profoundly betrayed by his heir is to order Eli into his room, alone, and tell him to turn himself in to the police. Instead, in a totally unpredictable turn of events, Eli opts to murder Lockwood instead.

At this point, the plot holes in Fallen Kingdom are already gaping wide, while the script is an abominable patchwork of bad dialogue, glitchy logic and poorly-executed transitions. Yet somehow, writers Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly manage to launch their B-grade opus into decidedly C-grade territory with Eli’s decision to have the captive dinosaurs brought to his actual fucking house and stored in his basement lab, oh my actual god. HE LITERALLY HAS ENOUGH ROOM DOWN THERE FOR A FUCKING BRACHIOSAURUS AND SOMEHOW NOBODY NOTICED??? EVERYONE GO DIRECTLY TO WRITING JAIL IN CONTEMPT OF COMMON SENSE. 

ANYWAY.

So like. OBVIOUSLY Eli has to auction off all the dinosaurs IMMEDIATELY to a throng of rich criminal buyers who gather IN PERSON, IN HIS BASEMENT LAB, TOGETHER, to see each dinosaur paraded before them in a cage-on-wheels like the world’s weirdest fashion catwalk. (Apparently every American intelligence agency is, I don’t know, out to lunch or something, because nobody seems worried about surveillance.) Naturally, Owen and Claire, who’ve arrived on the scene, are captured here by Eli, who naturally elects to lock them up rather than kill them. Equally naturally, they escape by getting the neighbouring baby pachycephalosaurus to bash open their cell wall and then the door, whereupon they encounter a fugitive, traumatised Maisie, who has just now learned  that Lockwood is dead and that – DUHN-DUHHHHN – she’s not his granddaughter after all, but a SECRET CLONE OF HIS DEAD DAUGHTER, a reveal that was in no way hella fucking obvious to anyone remotely trope-literate.

Loose in the mansion, Claire, Owen and Maisie get to watch the dino auction happen in real time. LO THE BIG REVEAL OF THE INDORAPTOR, whose existence is why it was so important to capture Blue: it’s a prototype with raptor DNA and something something BD Wong something GENETIC MOTHERHOOD something. The indoraptor has been trained to attack people on command if someone puts a laser-target on them and then hits a sonic trigger, and like? My brain was beginning to liquefy at this point and it makes literally zero sense, but okay: sure, Jan. Naturally, Owen and Claire decide that the indoraptor Must Never Be Released and resolve to act.

They do this by instead releasing the baby pachycephalosaurus into the crowd of important criminal guests, because Eli is apparently super bad at security for his bootlegged dino trafficking empire. This causes all the buyers to flee and a few to get trampled, which means the indoraptor is left alone in its cage. RE-ENTER GAMEHUNTER GUY, who chooses this moment of all moments to come in yelling for his bonus. Spying the indoraptor alone, he decides he’s gotta get him one of them Big Teef for his trophy necklace – LITERALLY FOR HIS FUCKING NECKLACE, EVEN THOUGH THE TOOTH ITSELF IS WORTH WAY MORE AS A SOURCE OF DINO DNA – and shoots it with a tranq gun. The indoraptor plays stunned, game-hunter GOES INTO THE CAGE WITH THE UNRESTRAINED SUPER-INTELLIGENT SUPER-DINOSAUR, BECAUSE THAT’S OBVIOUSLY THE SMART THING TO DO, and gets eaten while trying to take one of its teeth. With its cage door open, the indoraptor promptly escapes and sets about trying to destroy everything.

As the end is nigh, Eli and his cronies try to salvage as much stuff from their lab as possible, which… somehow involves Zia and Franklin ending up in a room with Blue? I’m certain there was some sort of handwavey justification given for their presence, but that terrible knowledge has been purged from my memory in the hours since, like toxins leaving the body. There’s a bit where DB Wong starts yelling at Zia about how he needs Blue’s blood because PURE DNA something something, which Zia ruins by telling him about the blood transfusion she did on the boat, which… ruins Blue’s usefulness, somehow? I don’t know much about DNA or genetics, but I’m pretty sure this is some Science Bullshit that we’re meant to take on faith despite the fact that it doesn’t ultimately matter. But, sure: GASP!

Shit promptly goes down and Zia sets Blue lose in a way that fucks up the Bad Guys while saving her and Franklin. However, some gas cylinders get damaged in the process and this means the underground lab is now filling with poison that will, once again, kill the dinosaurs trapped down there unless they’re set free, as the exhaust system is also conveniently broken Because Reasons. (The fact that the baby pachy was able to break down a supporting wall to escape even though none of the much bigger animals can do likewise is the kind of detail I ought not to care about by this point. And yet.)

This prompts Zia and Franklin try and find the others, who are now being hunted by the indoraptor, also Because Reasons. At one point during this expertly written chase scene, Owen DELIBERATELY TURNS ALL THE LIGHTS OFF.

And I just.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT??? YOU LITERALLY JUST HEARD ALL ABOUT HOW THE FUCKING INDORAPTOR HAS AMAZINGLY KEEN SENSES BUT YOUR DUMB ASS WANTS TO RUN FROM IT IN THE DARK, AN ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH IT CAN SEE BETTER THAN YOU???

GOD.

OK, so: protracted dinosaur chase scene through the mansion. Maisie tries to hide in her bed because terrified child whose caregiver has just been murdered by a man she thought of as family: fair enough. This leads to a scene that audibly scared the shit out of every child in the packed session I attended, wherein the indoraptor stalks Maisie, uniquely and specifically, as she cowers under the covers, reaching out to her with a ghoulish clawed hand before Owen barges in to shoot it. The shooting doesn’t work, Maisie leads Owen out the window, and there’s a big showdown on the glass roof of the mansion’s museum where Claire and Blue come to the rescue and the indoraptor gets dropped down and impaled on the spikes of a triceratops skeleton.

Only then do Zia and Franklin catch up to the main party and inform them that it’s now their Solemn Duty to choose what happens to the remaining dinosaurs: press the big red button (literally) to free them into the countryside, or let them all die? Teary-eyed as she watches the bellowing dinos on the security feeds that apparently didn’t fucking exist when she and Owen were escaping earlier, Claire professes that they ought to live, but doesn’t press the button. She steps back to be sad in peace, only for Maisie to zoom in and press it herself – because the dinosaurs are cloned, like her, and if she’s gets to live, then so should they.

Which… given that we already know Maisie loves dinosaurs, we really didn’t need the whole weird sideplot of her being a clone to explain her desire to free them! She’s a traumatised kid whose sole relative was just murdered! She could’ve just been sick of watching things she loves die, and it would’ve made sense! But more to the point, the whole burden of choice about saving the species as represented by the big red button is moot, because THE FILM ALREADY OPENED WITH A GIANT DINOSAUR-CROCODILE ESCAPING INTO THE OCEAN. And some of the dinosaurs sold at auction were already taken for transport! There’s probably still some on the island, including the pterosaurs who were able to fly away from the volcano! All Maisie has done is let these dinosaurs lose on the populated mainland, where they’ll very likely cause more deaths! But NOBODY POINTS THIS OUT IN TIME TO STOP HER, nor do they mention this afterwards, because this movie is terrible! And then there’s a random cut to Jeff Goldblum explaining why something like this was basically inevitable, because CAMEO!

Just to hammer home the point that Maisie’s choice was meaningless, the film immediately shows us all these already-free dinosaurs along with the ones she released herself. The fact that Eli immediately gets eaten by the T-Rex is kinda vindicating, I’ll admit, but it really doesn’t compensate for how wildly detached from reality the reactions of the characters are to everything that’s happened. The film ends with Claire and Owen – who are somehow a couple again, with just as little chemistry as before – driving away with Maisie. We don’t find out what happened to the nanny who raised her – Eli sent her away after killing Lockwood, so I guess she left the house – and Maisie never asks about her again, because, uh…. trauma, I guess? And her legal guardians are both dead anyway, so Claire and Owen get a free kid, kind of? GOD, THIS FILM WAS SO TERRIBLE, I’M OFFENDED BY THE CONSTRUCTION OF IT ON EVERY CONCEIVABLE LEVEL.

Also: this might seem like a comparatively minor nitpick in the scheme of things, but the fact that not a single character tries to call for help at any point in the movie – the total absence of smartphones of any kind – is really, really conspicuous, and has major implications for the shittiness of the plotting. Take, for instance, the early sequence where Eli’s original plan to dispose of Claire and Franklin involves remotely locking them in the radio tower, there to be consumed by lava and dinosaurs. Aside from the fact that they should’ve easily been able to phone a friend about his organisation’s treachery, forewarning people on the mainland to look out for his incoming dinosaurs, his decision to leave them to die there in the first place makes no goddamn sense in a context where he’d reasonably expect them to have phones – which both he and they fucking should, because they’re professionals in twenty fucking eighteen.

Given that huge chunks of plot in the original Jurassic sequel, The Lost World – which was written and filmed in the pre-smartphone era, and on which Fallen Kingdom is shamelessly riffing – revolve around satellite phones and the ability to radio off the island, there’s literally no excuse for the writers to forget that phones exist. Either Trevorrow and Connelly are being lazy as hell, or they’re so dismissive of the intelligence of viewers that they figured it wouldn’t matter. Either way, it’s a problem that crops up again and again. During the period where Claire and Owen were safe on the boat with the rescued dinosaurs and surrounded by enemies, they could’ve called for backup ahead of time, but they didn’t.

The fact that Maisie, a child of the smartphone era who’s clearly familiar with technology and accustomed to wealth, seemingly doesn’t have her own phone handy is weird enough; compare her to tech-savvy Lex from the original Jurassic Park, and the anachronism is even more startling. Armed with a smartphone, Maisie could easily have filmed Eli’s treachery to show her grandfather, or made her own call for help. Possibly there was meant to be some deliberate plot reason why Maisie had no phone, like being raised by an old, somehow tech-averse scientist – it stood out to me that the phone Lockwood tries to foist on Eli for his police-call looked like a goddamn portable landline from the early noughties – but if so, it was never explained. Even when the dinosaurs are set free at the very end, there’s no sign that Owen and Claire have bothered to call and warn the authorities to look out for them, even though a not inconsiderable portion of the early plot hinged on the dinosaurs having individual radio trackers – meaning that there’s a clear-cut way to recover all the escapees instead of letting them vanish into the wilderness.

But none of this happens, because Fallen Kingdom is clearly setting the stage for – god help us – a third shitty film, one where humans have had to adjust to dinosaurs roaming the North American continent. Never mind that this means disregarding everything we just watched in order to make it comprehensible as a premise – look, here’s that cool shot of a T-Rex roaring at a lion from the trailer! Here’s that shot of the dino-crocodile lurking in a wave, also from the trailer! Haha! Isn’t it cool how we implied the film was going to be one thing, and then only introduced those elements in the final minute of screentime? What a gotcha!

Films like Fallen Kingdom are a testament to Hollywood’s obsession with letting mediocre white dudes ruin everything. It’s hysterically bad in every way – even the couple of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it anti-Trump barbs fell flat – and yet I don’t feel like laughing, because Trevorrow and Connolly will invariably still get trusted with big-ticket gigs after this, while vastly more talented writers who are queer or female or POC or some combination thereof will be asked to prove themselves over and over and over again. Even if you’re only after a quick trashy action fix, don’t waste your money on Fallen Kingdom. Go buy some dinosaur Lego instead, or rewatch one of the earlier films. I promise, you’ll be better off.

