New Genre Wednesdays: Sankofa Fiction

Sankofa is a Twi word that means "go back and get it." Sankofa Fiction returns to the past to fetch what is necessary to light up the present, to better chart into the future.

Yugos

UPDATE: My slate, Strange Puppies, can claim some success this year.

Thoughtful post from Ian Sales.

Earlier: there is a YUGE buzz around Sales's new Sputnik Award.

Update: I have nicked the name. This year is a trial run. Go vote!

Earlier from me: idea for a new award.

HAPPY PUPPIES: idea for how the Hugos (or some award) should work, to make it unlike any other award.

Meanwhile, I also have a Hugo vote this year, and I'm thinking I'll delegate it or hivemind it or crowdenfranchise it or transfer it in some way, tbd. Ideas welcome. Sell it maybe.

Fight Like A Girl anthology launch in Bristol

Swords and feminism! Get it from Kristel Ink or Amavom.

Note on Pandora's Box

Perhaps this is putting it a little strongly, and I really haven't looked to it in depth, or consulted more than one translation of Hesiod, so please let me know if this is all wrong, but ...

There was no such myth, really.

It was a late misconstrual, and it caught on. In the original there is no box, or jar, or amphora, or anything, except as a metaphor for Pandora herself. First, here are two exemplary snippets, from modern retellings by anonymous and Louis Untermeyer respectively:

"Zeus, pleased that his trap was working, gave Pandora a wedding gift of a beautiful box. There was one very, very important condition however, that she must never opened the box. Pandora was very curious about the contents of the box but she had promised that she would never open it."

And:

"We will call her Pandora," he said. "Pandora, the All-Gifted. She shall become the bride of Epimetheus. But she shall not go empty-handed. She shall bring with her a casket, a box of magic as her dowry. And Hermes, my messenger, shall conduct her to earth."

These versions quite significantly augment the materiality or thingliness attached to the word pithos (jar, translated as box by Erasmus), compared with the source material. Here is what Hesiod says in Works & Days. I think the words "gift" and "snare" and "thing" and "gift" and so on refer to Pandora, who has just been made from clay. The jar is just an extended metaphor:

[69] So he ordered. And they obeyed the lord Zeus the son of Cronos. Forthwith the famous Lame God moulded clay in the likeness of a modest maid, as the son of Cronos purposed. And the goddess bright-eyed Athene girded and clothed her, and the divine Graces and queenly Persuasion put necklaces of gold upon her, and the rich-haired Hours crowned her head with spring flowers. And Pallas Athene bedecked her form with all manners of finery. Also the Guide, the Slayer of Argus, contrived within her lies and crafty words and a deceitful nature at the will of loud thundering Zeus, and the Herald of the gods put speech in her. And he called this woman Pandora (All Endowed), because all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread. 

[83] But when he had finished the sheer, hopeless snare, the Father sent glorious Argus-Slayer, the swift messenger of the gods, to take it to Epimetheus as a gift. And Epimetheus did not think on what Prometheus had said to him, bidding him never take a gift of Olympian Zeus, but to send it back for fear it might prove to be something harmful to men. But he took the gift, and afterwards, when the evil thing was already his, he understood.

[90] For ere this the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the Fates upon men; for in misery men grow old quickly. But the woman took off the great lid of the jar with her hands and scattered all these and her thought caused sorrow and mischief to men. Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door; for ere that, the lid of the jar stopped her, by the will of Aegis-holding Zeus who gathers the clouds. But the rest, countless plagues, wander amongst men; for earth is full of evils and the sea is full. Of themselves diseases come upon men continually by day and by night, bringing mischief to mortals silently; for wise Zeus took away speech from them. So is there no way to escape the will of Zeus.

In his Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines "forbidden" as "invested with a new and irresistible charm." But Hesiod's story of Pandora is not one of those stories. It is not a story like that of the forbidden fruit in Genesis, or Chief Wiggum's Forbidden Closet of Mystery in The Simpsons. It is not an allegory about somebody given something and told not to do something with it, who goes ahead and does it anyway.

This is definitely going to get me crowned Research Excellent Framework Queen, so let me put it in a more scholarly way. Hesiod wrote a story that went, "After Woman arrived in the world, the shit really hit the fan." And so for hundreds of years we have been telling stories about Pandora, who was given a magic bag of poop and forbidden to cast it at her fan. We look really dumb, you guys.

Hesiod is actually telling another story about how girls spoil everything, how awful and wicked women are, how women are to blame for everything bad, against any reasonable evaluation of culpability.

