Representation and appropriation

 A hopefully-growing list of creative writing type links.

• Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, Writing the Other
• Elif Batuman, 'Get a Real Degree'
• Jeannette Ng, 'Cultural Appropriation for the Worried Writer: Some Practical Advice'
• Zadie Smith, 'Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction'
• Adolph Reed Jr., Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why
• Charlie Jane Anders, 'When Is It OK to Write About Someone Else's Culture or Experience?'
• Nisi Shawl, 'How Not To Be All About What It's Not All About: Further thoughts on writing about someone else's culture and experience'
• Lila Shapiro, 'What the Job of a Sensitivity Reader is Really Like'
• Kit de Wal, 'Don't dip your pen in someone else's blood: writers and 'the other''
• Hiromi Goto, 'Wiscon38 Guest of Honor speech'
• Nisi Shawl, 'Transracial Writing for the Sincere'
• Itxy Quintanilla, 'Cultural Appropriation in Fiction' 
• FayOnyx, Decolonizing Games Resource List
• Bettochi, Klimick, and Perani, 'Can the Subaltern Game Design?'
• Kazumi Chin, 'So You Want to Play Someone of Another Race'
• James Mendez Hodes, 'Best Practices for Historical Gaming'

In terms of writing advice, these are a bit more leftfield but relevant in various ways:

• Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference
• Tuck and Yang, 'Decolonization is Not a Metaphor'
• Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists
• Frank B. Wilderson III, 'Grammar & Ghosts: The Performative Limits of African Freedom'
• Decolonising Utopia resource hub
• The Combahee River Collective Statement
• Angela Davis, Beyond Abolition Democracy
• Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel
• Barbara Foley, 'Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique'
• Vanessa Wills, 'What Could It Mean to Say, 'Capitalism Causes Sexism and Racism?''
• bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
• Stuart Hall, Maggie Steed et al., It Ain't Half Racist, Mum
• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography'
• Birch and Heideman, 'The Trouble with Anti-Antiracism'
• Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature?

Snippets:

“Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” -- Stuart Hall

"Bearing in mind that thoughtful pre-publication critique is your best defense against unintended resonances and associations, there are some steps you can take to ensure receiving helpful critiques—and some steps you can skip. To begin with, it’s worth noting that not all those who felt the story’s resonance with the Nazi Holocaust were Jews or descendants of other groups victimized by the Holocaust. That’s good, because it means you don’t have to have a preconceived idea about who you may be unintentionally offending. And you don’t have to run your manuscript by people with exactly the same ROAARS traits as your characters. What you need is a pool of reasonably intelligent, well-informed, and articulate readers." -- Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

"Against this revivalist definition of culture, we need a a materialist conception which looks at culture not as spiritual or religious heritage but as a set of material practices through which people live and produce the meanings of their lives. The starting-point for such an analysis is not the heritage of the past but the actual realities of the present, and one of the things that most crucially matter, then, is the degree of access to cultural goods — such as education or training in the arts — that different classes and social groups have in real life. When we look at culture in this way, we immediately recognise that social conflicts of various kinds, along lines of class, caste, gender, ethnicity, etc. actually leave very little room for all the people, or even majority of the people, to have roughly equal access to cultural goods, that may be shared by ‘a people’ or a whole nation to any significant extent." -- Aijaz Ahmed

"So I’ve tried to strike a balance in my own work, when I write about marginalized people whose experiences are different than my own. I aim for representation without appropriation." -- Charlie Jane Anders

"On reflection, it’s possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie." -- Adolph Reed Jr.

"One trend we have noticed, with growing apprehension, is the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives." -- E. Tuck and K.W. Yang

"Very often, I feel people are implicitly asking me for permission. And I understand, there is this weight of expectation and responsibility that you want to be free from. I desperately want to write with the freedom that I felt when I was ten, when I didn’t worry about what other people thought about my work or who was reading it. Self awareness can be uncomfortable, and you think perhaps this can help you return to that state of grace. [...] There is no simple fix that can be done once and allow you to stop worrying about cultural appropriation forever. It doesn’t work like that." -- Jeannette Ng

"You may notice that one profound difference has been left out of this acronym: class. This was a deliberate omission." -- Shawl and Ward

Notes from Beyond Trigger Warnings: Safety, Securitization, and Queer Left Critique

By Christina B. Hanhardt and Jasbir K. Puar, with Neel Ahuja, Paul Amar, Aniruddha Dutta, Fatima El-Tayeb, Kwame Holmes, and Sherene Seikaly.

Some interesting snippets from a roundtable published in Social Text (2020) 38 (4 (145)): 49–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-8680438.

Neel Ahuja:

[...] Because “antiradicalization” programs like CVE are promoted by liberals as an alternative to traditional warfare, their racialized and militarized forms of surveillance and their extraction of the unpaid labor of students are usually ignored by journalists. The overlap between Obama CVE programs, university communication and public health department, and antibullying discourse is particularly salient. CVE programs targeting Muslim youth work on the assumption that the racism and resulting bullying, alienation, and susceptibility to radicalization they purportedly experience is inevitable and individual (rather than produced by geopolitical conditions). Producing digital space as safe space guarded by morally virtuous undergraduate mentors, supervised by liberal faculty, is the proposed solution [...]