And if, in the mean time, Hollywood wants to make a good dinosaur movie – or if HBO wants to make an awesome dinosaur TV show, which would be even better – then I’d humbly submit James Gurney’s Dinotopia as a much more fruitful starting point. I’ve seen enough of mindless dinosaurs knocking things down; let’s have a story where clever dinosaurs help to build things instead.

Paul Cook On SF: In Which I Lack The Ability To Even

You know, as strange as it may sound given how much time I spend ranting on the internet, I actually live a rich, full life, one in which I regularly leave the house and talk to my friends about a wide range of things that do not, in fact, suck. I’m also a fairly busy person, especially right now, what with finishing up a new novel, writing various reviews and columns, tending my seven-month-old son and – oh, yeah – the fact that we just moved house. So even though I still make time for online shenanigans, the number of articles I read in full, per day, has dropped dramatically, which leaves me feeling like some sort of digital meerkat, briefly popping up into the bright, popcultural sunlight of the internet, then ducking back down into the subterranean warren of Shit I Actually Need To Do, No, Seriously, How The Fuck Is It September Already? And most of the time, it’s a policy that serves me well.

But invariably – and with a regularity that is fast depleting my finite stores of dispassionate, well-reasoned criticism – there comes a day when I poke my head above ground and encounter a fresh, steaming pile of bullshit, such that I start gritting my teeth and channelling Kat Stratford from 10 Things I Hate About You.

And today, we’ve hit the trifecta: this spectacularly douchey, concern-trolling, woe-is-my-unrecognised-talent Facebook post by John Ringo lamenting John Scalzi’s Hugo win, Mike Krahulik’s PAX announcement that he regretted ever discontinuing their rape-apologist Dickwolves merchandise, and – my personal favourite – an astonishingly incoherent post by one Paul Cook over at Amazing Stories on When Science Fiction Isn’t Science Fiction (which, surprise! turns out to be if it contains romance elements and is therefore written for ladies).

And I mean, OK: so Ringo is an entitled, embittered asshat, and Krahulik is the same foot-in-mouth, mostly jerky dude he always was, though with an increasing glimmer of self awareness and repentance, and those are definitely things worth talking about – as, indeed, many people are already doing. Once upon a time, I’d likely have gone in to bat about them myself. But like I said, I have limited ranting time these days, and so instead I’ll stick with responding to Paul Cook’s piece, because, seriously? Are we still having this same damn conversation about “real” SFF and why romance isn’t part of it?

We are?

I wish I was, rage comics dude. I really wish I was.

Right from the outset of Cook’s piece, it’s pretty clear that we’re dealing with some pretty deeply-ingrained assumptions about the genre. To quote (my emphasis):

Most writers who publish in the science fiction field stay within the usual parameters of the field, continuing their careers writing what no one would doubt as standard science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein to name but four, wrote and published their works as science fiction, with the occasional foray into the fantastic–but not outright fantasy. Heinlein did write Glory Road which was science fiction using fantasy tropes that no one would mistake for aspects of a regular fantasy novel. That is to say, Heinlein’sGlory Road isn’t at all like one of Robert Jordan’s epic fantasies nor does it resemble the Arthurian fantasy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s classic (and truly excellent novel),  The Mists of Avalon.

That said, some writers who might have started off in science fiction soon reveal their true selves when they start publishing what they really want to write about.

Or, in other words: Cook’s definition of “standard science fiction” doesn’t include any “outright fantasy” elements (though it can include “fantasy tropes” PROVIDED nobody could mistake the story for being a “regular fantasy novel”,  meaning either “epic” or “Arthurian” fantasies). This definition appears to be sacrosanct to Cook, because when, in his estimation, SF writers deviate from “the usual parameters of the field”, they’re not just mixing it up, evolving the genre, exploring new narrative possibilities or otherwise striving for originality – no. They’re revealing their “true selves” and writing “what they really want to write about” – language which not only couches their deviation as a betrayal of SF, but which actively suggests their former use of the genre was somehow all a cynical act; that they never really wanted to write SF at all, caring only for their subsequent stories and not their original SF works, as though the latter output was merely a misbegotten firstborn left to fend for itself after the arrival of a long-awaited second child.

He then proceeds to list the authors to whom he thinks this wildly prejudicial and utterly bizarre characterisation applies. Namely: Gene Wolfe, Lois McMaster Bujold, and duo Sharon Lee and Steve Miller; he also complains about “steampunk writers… shifting over to writing about zombies,” and while he names no names in that instance, the paragraph in question is accompanied by a picture of Cherie Priest’s Boneshaker cover, which would seem to indicate at least some measure of dissatisfaction with her work in particular.

Clearly, then, Cook feels strongly about what constitutes real SF – but despite how negatively he’s characterised such genre-hopping dilettantism, that doesn’t mean he necessarily hates the works in question; just the fact that people keep calling such books SF, when in his mind, they’re not. So what does he actually say to defend his position?

Of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, he says this (my emphasis again):

 I can tell you that these books–masterpieces as everyone seems to think they are–are actually medieval/Arthurian fantasies. In fact, there is virtually no real “science fiction” in these books other than various tropes… Severian’s travels and adventures and storytelling (Book Two has a long fairy tale inserted in the middle of the novel that goes absolutely nowhere and adds nothing to the novel) are straight out of a YA rite-of-passage fantasy…  The earth does not wobble on its axis (as it would if the moon were gone) and without vulcanism and tectonic plate induction in the ocean, carbon dioxide would not be removed from the atmosphere and recycled into the mantle where it can stay out of the atmosphere and not smother life. These things don’t matter to the fantasist. They didn’t matter to Wolfe.

Now, conceivably, that first backhanded disparagement – that people only “seem to think” Wolfe’s books are “masterpieces”, implying that Cook thinks they’re anything but – could just be the product of poor grammar, as the insertion of a comma after the word masterpieces would strongly imply that Cook agrees with its usage; and in either case, I don’t particularly care. Cook is, after all, entitled to his opinion about the merit of various books, and especially given that I’ve read no Wolfe myself, I’m hardly abristle at this possible slight to his honour. I mention it only because, if intended as a slight – and I suspect it is – it contextualises Cook’s subsequent judgements as belonging to a series of negative ones. In which case, the remark about the book resembling a “YA rite-of-passage fantasy” is clearly a disparaging one; and this sets off warning bells for me. Similarly, his subsequent assertion that proper details and scientific research “don’t matter to the fantasist” is jarring, as is the simultaneous inference that true SF always gets such things right. Being able to pick holes in the worldbuilding of a given novel might well demonstrate its structural failings, but that doesn’t mean the book belongs to a different genre. Off the top of my head, I can think of plenty of fantasy novels whose authors take extraordinary care with their inclusion of real-world details, just as I can name multiple SF stories that show a comparative lack of care for science. The whole idea of FTL travel and wormhole jumps, for instance, is just as handwavium-based as Wolfe’s decision to ignore vulcanism and a wobbly Earth axis, and yet I doubt that the inclusion of either element would irritate Cook to the same degree. Whatever: as I already said, I don’t really care what he thinks of Wolfe’s work – but I do care that he thinks sloppy worldbuilding is somehow a symptom of fantasy-writing.

Onwards, then, to his criticism of Bujold. This is where the real problems start, and in such an offensively baffling way that I can’t help but quote the whole paragraph (emphasis mine, again):

Another writer well-praised (from every corner) is Lois McMaster Bujold. Her great work is the Miles Vorkosigan series. These are supposed to be military science fiction stories, but they are really at their core Romance novels. At first, they were military science fiction novels of a higher order than most. But the romance elements creep in very early on. Bujold tips her hand in the eloquence of her language (normally a good thing) and the attention to detail that only women would find attractive: balls, courts, military dress, palace intrigues, gossiping, and whispering in the corridors. All of this is right out of Alexander Dumas. True, these intrigues and flourishes do happen in the real world (or they used to), but Bujold, over time with novels such as Miles in Loveand Cordelia’s Honor, you can see that Bujold is a closet romance writer. Not that this is a bad thing, but some of us aren’t that interested in romance. For me, personally, it takes much of the dramatic urgency out of a story if the hero is already married or if during a skirmish comes back to canoodle or wine or dine with his beloved before rushing back to the fray.

I honestly don’t know which is more painful: Cook’s efforts to try and say that really, it’s OK Bujold writes romance even though he doesn’t like it, or the totally oblivious sexism with which he undercuts this assertion. In remarking that Bujold “tips her hand” by including “romance elements” – which, he says, involve an “attention to detail that only women would find attractive” – he characterises romance as being a wholly feminine genre, such that, when he goes on to say that “some of us aren’t that interested in romance”, it seems pretty clear that by “some of us”, Cook means men.  Whether intentionally or not, he therefore manages to dismiss Bujold, one of the most respected and multi-award-winning SF writers out there, as not being a real SF author because she actually just writes romance and romance is for women only. Which makes his subsequent remark that all her “attention to detail that only women find attractive” is “right out of Alexander [sic] Dumas” all the weirder: I mean, what’s he trying to say with this? That Dumas only wrote for women, or that he was also a closet romance writer? It just doesn’t make any sense, and yet the insult to both women and romance is so palpable it left me staring at the screen in disbelief, jaw clenched.

On closer examination, though, it’s his final sentence that actually worries me most: specifically, the admission that it bores him “if the hero is already married”. It’s clear this description is meant to accurately summarise romance stories as a whole, but as even a cursory perusal of the genre would make plain, nothing could be further from the truth. The Happily Ever After is where, barring cameo appearances in future volumes, romance stories stop – it is emphatically not what constitutes their defining narrative structure. The Vorkosigan books, by contrast, feature both sides of the story: we see the characters meet and fall in love, but because their romantic, pre-HEA friction isn’t the defining aspect of the narrative, but rather just a single facet of a larger story, we also see them afterwards, getting on with their lives together. So while the series definitely contains romantic elements, collectively, the books aren’t romance novels. I don’t say that to defend Bujold against the accusation of writing romance, because I don’t believe there’s anything lesser or pejorative about writing romance instead of SF (and I certainly don’t believe it’s a women-only genre; female-dominated, maybe, in terms of readership and output, but that’s hardly the same thing, and a separate point besides). No: what bothers me is that, when Cook says he doesn’t like to read about married heroes who take a break from fighting to “canoodle” with their sweethearts, it feels like an admission that he prefers his (male) heroes to be single and to lack a romantic attachment to the women in their lives. And this is a very different thing: because whereas Bujold’s decision to portray happy, realistic, functional marriages necessarily involves male characters who treat the women they love with respect, Cook seems to be against that – because all that kindness and love and icky lady romance gets in the way of the action. And that makes me wonder: does he, then, have no issue with SF stories where the hero is a womaniser, someone who sleeps with various sexy maidens while in pursuit of his duty and doesn’t care enough to see them again afterwards, but who still cares just enough to be Tragically Wounded if they end up dead? Maybe I’m being uncharitable because this paragraph so profoundly rubbed me the wrong way, but even so – and especially given his citation of Heinlen, Clarke, Sturgeon and Asimov as stellar examples of real SF authors – I can’t help but feel that what he’s really objecting to in the Vorkosigan books isn’t the use of sex or romance, or even necessarily of marriage, but to the presence of female love interests who influence the plot in ways other than simply sleeping with the hero, and to the use of heroes who think about the women they love as partners rather than sex objects.

