Category Archives: Madness

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And so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Last month the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America gave a Nebula award to a piece that contained no science worth speaking of. There was very little fiction in it either, if fiction is the narrative of imagination; whatever images might have been in its author’s mind, what made it onto the page was determinedly unimaginative, and less narrated than vaguely gestured at. It put forward no fantasy, unless the fantasy that the world is an uncomplicated place populated chiefly by straw men and contrived examples is a fantasy. What writing was in it was mostly bad.

I suppose that as much as there was any of anywhere in it, there was some America. Maybe that’s something.

Let me make a point up front because if I let it go till later someone is bound to get confused. Yes, I am a Californian who deeply resents Temple Square’s interference in the affairs of my native state. Yes, I am a postmodern materialist who hasn’t been to church in twenty years, could probably count the number of times he has been on his fingers, has never believed in salvation through Christ Jesus except for a period of about twelve hours once back when the Berlin wall was still standing.

But I read Gene Wolfe, and find The Urth of the New Sun deeply moving. I read Connie Willis and rejoice with her characters at the hope of eternity offered in Passage and the hope of a compassionate divine plan offered in To Say Nothing of the Dog, even though in the bright light of day neither is a hope I share. I am in the middle of revising a novel in which an aquatic hive mind and a million-year-old alien warship are willing converts to Islam. Agnostic though I may be, I have no stones to throw here. I would welcome a thoughtful and inventive and well-crafted story of a devout Mormon standing up for his faith and in solidarity with his alien fellow believers against ancient and perhaps implacable powers far from home.

But this is not that story.

I actually find myself hoping that the reason “Leviathan” won the Nebula is that there is a constituency out there of Mormon writer-readers who are desperate for any science fiction that speaks to their experience, even when it has nothing to say beyond validating that their experience exists. That would give me some hope in turn that we might eventually see a good Mormon science fiction, a science fiction worthy of the Mormons I’ve known, who whatever our political and religious differences have been, most of them anyway, good-hearted, level-headed people whose unassuming natures often concealed a wry humor and a wealth of well-observed stories. The young men and not a few young women who carry the Mormon faith out into the world, learn difficult languages, go nearly alone into often-hostile places and make connections with people about as unlike the people they grew up with as it is possible to be — or who just go to small hostile Midwestern towns where the Methodists and Lutherans and Episcopalians and Catholics and Presbyterians can all agree to have a monthly prayer breakfast open to “any Christian denomination,” so long as that definition doesn’t include Mormons, where they happily do yard work for little old ladies about as likely to convert as the Pope — are brave souls doing what they think is right, and my hat is off to them. They deserve a science fiction that reflects the complexity of their lives and the world they’ve seen, and I hope some day they get it.

But this is not that science fiction.

And I don’t think the desire for that science fiction is enough to explain it.

Here is an interesting fact about the Nebula awards: contra what you might find implied on Wikipedia, and regardless of what you might read on the SFWA web site about the history of the award, there is nothing in the Nebula rules that says or even implies that any Nebula award is for the “best” anything. Unlike the Hugo award categories, which are established in section 3.3 of the constitution of the World Science Fiction Society as Best Novel, Best Short Story, and so on, the Nebula categories are merely Novel. Novella. Novelette. Short Story. The nominees in each category are only the otherwise eligible works that receive the most nominations from the membership, the winners the works that receive the most votes. No guidance is given to the members on what to nominate or vote for, or why.

I would like to say this explains a lot. That it explains how a story with no characters, no setting, no invention, no real speculation, very little plot and a bare sliver of theme — a story that nonetheless managed to drag itself out over 8000 words — was given one of the top awards in the field.

But I can’t. This is not the first very bad story to win a major science fiction award* in recent years (though it is, perhaps thanks to recent procedural changes, the worst to win the Nebula for novelette in many a year). It is not even a new type of bad story. It is representative of a type of story that seems to be gaining in popularity as the traditional science fiction community ages at something like a year per year.   Setting barely sketched-in, parasitic on reader memories of better-written worlds. Characters that are really just placeholders, the few who speak either author mouthpieces or caricatures of implausible opposing positions, all of them lacking substance, interiority, consistency, basic humanity.  Gestures toward “daring” that are no more than comfortable recapitulations of contrarian reader prejudices. ‘Ideas’ that were old and tired when John W. Campbell was young. Stories stripped of any complexity that would make them interesting or worthwhile, tables tilted always in the author’s favor.

If this is what we want, then we deserve every drop of the contempt we imagine the world beyond science fiction holds for us. If this is what we want, then there is something wrong with science fiction, as a community. I don’t know just what it is, if there’s more to it than fear of the future and fear of the unknown and fear of old age and fear of death; I don’t know what to do about it, or even if anything should be done about it.

I only know that if this is what science fiction is, then I won’t mourn when it passes.

* I am reminded that “Article of Faith” did not in fact win the Hugo for which it was nominated. On the other hand, “Travels With My Cats” did win in 2005. Though as depressingly derivative, inward-looking and cloyingly sentimental as “Cats” is, it is at least better-written than “Leviathan.”