Kwame Holmes:

[...] After decades of reactionary, often evangelical attacks on feminist interventions against rape culture, research universities were, by the mid-1990s, the last large institutions to employ and support feminist activisms. Higher ed cities like Columbus, San Francisco, and Austin were also home to more radical feminist formations like the Lesbian Avengers and Cunt Revolt, groups that often collaborated with undergraduates in women and gender studies. On and campus-adjacent feminisms combined calls for women’s physical safety with the need for cultural transformation through shared public emotional processing, informed by a range of psychotherapeutic techniques. These included confrontational street activism, reading groups, poetry slams, healing circles, and more. For campus feminism, affect was not a by-product of activism but a primary subject of intervention. Automatic alerts undercut feminist authority by simplifying the terms of safety, leaving us safe from the more complicated discomfort we experience when asked to interrogate our personal relationship to rape culture. [...] To confront rape culture, to teach affirmative consent, or even to raise the possibility that course content may retraumatize students is to ask campus communities to sit in emotional ambiguities that feel nothing like the “safety” provided by alert systems. [...]

Fatima El-Tayeb:

[...] A number of them [activists] are current or former UCSD students, working until exhaustion, while also fluent in the language of self-care and trigger warnings. In my experience, the latter are often a shorthand for students’ attempts to make sense of their shifting position in the world; that is, this is not necessarily about specific issues or images they are exposed to but about larger fears and stresses. Calls for trigger warn - ings, safe spaces, and especially self-care tend to activate my Grumpy Old Man Fatima persona, but I acknowledge that I come from a not very productive “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” background, which is enhanced by being an immigrant into a culture that performs emotion in ways that are still sometimes baffling to me (and I do worry about the many immigrant students from similar cultural backgrounds who might not be helped but, rather, further alienated by this shift in campus culture). In classes, I try to work with community agreements instead, which means we proactively and collectively take ownership of the class room experience, focusing less on avoiding triggers than on strategies to deal with the anger, trauma, and sadness that invariably surface when addressing the experiences of communities of color under racial capitalism [...]

Sherene Seikaly:

[...] To me, coming back to teach in the United States after a decade in Europe and later at the American University of Cairo, trigger warnings looked like another weapon to contain and police. On the first day of my modern Middle East history class, I gave a blanket trigger warning: everything in this course will trigger you. There will be blood. You have to deal. The regime of trigger warnings had placed a barrier between me and my students. It did not take long to wake up. I quickly learned to appreciate and be empathetic to my students, who in the public system often navigate two, sometimes three jobs and face a future of debt, uncertainty, and insecurity. It took me a while, but I came to learn that the language of trigger warnings, as Fatima suggests above, was “often a shorthand for students’ attempts to make sense of their shifting position in the world.” Dismantling the trigger warning as a barrier required two steps. The first was to invite students to search for commonalities in addition to differ ences among the Iraqis, Egyptians, Palestinians, Turks, Kurds, Algerians, Iranians, Israelis, and others they were learning about. The second was to explain that we were not just learning about these other people; we were also learning about ourselves. The tactics and strategies of historical actors are an abundant resource for confronting our realities. Students in the United States today are subject to the ravages of neoliberalism; they understand what it might mean for people in other places. Many students are increas - ingly denied the promises of security and safety. They live the reality that things can always get worse; we do not have to teach them this lesson. The task at hand is to dismantle and repurpose trigger warnings in a way that models radical empathy and provides students with tools to enact it. [...]

Aniruddha Dutta:

[...] I pointed out routine cases of workplace exploitation within nonprofits where trans feminine kothi-hijra staff from working-class and Dalit (oppressed caste) backgrounds cannot even raise allegations without risking their livelihood — thus the exceptionalist attention to sexual assault would result in a safe space only for select middle-class activists who could afford to raise such allegations. Another participant proposed that the collective should be conceptualized as an enabling space rather than a safe space, where complainants would be enabled to share their stories and seek legal help, but the collective would not pronounce judgments or take punitive action. In this context, the imperative of preventing miscarriage of collective justice takes precedence over “safe space,” which emerges as less of a valued ideal relative to many similar spaces within the United States [...]

Aniruddha Dutta:

[...] Safety and safe space thus gather contrasting valences —an aspira - tional tool for equalizing higher education, a neoliberal ruse that tokenizes diversity, a feared capitulation to hegemonic morality — rather than functioning as a coherent logic or discourse, neoliberal or otherwise [...]

Paul Amar:

[...] UCSB is the home of the UC Education Abroad Program; my global studies department has the highest proportion of students in international study opportunities in the entire UC system. Despite their high profile, these programs have been choked by securitization. For example, students were ordered to leave Egypt during the Arab Spring. Subsequently, insurance companies and politicalrisk consultants have refused to authorize the reopening of study abroad in the country. This has had real economic effects on youth in the Middle East, since it led to the near bankruptcy of our partner school, the American University in Cairo. AUC is one of the most important educational institutions in the Middle East, which depends on international student tuition to be able to offer scholarships for less privileged Arab students. And this process has been repeated in a number of sites. The security or risk rating for a site seems to be shaped by generalized notions of cultural otherness, by Eurocentrism, and by political risk experts rather than by dialogue with knowledgeable educators on the ground, much less with youth and student movements in those world regions targeted as at risk. Programs in Paris, Rome, or London are never closed, although students frequently become injured or even arrested during study abroad in Europe. [...] 

