Dear Norm, You Feminist You

This is an open letter to Norm Sherman of the Drabblecast.

Dear Norm,

Norm, I love you. Your are talented and creative. Your work on the Escape Artists podcasts and Abigail Hilton's audio fiction - not to mention your own groundbreaking podcast, the Drabblecast - is incredible. I am happy to call myself a supporter, though I admit that I don't often have enough money to donate. I do recommend you as often as I can, to everyone I can.

That said, you put something in your latest podcast that kind of annoyed me.

In the intro to one of your latest episodes - #274: Amid the Words of War - you described yourself as "not a feminist," and yet, you dedicated the podcast to female writers of science fiction and bemoaned the lack of female voices in genre fiction.

There is a campaign going on to discredit feminism. Regressive forces in our world who would love nothing more than to strip rights from women are trying to present feminism as radical, dangerous, and uncompromising. They find a few radicals - angry women with extreme positions - and claim that they define feminism. It's gotten to the point that women in arts and media - women who own property, act in the public sphere, and expect their voices and person to be respected - declare that they "aren't feminists."

Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler have written that "feminism is the radical notion that women are people." While I disagree with a lot of the rest of their writing - including the Muted Group Theory that made them famous - I think that this definition is better than any other I've heard. Feminists are just people who believe that women are equal to men and have the right to participate in society in any way they chose. We aren't people who believe that women are better than men, or that men are evil, or that every aspect of our society is secretly a twisted attempt to oppress women. We just think that women deserve as much attention and credit as men and should be allowed to participate in every arena of our society, including arenas that they have been traditionally barred from.

Including, you know, science fiction and other genre literature.

That's it. Feminists are just people who think women are people. We are men and women, we are all races and religions, we have all kinds of paychecks and talk in all kinds of accents, and we come from everywhere.

There are political forces that are trying to present feminism as a unified front of unpleasantly radical crazy women who are angry about everything. They want you to think that feminists are all man-hating lesbians or meek, guilt-ridden men. They want you to think that women want your job - not just to do your job if they're qualified, but to actually take away your personal job and deprive you of your livelihood. They want you to think that all feminists agree that men lose all rights to their property and children upon divorce. They want you to think that feminists condemn marriage and monogamy and God and country. They want you to be so angry and afraid about how they have presented "the feminists" that when they take rights away from women, or deny women access to a right they need, you'll side with them, instead of with the women.

The fact is that feminists don't agree on everything. For example, let's say you think that men should hold doors open for women - or at least that it's ok for men to do that if they want to. Does that disqualify you from feminism? Of course not! You can believe that women are fully realized, fully adult humans and still hold the opinion that it's polite for men to hold doors open for them. Can you be critical of the way that divorce law functions in America and still be a feminist? Sure! Feminism merely acknowledges that there are problems; the solutions are up for debate.

So, Norm, either you're a feminist and you really should own it, or you should think about why you're bothering to do a Women and Aliens Month on the Drabblecast. Do you think that women are people and that it's a shame that some areas of life - like writing science fictinon and fantasy literature - have been closed to them? Then you are a feminist! Do you think that women are not equal to men and don't belong in some parts of our society? Then you are not a feminist... but really, why are you promoting women writing science fiction? That's a man's world, isn't it?

I hope you'll reconsider your statement and come out in your next episode as a proud, card-carrying feminist. That, or stand by your convictions and cancel Women and Aliens Month. Or explain how you can be sad that women aren't on equal footing with men and still call yourself "not a feminist or anything."

Sincerely,
Mark


PS: Don't worry. We don't actually carry cards. Actually we get secret tattoos that give us magic powers.

PPS: I'm lying about the tattoos.

Moth-Eaten, Slightly Elitist

The Moth is starting to annoy me.

For those of you not in the know, the Moth is a combination open mic, traveling community theatre, and podcast. It is a place where people tell interesting stories from their lives. Some of them are depressing, some of them are uplifting, and some of them are hilarious. Recently, however, I've the Moth has started to bother me. My enjoyment wanes with every listen. I think the time draws nigh that I will drop if from my blogroll and iPod.

Here's the thing: the Moth is secretly incredibly elitist.

Most Moth stories start the same, with some pithy story of life in the sticks, dealing with a workaday job. Moth storytellers talk about being flight attendants and drug addicts, hikers on ordinary hikes. Weird and wonderful and horrible things happen to them, and then comes the conclusion... where smooth-voiced Dan Kennedy (author of Rock On, an office power ballad, learn more at www.rockonthebook.com... sorry, I've heard that outro way too often) explains that so-and-so the all-night diner waitress is actually a film-making comedian with a book coming out in September.

Almost everyone on the Moth is secretly someone, telling the story of how once, a long, long time ago they used to be no one.

And that's not counting everyone who tells stories of working in fashion or publishing or journalism, straight up and from the beginning. I don't mind them as much. Honestly, I don't mind the stories of people who used to be nobody, either, but their stories cast the flaws in the Moth into sharper relief. As I wrote above, practically everyone on the Moth is a Someone - a rising star of some scene or another - with some brand new media product to shill. No one is nobody. No one is a waitress who's still a waitress, a flight attendant whose still a flight attendant, a drug dealer who's now doing his best to be a good dad.

That's not true.

Once in a while - once every few months or so - the Moth will deign to allow once of the participants of their community storytelling classes to tell a story on the stage. These are the people who are just people, without anything to sell, trying to get by and live their lives.

The thing that bugs me is that this situation - rising media starts telling stories and selling their newest creations is just fine - is in the context of an organization that claims... well, I'll let the Moth tell you what it is:

The Moth is an acclaimed not-for-profit organization dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. It is a celebration of both the raconteur, who breathes fire into true tales of ordinary life, and the storytelling novice, who has lived through something extraordinary and yearns to share it. At the center of each performance is, of course, the story – and The Moth’s directors work with each storyteller to find, shape and present it.

From the Moth's About page.

You see, nowhere does it say that this is a place where media authors, comedians, TV personalities, and politicians will tell their stories. This is supposed to be a place where people - and by that, I assumed they meant all kinds of people - tell their stories.

So, ultimately, the dishonesty and quiet elitism is starting to annoy me. And the condescension of "special story hour with the little people" is starting to anger me. And the repetitive themes of rising stars telling the tales of their inglory days in the trenches are starting to bore me.

In other words, the Moth is on its way out for me. Where is it for you?

I Think They've Got It

You all know that sexism in fantastic fiction is a bit of personal issue of mine. In a previous post, I stated - quite clearly, I thought - my outline of the problem, and at least one solution.

If you know me in real life, you also know that my newest obsession is the sci-fi wargame Infinity, produced by the Spanish company Corvus Belli. If this post gets enough attention, I might eventually post a full review of the game, but for now I will content myself with this announcement.