In some retellings of the myth, Pandora slams the lid down, too late, and then a kawaii voice squeaks, "Wait! Let me out! For I am Hope!" And implicitly or explicitly, she does let Hope out to join the others. But nothing like that happens in Hesiod. There is no jar, there is just Pandora, endowed with every malicious and deceitful quality the gods could come up with, which she spreads far and wide, as well as hope, which she keeps to herself, as decreed by Zeus.

Perhaps it's because the myth is framed as the origin of an idiom -- opening Pandora's box -- that we tend to overlook the idiomatic language it presupposes.

Or if the jar does have materiality, it is a materiality that steals in gradually, and it is as a synecdoche for Pandora herself: the vessel isn't an object she brings with her, the vessel is her uterus and vagina. And perhaps the word elpis might be better translated not as hope but as expectation. That is, it's the big old patriarch's grudging "compromise": well, at least women bear sons.

RPGs

I have mostly been busy with slightly boring stuff lately, but here's a reminder that the RPG games now have their own site, which includes Dungeons & Drapers (which is D&D meets the Hunger Games, now up to around 80 pages) as well as alpha material for Ends, where maybe you fight subrosses before the big Ross Fight, plus some highly plausible sample play for the Chess mechanics based Dreams & Dystopias, plus the classic and extremely famous Daiquiris & Demigods, plus a nano version (200 words) of Drama & Dice, written for a competition. Everything is free or pay-what-you-want, but feedback, donations, & reviews & ratings (on RPGDriveThru) very much appreciated as always!

Strange Puppies

As is now customary, at around this time of year I produce my Hugo nominations recommendations slate, Strange Puppies. Go forth and nominate, minions. And should you find that any of these items make it onto the ballot, you may be assured it is by your agency alone.

BEST NOVEL
Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie
The Cinder Spires: The Aeronaut’s Windlass by Jim Butcher
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
Seveneves: A Novel by Neal Stephenson
Uprooted by Naomi Novik

BEST NOVELLA
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
The Builders by Daniel Polansky
Penric’s Demon by Lois McMaster Bujold
Perfect State by Brandon Sanderson
Slow Bullets by Alastair Reynolds

BEST NOVELETTE
“And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead” by Brooke Bolander
“Flashpoint: Titan” by Cheah Kai Wai
“Folding Beijing” by Hao Jingfang, trans. Ken Liu.
“Obits” by Stephen King
“What Price Humanity?” by David VanDyke

BEST SHORT STORY
"Asymmetrical Warfare" by S. R. Algernon
"The Commuter" by Thomas A. Mays
"If You Were an Award, My Love" by Juan Tabo and S. Harris
"Seven Kill Tiger" by Charles Shao
"Space Raptor Butt Invasion" by Chuck Tingle

BEST RELATED WORK
Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 by Marc Aramini
“The First Draft of My Appendix N Book” by Jeffro Johnson
“Safe Space as Rape Room” by Daniel Eness
SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police by Vox Day
“The Story of Moira Greyland” by Moira Greyland

CAMPBELL AWARD FOR BEST NEW WRITER
Pierce Brown
Sebastien de Castell
Brian Niemeier
Andy Weir

Alyssa Wong

BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM

Vox Day
Sheila E. Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Jim Minz
Toni Weisskopf

BEST EDITOR, SHORT FORM
John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Ellen Datlow
Jerry Pournelle
Sheila Williams

BEST DRAMATIC PRESENTATION, LONG FORM

Avengers: Age of Ultron written and directed by Joss Whedon
Ex Machina written and directed by Alex Garland

Mad Max: Fury Road written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nico Lathouris, directed by George Miller
The Martian, screenplay by Drew Goddard, directed by Ridley Scott
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, written by Lawrence Kasdan, J. J. Abrams, and Michael Arndt, directed by J.J. Abrams

Etc.

j/k obv

Half-Ignoring Sad Puppies

I half-noticed recently that this year's Sad Puppies' slate (perhaps not the right word) contains a sprinkling of SJW pixie-dust. My first thought was, alol, a wedge issue and bid for legitimacy courtesy of the right wing genre culture trolls, perfectly tactically commendable if perhaps a bit transparent. It's a familiar pattern in mundane politics too: divisive, nasty, "populist" tub-thumping to build your brand, then try to de-toxify it and play in the mainstream. I.e. I assumed those recommendations weren't sincere.

Just now I half-noticed that the Sad Puppies list (perhaps that is the right word) was put together by an open process (albeit one perhaps not very well-publicized outside veteran Pup circles). So while I wouldn't put it past a cadre of battle-wizened Pups to have infiltrated that process, in order to promote the very thing they hate -- a v. GG move obv., playing the long game bro -- it's much more likely it is what it seems: a collated recommendations list drawing on a right-leaning constituency, but not a totally repulsive constituency.

