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New story's up!



Featuring a butler sexbot named Oppie, and a tragic science person named Menander (based on , starring because THEY MUST ALL HAVE ACTORS). Is it gauche to say I really like this one?! It has a narrative arc! And an ending and everything! AN ENDING, PEOPLE. IT ENDS.

Anyway, this is an origin story in the "Dropverse" - i.e. the verse where and and and blah blah also feature, some indeterminate time later (because, RELATIVITY).

My relatively-new story is getting reincarnated (ho ho, joke if you read the story) in a neat "Weird West" antho: . Momma's gotta pay some bills.

A brief summary: radical teetotaler Kansas lady meets not-so-cute with recovering alcoholic frontier doc in 19th century heartlandic America. Featuring very literal Tibetan Buddhism.

Ahhh, I love year-end reviews.

2014 was an excellent year for reading. I try to keep my average rating around 3 stars, but this year a bunch of books pushed me periodically into 4-star and 5-star territories. Here are some of the bests.

Best graphic novel: Asterios Polyp, by David Mazzucchelli

While Saga, Lumberjanes and Will Eisner continued to be go-to graphic novel series for me, the really break-out, knock-out, transcendentally-sublime comix for this year was Asterios Polyp.

Briefly, the story follows a -lookalike architect named Asterios Polyp who smokes cigarettes, looks very 1960s mod dashing, and meditates on the nature of aesthetics and life. This comix held a very special place for me, since I used to gobble up philosophy of aesthetics, and so many of the concepts (the sublime, Apollonian vs. Dionysian art, death of the author) were like old friends. This comix handles those concepts with deft, intelligence and humor. Really blew my mind and made me happy.

Best fem(inism) book: The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

Ahhhh. They're coming for us. THEY'RE COMING FOR US!

So I was supposed to read this in high school and I never did. I'm glad I read it now, as I'm a bit more - ahem - conscious? Anyway, this is a brilliant, BRILLIANT speculative fiction/feminist book. The basic premise is: patriarchal dystopia. But, like Orwell, most of its aspects are true in some corner of the world. Indeed, since reading this, it's hard not to see Handmaid's Tale stuff all over the news.

Best title: TEOFTW (The End of the Fucking World), by Charles Forsman

Honestly, kind of a bummer.

Basic premise: Sociopath teen killers on the run.


Other best title/Best sci-fi discovery #1: Random Acts of Senseless Violence, by Jack Womack

This title makes me smile every time I see it. And I'm so happy to have discovered this book, about a little 1990s tween princess (hollaaa) who gets slowly corrupted by a Frank Miller-esque, pre-Giuliani dystopian NYC. Brilliant, brilliant. And I Twitteracted with Jack Womack this year - eeeeeeee.

Best sci-fi discovery #2: Floating Worlds, by Cecilia Holland

Discovering dusty, forgotten sci-fi classics is the shit. This was one such classic. Finding it made me feel like a million bucks. I had never, ever heard of this, or Cecilia Holland (who I guess writes more historical fiction?), but this book - wow. Jeez. The voice, the vision, the everything! If you like Ursula Le Guin or Kim Stanley Robinson, you will loooaaff this.

Best poetry: Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, by Patricia Lockwood

Finding a poetry book that I like is hard because, as I think a lot of people feel, I have this insecurity that I Don't Get Poetry. Of course, once I found poetry that was just fun to read (like Christopher Logue, or John Milton), I could at least enjoy it and stop Trying To Interpret/Analyze.

This book is incredibly fun to read. The imagery is koan-like: it shocks you into higher states of awareness. She makes links you wouldn't even think of. The most obvious and general being the link between patriotism/naturalism and sexuality/sensuousness. It's sort of fun, weird, vulgar, eye-opening and completely original. I loved it.

Best pulp: Blood Music, by Greg Bear

Ahahaha, WHAT IS HAPPENING. If you love the films of David Cronenberg (as you should) or appreciate the special harmony of horror-comedy in , then you will love this book. A basically ridiculous, bio-horror book about a crazy biologist creating wetware (accidentally, of course) that eats up the world. Wonderful! Totally stupid at times, very sexist, plot lines just meander away, never to return, but, oh my God, it's fun.

Best biz/econ book: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone

American consumerism 2.0! Oh God. The shape of things to come, people. Jeff Bezos is an interesting dude, sure, but what's more interesting (scary!) is what Amazon means for the future of our society. No joke!


And now... drumroll...

Worst book of 2014: (TIE) The Big Time, by Fritz Lieber, and The Shadow of the Torturer, by Gene Wolfe

Oh man. What's annoying is that books like Cecilia Holland's Floating Worlds get lost in the mists of time, but this nonsensical, self-important pap and its legacy just go on and on and on.

