wisb-Guardian-Express

I grew up with genre. No, seriously, I did.

It all began with a book of children’s stories complete with shape-shifting and transformation. The girl turned into a fluffy plush-tailed cat… and I was hooked. And it just kept on coming: Star Blazers (Battleship Yamato), Battle of the Planets (or G-Force), Robotech (Macross – Southern Cross – Mospeada), Star Trek and the list continued. I fell in love with science fiction and it opened
a whole world of possibilities for a lonely little girl who had nobody but herself to amuse herself. That’s right: I am an only child.

Then as my reading hunger grew, I feasted on epic fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons. Mind you, I was the only girl in the group of boys and I played a cleric. I explored Krynn when I bought the Dragonlance books and went on further to read Frank Herbert’s Dune, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series and so on.

I thought I was the only girl reading science fiction and fantasy. I felt alone and lonely. Where in the world were the rest of my peers? Singapore seemed so dull, so empty – and I went on searching for that elusive geek girl (or nerd girl). For a while, I did find her, a good friend of mine who read the Pern series.
Around this time, I had started writing. Short stories. Fan fiction (even though I hadn’t heard of this term until the Internet came about). The stories found their way in school magazines and I had people who told me I wrote well. I started topping the standard for English composition. Yet, I still felt… alone.

Now, thinking back, I feel as if things are at least changing. There is a community of SFF writers here in Singapore. Trust me – they are elusive, like unicorns and phoenixes. But imagine my relief when I found them.

Mind you, it felt like trawling the sea for that single needle.

At the moment, Singapore SFF is slowly taking off as people find each other and their own voices.  The Singapore SFF writer seems to be a quiet breed… but we are around. When I returned from Australia after seven years of undergraduate and postgraduate study, I thought I was the only SFF writer around. That was how isolated I’d felt.

Then, I found out about the Happy Smiley Writers’ Group, got involved in Nanowrimo and suddenly, they are there! Singapore SFF writers. And illustrators. And creators. And readers.

This book came out of the Happy Smiley Writers' Group!

Singapore SFF started to coalesce a few years ago. Still nascent, still growing – but becoming stronger. My only hope is that it grows bigger and more prominent, that SFF writing (heck, writing) isn’t looked down upon or mocked at. Asian mentality sees writing as a job that doesn’t pay at all and I get those pointed questions from my folks who think that I am still going through a phase (and I am in my late thirties, for crying out loud).

As I sit before my laptop, staring out into the nightscape, I wonder how Singapore SFF would look like in five years’ time. And then, the deeper and harder questions: Will I continue writing? Will I end up throwing in the towel and walking away? These questions hover in my mind. But at present, I am happy at what I am doing: writing. Be it wolves who walk on two legs, phoenixes who hide in human form or a human A.I who pilots a warship, I will continue to create new worlds.


Author’s note: This post is a tribute to Han May, whose book Star Sapphire captured my attention a long time ago.

Joyce Chng lives in Singaporean and is proud to be Singaporean. Her fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres, M-BRANE SF and the Apex Book of World SF II. She also writes urban fantasy under J. Damask. Her writerly blog exists at A Wolf's Tale.

Editor's Note:  You can check out my mini interview with Ms. Chng for the Week of Joy feature here.

The Geekexchange (via The Wertzone) reports that Warner Bros. has snagged the rights to Robotech, the classic 1985 anime.  And there are some good names attached to the project:

For a legion of fans that grew up on Robotech, it was fantastic news that it was previously announced that Warner Bros. picked up the rights from Harmony Gold USA to create a live action film version of the series. With big name veteran producers Akiva Goldsman (Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I Am Legend, Fringe (TV-series)), Tobey Maguire (Seabiscuit, Rock of Ages), and Jason Netter (Wanted, Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles) all attached to the project in producer roles, the search was on for a director.

 I remember watching re-runs of Robotech as a kid at some godawful hour of the morning (Saturdays!).  I was all of two-years-old when the show first aired, so I didn't start watching until
the mid-90s, when one of the local channels started showing it to nerds who had to be up at five in the morning.
Later, I read several of the novelizations, including Genesis by Jack McKinney.  I'm pretty sure we picked them up at a thrift store for 25 cents each (it was the 90s, so the books had been out for a while).  The covers were super cool -- giant robots and all -- though I don't remember much about them now, except that they followed the narrative of the show fairly directly (my memory about the novels and show are a tad hazy, though, as most of my Robotech experiences involved seeing things out of order -- yes, I've seen the original Japanese versions too).*  I probably read the first three books of the Robotech novel series at least three times as a young person.  Weirdly enough, I'd completely forgotten about them until the news about the live action Robotech movie hit the web.  Strange.
After the novels, I traversed into late-night Anime binges.  My grandmother discovered the wonders of satellite TV in my late teens, which meant I got to stay up late on weekends watching anime movies.  I discovered Blue Seed and a whole bunch of other anime shows that way.  One of the things that occasionally appeared at one in the morning was Robotech (specifically, Macross:  Do You Remember Love? and Macross Plus).  This stuff helped foster a love for mecha shows, including Gundam Wing, which remains one of my favorite anime shows of all time.

I should also mention that while discovering Robotech, I had also spent a great deal of time playing around with old RPG source books for Battletech, another mecha franchise.  My friends and I used to use tracing paper to mix-and-match weapons on Battletech mechs, creating our own super mechs.  I still have those somewhere, along with a whole lot of Battletech toys...And then I bought a few of the Palladium RPG books for Robotech and did the exact same thing.  All of those books are still on my shelves...

Basically, I was a total geek in my youth.  And I'm still a geek today, because I will go see a live action Robotech movie even if they cast gerbils for all the roles.  This is just too awesome!


*For those that don't know. Robotech is the name of the American adaptation of the original Japanese anime franchise, Macross.  The U.S. edition took the first three series of Macross and turned them into three seasons of Robotech (this is a drastic oversimplification, though, and I'm probably half wrong).

I don't know if it is common knowledge yet, but I pretty much hated the first stand-alone Wolverine movie.  Its plot didn't make any sense, the CG was lazy (at best), and the far-reaching story-line left much to be desired.  Almost none of those problems exist here.  The Wolverine is a high-octane action thriller with a fairly self-contained narrative, decent female characters, and a
compelling, though limited, examination of mortality.  This is one you should see on the big screen!

The Wolverine begins many years after the events of X-Men:  The Last Stand.  A psychologically-wounded Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) lives a mostly solitary life in the woods, desperately trying to fend off his nightmarish dreams with alcohol.  One of the dreams involves a Japanese soldier man named Yoshida (Ken Yamamura), who he saves from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.  The other dream involves none other than a mental reconstruction of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who forms the metaphorical representation of his deepest injuries:  those of the soul.  Eventually his past catches up with him:  much older Yoshida (Hal Yamanouchi) has sent one of his agents, Yukio (Rila Fukushima), to find the Wolverine to offer the "gift" of mortality in exchange for taking Logan's gifts for himself.  But the schemes in the Yoshida household are not what they seem:  Mariko (Tao Okamoto) is set to inherent "the throne," her father, Shingen (Hiroyuki Sanada), wants her out of the way, and a mysterious mutant known as Viper (Svetlana Khodchenkova) has managed to stop the Wolverine's regenerative abilities in the service of her own violent agenda.  Trapped in the middle, Logan must protect Mariko, uncover the plots that seem ready to destroy her, and regain his abilities before his injuries finally catch up with him.

Needless to say, a lot of people get stabbed.

There are a lot of things I love about this movie, but due to space, I can't cover them all in depth.  What I will say is this:  the film met my basic expectations.  When I came to The Wolverine, I wanted the following:

1. Decent CG (Wolverine's claws should actually look like metal claws)
2. A Coherent Plot (no giant plot holes)
3. Decent Character Development (the main folks should actually change somehow)
4. Focus (10,000 subplots do not a good movie make)
5. Awesome Action (good choreography and bit of gritty realism)

The Wolverine offers pretty much all of these, more or less.

