Deus Ex Machinatio

An Open Letter to the SFWA

Dear SFWA, 

I'm a professional science fiction writer, but I'm not an SFWA member. I don't meet your membership criteria. That makes me very sad. 

My projects are games -- specifically alternate reality games. Even traditional video games, however, are not an SFWA qualifying market. I've gone to the SFWA website and stared at the application form more than once, trying to find a way to massage my body of work into something that fits, but I stop dead at fields like "Length (words)" and "Date of Sale." They just don't apply to me.

The SFWA is purportedly considering admitting game writers into their ranks. Please, please do. Game writers may be working in another medium from your norm, but we have common interests all the same, and would benefit from co-mingling our communities. Game writers, like print writers, wrestle with questions of characterization and theme, pacing, tension, plot. Many of us also work on a freelance or per-project basis, and are concerned with copyright and contracts. There is strength in numbers, so our strength would add to yours.

Like many other game writers, I've earned a place in the SFWA. Many of us earn a respectable living and reach more than respectable audiences -- we are professionals. And games are indisputably a realm where science fiction reigns. Game writers have created worlds with crazed AIs, biotechnology gone horribly wrong, or terrible demons. I've written extensively in an alternate universe with a society structured to reward intelligence.

But am I a published writer? Ah, there's the rub. By SFWA standards, I'm not. My work amounts to hundreds of thousands of words of text, to be sure. But to make an alternate reality game, those words are turned into video or Tweets or websites. While screenwriters with professionally produced scripts are welcome in the SFWA, there simply is no way to account for somebody like me, or my fellow game writers.

It wouldn't be an easy job for the SFWA, defining what games qualify and what don't. It's easy to know what counts as a professionally produced script. It's easy to know who's published with a qualifying print market. You can make clear-cut lists of criteria for these things. But how do you qualify a game, or worse, a transmedia project? Almost any definition will exclude someone deserving. Size of the production company, project budget, dollars earned by the writer? So many words of dialog, so many minutes of cut scenes? 

Even aside from that, in the games industry, credit is often murky. The byline of a short story, a novel, a film, tells you who was the principal contributor. But in a game, sometimes a writer doesn't get credited at all. Sometimes the writer is credited for another role they also played as a designer or producer. And sometimes, especially in my circles, there are so many writers working on a project that it's hard to know whose hand was guiding the wheel. But these are solveable problems, and solving them would benefit us all.

I know it wouldn't be easy for you to admit game writers; and harder still to admit writers like me, who are even more removed from clear-cut criteria. I have no publisher, as such; just clients and contracts. Who is the 'publisher' of a Tweet, or an email, after all? My work lives on the internet. But I'm still a professional science fiction writer, and I long to participate in the broader community of my peers. I urge you to find a way to admit, if not transmedia writers like me, at least mainstream game writers. We are all the same. And games are growing fast, so fast; look to the future. Isn't that what science fiction is all about?

Love,

Andrea

Racebending

I've talked about gender issues here before, but really, all elements of social justice are important to me. Gender, gender identity, sexuality, and of course good old-fashioned race exist in a dazzling variety of combinations, and they all deserve respectful representation in media. This is something I learned how to do at the knee of Naomi Alderman, and I hope to continue it as long as I work (which will probably be as long as there is breath in my body). Perplex City was a place where men and women existed in equal numbers in authority roles; where gay relationships -- and, yes, marriages -- were celebrated as much as hetero; where skins and faces and hair came in all colors, textures, and configurations, and not much was made of it. Not bad for a quietly but profoundly xenophobic city-state, don't you think?

Around my house, we're all big fans of the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. (Bear with me, I'll tie it all together in a minute.) We watched every episode, bought the video games, evangelized to our friends, and in general were the kind of consumers that any IP property longs to have. When we found out there was going to be a live-action film, we were cautious but excited; when we found out M. Night Shyamalan was on board to direct, we were frankly a bit skeptical, but still willing to give it a shot out of sheer loyalty to the franchise.  