In both cases, the author seems to think he's the bees' knees, so smart. In both cases, I found the ultimate story insipid and the way it was told eyeball-gouging awful. For Shadow of the Torturer, Wolfe seems to think that using archaic, esoteric vocabulary is - I dunno - impressive? Instead of some sort of proto-hipster, exclusionary elitism. For The Big Time, Lieber's half-baked sci-fi idea gets all dressed up in awful sexist tropes. How is this book still even in print!?

BEST BOOK OF 2014: (TIE) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, and Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet, by Finn Brunton

Both of these books were soooo deeply pleasurable to read. So smart, so informed and informative, and so fun. And so different! Jonathan Strange is a 1,000-page fantasy about English magic in the Georgian period. It's, to me, a way more impressive fantasy world than Tolkien or Herbert, since Clarke manages to marry it completely to the realities of 19th century England.

Finn Brunton's Spam is likewise incredibly rich and well-researched: it's a non-fiction account of the past, present and future of spam. It also, like Clarke's book, filled me with delight - but of a very different sort. While Jonathan Strange was a costume drama with magic and wit, Spam was basically A Story of My Life, as I've lived much of my life online and know its cultures and tribes well. Learning about the inner workings of spam opened my eyes to, again, how late capitalism/consumerism influences our culture (now digitally!). Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

Very happy to report that one of my fresh, new, post- fics has been published: .

The magazine folks at Beneath Ceaseless Skies also very kindly turned it into a - wonderfully read by (who I understand is from Kansas! like the main character!). Seriously, her reading is amazing. I kinda freaked out.

The story is historical speculative fiction, partly inspired by Ted Chiang's masterful (Hugo/Nebula-winning!) , partly inspired by , greatly inspired by the sociological history of death in the Civil War by Drew Faust (This Republic of Suffering), and partly influenced by my unrelenting Orientalism (womp)! I kid on that last bit! Sort of.

Anyway, I liked Ted's brilliant idea of a world where religious beliefs are literally true: and I liked having people still being "atheists" in such a world. (Because come on, some things doesn't prove all the things, right?)

The character of Suttner is my atheist stand-in, though in his world, Tibetan Buddhism (reincarnation, , karma, etc.) is literally true. Suttner's also second banana in this story (though he stars in The Good Deaths, Part I - out someday, I hope). In this: the wonderful, outrageous, heroic Carrie Nation is the star. And maybe should be the star of everything?

I love this character. I loved writing her. She was completely unlike anyone I'd ever written. She was completely unlike anyone I've ever known. She was a gigantic breath of fresh air. Carrie Nation's Adventures next? Carrie Nation in space? Seriously, this lady.

She's actually , who lived in the 19th century and, yes, smashed up bars. Apparently that was a thing. An intense, fiersome lady, pre-Prohibition, church-lady-gone-crazy thing. Anyway, the main points of Good Death's Carrie's life are the same as actual Carrie: the "God talks to me" stuff, the hatchets, the bars, the alcoholic first husband. An amazing life! Trying to get inside that head was heaps of fun.

Going forward, I'm hoping to publish a few more from this verse (CW-verse? Buddhist Americana-verse?). Or other stuff! Who knows.

In the meantime, I'm proud of this fic, and so I hope one or two folks read it (I always wonder about the hit counts on these things... :)). And I can leave the best remark a writer can leave: I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Yesterday, I impulsively bought, read, and then just as quickly (well, 40% in) dismissed a trashy tie-in novel for . Why did I toss it aside? Because I was appalled at the combination of horrible writing with gratuitous carnage: words like "genocide" and crumbling civilizations were being thrown around, and all for some very cheap narrative oomph.

In other words, a planet was exploded in the first ten pages.

During my indignant raging, I realized - with horror - that I do the very same thing: I blow up planets to get some cheap drama. (See and and and oh, God.) Was I as much of a yokel as the next guy? Do I too capitalize on the death of fictional millions, just to give my protagonist some angst? My narrative some drive?

But wait. What about Gallifrey? That's kind of blown up, and that's canon. What about Alderaan? Vulcan? The twelve colonies?!

It was then that it dawned on me: the exploded planet is a sci-fi trope. And it's almost always a cheap one.

Cheap because, on the one hand, it gives me this ethical itchy feeling. If I'm ostensibly against torture porn and gratuitous violence (and, dammit, I am!), why am I okay with sci-fi writers referring to "genocide" this and "X million dead" that? Cheap because, on the other hand, not only is it lazy and unethical-ish, but it's completely embedded in . Maybe , but I certainly can't. Most humans can't. It becomes a number, an abstraction - perhaps, even, a scorecard for our hero? As usual, .