Corvus Belli gets it.

Here is the Asura:

Skintight white bodysuit. Perfect butt. Perky boobs. Flowing locks. What we have here is either a heroically idealized action hero, or a sexualized sci-fi babe, depending on what you think about the pose. For myself, I'm unsure. She is firing a heavy weapon, so backwards slant of her upper body might be intended to reflect how she struggles against the recoil. I'm inclined towards heroically idealized, myself, but if your opinion differs, I'd love to hear it.

Anyway, let's move on to the Deva:

As I admitted in my previous post in this topic, I'm not really equipped to judge mail attractiveness. However, it seems like what we have here qualifies. Strongly defined pecs, firm butt, nice arm muscles. Sure, he's a killer cyborg, and he's got the transforming-gun-arm-thing to prove it... but then again, so's the Asura.

The point is that the male Deva is certainly not far from the female Asura in terms of heroic ideal and sexiness (there are male models in skin-tight bodysuits, too, but I thought the Deva was probably a better example). These examples are both from the faction I play - ALEPH, the group-mind AI that runs mankind's economy and transportation network - but I encourage you to check out the rest of the Infinity line if you're curious. There are certainly models that will make you say "really?" However, it seems to me that those models aren't exclusively of male or female characters.

The best part is that male and female-desiring fans of Infinity aren't abandoning the game in droves complaining that photons that once touched a representation of pecs are now touching their delicate eyes. They love the models, they love the game, and they continue to buy the first to play the second.

Maybe change isn't so impossible, after all.

Pullback

Today's story will be replaced by another reflection. Deal with it.

The Abigail and I (and our personal trainer, for what it's worth) have been continuing to think about the weird reactions I get when I tell people that I'm using a diet to lose excess weight and improve my health. However, there's a very specific response that I get from a specific group of people that I'd like to discuss here.

My fellow geeks really don't like my diet.

I've had geeks criticize me for trying to lose weight. I've had the entire idea - not to mention me and my dedication to it - mocked and made light of. I've gotten completely ridiculous advice like "just go to the gym to take care of your health and eat whatever you want," as if there weren't long-term consequences to carrying around seventy extra pounds and filling your arteries with cholesterol. I've had some geeks even try to undermine me, albeit in "joking" ways. I'm pretty blasé about it, but it drives the Abigail crazy.

I think it's interesting that it's my fellow geeks that react this way, and I think there are a couple of reasons why.

Firstly - and most importantly - I think that a lot of my fellow geeks have pretty huge chips on their shoulders. We like to think that unlike those shallow social beings and crude physical creatures - you know, the people who gave us shit in high school - we are creatures of the mind. We are dedicated to the intellectual pursuits that we know will really make a difference in the future. We're engineers, scientists, and artists. We don't worry about our weight. That's for lesser creatures.

I think this is bullshit in a lot of ways. The improved body awareness and self-image that come from getting in shape can improve your life in many ways. Sex is better, food is better, driving is better - hell, walking is better.

Secondly, I think a lot of geeks get upset because they feel like I'm abandoning them. We're all in the same club if we're all too fat, too thin, and out of shape. When I start showing concern for my weight and my eating habits, I think that a lot of my friends feel like I'm abandoning them.

Relatedly, I think that a lot of geeks are about food and exercise the same way that the "mundies" are about alcohol. Have you ever noticed that if you talk to a bunch of people about drinking, what inevitably comes up are stories about the dumb things they've done while drunk? And if someone who doesn't drink - or only ever drinks to moderation, and never gets drunk - speaks up, suddenly all the drinkers get really uncomfortable? Well - I've noticed it.

I think it's because as long as we're all drinkers here, we're all in the club. None of us need to worry about being judged - or even being invited to judge ourselves - because we're all guilty. When, suddenly, someone reveals himself as being not part of the club, the drinkers all freak out. Suddenly they have to deal with judgement, even if it's only their own.

Geeks are the same way about general bodily health. I'm leaving the "let's all pretend that we're happy with our bodies" club, and it stresses people out.

As an aside - before I move on to one final aspect to this little topic - I want to point out that I'm not talking about bizarre body-image fatness, thinness, and healthiness. I'm not talking about wanting exquisitely toned abs or a butt you could use as an anvil. I'm talking about wanting to go from seventy pounds overweight to a healthy B.M.I.. I'm talking about wanting to add an extra five to ten years to my life, and improve my mobility and physical comfort in many more years. And, yes, I am talking about being a little more confident and comfortable in my skin, and with my reflection.

The Abigail has told me about an added wrinkle for geeks who are also girls. She says - and I really need to get her to write a guest post about this - that girls who are friends with boys have to be either for the boys or one of the boys. In other words, they either trade their sexuality for power and acceptance, or they de-girl themselves as much as possible. Unsurprisingly, most geeks girls (no, not all, but most) seem to prefer the latter. The Abigail has told me that when she tells geek girls about her health goals, or her growing interest in makeup, she gets a similar negative reaction.

"Don't do that!" they tell her. "You'll give us all a bad name. People will think that we're like them."

And I have to ask - is that really the best we can do?

One of the things that I always loved about geek culture was its willingness to accept other people on the merits they possessed, rather than demanding obedience and conformity. Of course, that has never really been true. We are a social movement, like any other, and we have our rules, our boundaries, and our qualifications. That said, I thought there was something noble about a group that would take in the broken and outcast, no matter how fat, scrawny, or otherwise unlovely. Are you interested in things nobody else is and disinterested in things everyone else thinks are necessary? Great - you're one of us!

And we know geeks can do it. We've survived the rise of the geek, when geeks have become rich and famous off the power of their enormous brains. Even the other kind of geeks - those of us with interests in super heroes and science fiction and D&D - have our heroes in the likes of Joss Whedon, artists whose works reach wider and wider audiences without compromising their principles (mostly...).

And I like to think that geeks can continue to be open and accepting to those of us who fit the geeky bill, even when we decide to make valid and necessary changes in our lives.

Earthblood

This is not a drabble. This is a 200 word story. It's my blog and I can do whatever I want.


This story is inspired by the recent reports of the horribly mutated fish and crustaceans that are still being found as a result of the BP oil spill of 2010. I won't try to find a link to articles about those poor creatures, because then I might see pictures, and... well, the Abigail has been bugging me to get more sleep. You can google it if you're interested. And masochistic.

This story is also not a part of a world I've already worked in. Though, now I kind of want to.

Incidentally, I think that I like 200 words a lot more than 100. I know that part of the point of drabbles is to help me develop my literary discipline. However, I feel that it's practically impossible to really express anything in 100 words. There are some exceptions, but I feel that most drabbles are almost identical. With only 100 words to work with, stories develop a certain rhythm that is hard to break out of, and the author's own voice becomes indistinct. I want to work on my discipline, but I'd like to find a sweet spot where I can work on both my discipline and my voice.