In talking about Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s novels – a paragraph which, once again, I’m forced to quote in full – Cook becomes even more disparaging about romance (my emphasis):

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s novels in their Liaden Universe® (from Baen Books) are also romance writers. Like the Vorkosigan novels, they begin as space adventures in the military science fiction genre, but their latest installments are romances only barely disguised with science fiction tropes and conceits. Lee’s and Miller’s stories in this series are carefully written, but I’d call them science fiction-lite because there really isn’t much tension in these stories. It’s as if, now that they’ve found their niche and their considerable audience, they want to play it safe. True, science fiction as a whole is indeed part of Romance Literature (if we go all the way back to the 18th century when novels were invented in England, with the Gothic novel leading the way), but some writers, by dint of their nature, turn to romance or the western or whatever. I’ve read several of the books in the Liaden Universe® and to me they are romances in disguise–with the couple coming together with a calm sense of inevitability rather than one preceded by blood, sweat, tears and some sort of significant loss. True, no science fiction or fantasy writer has the courage to end a novel the way Hemingway does in A Farewell to Arms, but then ours is an escapist genre. Which is also why we don’t have a Hemingway or Faulkner in our midst–but that’s another story.

By this point, the repetitive assertion that romance or romance writers are “disguised” or closeted somehow is really starting to wear me down. I find it depressing – but not actually surprising – that even though, in the very first paragraph, Cook is capable of acknowledging that SF stories can contain fantasy tropes without actually being fantasy novels, presumably because he wants to establish the credentials of his favourite authors as being beyond reproach, he spends much of the rest of the post categorically denying the idea that romance tropes can similarly exist in SF stories without causing the book in question to magically switch genres. The idea that Lee and Miller chose to write “science fiction-lite” by amping up the romance – and more, that this decision was a way to “play it safe” – is more than usually laughable given Cook’s simultaneous inference that it ruined the books; which begs the question, safe from what? Ridicule and accusations of selling out? Clearly not. I don’t even have the energy to try and unpack what’s meant by the claim that “some writers, by dint of their nature, turn to romance” – by what nature, exactly? There are so many things this could mean, all of them contextually pejorative, one of the least of which is the idea that “by dint of their nature” is a not-so-subtle code for “by dint of being born female, or having an interest in women”. At absolute best, Cook is simply so enamoured of SF as a genre that he’s inclined to view any departure from it by SFnal authors as not just a bad decision, but an actual character flaw – hence it being in their “nature” to revert to writing “romance or the western or whatever”. Which makes the fact that he then goes on to praise Hemmingway and Faulkner as being braver, better writers than anyone in SFF  all the more mind-boggling (never mind being an assertion that opens up a whole different can of worms).

Finally, he expresses his distaste for zombie stories mucking up steampunk and SF, and once more manages to throw in a gendered barb: “I have no interest,” he says, ” in reading about zombies, fancy dress balls, smooching warriors, or star-lit dinners on the terrace overlooking a waiting army about to go to war” – a remark which neatly mirrors his complaints about those pesky romantic details that “only women” like.  And that would be the end of it – except that, of course, he also manages to make an ass of himself in the comments. When confronted with accusations of sexism, Cook becomes angry, remarking that Lee and Miller, “competent as they are, are writing disguised romances” – which manages to be a more overtly disparaging slight about romance than he makes in the actual article.  He also refers to the romance elements in their books as being their “true predilections” – because clearly, if an SF writer writes romance, they mustn’t care as much about SF! The fact that he also claims to be “very precise in my wording, or I try to be” is, under the circumstances, rather heartbreaking. But it’s his response to accusations of misogyny that proves the most telling:

By accusing me of being a misogynist, you shut down all possibility of an informed analysis of any woman’s work. That’s a refuge I’ve seen critics in literature take for over 30 years, at least since the mid-1980s. It doesn’t work that way. Any work of art can be criticized, regardless of the gender of who wrote them, painted them, composed them, etc.

And I just… I don’t even know how to respond to this. Because Cook has said, right there in his own, apparently “precise” words, that Bujold’s work involves “the attention to detail that only women would find attractive” – details which Cook himself feels are detrimental to the story, and which he plainly states are a hallmark of Bujold’s romantic credentials. This is unequivocally a sexist remark, and the fact that Cook doesn’t recognise this fact – let alone understand that his disparagement of romance as both feminine and lesser is similarly gross – is the main problem with his piece. But the idea that misogyny is some kind of card that critics play to shut down the possibility of an informed analysis of women’s work? What planet is this guy even on? OF COURSE any work can be criticsed, regardless of the gender of the creator; that’s not in dispute. But that doesn’t mean that Cook isn’t being sexist in his analysis: and when he complains about the fact that accusations of misogyny have effectively been ruining criticism for thirty-odd years, it makes me wonder how many times in the past someone has called him out for sexist behaviour, and he’s chosen to interpret that as meaning “you can’t critique female writers because you’re male and therefore biased”, when what they’re ACTUALLY saying is “by all means critique female writers, but be aware that your internalised, negative assumptions about women, romance and femininity are influencing your judgement in unhelpful ways”. Like, seriously? Thirty years of viewing misogyny accusations as a tactic for dodging criticism rather than, you know, a legitimate fucking complaint about sexism in SFF, and he’s never once sat down and thought, Huh, maybe they have a point? Christ on a BICYCLE.

And then it gets worse:

I’m correct here. The books I mention as romances are romances. They are also very “light” in gravitas and absolutely devoid of metaphor.

More anti-romance bullshit! Because romance is light, devoid of metaphor and totally lacking in gravitas, AMIRITE LADIES? And obviously, the best way to prove you’re not sexist is to call romance a female-only genre and then disparage the shit out of it!

The last great sf story that, to me, resonated with metaphor was Terry Bisson’s “macs” which was about American’s natural desire to kill someone who’s harmed us.

Oh.

Well, THAT’S not profoundly unsettling. (Note also, please, that the story in question came out in 1999, which means that, by his own admission, Cook hasn’t seen anything worthy in the genre for nearly fifteen fucking years.)

 I know I’ve offended you, only because I have had an opinion.

No, it’s not because you had an opinion; it’s because the opinion itself was offensive bullshit.

DeAnn, please, please explain to me what “ground” Lois Bujold has broken with her writing. She’s writing in the 1940s Astounding tradition of space adventures tinted with romance. That’s it. If you want ground breaking, read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar or his The Long Result or his Shockwave Rider. Don’t bore me with telling me these mediocre writers are ground-breaking. They’re just writing pulp fiction–pure entertainment. Lift away all the standard tropes and conceits from Bujold’s writing and you have stories where we know the hero gets his heroine and all will be well. Our writers have lost the courage to tell a story such as Thomas Disch’s Genocides or any one of Philip K. Dick’s novels. But, then, publishers publish what they think sells. Thus, romance, thus zombies. But that’s my opinion. And the fact that I have a divergent opinion makes me the most hated person on the internet.

And in this final comment, despite all his earlier protestations that being a romance writer “isn’t a bad thing”, Cook finally gets angry enough to be honest: Bujold breaks no ground with her stories – she is, in fact, “mediocre… pulp fiction – pure entertainment” – and romance is only popular, not because it has any merit, but because “publishers publish what they think sells”. And isn’t it interesting how, with the sole exception of Marion Zimmer Bradley, every single person Cook has held up as an example of brave, exemplary writing is an old white guy from his generation? Talk about being stuck in the past.

Dear Mr Cook, if you’re reading this: you’re not the most hated person on the internet. Michael Brutsch couldn’t even claim that much, and he might actually have deserved it. Nobody is sending you rape or death threats; nobody is telling you, in graphic detail, the things they’ll do to your children or pets in revenge for what you’ve said (though all those things have happened to women writers just for existing on the internet, let alone saying anything controversial). All they’re doing is sharing their opinions of your opinion, as they – we – are entitled to do; and because we think your opinion is bullshit, you’ve elected to view our response as persecution. You aren’t being persecuted; you’re being argued with, and the fact that you can’t tell the difference is a sign of the privileged echo-chamber in which, until now, I suspect you’ve spent your fannish life. I’d tell you to grow up, but seeing as how, the last good story you read was apparently written almost fifteen years ago, one suspects it wouldn’t help. As far as I can tell, your tastes are so firmly fixed in the stories of your youth that every development undergone by the genre since then is something you’ve elected to view with suspicion. And that wouldn’t bother me, but SFF is my genre, too, and I’m sick of watching bitter old men try to claw away and disparage everything about SFF that’s welcomed me and drawn me in by saying that it isn’t really SF; that the genre is changing, not because the audience and the world are changing together, but because shallow people just want to make money. I’m sick of it, and so I’m arguing against your opinion – at length, in my own time, even knowing that, unlike you, I am actually risking a genuinely abusive backlash by doing so, because that’s what happens to women on the internet when the really ugly trolls catch wind of us.

So why am I bothering, then?

Because I fucking belong here and you will not make me feel otherwise.

Sexism At Fantasy Book Cafe

Warning: all the rant.

As someone who talks a lot about sexism in general, but particularly with reference to SFF and fandom, I’m often frustrated by the fact that many people either don’t understand what sexism is, or actively disagree that it still goes on: not just because their lack of understanding makes it harder to explain why Hollywood’s predisposition towards failing the Bechdel test is symptomatic of wider social problems (for instance), but because it means that, more often than not, before I can discuss the issue at hand – be it the treatment of women in gaming or the insertion of unnecessary sex scenes into HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thrones – I’m forced to run through the conversational equivalent of Sexism 101 in order to get my interlocutor onside. Now, being as how much of modern sexism is insidious and subtle, up to a point, I’m fairly sympathetic to being unaware of it: after all, I was in that position once, too, and no matter how repetitive it gets, you still need people who are willing to explain the basics. There are occasions, however, when my sympathy runs right the hell out, as does my patience – usually because someone has said something so fundamentally wrongheaded, point-missing and downright useless that there aren’t enough tableflipping GIFs in the world to adequately sum up my emotional response.

This is one of those times.

Behold, then, this hot mess of a post on sexism – or rather, on the author’s complete and utter misapprehension of sexism – by someone called Sarah of Bookworm Blues guest-posting at Fantasy Book Cafe. Straight away, the piece sets alarm bells ringing, beginning with the suggestion that:

While I’m sure sexism does exist in literature, I don’t actually think much of what people consider to be sexist is actually sexist.

Frankly, this is a big claim to be making, especially when prefaced by the admission that “sexism in fantasy… [is] not something I’ve really thought about before”. As this recent reprint of a 1982 article by science fiction writer Susan Shwartz can attest, sexism in SFF is something we’ve been talking about for decades now, and while that certainly doesn’t preclude a newcomer from having valid opinions on the subject, if you start out by saying that most of the existing dialogue is wrong, then you’d damn well better be able to show your working.

