the true, the good, the bad, and the ugly
Nov. 13th, 2012 02:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoelevenwhile in the bay area, and on the long flights to and from, i did a lot of reading.
i plowed through two complete issues of science, reading them cover-to-cover. reading an issue that way takes about four hours; science is hard. it was even worse than that, since there were seven or eight must-read articles in fields i'm trained in (biochemistry and/or data analysis) including ones on the structure of the ribosome, my favorite macromolecule,¹ a pair of back-to-back papers on the origins of the oxytocin/vasopressin hormone signaling system (birds do it, bees do it, even c. elegans do it.) and one discussing objections to ernst mayr's classic paper on the how's and why's of trait evolution. the two data-mining papers -- one of which talks about rigorously distinguishing causality from correlation -- were gravy.
then there were the merely cool papers, such as a new estimate of the state of world fisheries (Now with Even More Grim) and the usual batch of new stories on things scientific. i'm happy to post more about any of them, if anybody actually cares.
1: other people have a favorite color, i have a favorite macromolecule. my world is richer than theirs.
i also read hartwell and cramer's year's best sf 17, which was its usual mixed bag. rezendi confirms one thing i'd heard repeatedly at this year's worldcon: the conversation in short genre fiction is solely between authors of short genre fiction. i want to change that; thus, some feedback.
the good:
"six months, three days", by charlie jane anders. a fine piece that manages to live up to the conceit of the opening sentence: "the man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many futures.". it may be (by SFWA standards) a bit long for a short story, but it's an extremely good example of the form anyway. it takes off like a rocket and races to an interesting and satisfying conclusion. dïe überblönde had read it as part of the hugo voting -- i was too busy to bother -- and she liked it too: two propeller beanies.
"'and weep like alexander'", by neil gaiman. mr. gaiman manages to invent a new SF macguffin; a thing which ought to exist, but lacks obvious SF antecedents. the canonical example would be bob shaw's slow glass, from "light of other days": it's a very cool toy, but has nothing to do with ray guns, robots, or rocketships. gaiman's invention is also humorous.
"the education of junior number 12", by madeline ashby. a story about androids living in human society. ashby does one of the things i want from speculative fiction: she picks a bunch of starting conditions and runs them through to their conclusions, regardless of how odd those conclusions may be. if the protagonist wasn't an android, the story might be dismissed as a gadget story, but hey, i like those, and they're a vital part of making the genre work.
there were a few other good ones: "altogether elsewhere, vast herds of reindeer" is to typical speculations on uploaded trans- and/or post-human futures as the diamond age is to typical nanotech pixie-dust nonsense. (it's not quite that good, but it's close.) "laika's ghost" takes a couple of tinfoil-hat conceits and does something clever with them. "mercies" is a new variation on the theme of time-traveling assassin.
but the bad...
ashby's story is one of three about androids. the other two are -- i guess -- other parts of some conversation i don't know about. i don't care about it either, because the two stories are bad do androids dream of electric sheep? with a bit of blade runner sensibility thrown in for fun (or maybe the other way round). derivative is bad; derivative and bad at it is worthless. authors: please don't. editors: please return manuscript in SASE with box checked: "[x] done better already. see: _________". i don't like stories that are n-th generation copies of a better work.
"elliot wrote" has a Message. the editors say, "it interrogates ageism", whatever that means. what it means in the story -- yes, i'm going to spoil it, because it's rotten already -- is that nancy kress created a wise-beyond-his-years 15-year-old protagonist to beat a ditzy adult strawman antagonist in order to Say Something about age and maturity. how nice for you, nancy. strawmen are a somalian dime a dozen. i don't like Messages.
"our candidate" is a rant about real-world events with the words "science fiction story" scrawled at the top. i loathe faux fiction about current events. if i may paraphrase teresa nielsen-hayden's most excellent slushkiller checklist: "8. It’s nice that the author is working out his/her frustrations, but the process would be better served by getting a blog than by writing stories.". (also, many of the Messages have been written already by better hands. see above on Messages, n-th generation copies.)
i read escapist fiction to -- how should i put it -- escape from real-world events, especially politics. reading fiction is often described as a waking dream; referring to real-world events in them is as bad as being woken from a sleeping dream by one's neighbors having a loud, drunken argument. or in genre terms, it answer's gimli's rhetorical question in peter jackson's the two towers, "fangorn... what madness could have led them in there?" by pulling the camera back to reveal a starbucks sign sticking up from the forest. bad.
