Category: essays

My much news is two excellent things and one very bad thing. Let me start with the very bad.

 

What I thought was me turns out to be antisemitism targeted at so many Australians openly admitting to being Jewish. The Royal Commission is hearing submissions this week and they are uniformly shocking. You can make up your own minds and develop your own opinions from here: Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion

To cheer you up, the first good piece of news is a new fan publication celebrating Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday. I play a (very) small part in this: https://www.journeyplanet.org/uploads/1/5/7/1/15715530/journey_planet_-__issue_95_-_mel_brooks.pdf

And the last bit of news, which is such a relief… I have finished every single aspect of my PhD. All things have been approved. The university even has the library copy of my thesis. I am ABD and will probably receive the PhD itself in September. From September, please feel free to make Dr Dr Dr jokes, though, for the record, I still prefer ‘Gillian’ over ‘Dr Polack.’

I was listening to NPR (as we do when we’re in the car), where KQED Forum was doing a segment on the rise of tobacco smoking in young people. Smoking, as a social behavior, is staging a comeback.

This kind of floored me. I have personal reasons to detest smoking: both my parents were smokers when I was small, and I have the second-hand smoke damage to prove it. My father quit after the Surgeon General’s report came out–that is a saga in itself–and had chronic bronchitis and COPD for the rest of his life. My mother, who never quit, died from tobacco-related causes. And of course I saw all the anti-smoking PSAs (many of the ads that I remember well were discussed on Forum) including the one with the woman discussing how she started smoking–while smoking via the hole in her throat.

I kind of thought that this was a battle that was slowly being won, and a behavior that was emphatically in the rear view mirror. But as I listened to the panelists I began to formulate a question: is this because we don’t remember how bad smoking was, and therefore can assume that it wasn’t that bad at all?

I am old enough to remember walking in to a wall of smoke in restaurants and bars. I don’t miss that. Airplanes had smoking and non-smoking sections, but don’t kid yourself–if anyone was smoking on a plane, everyone was breathing it. My first serious boyfriend was a smoker, and while I loved him a lot, I had to get used to the taste (“kissing a smoker is like licking an ashtray” has considerable truth to it). But if you haven’t had that experience, how can you know? Especially in the face of forces like the tobacco industry which have been trying to play down the dangers of nicotine for 100 years.

Certainly smoking used to be positioned as glamorous. If you look at old movies (and I love me some old movies) smoking had a gestural language. It looked cool. It could look romantic (Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes and giving one to Bette Davis in Now, Voyager comes to mind). It could look tough. It could look louche–gangsters with cigarettes either clamped in the corners of their mouths, or dangling from their lower lips as if kept there by the power of sin. And apparently smoking is making a comeback in film and TV, telegraphing cool and chic.

It occurred to me that we have the same problem with anti-vax people. They don’t remember what the “childhood diseases” were like. I mean, I do. I had measles. It wasn’t bad enough that I felt absolutely horrible; it was accompanied by my mother’s terror that I would die or be struck blind. That leaves an impression. I also remember (dimly) the anxiety during polio season, before the Salk and then the Sabin vaccines became available. But in the years since vaccination became commonplace and these diseases receded into the rearview; measles, at least, became a sort of sitcom punchline, a funny disease that makes you break out in spots. Ho Ho.

Does this mean that periodically humans have to be reminded of how bad things can get before we permit ourselves to move forward? Or worse, that a portion of humanity will valorize the before times as better because they tangle things they don’t like in the current reality (say, racial or gender equality, and having to take thought to the environment before doing whatever they damned well please) with things that are unrelated but part of that current reality (like vaccines). I often write in historical settings, but I don’t for a moment believe that things were better then, at least not for the vast number of people who died early, and very often hungry and ill-treated. The tendency of some people, to assert that Things Were Better, or More Glamorous, or something, back when we took our chances with polio or lit one cigarette from the remnant of the last, bewilders me. I know how sophisticated Bette Davis looked with a cigarette in her hand, but I don’t mistake that for harmlessness.

Okay, so my sweetie and I have been watching an old SYFY series, 12 Monkeys, loosely based on the very creepy and good Terry Gilliam film of the same name from 1995. It has moments that are very effective, mostly it’s a little incomprehensible (time travel and paradoxes feature largely) and at this point we’re only there to see how they resolve the plot. But it raises a question that has been–for me–raised by a number of the fantasy books I’ve been reading of late: where do these people get their provisions?

