Sense8 says that we are all connected, though our bond is not as strong as that of the sensates. We are all humans inside, but our differences are to be celebrated and embraced; they should bring us closer together rather than tear us apart. In a way, sensating is like an SF version of Will Graham’s hyperempathy, as it allows the characters to literally feel what others are feeling. Their pain, their joy, their heartbreak, their aggression, their arousal, everything. Sensating is also an SF metaphor for social media, which similarly connects people around the world by allowing them to broadcast their emotions and ask for advice, though unfortunately I can’t drive your car from another continent with my Twitter account.
Sense8 is not without its flaws, of course. Despite its impressively diverse cast, the story does seem to favor the white characters as the season progresses, and in a show this queer, it’s disappointing that the climax centers on a heterosexual romance. Is this another case of using a familiar, safe template to give the audience what it is used to as a Trojan horse for all the queer content? Even so, this is a show that starts out with two lesbians using a rainbow prosthetic cock; we can handle far more queerness by the end. And more attention paid to the characters of color. The show mostly forgets that Kala is a scientist who could be helping the sensates out with her science knowledge until the finale, and Capheus (whose actor is sadly being replaced), precious cinnamon roll though he is, feels the most sidelined. As I mentioned earlier, the slow pacing may turn some viewers off, as may the sometimes-clunky dialogue.
But I can overlook all of these flaws because I love these characters so much. In preparation for this review, I read recaps of all the episodes, and I teared up just thinking about the characters because I’d grown so attached them. I rewatched the finale and teared up at a scene of seven sensates appearing in one sensate’s time of distress because they had bonded that strongly. This show is a celebration of life and humanity as an interconnected beautiful experience where coming together to find commonality and connection makes us stronger, and it is what we need right now. We need more character-focused science fiction with this level of diversity that allows so many people to see themselves as superheroes, which is essentially what the sensates are. The first season is their origin story, and I’m so excited to see where they’ll go next.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sunil Patel is a Bay Area fiction writer and playwright who has written about everything from ghostly cows to talking beer. His plays have been performed at San Francisco Theater Pub and San Francisco Olympians Festival, and his fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fireside Magazine, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Flash Fiction Online, The Book Smugglers, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Plus he is Assistant Editor of Mothership Zeta. His favorite things to consume include nachos, milkshakes, and narrative. Find out more at ghostwritingcow.com, where you can watch his plays, or follow him @ghostwritingcow. His Twitter has been described as “engaging,” “exclamatory,” and “crispy, crunchy, peanut buttery.”
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Book Reviews: September 2016
Amal ElMohtar | 1116 words
Comics!
The summer’s springs are winding down, though you wouldn’t know it from the weather: at time and place of writing heat warnings are in effect, presaging thunderstorms and the roulette-spin of whether or not they’ll break the humidity. In this season of storms I wanted to look at a tempestuous trio of comics ranging from sword and sorcery to space opera to quirky slice of life.
Monstress Volume 1: Awakening
Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda
Trade paperback
Image Comics
ISBN 978-1632157096
July 2016
192 pages
I hardly ever buy comics in single issues, preferring to wait for the trade volumes, but Monstress is so stunningly beautiful that I had to have every piece of story the moment it came out. Sana Takeda’s art is a breath-thieving marriage of Yoshitaka Amano and Sulamith Wülfing, all striking lines and soft colours in an art-deco-inspired wonderland of horrors, gorgeously matched to Marjorie Liu’s spare, understated, and often wryly funny writing.
There’s a war on between the Arcanics and the Cumaean Order—between those whose bodies contain magic and those whose science-sorcery is fuelled by it. Maika Halfwolf is an Arcanic with a secret, one that threatens to destroy her: in order to unravel its hold on her she needs to infiltrate a Cumaean stronghold and confront dimly remembered monsters from her past. Maika soon finds it’s secrets all the way down, and with the reluctant help of a fox-child and a two-tailed, poet-quoting cat, she begins piecing together truths from the shadows of her history.
It’s almost unbearable how beautifully Takeda draws horrors. The Cumaea literally lop limbs from still-living Arcanic slaves to make their lilium; Maika Halfwolf has a destructive appetite she can barely control. Indeed, the whole first issue is variations on the theme of people eating or being eaten: Maika recalls, “When we were slaves and starving, we once ate the contents of a dead boy’s stomach. We said it wasn’t like eating the boy,” before tucking into a feast of freshly slaughtered wild beasts. Neither Liu nor Takeda shy from depicting the vicious brutality of soldiers at war—but the art is so intricate, the expressions so moving, that it becomes impossible to look away.
I was so awe-struck by the visceral unity of beauty and violence that it took me a full two issues before I realised almost all the characters are women. The soldiers, the Cumaea, the chief Arcanic protagonists—all of them are women, tearing each other apart, being magnificent and monstrous together. I can’t easily articulate the effect this has had on me, except that it is desperately welcome and makes me want to stand and applaud. Monstress is far and away the best new comics series I’ve read this year, and an astonishing accomplishment.