a bit of prolepsis: satire has its place. this piece is not satire, or if it is, it's worse satire than straight science fiction.
regardless: i don't like intrusions of the real world.
and the ugly:
"the ice owl": i think this hits all of my bad list², and is just not a good story to begin with. to quote TNH again: "7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.". also, the nominal protagonists are irritating, and the only potentially interesting character is an antagonist, but his story is maimed by a deus ex machina on behalf of the viewpoint character, a god mode sue or a mary tzu (tvtropes links, click at your peril) and in either case, a child genius. i don't like child geniuses.
also, as dïe überblönde reminds me, the meet cute at the end of the story is saccharine, and violates one of the story's few interesting conceits. (space travel is done by light-speed teleportation, takes years between stars, and therefore has interesting consequences for the construction of the story's setting and plot. except when the author wants a cute ending.)
2: an example: the story's main antagonists are the local taliban. really:
notice anything odd about the sentence? probably not, since it's out of the story's context. the story is set in a distant future, so remote that the 19th century germany chemist friedrich kekulé is only a legend, known only vaguely as "a capellan magister", that is, a wise man from one of the planets orbiting the star capella.³
yet the world "conservative" means to the characters precisely what it does in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: those advocating a particular set of social policies. for all we know, that far into the future, environmentalists are "conservatives", only only because their policies are considered outdated, but also because of the word's connection to "conservation".
3: kekulé gets a mention in the story because god mode sue recapitulates his dream about the structure of beneze, uses that knowledge to solve a puzzle box cum safe-with-combination-lock -- except that the author's knowledge of chemistry is too weak for the proposed solution to work -- read the antagonist's coded secret messages in the puzzle box, break the code, and challenge the antagonist with evidence of his, um, antagonism. because she is God Mode Sue.
in myphantom fanfic edit, that scene will end differently.
dïe überblönde voted for this turkey below "no award" for its hugo category. i feel that's generous. i think the author should be busted down to "slush pile dweller", and the editor of F&SF should be sent down to the minors for more training in the use of TNH's checklist.
i plowed through two complete issues of science, reading them cover-to-cover. reading an issue that way takes about four hours; science is hard. it was even worse than that, since there were seven or eight must-read articles in fields i'm trained in (biochemistry and/or data analysis) including ones on the structure of the ribosome, my favorite macromolecule,¹ a pair of back-to-back papers on the origins of the oxytocin/vasopressin hormone signaling system (birds do it, bees do it, even c. elegans do it.) and one discussing objections to ernst mayr's classic paper on the how's and why's of trait evolution. the two data-mining papers -- one of which talks about rigorously distinguishing causality from correlation -- were gravy.
then there were the merely cool papers, such as a new estimate of the state of world fisheries (Now with Even More Grim) and the usual batch of new stories on things scientific. i'm happy to post more about any of them, if anybody actually cares.
1: other people have a favorite color, i have a favorite macromolecule. my world is richer than theirs.
i also read hartwell and cramer's year's best sf 17, which was its usual mixed bag. rezendi confirms one thing i'd heard repeatedly at this year's worldcon: the conversation in short genre fiction is solely between authors of short genre fiction. i want to change that; thus, some feedback.
the good:
"six months, three days", by charlie jane anders. a fine piece that manages to live up to the conceit of the opening sentence: "the man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many futures.". it may be (by SFWA standards) a bit long for a short story, but it's an extremely good example of the form anyway. it takes off like a rocket and races to an interesting and satisfying conclusion. dïe überblönde had read it as part of the hugo voting -- i was too busy to bother -- and she liked it too: two propeller beanies.
"'and weep like alexander'", by neil gaiman. mr. gaiman manages to invent a new SF macguffin; a thing which ought to exist, but lacks obvious SF antecedents. the canonical example would be bob shaw's slow glass, from "light of other days": it's a very cool toy, but has nothing to do with ray guns, robots, or rocketships. gaiman's invention is also humorous.
