Nancy Jane Moore’s poem “Retirement Dream” is now available at Strange Horizons.
The rest of the issue — another poem, a story, and a review — all look quite interesting as well.
Go forth and read!
Month: January 2024
Nancy Jane on Her Favorite Reads of 2023
Over at Ambling Along the Aqueduct, Nancy Jane Moore has contributed a piece on her favorite books (and a couple of other things) from 2023.
Her post is number 31 in a series of pieces by Aqueduct Press authors and friends on what books, movies, music, and related things moved them last year. Read them all and find some more books for your TBR pile or movies you have to go see.
Boldly going…
This week, I’m torn between writing about Thomas of Ercildoune and the wet weather. Let me find a third topic, instead.
In stories of all types, the general push of the tale help explain the impact of the words. Something that I encounter time after time in my research is that changing a single word to reflect contemporary understandings of hate speech does not by itself negate bias. It hides it a bit, that’s all until the underlying story doesn’t reflect that bias. If only the main character is given a place and a plot and everyone else is secondary to that character, then the story is about that character, for example.
In some circumstances the change itself can work very nicely alongside the bias and reinforce it. My current example of this is the change of “where no man” to “where no-one” in some Star Trek TV. “No-one’ opens the door to a wider sense of gendering, which is a good thing. The change, however, is in the TV prologue of Strange New Worlds, and Strange New Worlds is all abut discovery. The concept underlying the show reminds me every time someone says those words, that historically, European discoveries of new worlds (including the Americas and Australia) were mainly to exploit them (convert whole populations, make much money, populate with both the free and not-free– that kind of thing). Why does it remind me of that? All the non-human populations that experience First Contact in any Star Trek picture or TV show already know their own world. They are seldom watching out for strangers. How can they live in a place where no-one has gone before?
Also, the brilliance of the crew makes for neat plots of the ‘we can pull the wizard out of a hat – most people can only pull rabbits’ kind. These amazing folks are designed to be celebrated. Their very existence validates the right to discover and to settle. The newer shows are more likely to have scenes where what the discovered actually want, but these are not universal. What is universal is the sense of destiny and of empire building. That ‘no-one’ becomes rather important in this context. The language shared is that some people (mostly human or very close to human in many of the key culminating scenes) have discovery rights that trump the ancient peoples who own a land.
I will still watch Star Trek, but I will watch it and explain the bias to myself. There are other shows I wont watch at all. Reinforcing a bias isn’t nearly as bad as helping people hate, you see. But that’s a topic for another day.
Superhero Fatigue
There’s been some discussion online about whether people are growing tired of superhero movies. I haven’t seen enough of them to say I’m tired of the movies, but I am very tired of the whole idea of superheroes.
Many readers and writers I know can come up with a long list of stories and comics that are not about superheroes but would make great movies. I sysmpathize with that position, but that’s not my major objection.
And of course, there are always those who think we need more “serious” movies. I don’t care about that as much. In fact, I’d be delighted to see more highly watchable but frivolous movies.
I mean, I love a good adventure story. And I certainly don’t mind some heroic action.
It’s the super aspect of superheroes that I’m tired of. I like my heroes on the ordinary side.
Now this is not an objection to fantasy or other forms of speculative storytelling. I’m fine with a story world that involves magic or is set in the future with lots of interesting tech.
It’s those characters with outsized powers who apparently deal with crises caused by other characters with outsized powers in a world something like ours that get on my nerves.
That’s a world in which ordinary people like you and me don’t really matter. We’re just there so that the special people can save us.
I cannot watch such movies without thinking about our current world of superwealthy people who think that the rest of us don’t count for much. The tech billionaires are the most obvious, but anyone with a great excess of money shares the attitude that they are the only really important people. Continue reading “Superhero Fatigue”…
The Things I Know, The Things You Know
This post originally appeared a while back on my own blog.
Many writers (I won’t say all writers, because I don’t know them all, but at this point I think I have a pretty decent random sample) know a bunch of different weird things. Many writers (see above caveat) were probably the sorts of kids who stored up random factoids, or had deep pools of info about odd things, or could list all the kings of England from Edward the Confessor onward (that used to be one of my parlor tricks, along with reciting the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales). Many writers research science, or history, or Alexandrian mythology, or sanitation in ancient China, or, or, or…
The thing is, if you’re the kind of person who picks up spare facts the way other people nab pocket change, it will sooner or later burble to the top of your consciousness. My husband, the Gray Eminence of rec.arts.music.beatles, can reliably identify which out-take from which bootleg two bars of a given Beatles song is from, and probably knows all sorts of arcane info about who was recording that day, and can expound at length about the cool fill Ringo was using, or why George was using that guitar or… I, who have only the laywoman’s hey-I-was-there-when-the-Beatles-were-cool-the-first-time appreciation of the music, can still enjoy Danny’s over the top minutiae. And when I need an in-house set of professional ears, I have it. Your friends and beloveds are fonts of all sorts of information, if you only think to ask. And if they don’t know, someone among them will almost certainly know someone who will know.