First, I have to talk about the visuals for the film.  While the direction is perhaps somewhat uninspired (where's some Bourne-style action when you need it?), the look of the film does not disappoint.  Bad visuals are one of my biggest pet peeves.  If I can't believe what I'm seeing on the screen -- within reason -- then I cannot get into the characters whose motivations are based in part on the world in which they exist.  In the case of The Wolverine, the visuals rarely fall short of reasonably realistic, and this made it possible for me to suspend disbelief and immerse myself into the film experience.  For example, Wolverine's claws, which spend as much time on screen as every other actor other than Jackman, are rendered so well that it's hard to believe they're not actually part of his hands.  The same is true for Wolverine's injuries, which always look (and, by extension, feel) real.

Additionally, the action sequences look beautiful, most notably the bullet train fight, in which Wolverine takes on several knife-wielding thugs while trying not to get thrown off the 300 MPH vehicle or get smacked by a metal arch or a billboard.  Usually fights on top of large moving vehicles are dull and repetitive.  While I enjoyed Star Trek Into Darkness, the climactic flying dumpster battle at the end left much to be desired.  Here, however, the stakes have been raised.  The heroes and villains both struggle to hang on to the top of the train while trying to kill one another.  This makes for good comedy, such as when Wolverine feigns jumping over a metal beam, thus smacking one of his enemies into paste, but it also makes for a fight scene that has seemingly real stakes.*  Anyone can die.
Death is one of the things that makes this film far better than the Origins version.  The film explores two different dimensions of mortality:  the pain Wolverine feels at carrying the memory of killing Jean Grey within him and how discovering the possibility of death can change people.  I'll admit that I didn't care for the way they manifested Wolverine's dream-sequence-Jean-Grey terrors, but I at least understand what the director/writers wanted to do.  Wolverine believes he has no reason to live, and that the root of that disinterest in life stems from Jean Grey's death/murder.  But what he apparently has to discover by the end of the film is a different sort of purpose in life, one that involves using his powers for something greater than himself.  I don't think the film makes this message explicit, but the last moments of the film seem to suggest, to me, that Wolverine's rediscovery of the value of life, in part through his relationship with Mariko, represents one of the fundamental breaks from a life of killing necessary to turn Wolverine into more than his past.

The other major exploration of mortality concerns Wolverine's apparent vulnerability.  For at least half of the film, Wolverine is supposedly susceptible to the same physical pressures of any other regular Joe.  With his healing factor turned off, every attack could end his life.  In every other film incarnation of the character, Wolverine can take bullet after bullet without so much as blinking.  He doesn't get tired.  His head never rings from a blow.  He simple grimaces and moves on.  Filmmakers have responded to this by creating villains that do bigger and badder things, which seems like a horrible slippery slope to me:  once you start doing that, you have to keep making the villains bigger.  But in The Wolverine, he bleeds, and then keeps bleeding.  When someone smacks him on the skull with a fist or a blunt object, he falls -- the film also makes an effort to show just what having a metal skull would do to a person...ring, ring, ring.  Unfortunately, while the narrative plays up the mortality narrative, the film doesn't address why Wolverine can keep moving about despite his serious injuries.  He might grow tired or weak, but somehow he keeps going.  The film never offers an explanation for this, though I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that even without his healing factor, Wolverine isn't like the rest of us.  I, however, would have liked the film to reduce Wolverine to a total mortal, to put him out of commission for part of the film so that the secondary characters, especially the women, can take charge.
And that's one thing that this film does quite well:  the female heroes are relatively three-dimensional and compelling.  Yukio, who sees the future, is a sensitive martial arts expert with a side of arrogant snark.  And her action sequences are some of the best for one really good reason:  she kicks serious ass and knows how to navigate the field of battle when the deck is turned against her.  The other main female character, Mariko, seems to fall within the realm of a traditional Japanese woman (somewhat timid and willing to defer to her male elders) and fulfill the cliche "damsel in distress" trope.  However, her character does develop from timid to determined young woman by the end; she may never become the one who uses physical force to get the job done (that's Yukio's job), but she seems to recognize that strength can come from elsewhere.  The narrative also pays attention to the relationship between Yukio and Mariko, albeit somewhat simplistically.  While they are interesting because they are opposites of one another -- socioeconomically and physically -- giving their characters some background makes them more than mere set dressing.  I wanted to learn more about them, but I knew going in that The Wolverine was an action film, not a drama.**

That doesn't mean the film didn't have enough space to give us a little more about Yukio and Mariko.  One of the criticisms many have lobbed at The Wolverine concerns its unnecessarily complicated list of villains.  I won't name them all here; all you need to know is this:  there are at least five different villains, some of whom are working with one another (sorta).  While the film more or less closes all of its villain loops, the overabundance of villainous characters means that no single villain gets much attention at all.  The single mutant in the list, Viper, is the most caricatured villain of the lot; her motivations are never made clear, and what few lines she's given tell us nothing about her character other than that she is a bad person and has creepy super powers.  The other villains at least get a little depth, but it is superficial depth at best.  The result is a film that sometimes has to rush through things before it can get to the next major plot point.  This is no more apparent in the climax, when at least three of the five villains are dispensed in the same sequence.  It doesn't make for good character development, both because the villains aren't really characters at all and because all the time setting up all those villains takes away from time that could be spent on other characters.

I will say this about the villains, though:  the film avoids playing the "we have to create a villain so super powerful that Wolverine can't possibly win" card.
Overall, I actually quite liked The Wolverine.  While there are too many villains, which strains the plot and the development of the major characters, and there are some continuity issues in terms of Wolverine's powers, etc., I found the experience of the film mostly enjoyable.  There were quite a few humorous moments, the action sequences were exciting and high-energy, and the narrative, however strained, made sense.  If this is what we can expect from future Wolverine movies, then I think we're moving in all the right directions.

Directing: 3/5
Cast: 4/5
Writing: 3/5
Visuals: 4/5
Adaptation: N/A (I haven't read the relevant comics for this chapter of Wolverine's life, though I am familiar with them.)
Overall: 3.5/5 (70%)
Inflated Grade: B (for exciting action, a contained narrative, decent secondary characters, and Hugh Jackman's sexy self)
Value: $7.50 (based on a $10.50 max)


*This scene occurs after Wolverine's healing powers have been dampened, which means that he'll pretty much die if he gets smacked by a support beam.

**Yes, this film passes the Bechdel Test.

Note:  I've heard some folks criticize the film because of its representation of Japanese culture.  If I were more informed about Japanese culture, I would feel comfortable to comment.  However, I honestly don't know enough about Japan to know whether the Japan in The Wolverine is an ethnocentric stereotype.  Does anyone have any insight here?

After sending my critique partner a story about people living on the clouds, he commented that all my stories had robots. I denied everything. It was about cloud people! But there it was, the main character reminiscing on making a robot out of cardboard boxes as a child. Robots had made it in there.

It wasn't based on life. I never made a robot from cardboard, because I dreamt of functional
robots. Such things weren't easily available when I was younger, so I contented myself with Asimov's robot stories and Short Circuit (Number Five reminded me of me).

Eventually, I did get a robot for Christmas (which was expensive enough to also be my birthday present). It could be preprogramed to make noises and move on a set route. State-of-the-art toy material. And obsolete by the time I hit my teenaged years, when toys like Furby were all the rage. Robots could now react in a pseudo-animal way (within limits, as the original Furby couldn't really learn language, or remember phrases,
contrary to security fears).

I haven't been disappointed as an adult. Robot toys are increasingly lifelike. Movie robots now include one with a pet cockroach (it was like the people at Pixar knew all my interests when they made Wall-E).  Robonaut 2, a humanoid robot, has made it into space. There are robots everywhere, so perhaps I shouldn't feel bad if they're everywhere in my stories too.


