Just The Caffeine Talking

Changes in Fandom: A Different Perspective

Judith Dial (editor of the delightfully un-redacted Conspiracy! anthology) published some remarks on the Amazing Stories blog about the shifts in fandom which provide an interesting "parallax view" on my own musings about status and social class in SF. You can read her post here.

Boskone 2019

This Friday and Saturday I'll be appearing at the venerable Boskone science fiction convention, at the swanky Westin Waterfront hotel in Boston. Here's my schedule if you want to join in.

Friday, February 15, 4:00 p.m.: The Most Alien Aliens

A panel discussion about creating aliens and what our depictions of them say about ourselves. With me, Stephen Kelner, Jeffrey Carver, Laurence Brothers, and Karl Schroeder.

Friday, February 15, 7:00 p.m.: Game Editing

A discussion of how editing works in different kinds of games, and why it's important. Featuring me, Carlos Hernandez, Melanie Meadors, and M.C. DeMarco.

Saturday, February 16, 10:00 a.m.: Classic Dungeons & Dragons

Join me for a very old-school Basic D&D game. Characters will be provided. This session is only one hour, so be prepared to think fast!

Saturday, February 16, noon: Reading

I'll be reading from Arkad's World and taking any questions my listeners might have.

Saturday, February 16, 4:00 p.m.: Signing

I'll be at the signing table with Dan Kimmel, Bracken MacLeod, and Karl Schroeder. I'll sign whatever you bring me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pandemonium Event February 6!

". . . with awful ceremony and trumpet's sound, throughout the host proclaim a solemn council forthwith to be held at Pandemonium . . . " 

— Paradise Lost

This Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. I'll be at Pandemonium Books & Games in Cambridge for a reading, signing, and discussion of my new novel Arkad's World. Everybody come!

Class, Status, and SF Continued

The movie science fiction boom of the 1980s pumped a lot of money into the field. SF and fantasy authors began to get six-figure advances for novels, and sometimes cracked the New York Times bestseller list. Money and status usually go together (but not always, as we shall see in a moment), so you didn't hear the genre condemned as "trash" any more.

Science fiction had arrived, we thought in the 1980s. Academics were giving SF novels and short stories serious attention, bookstores were displaying them up by the front door, and moviemakers were paying big bucks for film rights.

Little did we know . . .

A lot of the SF fans of the 1970s and 1980s went into the hot new fields of computer engineering and programming. Some of them started companies making computers, or operating systems, or games. And by the 1990s some of those companies became global giants. Science fiction books didn't make it onto the bestseller lists as often in that decade, but science fiction fans were making it onto the "Forbes 400" list of the world's richest people.

As I write, the #1 person on the Forbes list is Jeff Bezos, described by Wiredmagazine as a "lifelong science fiction fan." Elon Musk cites the Foundation series by Asimov and The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams as major influences on him. The late Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, even used part of his fortune to endow the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.

Science fiction isn't just respectable. It's actually cool now. The world's richest men read it when they're not actually building rocketships to colonize Mars. There are TV shows which center on groups of SF fans — the people who would have been the goofy sidekicks of the cooler lead characters a generation ago. We've won!

Ah, but history shows that victors often begin quarrelling among themselves. Science fiction's new respectability has sown the seeds of conflict in the field and in fandom. In particular, its new literary respectability has created a split between the writers and fans in the literary/academic world, and the ones who stick to the older model of writing popular fiction for a mass market.

I think this is one reason why so much conflict centers on the awards and award nominations. For people trying to write for money, an award is a nice cherry on top of the sundae — a prize demonstrating that one has earned the esteem of fellow professionals and devoted fans. But for academics, prizes and awards are serious business. They go on your curriculum vitae and help you get teaching jobs, fellowships, and grants. Winning SF awards is a way to gain status that the academic writer needs. They'll lobby and network and fight to get them. 

The need for status bleeds over into the publishing world, too. If you are, for example, a twenty-five-year-old assistant editor working for a publisher in New York, you're not making much money. You're probably sharing a Manhattan apartment with three other people, or commuting from Queens or New Jersey and wishing you could afford to live in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile your classmates from Sarah Lawrence or Smith are Congressional staffers, or investment bankers, or maybe have a gig at a nonprofit. They have wealth, or power, or both. But at the class reunion, you aren't intimidated, because you're a book editor. That has status, too. But like all status, it has to be maintained. It's fragile. If your classmate the Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Miscellaneous Affairs asks what you've published lately, it's a little embarassing (still!) to admit it's a book about giant alien lobsters, or space pirates, or treasure-hunters on another planet.