Mumbly-years ago I was writing a novel set in New York, in which our Hero had to go to Rikers’ Island, the NYC jail complex that sits in the middle of the East River. First thing I learned was the difference between a jail and a prison (jails are short term, prisons long term, for one thing, and are generally run by local law enforcement–sheriffs and police departments; prisons are state- or Federally-run, and are for people who are in for more than 365 days). Second thing I learned was that, at the time at least, it was very hard indeed to find out logistical facts about the prison (how do you get there? is the protocol different for lawyers and visitors? what’s the layout of the place). Now, of course, there’s a website for directions, with information on the various facilities, and so on, but in these long-ago days, not so much. So I asked a friend’s husband, the only lawyer I knew, if he knew any of this stuff. He didn’t, but a friend did, and after an hour of fascinating conversation I knew more about Rikers’ Island than I’d thought possible. Thus: the power of friends and their friends.
I’m a member of a list called Joys of Research, which is a stunningly valuable focused-crowd-sourcing tool: it’s simply a bunch of writers who have different areas of expertise. Ask about medieval latrine technology or the decomposition rates of bodies or the weight of an 1795 flintlock pistol and someone will know. And if no one knows, they’ll have suggestions about where to find the information. Just being able to narrow the informational sources down a little is often a huge help when you’re time-crunched.
I’m not organized enough to make a list of who of the people I know I can ask for what, but you might be. And an added benefit? You get to know people better. I am hampered by shyness and an early inculcation of the goofy notion that asking people questions was rude. (I know. I know.) But asking questions about another person’s interests is a wonderful way of deepening a friendship, especially if you’re able to ask about things your friend is really interested in. My friend Steve can talk mammalian biology until the cows come home (he might even know why the cows come home). My friend Claire knows medieval history, my friend Kevin is a go-to for herbal information and cookery; my friend Ellen is a stunning well of mid-20th century American pop-culture. When I started working on Sold for Endless Rue I discovered that my friend Tess, who had been the administrator of Clarion when I went there, knew tons about the literature of medieval medicine. Connections FTW!
And never forget that you might be the one who knows something someone else needs to know. And that feels really good too: you get to be the pro from Dover and expound on something near and dear to your knowledge base too.
Happy New Year…and other thoughts
I’m running late with my blogpost because exciting things keep happening. The only one I can talk about at this point is the fridge repair that will happen on Friday. And that’s boring to most people… so I won’t. All I can say is that more good things have happened in my new year so far than happened in a month of last year. If I pick and choose the month carefully, then I can say “More than in two months.” I hope this is a harbinger for all of us – we all need a good year after the last one.
I know, as the Treehouse member who gets to blog on New Year’s Day (which is my 2nd January, which never ceases to amuse me) I feel I ought to say something inspirational.
Except… 2023 was a difficult year and many of us (the lucky ones) are merely tired and a little unsafe, many of us (me) are beyond tired, and many of us (too many people I care about) are living through very difficult times with much care and caution. I could say something winsome and hopeful, but it would feel a bit hypocritical.
What’s on my mind a lot right now is how many people don’t identify their own prejudices, but they do act on them. “I don’t hate this” they say. Often it’s Jews, which is, of course the bit that I experience directly. When a “No Jews allowed” sticker is put on a window of a place family members work, I feel it. When a synagogue is evacuated because of a pro-Palestinian protest I might (and, in fact did) have family there, and they had to thread their way through an antisemitic throng to get home on a Friday night. Ironically, that particular Friday night was also the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
All kinds of human beings are suffering from various kinds of hate (disguised and not disguised, recognised and not recognised) and all of us are hurting. If you have the wrong religion, the wrong nationality, the wrong race, the wrong skin colour, the wrong gender, the wrong view of sex, the wrong way of walking down the street, the wrong clothing, the wrong hair colour… almost anything that this person identifies as problematic, then it doesn’t matter how much a person says “I don’t hate” they are bigoted and that bigotry hurts.
I wish this were a luxury moment when general hate was low and I could say “Look, Roger Waters does this thing and is not as bigotry-free as he thinks he is” and step back and hold my peace because everything was explained. But this kind of despite that’s invisible to the person expressing it is infectious.
The people who go on massive demonstrations and say “Look, we’re peaceful. We’re safe” see only the friends around them that they demonstrate with and don’t look at the people who have to hide, or try to hide any differences that could cause them to be focal points of hate or (more uncomfortably for me) have to walk in the march shouting louder than anyone else to prove they’re acceptable.