In 12 Monkeys the action goes back and forth between now (2015 or thereabouts) to 2043 (or thereabouts) to the mid-1800s to the dystopic future of 2163 (again, or thereabouts). In the dystopic future there are scenes were someone is being urged to eat. While she’s a prisoner, she’s being fed fairly lavishly, for reasons. We don’t see much of the landscape surrounding the place where the prisoner is being held, but glimpses suggest that it’s blighted–and we know that even in the their-past-still-our-future of the 2040s, food was hard to come by. No one is out there planting or growing, and apparently not much grows on its own. Survivors kill each other for scraps. So WHERE DOES THIS SPREAD OF HEALTHY FOOD COME FROM?

In the same way, deploying the universal film-and-tv metaphor for a character’s despair, many of these characters are seen morosely downing whisky (it’s always whisky, or brandy, or some brownish liquor). The bottles have labels that signal single malt or at least Scotch. WHERE DO THESE BOTTLES COME FROM? Okay, maybe at the outset of the Very Bad Thing That Happened to cause a dystopic future, someone was hoarding bottles. But surely at some point the well would have run dry?

In the same way, I just finished reading a very good fantasy novel. Like many of the fantasy novels set in secondary worlds, people still drink coffee and whisky, and they smoke tobacco. Again, these things are useful in setting mood and character (and they call them coffee and whiskey and tobacco, because we’ve seen how often calling coffee klah, or something like that, pulls a reader right out of the story). But I often and often wonder: okay, the way you’ve described this world, where are the coffee plantations? Coffee requires a very specific climate to grow. And who’s growing and curing the tobacco? How about grain farms, and distilleries?

Are there fruit farms? It’s all well and good to imply, as the Hunger Games did, that there are districts that supply agricultural products (but oranges grow in climates where blackberries might not, and saying “district” seems geographically and therefore horticulturally limited to me). I might find it more believable if someone picked up an apple and said “Gosh, that’s a rarity! You must have some pull to be able to acquire an apple.” There’s your world building and character building right there.

I know: the point of the book is not where dinner came from. But if you just dump lavish meals on your fantasy and SF tables without at least a little handwavium, it is distracting.

To its credit, in the last episode of 12 Monkeys, someone asks another character where she had been getting her cigarettes from all these years. She answers that she planted tobacco around the side of the facility some years earlier. This of course raises all sorts of other questions, like: how was she arranging to cure and process those tobacco leaves in between attempting to save the universe through time-travel science (and since this character is almost never seen without a cigarette in her hand, the amount of tobacco she had planted had to be non-trivial.) But they made part of an effort. Kinda.

At least Star Trek had the good sense to give us the replicator, to keep Picard in “tea, Earl Gray, hot.”

I am back from Perth, which is just over 3000 km from where I live, still in the same country, and at sea level. I saw the Indian Ocean and dreamed of vast explorations that are unlikely to happen. I learned a great deal about many things.

The one I want to talk about today is what happens when the object of hate moves away from the finely-targeted despite and sees old friends and colleagues. While there were a few individuals I avoided talking at any length with and one person who had no idea what has been and is being done to Jewish Australia, I had an amazing and warmly welcoming 8 days in Perth. Everyone else saw me as an old friend or colleague or a new friend or colleague. My paper and my workshop had excellent attendees and a good number of them. The IHWA (horror writers!) sold my books for me and let me sit at their table and chat (and yes, I sold a bunch of books while I was there, some of which were mine) and… maybe the hate hasn’t yet changed the whole of Australia. Maybe there is hope.

I still have to write about the other stuff, because I’m still experiencing it every single day. Except… I didn’t experience it in Perth because I was surrounded by caring people who protected me.

How do we make that warmth and caring grow faster than the hate?

I’m writing this in May, but you will receive it in June. As you read it, I’ve just left the Australian national SF convention and am packing up, ready to go home. I might even be on my way home. As the crow flies, it’s over 3000 km from Perth to my flat. Distances in Australia are what they are.

When I lived in Sydney, I explained that going to Perth meant going from the Pacific to the Indian Oceans. Canberra is inland a way, however, so it’s a shorter route and there’s only one ocean involved.

In my dreams I take the train from Adelaide across the Nullarbor. The Nullarbor Plain’s name describes it literally – hundreds of kilometres with no trees – which means the night sky is apparently brilliant. The train costs, alas, more than my whole eight days in Perth, including flights and food and conference, so this is a dream. A friend (and her dog, Bill) will drive across the Plain the day I fly, however, and has promised to look up and wave.