Kwame Holmes:

[...] Perhaps the most devastating moment in the experiential and narrative arc of the campus safety response is when, inevitably, the dean or university president announces that the event is over. Often this arrives as a notification indicating that “all is clear.” But is it? There are unreported micro- and macroaggressions on a daily basis. It is impossible for them to know that “all is clear” on their campus. Yet provided campus alert systems allow administrators to create a virtual record of safety, they can avoid accountability for their institutions inability to provide comprehensive safety all members of the campus community [...]

Sherene Seikaly:

[...] Several strategies can facilitate collaborative intentions and outcomes. First, it is crucial to delink safety from discomfort, to embrace risk and diffi - culty as rich opportunities for learning, and to aim for fostering brave rather than safe spaces. Here, too, I am following the leads of Aniruddha, who discusses above enabling as opposed to safe spaces, and Kwame, who sug - gests above that confronting the challenges of our times requires “campus communities to sit in emotional ambiguities.” [...]

Sherene Seikaly:

[...] A third strategy is to insist on antiracism as a shared goal. This insistence infuses the room with a mutual accountability to name, own, and tackle Orientalism, Islamophobia, antiblackness, and antisemitism. Students and scholars of Palestine who are invested in the Palestinian demand for freedom can shy away from engaging antisemitism because of how it has been weaponized to silence critique. This is not a viable strategy, neither pedagogically nor politically. The history and present of antisemitism are crucial to understanding the history of Palestine. Antisemitism is inextricable from historical and contemporary iterations and experiences of race. [...]

Fatima El-Tayeb:

[On 2010 Black Student Union’s declaration of a state of emergency at UCSD.] [...] pressure came not only from the administration but also from nominally radical male faculty taking on leadership roles. Unsurprisingly, this led to the increasing marginalization of female and queer activists who had done much of the exhausting and unglamorous work that had made the movement possible. The end result of this pragmatism was a superficial diversity that could be used by the administration, while hiring and retention of faculty of color, especially Black and Native, remains abysmal and there are consistently low numbers of Black and Native students and a growing hostility toward identity politics and political correctness (also known as anything that would empower people of color). In retrospect, I am still deeply impressed with the students’ commitment, political insights, and strategic smarts and utterly disheartened not so much by the administration’s reaction, which was as expected, but by the failure of progressive faculty of color to support the students’ radical vision, instead using their supposed expertise and power to force them back into a system beyond whose limits most of us seem incapable of seeing, even while it is imploding. If nothing else, this serves as a reminder that the current, seemingly individualized understanding of safe spaces is in part a reaction to a failure of imagination not of a new generation of apolitical students but of our generation of faculty.

Aniruddha Dutta:

The lure of diversity and safety discourse as a bait for free speech trolling, on one hand, and as a mechanism for articulating white/conservative victimhood, on the other, might serve to undo the dichotomy of liberal freedoms versus political correctness that the right-wing machinery relies on. The very slipperiness of safety/diversity politics that permits its uptake by the Right might also frustrate conservative deployments of these terms. Such ambivalence demonstrates the lack of any singular socioeconomic logic behind safety/ diversity discourse seen in my previous response, and its inability to guar - antee a liberatory or reactionary politics by itself.

Kwame Holmes:

Indeed, we too easily forget that the political movements that pro - duced Black studies, women and gender studies, and various iterations of queer inquiry were themselves in a generative (though often uneasy) relationship with psychoanalytic therapeutic methods. Well, to be fair, the we I am referring to here are my fellow historians. Yet as history expands its purview from telling the stories of queer subjects to incorporating queer theory as method, modern Americanists will need to return to the emotive origins of the social movements we study. What happens to our studies of Black Power, when we take seriously Fanon’s career as a practicing analyst? How can we better narrate the conflict between white and Black feminisms if we don’t take seriously Hortense Spillers’s discussions of the impossible subject position of Black women in the West? Can we make sense of the origins of modern homonormativity without always keeping in mind gay liberation’s preoccupation with shame? I guess I’m saying, no, we can’t.

Review: Great North Road (2013)

Peter F. Hamilton, Great North Road (Pan Macmillan, 2013, 1104 pp.) 

This review first appeared in Foundation Vol. 43, No. 118 (Autumn 2014), pp. 135-140. It's been very slightly amended. Thank you to Andy Sawyer, Maureen Kincaid-Speller, Paul March-Russell, and Tony Keen.

There is a body in the Tyne, and its autopsy suggests extraterrestrial incursion. When the case lands on Detective Sidney Hurst’s desk, so do the nebulous agendas of innumerable civil, political, military and corporate elites. Meanwhile, through the shimmer of Newcastle’s stargate, a military expedition strikes out into the vast unexplored jungles of St Libra, Sirius – oblivious to a mustering ecological cataclysm – in search of sentient life. Among them is civilian advisor Angela Tramelo, fresh from serving twenty years for a brutal massacre which she has always maintained was the work of an alien life form; her team is headed by Colonel Vance Elston, the same spook who twenty years earlier tortured her and suppressed key evidence at her trial. We can expect that people on this trip will get crabby. 

The relationship between crime fiction and science fiction is an extremely intricate one. Any work which is serious about synthesizing the two tends to discover its own distinctive pattern of complements, affi nities, tradeoffs and contradictions. Ronald Knox’s fourth ‘fair play’ commandment for Golden Age crime writers (‘No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end’) suggests one way in which friction may emerge. To hide its solutions in plain sight, the clue-puzzle relies heavily on implication, on a shared social consensus. As often as not, it is not really until the last page of an sf novel that the reader knows enough about its world to start making clue-puzzle-style guesses about its secrets.