The long and the short of it is that you'll probably see 200 word stories on a fairly regular basis.

Earthblood

By Mark L.S. Stone

First Captain Illyanor of the Kaiserin’s Guard, retired, had made the Earthblood the object of study for nearly a decade. We heard reports of the lesions that emerged on skin habitually exposed to the Earthblood. A farmer whose lands had been blighted by tainted runoff spoke. We saw the pickled remains of the pitiful, eyeless, twisted creatures born in places effected by the Earthblood.

“How is this possible?” Lady Trentine demanded.

“The Earthblood is still a mystery,” Illyanor replied. “But my theurgists believe that it may be rendered, by natural processes, from the remains of ancient life.”

A gasp ran through the room. Power rendered from death. Necromancy. It had been illegal in the Republic for centuries.

“Does the Northern Coalition know?” another asked.

“Of course they know!” Illyanor snapped. “All of this has been either willfully ignored by or intentionally hidden by the Northern Coalition and Earthblood Discovery Company. That is not the question!”

Illyanor caught my eye and nodded almost imperceptibly. I stood smoothly, letting my hooded cloak fall to the floor. All who looked at me recognized Gallus Franz, the Kaiserin’s only son.

“The question is,” I declared, “what are we going to do about it?”

The Subtle, Sinister Side of Sexism in Speculative Stories

Six S's sequentially! Seventy supplemental... uh... points!

First of all, have a fascinating article about sexual dimorphism in the world of WoW from Wired.

Also, check out this picture from the oft-hillarious, sometimes disturbing, and rarely safe for work Boobs Don't Work That Way:

Arguing about the portrayal of men and women in fantasy (especially on the internet) is something of a hobby of mine. In fact, I've gotten a little sick of discussing this, so I'm writing this post in part so whenever this comes up I can simply post a link and say "see this - this is what I think."

First of all, I will the first, second, third, and last to admit that I appreciate fantasy chicks. The Chainmail Bikini has a place of honor in my heart, alongside the Naked Powerful Evil Queen (the Abigail loves to mock me about this one), Swords of Unusual Size, and Extremely Flash Magic.

That said, you need to watch what you're doing. Fill your story (or video game, or movie, or RPG book, or whatever) with half-naked women and you are sending an extremely powerful message: this work is intended to excite and titillate the men in the audience. Women who like women may glean some enjoyment if they can get past the discomfort of seeing their own gender blatantly and unfairly sexualized. Women (and men) who like men need not apply.

This is not a message that I intend to send with anything I create. It's also not a message I like to see in anything I consume.

"But Mark," I hear you say, "you just said that you're a fan of chainmail bikinis and wicked sorceress-queens lounging nakedly on thrones of skulls!" I hear you say it through the Internet. It's a new app I just bought, and it's awesome.

Ahem.

The thing is, there's nothing wrong with sexualized fiction. Mighty thews and heaving bosoms have been with us for as long as there has been writing; check out an accurate translation of the Song of Solomon if you don't believe me. The trick is to consider what message you are sending with your work. Are you excluding someone? Are you only giving eye-candy to a segment of your audience? If the answer is yes, you need to deal with it.

This is where the chart I posted at the start of this post comes in. It may be intended as a bit of tongue-in-cheek commentary, but I think it's actually useful as a guide for balanced titillation. What you need to do is this:

1. Decide where on the X-Axis your story is going to fall. Is your work Realistic? Heroically Idealized? Sexualized? A combination of the two (for example: largely Heroically Idealized but with a few sexy bits that slip over into Sexualized or largely Realistic but with a Heroically Idealized climax scene).
2. Keep yourself in that category for both male and female characters. Period.

I mean it with step two. That's where the magic happens. Balance between the depiction of the sexes is what sends the message "this work is for everyone to enjoy!" For every man covered in grime and sweat I want to see a woman who hasn't had a bath since she set out from Caer Amithar a fortnight ago. For every heaving bosom I want to see a mighty thew. For every levitating breast I want to see a buttock of a tautness that defies the durability of human flesh. And no fair skimping on the narration - you must describe everything with an equal degree of loving, sexy, titillating detail. If you aren't up for appealing to everyone in your audience, aim for the left side of the diagram and leave the sexy stuff to the professionals.

And by the way, you should probably take some of those examples with a grain of salt. I'm not into guys, so I'm not sure what actually qualifies as the equivalent of a heaving bosom or levitating breast. Do some research with your female-favoring friends of the male and female persuasion.

There is one more objection I hear a lot, usually from people who make more of their money in one or another artistic industry. "Mark," I hear them say (through the app), "the thing is, people who like to look at guys are used to this sort of thing and they'll buy our art anyway; people who like to look at girls (specifically, male people who like to look at girls) won't."

To this I say: grow the hell up.

Artists - quit being lazy wimps. You want to change the world with your work? Take a stand. The days of fantastic fiction being the purview of men and men alone are long gone - and good riddance to them. Don't hide behind the need to make money. I guarantee you that you can find a way to make a statement you can actually be proud of and also make a buck, if you try.

And all the girl-looking-at-male-people out there - guys, we can do better. I guarantee you that photons bouncing off words describing buff guys (or even - and I know this can be hard to believe - pictures) won't do you any harm. They don't cause eczema, hair loss, or cancer. Everybody else has had to look at what you like for centuries, and they're all fine. You'll live.

Before I go, I want to hear from you. Who does a good job of balancing appeal for those who like boys and those who like girls? What are some works of fantastic fiction that pass the Zeppelin Test?

In Another Life

In my other life, I'm a science teacher. I teach seventh grade science in an Oakland middle school. Whenever I'm not posting, writing, or sleeping, that's pretty much why. It's rough, living two professional lives, but I think it's worth it.

Anyway, I have classroom turtles, but their habitat is less than ideal. One particular problem: it stinks. I need a better filter to keep their water clean. Unfortunately, I don't have the three hundred dollars it takes to buy a better filter. If you know anything about California schools - and Oakland in particular - you won't be surprised when I tell you that my school hasn't got the money, either.

However, you do.

Not you individually (probably), but all of you - all my readers - probably have three hundred dollars to spare. I wrote in an earlier post that I probably have between twenty and thirty readers. That means that if all of you donate a little more than ten dollars, that's my filter. That's my turtles. My students get to have living creatures in their life sciences classroom, rather than just dead things.

If you're interested in donating, here's my Donor's Choose page. You can also use that page to keep track of my other projects, which you can continue to donate to, if you are so inclined.

Thanks from me, and all my kids, and Benjamin and Shelley (the turtles), too.

Latin name: Unicornis

You know what doesn't get enough attention? Unicorns.