There's more status if you can describe the book as intersectional, or "transgressive" (though not really transgressive), or talk about the author's exotic background. It's much less fun if the writer's just some ordinary science fiction guy writing ordinary science fiction. If that's the case the conversation will shift away from your work and the investment banker will start talking about the condo she's buying on the Upper West Side, and you get to stand there feeling like a failure.   

(I'm not even going to talk about the role of social media, partly because I am not much of a Twitter or Instagram user, and mostly because I think Twitter is the greatest threat to human civilization since the Black Death.)

Meanwhile, the vast expansion of "nerd culture" over the past half-century has created sub-fandoms which increasingly have little to do with one another. A few years back I went to a science fiction convention in Austin, and my wife and I found ourselves sitting across the aisle from a younger couple with a "fannish" look about them. We asked if they were also going to the convention. They said yes — but it turned out they were heading for a different convention in Austin that weekend, one centered on animation fandom, and hadn't even heard of the "literary" con we were attending. There are new status pyramids arising.

I'm afraid this atomization will only continue. As more authors take to self-publishing, I expect to see more and more little unconnected pockets of fandom, possibly unaware of each other. Instead of science fiction conventions, or even specialized written SF conventions, we'll see hyper-specialized single-author or even single-universe meetups. (Anyone who wants to put together a CambiasCon should email me privately.)

On the plus side, I have hope for a revival of local fan communities. It's much easier nowadays for fans outside the big cities to get in touch, and there are so many of us now that even a small or medium town get-together could bring together as many fans as the first Worldcon did. Maybe that's what SF needs — more drunken pool parties and movie nights, less fighting over status. It's something to hope for.

Open the Pod Bay!

You can hear my voice on the latest episode of the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast, talking about Arkad's World and various digressions. Listen here.

Class, Status, and SF

I spent last weekend at the Arisia science fiction convention in the heart of Boston. My chief amusement at conventions is the panels. I don't like "filk" singing much, I can rent my own videos, and I don't wear costumes (other than my "professional SF writer" outfit). I keep intending to spend more time in the game room but I never remember to do it. So it's panels, both as a participant and as part of the audience.

At SF cons you'll see lots of panels about the history of science fiction and fantasy, panels on how to write good, panels about the businesses of writing and publishing, panels about specific authors — and, lately, panels about race and gender in science fiction.

But you won't see much about social status. A few "worldbuilding" discussions may touch on how to use the social class structure of the Middle Ages in your fantasy settings, but that's about it. Nobody talks about the role of social status in science fiction and fantasy, nor about their place in our society's status pyramid.

Science fiction emerged as a recognizable genre (and gave birth to the original "fandom") in the pulp magazine era. Amazing Stories began in 1926, and Astounding in 1930, so let's pick 1930 as our start date. What status did science fiction have?

It was trash. Read any memoir by SF authors or fans who grew up before 1960 or so: every one of them includes at least one confrontation with a parent or a teacher or even an employer about "Why are you wasting your time reading that garbage?"

Now, some of that was due to the often clunky writing, but a lot of other awful writing was published in the early 20th century which didn't get condemned as garbage out of hand. I think the "lowbrow" reputation of SF came from who read it rather than how it was written.

Science fiction in the pulp era wasn't aimed at the educated segments of society. It took thirty years and the arrival of nuclear weapons and space travel for SF to make it into the "highbrow" markets, and it's still scarce there. No, the target market for the original SF magazines was blue-collar or lower-middle-class young men. The same young men who mailed off for Charles Atlas's "dynamic tension" system for building muscles, or correspondence courses in radio repair.

I get the impression that the early SF writers were a step up, socially, from their readers. Most of them had at least a couple of years of college, though they tended to have engineering, scientific, or business degrees rather than studying the liberal arts. None of them went to Harvard or Yale. America's elites didn't do science fiction in those days.

(Digression: even today, Harvard is startlingly under-represented in the science fiction field, with only Michael Crichton and William Burroughs to its credit. Interestingly, Radcliffe College — before its final merger into Harvard — had a considerably better track record than its sibling school, boasting Margaret Atwood, Ursula LeGuin, and Anne McCaffrey, though all of them graduated after World War Two. End digression.)

Science Fiction moved a couple of steps up the social scale as a result of the Second World War. When those Harvard and Yale grads running the government are suddenly interested in rocketships and atomic bombs, it's harder to look down on the non-Harvard people writing about them. Not impossible, but harder. This new respectability included the ultimate "middlebrow" accolade: a science fiction anthology in the Random House "Library of America" series. (See my review beginning here.) Science fiction stories began appearing in the mass-market "slick" magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.

