Tuesday, May 21, 2013
SKINJUMPERS published!
| Posted On 2:12 PM by Christopher Fletcher | 4 comments |
PREFACE to Skinjumpers
I first encountered the world of Skinjumpers—a strange and dangerous milieu—in a short story that the author submitted at the end of 2008 to my then-fledgling zine M-Brane SF. The story “A Clone of a Different Color” introduced New Cluster, a decaying city in an unspecified future and location, run by a corrupt and authoritarian police-state structure that resembles a mafia as much as a government and which is shot through with struggles among various factions. But it was not the post-cyberpunk veneer of this tale that appealed to me, but rather its subversive core conceit that people can move their consciousnesses, their very selves, from one body to another and somehow remain whole.
Specifically, the first Skinjumper tale evoked a topic that I’d wondered about a lot before I’d read that story: if I somehow change bodies (a perennial fantasy of mine), am I still me? Is there even actually a “me” outside my physicality? This remains a vexing question that we may—within the lifetimes of people reading this—have answered for us when we find out whether or not it is possible to separate consciousness from the body, move it into another body or possibly into a computer construct and learn whether that consciousness can survive intact or if it will be radically altered by the nature of its new physical form. I’ve wondered whether my “selfness” is really somehow a wholly different thing than my body in the way that humans tend to believe it is or if all I am is simply the compound of the literal physical stuff of my body. Is that which makes me an individual, a consciousness, actually a real thing that can be taken out of my body by some sort of futuristic instrumentality and moved elsewhere? Or is my body’s physical gender, its chromosomes, its genitalia, its sexual orientation, its age and condition and experience inseparable from the “me” of me? We don’t know this answer yet in the real world, but in the world of Skinjumpers, the answer is no: we can separate from our bodies and remain ourselves. We can even become even more our real selves by doing so.
In Michael D. Griffiths’ series of Skinjumper short stories that I published in M-Brane SF, and in this novel, a lot of questions are left unanswered. One is not given a detailed rationale as to why things are the way they are in New Cluster, but the reader doesn’t really need one either. The titular Skinjumpers threaten the social order and draw the fire of the authorities because (among other reasons) they are sex-rebels. They not only change bodies and cheat death by “jumping” into cloned replacements, but they can change physical gender. Some of them choose to do so permanently. In this story, you will meet Erin, a young woman whom you may underestimate at first because of the way she chooses to present herself. She is the long-term girlfriend of our protagonist Dak. But Dak has a particular sexual kink that is fabulously enabled in this world: he is oriented toward men who inhabit female bodies. Erin was once a guy and still somehow is even within her unambiguously feminine physical form. But she seems to not quite fit into our current understanding of LGBTQ-ness either. She and he are a shade different than what is enabled by or even understood in our so-called “real” world. Underneath their more or less conventional gender self-portrayals, they are both fascinatingly queer.
I am brought back to my original wondering about whether all this is possible and plausible. If I could move from my own body into that of a female, would I still be basically the same person, a gay male but somehow with a female physicality like that of Erin? What if I moved into the physicality of a straight guy? Or that of a one hundred-year- old man or a ten-year-old boy? Or even a younger clone of myself? Skinjumpers proposes, with great enthusiasm, that it is all possible: you can have the body you want and still be you—and maybe even a better “you.” It’s wonderfully subversive in the world of New Cluster in almost the same way that simply not being straight can be in our real world.
Now, please relax, turn the page, and recline into a world where your body is not a permanent boundary.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Thoughts on THE WANTING SEED
| Posted On 9:10 PM by Christopher Fletcher | 1 comments |
Usually someone gives me an Amazon gift card around the
holidays, and annually I use that as justification for the delivery of a bunch
of books I might not otherwise have purchased—and, of course, I always way exceed
the gift card’s value in doing so. Among this season’s haul is a nice Norton
trade paperback (not pictured here) reprint of Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed, his other futuristic dystopia, written and
published at about the same time as his more famous A Clockwork Orange, and which dwells upon some of that book’s same
themes of whether human goodness is innate or not, and what, if any, kind of
government or social order can foster the best sort of behavior in people.
Since the book is readily available, and summaries of it abound
online, I won’t detail its plot overly much, but it’s generally about a social
transition that occurs in England during an unspecified future era, and the
things that happen to a few closely connected characters during that period.