Polenth Blake lives with cockroaches and an Aloe vera called Mister Fingers. Her first collection, Rainbow Lights, is out in the ocean somewhere. Her website lurks at her website.

P.S.:  During my Week of Joy, I mini-interviewed Polenth about her collection.  You can read that here.

I said I would throw in my two-cents on this Jim Carrey story.  I realize I'm late to the party on this one, but I feel compelled to talk about the entire issue.  Instead of trying to summarize the whole damn situation, I'll just block quote something from the Guardian:

Carrey, who has been an outspoken proponent of increased gun control in the wake of the shootings by gunman Adam Lanza in December, tweeted on Sunday that he could no longer support the film. He wrote: "I did Kick-Ass 2 a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. My apologies to others involve[d] with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart." 

Scottish comic-book writer and Kick-Ass 2 executive producer Mark Millar, whose original work forms the basis of the sequel, today responded on his own blog, pointing out that Carrey, who plays a character named Colonel Stars and Stripes, knew exactly what he was letting himself in for. 

"Like Jim, I'm horrified by real-life violence (even though I'm Scottish), but Kick-Ass 2 isn't a documentary. No actors were harmed in the making of this production! This is fiction and like Tarantino and Peckinpah, Scorsese and Eastwood, John Boorman, Oliver Stone and Chan-wook Park, Kick-Ass avoids the usual bloodless bodycount of most big summer pictures and focuses instead of the CONSEQUENCES of violence … Our job as storytellers is to entertain and our toolbox can't be sabotaged by curtailing the use of guns in an action movie."

While I understand Millar's frustration with Carrey, I do think he misses the point here.  From Carrey's perspective, film violence leads, at least in part, to real world violence.  I don't know how recent of a development these thoughts are for him, but it is quite clear that recent events (Newtown, etc.) have "inspired" him to take a more aggressive approach to the gun rights issue (see his comedy music video, "Cold Dead Hand").  The position is guided by a particular set of principles, which suggests that supporting gun violence in media begets violence in the real world.  Within that perspective, life is viewed a sacred, and any action which might lead to the death of others (at the hand of a gun) must be opposed.  I understand this position and even agree with Carrey on many counts.  The notion that guns are, on their own, innocuous entities is specious at best and a downright lie at worst.  There are cultures attached to them, and some of those cultures support or foment violence, whether directly or indirectly.  Some of those cultures, of course, do nothing of the sort.

Millar, however, takes the position that the film is pure fiction, and that nobody was actually hurt.  That information is a given.  You can't intentionally kill people on film without violating the law, so the issue isn't whether people are actually hurt, but what impact the violence might have on the general public.  Carrey seems to believe that film violence -- at least, in some forms -- contributes to the problem of violence in our culture.  Considering how fervently he has supported the gun-restriction side of the debate in the last year, it shouldn't surprise us that he might have problems with anything perceived as connected to that very issue.  Carrey had a change of heart.  So sue him.
That doesn't make Carrey correct, of course.  There are two positions he has taken:

1. Guns and gun culture contributes to violence in the country
2. Violent media contributes to violence in the country (already mentioned)

*This also explains why I was hesitant to boycott the film adaptation of Ender's Game.  I may not care for Card's politics, but there are a lot of people I love who are involved in the project (and many more besides who never appear on the screen).  Does boycotting the film mean I'm also screwing some of them over?  And if so, am I OK with that?  I still don't have an answer for that question.

P.S.:  I also take issue with Millar's claim that Kick-Ass is about the consequences of violence.  That might be true for the comics, which I haven't read, but the first film glorified pain and suffering.  It turned suffering into a comedy of blood.  I enjoyed the first film quite a bit, but at no point did I believe I was watching something about the consequences of violence.  The consequences are sort of there, but they are withdrawn or overshadowed by the glorification of violence in general.  Granted, I have not seen the new one (it's not out yet), so it's possible the sequel will fill in the gaps.  I doubt it, though...

Though their heyday was undoubtedly the 1950s and 60s, giant monsters have rampaged through the movies long before and long after the era that saw the arrival of the Big Bugs, Godzilla and friends, and Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion marvels. Obviously, King Kong casts his long shadow from 1933, but before him were the dinosaurs of The Lost World in 1925 (whose climax features the first city rampage), and even earlier, Georges Méliès gave us the likes of the Frost Giant from The Conquest of the Pole in 1912, and the titular Gigantic Devil in 1902. So, when all is said and done, we have had well over a century of giant monsters stomping (or, in Méliès’ case, cavorting) across our screens.

Why?

I’m trying to tackle the question from a particular angle, given the theme of Shaun’s site this week.
What, exactly, is the joy that these creatures give us? And oh, why be coy: what is the joy they give me. They have for as far back as my conscious memories reach. I could go on about the symbolic riches they provide, such as the multiple, simultaneous readings embodied in Kong, the entangling patriarchy of It Came from Beneath the Sea’s octopus (defeated by the ingenuity of Faith Domergue), or Godzilla incarnating nuclear war in one film, enraged nature in another, or the vengeful spirits of the victims of Japanese war crimes in a third. And while it is true that these represent many of the joys I find in monster films now, they are only partial explanations. These reasons are encrustations, new pleasures that have grown on top of the old ones, but the old ones are still there.

To put it another way: while I am fascinated by Cloverfield’s allusions to the first Godzilla film as a way of underscoring the big thematic concern shared by both films (the re-enactment, in fantastic terms, of very recent national traumas), there is no getting away from the fact that my biggest thrill in watching that film is the giddy excitement of seeing that monster wreck stuff.

Let me put it more nakedly yet: when, in the VHS era, my brother and I were finally able to binge on all the Godzilla films, one of our primary criteria for deciding which ones were better than others was how much real estate was trashed. Monster fights in urban centres were way cooler than slugfests in the countryside (and this is a treat that Pacific Rim delivers in full during the Hong Kong sequence).
So there is joy in destruction, as we have known since childhood. Isn’t this the main reason we play with building blocks? So we can spectacularly knock down what we laboriously construct? In this respect, the monster movie and the disaster film offer overlapping pleasures, but not identical ones. To focus only on the falling skyscrapers would be to miss the importance of the monster itself.

It has been said (and I apologize for not recalling where I read this first), that one of the reasons children love dinosaurs so much is that they are non-threatening embodiments of power, embodiments that we first encounter when we are at our most powerless. If the power fantasies in super-heroes are ones where we suddenly have the ability to right the wrongs of an imperfect world, the monster gives us the ability to show an unfriendly world exactly what we think of it. Sometimes, we don’t want to save it. Sometimes, we just want to trample it underfoot. And that trampling is justified: with the exception of creatures such as King Ghidorah or Iris, who are the antagonists fought by the protagonist monsters (Godzilla and Gamera, respectively), the truly evil giant creature is rare indeed.* Kong, Godzilla, Gorgo, Gamera, Rodan, Mothra, Gwangi, and so on and on and on, even at their most vicious and destructive, have a core of innocence. They are more sinned against than sinning.

It is telling, too, that though the 1954 Godzilla is still arguably the grimmest, most despairing giant monster movie going, and emphatically not aimed at children, it would not be too many years before the reverse would be the case, and the character had become a super-hero. The joyless film somehow leads to the infamous-yet-infectious expression of joy that is Godzilla’s dance in Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965).
So the joys of the giant monster films are very much paradoxical. Even in the case of the darkest films (and let there be no mistake: Godzilla is about as bleak as they come), when the fears and traumatic memories of the audience are receiving their fullest, most graphic expression, there is still that anarchic joy to be had. There is still the excitement inherent to the rampage itself. Let me close by suggesting one further possibility. The rampage almost never truly comes out of the blue.** As baffling as the monsters are for the terrified, fleeing masses, there is always a context for them. I propose that we see the creatures as examples of the Event as defined by Alain Badiou: something that a particular system cannot account for, or even imagine, but that is nevertheless a result of that system, and shatters it.