In the everyday, some people who do the louder shouting are allying openly with bigots, not because they agree with the bigots on whether they themselves should live, but because there are some aspects of the politics they agree with (all humans deserve human rights and Palestinians are suffering a marked lack of them at the moment, for instance) and they either don’t know or don’t care that many people who see the suffering of Palestinians follow some really vile stereotyping and blame this suffering on every Jew they can find. They don’t just blame. They lash out and hurt Jews in many, many countries. As I said, it’s infectious.
I miss the days when I was allowed to teach cultural awareness and understanding. I didn’t teach the politics of it. That was for a different kind of expert. I taught people how to cross the imaginary divide between people and to see the person they were sitting next to as a human being and be able to work with them. I didn’t teach a token “Admit they’re human. Go on. Thank you. We’re done. Get back to your normal life.” I was talking about seeing people as … people. With favourite food and movies, with family, with their own unique lives and their own personal way of facing problems. Talk about issues came later. First individuals had to learn how to see and respect other individuals. This ability is sorely lacking right now.
Teaching cultural awareness is still my favourite way of combating hate. We don’t have to be like our neighbours in culture, religion or history. We do have to see them as equally human, and understand what that means.
In my perfect world, we all all taught how to identify the invisible bigotry most of us carry, and that it’s our responsibility to handle it. Also, that we’re all taught to take responsibility for accusations we make. It really scares me that so many of the stereotypes and hate are marching the streets rather than confined to the minds of the idiot minority. It scares me that I’ve started this sentence three times and dumped what I was going to say, because I’m worried that useful idiots will accuse me of supporting one country above all others and that I’m unpatriotic: what I had intended to say in this aborted sentence was about something quite different.
Years ago, a reporter explained to me that the only reportable Australian news about Jews was if we could be blamed for something (no matter how small) or if we were murdered. I put that small illumination into one of my novels, because I couldn’t shake it off. I still can’t shake it off. Someone say to me last week, “No Jews, no news” and they were not talking about someone Jewish who was being praised for anything good. Recently, most Australian media has lost interest in reporting Jews who are hurt. This focus on Jewish anything and the widespread with to blame Jews for so much is not simple antisemitism. It’s denial of guilt for others. It’s an irresponsible need to simplify a complex world.
To anyone who asks “Why are you focusing on matters Jewish – look, Palestinians are hurting.” I’m focusing on my own background here because I have learned to see myself as a human being, and that means I am allowed to talk about my own safety, which is what triggered this particular post today. If I’m not allowed to talk about my place in the world and who I am, then the person who tells me I’m wrong might want to ask if they silence themselves and their own views, or if it only applies to certain people. If it only applies to certain people and I’m one of them, then why isn’t reading someone else’s writing a good approach? Why may I not talk about these things from my own perspective? Is it because I’m female? Australian? Older than many? Have disabilities? Or because I’m Jewish? If it’s any of these reasons then maybe consider the role of invisible prejudice. You can ignore me as a Gillian without any bias at all, but telling me I can only talk about this or that is a different matter. Very few of us have to read the work of people whose views we dislike. If people don’t like me, then surely simply not reading my work is better than silencing me? Me, I don’t march in protests, but I don’t argue that the protests should be stopped… unless they become violent , which is what happened outside that synagogue that Friday night. Rule of law – crime needs to be stopped. Trying to run over pedestrians because they are Jewish is a crime. This is why I am angry about that protest and do not speak about most of the others. Protesting is not a problem: intentionally hurting people is.
If I were talking about politics in the Middle East, trust me, I would be talking quite differently in this post. This goes back to the shouting. Do I have to shout “I hate Netanyahu” every single time I want anyone to listen to me? Or may I say Gillian things in a Gillian way?
I like rule of law. Fair and just rule of law. I like the thought of criminals in all countries to be tried fairly and punished justly. This includes war criminals from all backgrounds. The more we allow hate and bigotry to rule the streets and airwaves, the less likely this is to happen in any given country.
For all those wonderful people who, in the last three months, have chatted with me as if nothing has changed – you see me as a person. For all those people I thought nice who have been avoiding me, some have admitted that this is because they don’t know what to say. If you’re avoiding me because this difficult world has overwhelmed you, then try something simple and achievable. “Say “Hi”, say “Why don’t we meet up.” We don’t need to talk tough issues. We don’t even have to talk for more than a minute if everything’s too overwhelming. The thing is, until you say “Hi – how are you?” I don’t know if you still see me as a person. A whole bunch of people from my old leftish haunts do not. I discovered this the hard way. My Jewishness dehumanises me in their eyes, and they don’t even recognise this.
How to prove to someone (anyone) that you see they themselves and not a stereotype? Talk to them. Let them know you see them and not a stereotype. All this is, in real life, outside the misshapen media, can be as simple as nodding and smiling at a neighbour as you walk past each other.
My NY resolution is to remind myself every single day to remember everyone’s humanity. To remind myself to see people and smile at them and chat if it’s appropriate and not to be governed by the current world of hate.