Obviously this Sad Puppies should have done a bit more to distance itself from last year. But my inclination would be, on the little I've seen, let's give them a break? This is deep, deep ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ territory. If you have awoken with horror to find yourself on their list, maybe don't sweat it. You're no more in a moral quandary than usual. Don't feel obliged to fall on your #SJWaward and declare yourself ineligible, or anything brave and silly like that. My hunch is, ignore it. This is probably the one time in your life you're not a pawn in somebody's grand evil scheme.

Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank The Atlantic, from whose Google cache snippet I have copypasted the shrug emoji more times than you've broken hot takes.

From Lud-in-the-Mist

By Hope Mirrlees.

Round and round trudged the pony, round and round went the hidden musical-box, grinding out its thin, blurred tunes.

Why did she cock her pretty blue eye
At the lad with the silver buckles,
When the penniless lad who was handsome and spry
Got nought but a rap on his knuckles?

These vulgar songs, though faded, were not really old. Nevertheless, to Master Nathaniel, they were the oldest songs in existence – sung by the Morning Stars when all the world was young. For they were freighted with his childhood, and brought the memory, or, rather, the tang, the scent, of the solemn innocent world of children, a world sans archness, sans humour, sans vulgarity, where they had sounded as pure and silvery as a shepherd’s pipe. Where the little charmer with her puce bow, and the scheming hussy who had cocked her blue eye had been own sisters to the pretty fantastic ladies of the nursery rhymes, like them walking always to the accompaniment of tinkling bells and living on frangipane and sillabubs of peaches and cream; and whose gestures were stylised and actions preposterous –nonsense actions that needed no explanation. While mothers-in-law, shrewish wives, falling in love – they were just pretty words like brightly-coloured beads, strung together without meaning.

Knights of the Thimble

There is a new free lightweight high fantasy tabletop RPG called Dungeons & Drapers added to the Games tab, whose rules may be very familiar to some of you. Other working titles: Skycrawl, Devils & Dwarves, Dweomers & Drow, Danger & Derring-Do, Dragons & Dungeons, Dystopia & Dragons, Hunger & Dragons, Dungeons & Desist.

It is what it is & any comments are appreciated (especially feedback on overall balance), but the interesting bit would really come with the supplementary spellbook, if I ever get round to writing it. There is also a kind of structural joke or provocation to do with race and class; maybe class especially, since it often feels to me that the power that high fantasy RPGs invite players to imaginatively occupy is the power of aristocracy and bourgeois finance, whatever the actual background of the character you're playing. Elf is structurally toff, isn't it? So in Dungeons & Drapers there's an attempt at a nod to the artisanal power of the early modern middling sort. Basically what I'm saying is that it's cool because you're a tailor.

Or perhaps this is just a sign of what happens when you come into some creative practice and start off making wrong & interesting things & gradually start making proper & therefore boring things? *Googles "shrug emoji"; copy-pastes it here*

Notes (mostly to self) on N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season

(Technically spoilers ahead)

* Assured, immersive, easeful, affecting, solid, a sense of being timely, up-to-date, "core." Colloquial. Ambitious without feeling strained. Makes it look easy (sprezzatura).

* The methods are obvious: good storytelling, good worldbuilding. Of course that's just the beginning. What does The Fifth Season teach us counts as good storytelling, good worldbuilding? What is a 'story' and/or a 'world' at this precise moment in history, at this particular textual nexus? (Could I go so far as to say 'strong characterization' or even 'relateable characters'? What does that consist in?)

* So very distant from Tolkienian epic fantasy. And yet finds ways to rekindle its pleasures?

* The conceit that ecological catastrophe can be averted and/or fixed through the power of the imagination (in the book, 'orogeny'). And/or: the conceit that ecological catastrophe can be averted/and or fixed through worldbuilding (cf. normal sense of orogeny, mountain-making). Comforting. Reflexive. (Surely we all fear climate change now. Perhaps the deniers most of all).

* Do storytellers only speak to their listeners? Or also for their listeners? What are the stories we most desire to hear? Are they the same as the ones we most desire to speak? Are they the stories we cannot find the words or images or names or skill to express? Are they what we fear to say, or are too traumatized to say, or rightly know we should not say?

* Anything to say about pronouns & POV?! Second person really works, especially when strands come together at the end. Cf. Banks Feersum Enjinn (structure wise) and (pov wise) Okorafor's Lagoon and Phoenix, Banks' Complicity, Leckie's Ancillary.

* A protagonist who commits massacres. "They will not realize for weeks that you killed the town in this moment" -- the town, ambiguous between object and humans. The realization "I killed Uche" rather than the realization "look what I've literally just done, look who I've killed, look who I may have killed though there is perhaps still time to do something about it." How do we think about "problematic" in relation to that huh.