Perhaps, then, at some level, our joy is the result of recognizing the monsters as necessary.

They’re certainly necessary for my inner child.


* Pacific Rim is no different: the evil kaiju are the antagonists, and while the jaegers are robots, it is significant that the opening narration refers to them as “monsters.”

** Cloverfield is an obvious exception here, in that the monster appears to have literally fallen from the sky. Its anomalous position is, I believe, a pointed one: one of the many aspects of 9/11 that the film is evoking is the confusion and terror of those on the ground in the middle of the event, people for whom, at that moment and in that place, the broader picture of why these things are happening is irrelevant.

If you didn't see it already, I'm one of many who contributed to the recent Mind Meld at SF Signal.  Head on over and see what everyone suggested, and then add your two-cents in the comments.

All hail Joanna Russ!

To begin with, Person of Interest was created by Jonathan Nolan, who wrote The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises with his brother Christopher (the Trilogy’s director) and veteran comic-book adapter David S. Goyer. The parallels between Person of Interest and the Trilogy run deeper than the surface fact that the heroes in both are vigilantes. “A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. But … if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely.” 

Some of Person of Interest’s similarities may be due to the archetypal characters it seeks to depict. The series’ crimestoppers are altruistic protectors derived from the Old West, the private-eye genre, and modern television reinterpretations (The Equalizer, Stingray, and Hack come to mind) of which Batman, “the Dark Knight Detective,” is one. Nolan confessed that he’s “always liked characters who … operate on the edge of the law” and said he “was interested in writing something … dangerous. I’ve always been drawn to that aspect of Batman … maybe we are tapping into some of that.” One cast member (Michael Emerson) hypothesizes  “that American audiences have a hunger for avengers … — the vigilante, the lone operators that will cut through the red tape and set things right … That’s such a strong theme in the States, and it’s part of what we are delivering. It goes back to cowboy movies and everything like that.”

Why do Americans like these vigilante types so much?  Why Batman and Superman and the X-Men and so on and so forth?  What about these individuals who take matters into their own hands is so compelling to American audiences?
I'll admit that if there is a field of academic study on vigilantes, my knowledge about it amounts to nil.  I, too, fell in love with vigilante types, from Tim Burton's Batman movies to Nolan's masterpieces.  And as a reader of comics in my youth, these figures have been central to my life in a way I never noticed before.  In fact, if you look at the sea of science fiction narratives that have dominated the screen in the last fifty years, it's rife with examples of people going against the grain of society in some crucial way.  Even Star Wars, commonly heralded as "that thing with which many of us grew up," is a relative of the vigilante narrative, albeit with a far more revolutionary feel -- vigilantes, in my mind, are far more isolated than the Rebels in Star Wars.  Vigilantes are Batman, Riddick, half of Marvel's superheroes (even Magneto), and on and on and on.

In thinking about all of these characters and their narrative purposes, it dawned on me that American audiences are drawn to these figures because of some deep desire for a fantasy of action.  So many of us live our lives trapped in a space we feel we cannot change, and most of us don't have the willpower or ability to fulfill the role of the vigilante ourselves.  And in the real world, the vigilante almost never wins:  he or she almost always dies and the media campaign against the vigilante almost always succeeds.

When you look at the political landscape of the United States, you can see the walls of the trap and how they function.  Whatever you might think about America's political parties, one can't deny the fact that Congress appears incapable of any serious action.  They say the system is gridlocked -- trapped between two parties with drastically different political interests.  The trap of American life extends from the directly political to the indirectly political.  Young people have been faced with the stark reality that many of their futures have been forfeited, or at least put on indefinite hold.  They can't get jobs, or the careers they set out for have withered away or stopped growing.  My mother faced this reality first hand:  when she got her paralegal certification, the economy had tanked, flooding the paralegal jobs with applications from law school grads.  There wasn't anything she could do but find a job in another field.  For a lot of Americans, there is a very real sense that nothing we do as individuals will matter in the long run.  We feel stuck or lost.  Some of us have lost hope (something with which I've battled over the years -- largely from a political perspective), and day by day, we hear about criminals getting away with horrible crimes, the police failing to do their jobs, governments cutting funding to programs that actually save lives (firefighters, for example), and on and on and on.

In my mind, the vigilante becomes a cathartic release, a way of living out the inner "us" that longs for change.*  All the things that are wrong with our world -- albeit, within a particular perspective of "wrong" -- seem beyond our control.  It feels good to watch Batman take matters into his own hands.**  When you look in American film, the list of "true American" vigilante-type heroes is a mile long.  In that list, I would include people like John McClane, Rambo, Erica Bain (from The Brave One), Hit Girl / Big Daddy / Kick-Ass, Batman, Punisher, Jack Burton, Dirty Harry, Foxy Brown, and so on and so forth.  None of these figures are political neutral, of course.  They are vigilantes in the sense that they get done whatever they believe needs to get done, and the degrees to which they care about the people that happen to be in their way varies considerably.
But the vigilante is a myth too.  In so many vigilante narratives, the distinctions between good and bad are largely already settled, but only within the world of the narrative.  We might recognize that the vigilante him or herself isn't necessarily good either, but the people he or she punishes are frequently "evil."  The Punisher is a great example.  In the film adaptation, the Punisher (played by Thomas Jane) takes revenge against the criminal elements in the city.  At no point do we believe that Howard Saint (played by John Travolta) is a good guy, even in a sort of "the world is shades of grey" sense.  He's evil, and he deserves some kind of punishment.  Even I felt a certain kind of sick pleasure in watching the Punisher kill off Saint's goons; much like the character of Frank Castle (the Punisher), I too felt a release when Saint finally got his share of the punishment, though for entirely different reasons (Castle because Saint killed his family; me because Saint was undeniably evil).

In retrospect, however, the Punisher is not really a good guy.  Even Batman isn't a terribly good guy either.  Neither of them follow the rules, and both do so knowing they have violated most of a civil society's basic codes of conduct.  But the vigilante is always a response to civil society's perceived failures.  The police in Gotham City can't end crime on their own because they are tied by the law; Commissioner Gordon knows this as well as Batman/Bruce Wayne does.***  Civil society can't seem to get its hooks into the crime that tears at that society's innards, because the rule of law is everything but perfection.  The rule of law can be manipulated or abused by the very people it is supposed to control, leaving those who enforce the law with a limited ability to act.  The vigilante doesn't have that problem, and often shits on the law in the process of taking it into their own hands.  In The Dark Knight, for example, Batman uses a surveillance system that until recently would have seemed like a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution; his reasons may make some sense -- he has to stop the Joker -- but in achieving that goal, he must consume a piece of the criminal within himself by violating everyone's rights.  Whether he feels particularly bad about doing so is never stated in the film.  Destroying the machine in the end seems more like a gesture of faith towards Fox than an actual acknowledgement of the Bat's moral or ethical limitations.
But we root for Batman anyway.  He can do what none of us can, either because we don't have the guts or because we're too rooted in our own vision of a just society.  Watching Batman take matters into his own hands -- i.e., beating the shit out of the bad guys -- allows us to get a taste of the freedom to act.  Those actions may fall into the shades of grey, or they may turn out to be evil in their own right, but it's hard to deny that it doesn't feel good to think about doing things for the betterment of oneself or others despite the law.  In the American consciousness, that descends from a pessimistic view of the world rooted in helplessness.  We might live in a democracy, but that doesn't mean we all believe we can change it "for the better."  For some of Americans, that dream of "changing things" got stamped out by reality a long time ago.

Of course, I might be talking out of my ass here, so you should feel free to rip into me in the comments.  What do you think about vigilantes?


*The type of change we long for is individual, of course.  What you may want to happen is likely to differ somewhat from my own desires.