Why did we love this show so much? It's hard to say. The writing was tight, surprisingly deep and sophisticated for a children's cartoon. Avatar actually examines the themes of good and evil at some length, and there is a whole season establishing that the people living in a nation with aggressive leadership are still just regular (and sympathetic) people. We loved the research that went into it -- four distinct styles of martial arts for the four types of 'bending.' We loved the original and heavily Asian-inspired world and aesthetic. I particularly loved that there are girls in active roles, both as heroes and villains. The show was like a breath of fresh air, even/especially to withered cynics like me who despair of getting my girls out of the pink ghetto of consumerism and incredibly strict gender roles. Last year, my daughter chose karate over ballet, and I'm sure Avatar influenced her decision.

But the news out of The Last Airbender film is bad, and it keeps getting worse. The problem? Casting.

See, in Avatar-the-cartoon, there simply isn't a white face on the show. It's all shades of brown and yellow. You see thinly-veiled renderings of Inuit and Chinese cultures, very specifically, with the people from them colored to match. I loved this to pieces (I was shocked to find this show was made in America, and not an import). The world is a big place, my friends, and I'd like my children to grow up knowing that not everybody looks like them, and that's OK. More important, I'd like all of those children in the world who are brown and yellow (and black and red, too) to get to see people on the screen like themselves, who are good people doing great things. And then the film announced who it had cast for the leading roles. And by now you see where this is going: They were white, every one of 'em. Nary even a suntan in the bunch. That's standard-op Hollywood racism right there; it happened with Earthsea, too.

Now, this was pretty awful, and people were justifiably upset about it, so the powers that be behind the film decided on a change of course and recast a role to a minority actor -- one. You know who he plays? Zuko, the bad guy. So suddenly a show that was all about the strength and beauty of Asian cultures and the interplay between them has turned into a movie where three white folks are battling a brown menace. I'm sure I don't need to draw you a diagram to explain why I find this problematic. This is just as awful as if they had kept the all-white casting -- and arguably it's a lot worse.

Fortunately, there are actions you can take to try to get the studio's head on straight. For a more thorough explanation of the problem here, including some historical information on screen shots, please see Racebending. They have a fantastic list of resources on things you can do to protest, from signing a petition and joining a Facebook group to writing to Paramount Pictures to contacting local media. 

Let's make some noise over this, people, and see if we can get it fixed. I'd really hate to have to skip the movie over this, but if nothing changes, me and a lot of other people will be staying home when it comes out.

In Which SciFi Channel Makes a Boneheaded Marketing Move

Today I happened on a news story that the Sci Fi channel is changing its name. To, uh, "SyFy." I am totally not making this up, guys. This would be merely a head-scratcher if it weren't for the appalling statement offered by channel president David Howe:

“What we love about this is we hopefully get the best of both worlds,” Mr. Howe said. “We’ll get the heritage and the track record of success, and we’ll build off of that to build a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand.”

Do you see what I see right there? They're trying to make a more "human-friendly brand." Does this mean existing viewers loyal to the SciFi brand are... aliens? Robots, maybe? Zombies?

It's not just the stupid name or the insulting reasons behind the change that makes this boneheaded; it's the combo of the two. If they'd wanted to defocus their origin, why on earth wouldn't they switch to something like 'SFC' for Sci Fi Channel (or Center, or Source, or Universe)? This is a common branding mistake, I think, when a company decides in order to get bigger and better it needs to shed the existing fans/customers/readers/viewers who made them a success in the first place. But how did Sci Fi.... er, SyFy get there?

Despite the suggestion on Twitter that the change is either an April Fool's joke that got into the wild early or the result of a chinchilla-staffed marketing department, I actually suspect there is a deeper trend at work. Let's go back to that article on TV Week again. 

During its fourth-quarter earnings call, parent General Electric said Sci Fi racked up a double-digit increase in operating earnings despite the beginnings of the recession.

It's not a move caused by poor performance. No, I think the key phrase here is "parent General Electric." Basically I think this is GE discomfited because it perceives SF/F as a tiny niche. SciFi is for pimply nerds with poor social skills who live in their parents' basements. These people, they collect comic books, they've never kissed a girl, they have pallid skin and a weight problem (alternating too fat or too thin for the sake of variety). We've all heard the stereotype, and it's why SF/F is considered a literary ghetto. 