Maybe it's just me - I watched The Last Unicorn so many times I'm surprised I can't recite the thing from memory - but I remember when unicorns were all over the place. The wicked and selfish hunted for them, the virtuous basked in their presence. I read short stories about unicorns and books that featured unicorns, and I generally thought they were pretty awesome.

Then, it all seemed to dry up.

The problem seems to be twofold. Firstly, along with talking horses and magical soulmates, unicorns have been relegated to "girl" books. This is silly, because like talking horses and magical soulmates there is nothing inherently gendered about unicorns.

Unless you're talking about a given unicorn's particular gender, or something. I mean, I guess there are boy unicorns and girl unicorns - otherwise where would baby unicorns come from? Unless unicorns reproduce parthenogenetically. Do you think they reproduce through spores? Budding? Ew. Or do they just get pregnant? And if so, do they have to have mock sex, like the so-called lesbian lizards (link is safe, I swear)?

Right. Back on topic.

So half the problem is clearly sexism. If unicorns are girl stuff, and girl stuff is unworthy, then unicorns are unworthy and don't get into mainstream fantasy. This is clearly bullshit, but it explains more than it doesn't.

Before I explain the second thing that seems to me to have driven unicorns out of modern fantasy (and, obviously, into the sea), I need to explain what it is that makes unicorns quite so cool.

In addition to being great big horses with horns (because almost everything is cooler with horns), unicorns represent virtue and purity as active, almost aggressive. This is not virtue that gets despoiled - this is virtue that stabs you in the face if you mess with it. This is virtue as a force of nature. This is why Dan Lacey's paintings of a naked Barack Obama astride a unicorn made perfect sense to me, and were such an internet sensation.

It sometimes seems to me that modern fantasy has lost interest in virtue. We like antiheroes, non-heroes, villains, and complications. We like to watch our heroes suffer, compromise, and fail. We don't want Frodo and Sam, whose love and friendship saved the world while armies clashed needlessly outside the Black Gate. We don't want Thomas Covenant, who laughed god's evil brother to death. Or, at least, we don't want them quite as much as I do. We want things more like the work of Brandon Sanderson (which I like, by the way), in which cleverness, alliance, and skill at arms (or magic, or geometry, or whatever) win the day.

Though, as the Abigail pointed out in conversation, this may also be a gendered issue. The Abigail was able to list several recent fantasy novels marketed for women and girls in which virtue (or love, or some other positive passion) is the defining engine of victory.

Anyway, I want more unicorns, more friendship, and more evil gods laughed to death in my fantasy. I like it when virtue lifts up its head (or lowers its horn) and takes action. If you do, too, let me know in the comments.

And by the way, if you agree that there isn't enough about unicorns out there, then the Abigail tells me to recommend Rampant by Diana Peterfreund and Zombies vs Unicorns, an anthology. I have read neither of these (yet), but the Abigail has and I trust her judgement.

Until next time, the Zeppelin is hoping that if it's careful enough when talking about books it hasn't read yet Diane Duane might someday forgive it.

Politics, Politics, and Politics

I'm currently engaged in a fascinating discussion of art, politics, and horror over here on the Pseudopod section of the Escape Artists forums. In case you didn't already know, I'm the erudite (and handsome!) ElectricPaladin.

The discussion gyrates madly around a recent Pseudopod story, Set Down This, by Lavie Tidhar. Set Down This is the testament of an ordinary person who finds that he has become obsessed with the brief encounter between two men, an unnamed American pilot who fires a missile at and kills a group of Iraqis, and one of those Iraqis. The horror comes from the narrator's inability to escape his obsession and the terrifying ease with which human lives can be erased by modern technology. The creepiness of the "hillarious military YouTube videos" culture - the narrator's brother is a part of this world, which is how the narrator was exposed to the video in the first place - is an added bit of surreal and disturbing.

In a lot of ways, Set Down This isn't a great story. It's kind of a non-story, in that nothing happens, characters do not develop, and the world does not change. It's more a reflection or a character study than a story. If you like that kind of thing, you'll probably just think Set Down This is pure brilliance; if you don't, you'll probably find it a little frustrating. The story is redeemed, however, by excellent craft and a truly disturbing exploration of the subject matter. I'm not a big fan of non-stories, and I found Set Down This striking and interesting.

Anyway, the discussion: what I find really disturbing about the discussion is that Set Down This is being called political.

Political!

What is political about pointing out that war is bad? How is it political to acknowledge that the people who die in war are people, not faceless foreign devils? Is it particularly leftist of me to feel sorry for the people who get blown up, maimed, mangled, and killed across the sea? Since when is it political to say that war has consequences for everyone from soldiers to civilians, from the families of those who are killed to those who just watch the deaths on YouTube?

Now, in order to favor the war, do you have to pretend that it's a good thing? Do you have to imagine that the people who die don't exist, or that they aren't people? Is it now impossible for us to acknowledge that we sometimes do things that are bad in pursuit of a greater good?

I'm not in favor of the war in Iraq, but that's neither here nor there. I'm definitely a leftist - in fact, I'm kind of a Communist - but that's also neither here nor there. Do the people who favor this war really believe that admitting that war is bad is a leftist political statement?

Because that scares the crap out of me.

More to the point, the story is being criticized by a forumite who complains that he comes to Pseudopod to be "entertained."

I'd argue that the power of literature - especially fantastic literature - is it's ability to simultaneously entertain and do so much more. When you read, watch, and/or listen to a story you are entertained and transported. You live another life and learn how to emphasize with someone completely different. This expands you, enhances you, and has the power to change the world.

... I feel better now.

Anyway, if you want to join in the discussion, I'd be glad to have you. Otherwise, stay tuned. Up next, an intro to the craze that's sweeping the internet, Echo Bazaar, and then a guest post by the brilliant brain behind The Guild of the Cowry Catchers and The Prophet of Panamindorah (I can never seem to spell that right on the first try), Abigail Hilton.

So Sue Me

I don't know where all this interest in the Mary Sue phenomenon is suddenly coming from. Clearly everyone in the world of fantastic fiction is reading this blog (... and not commenting... and masking their presence from Google Analytics... and... ah, whatever). Anyway, Marie Brennan, author of the brain-tickling Driftwood stories (and other things that I haven't experienced myself), has weighed in as well in a recent Science Fiction & Fantasy Novelists (.com) post.

Brennan's take? Basically, the concept of a Mary Sue is complicated and definitely smells of misogynistic prejudice, but it's a bad idea to write a character who alienates and bores your audience. I won't repeat Brennan's argument here, though. What you really should do is read it for yourself.

Maybe I should start a podcast. People listen to podcasts...

