Surreality Check
A Savage Writer's Journal
September 2001
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29 August–5 September: WorldCon

Last Month (August)

02 September 2001
Hugos

I achieved my usual prediction success with the six major awards: the voting members were perspicacious enough to agree with me one third of the time. A couple of categories this year demonstrate that award finalists simply must include juried ballot entries. For example, the novel category included a work that was in the bottom quarter of the novels I read this year, and excluded three works superior to every one that did make the final ballot. I am not very pleased with this process; as I've explained previously, and no doubt at greater length than you care to hear, a Hugo (at least, if one reads the bloody WSFS constitution) is supposed to go to the best work—not the most popular/prominent/aged author, not to the author who most needs "career assistance" (but neither to the author who has won the most previous awards).

In the order they appear on the ballot:
Award My Ballot
winner in bold type
 
Novel Martin, A Storm of Swords
Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
McLeod, The Sky Road
Hardcore fen are upset. Tough. Joanne Rowling's work is much more subtle than most readers, and even reviewers, perceive. However, what's bothersome is the other three deserving works pushed off the ballot by obvious electioneering for a marginally literate book. Clear proof that there needs to be a jury process of some kind in the nomination phase, perhaps a 3/3 split (top three voting choices, plus top three jury selections—and if they overlap, so much the better).
Novella Chiang, "Seventy-Two Letters"
Egan, "Oracle"
[No Award]
Williamson, "The Ultimate Earth"
Clearly a "fan vote:" far from Williamson's best work, and far from the best work in this category. The absence of several other works made this category almost meaningless. Again, this category indicates a need for a jury process. Ironically, there are substantially fewer eligible works than novels!
Novelette Baxter, "On the Orion Line"
Steele, "Agape Among the Robots"
[No Award]
Rusch, "Millennium Babies"
Exceptionally weak this year. The winner is about 4,000 words too long—the speculative element. It's not bad, just not what it could (and should) have been.
Short Story Langford, "Different Kinds of Darkness"
Swanwick, "Moondogs"
Burstein, "Kaddish for the Last Survivor"
This was probably a very close multi-way fight (he says, before reviewing any of the voting).
Dramatic
Presentation
[No Award]
Chicken Run
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
As usual, a poor selection. The quality of dramatic presentations as a whole just sucks. Damn you, George Lucas!
Campbell Kristine Smith
Thomas Harlan
The correct result. Harlan (and, to a lesser extent, Walton) are good at crafting decent works. They do not, however, take risks, or seem to have much in the way of an underlying theme to their work, which is why Kristine Smith deserved to win.

Not entirely surprising. Not entirely satisfactory, either, but then neither of the two criminally inept nominations won, so I shouldn't complain too loudly. As a point of explanation, I didn't list the ballot "top to bottom": only those that I thought "should" win from my ballot. I typically vote for two or three items per category, followed by that "No Award" guy who keeps getting on the ballot (talk about electioneering). With one exception: I virtually always end up with "No Award" at the top of the list for Dramatic Presentation.

05 September 2001
Road Trip!

Fortunately, I didn't have to drive all the way to Philly by myself. We shared the driving. This meant, of course, seeing the sights (at o-dark-hundred) of western and central Pennsylvania from the Turnpike. Such as they were. This included a number of llama farms, more antique "outlets" than I can shaker a turned stick at, and lots and lots of high-cholesterol, salty, fat-drenched cooking at restaurants along the way. Cardiologists looking for study candidates should definitely consider this prime territory!

Note to highway authorities: If you're going to have interstate highways this winding and hilly, please consider some decent centerline and roadside reflectors, ok? And some overhead lighting at particularly sharp or inclined curves wouldn't hurt, either.