There was still a whiff of the gutter about the field, though. For every respectable-looking hardcover from Gnome Press or Doubleday, there were a dozen SF paperbacks with lurid covers and easily-mocked titles. The fact that SF fans of that era could easily go haring off after weirdness like the "Shaver Mystery" or Dianetics didn't help.

The postwar era also saw a rapid growth in SF fandom. Tom Wolfe devoted much of his journalistic career to studying a phenomenon he noticed in the 1960s: the post-World War Two prosperity in America was so huge, and so widespread across the social spectrum, that every social class could indulge in hobbies and subcultures on a scale which only the wealthy had been able to manage a generation earlier. Custom car fans and teenage surfers and Appalachian amateur car racers could turn their obscure hobbies into major cultural phenomena.

Science fiction fandom followed suit. The lower-middle-class SF fans could now afford to travel halfway across the country for conventions, as a regular event rather than a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence. Fans could publish monthly zines, and construct costumes which would outdo anything at one of Louis XIV's masquerade balls.

The academy began to discover SF in the 1960s, as more SF readers went to college. Academic scholars had to fight for elbow room with SF's own internal apparatus of critics and historians, but academia could offer something that the fanzine and Locus reviewers couldn't: status. In such an affluent society, mere wealth was no longer the sole marker for social status. Academic prestige began to have equal, or even greater value.

And then . . . Boom! Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s science fiction began it slow takeover of visual media. The first big SF movie hit wasn't Star Wars — it was Planet of the Apes (1968). That SF movie spawned four sequels and a short-lived TV series, and made more money during its initial run than the other famous science fiction film of 1968, Kubrick's 2001 (though 2001 surpassed it later on). Star Wars merely cemented space adventure as the big money movie genre for a generation.

Meanwhile, a bunch of nerds in the Bay Area and Washington State were about to change everything. We'll pick up there next time.

Annie and Arisia

On Friday, January 18, I'll be doing two appearances to promote the release of Arkad's World. At 4:00 p.m. I'll be at Annie's Book Stop in Worcester, doing a reading and signing copies. Once that's done I'll scurry eastward to Boston, where I'll be a participant at the Arisia 2019 convention all weekend. Come out and join the fun!

Pandemonium Event Postponed

If you're planning to come see me at Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, I'm afraid tonight's event has been postponed due to a schedule conflict. When we set a new date I'll announce it here.

But if you're desperate to see me in person, I will be at the Arisia convention all weekend, at the Boston Park Plaza hotel. Stop by and say hi!

The Arkad Machine Rolls On

Marshal Zeringue has a fun 'blog with a neat premise: he asks writers what they're reading. To celebrate the launch of Arkad's World, he asked me to contribute an entry. You can see what I'm reading here.

And if you're in Amherst, Massachusetts, tomorrow evening, please stop by Amherst Books for the Arkad's World launch party! There will be reading, signing . . . and cake!*

I'll be doing a lot of bookstore appearances this week, so blogging may be a bit spotty. Please bear with me.

 

*No lie.

 

Appropriating the Past

I got my degree in history, and when I got to historical movies, I'm the one indignantly whispering to my seatmate about errors. Though actually I'm pretty charitable: I understand that movies do have budgets and physical limitations. If you're making a World War II movie and can't scrounge up enough M-1 Garand rifles for all the extras playing American soldiers, I won't be upset if some guy in the background is carrying a British or even a German rifle of the period. (But I will be ticked off if he's got an M-16.)

In fact, the thing that moviemakers get wrong which bugs me the most isn't the physical details, it's the attitudes. One of my perennial complaints about historical fiction is how often the main characters have modern opinions and mindsets. In C.S. Forester's wonderful Captain Hornblower series, it does occasionally strain belief how frequently Captain Hornblower displays mid-20th century ideas about early-19th century issues. One reason I utterly love Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series is precisely because his characters have unashamedly Regency-era views. Captain Aubrey in particular is very much a man of his time, even something of a reactionary, but he's still obviously a good man and a great character.

Why is this a problem? Why can't I just enjoy the costumes and quit nitpicking?

I think my objection to Getting History Wrong has the same root as the objections some others express about writers or moviemakers "appropriating" non-American cultures: the past, like other countries, is not just a stage set or a collection of costumes to play with. The past — again, like other countries — was inhabited by real people, as smart and as moral as ourselves (if not more so).

Making fun of our ancestors for not being clever enough to be born after 1980, or not being enlightened enough to read BuzzFeed, is more than just disrespectful. It's stupid. Having an iPhone doesn't change your essential humanity, so you can learn a lot from Marcus Aurelius, Gautama Buddha, or Hernan Cortez. Understand them on their own terms, just as you should try to understand people from other cultures in the present.

After all, you'll be history yourself, someday.