**Part of me wonders if this extends back to the Revolution, if not as some kind of mirror, then certainly as a bastardized version of a revolutionary consciousness.

***I'm talking about the film adaptations here, as the comics are a far more complicated universe.

Note:  I don't want to imply that only Americans feel this way about vigilante characters.  However, since I do not live in another country, nor have I ever done so, I do not feel comfortable inferring about another place or people, however similar they may seem to my own national people.  If you are from one of the 200+ other countries and have an opinion on vigilantes in relation to local interest, please leave a comment below or write up your own post and send me a link.  I would love to hear your take!

Over at The Skiffy and Fanty Show, I'm joined by David Annandale, Paul Weimer, and Michael R. Underwood to discuss Guillermo Del Toro's wonderful giant robit epic, Pacific Rim.  The podcast is not spoiler free, so if you want to see the movie before you hear what we think about it, save the podcast for later.  In short, we all really liked the movie and recommend everyone see it in theaters as soon as possible.

Anywhoodles!

After the horror of the weekend, which I will not discuss here, I have decided to continue the Week of Joy throughout the rest of the month.  Thus, July will now fall under the heading, Month of Joy.  For the remainder of this month, I will primarily blog about things that make me happy, and will refrain, as much as possible, from discussing the depressing garbage going on in our community.  Exceptions will exist, of course (I have a post about Jim Carrey coming), but I really want to bleed joy for a while.

And in the interest of making this as wide reaching as possible, I'm going to reach out to friends and writers for guest posts about joyful SF/F-related things.  Expect a lot of content for the remainder of the month!

On that note, I'm going to go teach stuff to students...

And here is my comment:

While I agree with you that the SFWA should be as politics free as possible, this is a two way street.  It cannot remain politically neutral at the same time as members within it see fit to thrust their politics into the dialogue within the organization, and vice versa.  Many of the most recent "turf wars" are responses to behaviors from members who have used official SFWA channels to share their politically-charged opinions (even Reznick and Malzberg were anything but politically neutral, as their most recent column in the Bulletin was practically a petty screed against people who criticized them primarily *outside of official SFWA channels*).  So in order to cut all of this stuff out, that means everyone gets cut out, and all those "turf wars" will have to occur in entirely different arenas. 

There's probably something really good about doing this, but it won't prevent attacks against the organization or between or against its members.  Understandably, you don't have many methods for stopping such behavior, but you can remove such behaviors from the SFWA's official channels.  In rare circumstances, you can (and should) remove members (and I honestly believe this should be for those circumstances when a member's presence within the organization causes notable harm to the reputation to that organization -- i.e., quite rare indeed).  I just don't think that's possible given the type of rhetoric being used in the most recent "turf war."  Vox Day seems hell bent on pissing on the organization and the members within it (for which he holds a personal grudge).  He doesn't really care to have a dialogue, in part because he is motivated by a supremacist's mindset.  It would be lovely if we could ignore him, but he has intentionally used SFWA channels as a soapbox for his ideology.  And he likewise doesn't seem to care if he breaks any rules doing it.  At some point, you pull the plug, I suppose.  It's up to the SFWA board to figure that out.

The other problem here is that the organization is supposed to represent as many people as it possibly can.  That means women, people of color, liberals, conservatives, mad scientists, and regular old doctors (provided they write genre, of course).  The official voice of the organization must therefore present a unified, reasonable, and respectful narrative.  To depoliticize the SFWA in the manner you seem to desire, you would have to excise anything that could reasonably offend or disrespect members of the organization (here I use "offend" in its malignant form; lots of people get offended for stupid reasons).  And that means something like the recent Reznick/Malzberg column shouldn't have happened.  It was not a positive examination or discussion of something relevant to members; it was an irrational attack on people who didn't like the direction of the Bulletin in the past couple of issues.  There's nothing rational about crying censorship or what have you in an official document, particularly when no such action had occurred.  And that also means something like Scalzi's post on race/gender difficulty settings, even if retooled for the writing market, wouldn't belong either.  

But I think we have to accept that the Bulletin cannot entirely avoid political issues (it can't); it can remain neutral, but sometimes neutrality prevents action.  You can't truly de-politicize the SFWA.  There are too many issues within the SF/F writing world that are political issues.  If the SFWA represents the writing interests of its members, that means addressing things like race or gender, which are factors that have and sometimes still do affect publishing and publicity prospects for members.  It also means addressing abuses against members within the writing world.  If Brad Torgersen really was denied the award by official staff of the organization (or if they tried to influence his nominations or wins so he wouldn't receive either), then the SFWA must address that (I don't know anything about this, so I will assume it's false until I see otherwise).  Point is:  the politics aren't going anywhere; the best we can hope for is lessening the hurt.  De-politicizing the SFWA is part of the process to make it a safe environment for everyone, but it doesn't work, in my mind, by allowing some things, but refusing others.  Either it must become absolutely neutral, or it has to tread carefully and deliberately.  Lately, it simply hasn't done that.  And that's the real problem.

 

This was making the rounds earlier this week, but since I was working on the Week of Joy, I chose to save my opinion on the matter until now.

Basically, it comes down to the sad fact that Orson Scott Card is a Yard Shitter.  What is a Yard Shitter?  I shall explain by way of an OSC example.  OSC recently said the following:

Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.

I don't think he understands how tolerance works.  I don't have a problem with his dislike for gay people.  I don't even care that he thinks gays are a genetic defect.  If his beliefs were just his beliefs, we could all tolerate one another just fine.  But they're not.  He has actively tried to push those beliefs on everyone else.  Sorry, but no.

I don't have to tolerate your desire to remove the rights of others.  I don't.  And for you to ask me to tolerate your intolerance of others suggests that you don't really understand how tolerance works.  Tolerance only works if what you believe doesn't affect others.  If your neighbor has an outhouse and takes a shit in that outhouse every night, you can tolerate that because he's not bothering you with his shitting.  But if your neighbor shits on your yard every night, you don't have to tolerate that.  EVER.  At that point, he's started sharing his shit with other people, at which point his belief in shitting outside of the house infringes on the ability of others to have nothing to do with said shitting.  The same thing is true for gay rights.  If you expressed your opinion and kept it at that, I could ignore you.  But you use your popularity to push your ideology on the rest of us.  You're shitting in all of our yards, and you think we should have to put up with it.  Gay people don't show up and shit on your doorstep, so why you feel you have a right to shit on theirs with impunity is beyond me.  (Translation:  gay people don't say you have to like their gay marriages or engage in gay marriage or hang out with gay people, married or otherwise, and so on and so forth.  For the most part, they just want you to leave them the frak alone.)

This is about shitting in yards.  Tolerance only works between parties who don't shit on one another's property.  If you want me to tolerate you, Mr. Card, then you have to stop shitting everywhere.  Take your shit to your outhouse and shit away.  But don't pretend like you get special treatment for shitting on my yard simply because you think you're right or because you have some sort of "moral authority" from a church.  You don't.  When you shit on my yard, you get exactly what you deserve:  ridicule and verbal backlash.  That's how tolerance works.


None of this is to suggest that Card cannot "redeem" himself.  I believe fervently in redemption, not just as a narrative, but as a way of life.  If we didn't allow redemption to exist, this world would fall to pieces.  People make mistakes.  In some cases, they make really horrible mistakes (and in still others, they make mistakes for which forgiveness is impossible).  Card falls within that horrible-but-forgivable-mistake category (I'll explain that in a second).  As far as I can see, there are two main ways for him to redeem himself, if he chooses to do so.

The first, and least likely, involves publicly apologizing for all the damage he has done to gay communities across the country, followed by admitting that, in most respects, he was wrong.  Posterity will recognize him both for the work he has produced and for holding out-dated and downright idiotic beliefs (just as most of us view the slave owners of the olden days).  He can change that, though.  By apologizing and admitting fault (followed by leaving most of the anti-gay organizations through which he has supported anti-gay policies and rhetoric), he can demonstrate that change is possible, and that all of us deserve a little slack when that time comes.

