Category: Science Fiction

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This list will functionally a little differently because most of the reading I do is not contemporary. As a result, the following list reflects my top five reads from last year–regardless of their publication date.

As I looked over my Goodreads log of 2016, to be honest, nothing stood out to me like it did in 2015. This was a year of metaphorically eating literary vegetables–I read a number of excellent or acclaimed texts but none of them left me awed or excited. For instance, I finally picked up Salman Rushdie’s infamous postcolonial novel The Satanic Verses and had to force myself to finish it. (It’s a bizarre whirlwind of incoherent magic realism, probably more renowned for the outcry it caused than for the success of the text itself.) I also read a number of interesting, more contemporary novels for a couple of book clubs to which I belong–books that took me out of my comfort zone and challenged me, but didn’t necessarily leave a lasting impression.

Perhaps what did leave a lasting impression in 2016, however, is my newfound love for graphic novels and comic books. In the midst of trying to graduate, move states, and start my Ph.D., comics became a really enjoyable form of escapism into incredibly built and beautifully illustrated worlds. Plus after reading +-200 pages every week, a picture book is a much needed rest for the eyes! So I kick off this list with not one text but a collection of three graphic texts.

1. Watchmen by Alan Moore, Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, and The Sandman by Neil Gaiman

These are three very different narratives, though all have been hailed as some of the best in the genre. I’m still developing my literacy in this realm, but it’s easy to recognize how masterfully the authors and illustrators collaborate. These aren’t simply stories with pictures; in graphic texts the images serve to enhance the text as the text in turn serves the images. The two are in constant conversation requiring an attentive and reflexive eye as one reads. Watchmen is a subversion of the classic superhero narrative. Saga is a tale of illegal interspecies love that threatens the very theoretical framework of its universe. The Sandman is the story of Dream (also known as Morpheus) and his realm of the Dreaming. While Watchmen is one cohesive whole (i.e. a graphic novel), the latter two are serial comics told over multiple volumes.

2. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

After reading The Sparrow last year, several people recommended this sci-fi classic of the 20th century. In A Canticle for Leibowitz, the world has receded into a second Dark Age after nuclear holocaust obliterates much of Earth, but one monastic order in the American Southwest remains committed to preserving a fragmented collection of scientific and philosophical texts from the 20th century. The novel feels a bit like Willa Cather meets the Fall Out video game series–yes, a strange blend! But that is what gives Miller’s world such a distinct feel. Even if you don’t enjoy science fiction, Canticle reads like historical fiction, so it is very accessible.

3. Critical Theory and Science Fiction by Carl Freedman

A surprise! Something that isn’t fiction . . . though it’s about fiction. I typically don’t include theory in my top five books, but I enjoyed Critical Theory and Science Fiction so much I decided to include it. Science fiction has traditionally not been taken seriously within the canon of “literature”. Freedman argues for why science fiction not only should be taken seriously but why it should also be recognized as a form of critical theory for the 20th and 21st century. He writes, “I do believe that both critical theory and science fiction have the potential to play a role in the liberation of humanity from oppression” (xx). This was a fun and fascinating read that further deepened my love for the genre of science fiction.

4) Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith

This is the third book in J.K. Rowling’s venture into detective fiction, the Cormoran Strike series. Each of the books are really enjoyable reads and the characters are complex and interesting, especially Cormoran Strike, the private eye, who is ex-military with a prosthetic leg and suffering from a form of PTSD. Each mystery is both solving a crime and helping him come to terms with his now civilian life. The next one is supposed to be out this year…and I’m awaiting it eagerly.

5) The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

And finally, I end with a book I read for a book club. The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize last year, and the prize was well deserved. The story is told from the perspective of a Communist double-agent who, during the fall of Saigon, escapes to America with his Vietnamese superior. In Los Angeles, he must make a life for himself while both helping the exiled Vietnamese military plot how to take back Vietnam and while sending intel to the Communist party. He is the sympathizer because he constantly occupies multiple worlds, resonating with those that occupy each. Indeed his conflicted identity began at birth as the son of a French priest and a Vietnamese woman.

I don’t know much about the Vietnam War and what followed, so this was an educational read from that perspective. It was also a compelling and nuanced exploration about identity formation, affiliation and representation in the modern era, especially in the wake of European imperialism. Each character must wrestle with not only how they view themselves, alone and in private, but also how to present themselves to others. This is further complicated when the protagonist finds himself advising a Hollywood crew about Vietnamese culture as they shoot a film about the war.

