The Antisocial Socialist

While making/eating dinner, zingerella and I discussed several perplexing problems. We felt that the internets might be able to help us answer them.

1. Would Dollhouse have been better (or, more to the point, able to grapple with the questions Whedon wanted to ask) if all of the characters except Adele were genderswapped?

2. What would happen if Angel had a calling to the priesthood?

And the most troublesome, and thus important, of all:

3. Can a cyborg perform baptisms or last rites in an emergency?

Help us, internets. You're our only hope.

ETA: zingerella adds, "Okay, but what about a replicant?"

I really wish I could give it a proper review, but I'm too busy shuddering. I was, I must admit, duly warned ("You'll like it. It's dark."). It hits one of my major fiction kinks: protagonists that are only protagonists by virtue of being slightly less awful than the antagonists. Or, as Watts describes in the acknowledgments, "a cast of characters who were less cuddlesome than usual."

The premise gets vampire novel all over your hard SF, in a most cheeky and awesome sort of way, the vampires being a long-extinct human subspecies that goes into seizures when confronted with Euclidian geometry. And they are genuinely creepy and don't sparkle; natural predators that are evolutionarily disinclined to feel anything resembling empathy or connection with their prey. The rest of the cast is a fraction less chilling: human enough that you sympathize with them, horrific enough that you feel a bit disturbed at belonging to the same species as them. The narrator has had half of his brain removed because of childhood epilepsy, leaving him highly intelligent but, like the vampires, unable to feel empathy. He and a handful of others—a linguist who has partitioned her brain into four distinct personalities, a pacifist soldier, and a biologist with augmented senses who can no longer feel anything with his own body—are sent, along with a vampire captain, to make first contact with an alien ship.

What follows is a slow-paced, tense dance between two (or possibly more) species that are so different that, even with the best of intentions, understanding is impossible. Because the hard SF is largely window-dressing: the real ideas in the book have to do with language and consciousness. Watt's thesis is that consciousness and intelligence are unrelated, the conclusion is that the default state of evolution may be some sort of sociopathy, and the result is that I think I will have nightmares from this.

So, of course, highly recommended. But I think I need to read some fluff now.

You guys! I just saw the new sparkly vampire movie. I didn't pay to see it, of course—that's what the internet is for. It's really awful. It's better than the first one because it has a werewolf versus vampire fight, though it's a kind of pathetic werewolf versus vampire fight, and also nothing blows up and the only people who die are people of colour (of course).

( spoilers under here )

There you go, LJ. I just saved you two hours and the price of admission. You can repay me by telling me why the vampires need to go to high school.

In an effort to decompress after reading Serious Literature, I borrowed a copy of Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris that had somehow made its way into my house. (Basically, zingerella tossed it at me and said: "Trashy vampire novel! Read it! You won't be able to put it down and you'll want to stake Bill.") True on all counts, because she knows my taste pretty well. After having now read something from the big three popular paranormal romances (Twilight and the Anita Blake books being the other two), I think I have now read enough that I can form a few half-assed conclusions about paranormal romance as a genre.

The first is that I don't like it. Oh, I like to read it, because it's excellent subway material and makes me outraged in a particular way that I find entertaining, but I don't lose myself in the fantasy like a good little girl is supposed to. I remember, as a teenager, being quite into vampire novels (I drew the line at Anne Rice, given how piss-poor her prose was, but I quite enjoyed Nancy Baker and other embarrassingly Goff writers). But I've yet to read one that didn't offend me.

The second is why it offends me. There's the obvious feminist angle, of course. While within a patriarchal society heterosexual relationships typically involve some imbalance of power, in paranormal romance, the relationships are by necessity severely imbalanced. The male half of the couple is dominant, not by virtue of privilege, but because he is a predator and the female half of the couple is his natural prey. This is never portrayed as deeply fucked up, but actually quite special and romantic. Anita Blake is the least offensive of the lot on this issue, because at least she's a fairly powerful woman in her own right. But she's still less powerful than her love interests.