But Card is highly unlikely to ever do that.  Why?  Because nothing so far indicates he has changed his mind on much of anything, save taking the U.S. government by force and preventing gay marriage by coup (he seems to have thrown in the towel).  The comment above -- i.e., the main discussion point thus far -- indicates that Card wants you to tolerate his intolerance.  In other words, he still believes most of what he has always said, but now he thinks he shouldn't suffer financially for holding those beliefs, nor for using his popularity to push for legislation to force those beliefs on the rest of us.  Remember that gay rights activists have never advocated (except perhaps as a joke) for everyone to have gay marriages and gay rights.  They just want their gay marriages and gay rights. Even if we pass gay marriage laws in every state, straight people and anti-gay people will still get married just fine.  There's a huge difference between the anti-gay and pro-gay stances.  The first wants to force everyone to follow its version of morality by removing or banning certain rights otherwise afforded to gays.  The second just wants all those gay folks to have the same rights as everyone else.  Huge difference.

The second and more reasonable option for Card is to admit he was wrong about advocating for anti-gay positions on the legal level.  Basically, he'll keep believing gays are degenerates and shouldn't have rights, but he'll stop actively working to deny them rights.  I don't see this happening either, of course, and I wouldn't ask him to do anything of the sort.  But it's one of a handful of options available that will allow him to remain anti-gay and possibly prevent people from using that as a basis for boycotting his work (or maybe not -- probably not...).  After all, a lot of us know people who believe things we can't stand, and we're perfectly fine with that so long as their beliefs don't become actions.

All of this goes along with my "mind your own fucking business" rule, which I think people should follow as much as possible when it comes to the government.  It's not really our job to determine who can and cannot get married, except insofar as consent is concerned (so you can shove your "u r fer peedos" nonsense somewhere else).  If you don't want to hang out with gay folks, then don't.  That's your prerogative, and I have zero interest in forcing you to have gay friends (just as I have no interest in forcing you to have black friends -- or female friends, etc.).  You mind your business, and I'll mind mine.

But, again, none of these things are likely to happen with Card.  So all of this is just speculation.  At the end of the day, Card wants us all to put up with his wish to see gays denied their rights by the government.  And he wants to play the victim while doing it.  But he's not a victim.  He's the victimizer.

Whimsy is important to me. Most everything I love about art -- music, movies, books -- comes down to one aspect:  whimsy. I appreciate technical masterpieces like a Rachmaninoff concerto or a Joycean short story. I enjoy gritty realism like Law and Order or Lord of the Flies. However, my love lies with those pieces that make you wonder and smile, that turns the mundane into the fantastic with a turn of phrase or a splash of color.

Whimsy is one of the most difficult aspects of art to quantify. It's one of those "you know it when
you see it" things. It's a butterfly landing on the rim of a lemonade glass or a wind-up toy that never dies down.

Whimsy is why Miyazaki movies are so compelling. Whimsy is the noise Totoro makes when he opens his mouth and the castle floating in the sky.

Whimsy is the feeling of the uncanny when the mundane is melded with the fantastic. It’s the bright colors in The Yellow Submarine. It’s the surreal made comfortable. It's what made Harry Potter a phenomenon. It's the feeling you get when you look out on a lake and imagine a mermaid swimming right below the surface.
Whimsy is the green apple in Rene Magritte paintings. It’s the extra-dimensions of Escher.
Whimsy is reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, pretending you’re looking over the shoulder of Willy Wonka as he gazes out on his candy empire.

Whimsy is one of the reasons we start reading and telling stories in the first place. It's why children can have imaginary friends with no sense of self-consciousness. Whimsy allows us to believe in the unbelievable, to suspend our disbelief in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Whimsy is the reason why we can be scared by ghost stories. Even in the most different of secondary worlds, it's why we can sympathize with characters that are nowhere near us.

Whimsy is a powerful tool. A lot of adults lose it as they age. And that's a real shame. Without whimsy, life becomes dull and gray. Without whimsy, the problems of how to pay a mortgage or hospital bills become the reason we wake up in the morning instead of looking forward to the new experiences a day will bring.

Whimsy is important. I think most of us forget just how important it really is.


About the author:

Adam Callaway is a science fiction and fantasy author who spends his days dreaming about tentacles and secondary fantasy worlds involving magic cooks and flying monkey overlords.  His work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Flurb, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror and many other wonderful places.  You can find out more about him on his website.

Go read his short stories.  They're really good.

It's funny. While I've always loved books, I don't remember the moment when I decided I wanted to be a writer -- not any longer. You see, originally I wanted to be an artist, but during seventh grade I decided that writing was what I wanted to do more than anything else. From the moment I forced myself through the process of learning to read[1] I loved books. Books were safe. Books were also adventure. So, I quickly found favorites. Zilpha Keatley Snyder was the first author that I actively tracked down in my local library. I read everything I could find: The Changeling, Season of Ponies, The Witches of Worm, The Headless Cupid, The Velvet Room, The Eyes in the Fishbowl -- most are out of print now. Some were Newbery Honor Winners. I think she was the author
that gave me that first spark, that first thought that I could be more than just a frightened little girl. I remember wanting to be ageless, free, and spritely like Ivy in The Changeling. I wanted to be mysterious like Amanda in The Headless Cupid. I wanted to ride standing on the backs of graceful, magical, cantering circus ponies like Pamela.

It's good that I found Zilpha Keatley Snyder's books before I found Francesca Lia Block's -- otherwise, I'd have searched the world for a pair of cowboy boot roller-skates, wore layers of wispy mismatched skirts with fairy wings, played with glitter, pierced my nose, and painted my hair purple long before I reached voting age.

And my mother would've killed me. A lot.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get glitter out of things?

Then there was Joan Aiken. I still say Lemony Snicket wishes he were Joan Aiken. She totally and utterly rocked my world. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Blackhearts in Battersea, and Nightbirds in Nantucket combined fantasy and history -- technically alternate history -- and hapless orphans who triumph over e-vile caretakers out to do… well... evil, of course. It was heady stuff. Throw in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle and I was gone, gone, gone. Meg's mother was a scientist! It was the first time I'd come across such a thing. I remember thinking how awesome that was. I wanted to be a scientist for a whole month because I knew right then it was possible. I wanted to cook dinner on a hotplate in a laboratory while working on something really important. Something about that seemed so cool.
The first book to spirit me away into the adult section of the public library, however, was Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.[2] My father read it aloud to me when I was twelve. I remember being frightened that the Library Police™ would find me among the adult book shelves. Because surely there was some sort of alarm that sounded when kids wandered in there. You know, I'm not entirely sure what I thought they'd have done if they had found me. I lived in terror of librarians. To be honest, I pretty much lived in terror of everyone in those days. I was a very shy, very skinny kid with frizzy hair, after all. The main thing was that I didn't want to be thrown out. The library was my world. I loved the smell and the feel of the books and the hushed consecrated ground. Now that I think back on it, The Sharpstown library in Houston wasn't very big -- one floor, a dozen long shelves in the center of the building, and a magazine section. They didn't separate the SF novels from the rest of the books in the adult section either. (I'm sure it was because they didn't have enough to warrant it.) I remember asking the librarian[3] where the SF books were and being overwhelmed by the concept of sorting through all of the books to find what I wanted. Unlike the children's books, I'd have to rely on the card catalog. The book covers weren't as much help. It wasn't long before I'd read everything they had that Bradbury had written. Then I moved on to others: Joshua Son of None by Nancy Freedman, Dune by Frank Herbert, Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clark, The Anything Box by Zenna Henderson, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien -- I wandered all over until I found Stephen King. Then I kind of parked there for years like I did with Zilpha Snyder. But really, I think it was the combination of Zilpha Snyder, Joan Aiken, Stephen King, and Ray Bradbury that made me think about writing my own stories. They were the first to open the doors of my imagination. The were the first to open up my mind to the possibilities.