* To generalize ahistorically a little about what "great storytelling" is ... could it sometimes be figuring out how to "have things both ways"? In Fifth Season I sense these are "my" politics and yet they are owned more expertly, more luxuriously than in real life: they aren't fraught with the same dangers, there is no sense of self-denial on political principle. Yes, there is conflict, there is estrangement ... but the fit between myself and the politics embodied here, that feels natural, comfortable, inevitable. Cf. story sludge.

* How much concern is there with subjectivitybuilding, i.e., how much is the strangeness of the world reflected in the strangeness of the personality types? I think not much. Just slightly though. For the most part these people, despite it all, are us. (Becky Chambers's Long Way as an example of taking it even further. Definitely contemporary personality structures projected into the future).

* A premium on educational capital. The book feels like it esteems education. Hard knowledge work.

* That extended subplot about getting the kind of respect they deserve. Could it seem weird and petty? The fact that it doesn't, is that because of cognitive estrangement / allegory? There is no mistaking it for something that is merely in the story-world. It is 100% about a certain style of brutally brazen interpersonal racism. Episode makes sense because it is interwoven in some way with the real world. We know this isn't just about fictional identity characteristics, fictional decorum, fictional formal equality, fictional regimes of rights. The intensity of that connection managed upward and downward in different episodes and aspects. We KNOW what word is behind the word "rogga." At other points, particularly the more institutional / systemic persecution of the orogenes, less of a one to one correlation?

* Just btw: it's one of those books where by convention the characters are assumed to literally play host to the words that are "from" their "POV." E.g. "what made her think 'ready'"? (Not exact quotes here).

* A sustained downgrading of the concept of "the end of the world." The world ends all the time, it's nbd. A sustained play on the shared planet we all live on and the (capitalist individualist?) personal world, as in "my whole world shattered that day" or "my son was my whole world" (really? Did he have an atmosphere? Arable lands?) Cf. in its many variants, "nowadays it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." Question: how does this book make me feel, in the end, about ecological catastrophe? More anxious or more comforted? And what else? And does what it makes me think align to what it makes me feel?

* Stone people. Cf. Pollock's and especially Pratchett's (trolls and golems)? Lithic agency!

* Not happy about the Malthusian edge. And the quasi-authorial interjections about what "matters." Cf. 'Farnham's Freehold' etc. Of course again, super skilled handling of a core strand of sf, albeit an evil one.

* A lot of quiet kink. Fulcrum obviously abusers, but also the faint logic of BDSM. And the "shut up I'm here to fuck you" breeding programme stuff (although that does lead to some genuinely seriously unsexy zero enthusiasm "sex"). But a lot of the time, hard to say why exactly, but it's kinda hot. " I can't tell if this novel is flirting with me or not and the hottest part of it is that I can't even tell."

* So, HOT.

* Does it throw you in at the deep end? And then reward you for sticking it out, 100 pages or so in? At the same time it's not exactly a steep learning curve. Or at least you're I in no doubt iit is going to make sense eventually.

* The final chapters quietly virtuoso in giving the reader a lot of what it is rumoured to most like. Sex, big fights, death of reasonably major characters, a sort of structural twist (of the engineered-by-withholding kind -- cf. e.g. Banks's Use of Weapons and Feersum Endjinn -- which I find nonetheless gratifying), a show-down with a nemesis, a sort of motive twist (last word of novel, saw it coming btw, cf. Feersum again), a coming-together-of-two-storylines, a controlling gaslighting abuser resisted with a defiant existential self-assertion, horrific "sacrifices" (hmmm & cf. Ringworld), action sequences fragmented around interposed aphorisms/horoscopes ("There are moments when everything changes"), apocalypse(s), a special power leveling up, etc. Oh and a glossary!

* Title. Box sets.

* What happens when two characters merge? Cf. marriage. Cf. rightsizing, Mergers & Acquisitions. Cf. how it plays out within the folk poetics of relateability. (What if you like one character and hate the other, and they turn out to be the same?)

* Interesting thing with "you" turning out to be in the other story. Because in another way, of course you the reader had to be there all along, to bring it to life.

* Cf. the powerful and persecuted protagonist of Phoenix. One very distinctive thing: Fifth Season has a sense of record-breaking. I.e. this is something that speculative fiction often does, and here a new record has been set for doing it in a particularly difficult and intense way. (Jemisin makes it look easy, of course). One thing in particular. That is the reconciliation of being special and powerful and magical with being persecuted and oppressed and abused. Jemisin reconciles an extraordinary level of power with an extraordinary level of persecution. "Gods in chains."