(Compare to say, Buffy and Angel. The relationship is more balanced than the ones in paranormal romances because while Buffy is human, she has supernatural powers, and even when she's weaker than the vampires, she outmatches them by being unpredictable and a brilliant strategist. And even so, everyone in her life comments that her relationship with Angel is dysfunctional and unbalanced, because even when he's good, he's still a vampire and several hundred years older than her, and thus not really the type of guy you want to bring home to Mom, no matter how awesome Joyce happens to be.)

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a really big fan of dysfunctional relationships in fiction. I don't think I've ever portrayed a happy couple in my own writing. But I want some acknowledgment that the dynamic is creepy rather than romantic.

When I'm reading these stories, I wonder about the women who do get off reading them. Far be it from me to judge anyone's fantasies, but it is a bit of an odd one to be so very popular, particularly among women who don't consider themselves to be particularly kinky.

Detractors of genre fiction frequently argue that sci-fi/fantasy is "escapist"; I disagree, of course. Good skiffy is quite the opposite, using the language of the bizarre to describe the contemporary human condition. But I don't just limit my reading to good speculative fiction, because there isn't enough of it—I'm quite fond of the trashy stuff too. Particularly young adult skiffy, where the predominant fantasy is of the bookish daydreamer who is somewhat of an outsider but, as it turns out, is the powerful Chosen One meant to save the magical world from doom.*

Paranormal romance seems to follow a different narrative, however. It's a fantasy of powerlessness. In it, the female (always female!) protagonist is frequently ordinary; if she possesses any special abilities at all, they won't help her when she actually needs them. She falls in love with a man who is stronger than her in every way. Whatever advantages she had over the average human are useless to her now. In addition, she frequently suffers from "character flaws" that make her weaker and less well-equipped than average to navigate the dangerous world of the supernatural. Bella is so clumsy that she hits an artery every time she looks at something sharp; Sookie is, well, a moron. She becomes completely dependent on a man, who, because of his "old-fashioned" values, begins to take over every aspect of her life. And her ordinariness does not save the day at the end in some cool twist; she must be rescued. By her man.

This is not new insight, of course; every Twi-hater has the same visceral reaction. (One of my friends, who really liked the Twilight movie, couldn't understand why I found Edward creepy. To which I replied, "Imagine you have a daughter. Imagine she brings home her new boyfriend, who is rich—and 50 years old. Are you cool with this? Now imagine he breaks into her bedroom at night to watch her sleep and slashes her tires so she can't see other guys.") What I do see missing is a class angle.

Back in the day, Marxists used to refer to capitalists as "vampires," a metaphor that seems to have fallen out of use. But there's something to be said for it. You never see a working class vampire; they are always aristocratic, urbane, well-read (they've had hundreds of years to accumulate wealth, of course). The female protagonists of paranormal romances, not so much. They're working class or lower-middle class girls, with human friends and family in the same economic strata. It's the friends and family who hold them back, who disapprove of the new bloodsucking beau, who represent the old life that must be discarded and looked down upon. It's—unnerving, to say the least.

So paranormal romance scares me. Just, you know. Not in a good way.

* Of course, this fantasy is also problematic, and deconstructed spectacularly in China Miéville's Un Lun Dun.

The Stone Canal, Ken McLeod

Yes, people who keep recommending him to me, I finally got around to reading one of his books. And yeah, I see what you mean.

The Stone Canal is part of a trilogy, and I don't think it's the first book, but that didn't get in the way of my enjoyment of it. It begins and ends in a distant future where humans and robots live on the Planet of Free Market Yay, and death is a relatively minor inconvenience because of cloning technology, flashing back, in what I found to be the most interesting scenes, to Scotland in the 1970s where the main characters debate and eventually put into practice the beliefs that will shape their future. What begins as an argument in a pub between two friends, one an anarcho-individualist and the other a Trot, becomes a struggle between anarchism-of-a-sort and capitalism-of-a-sort, to the point where I couldn't come up with substantive differences between the two.