Alas, not only doesn’t Sarah understand what’s meant by sexism in SFF, her interpretation of the concept is so confused that it’s actually quite difficult to formulate an intelligent response. For instance: throughout the article, she continually reiterates the threefold idea that, according to some people, men and women write differently; that authors can’t write characters of the opposite gender with any degree of skill; and that women are more emotional writers, while men are more action-oriented – all of which she apparently disagrees with (and rightly so). The problem, however – and I’m struggling to even articulate this, because it makes so little sense – is that Sarah seems to think that this opinion is held by people who say there’s sexism in SFF; which is to say, the exact group of people who think these ideas are bullshit. This isn’t a case of me misunderstanding her argument: it’s literally what she appears to be saying. To quote:

After I had the discussion about sexism in SFF with that author, I became a lot more aware of people accusing authors of being sexist, or saying an author couldn’t write some character properly because the author was of the opposite gender. It actually shocked me how much of that sort of dialogue is floating around that I’ve never really been aware of before… 

I think people are a little mixed up. That’s the crux of it. It seems to be a common belief that women are more emotional and character driven than men and men are more obsessed with action and adventure. Then there is a common belief that because an author is male/female they can’t properly write a character of the opposite gender because they aren’t of that gender and thus, just don’t get it.

Almost – almost! – I can parse the logicfail here. Sarah has, I suspect, seen male authors criticised for sexist representations of female characters, possibly with involvement of the phrase ‘male gaze’, and taken this to mean that, in the eyes of the person doing the criticising, men are inherently bad at writing women Because Gender. This isn’t even an oversimplification of the actual issue, which is the poor depiction of female characters by authors whose exposure to a culture that traditionally relegates women to either secondary or highly stereotyped roles in narrative has resulted in their automatic usage of sexist tropes; rather, it’s a catastrophic conflation of the critic’s position with the position they’ve set out to criticise. Thus: while some people certainly do believe that women can’t properly write men, and vice verse, this is itself a sexist belief, not the default assertion of those who call out sexism. Her misunderstanding is so total, it’s like she’s come across a group of soccer fans complaining about people who hate soccer, and come to the conclusion that they must hate it, too.

Underscoring Sarah’s confusion is her repeat assertion that an author’s gender doesn’t matter, and that focusing on it is therefore meaningless. To quote again:

“I have never sat back and thought, “Well, since she’s a woman, her writing is different than a man’s because (insert reasons here).”…  I don’t think of authors as male and female in more than an observational way. The gender of an author doesn’t matter to me in the least. It has zero impact on the quality of their writing. Monet was a man who painted more water lilies than any other human being who has ever lived. Being a man had absolutely no impact on his ability to paint them.

I agree, Sarah! An author’s gender doesn’t impact the quality of their writing in any way whatsoever. But it can certainly impact on how their writing is treated by others – which is why, to take just one example, many female SF writers are still encouraged to take male pseudonyms, the better to counteract the sexism of readers who, whether consciously or unconsciously, assume that men are naturally better at SF. To borrow your example, Monet didn’t paint great lillies because he was male, but his gender certainly afforded him the opportunity to paint in a way that was denied to women. Similarly, when it comes to the impact of authorial gender on content, it’s not a question of whether our sexual biology or gender identity has some inherent, magical quality that necessarily infiltrates our writing and betrays who we are: instead, it’s a question of privilege, and the extent to which it influences our perception of other people. Like it or not, the vast bulk of Western society is geared so heavily towards the promotion and support of straight white men that, somewhat unsurprisingly, its associated narratives – whether movies, TV shows or novels – are rife with limiting, negative and prejudicial portrayals of women, POC and QUILTBAG persons. Thus: when a male writer perpetuates said stereotypes – perhaps via the inclusion of female characters who exist only to sleep with the hero – his gender becomes a relevant consideration in why he thought this would be an acceptable story to tell, because socially sanctioned sexism has told him, over and over again, that it is.

I wish that was all the article got wrong; instead, it gets worse. To quote again:

If an author portrays a female character as physically weaker than their male counterpart, they aren’t being sexist; they are probably being realistic. I will use myself as an example. I can’t lift more than twenty pounds on a good day. That doesn’t make me weak, nor does it mean that I’m weak because I’m a woman… I’m physically weak but I’m strong in many other ways and the fact that I’m a woman has nothing to do with it. There are plenty of men out there with the same disorder I have, and they are just as physically limited as I am. Portraying a character with certain limitations and other strengths doesn’t make an author sexist, as so many are fond of exclaiming. It makes them realistic.

Christ on a bicycle. This has got to be the worst and most fatally literal interpretation of the phrase ‘strong female characters’ I’ve ever seen. Listen: setting aside the fact that it’s entirely possible for women to be stronger than men, when critics talk about ‘weak’ female characters, we’re not talking about physical strength, but about the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the characterisation, and the extent to which it adheres to prejudicial gender stereotyping. If the female characters have agency and read like actual people, I don’t give a shit how much they can lift, because it doesn’t matter – but if the author has (for instance) written a swooning, helpless princess whose emotional weaknesses are metaphorically emphasised in a scene where she tries and fails to lift the hero’s sword, then yeah: I’m going to call shenanigans.

What bothers me about these conversations is that they seem to divide people more than unite them. When we focus on how genders affect an author’s ability to write, we highlight differences more than similarities, and we help cement old, often unnoticed habits of categorizing authors based on the kind of underwear they wear…

Sexism? Yeah, it exists, but I think the way to truly overcome any gender bias is to get rid of these gender-focused discussions. We need to focus on quality, rather than plumbing.

Let me get this straight: the way to get rid of sexism is to stop talking about gender? That’s like saying that the way to prevent STDs is to stop talking about sex: in both instances, the latter concept is integral to any meaningful discussion of the former problem, such that omitting it would render the entire exercise moot. And don’t even get me started on the pervasive cissexism of constantly defining gender in terms of plumbing and underwear: the issue at hand concerns brains, not bodies, and trying to boil it all down to descriptions of bits is both childish and incredibly problematic.

There’s more I could say about the article, but ultimately, it all amounts to the same thing: that the writer has committed an act of misunderstanding so profound that I’m tempted to call it willful, and in so doing further muddied the waters about what sexism is, and why discussing it matters. Instead, I’m just exhausted – angry, bored and exhausted – with the terrible, sickening ignorance of it all. Calling out sexism isn’t about cementing old habits or promoting gender warfare; it’s about, you know. Calling out sexism, on account of the fact that sexism is fucking awful. The point being, if you honestly can’t distinguish between “some people think men and women write differently” and “the idea that men and women write differently is sexist”, then I really don’t know what to do with you – and so, for the moment, I’ll leave it at that.

Doctor Who: More Thoughts

Warning: spoilers. 

Since yesterday’s post, I’ve caught myself up to date with Night Terrors, The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex. All three are well-written, well-executed episodes: their plots are coherent and self-contained, the scripting is solid, and there’s a genuine feeling of mystery and tension to each of them. That being said, I’m still distinctly unhappy with the treatment of the female characters. In all three episodes, Amy ends up a damsel who needs to be rescued, while the latter two both use the deaths of competent, clever, interesting women to wring emotional responses from the audience. There’s also the lesser (but still relevant) issue of Moffat’s constant reuse of robots/functions as villains and the overwhelming number of Earth-based episodes, but we’ll get to that later. First, let’s look at the ladies.

For an excellent summation of the problems with the death of Older Amy in The Girl Who Waited, I recommend this post by Phoebe North. To quote:

Every single aspect of this plot and every action of the Doctor conspire to invalidate Older!Amy’s choices, desires, and personhood. What matters is that she be spared, even if she doesn’t want to be spared–because the men, of course, know better than she do about her very life.

In this episode, the Doctor acts in a way that’s in keeping with his recent behavior, but is still insanely maddening. He’s paternalistic. He’s condescending. He lies. He rejects Amy’s right and autonomy over her experiences outright…

It’s only Older!Amy who is anything new. This is the first time we’ve seen concrete, verifiable growth in Amy-Pond-the-adult. It’s also the first time it’s been suggested that she’s a certifiable genius. Karen Gillan is able to stretch her acting chops like never before. She fights. She invents. She hacks. She flirts. Despite the fact that she’s been hurt, she’s still indisputably a whole, capable person–in precisely the way that our Amy has never been…

Amy’s storyline is really more of the same. The woman has to be saved. Worse, the woman doesn’t really know what’s good for her–to the point where she has to be manipulated and tricked into making the right decision.

I understand television’s need to protect the status quo. But Rory has been allowed to grow, from passive near-cuckold into a hero. In previous seasons, Donna, Martha, and Rose all underwent very palpable growth as their experiences changed their goals, lives, and desires (even if Donna was pretty much royally screwed over in the end). Now that I’ve had a more concrete vision of what Amy could be dangled in front of me–and then snatched away by male characters and writers who say they know better–damn it, I want a sign of that woman on the actual show. I want some sign that Amy can grow into a brilliant, kick ass person even as she stands by her husband’s side.

Because otherwise? If Amy stays as she is today–if the show continues to value damselship over competence, raw youth over experience, passivity over self-sufficiency–if Amy is always the problem and almost never the solution?

Then I’m done.

As has been previously mentioned, A Good Man Goes To War left me with so little faith in the show that I had to postpone watching the next set of episodes. This meant that my husband went ahead and watched them without me; a sort of advanced guard to test the waters. After finishing The Girl Who Waited, he came storming out of the bedroom in a state of distress, talking about how vile and awful it was that the Amy who’d been left on her own for 36 years – who was clever and capable and deserving of freedom – was killed off in favour of her younger self. What was worse, he said, was how little criticism of the episode he could find online: did people not realise how morally reprehensible this was? Admittedly, that absence may be more reflective of his weak Google-fu than of the majority reaction to the episode, but even so: my husband, who has been a fan of Doctor Who since childhood, has reached a point with the new series where he considers the Doctor to be morally bankrupt. And honestly? I am not about to disagree with him.

There is no reason why Older Amy had to die except that the writers wanted her to. In a show – and, more particularly, a season – where continuity is constantly being retconned, where exceptions are constantly found to old rules and where pretty much everything that happens is explicable only by magic, blaming the necessity of Older Amy’s death on any extant Whoniverse laws is both demeaning and cheap. Worse still is the decision to make the Doctor directly responsible for it: he literally slams the door in her face and leaves her to die, having promised sanctuary he knows is impossible. But the only reason for that impossibility is authorial. We still could have had a heart-wrenching finale where Older Amy was deposited on an alien world and forced to hand Rory over to her younger self; given that she was in a quarantine facility, she could even have been left behind on the original world, but in the visitor’s section, free to make her own way out. But no: as with ‘Ganger Amy before her, she is killed – and not just on the Doctor’s watch, but by him.

And then they pull the exact same trick again. In The God Complex, we are introduced to Rita, a clever, capable woman who immediately wins the Doctor’s respect to such an extent that he tells Amy she’s fired. It’s a joke, of course, but intentionally or not, this sets up the whole episode as a comparison between the two characters. Rita is brave, calm and selfless (and a Muslim! an actual positive representation of a Muslim woman on television!), while Amy clings, quite literally, to a blind, childish faith in the Doctor. There is no need for her to try and rescue herself or others, because he will always save her, and as the episode hinges on her admitting as much, it becomes abundantly clear that this has, in fact, been the defining aspect of her character all along. Meanwhile, poor Rita’s fate is sealed when the Doctor mentions taking her on the TARDIS with him, which has always been a kiss of death equivalent to watching a redshirt beam down to an alien planet alongside Kirk and Spock. She dies nobly and bravely, of course, but she still dies, and while in another time and place – by which I mean, an earlier season – I might have just accepted her death on its own terms, in the particular context of Season 6 and Moffat’s reign in general, it stands out as part of what is starting to feel like a calculated decision to keep the female characters young, pretty and pliant, or else to kill or depower them.