The world is somewhat Orwellian, with a fair amount of Newspeak-style
short-word jargon, but it’s not ruled by quite the same sort of repressive
totalitarianism as Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Ingsoc
regime. Instead, as the story opens, England is part of a multinational state
called the “Enspun” (Newspeak for the English Speaking Union), which in turn is
part of a world order that also includes the “Ruspun” (Russian-speaking,
naturally), and its government and society is in what is described as a
“liberal” phase. More on these phases later, but contemporary American
Teabaggers and moral majoritarians would eat this stuff for breakfast, lunch
and dinner. Because the excesses of far-future liberalism, according to
Burgess’s future-world, include: Forced Abortion! One-Child-Only Policy!
Self-Sterilization! No Religion at All! The Intermixing of the Races! and, most
obnoxious of all, Glorified Homosexuality!
Burgess was a comic novelist primarily—even A Clockwork Orange with all its horror
is frequently laugh-out-loud funny—and his wit is baked thoroughly into the
cake of his writing style, his word choices and multi-lingual jokes and
seriously enormous vocabulary (who ever actually says “eleemosynary" several times in a single book, really?),
his unexpected and sometimes weird metaphors, and jokes that are drawn out over
long sections of the novel. For example, a secondary character’s odd verbal tic—he
peppers his speech constantly with the phrase “do you see”—comes back
eventually as the highlight of a stupidly funny scene well after one has
probably forgotten all about it. So The
Wanting Seed is super-funny fairly often, but…but…
But it’s also chockfull of homophobia and racism, do you
see. I’m not generally one to
criticize dead writers and their work based on these things when they and it
are of a period in history a lot different than now, and when the work is not primarily all about those issues.
Also, I know that social change in England and America on issues like race and
homosexuality has happened more rapidly in recent decades than it did during
most of the twentieth century. I get it that everyone who has ever written
fiction tends to have been a creature of his or her own era. For example, I
strenuously disagree with a lot of other readers and writers in the spec fic
genres who think that we ought to jettison H.P. Lovecraft and ignore his
influence on the genres because he was a typical man of his culture—a
turn-of-the-20th century New England white man freighted with tons of
racist prejudices and patrician class biases. Unattractive? Sure as hell it is.
But he didn’t write Mein Kampf. He
may have been insensitive to and fearful of and uncharitable toward the Other
but he wasn’t on an explicit mission to oppress people and didn’t actively work
at promoting a hate-agenda with his work. One might think the same about
Burgess, a man of his time, certainly not on a hate-crusade. Yet I winced and was annoyed
every single time, while reading The
Wanting Seed, when I encountered a stereotypical or straight-up mythical
characterization of gay men and every time I encountered a reference to the
non-English “races” and their attributes.
And they are legion:
This novel is hung heavy with the preposterous conception
that a majority of straight men (they in the yoke of population-control
“liberalism”) will actively feign homosexuality in order to secure career
advancement, and that to feign such an (obviously) undesirable condition, one
must simper and caper and lisp and have their balls cut off and otherwise
cultivate faux-“effeminate”
characteristics, and such references dot this tale almost from cover to cover,
fading out only toward the end (when society has changed blessedly back to
hetero-normal). Also, there eventually comes into being a brutal security
force, crewed entirely by homo men, with a mandate to oppress the breeding
straights, and which resembles somewhat the thuggery of Alex and his droogs in Clockwork (I must admit that this development
appealed to me rather more than a little bit after chapters of homo-cliché…but
still). But this is purely a satire, right? A joke, right? Maybe. More on that
in a minute.
It’s also larded through with race business. Asians are
small-boned and high-pitched in voice. Africans are huge, frightening. One of
them, a Nigerian, has such a large mouth that it beggars the imagination that
he is able to pronounce properly the sounds of English (he also seems endowed
with a supernatural number of teeth). One woman is an “orchestra” of races,
indecipherable as to her whole complex lineage. Again and again it is commented
upon when non-white people appear, as if they are anomalous even in this future
society of the Enspun which is supposedly past having such worries. Never is a
non-white man mentioned without also mentioning some supposedly intimidating or
unflattering characteristic of his appearance or behavior. It’s a multi-racial
world with a lot of white people worrying overly much about mixing it up, and
the reader is reminded of this all the time and by an uncritical narrative
voice. However far in the future this England is, it’s still the ideal social
norm to be white, rather patrician, and more than a bit scared.
Oh wait, how about sexism? From cover to cover, it’s this
novel’s stock in trade, perhaps even more so than homophobia and racism. In the
far-flung future of the Enspun, even when having babies is state-discouraged
and literally illegal if you’ve had one already (even one that died young),
women still don’t seem to have any reason to exist at all other than for reproduction.