Saga volume 6
Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
Trade paperback
Image Comics
ISBN 9781632157119
June 2016
152 pages
Saga is a widely acclaimed, multiple-award-sweeping series, and if you aren’t already reading it I don’t even know what to tell you. Go read it! Star-crossed lovers crossing the stars in a spaceship of living wood, trying to protect their baby! Weird sex planets! Lying cats! Mercenaries whose status is indicated by a definite article! It’s brilliant, moving, harrowing, hilarious, and the best space opera I’ve seen in comics since The Ballad of Halo Jones.
That said, I was getting a little worried about it; after a solid run of each volume surpassing the last, volume 5 made me miserable, and left me feeling as if I’d fundamentally misunderstood its deeper project. But volume 6 blew me away so thoroughly that I felt it deserved a review, even this far into the series.
Alana and Marko were soldiers on opposite sides of a generations-old war between a planet, Landfall, and its moon, Wreath, now mostly being fought by proxy on planets ever farther away from the source of the conflict. They fell in love, had a child, and are on the run from the powers that be, trying to keep their daughter, Hazel—a child born with wings and horns, characteristics of both her parents’ peoples—secret and safe. They’re hunted by princes, mercenaries, tabloid journalists, and intriguing agents of both Landfall and Wreath, all with their own agendas. By volume 6, Alana and Marko have lost track of Hazel but have reunited with each other, and are trying to get their family back together one daring information heist at a time. Meantime Hazel is a few years older, held prisoner with her grandmother on a Landfall-run re-education facility, keeping her wings bound and hidden.
What makes this volume especially interesting to me is the fact that Hazel—who up until now has been narrating the series from an undisclosed future point in time—is old enough to have a voice and agency as an onscreen character. She’s no longer only a wry scrawl of words appearing almost as whimsical footnotes to events—she’s present, active, and interacts with th
e narration in interesting ways. That alone would have been enough to renew my love for the whole, but the added nuance is combined with perfect heart-in-mouth pacing, wonderful twists and turns, and some amazing shifts in character design from Fiona Staples. I can’t wait for the next one.
Giant Days Volume 1
John Allison and Lissa Treiman
Trade Paperback
ISBN 978-1-60886-789-9
June 2016
128 pages
Susan, Esther, and Daisy are in their first year of university, have known each other for three weeks, and are the best of friends. Together they provoke drama, fight campus sexism, and enjoy autonomous sensory meridian responses in between bouts of campus illness and recreating the early ’90s.
It’s delicious to read a book so thoroughly dedicated to enjoying friendship. In among the hyperbolic shenanigans (always with a core grain of truth about the university experience) is real, lovely affection between three very different women supporting each other against whatever the world might bring. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny: John Allison and Lissa Treiman have between them struck the sharpest comic timing I’ve read in a while, and every single character, hero or villain, is a delight.
Profoundly charming, enormously wacky and completely hilarious, Giant Days is a rare treat. I didn’t want it to end.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amal ElMohtar is the Nebula-nominated author of The Honey Month, a collection of poems and very short fiction written to the taste of 28 different kinds of honey. Her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times and the Richard Jefferies Prize once, and her story “The Truth About Owls” is presently a Locus Award finalist. Her fiction has most recently appeared in Uncanny magazine and is forthcoming in The Bestiary, edited by Ann VanderMeer. She writes reviews for NPR, Lightspeed, and Tor.com, narrates fiction and poetry for Uncanny’s podcast, edits Goblin Fruit, and has occasionally been known to deadlift genre professionals. She is also, with Scott Lynch, Liz M. Myles and Michael Damien Thomas, part of Down and Safe, a Blake’s 7 podcast. She divides her time and heart between Ottawa and Glasgow. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com or on Twitter @tithenai.
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Interview: Kameron Hurley
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy | 9211 words
Kameron Hurley is the author of such novels as God’s War and The Mirror Empire, and her essay on the history of women in conflict “We Have Always Fought” was the first blog post to be nominated for and win a Hugo award. That essay and many others are included in Kameron’s new book The Geek Feminist Revolution.
This interview first appeared in June 2016 on Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, which is hosted by David Barr Kirtley and produced by John Joseph Adams. Visit geeksguideshow.com to listen to the interview or other episodes.
• • • •
Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
First of all, just tell us about how you discovered Joanna Russ.
That’s a very good question. I went to the Clarion West writing workshop in the year 2000, so a while ago now, but that was when I started exploring some old-school science fiction because I was getting a lot of pushback. All the guys would tell you, “You kids these days, you don’t read the good stuff.” So, I started reading lots of Alfred Bester, and Heinlein, and all those folks. I stumbled across Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Vonda McIntyre, all of those New Wave feminist science fiction writers.