In Offense of Sues

Other potential titles for this post could include "Defining my Terms, Bitch" or more aggressively, "Why I Hate Mary Sue." The first, however, is either mildly offensive or an in-joke, depending on how long you've known me in real life ("substantiate your data, bitch!") and the second really is too aggressive. I'm going to use Miss Haitch's post as a jumping-off point, but I really have nothing against her (him? zhe? dog? hooray for the internet!) and actually find a lot of the post's points interesting and compelling.

In said post, Miss Haitch comes to the defense of the oft-hated Mary Sue. Her argument is that the very idea of a Mary Sue is misogynistic. The title is less frequently applied to male characters than to female (true) and can imply that outrageously awesome women are an unrealistic rarity (also true). She also talks about how a culture of bullying and shaming surrounds the idea of Mary Sue, something I - who have almost never written fanfiction - know nothing about; I have to admit, though, that it sounds plausible. She closes with a description of the awesome characters in her real life and how they could be summarized and dismissed as "Sues."

And oddly, that's where she loses me.

What I think Miss Haitch is missing is that there is a literary dimension to Mary Sue being a bad thing. You can't just something bad and redefine it as something good, however problematic the bad thing might be. Mary Sues aren't just misunderstood but awesome, female characters. They are characters who are so awesome as to be flat, whose overwrought greatness deforms the world around them, whose bright light conceals the fact that they are as complex and nuanced as a lightbulb... and about as hollow.

Rather than heap on the hate, I'm going to go ahead and actually define my term (bitch). In the land of the Burning Zeppelin, what is a Mary Sue?

For me, a Sue is a character who is perfect and special to the point that it hurts my ability to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story. Such characters are distinguished by their flawlessness, a degree of style-violating absurdity, and the moral flatness of their surroundings.

A Mary Sue Has No Flaws

Flaws make a character interesting. Mistakes are generally more fascinating than mishaps. Mary Sues have neither. Either they always make the right decision, or their mistakes always turn out

to be good decisions in disguise. He never leaves his cell phone on when sneaking into the alien sky city. She never forgets to lock her car door. He can't remember the last time he misplaced something important. She's never let a friend down in her life. When he developes an irrational dislike for someone, it's always for bad guys (more on that later).

What this really comes down to is that Mary Sues are emotionally and narratively flat, and therefore, meaningless. They don't have inner struggles. Their passions don't overwhelm their good sense - except when it makes them romantic and striking, and then, it always turns out for the best. Mary Sues don't make moral choices, they just exist.

A Mary Sue Breaks His Universe

This point is a little roundabout, so bear with me (rar!)

In roleplaying, we have a term that is related to "Mary Sue": Unique and Beautiful Snowflake (UBS for short). UBSs are distinguished by being special, unique, and entirely one-of-a-kind, and violating the rules of their setting to do so. The first magic user after a thousand years of mundanity, the only man to do magic in a world of wizard-chicks, the orc who wants to civilize his people and bring them into a brighter future, the woman who does that special kind of magic no one else can do, the vampire with a conscience and a soul (ok, maybe that last isn't a UBS any more - there's enough of that dude to start a baseball league). Almost all Mary Sues are Unique and Beautiful Snowflakes, but not all Unique and Beautiful Snowflakes are Mary Sues. The juncture of the two - the place where a UBS can be awesome and a Sue never is - is where this concept lives.

Those Unique and Beautiful concepts I listed above? They're all awesome. They may break the rules of their settings, but if they do so in a way that is in line with their setting's general themes, they do so in a way that produces an excellent story. The first good orc, the last male mage, the only X-mancer... in the right world, these people could be awesome. In fact, several of the blurbs above are inspired by highly successful novels that I've loved. The key phrase above, however is "if they do so in a way that is in line with their setting's general themes." If they don't, they're not just UBSs, they're Sues.

Mary Sues have cinematic good luck and don't make mistakes in worlds of grit and sorrow. Mary Sues have special epic talents in worlds with unbreakable rules. Mary Sues have fluttering capes and hair in worlds without wind. They don't stand out because they're awesome... they stand out because they don't fit.

A Mary Sue is Morally Flat

This concept is related to the two above, but surpasses them. To explain it, I'm going to quote myself:

"In these books, everyone who opposes Yelena and her interests turns out to be an utterly despicable person with a taste for rape, domination, torture, rape, murder, and rape (note the repetition of 'rape'). With one exception, everyone who takes a disliking for Yelena turns out to be in league with the villains."

Real people have erring moral senses. We like people who turn out to be bad for us and we fail to hit it off with people who turn out to be great, decent, wonderful folks. We have characters from our complicated pasts and things we hate about ourselves that we project onto people around us, making them players in our own private psychodramas. It's not bad, it's just human.

Not so with Sues. When a Sue dislikes someone, it's because she's a bad, bad, bad woman. When someone dislikes a Sue, it's because he's a bad, bad, bad man.

The phenomenon goes deeper, however.

Mary Sues live in a world devoid of moral complexity. For a Sue, the choices are always easy - in fact, they aren't choices at all - and the Sue is always right. A Sue's opponents are always bad, his allies are always good, and you can always tell the difference between them.

Usually because of how they react to the Sue.

In conclusion, a Mary Sue is a character of singular moral flatness who violates the stylistic underpinnings of his world. He's always right, he never makes choices, and compared to the rest of his world, he just doesn't make sense.

For me, a Sue is always indicative of lazy or immature writing. It's easy to slap a bunch of good qualities together with some nominal flaws, give it a name, and cut it loose. It's much harder - and much more rewarding - to make someone who is real, flawed, interesting, and sympathetic. It's much harder - and much more interesting - to write your main character making terrible mistakes and maintain the audience's sympathy. In general, it's a good idea to reject everything that makes a Sue a Sue and write something good and interesting.

And Haitch? I don't think your friend, your sister, or your girlfriend are Sues. They sound like good people to me; they certainly don't violate the stylistic underpinnings of the world I live in. So nothing personal, ok?

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I'm not going to follow this up with provocative questions because I think I've probably been provocative enough. I'm just going to close with this: I LIKE COMMENTS. If you're out there reading this, I promise I'll even respond.

[bear image courtesy of Peter Macdonald; like my blog, it's all Creative Commons and stuff]

Burning Limitations

In a recent (sorry, friendslocked) post, a friend of mine wrote about her limits as a roleplayer: the things she never wants to have happen to her characters or in her games, no questions asked. Her limits, quite reasonably, include:

1. Having a PC raped.
2. Having a PC tortured, explicitly, on-screen.
3. Having the PC's actions lead to a child's death (when the child is someone narratively important and personified - she has no problem with her PC's committing genocide or xenocide, for example, when the populations she wipes out only include children in the abstract).
4. Explicit sexual content.

That's just the blacklist. She also has a list of things she wants used only with extreme consideration, such as her character becoming pregnant.