"the education of junior number 12", by madeline ashby. a story about androids living in human society. ashby does one of the things i want from speculative fiction: she picks a bunch of starting conditions and runs them through to their conclusions, regardless of how odd those conclusions may be. if the protagonist wasn't an android, the story might be dismissed as a gadget story, but hey, i like those, and they're a vital part of making the genre work.
there were a few other good ones: "altogether elsewhere, vast herds of reindeer" is to typical speculations on uploaded trans- and/or post-human futures as the diamond age is to typical nanotech pixie-dust nonsense. (it's not quite that good, but it's close.) "laika's ghost" takes a couple of tinfoil-hat conceits and does something clever with them. "mercies" is a new variation on the theme of time-traveling assassin.
but the bad...
ashby's story is one of three about androids. the other two are -- i guess -- other parts of some conversation i don't know about. i don't care about it either, because the two stories are bad do androids dream of electric sheep? with a bit of blade runner sensibility thrown in for fun (or maybe the other way round). derivative is bad; derivative and bad at it is worthless. authors: please don't. editors: please return manuscript in SASE with box checked: "[x] done better already. see: _________". i don't like stories that are n-th generation copies of a better work.
"elliot wrote" has a Message. the editors say, "it interrogates ageism", whatever that means. what it means in the story -- yes, i'm going to spoil it, because it's rotten already -- is that nancy kress created a wise-beyond-his-years 15-year-old protagonist to beat a ditzy adult strawman antagonist in order to Say Something about age and maturity. how nice for you, nancy. strawmen are a somalian dime a dozen. i don't like Messages.
"our candidate" is a rant about real-world events with the words "science fiction story" scrawled at the top. i loathe faux fiction about current events. if i may paraphrase teresa nielsen-hayden's most excellent slushkiller checklist: "8. It’s nice that the author is working out his/her frustrations, but the process would be better served by getting a blog than by writing stories.". (also, many of the Messages have been written already by better hands. see above on Messages, n-th generation copies.)
i read escapist fiction to -- how should i put it -- escape from real-world events, especially politics. reading fiction is often described as a waking dream; referring to real-world events in them is as bad as being woken from a sleeping dream by one's neighbors having a loud, drunken argument. or in genre terms, it answer's gimli's rhetorical question in peter jackson's the two towers, "fangorn... what madness could have led them in there?" by pulling the camera back to reveal a starbucks sign sticking up from the forest. bad.
a bit of prolepsis: satire has its place. this piece is not satire, or if it is, it's worse satire than straight science fiction.
regardless: i don't like intrusions of the real world.
and the ugly:
"the ice owl": i think this hits all of my bad list², and is just not a good story to begin with. to quote TNH again: "7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.". also, the nominal protagonists are irritating, and the only potentially interesting character is an antagonist, but his story is maimed by a deus ex machina on behalf of the viewpoint character, a god mode sue or a mary tzu (tvtropes links, click at your peril) and in either case, a child genius. i don't like child geniuses.
also, as dïe überblönde reminds me, the meet cute at the end of the story is saccharine, and violates one of the story's few interesting conceits. (space travel is done by light-speed teleportation, takes years between stars, and therefore has interesting consequences for the construction of the story's setting and plot. except when the author wants a cute ending.)
2: an example: the story's main antagonists are the local taliban. really:
Clarity said, "The Incorruptibles are actually a pretty new movement. It started among the conservative academics and their students, but they have a large following now. They stand against the graft and nepotism of the Protectorate."which is about right for the taliban.
notice anything odd about the sentence? probably not, since it's out of the story's context. the story is set in a distant future, so remote that the 19th century germany chemist friedrich kekulé is only a legend, known only vaguely as "a capellan magister", that is, a wise man from one of the planets orbiting the star capella.³
yet the world "conservative" means to the characters precisely what it does in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: those advocating a particular set of social policies. for all we know, that far into the future, environmentalists are "conservatives", only only because their policies are considered outdated, but also because of the word's connection to "conservation".
3: kekulé gets a mention in the story because god mode sue recapitulates his dream about the structure of beneze, uses that knowledge to solve a puzzle box cum safe-with-combination-lock -- except that the author's knowledge of chemistry is too weak for the proposed solution to work -- read the antagonist's coded secret messages in the puzzle box, break the code, and challenge the antagonist with evidence of his, um, antagonism. because she is God Mode Sue.
in my
dïe überblönde voted for this turkey below "no award" for its hugo category. i feel that's generous. i think the author should be busted down to "slush pile dweller", and the editor of F&SF should be sent down to the minors for more training in the use of TNH's checklist.