Doing my WHMIS training for my new job

Did you know you're not supposed to apply bleach directly to the eyes? News to me.

Vampiric Musings

Here, Charlie Stross wonders how vampires became sexy. Vampires are generally portrayed as parasites - non-fatal repeat predators who often prey on the same host over and over again - and parasites as a group are probably the least-sexy animals imaginable.

Charlie and a lot of his commenters make the obvious points about parasitic aristocrats, but aristocrats were on their way out when the original sexy vampires started to appear. And on closer examination, the idea that sexy vampires were a metaphor for aristocrats doesn't really hold up due to one simple fact: When people who lived in aristocratic societies wanted to complain about the aristocrats, they told stories about monster-aristocrats. Cruel nobles who live in castles filled with riches, butcher-knights who come home from the Crusades twisted and vicious, malignant bishops misusing their status to prey on beautiful youth...

Sexy vampires aren't aristocrats, they're disease-vectors. And they started showing up in stories when syphilis had mutated, taming itself, going from a disease that ate bone to a slow insidious killer that took years to do its work. The idea of sex and seduction as a pathway for a slow killer is fairly obvious.

Sexy vampires aren't aristocrats, they're well-preserved corpses. And they started showing up in stories after embalming became a major part of the funeral process. Between the vast size of the British Empire and the long distances between home and battlefield in the US Civil War, there was a huge demand for bringing the dead home in some sort of recognisable condition. He looks so lifelike...

Sexy vampires aren't aristocrats, except in the sense that sex and seduction are supposed to be glamorous and the fallen dead when viewed from a safe distance carry a sort of glamour as well. The easiest way to bring those glamours into one package and make it beautiful is to wrap it in wealth and tie it with the bow of a highborn name.

Sexy vampires aren't aristocrats, they're lazy writing.

Signal Boost: An Analysis of Theodore Beale and his Supporters

A few decades ago, if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds. If you saw a barbarian swinging an axe? You were going to get a rousing fantasy epic with broad-chested heroes who slay monsters, and run off with beautiful women. Battle-armored interstellar jump troops shooting up alien invaders? Yup. A gritty military SF war story, where the humans defeat the odds and save the Earth. And so on, and so forth.  

These days, you can’t be sure.  

The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings? 

There’s a sword-swinger on the cover, but is it really about knights battling dragons? Or are the dragons suddenly the good guys, and the sword-swingers are the oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land? 

A planet, framed by a galactic backdrop. Could it be an actual bona fide space opera? Heroes and princesses and laser blasters? No, wait. It’s about sexism and the oppression of women. 

Finally, a book with a painting of a person wearing a mechanized suit of armor! Holding a rifle! War story ahoy! Nope, wait. It’s actually about gay and transgender issues. 

Or it could be about the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy. 

Do you see what I am trying to say here?

There are several things worth noting here. First and most obvious is the spectacle of a grown man complaining about how he just can’t judge a book by its cover anymore. Second, and hardly something that Torgersen has tried to hide, is the basic political aspect to this complaint. Observe the list of things that Torgersen does not want in his science fiction: racial prejudice and exploitation, sexism and the oppression of women, gay and transgender issues, the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy. 

Obviously, as histories of science fiction literature go, this is not exactly the most accurate; it is hardly as though science fiction of the 1960s-80s (the period Torgersen highlights as the sort of authentic science fiction that doesn’t get Hugo nominations anymore) was not largely about these exact issues. A perusal of the Hugo winners over those decades will reveal wins for Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land , a book about sexual freedom and prejudice; for Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness , an early and major work of feminist science fiction; Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves , which features an alien race with three genders, all of which must participate in sexual reproduction; two wins for Octavia Butler, whose work is massively focused on race and gender issues… we could continue like this for a long time. The idea that science fiction, in the sense that the Hugo Awards have ever cared about it, is an apolitical genre of thrilling adventure fiction is simply not supported by any sort of historical reality. 

And, of course, there’s the second obvious point to make, which is that it’s not the 1980s, and hasn’t been for more than a quarter-century now. The suggestion that any genre ought resist evolution and development over the course of twenty-five years is a strange one; to make the claim about a genre ostensibly about the future is even stranger. Simply put, ideas get old and played out, and art requires people to come up with new ones to maintain a sense of freshness. This, in particular is a point we will return to later. 

Not Dead, Just Resting

Training for my new job is burning up a ridiculous amount of my time. Here's something to keep you all entertained until my next round of incoherent mutterings essay about the history of science fiction.

And now for something completely different...

This looks interesting

"Singularity&Co. saves vintage books from the paper on which they're printed by making sure they're preserved digitally for future generations."

I haven't bought anything from them yet, but all the editions in their store look professionally done. I'm extremely happy to see people working to preserve the history of science fiction and make it available to new audiences.

More on this year's Hugo awards

Over at File 770, Mike Glyer breaks down the Sad/Rabid Puppies slates and compares which one was more effective at forcing names onto the awards list.

On a related note, Abigail Nussbaum of Asking the Wrong Questions has this to say about the Hugo nominees:

To begin with, I'd like to discourage people from referring to the bloc-voting campaign with the moniker Sad Puppies.  Larry Correia chose that name when he started encouraging his fans to "take back" the Hugos three years ago, and Brad Torgesen adopted it for his suggested slate of nominees when he took over the project this year.  In the latter case, there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to distance the Sad Puppies from the toxicity of bigots like Vox Day (who was not on Torgesen's ballot) and to present a kinder, gentler face of right-wing bloc-voting.  Day's response to this was to post his own suggested slate, the Rabid Puppies ballot, including himself in several categories.  As this analysis by Mike Glyer shows, it was Day's choices that prevailed, with almost all Puppy nominees appearing on both ballots or on Day's alone.  Our current slate of Hugo nominees are not a Sad Puppy ballot; they're a Vox Day ballot.  They represent the views of a racist, misogynistic, homophobic troll, whose supporters solicited the help of GamerGate to achieve their goals.  Using Sad Puppies as a blanket term allows the people who helped make this happen pretend that it comes down to nothing more than a political disagreement between equally valid stances (as Torgesen has been doing in the Making Light thread) instead of what it actually is, a hate campaign.