And then there’s the fact that Amy and Rory have ceased to grieve for their daughter. I don’t care that Melody Pond grows up to be River Song. I don’t care that Amy and Rory know this, and like who River is. They have, as a couple, lost a newborn child – one who goes on to be raised and brainwashed by terrorists – such that they are never really her parents, and know she endures a terrible childhood without them. This is fucking traumatic; or rather, it should be, except that we never actually see them grieve. In fact, against all logic and expectation, at the start of Let’s Kill Hitler, we learn that the Doctor has been looking for Melody through space and time without them, and I’m sorry, but what the fuck? Amy and Rory lose their daughter, and then they just go home to wait while the Doctor tries to hunt her down instead? This makes no sense; growing up with Mels is not equivalent compensation for losing a child; and when, at the end of The God Complex, the Doctor drops Amy and Rory home – seemingly for good, but who knows? – and Amy lightly says that he should tell River to drop in on them some time, my whole body clenched with anger. NO. As much as I’m ready for a new companion, Amy deserves better than to have been dragged through all of space and time, where she loses her child, and then just be taken home because the Doctor says so. I don’t care that he’s almost a thousand years old: this sudden, awful paternalism of Doctor Knows Best For The Ladies, such that he gets to override not only their desire to travel with him, but their desire to live, is vile.

To close out the feminist side of things, there’s an excellent piece at Tiger Beatdown about the problematic nature of Amy, wherein Lindsay Miller says:

Amy as a plot device… drives me insane with rage.  The writers cannot seem to come up with anything for her to do that doesn’t involve being a sexual or romantic object, a damsel in distress, or—more recently—a uterus in a box.  This is primarily a show about the Doctor, not his companions; I get that.  Still, Rose, Donna, and even the tragically underdeveloped Martha all got at least a few episodes dedicated them and their problems and their families…

Amy’s dialogue is reasonably well-written, and Karen Gillan’s performance is funny and engaging.  But her storylines are terrible.  We spent all of season 5 (which, for me, was about three days) hopelessly enmeshed in the Love Triangle that Just Wouldn’t Die.  Amy was engaged to Rory, who had a smallish head, but she wanted to make out with the Doctor, who had a huge head!  How would she ever choose between two such different head sizes?  Then she had a moment of realization and went with Rory, presumably because their eventual offspring would do less damage on the way out.  But every two or three episodes since then, we’ve gotten these teasing “maybe she really DOES love the Doctor” moments, even though everyone, including all three characters, is sick to death of that plot thread.  It’s like the writers honest-to-God cannot come up with anything better for two dudes and a lady to do, with all of space and time at their fingertips, than worry over which dude the lady will end up with.

Finally, there’s the Moffat tropes, which are wearing seriously thin. Let’s have a look at the themes and villains of this past season, shall we?

The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon: An eerie little girl in a spacesuit repeating the same few lines of dialogue over and over, plus the Silence, who also repeat themselves, are uniform in appearance, and can’t be argued with.

The Curse of the Black Spot: The robotic function of a medical ship, who can’t be argued with.

The Doctor’s Wife: An evil planet who eats TARDISes and who has actual conversations with the characters. (Note: this episode was written by Neil Gaiman rather than a member of Moffat’s regular staff, and was originally meant to appear in the previous season.)

The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People: Dopplegangers of the crew of a mining station, plus the crew itself and the Doctor.

A Good Man Goes To War: Headless monks, an army commander, and an evil eyepatch woman.

Let’s Kill Hitler: Robot doppleganger people filled with robotic ‘antibodies’ who attack intruders while repeating the same few lines of dialogue over and over, plus a creepy child-Amelia as a function of the TARDIS who repeats the same few lines of dialogue over and over.

Night Terrors: Creepy, unspeaking zombie-dolls who chase the characters and mindlessly try to convert them.

The Girl Who Waited: Hospital robots who mindlessly try to subdue intruders while repeating the same few lines of dialogue over and over.

The God Complex: A host of creepy, unspeaking dolls, plus a minotaur-monster who behaves exactly like a robot (i.e., he can’t turn himself off or stop what he does, nor do we hear him speak in his own right except through the Doctor’s translations) who causes people to turn into zombies and repeat the same few lines of dialogue over and over.

Is there a pattern here, do you think? Just to be sure, let’s run a check on the themes and villains of some previous Moffat episodes:

The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances: An eerie little boy in a gas mask repeating the same few lines of dialogue over and over, plus the robotic functions of a hospital ship who can’t be argued with.

The Girl in the Fireplace: Clockwork robots acting as functions of a ship who repeat the same few lines of dialogue over and over.

Blink: Quantum angels who don’t speak, but who prey on other lifeforms as functions of their existence and who, like robots, cannot be argued with.

Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead: Eerie dead people trapped in spacesuits repeating the same few lines over and over, plus the Vashta Nerada, who prey on other lifeforms as a function of their existence, and who are argued with once.

The Beast Below: Creepy clown-doll-robots acting as functions of a ship.

The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone: More quantum angels.

And then there’s the high incidents of female characters meeting the Doctor both in childhood and as adults, which started with Renette in The Girl in the Fireplace and goes on to define both River Song and Amy Pond. Put another way: Moffat seems to have a narrative range of exactly one female character, and the more he writes her, the weaker she gets.

Call me crazy, but I’m fairly sure this constitutes a pattern.

Which might go a long way towards explaining why we rarely, if ever, see any actual aliens any more; why we’re constantly stuck on Earth or in Earthlike settings as opposed to other worlds – because Moffat, for all his strengths (and some of these episodes are, in fairness, utterly brilliant) doesn’t seem to like writing alien races, or alien cultures. He likes puzzles and hospitals and automated processes and robots and enemies who can’t be argued with, which is all fine and awesome, except that this is all we’re getting any more. Even episodes which aren’t written by Moffat, like The Lodger and The Curse of the Black Spot – both of which feature automated hospital ships and their attendant robot-functions as the ultimate explanation for things – are chock-full of Moffaty tropes. And I don’t know about you, internets, but I am getting bored of so much sameness.

It doesn’t strike me as irrelevant that so far in Moffat’s tenure, not a single episode has been written by a woman. Admittedly, the same was true under Russell T. Davies – his first two seasons lacked any female-authored episodes, with Season 3’s Daleks in Manhatten being the first – but it shows more under Moffat, not only because of how he treats his female characters (badly), but because his preference for writing robots means that there are fewer gendered characters of any kind in the background, so that the number of secondary women has dropped, too.

I’m worried by all of this, internets. I really want the show to make a clean break next season, but I’m very much afraid that won’t happen. Yes, the writing and plotting has picked up again, but unless the ladies start to develop, too, it’s going to get harder and harder for me to continue with it.

Defining Fantasies

Ever since I made a conscious decision to start reading more widely, I’ve found that my definitions of genre have been shifting. To lapse briefly into metaphor, my earliest reading habits were like a stream of water that gradually wore a riverbed in the earth; but as I became more rigid in these choices, forcing myself to stick to what was known rather than breaking new ground, the flow of water lessened, confined to a muddy rut. The decision to read new things was like a drought breaking: since then, the river has been in spate, surpassing all previous limits. Which is actually a longer sort of metaphor than I’d intended, but the point is this: that the more I read across various genres, the harder it is to view them as being wholly separate, unconnected entities.

Right now, I’m fascinated by the crossover between mainstream literary novels and SFF. Several times recently, I’ve picked out popular fiction works and been surprised to discover their reliance on magic and SF elements. Which, don’t get me wrong, is a wonderful thing. But it makes me wonder: why are these books classed as fiction, when their content is clearly fantastic? I feel like we’re missing an important taxonomy here, one that might seriously help ease the debate about Literary Fiction vs Genre – the categorical equivalent of a Missing Link. Having read The Tiger’s Wife and Chocolat in quick succession, for instance, it strikes me that in both cases, the presence of magic is simultaneously incidental and integral: incidental, in that neither story is interested in expounding on how and why it actually works; yet integral, because the emotional crux of both narratives hinges on its ability to touch ordinary lives, thereby transforming the characters and generating the plot. The same is equally true of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, both by Audrey Niffenegger, and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, two of which books, in addition to Chocolat, have been turned into movies. In each of these stories, a real-world plot with a deep investment in the emotional lives of its characters has been facilitated by a fantastic premise, respectively a deathless man, a chocolate-making witch, a genetic time traveler, a persistent ghost and a girl who narrates her previous life from heaven – and yet, they’re not quite SFF, either.

What makes such stories different? Why is Erick Setiawan’s Of Bees and Mist, despite its openly fantastic blurb, shelved with fiction, while Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, despite its similar themes of family, loneliness and love, put in with SFF? What about Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus: A Novel, which has all the conventions and impossible whimsy of a fairy tale? Were YA genre novels consistently separated from their fictional fellows, one suspects that This Is Shyness by Leanne Hall would pose a similar problem to would-be pigeonholers. And yet, the more I consider such books collectively, the more it feels like they’re all of a kind – neither fiction nor SFF, but something distinct and beautiful by itself. Whatever we might term this hypothetical section of the bookshop, it wouldn’t lack for content. Taking the incidental/integral balance described above and rendering it in language more familiar to SFF discussions, what distinguishes these books from other genre titles is their disinterest in worldbuilding. By which I mean: creating a secondary, hidden layer to the everyday world – or, as in the case of Yu’s work, speculating about a not-too-distant future – is less important than the emotional development these scenarios afford. (I’m being particularly tentative about Yu’s inclusion on this list, not just because his work is shelved in SFF, but because it’s the only novel mentioned here not set in the current Real World. Nonetheless, I think it fits.) What separates them from straight fiction is the inclusion of unreality.

Despite their SFF elements, these novels are concerned almost wholly with traversing internal, emotional landscapes – the magic is there to facilitate these journeys, but stops short of being a journey in itself. This is not a bad thing, the way it might be for a poorly written genre novel, because the story is meant to stop short. Asking questions to which deeper worldbuilding might provide an answer – Why does Vianne have magic? Where does the deathless man come from? What makes Wolfboy howl? – would only detract from the rhythms of the narrative proper.  Magic here is at its purest form, resulting from the perennial what if of human imagination and leading to stories which are essentially folkloric in nature. Just as a child reading Rapunzel has no need to ask how a princess’s tears can cure blindness, so does an adult reading Of Bees and Mist have no need to wonder why Meridia’s childhood home is full of sentient fog. Asking is not the point; the people – and their situations – are.

Am I on the right track, here? If so, what might we call this nameless story-genre? If not, why? Do you agree or disagree with the books I’ve mentioned? Do you have some recommendations of your own? Come on, internets – inquiring minds must know!

Water to Burn

Last night, I stayed up until 2am finishing my ARC of Water to Burn, the second Nola O’Grady novel by Katharine Kerr. Despite being set in San Francisco and following the exploits of Nola, a psychic employed by a secret government agency on the side of Harmony, it’s not quite accurate to describe the series as urban fantasy. For one thing, an ongoing plot point from book one, License to Ensorcell, focuses on the discovery and exploration of deviant world-levels – that is to say, alternate and parallel realities both similar and dissimilar to Earth – populated in some instances by doppelganger inhabitants raised under vastly different circumstances. This puts the flavour closer to SF than fantasy at times, raising questions about the setting’s scientific theories and contributing to a rich sense of narrative possibility. The series is also distinguished by its strong sense of Earth politics: Nola’s offsider, bodyguard and love-interest since book one, Ari Nathan, is a high-level operative with both Interpol and the Israeli government. While some writers might be tempted to mention this merely by way of exotic background detail, Kerr actively incorporates it into events, not only in terms of Ari and Nola’s respective efforts to balance duties and secrets with their personal relationship, but also as a source of cross-cultural commentary and plot relevance. Just as Nola’s character is defined in large part by her family ties, psychic gifts, religious upbringing and Irish-American heritage, so too is Ari defined by his family ties, martial gifts, religious upbringing  and Israeli heritage. Kerr has done her research, and if ever Nola lapses into forgetting that Ari, despite his perfect English, was raised in a different culture, neither she nor the reader is allowed to keep that ignorance for long.