Special Note: I also finished the remainder of the Red Mars trilogy during 2016. Red Mars made my list last year, and both of its sequels Green Mars and Blue Mars were equally satisfying. 

See my Goodreads Year in Books here.

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This is a post about the science fiction world for people who don’t read science fiction. There’s an interesting culture battle going on within this community that I have found myself explaining to a number of friends the past few weeks, so I decided why not write a post that does just that. Thus, this post falls into the realm of informative more so than opinion piece; however, my opinion about the situation will be quite clear throughout. If you are part of the sci-fi world and have a different opinion or information to add, please jump into the conversation!

So first things first, in the science fiction world there are a number of big awards but the two biggest would be the Hugo Awards and the Nebula Awards. While the Nebula Awards are voted on and bestowed by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), the Hugo Awards are nominated and voted on by science fiction fans. In that sense, the Hugos are more like People’s Choice Awards. As long as you pay your membership fee to the World Science Fiction Society, you can participate in the “democratic” process. Let the chaos ensue.

This is slightly complicated, so stick with me.
In 2013, a writer named Larry Correia wrote a blog post asking his readers to band together and nominate his pulp fiction novel Monster Hunter Legion. His rationale was grounded in the conviction that, in the last decade, the contemporary science fiction literary world has been overrun by politically driven writers and critics, who only care about pushing out liberal message-fiction–not stories that are actually well-written and engaging.
Here’s an excerpt from that blog post:

(just imagine with me… Should I vote for the heavy handed message fic about the dangers of fracking and global warming and dying polar bears and robot rape as a bad feminist analogy with a villain who is a thinly veiled Dick Cheney? Or should I vote for the LAS VEGAS EXPLOSION SHOOTING EVERYTHING DRAGON HELICOPTER CHASE ORC SACRIFICING CHICKENS BOOK!?! Grglglgggggsllll………BOOM!)Larry Correia

This (unsuccessful) campaign was titled Sad Puppies. In an interview with Wired Magazine, Correia told writer Holly Andres that “he came up with the name after seeing an SPCA ad featuring forlorn canines staring into the camera, with singer Sarah McLachlan. ‘We did a joke based on that: That the leading cause of puppy-related sadness was boring message-fic winning awards,’ he said, laughing.” This small start evolved into what is now a much larger voter bloc/community of like-minded sci-fi & fantasy writers and fans, who publish a slate of recommended nominations every year. Though the community insists “The List” is not a slate but rather a collection of recommendations (see this post from 2016), “The List” is still a politically driven resistance attempting to flood the nomination pool with what the Sad Puppies deem as non-message fiction. Tasha Robinson for NPR described it this way: “A small Gamergate-aligned coalition who feel the Hugos, the annual science-fiction and fantasy awards voted on by people with WorldCon memberships, are becoming too liberal, leftist and inclusive. The coalition argues that conservative, straight, white (and mostly male) writers are being shut out by ‘affirmative action’ voting.”

Last year, this movement grabbed larger media attention when it (along with a more radical and overtly racist offshoot called the Rabid Puppies) managed to dominate the finalist ballots for the 2015 Hugo Awards. By this, I mean that many categories only had Sad Puppy or Rabid Puppy options from which to choose. Quite a number of nominees not associated with either organization asked to be removed from the official ballots, though the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies refused to remove those names from their own online slates. It put those writers in an awkward position because they found themselves not knowing whether their work had been nominated for its merit, or because of the publicizing efforts of these right-wing groups–ironically perpetuating the very type of situation that the Sad Puppies are supposedly trying to eradicate.

At the annual WorldCon, everyone in the larger sci-fi/fantasy community awaited the final results with bated breath–would the Sad Puppies succeed in completing taking over?

Nope. See there is this choice on every ballot called “No Award,” which prior to 2015 had rarely been used. This year, however, the overwhelming majority of voters made known their opinion about the Sad Puppies by selecting this option. In the end, the only Sad Puppy nomination to win an award was Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. But though last year’s Sad Puppy campaign did not seem very successful, because it dominated the nominations, it potentially shut out other more diverse voices from competing.

