Unqualified Offerings

The House Committee on Benghazi has subpoenaed an IT worker who helped Hillary Clinton with her email, and he plans to take the fifth.  The House Republicans are assuredly rubbing their hands together and saying “Finally!  Finally!  After 23 years we have found the crack that we can pry open to reveal the Clintons for the crooks that they are!  At last!”  And Hillary Clinton is standing there and holding the football and saying “Go ahead and kick it, Charlie Brown!”

Look, we’ve been here before.  In the 1990’s the investigation into Whitewater morphed into a wide-ranging investigation of all sorts of things.  Whitewater never turned up anything that could hurt the Clintons, but it did lead the investigators to other things that eventually helped them back Bill Clinton into a corner where he lied under oath and….somehow Newt Gingrich wound up resigning.  Even if, for the sake of argument, you think that the Clintons actually did do things that they should have gotten into trouble for, you have to admit that the effort to get them was a spectacular failure.

So now, more than 17 years after the reveal of the Lewinsky affair, there’s another investigation into something that cannot possibly lead to anything terribly damaging (Benghazi?  really?) but they think it’s led them to something else that can damage the Clintons and….my guess is that a few House Republican Committee Chairmen will be resigning before this is all done.  I mean, we’re coming out of the fever swamps of August, headlined by Donald Trump, whom Bill Clinton actually encouraged to run as a way of trolling the Republicans.  Bill’s in top form, August is over, and there’s nobody of consequence in the Democratic Party who will side against Hillary. Given that, it is absolutely adorable that the House Republicans actually think that they have a fighting chance here.

Some of you might be wondering why I won’t admit that the emails are a big deal.  Well, yes, on some level they are a big deal.  Nobody lower on the food chain could get away with it.  If some State Department underling said “Hey, Madam Secretary, I’m just going to use my own private email server for these trade negotiations…” I’m pretty sure it would be slapped down.  Between open records issues, security issues, availability for internal audits and investigations, and the mundane practicalities of needing access to old communications for ongoing business after somebody has changed jobs, there are a lot of reasons to keep these emails in-house.  Hillary Clinton, like most/all politicians, wants to play by a different set of rules than everyone else.  But we knew that already.  You can say that it should still be a big deal, and you’re right, but that doesn’t change the fact that we already know it, and that the same could no doubt be said about whoever her opponent will be next year.

“Ah!”, you say, “but what about the law?”  Well, first, I’m not a lawyer.  Second, I have no doubt that they found their loophole. These are the Clintons we’re talking about.  And they probably have a paper trail of pretexts from 2009 (when she started at the State Department), with documents showing that the only motive for any of this was “…to facilitate performance of duties while…” and “…with no intent to…” and whatever else they need to establish in order to make this no more than a venial sin. Moreover, a boss has the unique advantage of being able to decide what they will do by email, what they will do by phone, and what they will tell a subordinate to do by email.  They can decide what sort of business to keep out of email, and thereby say “Yes, but none of the messages involve anything related to…”  Is that a good enough excuse?  Maybe not for lawyers, but by the time the PR flunkies are done with it it will be good enough for the public. As to the handful of messages with classified material, my understanding is that those particular messages are actually in very much a gray area.  You can say that my understanding is wrong, but guess what?  The Clintons already put the fog out there.

So, go ahead, Charlie Brown.  Try kicking that football yet again.  Me, I’m listening to the Cranberries right now.