Indeed, as I ticked off all planet-exploding sci-fi, I noticed a trend: they were all pretty trashy pulp (with two notable exceptions - more below). All the sci-fi that didn't explode a planet was of notably higher quality, and was smarter, more conceptual, more... well, more and less airport-paperback sci-fi.

But let's examine some exploded planets.

Cheap explosions

Alderaan

"Oh no, you can't destroy innocent people! Basketball is a peaceful planet! Please! We have no weapons!"
- (the first Star Wars parody?)

Alderaan is the idyllic, grassy homeworld of Princess Leia, a place where she was raised. So we hear, anyway. It's blown up fairly early on in Star Wars, mostly to establish the evilness of the Empire (which I always find a , to be honest!) and the Death Star's tech specs. We never step foot on it; hell, we don't even get a scene where Leia can mourn for it or reminisce about it.

Tangentially, Ralph McQuarrie's old concept art for Alderaan is pretty damn beautiful, and made a huge impression on me as a child:

Looking at it now, it's reminiscent of Miyazaki's art for Nausicaa!


Vulcan

(Kudos to Vulcan's elegant imploding. What special effects!)

In fact, maybe blowing up a planet is sci-fi's answer to jumping the shark. Because the big, bombastic of 2009 is a very hollow rendering of the glorious, utopian, smart and techno-positive vision of Gene Roddenberry. Star Trek (2009) is certainly fun and glitzy, but it's also pretty dumb.

Like Alderaan, Vulcan is barely visited. Like Alderaan, we arrive in Vulcan's orbit just in time to see it get blown up. As before, the blowing-upness is the main catalyst to drive the plot forward (as well as the characterization of Spock, and his relationship with Kirk). As before, it's cheap, it's easy, and - despite the nice acting - you don't really feel much of anything, even though ostensibly millions have perished. Millions of Vulcans even! Vulcans are so cool!

Oh - and, like Alderaan - the villains don't even care about the planet. They just blow it up FOR THE SAKE OF BLOWING UP A PLANET.


Gallifrey (sort of)

Okay, Gallifrey hasn't blown up - at least I don't think it has. But it has been basically rendered uninhabitable due to the Time War, and the vagabond Doctor mourns regularly for his lost home (). Here, the trope is slightly modified: the destruction of Gallifrey sort of drives the plot forward, in that it renders the (modern, post-2004) Doctor the interminable traveler he is. But there's no vengeance plotline; it's kind of a done deal. Maybe that makes it slightly (slightly!) less trashy.


Exceptions: Two explosions that are less trashy


The Twelve Colonies



Same tropes as before - blown up planets kick-starting the narrative drive, planets are barely visited and exploded very early on - but with one notable difference. Whereas the Empire and Nero blow up Alderaan and Vulcan just for the sake of blowing something up, the Cylons are blowing up the Twelve Colonies in order to eradicate humanity (there's that cheap genocide option again...): it's strategic and it's targeted.

Indeed, the main narrative difference here is that the blown up planet isn't collateral damage (as Vulcan and Alderaan were), the blown planets are the plot. One of the Battlestar Galactica's big themes is how you build a post-civilization society, what sort of politics and religion and culture could thrive and evolve. It's also big time about survival, as a concept and as an ethical question.

As such, it's probably the be-all, end-all Blown Up Planet story. Maybe we don't need to blow anything up ever again? If we do, we can just hyperlink them to the ?


Earth

Uh, spoiler? Well, it's not a huge spoiler. Surely things written almost 50 years ago don't need spoilers!?

Anyway, Ray Bradbury's wonderful, evocative, basically-perfect novel, Martian Chronicles, ends with the survivors of post-nuclear holocaust Earth landing on Mars to restart civilization. It departs from the Blown Up Planet trope in several notable ways: Earth "blows up" (becomes uninhabitable) at the very end, it's not collateral damage, and its blowing-upness raises the issue (again) of a post-civilization civilization. The blowing-upness is a coda, and maybe a postscript.


QUANTIFY THIS.

I've developed a database, where I'll be noting all exploded planets in all sci-fi media I consume. Feel free to let me know if you come across any additional exploded planets. I'm sure this can be (inversely) correlated with quality indicators like . But I wonder if it also shows any time-trends - e.g. do we see more or less blowing up during the 1940s? 1960s? Post-9/11? Not sure on sample size yet, but - since I'm willing to take all media (books, film, comix) - I expect it might be fine for getting significance and .