But evidence just doesn't support this ridiculous supposition, particularly when it comes to filmed entertainment. If you look at IMDB's top-grossing films of all time for the United States, arguably nine of the top 10 are science fiction or fantasy. Of the top 50, I could only find six where I don't think I could make a compelling case for calling them works of either science fiction or fantasy.

So yeah, GE? Do a little research. And Sci Fi? Stick to your guns. You know you've got the good stuff, and it's mainstream good stuff, too. Go ahead and back out of this misguided attempt to fool people into thinking you're something different. Don't worry, we'll probably forgive you.

Making Book: A Few Scattered Thoughts

I met Teresa Nielsen Hayden once. It was an unexpected privilege for me; I'd been accepted in a writer's workshop at a con and she was acting as a last-minute substitute for one of the original panelists. My story was shredded in the workshop (and rightly so).

Being soundly critiqued by Teresa Nielsen Hayden (and, don't get me wrong, other notable and worthy professionals as well) was both dismaying and comforting. The comfort was that the meat of it was stuff I already knew, though I hadn't quite shifted it into the bits of my brain where you know how to fix it: Mainly, the piece in question was based on a fairly tired bit of folklore and didn't do anything particularly original with it, nor even anything interesting. It was dismaying because I've long held TNH in high esteem, and I was crushed to think that she would hereafter believe that was a sample of my best work¹, should she be moved to remember it at all².

I've long been a fan, you see. Part of this grows out of my teenage years, and a certain wide-eyed naivete toward publishing and the mysterious springs and gears that make it go. I knew she was One of the Editors at Tor, and I knew I loved books from Tor, and so she was part of a canon of semi-mythical creatures to me: the people who made the culture that I consumed.

In more recent years, I've been a fan because of Making Light. Making Light is an exceptional online community, populated with wonderful and erudite persons of all manner. Although I read it without fail, I comment but rarely. It has the distinction of being one of the few places on the internet where I feel thoroughly outclassed in every respect, so I rarely feel I have much to add to the conversation.

This is all by way of context so you can understand what I'm really here to say. I have finished reading Making Book, a collection of assorted writings by TNH. It's been out for years and years, and I'm not sure why I never bought it earlier. And once I had, I wasn't sure exactly what I expected from it. Probably something like a series of Making Light posts? Slushkiller writ large? But the book was not what I expected.

It's easy to think that you know people on the internet when you just don't. And I admire TNH and her work, but I really don't know her, not in any meaningful sense, and probably don't know most of the important things about her. All I really have is the public persona she presents to the internet, which is charming, intimidatingly competent and educated, and all-around the sort of person I'd love to grow up to be.

So Making Book was a fascinating read because it gave me a glimpse of Teresa Nielsen Hayden as she was before she was... well... Teresa Nielsen Hayden. A history, if not an actual blueprint. You see that time in her life when she and her husband were a couple of broke kids trying to build culture while being dealt a number of bad hands. She lays out bare her narcolepsy and the insidious, pervasive influence it had on her life. She's a person in there, and not a fabulous creature borne of the internet and exacting prose.

Is it arrogant to say I saw myself in her words? I did, I really did. I don't mean this in an hubristic sense. I mean: I read a letter that TNH wrote to Ted White, and in dizzying echoes through time I see that she is addressing the fannish culture of the late 60s with the same sense of signification that I might address the fanzine culture of the early 80s. (Though it does bear saying that she actually knew Ted White at the time, whereas I do not actually know Teresa, as discussed above.)

And this in turn makes me wonder at the children who are in grammar school today. Will they one day look back at the internet culture of the mid-oughts and see in our blogs and tweets the determination and luck that will create the next generation of demigod culture-makers³? Will they blink and think to themselves, "Wow, once such-and-such was trying to find their place in the world, just like me"?

I hope so, I really do. It makes the goal seem attainable, to know that your heroes were not born heroes, but had to grow to become them.

---

¹ And here I make my excuses, feeble as they may be: Applying for the workshop was a last-minute thing. The piece in question was ripped from a novel I'd written because it was the only thing I had lying around at the time that could stand on its own feet as a short story, and I badly wanted to meet Jim MacDonald (another panelist and Making Light contributor) and shake his hand over his selfless service to aspiring novelists at Absolute Write. I'd written the chapter/story/work in question years before, and my craft had leveled up significantly in the years intervening. I really should have known better, etc.