According to Kevin Drum, September’s big election focus will be on neurosurgeon Ben Carson.  Say what you will about Carson’s views being extreme, but he is clearly an improvement on Trump in the sense of moving this thing in a saner rhetorical direction.  Moving from the circus clown to the more reasonable-sounding guy will enable a soft landing from the lunacy of summer (and August in particular), at which point the more plausible candidates can start getting attention.  My predictions:

1. Carly Fiorina still needs her moment.  That will come at…some point.  But it will come.  In a primary to pick Hillary Clinton’s opponent, it is both inevitable and appropriate that the only female candidate will get serious examination at some point.
2. Do not write off Scott Walker.  Yes, his poll numbers are low.  Yes, he’s made mistakes.  I nonetheless see him having a certain sort of appeal that should not be underestimated.  Read some Rick Perlstein if you doubt me.  I’m not predicting that he’ll get the nomination (there are too many twists and turns ahead for any such predictions to make sense), but I do believe that he will have his spell as a contender.  Whether that leads to his nomination or not is too hard to tell, but he is not to be underestimated.
3. If Jeb Bush is able to stay in the race he will be nominated.  I say this not because I think he’s a great marathon runner, but rather because I think he would drop out to save himself the embarrassment of running all the way and coming in second.

We’ll know more in October.  For now, enjoy some campaign trail anecdotes about brain surgery.

Ken Burnside writes the best “pro-Puppy” retrospective on the Hugo Awards that I’ve seen. It’s frank about the pain he felt from the way some people treated him during the controversy but impressively free of bitterness. The piece is long, but what interests me most is something he doesn’t quite say, and possibly doesn’t quite realize. Here’s what he does say, about what he identifies as the “Heroic Engineer” genre, also known as competence porn:

Heroic Engineer Stories drive a lot of sales. Nearly every SF author I know who doesn’t need a day job writes an action-adventure series, where the Heroic Engineer/Officer/Competent Protagonist Solves The Problem. They sell, and they sell to a male demographic, often current or recently retired military, and that demographic skews conservative.

Let’s zero in on the last sentence. It states that SF competence porn sells to people who see themselves in the protagonist. They are pleased to read stories in which they recognize people like them.

Which is exactly what gets called affirmative-action “box checking” when the protagonist is female, non-white, queer or some combination of those. Often, particularly when Puppy advocates are writing, when readers derive pleasure from seeing themselves in those protagonists, they are accused of favoring representation over quality, even though representation can be a marker of quality.

I remember when I first saw Apollo 13 in the theater, my overwhelming, thrilled reaction was: “My people!” Those very clever, very white nerdboys in Mission Control, trying to save the lives of the astronauts via kitbashing and pedantry reminded me of myself and my friends in a way hardly any screen protagonists had heretofore. And you know, there’s nothing wrong with that. And there’s nothing wrong with an ex-service-member deriving pleasure from stories about guys kinda like him saving the world with shop tools and shaped charges.

But there’s also nothing wrong with a black woman deriving pleasure from stories about black women on Mars, or gay men enjoying stories about gay men dealing with unexplained phenomena. This even goes beyond the issue of representation-as-quality – that stories with people of color, LGBT folks and women of agency better reflect the world as we know it and our plausible futures. While the old stereotype of science-fiction and fantasy as nothing but wish-fulfillment stories was unjust, wish-fulfillment remains an element of much fiction, and most adventure fiction. There’s simply no case that non-white, non-straight, non-male readers’ enjoyment in seeing themselves reflected in fiction is somehow less legitimate than the pleasure that “a male demographic, often current or recently retired military” takes in the same phenomenon.

And here’s the thing: science fiction has produced decades of that sort of “fan service” for white nerdboys like me and “current or recently retired military” readers like the stereotypical denizens of Baen’s Bar. It continues to produce those stories, as Burnside himself notes, and they continue to sell. What science fiction and fantasy have only begun to do recently is produce a decent crop of “fan service” for people not like me, and not like the modal Barfly. That’s the new thing, and therefore the visible thing. And people get excited about new, visible things. But all that’s happening is that SF&F are finding ways to do for everyone else who might be interested what it was already doing for the white, male, geeky audience: not just show people new futures and other worlds, but show people new futures and other worlds with themselves in it.

I can’t begrudge them the same pleasures I’ve been given.