I find all of this eminently reasonable. It's good and important to know where your limits are in game. Otherwise, you're sure to discover them at a bad moment, such as the middle of a session when something happens and suddenly you're somewhere between retching and feeling like maybe not coming back next week.

Now, the weird thing is, my limits work very differently. No matter how I look at them, they all come down to the same central principle:

Let me play the game I signed on for.

Don't take away the power, situation, or setting element that makes my character cool. Don't impose new powers, situations, or setting elements on him until the game's style twists away from what I'm interested in. Don't traumatize him until he isn't the person I made anymore. Don't kill off the NPCs I want h

im to interact with. Don't kill him.

That said, you can do any of those things with my permission. Having my character change and grow is part of what I signed on for, after all. Change my character's powers if it adds to his story, traumatize him if it forces him to develop, kill of NPCs whose deaths will force him to grow, kill him if it puts a suitably dramatic cap on his narrative, just make sure I'm ok with it. Rape, torture, infanticide... I have a hard time imagining many characters whose stories would be enhanced by events this extreme, but they aren't off the table for me.

Lest this seem like a fake limit, I want to be clear - I am a real control freak about this. If you take away the game I signed on for, I will be unhappy about it, I will let you know, and I will expect you to do something about it. My limits are just as firm as others, they just lie in what I've come to see as a kind of odd place. I suppose it's because I'm a writer and I approach game as a writer. My character is my story, and while I'm ok with my character's story being dynamic, as good roleplaying must be, there's a point where I stop having fun.

I have my limits.

What are yours?

Link Orgy! On Fire! In a Zeppelin!

On his blog, author Joshua Palmatier (creator of The Skewed Throne and its sequels) has just hosted a post by Juliet McKenna, author of Blood in the Water. Juliet takes advantage of her sudden rise to blogdom (or perhaps it's not a rise - I can't actually get to her website through my school's firewall, so for all I know she's got blogs in her blogs so she can blog while she blogs - for all I know, it's a descent; maybe she podcasts) to talk about girls - and feminism - in fantasy.

I'm really not proud of that last sentence. Not the sentiment - that's ok - it's just a big, ugly sentence. I'd never let myself get away with crap like that in a story.

Anyway, I like girls in fantasy, I like feminism in fantasy, and I like the way Juliet McKenna puts it. So, if you won't take it from me, take it from someone who's actually published and follow the link to Juliet's post.

I'm Sorry, Sir, But You're Going to Have to Come With Me...

That's a violation of Moff's Law, sir.

Moff's Law (as described on the Racialicious blog) was born here, on i09. Moff's Law is the brainchild of Grand Moff Bastard, an io9 poster. You should read the post yourself, but I shall summarize it thusly:

"If you aren't interested in deeply analyzing a piece of art, stay the hell out of conversations analyzing art. Sharing thoughts to the effect of "don't share your thoughts" is stupid, rude, and hypocritical."

I will add that insisting "it's just art, you're over-analyzing it" is a way of shutting down discourse, which I consider the greatest intellectual sin. It's invariably a rank attempt to stop a debate the lawbreaker doesn't think he can win.

I mean, seriously, have you ever heard someone say "I agree that X has some complicated racial themes and maybe isn't as well thought-out as it could be... but why are we bothering to talk about it?"

No.

It's always someone who thinks that things are just fine the way they are, but rather than argue their actual point they're trying to shut down the conversation, which is sneaky, stupid, and doesn't contribute to the discourse.

Well, that's all done. Now that Moff's Law has been passed we can finally prosecute (and persecute!) these people, confiscating their computers and fining them one million internets each.

What do you mean "it doesn't work that way?"

Jumping on the Bandwagon

This just in from a wide variety of sources, including two game developer livejournals and a forum for the Reign rpg that I just joined: DriveThruRPG is offering a ridiculous deal, more than one thousand dollars worth of rpg pdfs as an incentive for donating $20 to earthquake relief in Haiti.

I don't normally do stuff like this. I like to think that my donations come from the heart, not out of avarice. But this... oh my God. There's some good stuff in there. Check it out.

That is all.

The Evil Dead... Lesbian Edition

In keeping with my theme of being as outdated as humanly possible on this blog, I finally read the Willow and Tara as Evil Dead Lesbians article by Stephen Booth (a man of mystery who is either a cricket player, a Berkley English professor, a crime writer, or some dude with a website and an opinion). The Abigail has been trying to get me to read this article for a while, but I've been too busy. Actually, I'm still too busy, but I finally read it anyway.

Booth's basic premise is that Tara's death in Season Six of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a prime example of the evil/dead lesbian cliche. Apparently there's a long, shameful history of this in hollywood. Gay characters are generally introduced as weak, insane, and victims (or some combination of the three). In older works, the message was that homosexuality is bad and will lead to your destruction, while in some newer films, it's more a matter of token gay characters being introduced and then killed off because their sexuality (in the eyes of the authors) stops them from becoming major characters with wide appeal. Culminating their affections with physical sex tends to lead to the death of one or both partners. Booth cites a huge list of films which feature (or even center on) this plot device. I won't reproduce it here - read it for yourself - and suffice it to say that I am basically convinced. Booth goes on to say that Whedon's decision to kill off Tara was hurtful and unnecessary, bad for the show and for people who idealized it, and reveals secret and/or unconscious bigotry or a tendency to fall prey to the allure of the ratings stunt.

Booth also condemns my favorite scene in Buffy - the Yellow Crayon Speech - as just a man saving the world from the "crazy lesbian." That I can't forgive. The Yellow Crayon Speech will live on in my heart as a perfect literary moment. I don't cry at television shows often, but the Yellow Crayon Speech made me seriously moist.

In every other way, however, Booth is pretty much right.

I don't think Joss Whedon is a bigot, but as I've said before (and will say again) I do think he's kind of lazy. A lot of his world building is pretty suspect, from Buffy's schizophrenic attitude about what it means to have a soul to the inconsistent motifs of Firefly and Serenity. Sometimes this laziness manifests in ways that are racially charged, like how the supposedly chinese-dominated future of Firefly lacked asian main characters for no good reason or how nonwhite Actives in Dollhouse are vanishingly rare and never more than secondary characters. Or, for that matter, how Buffy's Sunnydale, supposedly a Southern California town, contained few blacks and no latinos. And at least once, as in Buffy, this laziness manifested in a abrupt descent into a deplorable homophobic cliche.

The Abigail is strident about this, and over the years I've come to agree: when you write for adolescents, you have a responsibility to help them grow. I'm not going to talk about how to help them grow. Someone who writes Christian young adult novels about the evils of sex and spiritual experimentation has as much a responsibility as someone who writes sex-positive pagan propaganda; the difference is only one of content and point of view. The only sin that I'm willing to condemn here is laziness. Kids are all our responsibility, and cash cows, rating stunts, and unwitting anything has no place in fiction created for their consumption. Sell your ideas and let adolescents decide who to follow, but don't abuse your audience.

