Essays: Invisible 2

Invisible 2: Personal Essays about Representation in Science Fiction, edited by Jim C. Hines, is the second collection of essays about the visibility - and invisibility - of people who are not straight, white, cis, nominally Christian, able-bodied, and most likely male in speculative fiction.

I haven't read the first Invisible collection, but I am certainly going looking for it now that I've read the second.

These are essays about never finding someone like yourself in the genre that you love, or only finding yourself rarely, usually as a side-kick or bit player, or maybe a villain, but almost never a real hero. Or finding only caricatures of people like you, stereotypical images that are almost as bad as never seeing yourself at all. And some stories about what it's like to find somebody like you, a fully realised character, a hero.

As Aliette de Bodard writes in her Introduction,

The trouble with stories, of course, is that they don’t exist in a vacuum. They are shaped, too, by the culture in which they were born—and worse than that, by the dominant culture. Stories tell you what to value, and what not to value—they teach you, over and over, that some people get to be heroes and some don’t. That some behaviours like violence are acceptable and heroic; others (like mothers sacrificing themselves to the bone year after year to raise their children) aren’t even worth a mention.

And stories, in the end, shape that dominant culture. Telling the same story that we ourselves have been told, over and over, erases all the others. It tells some people—those outside the dominant cultural paradigm—that they don't deserve to have stories told about them. That people like them never get their own books or their own stories; that they are not worth writing about; which a lesson no-one should have to learn.

These essays remind us of all the people who are all too often invisible in speculative fiction, the people we need to see if we are to have stories that reflect the breadth and depth of the human condition. The people represented - and representing - in this volume include people of colour - not just the generic Latin@, Asian, Black, Indigenous groupings, but Vietnamese and Puerto Rican and Japanese and Cherokee and other members of specific cultures who want to be seen for themselves, not as part of some general non-white conglomerate.

The people writing these essays are queer, and trans, and genderfluid, and asexual, and survivors of abuse rather than victims, and think that they deserve to have their stories told so that others, especially young people growing up without any one who shares their experiences around them, will know they have a right to exist, that they are not alone.

They are Jewish, and pagan, they are immigrants, they are older women, they are disabled and non-neurotypical, they are fat, they are people with life histories and experiences that lie outside the straight cis able-bodied white male paradigm that it so often seems our understanding of humanity is based on.

Some of them are even examples of that paradigm, talking about how they have come to treasure the stories that are not about them. And it's all good reading.

Short Fiction from 1940

Because I am nominating for the 2016 Hugos, and there will be Retro Hugos for 1941 (meaning, material published in 1940), I have been doing some reading of short fiction from 1940. A lot of it has been re-reading of things I remember with some fondness - and I shan't be reviewing those, too much work, but there's been a few things I hadn't read before and was able to find here and there at little cost, so here's my thoughts on those.


"Song in a Minor Key," C. L. Moore

A very short but poignant piece in which one of Moore's great characters, Northwest Smith, reflects on his past... And moves on.


"The Stellar Legion," Leigh Brackett

One of many planetary romance stories Brackett wrote, this one is about treachery, honour and redemption in a Venusian version of the French Foreign Legion. The prose is delicious.


"Farewell to the Master," Harry Bates

Though it tells a rather different story, this novelette was the inspiration for the classic film The Day the Earth Stood Still. Here, Klaatu is killed by a madman the minute he leaves the ship, and he is interred in a mausoleum, while his robot companion Gnut is placed on display in a museum erected near the ship. The narrator, a daring young reporter, notices that despite being apparently immobile, Gnut has been changing position, and hides in the museum overnight to observe. Once he discovers what Gnut has been doing, he tries to help - and learns more than he wanted to about civilisation that Klaatu and Gnut are from.


"Fruit of Knowledge," C. L. Moore

A vibrant and psychologically complex retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden, of Adam and Lilith and Lucifer and Eve.


"Martian Quest," Leigh Brackett

A dispirited young man flees failure and a difficult family background to become a settler on Mars, but even this choice seems doomed when deadly Martian lizards threaten to overrun the settlement areas. An exploration of courage and redemption.


"It," Theodore Sturgeon

An intelligence somehow embedded in a collection of mould and dirt and ancient bones creates terror in a rural community. Solid horror story told from multiple viewpoints, including that of the 'monster.'

Andy Weir: The Martian

Andy Weir's The Martian is one hundred percent non-stop competence porn. Which is exactly what a story like this has to be, because survival under the circumstances areonaut Mark Watney faces is the ultimate scenario for the techie high-stress mantra - "do the next thing. And the next thing. And the next thing. Til you survive or die."

If you've been living under a rock, here's the set-up. Watney is part of a six-person mission to Mars. When a serious high-wind sandstorm threatens to destroy the MAV - the craft that will take the crew back to their ship in orbit - they are ordered to abort the mission. Watney is struck, wounded,and knocked unconscious by flying debris; his suit's biotelemetry circuits is damaged, and when the rest of the crew try to find him, they can't - and the feedback from the suit makes it appear that he's dead. They continue with the abort, leaving Watney behind, unaware that he is alive.

Fortunately for Watney, there is a habitat and supplies and life support equipment left behind with him, but unless he can communicate with Earth and let them know he's alive, there's not enough to last him until either the next planned Mars mission or some kind of rescue mission can be organised. So he has problems to solve, lots of them.

What makes it a great story rather than a Martian survival tech manual is Weir's gift of characterisation. Watney becomes real in short order. He has a voice, a sense of humour, a humanity. Most of the story is told through his logs, and these cleverly avoid infodumping by having Watney work out the problems as he goes along, talking the reader through his own logic as he solves problem after problem, sometimes screwing up but never quite fatally, sometimes being foiled by unexpected chance occurrences, but never so badly that he and the experts back on Earth can't figure out something to keep him alive.

While we see much less of his fellow crew members and of the mission specialists and administrators back on Earth, we see enough to get a sense for them as people too. And to watch them as they do the same thing Watney does - try the next thing, and the next, and the next....

A fast paced read, but one that pulls you into the action and makes you care.