Great North Road is not particularly concerned with fair play. Data is supplied in whatever order is presumed to be most exciting. For much of the time, the novel solicitously stokes the possibility that Angela Tramelo really is responsible for the brutal massacre for which she’s been imprisoned. Eventually the backstory becomes interspersed through the main storyline, gradually rolling towards this alarming incident. The pattern of interleaved linear timelines is well established: but when we expect to find Tramelo either exonerated or recast as antihero, instead we confront … an ambiguous aftermath. We have skipped the massacre. Tramelo is scrabbling in panic, slicked with blood, her contribution still indeterminate.

It is especially awkward that Great North Road sustains such indeterminacy whilst we pay frequent visits to Tramelo’s consciousness. Of course, many crime authors invite us to peer into characters’ heads without letting us glimpse their guilt or innocence. Guilty people are often experts at having innocent thoughts. But there must be a difference between allowing leeway for sleights-of-hand and excusing authors for withholding whatever they feel is convenient. So how might we formulate that difference? You could say authors should not artificially keep things from their readers. But that’s only a mildly satisfying way of capturing it. Literature is artifice through-and-through: why does only some of it strike us as illegitimate?

Another approach holds that crime fiction should offer a consistent epistemology. That is, good crime fiction takes a stance on what knowledge is and how it can be achieved. As we read, we learn what happened, but we also learn something about learning itself. The electrifying story tacitly establishes parameters within which many other stories are feasible. Disclosures in Great North Road, by contrast, often seem artefacts of its formal idiosyncrasies. They give us very little that is portable or expandable. Sitting and waiting for it to be your turn to know is not a convincing model of how knowledge is produced. Readers work patiently and attentively through a towering stack of pages. Just like the police investigators they depict, we may be tempted to skim, but risk missing something important if we do. The meticulousness and staying power which the novel requires of us are the same virtues it valorises in Detective Sidney Hurst and his team.

It is interesting that the novel’s dazzling socio-technological premises – interstellar wormhole tech, shapeshifter implants, an elite dynasty of clones, longevity treatments, drugs you take by banging them on your neck – don’t radically reorganize its police procedural dimension. The novel does explore how detection is transformed by a regime of sophisticated forensics and ubiquitous surveillance and archiving. With all this advanced kit, must we basically watch our protagonist click ‘solve’, our only source of narrative tension the progress bar moving to 100%, with its cryptic contour of humps and downhill stretches?

But that is familiar territory for police procedurals with a contemporary or near-future setting. In C.S.I., as in Great North Road, the detection function is distributed across a network of experts and technologies. The middleranking officer occupies the hero slot, though not in quite the same way as the classic sleuth. In integrating a variety of specialist perspectives, the managerial perspective is only primus inter pares, not a transcendental arbiter of salience. There is no subject who experiences every stage of the solution, nor could such calculations in principle be fully performed within human experience. This partial decentring of the detective is mirrored by a partial decentring of criminality; there is a heightened interest in its systemic context, and a decoupling of the execution of social justice from the determination of legal culpability.

Great North Road does not, thankfully, trouble us with the professional fetishism or the glossy state triumphalism of C.S.I. The atmosphere is perhaps more closely matched by The Wire (2002-8). Hurst must bargain, cajole, orate, gain leverage, bend rules, cash in favours. There are no faces, no heels, only tweeners. The priorities of individuals seldom harmonize with those of their job description. Bureaucratic and technological systems don’t function as they should. Great North Road is uninterested in fair play conventions; nor does it seem fully committed to exposing the systematic context of its criminality. The politicking, loopholes, glitches and mercurial surges of social complexity tend to be dictated by storytelling imperatives, rather than providing storytelling with its scope and materials.

John Doe sloshing downstream, for instance, may be a reputable way of opening a contemporary police procedural yet it is unclear why anyone in 2142 should take such pains to put John Clone in the Tyne. The gangland body disposal team can anonymize cyborg corpses and hack into municipal surveillance systems. With relatively comprehensive surveillance of public space, shouldn’t we expect such well-resourced criminality to shift to private space? Is melting a bit of meat and bone in a private apartment really beyond them? But the body is not put in the river by gangsters, to sink without a trace; it is put there by Hamilton, to be found.

The way of life shown in Great North Road is not always minutely reflective of its social, economic and technological infrastructure. There are exceptions, but to sloganize somewhat: Far Future Tech, Near Future Customs, Manners, Mores. This incongruously contemporary cultural atmosphere is not necessarily uncomfortable. A proudly Geordie stargate is, in and of itself, a very fine thing to contemplate. Moreover, it’s possible that this atmosphere has not accumulated by unexamined failures of the imagination, but rather been deliberately wrought, as a self-styled clear-eyed provocation that some things never change.

Exhibitions of extrapolative rigor are one widely acknowledged tactic by which science fiction negotiates its mandate. An awkwardness can cling to tacit claims of rigor when the axioms rigorously worked upon are conspicuously a legacy. New space opera is often spotted proving its seriousness by how responsibly it sponges off a trust fund established by cyberpunk. Less well attested but equally important is the tactic of exclusionary rigor. Here what is necessary is that nothing break the spell. The grizzled capsule pilot who, engrossed in the archipelago of an approaching asteroid field, so much as carelessly sparks up a Camel is in peril of losing his legitimacy as an image of our future. Superfluous innovations are as risky as superfluous relics. Just as nothing must improperly last, so nothing must improperly change.