Just a few random notes on WorldCon. In no particular order…

  • Some day, there's going to be a WorldCon without a fundamentalist Christian convention going on simultaneously in the same (or adjacent) facilities. Not this year, though. There was some talk of trying to smuggle a couple of Vulcans into the choir, on the ground that Vulcan was settled by the Lost Tribes, but apparently ethanol levels simply were not high enough.
  • As the new Quaestor of Queen Esther's Kingdom of Magic, Mayhem, and Skullduggery, I hereby decree that all persons of Elven ancestry must report for reeducation to the offices of the National Library of Poetry. Since royalty always signs anything the Quaestor presents for signature, I hid this one in the middle of next year's budget. I'm sure that my colleague the Justiciar will assist in enforcing this. Otherwise, the Quaestor's other traditional function will be exercised.
  • It only took a year. But payback is hell, isn't it, James? What I'm afraid of is that you'll really write the damned thing… and manage to sell it.
  • Gardner was remarkably restrained this year. The vibrating spider apparently did not reappear. Perhaps there is something to be said for being a Guest of Honor! However, that did limit the entertainment value somewhat.
  • The art show was among the least interesting I've seen at any major con. The presentation was not good—the lighting was poor, the "display stalls" were too narrow, and the art displayed was limited in both average quality and originality. There were some nice works, such as the working fantasy/horror-themed roller coaster, and a set of fascinating road signs ("Speed Limit: c" is one example). But the one work that stands out most in my mind is the AGoH's cover for I, Robot, which (if one doesn't spot the lettering at the top quickly due to the aforementioned poor lighting) looks like Saturday Night Cyberfever. I'm not sure whether or not this is a good thing.
  • The Federal Reserve is going to have to crack down on merchants at cons, and in Philadelphia in general. Many were demanding that transactions on credit cards meet a minimum, ranging from $15 to $30. This, folks, is a violation of the Truth in Lending Act and a number of other provisions, unless the merchant demands that all transactions meet that minimum. Favoring one form of payment over another is illegal.
  • It's always amusing to see panelists on panels who don't know why they were selected for the given panel. Not very enlightening, but amusing. As an aside for future programming staff: Don't put multiple members from the same publisher on the same panel, unless it's a showcase panel for that publisher.
  • Jaws was fed. He is, however, refusing on advice of counsel to comment on any reports of shark attacks off the East Coast.

09 September 2001
Madness

It's contagious, isn't it? Hang around enough people who are missing a few marbles and pretty soon you begin to think that way. This is not a good thing. Perhaps because sanity has never been one of my greater failings… and I don't intend to start now.

I expect things to start calming down around here long enough to review a few more books in the next few weeks. There are several candidates for good reviews from Ursula Le Guin, Connie Willis, and a few others, with more on the horizon shortly. There are also, unfortunately, several candidates for dismissive (or worse) reviews. They're just candidates at this point, though.

Anyway, back to the salt mines. Which doesn't really bother me, as I've been ordered by my physician to increase my sodium intake to compensate for low blood pressure.

11 September 2001
Jihad

I must find a way to distract myself from today's attacks, so I'm working on this journal. No doubt I'll have to recode it completely. My sincere condolences to all of those affected by the incidents today—including, unfortunately, opposing counsel in one matter, which had a New York office. I spent a number of years concerned with some of these issues, and that probably makes me more disquieted than most.

The devastation caused by these attacks is frightening. I keep hoping that someone will announce that Orson Welles made a comeback and updated the famous The War of the Worlds, or that I'm really watching the Director's Cut of Wag the Dog. It's not that simple, or easy, or possible. My greatest fear is that the coming paranoia, however justified, will irreparably harm this country—which, no doubt, is the motivation behind these attacks. I wish I was imagining this risk, but I'm not. Take a look at Northern Ireland if you think "That couldn't happen in a Western country."

I'm also wincing at the anticipated reactions of and to the Arab American community in the near future. We may be facing the post-Rodney King riots all over again—in every city in which there is a significant Arab American population. Given the paranoia that today will evoke, I'm going to be surprised if there are fewer than a hundred or so attacks on Arab Americans in the next few days by angry assholes looking for a scapegoat. Arab Americans are no more responsible for Islamic-offshoot-inspired terrorism than German Americans are for the Holocaust. But they're going to be treated that way. Remember, though: If we treat them so, the terrorists win.