[1] I'm dyslexic.
[2] You should be sensing a theme here. If it was mildly spooky, off-beat, or magical, I was all over it.
[3] When I finally got up my courage to do so. I was shocked to discover that the librarians were thrilled to death that I wanted to read adult books. Of course, by that time I'd already discovered Dickens and Twain.

About the author:

Stina Leicht is the author of Of Blood and Honey and And Blue Skies From Pain, urban fantasy novels set during the Troubles in Ireland.  She is a two-time Campbell Award nominee and lives in the great old state of Texas, where she actively causes trouble (because she's awesome like that -- love you, Stina! :P).  You can follow Stina on her blog and find out more about her work (such as where to buy it) on her profile.

Note from the editor (i.e., Shaun):

If you haven't read Stina's work before, you should do so immediately.  Her Ireland novels are bloody amazing.  We interviewed her twice about them on The Skiffy and Fanty Show.  You can find every episode she's ever been on here.  But first...buy her books!

Additionally, Stina mentions that most of Snyder's books are out of print.  Many of Snyder's books are available in ebook form now.  The wonders of electronics!

J. Damask (a.k.a. Joyce Chng) was kind enough to answer a few questions about her new book, Heart of Fire, which hits digital shelves in September.  The book comes from Masque Books, a digital-only division of Prime Books, a notable small press genre publisher (notable most recently for releasing the absolutely amazing Yoon Ha Lee collection, Conservation of Shadows -- check out the Skiffy and Fanty interview here).  In other words, Heart of Fire is sure to be damned good!  Though you'll have to wait for a little while, you should bookmark this page and remember to buy it in a couple months!

Now for the mini interview:

If you had to describe your novel to someone who doesn't read a lot of genre fiction, how would you describe it?

It is set in Singapore, has a lot of mythological animals and creatures and Singapore food. And oh yes, it has werewolves.

What do you think makes fantasy such a compelling genre for so many readers?

I think it’s compelling, because it allows readers to slip into other worlds. You know, make-believe world. It’s like Narnia!

How would you say Heart of Fire fits in with the rest of your work?  Does it share certain sensibilities or thematic concerns?

It does, come to think of it. I tend to examine tropes of transformation and transfiguration, as well as motifs like family ties and relationships.  To me, the family is central and it does appear in many of my stories.  I often wonder if this is an Asian thing, to feature the family as an important motif/theme.

As a Singaporean author writing in English, what would you say are your greatest challenges in terms of reaching audiences abroad (particularly in other English-speaking parts of the world -- not just "the West," mind you)?

Authenticity?

(Then again, what is authenticity?)

I am Singaporean Chinese. So, I sometimes feel that people would want me to write in Mandarin Chinese (no, I couldn’t – and my last (and only) Mandarin spec fic story was written when I was a kid as a school composition). I think people want to see an “authentic” voice, so to speak.

I think there are no such things as authentic voices.

What one thing that you know now do you wish you'd known when you first started treating writing as a professional endeavor?

That it couldn’t be a full-time job.

That it won’t be easy for people from Southeast Asia?

(Wait, that’s two things…)

And, last, for a silly question:  If you had to choose an animal to write your next book for you, which animal would you choose and why?

A wolf.

Because it’s cool.

(But hey, it doesn’t have opposable thumbs…)
About the Book:

Jan Xu, wolf and pack leader, faces more dangers when she saves a foreign male wolf in love with one of her ancient enemies, a jiang shi, a Chinese vampire. Throw in a love-struck drake—and Jan finds her situation suddenly precarious, with her reputation and health at stake. How much is a wolf going to take when everything is out of control again and her world thrown into disarray? How is she going to navigate the complexities of Myriad politics while keeping her pack and family intact without losing her mind? The third book of the Jan Xu Adventures will see Jan Xu’s continual fight as pack leader, her clan’s Eye (seer) and mother of three young children. Her mettle, courage and love for her family will be tested to her utmost limits.

Books change lives, right?  Well, they certainly changed mine.  Books have been a part of my life since I was a kid, though I honestly didn't understand their true value until much later in life.  They were entertainment in my younger years.  I read Goosebumps and Hardy Boys because they provided quick, fun narratives (and some of the former were actually kinda scary at times -- they seem ridiculous today, of course).  I even read comic books as a kid, for the same reasons everyone read comics in their youth:  fun!  But I wasn't a literature nut in my younger years.  I wanted to play video games or do stupid things on my bike -- I honestly don't know how I survived childhood, because I used to do some monumentally stupid things on my bike.

Despite all of that, books eventually smacked me upside the head and changed the way I viewed them and the way I viewed life in general.  I read or discovered these books during what I would consider to be pivotal moments of my life.  Some of those moments were dark times; others were quite happy and exciting.  But none of them were exactly same.

In chronological order, here are the eight science fiction and fantasy writers who changed my life:

The first adult fantasy book I ever read was Richard A. Knaak's Dragonlance novel, The Legend of Huma.  I won't pretend it's a great work of art, or a great piece of fantasy (well, it's a fun piece of fantasy, but Dragonlance isn't exactly known for the best writing in the universe).  I would later go on to read his DragonRealm series -- a much more interesting and well-written set of relatively short fantasy novels.  I think it's fair to say that I was always a reader or viewer of genre fiction, having watched Star Wars so many times as a child that I eventually had to justify owning three different VHS copies to prevent ruining my really good copy (the Leonard Maltin versions, which I still own).  But I had never really grown fond of SF/F literature.  That was until someone introduced me to Dragonlance.  The Legend of Huma introduced me to a whole new sea of stories, and reading that particular book would one day give me fuel for an interest in writing genre fiction (I've never wanted to write anything else, really).  Without that book, I don't know what I would be like today.  A genre fan?  Probably. A scholar in the field and a wannabe writer of SF/F?  Probably not.

(This is a familiar narrative, no?)

I also discovered the wonders of science fiction in high school.  However, rather than having George Orwell's incredible and canonical novel 1984 thrust at me by my friends, I had the novel thrust on me by a teacher (duh).  And lucky me.  I attended two high schools as a teenager:  one in Oak Harbor, Washington, and another in Placerville, California.  Of all the English classes I took while in Oak Harbor, only one managed to make reading interesting.  That class had us reading things like Watership Down by Richard Adams, A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, and, of course, 1984.  And since that class, I've re-read Orwell's novel at least six times.  The book made me realized that literature could have depth, that re-reading a work could actually change your experience of it.  That book also helped turn me into a science fiction nut.  And every time I re-read the book (less frequently now than when I was in my early 20s), I discover something new.  That's the mark of a good book, if you ask me!  I think it's safe to say that my interest in literature as an academic subject began here.

The short version of the story goes like this:  during my senior year of high school, my English teacher assigned Beowulf, as often happens in high school.  Instead of having us write straight literary analysis, however, she asked us to take the core themes of the story and come up with our own poetic versions.  Thus began a month-long journey to rewrite Beowulf (with a friend).  The weird part?  We actually took it quite seriously, while others in our class sort of dilly daddled the way a lot people do when it comes to these kinds of assignments.  We went to the library and looked up British history (the place where we intended to set our version of the story), dug up maps of the pre-Norman-invasion British Isles, and tried our best to fit our re-worked version into that new world (Grendel's lair ended up on the Isle of Man).  We plotted the entire story, developed all of the characters, and then I started writing.  And then came the all-nighters.

After a weekend of intense writing (in what I then thought was proper "Old English" style -- heh), I strolled into class on Monday with a 31-page epic poem in tow.  I still have a vivid memory of my teacher's eyes opening wider than should have been humanly possible at the sight of our work.  She had expected something like 5-10 pages, not 31.  And we got an A.