In Great North Road not much seems to have changed about the aesthetics, habitus and culture of corporations, the military, and the police and prisons. No doubt such choices are mixed up with extrapolative worldbuilding to some extent. But I suspect that how plausible they are is fundamentally a wager about their aesthetic intelligibility. In other words, their plausibility solicits preferences and associations formed independently of the novel’s future history. If men in green fatigues with machine guns don’t look out-of-place milling around in front of a stargate, then that has little to do with how probable that scene really is. It has everything to do with the saturation of the contemporary imagination by images of prevailing military institutions.

There is another front, also closely connected with taste, on which Great North Road doesn’t play it quite so safe. One effect of the central mystery is to pose the question: is ‘the alien’ – in the sense of a monstrous, sentient extraterrestrial organism, perhaps the hegemonic trope of science fiction – still a legitimate sf figure? Or is the alien now a spell-breaker, rather like a rocket or a UFO? Eight hundred pages in, we still do not know for certain if we are reading a story with aliens in it. Instead, we are treated to a pageant of proxies. It is as though we are asked, will clones do instead? Or, genetically modified humans; won’t they do? Cybernetically enhanced people; will they do? Extraterrestrial plant life, surely it will do? Then there is the Zanth. The Zanth is a sort of kaleidoscopic reality glitch, akin to an ecological catastrophe. But it receives the kind of treatment typically reserved for Heinlein’s ‘Bugs’ or Wells’ Martians. It even gets called an alien threat. So, will it do? What, exactly, do we need an alien for? And how badly do we need it?

In its collusion with the spectacle of multinational corporations and standing armies that just keep on standing, Great North Road invites a critique of ideology, but it does make fairly safe wagers vis-à-vis evoking a convincing and immersive future history. The ‘ET or not ET?’ business is a bolder bet, but one which pays off. The alien that might be in this story could even be read as knowingly retro-futuristic, a nod to the far-fetched hominids of an earlier era, some horror confined to the shadows because budget is too low to show it in the light. We may realize we do miss this alien and are prepared, after all, to make some allowances.

But Great North Road makes another wager which is neither bold nor really pays off. Just as corporate life has proved robust, and standing armies are standing in pretty much the same pose we left them in back in 2013, so too gender institutions have changed very little. The drip-fed revelations of Tramelo’s past, for instance, ooze sleazy glamour and gratuitous fan service. As we try to conceive of a credible 2140s, we may want to ask – as a rough benchmark – how have gender and sexual politics changed from the 1880s to the present day? Yet Great North Road gives us a deeply binary and subtly hierarchical world, peppered with hokey truisms about boys and girls, men and women, husbands and wives. 

Complexity is added, however, in the form of Hurst’s sidekick, Detective Ian Lanagin. We first meet Lanagin on duty, flirting with a pair of scantily clad lassies: ‘I’m in there, man. Did you see those lassies? Up for it they were, both of them’ (9). Lanagin is a manifesto for cyborg misogyny, who abuses police data systems to stalk his targets and devise his pickup strategies. As an institutionally fostered social type, and a case study in police sexuality at the intersection of voyeurism, chivalry and clout, Lanagin is one of the novel’s subtler achievements. But the resolution of his plot arc is unacceptable. When Lanagin meets his match – gorgeous, rich and, discomfitingly, class-inflected – revisionist implications ripple back across his previous frightening behaviour. Boys will be boys, seems to be the official line, but some day they all grow up and settle down. Lanagin’s emasculation is apparently being played for laughs. Are we soon to meet the predictable evolution of this comic character; grumbling, doting Lanagin under-the-thumb? Luckily, a monster slashes his throat out before we have to discover.

Great North Road is tricky to place ideologically. On balance, my impression was one of discreet Middle Englishness. Granted, the capitalism it portrays is one of corporate misdeeds, cronyism, corruption, decadence and precarity. Teamwork, even to the point of sacrificing oneself for a collective, rises and disports itself rather elegantly above this mire. But for all that the novel’s capitalism resembles our own, it is an embroidered version of the current regime. There's a kind of literary centrism at play here. What a left-wing reader could just about celebrate as a prophetic satire, a right-wing reader can still regard as a boundary flag – as a pathological and dysfunctional extreme implying, the relative moderation of our contemporary status quo. Perhaps Sid Hurst was a bit of an Ian Lanagin himself in his day! But now he is a decent, family man, doing what he has to do: possessive individualism and civil, vocational and familial privatism. We are supposed to like him, his long-suffering wife Jacinta, and their two impertinent kids. So if Hamilton is trying to please everyone, I think he catches the right-wing reader’s eye oftener.

That said, thoroughgoing Middle Englishness could never really survive an act of imaginative expression of such scale and ambition. There is ultimately a great deal to like about this novel. There is merit in the bare fact of being able to turn out 1,000-plus pages of proficient prose. Certain economies of scale kick in: a plot thread simply left hanging long enough then seized up again can feel satisfying in the same way as a plot twist can; and though Hamilton does not achieve the stylistic variety of, for instance, Iain M. Banks’ space opera, by the end of the novel a diverse grandeur has gradually accumulated.