I also couldn't get a handle on McLeod's politics any more than I could grok those of his protagonist, Wilde. Which says something about McLeod's writing—if he shares the views his characters espouse, he also does an equally good job of debunking them. Anarcho-capitalism is functional in the book only because death is impermanent and other planets exist to colonize, which is a fairly good take-down of the philosophy, if you ask me.

Overall, it's a lovely mix between hard sci-fi and political sci-fi, which, as you can imagine, is the sort of thing that makes me happy in my geek places. I was thoroughly absorbed in it up until the ending, where [spoilers for this book and Miéville's Iron Council] the Singularity happens, or something like it, at which point the writing goes all weird. China Miéville claimed that he gave Iron Council the horrific downer of an ending that he did because, as a revolutionary, he felt ill-equipped to write The Revolution in a way that would do it justice. (I don't really believe him; I think he just likes writing really depressing endings.) But anyway, there's something about depicting The Revolution (not a revolution, mind you, but the big one that would fix things), or the Rapture if you're a fundamentalist Christian, or the Singularity if you're an SF geek, that is inherently problematic. As in I wasn't sure if he was typing with both hands. [/spoilers]

But yes, now I want to read more by him. What do you guys recommend?

New Amsterdam, Elizabeth Bear

There's been some controversy about Bear lately, but I've been so into reading New Amsterdam that of course I haven't been following it. You can tell me later. Anyway, it's a series of steampunk novellas about a vampire detective, a forensic sorceress, and their various friends and lovers. The first story takes place on a zeppelin, so if that doesn't make you want to read the book I don't know what will.

Bear does a tremendous amount of things right (I did mention the zeppelin, yes?). This is the first vampire novel since Sunshine that I've read that's actually good—her vampires don't bloody well sparkle. And also, they're impotent. Three cheers for tradition and realism. Her writing is engrossing—period and witty and evocative. I am a sucker for "cozy murder mystery set against the backdrop of impending war" (see also: Farthing by Jo Walton). The last story has a cameo by a certain historical personage that made me squee out loud on the subway.

Where it falls down is in its structure. It was originally published as a series of novellas, and it doesn't quite work as a novel. We get repeated descriptions of characters we've already met, and it feels episodic. That's okay until the last few stories, where [spoiler] first, a series of monumentally life-changing events threaten to give the book a bit of a genre shift and permanently change the lives of the characters, and then we are hit with a wallop of Teh Angst in the last few pages, which would be fine if there were some sort of big plot arc. But there isn't, so it's jarring. [/spoiler] Other than that, completely awesome.

Am currently reading Whipping Girl by Julia Serano, which is fantastic so far.

In an attempt to distract myself from my ongoing anguish and misery, I ordered myself a greasy pizza and streamed Twilight last night and actually watched the whole thing. It kind of cheered me up owing to how amazingly bad it was; I think the main thing that SMeyer is good for is reminding us hack writers that really, anyone can do it.

Anyway, I was struck by a few things about the movie. First, it is an excellent depiction of clinical depression. Think about it. Everything is gray and dreary, no one ever really smiles or laughs, and even the most theoretically life-changing events do not merit much of an emotional response beyond a look of grief and/or constipation. Also, when you're depressed you tend to do stupid things like falling for someone you really shouldn't and building that person up to be the most important person in your life whom you'd die without.

The second thing I noticed was that SMeyer isn't really good at coming up with motivations for her characters. Bella never gives any real explanation for why she moves. The Cullens never give any real explanation for why they wouldn't just eat people, or why they send their vampiric kids to high school over and over again. I mean, they look like they're in their 20s anyway, so why torture yourself like that?

The last thing is that the movie really would have benefited from more explosions, preferably one that took out all of the characters in one spectacular boom.