I won't go to far in decrying Whedon's laziness, however, because when push comes to shove I still like his work. After this post is done, after all, I'm going to take a nap - because I'm a teacher and therefore the first to be infected with whatever terrible disease is sweeping through Oakland this flu-and-cold season - and then watch the latest episode of Dollhouse. I sometimes just wish the man would pay a little more attention.

Anyway, read the Booth article. It's long, but you won't regret it.

* * *

• Bitch session: what laziness have you noted in Whedon's world-building, character-developing, and word-writing?
  
• Bitch at session: where have you seen Whedon be absolutely brilliant? Let me know (and be sure to tell me I'm a bad person for forgetting it)!
• The Yellow Crayon Speech really was perfect, wasn't it? How depraved do you have to be to criticize it in the slightest?
• Remember, I'm still taking suggestions about which of my two competing ideas to pursue this NaNoWriMo. Check my last post to read (highly imperfect) synopses and comment with your opinions.

Burning the Midnight Zeppelin: Girl Fantasy

Wow, this post is coming in late. That's going to happen a lot this month.

* * *

On the way to Cleveland, the Abigail and I got into a conversation about women in fantastic television. The results were rather morbid.

Dollhouse has a strong female character, but no female heroes. Adele may be tough, but she's no hero, not even a problematic one. Echo/Caroline's struggle is certainly heroic, but she lacks a persistent self; she can't be a hero because she isn't a person. If the show continues in the direction its headed - if the show continues, period - Echo's emergent metapersonality might eventually become a hero, but right now it's barely there at all. The real heroes of the piece are Ballard and Boyd.

Of course, Dollhouse has an excuse. Dollhouse is, in part, about slavery, and in America right now, most slavery is sexual. If the Dollhouse technology existed, we'd use it to screw, and it would be largely (not entirely, but largely) men who'd use it. It's hard to provide a huge number of female heroes in a show about female sexual slavery. Agent Ballard can't be a woman because he needs to have an attraction/revulsion connection to Caroline (and unfortunately, I don't think most of TV watching America is ready for the lesbian-driven cop story - the assholes), and Boyd needs to be Ballard's other number, his counterpart and his nemesis. In a culture that still primarily identifies people through gender, Boyd and Ballard sharing a chromosome is very important. Dollhouse isn't entirely out of the woods, but I'll cut it some slack.

Furthermore, Dollhouse keeps undermining it's one strong female character. At first, Adele is a tough, no-nonsense, take-charge lady. Then it turns out that Adele isn't really in charge, that there's a mysterious "sir" that she answers to, and then it turns out that her sexual desires undermine her and the only way to regain her strength is to forswear them. Way to be uncomfortable with female sexuality, Joss.

In Lost, on the other hand, we have many female leads. Some of them are even powerful. However, a closer examination reveals a frightening pattern. Consider attachment to plot. Who drives the story in Lost? Who makes plans and carries them out? Who is attached to the story? Right now Locke, Jack, Sawyer and Weaselface.... I mean, Ben are the movers and shakers. Kate and Juliet are attachments, always seeking powerful characters to follow and be protected by.

I will grant that Sun is the exception, though I feel she proves the rule. Sun is self-driven, and the fact that it is in pursuit of her husband doesn't really bother me. Love is a great motivator.

There is a lot of television I don't watch. I can't talk about what's going on in Fringe, for example. My friend Jon wants me to start watching True Blood, but that's another show I haven't seen yet (except for the incredibly evocative opening credits), though Jon, sitting across from me at the Abigail's uncle's table, informs me that it's no better. I see a pattern, and it bothers me. I see that female characters can only be strong for so long before the writers begin undermining them. I see that the characters that drive the plot tend to be male and women are relegated to secondary attachment. I see that sex weakens women and strengthens men (except in the rare cases that it demonizes them - see anything by Joss Whedon). All of this isn't true of any one show, but a lot of it seems to be true of many shows, across the board.

What the hell is up with that?

Turning to literature, I see that the situation is a little better. We have luminaries like Tamora Pierce and Diane Duane who write women who can be strong without men having to be weak. I get similar vibes from Jennifer Roberson and Garth Nix - see the former for a series that turns sword and sorcery on its head, inverting some of the core assumptions without losing the essential feel, and the latter for some really exciting female heroes. There are others - Neil Gaiman, for example - but there's also a lot of crap.

The long and the short of it is that I'm finally seeing the need for some powerful female heroes, and I'm bemoaning what seems like a lack of it outside of the rather limited subgenre of young adult, girl-oriented novels. I want to see stronger female characters on television. I want to see stronger female characters in young adult novels not directed primarily at girls. I want to see stronger female characters in novels marketed to adults.

Apart from giving myself the usual answer - write it yourself, shithead - what's up with this disparity?

I think what I'm seeing is the dregs of a sexist culture, pernicious shreds of sexism clinging to a people who have done a lot of work, but still have a long way to go. The tropes are against us, and it's difficult to escape them. Female heroes still need to do battle with a vast and terrible host of damsels in distress, scheming women and their dangerous sexy, bleeding hearts who go all mushy whenever a baby enters the picture, and a gaggle of equally silly stereotypes. All it takes is one lazy moment and the tropes rise up and devour you. Television is more susceptible to this phenomenon than books because TV shows are written by comittee and stupidity arises in groupthink, and also because, as the Abigail assures me, Hollywood is still an incredibly sexist place (she's studied this thing - take it up with her if you disagree). A book, on the other hand, really only takes one person, and writers live all over.

I'm glad we have what we have in literature, but I'm also looking forward to when fantastic television realizes that it's time to grow up.

I'm Not Alone

Last night, during a conversation about Monday's post about The Vagina Monologues, the Abigail directed me to Betty Dodson (a famous sex educator, pro-sex feminist, author, and artist) and her opinion about the play.

For those of you who are too lazy to follow the link (read it - it's a great essay), I'd be doing Dodson a disservice by summing it up as "she agrees with me." However, I think it's fair to say that Betty Dodson's criticism and mine stem from the same sentiment: it's not enough to simply have a voice. You need to pay attention to what that voice is saying.

* * *

I'm sorry that today's post is brief, a link in the dark, and really about as off topic as I've ever gotten. I just found out yesterday that I'll be taking the CBEST on Saturday, and I haven't got much time. I will mend this with the following:

Source unknown, but the image looks old so I'll risk it.
Image Courtesy of RPGnet's "Spirit of the Century Inspirational Art" Thread

Which really is about as on-topic for this blog as you can possibly get.