There is some excellent interplay between passages of deliberately arduous information and often bloody action sequences. The St Libra narrative strand is dominated not so much by military science fiction as military logistics science fiction. The fine grain elaboration of its material culture is another of its admirable features, albeit at times a bit Top Gear. Hamilton is particularly proficient at contriving tense scenarios by layering together mundane and extraordinary mishaps. Sometimes the slow, detailed mode is also deployed as a crucible of tension in its own right. The plodding early phases of the expedition employs that mode, gradually establishing a potent sense of remoteness. There is a real sense that small decisions or acts of neglect can have tremendous consequences. The Zanth in particular is used sparingly but thrillingly; the novel’s closing sentences are excellent. Part of me was left wondering, however, whether Hamilton could have cast his exacting eye a little oftener in the direction of the human (posthuman) heart? Or indeed, what might he have written had he permitted himself complete absorption by his unfolding material, bringing to bear his considerable talents – his comprehensiveness, his copia, his evident interest in pacing and his skill at convergence – in a manner less attentive to his presumed readers, and to their presumed appetites for worlds and thrills?

Worldbuilding Games

For my own future reference really, some recommended TTRPGs with strong and/or interesting collaborative worldbuilding elements:

• The Quiet Year / The Deep Forest
• Shock: Social SF
• The Sword, The Crown, The Unspeakable Power
• Microscope
• Monsterhearts
• OTOH
• Palimpsest
• Companion's Tale
• Dawn of Worlds
• Downfall
• Icarus
• Soft Apocalypse Anthology

Eastercon Schedule

I am going to Eastercon! To make it feel really special, I might even go and sit on the other sofa.

I am going to do four things ...

• A shift at the virtual BSFA stall in the dealer's hall
• 11am on Saturday [time change!]: Moderate a panel about contemporary children's SFF, which I don't know much about but hope to learn a lot about 
• 7pm on Friday: Give a presentation about utopia, board games, and being very tiny, alongside presentations from Avery Delany and Francis Gene-Rowe. GAMES, FRAMES & FLAMES TALK TRILOGY. If you wish to do some prepatory reading (optional) for my talk, please watch J. Balvin's 'Verde' and read The Bible.
• Monday at noon: Be on a panel about dragons, which I know all about and am one

Also: on Saturday, BSFA Lecture (Ariella Elema) at 3pm, BSFA Awards at 5pm.

Candide and the Utopian Enclave

Optimistic theodicy thrived briefly in the Eighteenth Century, and today is perhaps best-known as the target of Voltaire’s satire Candide (1759). Optimistic theodicy aimed to solve the problem of evil — if God knows everything, can do anything, and is infinitely good, how then can evil exist? — by proposing that evil in some parts of Creation is the necessary condition for greater good elsewhere. So the best of all possible worlds, reasoned optimistic theodicians, may still be filled with plenty of suffering and vice.

Voltaire’s Candide famously concludes with Candide’s words to his former mentor in optimistic theodicy, the indefatigable Pangloss, who is still trying to trace divine benevolence in their mutual history of brutal suffering. Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin. All that is very well, but let us grow our garden. 

Out of context, the sentiment might be read as a conservative one, perhaps a kind of civil privatism: the world is an irredeemably evil place, and all we can do is count our blessings and defend whatever little patch of it will sustain us! 

But I think this reading neglects both the larger context of the narrative, and half of what Candide actually says. “All that is very well.” The liberal virtue of tolerance is being exemplified, sure. More broadly, this is an ending that celebrates the work of worldmaking. Candide tolerates and transcends rather than strictly speaking dismisses Pangloss’s disputation.

The whole little society entered into this laudable design, according to their different abilities. Their little plot of land produced plentiful crops. Cunegonde was, indeed, very ugly, but she became an excellent pastry cook; Paquette worked at embroidery; the old woman looked after the[Pg 168] linen. They were all, not excepting Friar Giroflée, of some service or other; for he made a good joiner, and became a very honest man.

“All that is very well,” says Candide: even Pangloss and his philosophizing have a place within this inclusive community, a found family of former slaves, forced migrants, survivors of traumatic violence, who work together to preserve and extend their small sphere of care and security. It’s sometimes forgotten that Candide does also include a utopia, El Dorado, apparently unironically a place of prosperity, generosity, and happiness, characterized by its muted hierarchy and its lack of a clerical class. That is, Candide is a narrative that has certain ambitions about how big a garden might grow.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future

I liked and highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future (2020), a big and miscellaneous quiltwork of a book, filled with vignettes, mini-essays, lists, and prose-poem riddles. It lays out a guardedly optimistic vision of the next few decades, and shows humans (and many other actors) mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis that is currently unfolding.

You could call it solarpunk, delivering a promise that genre intermittently delivers: gritty and realistic hope, integrating technological innovation with real economic and socio-political change. The Ministry for the Future is fiction, of course, but it often holds the interest in the same way non-fiction does. It is about us, it is about now. It exemplifies a kind of hard science fiction that is worth wanting, borrowing and synthesizing from across STEM, social sciences, arts and humanities, and other forms of expertise.

The Ministry for the Future gathers up numerous utopian sparks from contemporary radical and progressive projects and -- like a Magpie for the Future -- arranges them into a pleasing heap, rather than some rigid causal sequence. It is a novel filled with judicious gaps and uncertainties. About some ideas, the novel is enthusiastic, and about others it is lukewarm. For the most part, this is a book that doesn’t want to take things off the table. It does frame a few hopes as false hopes, perhaps: the notion that billionaires may start to show compassion and rationality if petitioned persuasively enough, for example. And while it has a lot of time for myriad diverse economy practices, including those of an anarchist cast, it ultimately sees governments, law, and central banks as key actors in any credible positive future. 