What am I doing at the SF convention, besides talking (to anyone who wants to hear) about my books? I am in charge of the Humanities part of the academic programme. I’m also giving a workshop. And I intend to spend much time in the dealers’ room with friends.

If I’m already home when you read this, I suspect I’ll be catching up on sleep. Just suspect, mind!

I had a dream last night about trying to pack up everything in a large house, preparatory to moving.

My husband and I are planning to move in… I dunno. Somewhere between 5-7 years from now. Between this long-range deadline and the fact that my house is currently knee-deep in books I’m reading for World Fantasy (the photo on the left is the stacks of books I am not the primary reader on…the books that are my responsibility are in another room) the notion of is very much with me. And evidently, very much with my dreams.

I’m not sure how it comes to this. When I was graduated from college, I had… a couple of plants. Two or three shelves of non-textbook books, and perhaps six inches worth of record albums (yeah, vinyl. Because I’m from the Before Times). A small barbershop cabinet (about 10″ x 15″, and 40″ high). A guitar. My bicycle. That was about it. Moved all that stuff back to my parents’ house, where it barely made a blip (my parents lived in a Barn. When you live in a Barn there’s always somewhere to put stuff). When I moved into my first apartment I added a rather sad sack twin bed and a bureau. I bought a pot and a knife (my roommate had other cooking gear).

And then I began to acquire stuff. Nothing crazy: bookshelves made of boards and bricks, because I knew I would acquire more books. A Selectric typewriter, bought with part of the proceeds of my first book sale. A second-hand desk. By the time I moved into another apartment (same roommate) I had acquired more kitchen stuff, a better bed with a futon, a chair (prior to the chair I had done my writing sitting crosslegged on my bed with the Selectric on my lap, which may explain the state of my legs). My father gave me a Hoosier Pie Cabinet, because it reminded him of me.* More books, of course. Then I moved to a studio apartment on my own, where, among other things, my stereo was stolen. And on and on. I moved in with friends and wound up putting 90% of what I owned in storage. Then into a flat with another friend. Then I got married, and we had to negotiate whose stuff would achieve primacy in our three room apartment. Then we had a kid–kids require, or seem to require, an inordinate amount of stuff, even tho’ we were not of the “anything Little Gumdrop wants, she must have!” brand of parents. We moved to a larger apartment and put in a wall of bookshelves, and had another kid. And then we moved to California and bought a house–not a huge house, or a particularly glamorous house, but a whole house with an attic and a basement. The kids grew up. Both moved out, but left stuff behind. That stuff is mostly in the attic, which has dormer cupboards, so we can maintain the notion that the attic is a guest room.

A couple of years ago I gave away 25 cartons of books to the San Francisco public library. I don’t know what it is, but I have a distinctly squinchy, unhappy feeling about throwing out things that are useable but not wanted. I want them all–books and dishes and furniture–to find a new home. But finding that home can be challenging. I have my floor loom from when I was a kid and taking weaving lessons. It’s in good shape, entirely useable, and while I keep advertising it in local weavers’ organizations, I haven’t had even a tickle of interest. I also have a rug-hooking loom of my mother’s that I suspect I’ll have to donate somewhere. And my baking paraphernalia… I have heard that some libraries will collect baking paraphernalia and check them out. Maybe SFPL would like mine? In 5-7 years?

I walk around the house and state with certainty: when we move, THAT comes with us. And THAT. And THOSE. But not everything. And every time I think of picking something up–a tool for the kitchen, for instance–I am now reminded that I might not want that tool in the future, no matter how convenient it might be Right Now.

So, yeah. I’m a little consumed by Stuff. In my dreams, in my kitchen, in the attic.

_____

*Over the years my father gave me a number of things that reminded him of me, including the pie cabinet, and a large ball of alabaster and carving tools. I have never been sure why these things reminded him of me–was it structure or function? Still, I adore the pie cabinet. The alabaster was eventually surrendered to an art school.

I’m a bit snowed under right now. It’s mostly for the best reasons.

First, I have to do minor revisions and then I will have a PhD. I’m meeting with my supervisors this week to work out the best approach. Once the adjusted thesis has been submitted, that’s the end of doctoral studies for me. I promise I won’t do another PhD!

Second, I’m meeting with a Robin Hood scholar for shared work on Eustace the Monk. That guy haunts me.

Third, proof-reading is being done for a novel. More about that when announcement time arrives… which is not far away.