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I hate Eclipse

I swear to God the Eclipse developers are deliberately sabotaging Subclipse to get people to switch to Subversive. It works, too. After twenty-four hours of trying to get a working Eclipse 3.5.1 + Subclipse + EPIC installation on my laptop, I’ve finally given up.

I suspect this also has something to do with Mylyn, but I can’t prove it.

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No, I do not want fries with that

You would think that a development platform — a free, open-source development platform — that prides itself on its flexibility and modularity would give you a way to install only the pieces you want, or at least uninstall the pieces you don’t want. And up till recently, you would have been right. But now you’re not.

(Seriously, if I can’t get this crap uninstalled, I might actually break down and pay for that IDEA 8 upgrade I’d been planning to skip. If it would take bread out of the mouths of the children of the people who thought this distribution system was a good idea, I’d do it in a heartbeat.)

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GeekGenderFail ’09

(X-posted to Chrononautic Log)

It’s good to know the science fiction community isn’t the only one capable of major fail, I guess. From Martin “Refactoring” Fowler, “Smut On Rails” (emphases added):

A couple of weeks ago there was a Ruby conference in San Francisco called GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference). This conference has grabbed attention due to a talk at which the presenter illustrated a discussion of CouchDB by using sexually suggestive pictures of women. Unsurprisingly the result has been a fair bit of heated, and occasionally offensive, debate.

The main lines of the debate are familiar. Various people, not all women, lay the charge that the images and general tone was offensive. Such material makes women feel degraded and alienated. This kind of presentation would not be tolerated at most professional events.

Defenders of the presenter point out that the slides were humorous and no offense was intended. The Rails community has always had a edginess to it — in part because much of the Rails community is focused on the rejection of enterprise values — both technologically and socially. David Heinemeier Hansson is happy to proclaim himself as an R-rated individual and is happy to consign “professional” to the same pit to which he cast “enterprise”.

I’ll admit to finding much to like in the general edginess of the Rails world. Innovation often involves seeing a generally accepted line and vaulting over it. There’s plenty of precious posturing around the software world that I’m glad to see skewered. Many of us have been delighted at how Rails has cheekily whacked over-complex frameworks, vendor bloatware, and other assorted ills. An important target of this skewer has been the rise of corporate blandness, where a fear of offense has transformed into a fear of any authentic communication and the rise of the anodyne press release. I’m right with the Rails people on this — software is too much fun to shriveled up in dry talks and writing.

So the view of the Rails leadership seems to be this: that the objections to the presentation are yet another attempt to foist empty corporate values on the thriving Rails ecosystem.

Except on this occasion I don’t see the suits as the people doing the complaining. Most of those calling foul are women who have had to struggle with very real sexism in their careers, and men who have seen this and side with those women. They have been fighting the suits since before the Rails leadership were born, and for much higher stakes.

This incident has now grown beyond a conference presentation and a slide-deck on the web. The issue is no longer the presentation, but the reaction of the community to this event. The leaders, particularly David Heinemeier Hansson as the most visible figure, now face an important time in influencing what the future of the community will be.

The reaction of the Rails leadership thus far is to deny the offense. I’ll say now that I don’t believe they are sexist. I believe that they didn’t think the talk would give this much offense — and even that they don’t think the talk should give offense.

At this point there’s an important principle. I can’t choose whether someone is offended by my actions. I can choose whether I care. The nub is that whatever the presenter may think, people were offended — both in the talk and those who saw the slides later. It doesn’t matter whether or not you think the slides were pornographic. The question is does the presenter, and the wider community, care that women feel disturbed, uncomfortable, marginalized and a little scared.

This is the kind of dickhead behavior that makes me hate programmers. It was evident at the last conference I went to (Javapolis ’08) but I sort of put it down to the organizer and chief offender being Belgian. Unfair of me. He was just being an undersocialized alpha geek. Beware the alpha geek; he will fuck your shit up.

There’s a metric crapload of technologies out there, and geeks have got a choice what they want to use, learn, work on, participate in. Funnily enough, Hansson’s handling of this little crisis reduces my interest in making Rails my next technology of choice by about 90%. His defenders would undoubtedly sneer at that, asking what kind of geek picks a technology for “non-technical” reasons. I’d ask: what kind of geek picks a technology that bets its future on alienating the smart half of the human race.

Update: Some follow-ups:

Neal Ford: “Lots of people who aren’t affected by this will say that this is a tempest in teapot, and that the offended parties are over reacting. Insidious misogyny is like lazy racism: people who engage in it hide behind a casual facade of ‘Oh, really, that was offensive?’ Yes, by the way, it was.”

Tim “XML” Bray: “When you offend people but didn’t mean to, you should just fucking well apologize. And do it in an unreserved way, unless you think that offending them is a good thing and will produce a result that you’re in favor of.”

Update again: A very good post from Virginia DeBolt at BlogHer, with further links: “A tipping point for women in tech? Here’s hoping.”