But not through their being seized. I'm especially interested in the novel's themes of violence and revolution. When we think of revolutionary violence (and maybe even when we try to put it into practice) we usually think of two things. There are protestors throwing things at lines of riot cops, as military vehicles rumble closer in the distance. And then there's the well-organised armed coup, seizing the state apparatus. So this sets up a lot of questions about how the two things might relate. But maybe these questions are sometimes red herrings. Because really, this is a rather narrow imaginary, one enthusiastically embraced by right wing media, but one which The Ministry of the Future tries in its own gentle way to dislodge. 

Because the actual histories of successful radical social change usually reveal a much more diverse array of tactics. If there must be a default way of thinking about the role of violence in revolutionary activity, maybe a good candidate is "militant self-defense." Many activities in Ministry's optimistic narrative fit this definition. I.e. one way the people in this book defend themselves is by conducting their paramilitary operations in secret. So secret, in fact, most of the time even the reader doesn't find out about them! They don't storm in trying to seize state power. Another way they defend themselves is by targeting the infrastructure and logistics the enemy is using to kill them. They presumably have fierce debates about what is and isn't acceptable (rejecting nonviolence doesn't mean "anything goes"). 

State power is still absolutely crucial to Robinson's optimistic vision, but he doesn't foresee seizing it. There are two prongs here. One, there is a vast and plural uprising which doesn't attempt to unify itself, but rather embraces a diversity of tactics, including paramilitary action aimed primarily at multinational corporations. Two, there is an intense, grinding badgering of states, and especially their central banks, to begrudgingly take more radical action than they otherwise would have. This sometimes involves gritting our teeth and putting things in terms they can understand. How can you have stable currencies if you don't have civilisation? Let them put the cart before the horse, if it will stop us all from riding off the cliff.

Stylistically, this won't be for everyone. Notes from meetings, flat and largely vague eye-witness accounts of extraordinary events, infodumps, mini-articles on topics in political economy, a giant list of names of organisations ... this is a book which has a very particular, very strange relationship with "boring" and "exciting," and how desirable these two things are, in what proportions and in what rhythms. It sometimes makes me think of grindy games, where what you are doing is certainly work, but oddly compelling and absorbing, and it draws you along in a way that mere entertainment might not. For some people, nyway. Others may find the whole thing a bizarre imposition.

Sometimes representations of nationality feel a bit cringe. Especially Ireland. The novel seems to have a sense of Irishness, or of a plausible Irish person's sense of their own Irishness, which I don't recognise anyway. I'm also not sure how credible I find Mary mentioning "some good" in the British Empire, and perhaps Stan's not aware what a right-wing talking point that is in these isles? But the grinding insistence on the reality of nations, ethnicities, and cultures is admirable, even if it sometimes generates awkwardness.

A longer review will appear in Stir magazine, focusing a little bit more on the novel's political economy.

Some SFF groups on Facebook

Just a few I kind of like:

Science Fiction group that isn't a dumpster fire of racism and misogny 

Fantasy & Sci-Fi Salon

British Science Fiction Association

London Science Fiction Research Community

African Science Fiction and Fantasy Reading Group

Afrofuturism Central

Science Fiction Shitposting

Scifi & Fantasy - I am liking this a little less than I used to, but maybe still worth a whirl!

The top one was a splinter from biggest SFF group by some way, called just "Science Fiction," which is implicitly the dumpster fire.

Update I also really like the Rite Gud Discord. 

From a work-in-progress

By Reason Alone 

From The Tragedy of Beyonce Knowles / Interpellation (working titles?)

Arthur is to meet his girlfriend's family for the first time

‘An invite to Mannerly Manor? If it were just Katie and her mum!’ I sighed. ‘But the cousins are sure to be there. And the groundskeeper, who has a gun, and chambermaid and scullery chef, and the grouse, who may all have guns for all I know of the world. And all the butlers in all their siller finery. I am just so nervous. I am not sure who will be there. No one's explained the event.’

‘Lunch,’ said Tam.

‘But is that . . . tea?’

Tam treated me to a gaze of his gravest sympathy. ‘If you do it one way and they do it the other,’ he offered, ‘you are by definition wrong. And there is simply no way to know what they will do nor how they will do it.’

‘Save Reason,’ I said.

Together Tamburlaine and I attempted to formulate the customs of the upper classes by Reason alone.

‘Give me some task, Tam.’

‘Say you are to pick your nose, Arthur.’

‘Which finger does one use?’

‘Where do the other nails point while the principal is busy? Start simple.’

We tried every finger we could find, falsifying the pick itself so as not to run out of matter.

Thus laughing, we lay contentedly in each other arms. ‘Perhaps they leave it in the ground,’ Tam muttered. But soon we were frowning again.

‘Aye,’ I added softly, ‘or it doesn’t even matter which fingers? It’s which nostril. Nor are nostrils the only niches.’

Tam shrugged me off, leapt up and began to pace. ‘No they’re not! Well then! Reason man! Think! Do the upper classes of Britain sit at their feast-laden tables manually disimpacting earwax or is it sometimes poop? Think! Think!’

He looked aghast and I didn’t know how to calm him down. He was right. Did they reach one slimy arm down their gullet, shortly having swallowed their meal, as some pythons are said to do, and pull it intact back onto the siller plate?

Soon it was mid-morning. My train would soon be leaving for Katie’s country estate. We had got nowhere. And then suddenly, as Tam helped me into my scarf and mittens, it all came pouring together. An avalanche of reason alone.