You might be wondering how this changed my life.  Throughout my youth, I recall writing a lot of stories.  For the most part, these were horror stories (I still think that movie with the evil severed hand somehow stole my ideas); they weren't very good.  But it wasn't until that Beowulf assignment that I realized I really had the writing bug.  From that point on, I started writing with more fervor.  Clearly that bug never truly left, because I still write fiction as often as I can (not as much right now due to PhD work, though).  Without Beowulf, I'm not sure I'd be where I am right now:  an English major and a published writer.

I've written about my experiences with cancer here, here and here.  There is a lot more to tell about my cancer, so I won't ruin all of it here.  However, what I will say is that Alan Garner's fantasy novels were the only positive things I remember about being stuck in the hospital thinking I was going to die.  That's about all I remember, actually.  The narratives have since left my mind.  If you shoved one of his books in front of me with the title and author removed from every page, I probably wouldn't recognize the writing.  I blame it all on the drugs.

But that doesn't mean Garner's work didn't influence me in some significant way.  His books were a welcome distraction from what is an understandably terrifying experience.  Some folks like to say that escapism is bad for us, but I think escapism is just what we need from time to time.  When the world descends into darkness, it's actually good for us to wander off into other places (in our minds).  It just so happens that Garner was that distraction (others would follow him, of course).  It's hard to argue with the awesome feeling of escapist relief, no?

One of the first science fiction courses I ever took at UC Santa Cruz was an American Studies course on African American fiction and the Other (I can't remember the exact title).  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick is an obvious choice for such a course (especially when coupled with something like Sun Ra's Space is the Place).  We read a lot of things in that class, including work by Tananarive Due, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and many others.  But it was Philip K. Dick's novel that acted as the catalyst for my academic career.

Up until that point, I had always intended to study science fiction in college.  Unfortunately, there weren't a lot of courses on the stuff when I first entered the college system, and so I had never been exposed to PKD (or other great writers, for that matter), nor had I been given the impression that I could actually study what I wanted.  But that class completely changed things for me, and PKD more so than anyone else at the time.  I would go on to take an independent study with the same professor (Prof. Ramirez!), in which I read several more works by PKD, including Ubik (my favorite of his novels, actually -- I need to assign that for a class one of these days).  Basically, by the time I finished my B.A., I had done so much work on the Other and science fiction that it would define my academic interests for a nearly half a decade (see Buckell and Hopkinson below for the shift in my these interests).  PKD exposed me to an entirely different world of SF -- where the human question is always in flux.  There's a reason why he's so popular these days...his work is just too damned good.

As I've already mentioned, I had the privilege to read Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler in college.  I don't know what it is about Butler's work.  Even a story as simple as "Speech Sounds" captivates me as a reader and as an academic.  Whatever her allure, reading Butler showed me a different world of science fiction (and, by extension, fantasy):  one in which people of color are central.  I got to see science fiction from an entirely different perspective, which not only helped me round out my academic work, but also helped foster an insatiable appetite for fiction about experiences relevant to people of color (and women, too).  From Butler, I grew the guts to take an intensive graduate course in feminist and queer theory (as an undergrad), and to extend that same desire to broaden my horizons by taking a similarly intensive course on the Harlem Renaissance (as a grad student -- this is actually one of my favorite periods of literary history).  The amount of work that I devoured because of Butler's amazing fiction is too long to list here.  I am just forever thankful that Prof. Ramirez assigned Parable of the Sower, and I am likewise thankful to Butler for sharing so many wonderful stories with all of us -- especially me.

I'll address these two in order of exposure.  The first Hopkinson novel I ever read was Brown Girl in the Ring.  While this is not my favorite of her work (Midnight Robber is her best science fiction novel thus far, and you're not allowed to ask me to pick a favorite from her list of fantasy novels), it certainly did for me many of the same things as Butler's Parable of the Sower.  But while Butler exposed me to a world of PoC writers and who were writing about issues about which I would become increasingly more interested, Hopkinson proved to be a gateway "drug" to SF/F by people outside of the traditional Western sphere.  True, Hopkinson has spent a great deal of her life living in Canada (and now the U.S.), but her work has always been about fusing and exploring the depths of Caribbean experiences.  In another year, I would have read work by Ngugi wa Thiong'o (not a Caribbean writer, obviously), Amitav Ghosh (perhaps closer to a magical realist than a regular genre writer), Salman Rushdie, and many others.  And her novel, Midnight Robber, would eventually become one of two primary texts for my M.A. at the University of Florida.  In a way, Hopkinson completely changed the direction of my work as an academic and my habits as a reader.
But she wasn't alone.  At some point during all the madness of school, I discovered Tobias S. Buckell.  I started reading his work as a reviewer.  While Crystal Rain is not my favorite of his books (though it is probably the most tightly plotted), the melding of peoples in his first Xenowealth book seemed novel to my younger self.  From there, I went on to Ragamuffin (my favorite of his Xenowealth novels, though Sly Mongoose and The Apocalypse Ocean are quite good too), which showed me a completely different side to Caribbean-influenced SF.  Whereas Hopkinson stayed firmly in the realm of what we might call "da serious genre fiction," Buckell took his mixed bag of characters to the wondrous world of Space Opera.*  I love Space Opera, and even more so because Buckell's work did something with the genre I'd never seen before:  he stuck Caribbean people and other racial groups right in the middle of it all.  I'd never read anything like it, and since then, I've craved more like it (please recommend stuff to me).  I'd read so many novels about white guys doing what white guys do in space that I'd sort of forgotten what the future might actually look like (Butler helped with all of this too, though her work has a tendency to remain fixated on the Earth -- exceptions exist, of course).

Without Buckell and Hopkinson, my academic career wouldn't be where it is today.  I'm studying Caribbean literature, and I intend to continue studying postcolonial science fiction from around the globe.  But they also changed the way I viewed literature, so much so that by the time the whole World SF thing became a big deal (at least, on the Internets), I was already riding the world train.  Now, when I see genre fiction by people from elsewhere in the globe, I pause and think to myself:  I wonder how they write about SF tropes or explore their own experiences in relation to genre (sometimes their explorations aren't all that different from my own, which is interesting and important too).  That's a good thought to have, I think.

There you go.  That's my rough list.  There are a lot of other writers I could stick in here, but I think eight is plenty enough for now.

What about you?  Which SF/F authors changed your life?

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*I am not suggesting that Buckell's works aren't "serious genre fiction."  Rather, I am pointing out the difference in tone, which has a lot to do with what I think of as underlying cultural echoes of Space Opera's history as "that silly subgenre."  The Xenowealth novels are actually quite serious, but they do use a lot of the tropes of Space Opera to get to its serious points.  I think this is actually a great thing.  Whereas Hopkinson's work tends to look at the experiences of Caribbean peoples within the sphere of our real world experiences, Buckell's work seems to suggest that the somewhat more cognitively estranged world of Space Opera and interstellar empires is just as fitting a space for those same individuals.

P.S.:  I am well aware that this list is largely male-centric.  In all honesty, I did not read a lot of work by women during most of the events described above.  This wasn't a deliberate choice, but it was certainly an oversight I failed to recognize at the time.  People like Joanna Russ and James Tiptree, Jr. have had a profound impact on me, but because I discovered their work so recently, I don't feel like I can properly gauge their influence in objective terms.  Other great female writers have influenced me too:  Karen Miller, Karen Lord, Lauren Beukes, and Stina Leicht, to name a few.  There have also been quite a few women who have had impacts on my life for things other than writing -- people like my mother and grandmother, my best friend Jen, Tansy Rayner Roberts and Alisa Krasnostein (for their feminist criticism), and Julia Rios (a fairly recent influence).  I may have to make a completely different list one day for those non-writer folks!

P.S.S.:  I really should include Ginn Hale, too, though I don't think it is fair to attribute my interest in SF/F featuring LGBT characters or concerns only to her.  Christopher Barzak and JoSelle Vanderhooft were involved in that development too.