Which brings us to this year. Once again, the Sad Puppies have released their list of recommendations, many of which were nominated–though this year they drew from a wider and more generally popular set of options. On their website, they wrote: 

We want to make the Hugos bigger and more representative of fandom as a whole, to bring people in rather than give them an asterisk that looks kind of wrong (especially beside the rocket) to try to drive the “interlopers” out. SF is a big tent: we don’t want to kick out anyone, even writers of bad message fiction that makes puppies sad.Sad Puppies IV

So, why do I care about this culture battle?
I, for one, do not appreciate thinly veiled fictional propaganda, but I find the Sad Puppies’ premise to be ill-informed, founded on the same sort of fear narratives that have emerged from the Gamergate controversy, which targeted females in the video game industry and community. Science fiction and fantasy, as with all fiction, non-fiction and art in general, is fundamentally shaped by the political/social/religious perspectives of the creator. The best science fiction has always been driven by an author’s passionate exploration of some particularly loaded philosophical idea, whether that perspective would be considered left-wing or right-wing. Some of science fiction’s most celebrated authors from the 20th century are known for their politically charged but incredibly constructed narratives, for instance, Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, which explores gender, any of Octavia Butler’s novels, which address issues of race, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars series, which tackles a number of environmentally driven questions. In fact, as I mentally flip through a wide variety of different authors and books, I can’t think of one title that wasn’t philosophically or politically loaded in some fashion. That’s the very reason I love this genre; it’s an amazing space in which to speculate about or posit one’s ideas about society and culture in a creative fashion.

Popular science fiction writer, Brandon Sanderson, wrote a really great response to why he proactively asked to be removed from any Puppy slate. It’s semi-lengthy, so I will refrain from posting it here, but if you are intrigued by this political drama, I highly recommend wandering over to his piece and reading what he wrote: Brandon Sanderson on the Hugo Awards 2016.

I’ve also included links to the Puppy websites and some of the news articles I referenced, so you can expand your reading on the topic:

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2016 is already slipping through our fingers quickly. This weekend marks the Academy Award Ceremony, as well as the end of leap year February. I just barely got through screening the Big Five categories (Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay), finishing last night with The Danish Girl. Whew, I think this might be the first year that I have actually pulled it off–all 17 different films if I counted right. 

Image courtesy of ABC and CC 2.0 license.
Image courtesy of ABC and CC 2.0 license.

A few people have asked me why I dedicate so much time each year trying to watch as many films from the Big Five ballot as possible. I started this practice back in my junior year of undergraduate, inspired by my friend Aaron Smith (@OGNetflix), who took this season as an opportunity to bond with friends and family. He’d screen each nominated film with a different group or individual, using the time to have thoughtful conversations about cinema, while simultaneously catching up on his friends’ lives. Since I started copying Aaron, I now can’t wait for the months of December-February because of how many great memories I have made with people while going to see films. Last year, I remember seeing Birdman on a double date; I came out being the only person underwhelmed by the film but it made for a feisty and memorable conversation afterwards in Starbucks. This year, I got to see Brooklyn at a LACMA & Film Independent advance screening with a dear friend. We both laughed and cried a lot through the film, and now the film is attached indelibly in my mind with our friendship, that evening, and the many subsequent conversations we’ve had about how we were touched by that story.

But there is another reason why I painstakingly try to check each film off my list: it’s a matter of discipline in my content consumption. With today’s algorithms on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Netflix, we have become increasingly more accustomed to only seeing the content that we want to see and the content that aligns with our personal interests and ideologies. We actually have to go out-of-the-way to engage with material that challenges us or makes us feel uncomfortable. However, if you commit to follow a list generated by a third-party organization like the Academy Awards, you are more likely to encounter content that falls outside of your normal preferences–content that you may find you actually really enjoy or appreciate. That’s how, a couple of years ago, my husband and I ended up bawling our eyes out in the car after seeing the utterly incredible French film Amour (which, by the way, should have received much greater recognition).

I use this same practice with a variety of content, but with books in particular. I have belonged to several book clubs over the years, both with local friends and on Goodreads, and I’ve been steadily working through the Pulitzer, Nebula, and Hugo Award winners when I can. Both those lists and those communities have introduced me to some of my favorite authors and pieces of literature, such as American Gods by Neil Gaiman and Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Plus it takes some of the mental effort out of having to choose your next film or book! Just go with whatever’s next on the list.

So next year, give it a try with the Oscars and tell me what the experience is like for you. Or if you are more into reading, you can check out this year’s Nebula nominees that were announced six days ago. I haven’t read any of them, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on the choices.

Happy listing!

Featured image courtesy of LincolnBlues, distributed by permission of CC 2.0 license.

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