First, a good bully always maximizes cognitive load. For example, pick on your prey by presenting insoluble puzzles and palpably false attributions. The pot shoving the kettle up against the lockers and sneering at its searing, and so on.

Thus for many years the upper classes have been evolving tells and shibboleths that make them out to be simple, dumpy, down-to-earth folk. 

They say we are the posh ones! 

In years gone by, for instance, the upper classes would not have the ostentation to say serviette when they might say napkin. Poor and humble, they would not go horse riding, merely riding. As if they hadn't got one. This principle is broadly applicable, and applicable in particular to ...

‘They won’t ostentatiously thrust the fingers in?’ suggested Tam, grinning avidly. ‘They’ll wait till it pokes out of its own accord!’

‘They love all the creeping beasts of the earth,’ I agreed. ‘They’ll wobble the philtrum to and fro till it plops out, without any fuss. It is not for them to pick which noses.’

But there was more. At the top, power frequently acquires the morphology of an 'overlapping consensus.' Not always, but among the upper classes of Britain, Tam and I reckoned that it did. That is, ceteris paribus, the upper class will prefer manners that they can agree upon for many different reasons, without recognising that they are so doing.

Tamburlaine and I did a few quick calculations. Around three-quarters of toffs believe they are looking down their noses at everyone else. We uppity and grasping plebs are hilarious with our shabby fool’s gold, and so on. Their idea (which when it gets out of hand is genocide) is: Look at those fools! If the situation were reversed, they would do the same as we do. 

But around a quarter of toffs truly think of themselves a simple, plain people, staring up their noses at us, staring up that cleared-out tunnel, whose rubble they are too simple and plain to clear, being unpretentious, down-to-earth sorts who accept their lot, which just so happens to have a main facade of twelve bays of classical sash.

Understanding now its underpinning logic, I felt confident I would be able to reason out all the etiquette that lay ahead of me this afternoon and evening. Which salad spoon. How to greet the groundsman. Anxiety diminishing, my crush on Katie revealed itself once more, raw and pink with a new lustre of lust.

After all, do not the upper classes of England simply love duels where only one fighter is allowed oxygen? Thrust! Parry! Look at that footwork! Da da da da da! Ta ta ta ta! Look at those chaps dance, two consummate artists, equally matched! The flashing silver! On the side-lines, variegated princesses simper and swoon! And that will be me in a couple of hours. My starlight white frock with the flared silhouette that bells when I spin, my golden locks done up with bright red ribs and bins.

‘Oh, Arthur,’ squawked Tamburlaine, and tied my scarf, and my heart, in a complex knot.

Thus equipped I went to Mannerly Manor, to meet my betters.

From Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass

Like nature's recommendations algorithm, Tenet (2020) made me revisit this, by Lewis Carroll:

‘The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.’

‘It must come sometimes to “jam to-day,”’ Alice objected.

‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every other day: to-day isn’t any other day, you know.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Alice. ‘It’s dreadfully confusing!’

‘That’s the effect of living backwards,’ the Queen said kindly: ‘it always makes one a little giddy at first—’

‘Living backwards!’ Alice repeated in great astonishment. ‘I never heard of such a thing!’

‘—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.’

‘I’m sure mine only works one way,’ Alice remarked. ‘I can’t remember things before they happen.’

‘It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ the Queen remarked.

‘What sort of things do you remember best?’ Alice ventured to ask.

‘Oh, things that happened the week after next,’ the Queen replied in a careless tone. ‘For instance, now,’ she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster on her finger as she spoke, ‘there’s the King’s Messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.’

‘Suppose he never commits the crime?’ said Alice.

‘That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?’ the Queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon.

Alice felt there was no denying that. ‘Of course it would be all the better,’ she said: ‘but it wouldn’t be all the better his being punished.’

‘You’re wrong there, at any rate,’ said the Queen: ‘were you ever punished?’

‘Only for faults,’ said Alice.

‘And you were all the better for it, I know!’ the Queen said triumphantly.

‘Yes, but then I had done the things I was punished for,’ said Alice: ‘that makes all the difference.’

‘But if you hadn’t done them,’ the Queen said, ‘that would have been better still; better, and better, and better!’ Her voice went higher with each ‘better,’ till it got quite to a squeak at last.

Alice was just beginning to say ‘There’s a mistake somewhere—,’ when the Queen began screaming so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as if she wanted to shake it off. ‘My finger’s bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!’

Her screams were so exactly like the whistle of a steam-engine, that Alice had to hold both her hands over her ears.

‘What is the matter?’ she said, as soon as there was a chance of making herself heard. ‘Have you pricked your finger?’

‘I haven’t pricked it yet,’ the Queen said, ‘but I soon shall—oh, oh, oh!’

‘When do you expect to do it?’ Alice asked, feeling very much inclined to laugh.

‘When I fasten my shawl again,’ the poor Queen groaned out: ‘the brooch will come undone directly. Oh, oh!’ As she said the words the brooch flew open, and the Queen clutched wildly at it, and tried to clasp it again.

‘Take care!’ cried Alice. ‘You’re holding it all crooked!’ And she caught at the brooch; but it was too late: the pin had slipped, and the Queen had pricked her finger.

‘That accounts for the bleeding, you see,’ she said to Alice with a smile. ‘Now you understand the way things happen here.’

‘But why don’t you scream now?’ Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.

‘Why, I’ve done all the screaming already,’ said the Queen. ‘What would be the good of having it all over again?’