13 September 2001
Belfast on the Hudson

It has started already. New York is starting to resemble Northern Ireland, and what is most sickening is that the populace is demanding it. I'm not saying that no security precautions are necessary, but some of the proposals are just sickening. It's an awful lot harder to get civil liberties back after voluntarily relinquishing them than it is to create them in the first place.

One prominent columnist—I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of either a link or an indexable entry—has suggested that the major problem is with our immigration policies, implying that it's all them damned furriners' collective fault. (Said columnist's photograph betrays no Native American ancestry, so I think he's a bit off the mark.) But this is exactly what the terrorists believe about Americans: the stereotype of the Ugly American. The best answer, of course, is to change our behavior to become a bit more security-conscious (such as paying decent wages to airport security personnel and making them government employees, not employees of lowest-bidder security services) without changing our character.

Just like a building, one doesn't make a society more disaster-survivable by making it more rigid. Instead, buildings must allow a certain amount of flexing to survive an earthquake, or even a Chicago winter wind (the Sears Tower, for example, can displace a startling amount in the wind—and is designed to do so). A rigid barrier against people who Don't Look Just Like Us, or a rigid system that allows the authorities to enshrine a national security exception to the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments instead of having to litigate it case by case, is going to crack when tested by the right (wrong?) stressors. Remember what happened when the Jim Crow laws were attacked from the flanks (the education system) by the civil rights movement? But remember how long it took, and the human cost?

What is saddest is that we refuse to use the same "divide the enemy against itself" method that underpins all successful terrorist campaigns against the terrorists. Those who recall the early part of Monty Python's Life of Brian probably snicker at the arguments between the various terrorist organizations, particularly the animosity between the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea. As usual with Python humor, there's more than a grain of truth in there. Compare the experiences of France and Yugoslavia in the 1950s with their respective partisan/resistance movements, and realize that instead of the three major factions of Yugoslavia there are at least half a dozen in the occupied Palestinian territories alone. In the Middle East, these are encouraged by the slightly less despicable fundamentalist factions in the Israeli government (who have at least partly reformed since the War of Independence by making their bullies wear uniforms). There's plenty of blame to go around there, folks.

And here, too. 11 September is largely going to be viewed as an intelligence failure; it is, at least to some extent. The intelligence community, however, is partly itself to blame for its own capability shortfalls—because it proved untrustworthy during the middle third of the century by acting like its Soviet counterparts and spying on dissidents, and because it has become so preoccupied with shiny new toys that the institutional memory of how to find, nurture, use, and protect human intelligence sources is fading rapidly. Of course, that was under leadership that is now largely dead, and doesn't have to live with the consequences.

But that really is an internal matter. The system does need a kick in the pants. However, let's not forget that there have been several equally devastating plots defused over the last several years with little or minimal damage. Adjust things, but don't destroy careers because the analysts weren't infallible.

In a way—a very sick and twisted way—the American public is starting to learn a little bit what it's like to be a rape victim. Despite the general sympathy, the damage is done, and some people are whispering that we were dressed lewdly and flirted with the "guys" (most commonly by supporting some less-than-brilliant policies in Israel), so we had it coming. Like I said: very sick and twisted.

15 September 2001
Until Everyone Is Blind

Vengeance is a luxury that only the powerless can afford. The powerful must content themselves with legal justice. Sometimes the remedy prescribed after legal proceedings looks a lot like vengeance—but it's that "after" that matters. Legal proceedings need not necessarily, in every instance, include a trial before an impartial court with right of appearance and right of appeal, except in the case of individuals who have not explicitly admitted conduct. Nation-states cannot be put in the dock, not least because there is no satisfactory punishment for a nation-state that does not itself create problems with atrocities and destruction of the innocent.