Sasquan has posted its video of the Hugo Awards ceremony from Saturday night. If nothing else, it’s worth watching David Gerrold get upstaged by a Dalek. Bill Higgins provides a brief program guide, useful for figuring out how to skip the pre-ceremony talk show if that’s not your bag. Everyone on the internet is still busy writing thinkpieces, remonstrances and recriminations, and likely will be for awhile. File 770 remains your one-stop shop for links to many of the major examples.

But I’m feeling a song come on! Where, indeed, do we go from here? Depending on how you count, two to four anti-slate measures passed the Worldcon business meeting Sunday – EPH; 4 of 6; the 5% Solution and a ballot diversity measure that would keep, say, a single writer from pinning down three nominations in one category. But those won’t go into effect unless also passed at next year’s Worldcon in Kansas City, MO, and if that does happen the 2017 Worldcon in Helsinki will be the first one where the new rules take effect.

So next year slates will be as effective as ever; and even afterward they’ll have some power, especially in the categories that attract fewer nominators. So one partial remedy is for the newly energized Hugo voting base to do more nominating. This is only a partial solution because math. A coherent slate bloc dominates a “nominate what you idiosyncratically like” electorate by a factor of five or so. But it is a partial remedy, and besides, this year has reminded me that reading science fiction is fun!

So I figured I should develop a plan. Here is my plan. Make your own to suit yourself.

I’m not going to worry about reading current-year novels, with one exception. The novel category is better able to withstand slating attempts both pre- and after EPH goes into effect. I’m now three books into the late Iain M. Banks’s Culture stories. I have no desire to break from those. I’ve also got M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts, from last year, queued up. As “Mike Carey” he wrote the Felix Castor novels that are hands down my favorite urban-fantasy series. So I haven’t got much prospect of getting to a lot of 2016-eligible novel-length fiction between now and when nominations close next spring. The one exception is Ann Leckie‘s trilogy-closing Ancillary Mercy due out in October. I will be all over that thing, because I loved the first two.

Instead, I’m going to concentrate, for Hugo-nominating purposes, on short fiction. And since more short fiction is published these days than any single SF/F reader can keep up with, I am going to narrow my focus a bit, to four outlets, for the reasons I will give:

• Tor.com – The editor declined to revive my superhero-blogging gig over the winter, which is too bad because I’m a damned good superhero blogger and I could’ve used the money. But the site published Ruthanna Emrys’s “The Litany of Earth“, which was my favorite thing I read last year. They also published John Chu’s “The Water that Falls on You from Nowhere“in 2013, which I finally got around to reading, and which is terrific. So odds are good I will like things here. Plus, hey, free online!
• Apex Magazine – also free online! They published Ursula Vernon’s wonderful “Jackalope Wives” last year. They also publish poetry. SF poetry is not very good for the most part, but people should definitely keep trying.
• Galaxy’s Edge, edited by Mike Resnick. Resnick has a system of publishing new writers while drawing eyes to his magazine (website) by publishing reprints of popular veteran writers. I like this approach and want to reward it, so I’ll give the stories there a shot. And since Resnick is a political conservative, I may find things that get me out of my comfort zone a bit.
• Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, mostly the sample issues. I’ve never read any of Card’s books, and his political views are not my cup of tea, so this is potentially another ideological diversity pick. Plus, Editor Edmund R. Schubert pulled himself out of the running for a Hugo last spring when he learned he’d been on the Puppy slates. That makes him a mensch, so his magazine deserves a look.

(There’s a bias here toward stories that are available free online. That’s a high hurdle for venues that still charge for all their new work, I realize.)

That’s about all the SF short-fiction I can commit to while still having time for the rest of life, and writing my own songs and stories. Here’s the thing: this will still only expose me to a small portion of all the eligible short fiction from this year. In the past, that would’ve been enough to discourage me from nominating. I wouldn’t feel qualified: “How can you know if even the stories you liked best from these four venues are really among the best available last year given that there are more than a dozen online and dead-tree periodicals publishing short fiction? To say nothing of the world of anthologies!” (Old Venus is getting a lot of buzz just now.)