Plot-wise, the events of Water to Burn follow closely on from the end of License to Ensorcell: the Chaos masters who orchestrated the events of book one are still at large, though their influence is being felt in difference ways. A twelve-year-old girl drowns when a freak wave seemingly pulls her from the shore; Reb Ezekiel, the self-professed prophet who ran the kibbutz where Ari spent his childhood, has been sighted in the city, despite having been thought dead for some years; and a shady businessmen appears to be blackmailing Nola’s affluent brother-in-law. Though seemingly disparate at first, these separate occurrences all begin to tie in with the mysterious Peacock Angel cult and its Chaotic adherents, increasing in intensity as Nola and Ari get closer to the truth.

There are several satisfying differences that set this series apart from other UF works. Firstly, the romance: though Nola and Ari flirted and danced around each other for a significant portion of License to Ensorcell, by novel’s end, they’d reconciled their attraction and embarked on an actual relationship. There is no mysterious third wheel waiting in the wings to try and turn things into a love triangle; nor did Water to Burn begin with either party calling things off, thereby restoring a default state of unresolved sexual tension. Instead, they look for a new apartment and move in together, while Nola wrestles internally with her fear that ‘picket-stakes of domesticity’  are dropping into place in her life, confronting her past issues with commitment and abandonment. Given the fact that her other novels have cheerfully featured romantic, sexual scenes, the fact that Nola and Ari’s encounters are always hidden by a cut-to-black suggests  that Kerr has made a conscious decision to differentiate the O’Grady books from the plethora of sexy, paranormal crime series already available. In this instance, the romance isn’t about wild, passionate tension, but rather about two defensive, similarly wounded people struggling to turn chemistry into love, with all the pitfalls, doubts and self-recriminations that involves.

The series also places a tremendous significance on family. Again, this runs counter to the usual intuitions about urban fantasy: Nola’s gifts are genetic and certainly contributed to her childhood woes, but she is neither an isolate orphan nor an only child. Instead, we’re  introduced to the loving-yet-complicated network of brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles – most of them similarly gifted, though in different ways – that make up Nola’s family. We know her mother is in deep denial about her own magical gifts, let alone everyone else’s, while her father, for reasons that are slowly being uncovered, was forced to leave his wife and children while they were still a young family, with consequences that are still being felt in the present. Nola has seven siblings, one of whom was murdered before the start of the first book; a strong relationship with her caring, religious Aunt Eileen; and a plethora of other such kinships, each one uniquely complicated in the way that only extended family can be. So far, we’ve only been allowed to glimpse Ari’s history, but his own upbringing has already proved crucial to the plot, and with Nola fixing to secretly contact his mother, it seems plain that sooner or later, his family secrets will be subject to just as much scrutiny as Nola’s.

Finally, there’s the issue of Nola’s eating habits. As the books are narrated almost exclusively from her POV, the fact that both Ari and her family members are concerned about her having an ‘eating disorder’ is brushed off in her thoughts as meddlesome paranoia. And yet, we also see exactly how much calorie-counting Nola really does: scrimping her portions, foregoing meals, declining various dishes at family gatherings, and generally keeping herself half-starved. It’s both a refreshing and a confronting move on Kerr’s part: refreshing, in the sense that so many heroines are described as meeting society’s physical ideals without any conscious effort on their part or narrative criticism about the value of said ideals, and confronting, because by the end of Water to Burn, we’re left in no doubt that Nola really does have a problem. Happily, our heroine seems to understand this, too, but issues of esteem are never easy to overcome, and we’re left with the knowledge that Nola has a long road yet to travel.

Water to Burn is an immensely satisfying second installment in the Nola O’Grady series. Rather than relying on sexual tension and violence as the backbone of her series, Kerr has instead built a rich, original, complicated world of politics both real and magical, parallel worlds, family ties, cultural clashes and work-in-progress relationships that cannot help but suck the reader in – and I can’t wait to read book three.

Women, SF & Feminism

The year is 1991; the setting, my kindergarten classroom. I am not quite five years old, and if this isn’t my very first day of school (memory being understandably hazy about such things) it’s certainly sometime in my first two weeks. Our young class has spent the morning seated on the floor, and now our teacher, Mrs Pallier, tells us all to stand up and find a desk. There is no seating plan; the ‘desks’ are actually conglomerates made of four or so smaller tables, big enough to seat about eight students each. Despite our newness, groups of friends have already started to form – one such being the cadre of boys who, by Year 6, will have become the male half of the popular crew. They pick a desk and sit down together. I don’t have a group yet; the boys, though, are interesting, and there’s a spare seat at their table. I go to take it, but no sooner have I sat down than they all leap up again, yelling about the undesirability of girls, and run to colonise the next desk down. This leaves me with a choice: either I can stay where I am, feeling hurt but pretending I really did want this particular chair, or I can follow them and see what happens. Desks are starting to fill up, after all – they have to sit somewhere. More importantly, though, I’ve discovered a secret power: I can make the boys run, and even though I really did want to join them, thinking of it as a game – one where I’m in charge, the chaser – is easier, less hurtful, than staying still and accepting their rebuff. And so I get back up, and follow them again.

What happened next is hazy. I couldn’t say whether I won or not, if I claimed a seat at their table or ended up somewhere else. But I remember the choice, and the thoughts preceding it, with clarity.

I mention this because there’s been some recent discussion about the perception of women SF writers within the industry generally and their relationship with feminism in particular, and when it comes to the assertion that such authors are given less credence, less prominence and less publicity than their male counterparts – when I am presented with the image of women writers chasing after acceptance in a male-dominated area – the first thing that always springs to mind, or rather the first memory, is the image of a table of five-year-old boys in shrieking fear of Girl Germs. It’s not just this debate, either: earlier this year, there were questions asked about the feminisation of epic fantasy, and more recently VS Naipaul has asserted that women writers are “unequal” to him. Unclenching one’s teeth sufficiently to talk about this latter case, there’s something interesting to unpick in Naipaul’s claim that:

“I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.” 

It’s an argument I’ve encountered elsewhere: that women just write differently to men, that everything from their subject matter to their sentence structure and word choice sets them apart. It’s a breathtakingly flawed assertion, and yet so fiendishly simple that, like most such lies, it is easily believed, repeated and socially countenanced. Ignoring the fact that this is an unquantifiable, personal claim hinging entirely on anecdotal evidence, how often do we read anything without seeing a name attached? Almost never, would be my guess – unless, of course, you’re someone in charge of vetting anonymous submissions to an academic publication, which is by no means irrelevant to the topic at hand. Surely, if Naipaul is correct, the flaws which distinguish women’s writing and ideas from those of men will be present in any type of writing, and not just works of fiction? If so, wouldn’t the publication records of academic journals with a policy of anonymous submissions – or better yet, journals which had recently switched from named submissions to anonymous submissions – be the perfect venue to test the theory? What about studies assessing the difference a male or female name makes to the reception of a single piece of writing?

As it happens, such data and studies do exist – bur rather than confirming Naipaul’s assertion, what they show is that switching to anonymous submissions increases the number of female-authored articles accepted for publication in academic circles. Take a moment to appreciate the significance of that finding. By removing a writer’s name – and, by extension, their gender – from the equation, more women are being published. This is all that changes. For obvious reasons, blind submissions will not translate as a solution to the bias in literary circles and awards: books are published with names on the cover, and even in the case of novels we’ve not yet read, there’s still a strong chance that we’ll know who the author is. But when, for instance, Gwyneth Jones expresses a wish to have used a male pseudonym for her earlier feminist works in order to have bettered their success, rather than criticise this as a betrayal of the sisterhood, we could perhaps extrapolate that the same biases which afflict academia are just as omnipresent in the fiction/SFF world, and that wanting to avoid their ill-effects is entirely understandable.

In the same Women’s Hour segment where she expressed that opinion, Jones went on to say:

“If you’re a feminist, it’s much better to be a man, with the science fiction public.”

It’s an inflammatory suggestion, but one which seems all too sadly in keeping with the bias against women. Reading through the reactions of Jones, Timmi Duchamp and Cheryl Morgan to the Women’s Hour interview, much of what’s being discussed is the idea that the US and the UK have different notions of feminism; or that writers from these countries do; or that these particular writers do; or some combination thereof. As a recently expatriated Australian, I don’t know enough about the differences in feminist practice on either side of the pond to contribute to that debate. What I take away from this particular conversation, however, is the fear that simply being a woman SF writer, regardless of the actual content of one’s books, is enough to see those works branded as feminist by readers who have no interest in feminism – a misapprehension which ineluctably forces the writer to argue that their gender ought not stand in the way of their writing. Thus, the author is forced to speak out as a feminist – thereby reinforcing the perception of their works as feminist writings – only because this was already assumed to be a foregone conclusion. And so we go round, and round again, until it’s easier just to pretend to be male feminist, the way George Sand once did, than to confess to being a female one.

What a squeamish irony that is: that even feminism is more palatable when espoused by male advocates! Presumably, this is because women, as the movement’s primary beneficiaries, are seen to have more of a personal agenda in putting it forwards; whereas men, who are casually assumed to gain nothing from its success, and are vindictively assumed to lose everything, are seen to be more objective. If male feminists become passionate in their writing, then it is a rational passion, commendable for its intelligence; but if women feminists do likewise, then they’re guilty of pushing a personal, politically correct agenda, or of being angry, hysterical writers. Obviously that’s a provocative statement. Obviously we want and need male feminists: I am by no means suggesting that the feminism of men is less important, less relevant or less meaningful than the feminism of women. But I can and will criticise those members of the public, be they feminist or unfeminist, male or female, who find feminism to be more palatable when it comes from men; because if you think men are intrinsically more lucid on the subject than women, or think women can’t be trusted to speak dispassionately about it, then you’ve probably missed the point.

Back in 1991, I chased the boys rather than be ignored by them, and some time over the next seven years of primary school, they stopped running and became my friends. Regardless of genre, authors in the fiction world – like children in a playground – have no recourse to anonymity, no ready means of stripping names and faces away, to let our words stand on their own bare merits. Instead, we must take the harder road: to actively consider the principles of equality, to hold ourselves accountable for our own biases, and to continually question whether or not we’ve truly overcome them.

Litfic, Feminism, Genre & Subgenre

I’ve just been reading this interesting post over at Katharine Kerr’s blog about trying to define what constitutes a work of literary fiction, as opposed to a work of genre fiction. She also talks about the dangers of arguing against litfic and the literary establishment by way of derogatory strawman arguments, not only because this is exactly the kind of negative pigeonholing SFF fans and writers have always railed against when it’s turned our way, but also because it’s unhelpful in trying to understand what literary fiction actually is. It’s an interesting question, but in trying to answer it, I ended up in quite a different place to where I started. Rather than hijack the conversation, therefore, I’m going to take the comment I left as a starting point for answering a slightly different question: how might a lack of named literary subgenres be impeding the success of women literary writers?