That is not to say that extreme, but focused, force in removing a criminal regime from power is never appropriate. The legal process is necessary to ensure that the right regime is being toppled for the right reasons. In the current context, a punitive strike that resulted in the arrest of every member of the Taliban on grounds of a history of anti-US actions is not justified; there is not sufficient evidence of collusion with bin Laden or another agent of destruction in these atrocities. That we disagree, at a fundamental level, with the Taliban's treatment of both foreign nationals and its own citizens does not justify such action. Put the shoe on the other foot for a moment: Would we like the leftists and peasants of 1970s-1980s Nicaragua to make the same assertions against the Reagan administration? Whether one agrees with this or not, it's the same principle. This is not a principle that can suffer administration by degree, but only by kind.

Sometimes, and particularly in this context, the best revenge is living well. Leave the strong actions to those who actually have the information and analytical capability to determine who really is responsible.

It was on a Sunday morning when the awful news came 'round
Another killing had been done just outside Camlin town
We knew that Isaac danced up there, we knew he liked the band
And when we heard that he was dead we just could not understand

We gathered at the graveside on a cold and rainy day
The minister, he closed his eyes and for no revenge he prayed
And all of us who knew him from along the Ryan Road
We bowed our heads and said a prayer for the resting of his soul

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people ran together

Now fear it filled the countryside, there was fear in every home
Late at night, a car came prowling around Ryan Road
A Catholic would be killed tonight to even up the score
Oh Christ! It's young McDonald that they've taken from the door

"Isaac was my friend!" he cried, he begged them with his tears
But centuries of hatred made ears that cannot hear
An eye for an eye—it was all that filled their minds
And another eye for another eye, till everyone is blind

There were roses, roses
There were roses
And the tears of the people ran together
....

Now I don't know where the moral is, or where this song should end
But I wonder just how many wars are fought between good friends
And those who give the orders—they are not the ones to die
It's Scott, and McDonald, and the likes of you and I…

© 1985 Tommy Sands/Elmgrove Music

18 September 2001
The Worst Case

Out of a perhaps inordinate sense of fairness, I suppose I should provide at least some defense for the intelligence community over last week's atrocities. It could have been much, much worse. Before the fallout is settled, it almost certainly will be—but not through anyone's fault. The public should be able to infer that at least four major terrorism attempts within the US have been foiled in the last three years; even this asault didn't go off completely as planned. My imagination (and experience) tells me that last Tuesday's actions were badly misaimed; there were much, much juicier targets available, and the method (horrific as it is) is not nearly as subtle as the true madman would use.

Counterterrorism is a very risky, imprecise business, for a very simple reason: It requires perfection or it's adjudged a failure. Although it took more than a single slipup, any single slipup can result in horrific consequences. Think of counterterrorism as emergency medicine, practiced while the patient is trying to get up from the table and the guy who stabbed him is in the OR waiting for another opportunity.

Unfortunately, there are two simple things that the international legal community could do to help with the problem; neither is going to happen.

  1. Bring terrorism and incitement to terrorism under the jurisdiction of the World Court—and then give the World Court some teeth. "Incitement to terrorism" doesn't mean a bunch of Iranian students saying "Down With USA" (or "IRS") outside the US Embassy in Teheran. I'd propose a test that is in many ways stricter than that current in US law: "Whoever willingly makes statements that the speaker knows, or reasonably should know, creates a substantial and immediate risk of violence to multiple persons, directly or indirectly, on account of the victims' race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, and/or socioeconomic status, shall be guilty of incitement to terrorism." I've probably missed a couple of things in there, but this needs to be flexible enough to withstand sudden changes in social conditions.
  2. Expel every nation knowingly harboring terrorists from the UN, the IMF, the WTO, ICANN, WIPO, the IOC, FIFA, and all other politicoeconomic, sporting, and cultural organizations. Unfortunately, this punishes the populace as much as or even more than it punishes the responsible government. The difficulty with so-called "economic sanctions" is that they are seldom either broad enough or coordinated enough to do any good, and must usually be initiated by an individual victim-nation rather than by the community itself. There is no perfect solution here. However, using exclusion as a punishment is about as effective as telling a teenager that he or she can't watch Buffy this week, but can change the channel to anything else, as punishment for totalling Dad's car while driving drunk.