² I expect she does not. Or at least, I'd hope the piece wasn't so bad as to be memorably bad, given the vastness of her experience with bad writing.

³ This is not to assume I'll be a part of that canon, mind.

Retro-Futuristic

I've just been reading Isaac Asimov's short story, The Last Question. It's a lovely story, and deservedly one of the great classics from one of the Old Masters of the Golden Age of science fiction. If you've never read it, go take a look now and then come back.

Now look, I'm not going to be breaking any ground when I say that Asimov was truly visionary. This story was published in 1956. For a man who was writing over 50 years ago, he astonishingly sees a lot of the same things we're still writing and dreaming about today. In this story, you can see the fertile ground that sprouted transhumanism, singularitarianism, and a prophetic take on the way that humankind seems to be growing more and more inextricably linked with our technology. He writes about a future in which people ask computers for answers to everyday questions -- Google, anybody?

But what struck me, on reading this story again for the first time in lo these many years, were the subtle ways that he was wrong. The most notable, of course, is that reality's timescale has thus far collapsed to fit into the barest fraction of what he imagined. A hundred years or so into Asimov's future, a computer is the length of a family-sized spaceship, and it prints its answers on little slips of cellufilm. He sees an analog to a mobile data device: "It was only two inches cubed and nothing in itself, but it was connected through hyperspace with the great Galactic AC that served all mankind." But Asimov predicts this wonder technology a staggering twenty thousand years into the future! I've got a device lying on my coffee table right now that's not much bigger than that (and a lot more ergonomic). It's connected via what may as well be hyperspace to the great crackling data networks that claim to have answers to my every question.

And of course Asimov sees an optimistic future for spaceflight. It's difficult to be so enthused about man's future in space anymore. We went to the moon a mere 13 years after this story was written. In the 40 years since then, little to no progress has been made. In fact, nobody has gone back to the moon since 1972. Space exploration has veered heavily toward using cheap unmanned probes in favor of developing modes for human beings to travel in space. Still, he pulls a bit of deus ex machina to in the beginning, by positing a cheap and permanent solution to the question of supplying energy to do it. He was aware of the problems mankind would face.

Modern SF often envisions similar futures to the most distant ones in The Last Question -- but sees them happening mere hundreds or thousands of years in the future. This is a function of our fundamentally altered expectations about what the future will look like and how fast it'll get here. And why shouldn't we have a dramatically different expectation of the future, compared to the futures of 50 years ago? That future got here so very quickly (though as William Gibson would remind us, "The future is here -- just poorly distributed.") There are serious thinkers and scientists who suggest we'll see the end of senescence and achieve immortality in our own lifetime, a far cry from Asimov's twenty thousand years even if you assume they're wrong by an order of magnitude.

...and as I'm writing this, Bryan over at Infocult has posted an interesting piece that touches on some similar topics -- how our present informs the future we write about, or whether we want to read or write about the future at all. It's an old SF chestnut that the future we see reflects the deep sociological hopes and fears of the era that dreams it up. Of course the future of 1956 isn't the same as the future of 2008. But it's worthwhile for us to revisit these past dreams of what might come to pass to do a little soul-searching about how we as a society have changed.

The future isn't just a dream imagined by the present. The present creates the future. So if we peer into our looking-glass SF future and don't care for what we see there, then the answer is to look around today and see what we can change to make sure that isn't where we end up.

Escape Pod and the Rebirth of Short Fiction

The last few weeks, I've been listening to Escape Pod, a weekly podcast of short-form science fiction. I'm a latecomer to podcasts, both because of a strong preference toward text and transcripts, and because of my horrible continuous partial attention habits. It's hard to follow a story via audio while doing any other brain-engaging activity. But I've been conducting an experiment with podcasts while folding laundry, rocking the baby to sleep, and one near-catastrophic journey through Staples. The result: Escape Pod has completely won me over.

I can't speak for the entirety of the podcast's archives, but the episodes I've listened to have all featured spectacularly high-quality stories. The delivery is entertaining. The notes and feedback are thoughtful. This podcast is a jewel in the navel of the internets, and I'll be very glum the day I've fully excavated the depths of its archives. For these reasons alone, you should all go subscribe now.