I’m trying to remember the first one I read. I don’t remember which one it was. It might have been We Who Are About To …. I own everything that she’s ever written, which was not a lot, unfortunately. She was kind of taken out of the game early due to health issues. But that was my introduction, just me trying to get a better depth and breadth in the field of science fiction.
What was it about her writing that made such an impression on you?
Le Guin is a fabulous writer. She is absolutely wonderful, but she was not as radical as Russ. Joanna Russ was like screw everything, burn it all down, rage against the machine. It took me a long time to read The Female Man because it’s so dense and out there. The second time I tried to read it, I finally got it. What she’s doing there is so incredibly radical. It really does burn it all down.
Le Guin is like, “Hey, let’s all get along, and we’ll change things from the inside.” And Russ was like, “This whole system is screwed. We’re all screwed. Kill them all.” And I admired that, you know? I thought that was cool. I just really loved her attitude toward change, which sounds terrible, but I think sometimes you need to have anger to drive you, because honestly, you get worn down very easily with all of the different things that come at you. I mean, this entire system is in place, made to get you to give up and to accept the status quo. I think she used her anger a lot to get her through that, and to get her through that depression that living in this kind of oppression can give to people.
You talk in the book about how when she died in 2011, you kind of looked around and said, “Hmm, who’s going to pick up this mantle?”
It was interesting. I think it was the last public interview that she did, Sam Delany interviewed her over the phone at WisCon, and she answered a few questions and things like that. Then it was a few years later that she passed away. You always look back to who came before you, and she was just such a great voice, even though she hadn’t written anything substantial since the late ’90s. You can’t just go, “Well, that generation is going to handle it, and it’ll be fine, and they’re still all kicking.” There’s sort of a thing where you go, “Is that us?”
I look around at my peers, the folks that I considered the newbies in the field when I first came up, and now I look ahead at them, and I’m like, “Wow, they’re The Man. They’re the establishment.” Right? Like, Scalzi was the scrappy little internet dude, and now he’s kind like, “Oh, he’s Science Fiction.” You just look at how that mantle gets passed down to people. You can wait for everybody to give it to you, or you can seize it yourself and say, “You know what? These are things that need to be said, and we can keep sharing these same sorts of messages to new audiences in different ways.”
I like this, you say in the book, “I’ve been screaming on the internet for ten years. What’s forty more?”
[Laughter] In whatever form the internet will have, exactly, yeah.
What is the system that needs to be burned down? What are some of the issues that really need to be addressed when it comes to women writing fantasy and science fiction?
I think it’s the same as women of all races, men of color, in any kind of industry. We live within a society that has stratified and codified where people live and how people interact. One of the things, it’s in the book, but I grew up in a very white town, and I thought, “Well, that’s just how it is. It’s just very white.”
That was made that way on purpose. There were no black people allowed in Oregon, Washington, or California for years and years. It was illegal for them to live there. They would be kicked out and burned out. They had people in towns where literally they would go into towns sometimes and they would burn people out. We look at these kind of structures and systems and go, “Well, that was all a long time ago. We’re so much better than that. Blah, blah, blah.” But, we’re living with the historical memory of that and the historical fallout from that.
So we have to then negotiate our entire lives and build new lives based on all that horror that has come before us. That’s really difficult to do. It’s very easy to perpetuate this myth that, well, these things have always been this way. Men have always written eighty percent of science fiction, and women, there’s occasionally an Ursula Le Guin. When in fact, you look at it, and it’s almost at parity. Right now we’re about at parity as far as authors go, but you wouldn’t see that if you look at reviews, if you look at coverage, if you look at all those sorts of things. You run the numbers, and you go, “Well, how do we fix all of that?” The answer i
s that you have to completely reimagine all of the things that you’ve been told to be true. That’s really hard. It’s really hard to be like, “Wow, all of those things I was told were a lie.”
You say, “I know women who wrote hard SF or epic fantasy who threw in the towel or went to genres like urban fantasy or romance that were far more welcoming to women authors.” When you say it’s hard for women in hard SF or epic fantasy, what exactly are the challenges in those particular genres?
Well, you go to a convention. For years and years, people call them the “whisper networks,” but it’s not. Basically, it’s just like, “Oh, you have a panel with such-and-such a guy who is an editor or an agent, and hey, just so you know, they’re a creeper, and they’re totally going to hit on you or they’re going to say something inappropriate, or they’re going to try to do something awful.” There’s a story from one writer I know, it was her first convention that she went to, and a very established science fiction writer—she’s a little baby writer, she just had her first book come out, and she’s volunteering in the green room—and he goes, “What do you write?” And she said what she wrote, and it was not hard SF, it was a different genre, and he looked at her, and goes, “You are worth less than the shit on my shoe.” She was like, “Okay, thanks! Welcome to science fiction.” We see that all the time, right? We have classic harassers that we’ve been trying to get rid of for years in the field, and of course people keep going, “Oh, it’s not a big deal. It’s dah dah dah.”
Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016 Page 22