The modern concept of the nation-state is largely to blame for today's terrorism. Without the Balkanization of the world, there actually would be a "world's policeman"—not just a part-time deputy armed with the legal equivalent of a pop gun. (Of course, the active feodality systems common prior to the rise of the nation-state were, in many ways, worse.) I realize this sounds a bit strange from someone of my background; so be it. I didn't get paid for thinking inside the box.

22 September 2001
Napoleon's Method

Napoleon believed that medals and ribbons, freely distributed to the troops, were one of the best means available to keep an undersupplied army motivated. It seems to have worked; motivation was never a problem. But does it work for science fiction writers? If so, should it?

I suppose that I'm going to piss off some people here. It's not like I've never done that before, though. Gardner Dozois's annual Year's Best Science Fiction is the clear choice among the science fiction annual anthologies. No disrespect to Mr. Hartwell, but his emphasis on "core science fiction" is wrongheaded and harms the quality of his competing anthology. In turn, one of the more interesting features of Mr. Dozois's anthology is the extensive list of "honorable mentions" in the back. But just how meaningful is it?

Adding the honorable mentions to the works actually included in the anthology gives some idea of what Mr. Dozois considers excellent work. Not surprisingly, the stories in Asimov's are the most common members of this list, however one slices the statistics. The remainder of the list, however, is quite interesting. The statistics for 1999 are not much different, so I don't think this is an aberration. Or, at least, not inconsistent with prior years.
Dozois, YBSF 18 (2000)
Publication Selec-
tions
Null
Issues
 
Asimov's 64 0 90%
SciFiction (from May) 18 0 69%
SF Age (to May) 10 0 59%
Vanishing Acts (anth.) 7 n/a 47%
Interzone 24 2 39%
F&SF 29 1 35%
Analog 27 1 29%
Dark Matter (anth.) 7 n/a 27%

It's really not fair to criticize Mr. Dozois for believing that such a high proportion of the stories he published as editor of Asimov's are excellent (one must feel some sympathy for the seven stories that were not so recognized). Even the assertion that 34% of the stories that should be recognized for their excellence in 2000 appeared in only these seven sources (the only sources with more than four nominations) isn't unreasonable, particularly as that seems to reflect (and perhaps underrepresent) the proportion if one looks at major awards and nominations therefor. Although I would probably be harder on my own magazine, or even exclude it entirely from consideration (if you want to read the contents of Asimov's for a year, buy the magazines instead of waiting for the following summer!), this is a difference in style, not one in substance.

It's the remainder of the list that's interesting. In order, we have (gasp!) an electronic publication, statistically distinct from the remainder. Next, a defunct publication and a one-off anthology (together statistically distinct). The third group is an English magazine that is not, in the questionable judgment of either SFWA or WSFS, a "professional" publication, and a publication with a long history of excellence. Bringing up the rear—so to speak, as that's really not a fair conclusion—are the old-line Analog and the first in an apparent short series of themed anthologies.

One can draw many interesting conclusions from this. The most important, though, is this: Electronic publishing must now be considered a viable first-run option; or, at least, one particular electronic publication must be.

On the other hand, this list disturbs me in its overconcentration. Well over a third of the "excellent" works are multiple works by the same author. As far as I can tell, eight authors' entire (multiple) output of short fiction was included. Nobody always produces excellent short work for publication. While one can always count on Ted Chiang's, or Ursula Le Guin's, or Brian Stableford's, or Michael Swanwick's stories to be professional, one cannot always count on excellence. One must wonder whether the same result would be reached if the review was double-blind. (I don't wonder at all: several selections left me scratching my head wondering just how anyone found them readable, let alone excellent; a few were objectively—not just in taste—subprofessional.) That is entirely the problem with the current method of submissions: the brand name on the manuscript has an inordinate influence. Maybe law reviews (or at least the better ones) do things better than fiction publications… a terrible prospect indeed, if one knows just how badly law reviews manage their submissions!