But there's more. Escape Pod has single-handedly awakened my long-slumbering enchantment with short-form fiction. Sure, I've read a few shorts here and there. I've dabbled in the archives of Strange Horizons. I've devoured Shadow Unit (which is arguably not short fiction, but that's another whole post).

But it's been years -- decades -- since the last time I picked up anything like the once-coveted World's Best SF anthologies. If there was a Sailing to Byzantium since the late 1980s, or a Mimsy Were the Borogoves, then I've probably missed it. And that's a damn shame.

And more than that, Roger Zelazny, one of my absolute writing heroes, had a wicked, powerful way with the short story. While his Chronicles of Amber are certainly very powerful, it wasn't what inspired me. No, that mantle belongs to Unicorn Variations, a book of short stories. Those stories were often experimental, always fascinating, and particularly in the case of works like Recital, they stripped bare the actual process of creation for me. I could see what he was doing, and why, and it was Zelazny that first made me think, "I want to do THAT." Why would I abandon my roots, so to speak? Why distance myself from the kinds of writing that always spoke to me the most?

As with many things, it comes down to the bottom line. In recent years I've bought into the idea that the market for short fiction is on its deathbed. So it seemed more economically prudent to skip the writing of shorts in favor of novels. And anthologies simply slipped out of the scope of my attention, pushed out by novels, especially novels in series, and the cruel mistress that is my RSS reader.

But now there's Escape Pod, and I find myself plunged back into my love for short fiction as though it never left me. If there were an episode every day, I'd listen to it. I'm looking for more-like-that-please. I'm wondering if I should buy twenty years' worth of missed anthologies and scour the used book stores for copies of the last few decades of Hugo and Nebula winners.

And this fact brings me hope for the market for short fiction as a whole, too; surely I can't be alone, here. Maybe a new age of short SF/F is upon us. A Golden Age! A Renaissance! It might not be the most lucrative market, but it may well be one of the most rewarding. And if you're writing SF/F for the money, I hate to break it to you, but you're in the wrong business. At the end of the day, rewarding is the only thing that you can count on; and maybe it's the only thing that matters.

The Hugo Awards

There's an interesting conversation on age and SF fandom going on over at Tor.com. The focal point of this conversation is the observation by Nicholas Whyte that Elizabeth Bear is only the second writer born in the 1970s to have won a Hugo.

This has, in turn, caused me to reflect a little on the funny cross-media space I work in. I'm certainly not eligible for a Hugo; I've not written and published a novel, novella, or short story. (This is not to say that I think I deserve one, mind you. I'm pretty sure I don't!) For the same reason, I'm not eligible to join the SFWA. But I think you'd be very hard-pressed to say that I'm not a science fiction writer, nor that my work isn't science fiction.

Some of you may remember that Perplex City was short-listed for a BAFTA -- and yes, the F and T stand for 'film' and 'television,' which is a bemusing development. I wrote a quarter of a million words for Perplex City, words that took the form of pixels lit up on a screen, but they told a story. Those words created an alternate sci-fi world, and yet this work was eligible for a film award, and not a science fiction award.

So what does it mean? Well, I think it means that a lot of the infrastructure of SF fandom is going to have to change, and they'll have to be hard, fast changes, or somebody else is going to come and eat their lunch while the teachers aren't looking. SXSW, I'm looking at you. Some are talking about instituting Hugos for categories like podcasts or video games, but frankly that doesn't go far enough. I want awards for innovation in cross-media storytelling, awards for best collaborative work of fiction, awards for best novel use of an emerging technology to tell a story.

This doesn't spell the end of SF/F as a genre, though. I think it means that traditional SF and its loyal fandom have moved into an era where many of the ideas, dreams and nightmares alike, of SF/F have come true. A lot of the phenomenal, innovative work has moved to SF places, webzines and video games and podcasts. Literature and community alike live in the internet. And SF/F is everywhere, now. Movies like The Dark Knight are hardly even recognized as genre film because they're so dazzlingly successful.

It's funny, isn't it? You wouldn't think the SF/F community would be resistant to the future. They were the ones expecting it all along.