As a casual glance at the blogsphere will reveal, there’s been considerable recent debate in SFF quarters about the feminisation of epic fantasy and the nihilism of gritty fantasy, conversations that have been in no small part facilitated by our ability to distinguish between the different SFF subgenres. We know that Tolkien is the Mitochondrial Eve of fantasy writers: one way or another, all our works descend from his. But as with the human race, things have grown more and more diverse with successive generations, such that trying to use fantasy as an exclusive, catch-all terminology has become, except in the most general sense, both useless and inaccurate. Without a language of subgenre terms with which to discuss these differences, it seems inevitable that SFF writing would automatically default to using Tolkien as a blueprint for all new stories – and indeed, up until very recently, we can see that this was the case. Only when writers started trying to break new ground did an alternate language spring up to try and describe their efforts. Partly, it must be admitted, this happened as a means of distancing such heretical works from their canonical predecessors, but also because it was suddenly necessary to look back over everything that had happened since Tolkien and ask whether fantasy could – or should – be more than just the same old Eurocentric, medieval vision of elves, dwarves, men and halflings fighting a succession of ultimate Dark Lords over and over again.

Suddenly, fantasy ceased to be a universal term, and once we started talking and thinking in subgenres, it became easier to understand why new types of story were arising; to pinpoint the tropes their authors wanted to address or change, and for what reasons. True, it also became harder to classify individual works, and the need to fit each and every book into a particular box is something we’re all still arguing about. But the fact is that language is important. Naming a thing allows us greater control over it, and that’s true regardless of whether we’re talking about the magic of Earthsea or the politics of Earth. Consider, for instance, this article by feminist philosopher Jennifer Saul, wherein she talks about the significance of language in feminism. To quote:

“Languages may also lack words for things that matter a great deal to women. This sort of gap is another way that a language can be seen as encoding a male worldview. The term ‘sexual harassment’, for example, is a recent feminist innovation. Women’s discussion of their experiences led them to see a certain common element to many of their problems, and as a result they invented the term ‘sexual harassment’. Once the problem was named, it became much easier to fight sexual harassment, both legally and by educating people about it.”

Which brings me to the matter of the Orange Prize – or rather, to the recent suggestion that an equivalent award is necessary to combat sexism in the Australian literary scene. It’s none too encouraging a sign when women take steps to set themselves apart from men, not because they want or ought to, but because discrimination has left them with no other means of achieving success. For an intelligent and comprehensive rundown on the issue, I highly recommend this excellent piece by writer Benjamin Law, wherein he says, among other things:

“If you take Brookner’s insistence that a meritocracy exists, what are you supposed to make of the raw figures? Books written by women are reviewed less. Women win fewer literary prizes. If that is a meritocracy, then you have to buy into the argument that books by women must be inherently inferior. I can’t accept that. The danger on relying on meritocracy is assuming one actually exists.”

But what, I hear you cry, does any of this have to do with SFF subgenres? Only that women SFF writers seem to have a stronger platform from which to argue their case for equality, simply because their dialogue about content, bias and narrative is so much more linguistically robust than in the literary community. This is not to say that the problems outlined by the recent VIDA statistics on the representation of women vs men in literary reviews are absent in SFF; indeed, it has been demonstrably proven that they aren’t. But when it comes to the question of awards, it doesn’t seem unduly optimistic to say that change is in the air. The Hugo Award nominees for Best Novel in 2011, for instance, are all, with one exception, women, and the situation is identical when it comes to the Nebula. The 2010 Campbell Award was won by a woman, Seanan McGuire, and for the purposes of my argument about subgenre, it doesn’t strike me as irrelevant to note that McGuire’s debut novel, Rosemary and Rue, was the first work of urban fantasy to win its author the Campbell, nor that it did so in competition with another female-authored UF novel: Gail Carriger’s Soulless.

So much of the debate I’ve seen about the disenfranchisement of women literary writers centers on anger at the perception of women’s novels as being “domestic” (where such a label is pejorative) compared to those written by men, which naturally deal with Big Themes and Important Issues. What has always struck me about this complaint – aside from the fact that it appears to be correct, both intuitively and in terms of critical perception – is the difficulty these writers seem to have articulating the problem. They talk about literature and literary fiction as a single entity, grasping after a magical phrase that will allow them to explain simultaneously why women might indeed be more prone to writing about domestic topics, why this is not a bad thing, and why it still counts as literature. Because such amorphous justifications are exactly what subgenre terminology exists to prevent, allowing us to acknowledge that two different types of storytelling are related to one another, that they share a common ancestry and ultimately a common genre, but that their conventions and approaches may nonetheless be very, very different. As in the case of last year’s Hugo Award nominees for Best Novel, it allows us to put vastly different works like China Mieville’s The City & The City, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest on the same ballot, despite the fact that the first is heavily noir/New Weird, the second is dystopian SF, and the third is urban fantasy/mythpunk.

It also puts the SFF community in an excellent position to discuss tropes and archetypes. A communal, cultural resource like TV Tropes provides a go-to lexicon for discussing narrative structure in shorthand, with many such terms finding their way into the mainstream dialogue as a matter of course. Perhaps it’s because the origins and inspirations of SFF are so heavily rooted in jargon-heavy areas like mythology, science, linguistics, pop culture and folklore that the community has taken so readily to isolating and naming its parts; alternatively, it seems reasonable to assume that any group of people who spend a significant proportion of their intellectual lives reading made-up languages, interpreting new cultures and memorising invented systems of magic will inevitably come to appreciate the deep precision and relevance of language. Whatever it is, the literary community doesn’t seem to share it – or if it does, then to nowhere near the same extent.

As more than one would-be inventor of slanguage has come to realise, there’s no telling which new terms will enter our collective vocabularies or die a series of quick deaths. But as corny and New Age as it might seem, it strikes me that the writers most deeply concerned with the state of literary fiction and its biases against women could do a lot worse than trying to coin some terms of their own: to name the archetypes they wish to invert or criticise and thereby open up the discussion. If authors can be thought of as magicians in any sense, then the root of our power has always rested with words: choosing them, arranging them and – most powerfully – inventing them. Sexism won’t go away overnight, and nor will literary bias. But until then, if we’re determined to invest ourselves in bringing about those changes, it only makes sense to arm ourselves with a language that we, and not our enemies, have chosen.

Tron: Legacy

A lot has been happening recently, what with the upcoming move to Scotland, our recent trip to Sydney and the general madness of the season, but I’m not going to blog about that, partly because it was exhausting the first time around, but mostly because writing about packing boxes is only slightly less interesting than reading about packing boxes. So! Instead, you get a long, spoilery review of Tron: Legacy, which we saw this evening, because unpacking the weirdness of Hollywood cinema is like candy unto my soul, with the added bonus of not involving boxes of any kind.

It is worth noting from the outset that I am yet to see the original Tron. Saying so out loud, where “out loud” can be read as “on the internet”, makes me feel something of a traitor to my own geekhood. More importantly, this means that, while there were clearly a multitude of references to the first film in Legacy, I was in no position to gauge how faithful they were, or how meaningful: instead, I can simply vouch that they were there, and didn’t appear to add much.

The main gambit of Legacy – wherein a technological/scientific maverick father either dies, vanishes mysteriously, becomes a crazy recluse or is killed along with his equally brilliant wife (assuming she hadn’t already died of unspecified causes some years previous), leaving their genius offspring to grow up in isolation from the grand and noble calling that is their birthright until such time as Our Story Starts – is a stalwart backbone of the SF/F genre. This is where Batman, Tony Stark, Astro Boy and Luke Skywalker all got their motivation, and as such, I’m not about to knock it as a premise. However! It is also, as such, a plotline that comes with baggage. Either the Absentee Maverick Dad serves as a key-but-background motivator for the protagonist, or Uncovering What Really Happened That Fateful Night is the driving force behind the story. That’s a black and white way of doing disservice to a complex and potentially powerful plot device: what I mean to say is, movies have time limits. Unlike in TV shows, serial comics or novels, films have a very limited space in which to disseminate key information, particularly as regards backstory, and unless an extremely cunning and original scriptwriter/director team is at the wheel – or possibly unless they have the well-defined space of a trilogy in which to operate – it behoves moviemakers to pick one version or the other and then stick with it.

Legacy does not do this, which is why a comparatively simple three-act narrative has ended up with a runtime of just over two hours. We begin with the traditional Bedtime Story scene, wherein the Maverick Parent – here computing legend Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) – imparts the Secret Of What Is To Come in the form of a fairytale to his wide-eyed, cherubic spawn. Then, of course, he ups and vanishes, leaving us to watch as the Company That Was His Brainchild Is Taken Over By Unscrupulous Businessmen Who Do Not Share His Dream. In fairness, these early scenes were some of the best in the film: they did a good job of introducing us to protagonist Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) and created a strong build-up to the main event. Unfortunately, once Sam enters the world of Tron – emphasis on world, for reasons that will hopefully become apparent – this tension is soon lost.

Even to moviegoers completely lacking in narrative presience, it should be obvious that any danger faced by the protagonist before the halfway point will not – cannot – prove fatal, and instead must only serve to move the plot forward. Under those circumstances, only secondary characters are at risk, and at this point in Legacy, there were none. So when Sam is instantly thrust into the gladiatorial games portion of the Tronverse, it is very, very hard to feel anything even vaguely like apprehension. Yes, those scenes looked lovely in 3D, but twenty minutes later, the only thing to have been achieved was, finally, the introduction of Clu, aka Evil Jeff Bridges, whose next move as the villain – having first decided not to execute Sam in order to talk at him for a bit – was to send him back into the games so that the two of them could fight, on bikes, with matched teams of Nameless Dudes. At which point, I started to hear Scott Evil yelling in my head about how stupid Doctor Evil is for repeatedly trying to kill Austin Powers using a ridiculously slow-moving torture device instead of just shooting him on the spot. But, whatever. It’s not like Legacy is alone in having this fault, and it’s certainly never stopped me from enjoying James Bond. I dealt with it and moved on.

Not unsurprisingly, the following action scene involves the glittery, exploding-into-pixels deaths of all Sam’s fellow bike-riding Namless Dudes, about which I did not care because they were henchmen written into the plot for the sole purpose of being rent asunder. And then – lo! – we have the introduction of Hot Chick, aka Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who performs the ever-so-textbook Heroine Rescuing A Hero Only He Doesn’t Know She’s A Girl Yet Because She Is Mysterious And Wearing A Helmet shtick by driving her all-terrain quad-jeep-bike-thing into the grid and yanking him out of harm’s way. Once they’ve put some distance between them and the bad guys, she takes off her voice-distorting helmet (which we never see again) and reveals herself, to the requisite jaw-dropped approval of our hero.

It is at this point, gentle reader, that we start to run into difficulties.