24 September 2001
Award Nonsense

The last entry (scroll up) just led my fevered brain into more musings on awards. The biggest problem that I see with speculative fiction is that we don't have an award with street credibility—and none of the awards we have can get there. In no particular order:

  • The Hugo Awards are not only a sheer popularity contest, but one pays to vote. Even if the potential voting population wasn't seriously (and, IMNSHO, ineptly) skewed by the viscissitudes of fandom, the latter requirement is right out.
  • The Nebula Awards have their own problems with skewed voting population. In the end, though, they are merely the Oscars—which, in the long term, do not have much credibility. Bill Goldman's books have interesting explanations of this. As a test question: Name the five movies nominated for Best Picture of 1979 (given Spring 1980), and state when the last time you watched any of them was. Now do the same for 1995 (given Spring 1996). On the other hand, look at the way the Newberry Award, Caldecott Medal, etc. (all juried) retain longterm memory.
  • The Locus Awards are a microcosm of the Hugos, if not worse.
  • The Tiptree Award is focused very narrowly on a politically charged segment of speculative fiction. Even were they to be expanded, they would carry this stigma for a long, long time.
  • The Clarke Award is reasonably managed, but is essentially unknown over here, biased toward certain varieties of speculative fiction, and probably impossible to expand.

See what I mean? My brain initially became fevered when I started reading the sour-grapish comments from some people critical of awarding the Best Novel Hugo to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This is a valid complaint if, and only if, one considers that the Hugo should go only to the objectively verifiable very best work at a given length in a given year. Objectively verifiable? For a work of fiction? Give me a break. Bluntly, two of the best novels of the year weren't even on the ballot, and they are as close to verifiably outstanding as we can easily find. And two of the novels that were on the ballot are, in fact, objectively verifiable—as at best thoroughly ordinary.

When speculative fiction establishes an appropriate equivalent of the NBAs and NBCCs (if you don't know what these are, I've already lost you with this argument), and the field actually acts as if it cares, and starts to respect critics—especially those of us who will bitch about the Emperor's nudity and varicose veins—maybe the complainers will have a leg to stand on. Recall, though, that the vast majority of the persons who vote for any of the major awards have no substantial training in literature, or literary theory (which need not be as silly as it is often, nonetheless correctly, portrayed), and that many of the voters are individuals who have difficulty writing a coherent 750-word review. Until then, you'll have to put up with discord, and people like me pontificating that the reading public doesn't know what's good for it. It doesn't—witness, for example, the popularity of John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Janet Dailey, Danielle Steele, et alia—but that's not the point.

28 September 2001
...One Step Back

One of the major "writers' guide" magazines—the slick ones found in every bookstore—had, up to now, been cleaning up its act. However, the just-on-the-stands issue indicates that some of the writers, and editors, just don't get it.
Writing Magazines
Inexperienced Authors Need… They Usually Get…
Current, complete, unbiased guides to markets Out of date, incomplete, misinformed guides to markets
Accurate discussion of the publishing business Skewed discussion of the publishing business
Advice on writing mechanics and methods from well-qualified, experienced writers Advice on writing mechanics and methods from authors with little (if any) pedigree, commercial or academic
Assistance in developing self-criticism Cheerleading
Focused advertising for relevant, reputable products and services Deceptive advertising at best, and often outright fraud
Accurate commentary on legal issues from attorneys who practice in that area Dubious commentary on legal issues from people who have no legal training or experience in that area
The writing business, warts and all The writing business after plastic surgery

Before getting into the details of the article that has raised my ire, which will have to wait for next time—I'm too offended to give a reasoned and reasonable critique—what should writers be looking for from these magazines? And what, on the other hand, do they usually get?

There are plenty of scams out there. A magazine that essentially supports the scams, often with scare tactics that drive writers into the wrong arms, is really no better than the scams themselves. Some wannabe writers have a very negative addiction; these magazines function as enablers.

What disgusts me the most about the particular article in question (foreshadowing, anyone?) is that the magazine in question had given the appearance of trying to clean up its act, at least a little. Which is more than one can say for the magazines as a whole.

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