There is not anywhere in The Wanting Seed, a novel replete with incidental characters, a single occurrence of a professional woman other than a servant nor any sort of
woman not in the thrall of an undesirable man and his broken-down jalopy of a social
order. Which is just plain bizarre given the rest of this story’s trappings. I
could embrace this more readily as the reader if the author didn’t seem to be
tacitly in alliance with that social order.
Burgess proposed an idea of cyclical social/political
history. It’s indicated in A Clockwork
Orange, but elucidated more fully in The
Wanting Seed. Basically, the organization of human affairs turns again and
again from a “Pelagian” phase to an “Augustinian” phase, with a tumultuous
transitional period in between. The names for the phases refer to the
theologians Pelagius and Augustine. To very crudely summarize it, Pelagius
believed that humans are basically decent and can be prodded toward good works
and ultimate spiritual redemption, free of the Original Sin. Augustine, on the
other hand, subscribed to the concept of Original Sin and pretty much assumed that
humans had no chance at all short of redemption by way of submission to the
Christian faith’s most doctrinaire doctrine. In the novel, Burgess’s protagonist
calls these phases, in Newspeak fashion, the Pelphase and the Gusphase, with a transitional
Interphase. As the story get under way, we gradually learn that the Pelphase is
ending and a violent Interphase is beginning. What’s striking about these
developments is that they appear to have little at all to do with the specific actions
of the government of the time. Indeed, the Prime Minister, in one scene, lazes
about in bed ignoring attempts at soothing from his “catamite,” oblivious to
and helpless against the turning of the historical wheel that is happening
around him. The protagonist explains to his social studies students early in
the novel that the actions of parties and parliaments had eventually come to be
irrelevant over the ages because the affairs of people just somehow naturally
cycle from Pelphase to Interphase to Gusphase, and do so with a consistency
that can be seen again and again in the historical record.
This book is comedic and satirical, but it feels as if its
author’s views on things like race, gender and sexuality have passed almost unfiltered
into it, because the comedy and satire seems never aimed inward at those biases. Though
he indicates a calm and unworried supposition that the transition from Pelphase
(liberal) to Gusphase (conservative) and back again, over and over, is the
normal order of things, his own authorial alliance seems clearly with the Gusphase
and its return to traditional roles for women (breeding stock), non-white races
(scary, undesirable) and gays (outlawed). But why does this bug me more in
Burgess’s book than it would if I’d encountered it in something written a
half-century or more before it (like Lovecraft) or even from someone else from
Burgess’s own time period who didn't delve into spec fic? I think it's because that he chose a couple of times to write science fiction in
an era when he should have been more
progressive. And also because he was in fact a real intellectual, world-traveled,
an internationalist, and should have somehow just been too modern to have been
so reactionary about social change. It’s almost like the reason that I don’t
cut any slack for Orson Scott Card. Though in the case of Card, there is much
less excuse: he is a currently living, producing writer who is also actively
promulgating a crazy-ass view of things for political reasons. It's maybe
because Burgess is a bit too recent, and that’s probably not a rational reason,
but there it is anyway. But it does somehow feel
different when Burgess refers to the weird and frightful attributes of the
various races (the non-English people) than when Lovecraft gives the cat in
“The Rats in the Walls” the name “Nigger Man” or when Card openly calls for the
toppling of the United States government should gay marriage become legal (even
while he continues to milk the gay-ass Enderverse for all its worth).
Since the course of real-world history seems always, in fits
and starts, to be toward greater tolerance, inclusiveness and equality among
various peoples, I think it gets under my skin when science fiction writers are
so aggressively not progressive, and
it bugs me more the closer they are to being my contemporaries. I can deal better
with Lovecraft’s bigotries because his work is most of century in the past and
it was never principally about being
a bigot. I cannot deal with Card
because he is currently working and is actively and deliberately a bigot.
Burgess is somewhere in between. He came of age before the Second World War,
but he saw the world from a position of great privilege after it—even living
for a while in a motorhome on the Continent as a tax exile from Britain because
he was so well-to-do and didn’t like paying his taxes. Because he was such a
good stylist of a prose that can be so much fun to read, I wish that I could
read The Wanting Seed without all these
annoyances that repeatedly made me trip and stall during my hours with this
book.