Now I realize that I was being too finicky. In the absence of slates distorting the wisdom of crowds, what should happen is that everybody nominates whatever enthused them, and the sum of genuine enthusiasm over a broad range of voters becomes the set of informed choices. In my head I had a figure of around 15 as the number of things you should be familiar with to vote on a category – 15 eligible novels to be “qualified” to nominate novels, e.g. So I’d never think of nominating “The Litany of Earth” for a Hugo, because I did not read remotely near 15 novelettes last year. But if I had the spring to do over, I would absolutely nominate it*, because I loved it as much as anything I have read in years. And that is, in the absence of skunks, enough to be worth bringing to the picnic. If it turned out there were five “better” novelettes out there regardless, the collective choice of all ethical nominators would discover them.

So I think my plan to pay particular attention to about four short-fiction venues for the rest of the year is good enough. Anything I read therein that I love – not like, love – will go on my year-end recommendation list. I’ll start paying attention to other people’s recommendations in January. Out of my own favorites, and whatever I like of other people’s favorites, I should be able to come up with 1-5 things I find worth nominating in short story, novelette and novella. This seems how it should work.

*This is not literally true. During the period of when nominations were open I was unemployed and broke. No way was I spending $40 to express my affection for the writing of Ruthanna Emrys, genuine as it was. But you get the idea. Also, everything’s fine now. Job; income; yay. Don’t worry about me.

I am done reading Seveneves by Neal Stephenson.  It would be a lie to say that I read until the end of the book, because like most Neal Stephenson books it doesn’t really have much of an ending.  But it does have a last page, and I read until that point.  I’m not spoiling anything if I say that it starts with the destruction of the moon, then goes through humanity’s efforts to survive the consequent destruction of earthly habitat, and then fast-forwards several thousand years to describe the society that eventually repopulates earth.  If we accept the very first scene, and a couple of weird pieces of biology in the future, it’s very much a “hard” science fiction novel.

MILD SPOILERS FOLLOW

I found the first part to be remarkably plausible on a character level.  I think Stephenson made the right choice in mostly focusing on the characters who are going to board the space ships, rather than on the doomed characters.  Between that and the way that humanity was given a way to focus on their legacy, the remarkable order in earth’s last days (e.g. major infrastructure continuing to work even though it’s not like those last paychecks for the power plant operators really matter) was just on the edge of plausible.  The chaos and infighting among the survivors was utterly and sadly plausible.

The degree of (figurative) ancestor worship was at first glance weird, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense.  The people on the space station and also the people on the submarines were under a remarkable degree of video surveillance. After those cameras broke down, humanity entered a long period without the ability to record images and sounds, so those recordings of their ancestors were the last set of records that they had for a long time.  Hence it makes some sense to me that the people who emerged from the water would just happen to recognize an image of a key ancestor’s last recorded action before the disaster.

Another interesting aspect of the story is that this amazingly wealthy future civilization has not terraformed Mars.  On one level, given the amazing wealth and luxury that they enjoy, and their demonstrated ability to move asteroids and comets all over the solar system, it is mildly surprising that they wouldn’t have started a parallel project to make Mars habitable.  They clearly have the money and technology, and the most significant event in their history was a stark reminder that it’s a bad idea to put all their eggs in one orbit.  On the other hand, even thousands of years later they obsessively watch and rewatch videos of the tumultuous birth of their society, and the debate over whether to go to Mars was a key moment of schism.  I suppose I can see how most of them would be opposed to it.  But, on the third hand, they owe their survival in part to an iconoclastic billionaire who ignored the official plans and went off to find an extra comet full of water.  Surely in their society there must be at least a few iconoclastic billionaires who put their money into pushing ice and ammonia into Mars.

Anyway, it’s a classic Stephenson novel, and like most classic Stephenson novels I would really love to read the last 50 pages, if he ever gets around to writing them.