You see, when Sam looks back over his shoulder and remarks on the fact that Evil Jeff Bridges and his Orange Evil Henchmen are not following, Quorra replies that this because they can’t – unlike their own vehicle, which has special grippy tyres for traversing rocky terrain, the bikes used by their enemies won’t work off grid. Which would be fine and dandy, if they were not actually inside a digital environment where tyres do not matter, and even if there was a good reason for this to be so, Evil Jeff Bridges totally has like a million badass flying devices, surely he can chase them somehow, etc. But again, whatevs, let us move forward to the bit where Sam has a Touching Reunion With The Real Jeff Bridges, his dad who has been trapped in the Tronverse for quite a while now, and who is all zen and hippyish and continually refers to his own son by saying things like, ‘listen, man’ and using the word ‘jazzed’ unironically. At this point, my inner movie-referencing monologue switched from Austin Powers to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, because there is something decidedly chessboard about the Tronverse. It’s not just the Colours As Alignments thing or the fact that, ultimately, we are meant to be in a gamespace: it’s that Maverick Dad, dressed in yogic white and living in a totally white house, likes to stand on his balcony and stare wistfully at the Dark And Brooding Lair of the Evil Jeff Bridges while espousing a theory of passive non-violence a la Anne Hathaway’s White Queen. Which is, if you dwell on it for too long, a deeply weird comparison to make.

And then they all have dinner.

There are so many problems with this.

Now, I get the point of this scene. I do! It is cute and unexpected and sort of sweetly awkward while also providing a striking contrast between the stark, futuristic decor and the homeliness of three people sitting down to a medieval meal of roast suckling pig. (Seriously.) But again, as with the tyres: we are in a computer world. Admittedly, it is a sketchily defined computer world into which the physical bodies (rather than just the minds) of Maverick Dad and Sam have been magically transported, but given that the only other occupants of said world are computer programs, and given also that the world itself appears to be restricted to a nebulously defined cityspace surrounded by blank rock and deep water, and given again that Maverick Dad’s powers in this world are limited to the ability to manipulate what he himself has created, and given finally that any food made in this world must be made of code, which is presumably ill-suited as a form of human nourishment, then where did the goddam pig come from and why the hell can they eat it?

Yeah.

And then, then we have the explanation of what Maverick Dad was so excited about all those years ago: within this digital realm, a race of sentient computer-beings called isos had spontaneously came into being, creatures whose very existence would have changed the face of absolutely everything ever if not for the fact that Evil Jeff Bridges, who was originally designed as a program-copy of Maverick Dad to run the world of Tron, viewed them as a chaotic threat to his perfect order and wiped them all out in a hideous genocide known as the Purge. (Anyone who does not instantly recognise that Quorra must be the sole surviving iso gets a smack on the wrist, for that is how this story goes, forever and ever, amen.) Timewise, we are now at about the halfway point – that is to say, about an hour or so in – when we finally learn what is meant to be happening. Evil Jeff Bridges paged someone in the real world so that Sam would come to Tron, which was the only way of opening the portal to the outside world. There is, of course, an ever-narrowing window before the portal closes again, prior to which Sam wants to take Dad and Quorra and get the hell out of Dodge. But! If they use the roads that lead to the portal, Evil Jeff Bridges will catch them and steal Maverick Dad’s disc, which contains all his knowledge on how to operate the Tronverse, thus allowing him to escape into the real world and wreak havoc (think the end of The Lawnmower Man, but in reverse). Dad is also unwilling to try and reprogram his evil twin, because this will result in both their deaths. For some reason. So instead, he wants to sit tight until – wait for it! – the native programs revolt and overthrow the government.

It is one thing to rely on traditional plots and narrative devices to bump your story along and bulk out your characterisation. Indeed, in action movies, it’s sort of the point, because of that whole lack-of-time thing we talked about earlier. But a complete abandonment of causal, emotional and narrative logic? Is not even in the same ballpark.

How about this for a suggestion: Maverick Dad destroys his disc, on account of how he doesn’t need it to live or utilise his awesome powers or remember anything about the Tronverse, whips up a goddamed super-speed plane seeing as how he is sort of the god of this universe and also a kickass engineer, flies all three of them to the portal, and then deletes Evil Jeff Bridges from the outside as Sam keeps suggesting they do? This is not so hard. Instead, he refuses to do anything, which is the cue for Quorra to sneakily help Sam by giving him the coordinates needed to find a rabble-rousing program named Zeus who can help him get to the portal. Maybe. If anyone can. (Dramatic chord.) So Sam steals his dad’s Awesome Grid Bike and rides it straight down the road that connects their hideout to the centre of the city, seriously you would think the bad guys might have noticed that before getting scared away by their lack of grippy tyres. And then? Then he trades the bike for a cloak so he can escape detection by going into a fashionable club where the first thing Zeus does is identify him loudly in front of everyone.

A moment of pause, dear readers! Because my constant use of italics might be leading you to suspect that I was sitting in my cinema seat, teeth clenched and frothing at the mouth with every successive outrage. In fact, this was not so. Yes, I spotted these things, and yes, they irked me. But despite its complete and utter lack of sense, there was something sort of charming about the plot, and after so much drifty, father-and-son-reuniony chat, it finally felt like we were getting somewhere. I have a very high threshold for bullshit in my cinema. Specifically, I do not care how ridiculous a plot might be, provided it is not endeavouring to take itself too seriously. This tends to make me a very charitable watcher of trash, and a very scatching watcher of anything intellectual, because if you are going to make a film whose sole purpose is to try and wring me out emotionally so as to Connect With The Big Issues Of Our Times, you had damned well better not go and break the logic which sustains your heartfelt premise by, say, setting a snake on fire. All of which is a long way of saying that, up until this point, I had been relatively on board with the whole (as my husband dubbed it afterwards) electro-opera thing.

Then the bad guys found the Awesome Grid Bike, and announced that now, finally, at long last, they could trace it back to its point of origin – the hidden lair of Maverick Dad.

Um.

Early on in Legacy, there was a scene where Evil Jeff Bridges steepled his fingers and expressed a desire for Maverick Dad to make the next move, as though the two of them were perennially locked in a game of wits over dominion of the Tronverse – not an unreasonable supposition, given that Maverick was trapped there for twenty years with only Quorra for company. What with the grid-bike road leading right to his house, the Evil Citadel being visible from the Maverick’s balcony and the fact that the whole point of bringing Sam to the Tronverse was to simultaneously open the portal while luring Maverick into the open, I’d sort of assumed that the bad guys knew where he was, but couldn’t penetrate his defences, given that creators tend to be fairly good at defending their home turf in a hostile universe which also they made themselves.

BUT NO.

He was hidden! All this time! Just a short ride – or, presumably, walk – away! In a straight line! Down a road! With no defences whatsoever! Holding the one thing that Evil Jeff Bridges really wants! With nobody looking for him! Ever!

UNTIL THEY TOTALLY FOUND HIS BIKE AND SOMEHOW COULD TELL WHERE IT CAME FROM, EVEN THOUGH THAT MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL.

A lot happens after this. By which I mean, not a lot happens at all, only it takes another hour. The bad guys go to the hidden lair and poke around only to find that (duh) Maverick Dad and Quorra have already gone to go help Sam, which results in Quorra getting part of her arm cut off, Maverick’s disc being stolen and the supposedly good rabble-rouser guy being revealed as TOTALLY A VILLAIN SURPRISE! (Hint: this was not a surprise.) And then they all hitch a lift on a magic goods train, which goes through the sky looking pretty and glowy for about a bajillion years while Sam catches his dad up on the war in Iraq and wifi and is in turn told that yes, Quorra is an iso who has never seen a sunrise ever and it is at this point, dear reader, that I realised exactly what was causing Legacy’s problems, viz: it is an epic fantasy movie in every important respect and not, in fact, sci-fi, because while even soft SF and space opera dignify their worldbuilding by saying, ‘Alien technology!’ or ‘Telekenesis!’ or ‘Unobtanium!’ or ‘Lightsabres!’, Legacy was basically just shouting, ‘Magic!’, but without anything that backs it up.

Take a moment to consider the plot thus far in terms of fantasy tropes. You have a Maverick Dad who, in the Time of Backstory, discovered a portal to another world, one where a rigidly enforced class divide between the rulers and ruled had resulted in a tradition of violent gladiatorial games for the amusement of the masses. Befriending a sympathetic fighter, the two of them overthrew the regime and installed a democracy, with the Maverick’s trusted lieutenant left in charge while he commuted between worlds. But then, a coup! The lieutenant went insane and ordered the genocide of hundreds of thousands of innocent newcomers to their territory, crowning himself king. Appalled and with no means of escape, the Maverick turned to mystical contemplation and confinement in an ivory tower, until the imminent fruition of the Evil King’s plans caused his now-grown son to reopen the portal. Stranded in a world whose rules he knew from the fairytales and bedtime stories of his childhood, the son did battle in the gladiatorial games of old, fell in love with the last survivor of the genocide and, together with his father, plotted the downfall of the Evil King, who – we are about to find out – has built an army of drones with which to invade Earth. Having finally captured the magic secrets of the Maverick in the previous battle, the enemy is now on the brink of success. Only by exploiting his mystical bond with the Evil King – the destruction of which results in both their deaths – is the Maverick finally able to save both his son and female protege, who return to our world as guardians of the secrets of this second, magic realm, and who will totally have makeouts in the not-too-distant future after she sees her first Earth sunrise.

Also, yes: that is bascially how the film ends.

There’s still some other random silliness packed into that scenario, the chief insult being that Quorra inexplicably decides to throw herself at the enemy to … do something. We’re not quite sure what, because the enemy hasn’t spotted their group, nobody else knows she’s an iso yet and she’s not trying to heroically distract the guards so the menfolk can sneak by (or at least, if she is, it’s not explained as such). So far as I can tell, the only point of this scene is to stretch the film out by another fifteen minutes with damsel-rescuing, ensuring that Quorra’s introduction as a Kickass SF Chick is completely undermined by the end of the film. Because after that first rescue scene, where she’s all awesome and mysterious? No skills whatsoever. Even the scene where her arm gets snapped off contrives to make her a damsel rather than a fallen warrior, and only seems to happen so that Maverick Dad could regrow it while she slept and thereby demonstrate her magical iso-ness to Sam. Plus and also: the genocide timeline is screwy. Only a day passes on Earth after Maverick Dad first discovers the isos before Evil Jeff Bridges kills them all, but when Quorra tells the story, she’d been living in a city for some time when it happened, and had to flee her home as everyone she knew was killed around her, at which point Maverick effected a Miraculous And Poorly-Explained Rescue That Makes No Sense.

So, yes. Tron: Legacy is a fantasy film in denial, which, given the SF context, becomes very problematic very quickly. Take that as you will. There’s a few nice moments packed in there amidst all the senseless plotting, and a weird consistency in the background details that belies the total lack of logic elsewhere. These include: fireworks that explode in geometric pixel designs rather than soft circles; the Maverick Dad’s use of 80s slang, which, while naff, makes sense when you consider that he’s been in a computer for twenty years reading zen texts and therefore hasn’t had cause to update his argot; and an enemy program picking up one of the Maverick’s books by the corner and then flipping through it sideways, because he’s obviously never seen one before. The 3D is nice, but only really gets a workout during the action scenes, which are surprisingly few and far between. The bulk of the film is dialogue, with not a lot going on and not a lot of sense to string it together. But, as has been mentioned previously, I have low standards. It was fun. The music was truly awesome. And at least it gave me a lot to think about.

Also, as a bonus for those who are curious, I started thinking about stories where the genius child of the absentee Maverick Parent is a daughter rather than a son, and was able to come up with three examples: Ritsuko from Neon Genesis Evangelion; Kimiko Sarai Kusanagi, aka Kim Ross from the webcomic Dresden Codak, and Deunan Knute from Appleseed. The two other uses of the bedtime story technique which sprang to mind are Inkheart and National Treasure. If you can think of any others in either case, I’d be interested in hearing about them!