Fourth, this weekend I’m at the virtual end of Balticon. I have some wonderful panels and the best possible company.

Fifth, Swancon (the Australian national science fiction convention in Perth this year) is the weekend after. I’m running the Huamnities side of the academic programme. I’m lucky in the people I work with, because it’s all a lot easier for me than I expected. This is through the hard and clever work of the chief runner of all academic things and because of the Swancon team as a whole.

Sixth, I have a novel I need to write and a NF book to find a home for.

Seventh, I’ve my ME/CFS back. Aren’t I lucky?

I’ve had it for a while, but it’s reached the place where I can do things and this means I can overdo things and get set back for a full year if I’m not careful. I’m one of the lucky ones in that I get remission. I’m unlucky in that I was finally succeeding with an exercise programme that was enabling me to walk a full kilometre and I was so proud of myself. Pride and falls – we have reached the time of the fall. Not all falls are bad. It’s autumn in Canberra, so, if I wander in the right suburbs, I get to see autumn leaves. A friend and I investigated leaves last week, and we jumped in them and it was lovely.

With all this going on, later today I’ll put up posts for the next fortnight. They will magically appear on the right day and it will look as if I’m diligent and at my desk. I will be neither diligent nor at my desk, but I will be spending time with wonder and friends and much talk of speculative fiction. Also, I will be giving a workshop.

The noise you hear in the background is the Australian Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. It’s not the Commission itself, but many who hate coming out of the woodwork and making sure we see them. Most of them complain that too much energy and attention is being spent on Jews. This is beyond irony.

I got my start as a writer back in the long-ago, writing Regency Romances. These were relatively short novels that charted the progress of two characters toward each other, ending in a happy ending and (presumably) a wedding, set against the backdrop of the English Regency. I wrote five romances and then stopped. Not because I didn’t love the setting and the era, but because nudging two people toward each other, with no possibility of a surprise (given the expectations of the form, if you buy a romance, you expect that happily ever after) stopped entertaining me. And I write to entertain myself, first and foremost.*

But that wasn’t the only reason I stopped. At that time the expectations of the romance genre were, um, broadening, and I found I wasn’t very interested in the way things were going. This was the dawn of the Big! Sweeping! Highly Sexualized! romance, with lots of sex scenes using lots of (to me, risible) descriptions of sex which I found as arousing as plumbing manuals.

I am pro sex, personally, and in fiction. But many of the books I looked at at the time were, um, sex-scene delivery systems wrapped up in a thin coating of historical setting. Most of the books had protagonists who were of the middle and upper classes, who were swept off by pirates or brooding Earls or some such, and not-quite-forced into having mind-blowing sex, swept away on a tide of passion that overcame all their prior training about what a woman of good family did or didn’t do and… And there were (in my admittedly smallish sample, because most of the books I looked at were not to my taste) never any consequences. Not the obvious ones–pregnancy and STDs**–but the very crucial societal consequences to a woman of good family. This drove me nuts, and is part of the reason I started writing my Sarah Tolerance books.

I mention this because I’ve been reading a lot of “romantasy” of late, for Reasons. And I have, therefore, staggered through a lot of plumbing. Er, sex scenes. And some of those books come off as sex scene delivery systems wrapped in a thin coating of fantasy tropes. Not my thing. For the people who love this stuff, it is exactly what they want, and I’m happy for that. Everyone should have access to the fiction they want to read. And I think the authors of these books are just as happy as their readers–I don’t believe it’s possible to write this kind of fiction unless you subscribe to it wholeheartedly.

But I would like to suggest to those writers (who are probably not seeing this) that sometimes less truly is more. A little less specificity as to what goes where allows the reader to insert their own idea of what is romantic/erotic. Lead me to the bedroom door, as it were, and my imagination can tailor a scene that contains everything I find satisfying. Giving too much specific detail (particularly when the details are in language that makes me snicker) makes that impossible. I once had a writing student, a nice guy who wanted to write Harlequin romances, and (as I put it at the time) filled his books with more thighs and breasts than a poultry counter… but lacked incense. Sometimes the thighs and breasts get in the way of  the emotional core of the scene, which is what I’m there for.

We know how the plumbing works.  Tell me less.

__________
*I’m sorry if that sounds selfish, but honestly, if I’m not having a good time why would a reader?
** And dear God, why everyone in Europe didn’t have syphilis at this time I do not know, so how any of these characters could have dodged that bullet…especially with pirates and brooding Earls, neither of whom were famous for restraint…