In fairness, it's true that some of these things can easily be spotted in other British spec fic of the period, particularly in regards to the assumption that the English are the most accomplished race of people ever (a bias that white Americans inherited and still cultivate aggressively even now). For example, in J.G. Ballard's The Wind From Nowhere, we learn that the ever-accelerating titular wind is blowing to the ground all the shoddy cities and hovels of most of the rest of the world at a point where it has only reached the level of a nuisance in stoutly-built London.
But, really?
Extra teeth? A mouth so large, do you see.
But, on the other side of the ledger, The Wanting Seed does fairly pillory war and all the frauds surrounding
it with some very funny comedy and satire. Later in the book, as the world passes
out of the Interphase and into the Gusphase, a professional army is raised, its
function: war. But the world has known no war in generations, England has no
real infrastructure for it, and no particular enemy to fight, (shades of 1984 where it remains unclear whether
Oceania’s perpetual enemies even actually exist). So the War Department—now not
even a department of government but rather a private contractor—creates the illusion
of such, shanghaiing people into the army, duping them with mock campaigns,
noises of battle literally blasted over loudspeakers from record players. It’s
all a scam to create corpses for the processed food industry and to provide a
useful lie to sedate the public. As a character very cannily observes,
perpetual war is perpetually popular so long as it has no impact on day-to-day
civilian life. “Civilians love war,” it is noted, so long as they can continue
to be civilians during it. It sounds very, very familiar and timely.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
The delayed re-launch further delayed!
| Posted On 5:57 PM by Christopher Fletcher | 10 comments |
The zine?
So, for anyone who may still care, here's an update. Yes, I do wish to resurrect M-Brane SF. I love it, it was great, and want to do more. But I haven't decided on the best way to do it yet, and maybe somebody will give me some opinions on it. The old format of monthly issues got to be too much. So I think it needs to be something with either less frequency or less content. Maybe it could be monthly still but only one or two stories? Or a quarterly with a few more? Should it be a free web-posted thing? I will probably still always want to compile print anthos, like I did for the last twelves issues of the old zine, the four print Quarterlies, which were beautiful thanks to the unbelievably imaginative writers who filled them. But the subscription model for the electronic version never did work very well, and was a giant pain in the ass to maintain. In fact, I did not maintain it. At all. There were some readers who paid for a subscription back during the beginning of the first year and ended up getting all three years of it without ever renewing and with me never once bothering them about it. Basically, I hate selling stuff and I hate the fuck outta fundraising. The whole sales/money-finding aspect of editing and writing and publishing never was the thing for me, and I know that clearly now after the experience of M-Brane SF. So, yes, I think the new zine will be freely available online. And I will probably still do print versions of it for fun. And then I need to figure out what I can pay writers, how or if I am going to have some kind of income stream for it in order to fund those payments, and so on.Whatever form the re-launch takes, I think I need to offer up much higher pay for the writers (even if I can't figure out how to fund it, which I probably won't because I will not engage in anything more than the most passive fundraising activities). During the final year of the old zine, its pages were filled with writers who were either already pros or have since become so, and I considered myself lucky to have had my pick of such good content. I am not even sure why that happened, and I am too modest to think that some kind of weird respectability and cachet had evolved around my modest publication, such that certain authors would take my paltry compensation for their work in exchange for an appearance in its pages.
But then that becomes a whole new problem: if the new M-Brane SF pays significantly more than the old one did and reaches a wider audience (due to the new free-everywhere format), then I am going to be faced with an even larger mountain of slush than ever before. Because sf writers who sub to the micro- and small-press pubs naturally work down the list from those who pay something to those who pay a little bit and then to those who pay nothing. Even though it is basically impossible for anyone--even the most established pro--to make any kind of noticeable money from short fiction anymore, the tendency is still naturally to try for at least some. Which leads me to the other thing I don't really want to do, try to recruit uncompensated slush-readers. Because the day I re-open to submissions, I am going to be swamped. That's what slowed me down so much during those last few issues of the old zine: I was buried in "real life" work and buried under heaps of M-Brane subs that I had to cull ruthlessly, some by barely reading their first sentences. No way to live, and not fair to the writers. So, do I ask for help? Not sure right now.
Other stuff:
In other news, there is some new and pending activity in the broader M-Brane Press itself. I am finally, after about three years of promising it, rolling out Mike Griffith's Skinjumper novel. That's hopefully on the February docket, and I'll announce it officially as soon as a couple details are settled. The new, and (alas) final, issue of Fantastique Unfettered is finally about ready to roll out after some delay. But the wait will be worth it. And then there's some rumor and hearsay afloat regarding a possible new antho (something to do with "aether" of all things) and maybe a short fiction collection from a major figure in the M-Brane expanded universe and the vague possibility that I may just go ahead and expose my own nearly-done WIP if I don't get immediate agreement-of-awesomeness from some other pub, we will see (it's not more Justin Bieber fan fiction, btw!). I'm also considering a follow-up to Things We Are Not (the queer antho from 2009), but maybe with some kind of very specific hook or semi-shared reality for all the stories.
Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Crossed Genres close to becoming a PROzine
| Posted On 5:37 PM by Christopher Fletcher | 15 comments |
Below is an update from publisher Bart Leib of Crossed Genres (posted to the Outer Alliance list earlier) about their Kickstarter campaign to raise sufficient funds to elevate their wonderful magazine as a SFWA pro-rates-paying market for fiction. If you can help out at all, please do so. They are offering some nice incentives, and it would be terrific to see CG at pro-paying level. I've always had a lot of liking for that zine and for Bart and Kay personally. Like M-Brane SF, their zine ran on a monthly schedule in electronic and print formats, and also managed some very cool stand-alone book projects, and we had a lot in common as far as the kind of stories we liked, including an openness to and desire for socially progressive material. Our ToCs over our overlapping period of publication included a lot of the same writers, which always made me happy. Also, I was very proud to have one of my own stories published in CG about two years ago, an item that I wrote to fit that issue's theme. I was very happy with the story, but I wasn't sure it was going to find a home elsewhere if it didn't work for CG, so I was thrilled when it was accepted and I showed it off far and wide when it went live not just because it was my story but because it was my story in a zine that I was a big fan of.
Hi all,
I apologize for multiple posts on this. But we're down to the wire and we need a last, big push! After saving Crossed Genres from extinction, we're trying to raise funds so that CG Magazine can pay SFWA-level pro rates for fiction! We've managed to get our Kickstarter up to $11,361 - that's over 80% of our stretch goal! Butwe still need $2,639 more, and we have only 55 hours left!
No matter what, CG Magazine will continue to encourage and publish progressive, inclusive fiction. We want to be able to compensate authors better than token payments for their excellent work!
Also, as a market that always wants to support and help develop new/emerging authors, if we reach our goal we intend to implement a "Spotlight" feature, where each month a new author gets their first pro sale, as well as an interview and hopefully some extra promotion as well.
More info about WHY we're pursuing pro rates is in this post: http://dft.ba/-2NUa
There are some great pledge rewards: you can preorder ebooks of everything we publish through 2013 for just $25, or add all our current titles (7) to that for $45! There are t-shirts and photo prints (including the well-loved cover of our LGBTQ issue by Julie Dillon), signed or OOP books, even one or two short story critiques still available! And ANY pledge of $25 or more gets ebooks of the 2013 year of CG Magazine FREE!
Please support our efforts with a pledge, or help spread the word with a blog post, FaceBook Like, tweet, or sharing via word of mouth. We have until 5pm Eastern time on Friday!
Kickstarter main page: http://kck.st/LdGatJ
Thanks!
-Bart
Hi all,
I apologize for multiple posts on this. But we're down to the wire and we need a last, big push! After saving Crossed Genres from extinction, we're trying to raise funds so that CG Magazine can pay SFWA-level pro rates for fiction! We've managed to get our Kickstarter up to $11,361 - that's over 80% of our stretch goal! Butwe still need $2,639 more, and we have only 55 hours left!
No matter what, CG Magazine will continue to encourage and publish progressive, inclusive fiction. We want to be able to compensate authors better than token payments for their excellent work!
Also, as a market that always wants to support and help develop new/emerging authors, if we reach our goal we intend to implement a "Spotlight" feature, where each month a new author gets their first pro sale, as well as an interview and hopefully some extra promotion as well.
More info about WHY we're pursuing pro rates is in this post: http://dft.ba/-2NUa
There are some great pledge rewards: you can preorder ebooks of everything we publish through 2013 for just $25, or add all our current titles (7) to that for $45! There are t-shirts and photo prints (including the well-loved cover of our LGBTQ issue by Julie Dillon), signed or OOP books, even one or two short story critiques still available! And ANY pledge of $25 or more gets ebooks of the 2013 year of CG Magazine FREE!
Please support our efforts with a pledge, or help spread the word with a blog post, FaceBook Like, tweet, or sharing via word of mouth. We have until 5pm Eastern time on Friday!
Kickstarter main page: http://kck.st/LdGatJ
Thanks!
-Bart