Let's treat this as a creative prompt post. Tell me the plot of Zeppelin V. Pterodactyls. Who are the characters? What do they want? Where did they get a Zeppelin? How did they end up fighting dinosaurs? How can I get that job?

And if you can manage to tie the second half of the post into the first half, well... no one's stopping you.

The Power of Fantasy

On Friday night, the Abigail and I went to see a production of the Vagina Monologues at the Abigail's school, the California Institute of Integral Studies. As a production the presentation of the Vagina Monologues the Abigail and I watched was very good. The actors were all great, supported by an effective minimalist set and some powerful, subtle staging choices. The heart of this production was clearly in the right place.

This is my first time seeing the Vagina Monologues, and I wish I could say I was struck by the weight and beauty of the piece and completely blown away, but I wasn't. My problem with the Vagina Monologues (and this is relevant to the Burning Zeppelin Experience, I promise) is founded in some terminology I learned a few months ago at a weekend seminar. I'll do my best to make it quick.

In any conversation, you have three factors: what one person (or faction) is saying, what the second person (or group) is saying, and the way the conversation is taking place. The nature of the conversation. In essence, the way an issue or debate is framed is the third participant in any conversation.

To me, the conversation of the Vagina Monologues was something like "how can we protect vulnerable women from bad men." Of the monologues I saw, most of them were about the pain and suffering of women - women as the victims of violence and cruelty at the hands of men, women as losing something precious about themselves thanks to our male-driven culture, women as needing women to save them, protect them, and teach them - with only one exception. This conversation is extremely well-intentioned. After all, when bad men and vulnerable women come together, the result is always pain and suffering.

The problem is that conversations make themselves true. They need to, otherwise they can't exist. So, the conversation "how can we protect vulnerable women from bad men" requires that women be vulnerable and men be bad. No matter how hard you work at keeping vulnerable women away from bad men (and vice versa), no matter how hard you work to make some women vulnerable and some men less bad, what you are working with is still vulnerable women and bad men. More and less is not a real change, it's just more and less of the same. I saw that the Vagina Monologues was totally caught up in a conversation that would never let it succeed at its goal.

To really transform the world, you need a truly transformative conversation, like "how can men and women live together" or "how can we make a world where everyone is equally valued regardless of gender." Alternately, more personally, "how can the Abigail and I create a relationship that works for both of us" is a more powerful and liberating conversation than "how can we make sure the evil patriarchy doesn't sneak into our relationship." The goal is (kind of) the same, but the way of thinking and talking about it is completely different.

How does this relate to the Burning Zeppelin Experience?

The thing I love most about science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, and every other kind of fantastic literature is the power it has to transform conversations. A favorite of mine is Sharon Shinn's Heart of Gold (which I reviewed here), which tackles issues of ethnicity, gender, and culture. By making its characters blue, gold, and white-skinned humanoids with cultures made out of bits and pieces of recognizeable human ways of life glued together into new configurations, Heart of Gold allows the reader to examine the issues in a new way. With fantasy, we break out of old habits and create new ways of seeing the world. We turn our challenges into games we can play over and over again, until the pain has no power over us and we can give up conversations that can't help us and embrace conversations that will.

That's all I've got to say on the matter. I'm looking forward to your comments.

Making an Ass Out of You and Me Since 1983

Everyone makes assumptions. I studied a little social psychology in college, and this is one of those rare situations where I am confident enough in my knowledge to say "trust me." Our brains are designed to be as lazy as possible - it saves on energy - and only think hard when they really need to. Making assumptions - social psychologists call them "heuristics" - saves on energy. Some of our assumptions are good: if it's glowing bright red, it's hot and it will burn me, so I should be careful. Others are bad: if it's human shaped and has dark skin, it wants to rob me, so I should be careful. Assumptions can be blatant, like the ones I just described, or they can be subtle, pernicious little buggers that sneak into your daily interactions - and your writing - and annoy the heck out of me. No matter how smart, tough, and enlightened you think you are, your brain will do this. It's better to admit it and learn to compensate than it is to pretend it isn't happening.

Case in points, consider the two books I am reading right now: The Wreck of the River of Stars by Michael Flynn and The Sword and the Dragon by Diane Duane. Both books contain characters of a variety of genders and sexual orientations, but they treat the issues differently.

A brief disclaimer: first of all, I have not actually finished either book, but I have made not insignificant progress in both. Such is the life of a blogger, however: you write when you have the idea, because you've promised your readers one post every weekday and you are going to delier come hell or high water. You can expect more in-depth reviews when the books are read all the way through. Secondly, I am really enjoying both books a great deal. So when I criticize, I do so fondly.

The Sword and The Dragon includes a homosexual pairing. We have a male magician who lives with his father and his son, struggling to master a particularly difficult form of magic. Off in the world his his "loved," a deposed prince who the magician is madly in love with. The opening adventure involves the magician riding off to rescue his beloved from a siege.

One of the things I love about The Sword and the Dragon was the fact that Duane stubbornly insisted on writing this relationship as no big deal. After all, the setting she had invented was one where sexuality was a non-issue. The world is not so much super-enlightened as it is a place where prejudice had settled on different targets. Much of the world's history, culture, and mythology are designed so that this assumption makes sense. Duane takes nothing for granted and builds her setting from the ground up, out of whole cloth.

On the other hand, we have The Wreck of the River of Stars. Again, The Wreck is a wonderful novel that I'm enjoying immensely. However, Flynn has done one thing that I consider a small mistake: he has applied modern day assumptions to a story taking place in the far future. We have a homosexual male character who exclusively likes young men (older teenagers) and a variety of female characters who are either feminine or markedly unfeminine, which is remarked upon by other characters. The book's take on gender and sexuality is very modern.

This is a story set in the far future. Does it really make sense for the inhabitants of a space ship however many hundreds of years in the future to make nearly the same assumptions about gender and sexuality that we do? I'd never accuse Michael Flynn of sexism or homophobia - not only would it be unfair and probably untrue, it's completely missing the point - but I will accuse him including modern assumptions in his setting without really working out the causes or consequences.

Do I like both books? Absolutely. Will I finish them? Definitely. However, The Sword and the Dragon is just ever so slightly superior. The setting is just that much better thought out.

In my writing, I endeavor to make my assumptions make sense. Especially if I am inventing a fantasy world, I take nothing for granted. No assumptions from the real world sneak past me, not if I can help it. I feel that that kind of diligence is the difference between a good setting and a great setting, and a great setting is one of those things that contributes to a really great story.

But in this, we writers are swimming against our own brains. It is a constant struggle not to make poor assumptions in writing, but worth it.

* * *

• When have you encountered a story the assumptions of which were unpleasantly - or pleasantly - jarring?
• Where have you struggled with assumptions in your own writing?
• This last isn't a question: if you enjoyed this post, you should check my previous posts on Big Issues, which might entertain you.