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Between work friends, Reddit, and the Escape Pod flash (more on that to come), I'm having a lot more discussions about speculative fic so I want to write up some of them in a more permanent format. Dreamwidth is good for pretentious-looking babbling, but beware that I am actually way too shallow and uncool for the cool kids. TL;DR.
"If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love" is a flash-fiction piece from 2013 that won a Nebula Award (and got nominated for a Hugo) in the short fiction format. Even though it's short, I would argue it sort of qualifies as a "story within a story" format, because there's a frame story and then the doubly-fictional world imagined by the narrator as a what-if. In the internal story, the narrator imagines her lover as a T-Rex, who eats goats and performs love songs on Broadway. When the T-Rex eventually marries another (cloned) dinosaur, the narrator is so overcome by emotion that she turns into a flower. Because dinosaurs who perform on Broadway and humans who transform into flowers are not things that happen in our world, such events certainly fall under the umbrella of "speculative fiction."
The frame story, however, is a lot more somber. The narrator is, "in fact," speaking to a comatose lover who's been the victim of a violent crime; the perpetrators use hurtful epithets while attacking him, for instance, anti-LGBT slurs, even though the victim isn't necessarily LGBT himself. She's both mourning him and decrying the violence of a world where these things happen.
This story's success at the Hugos and Nebulas was one of the factors in the escalation of the "Sad/Rabid Puppies" campaign for slate nominations at the Hugos (though some of that had preceded this story); this kind of brigading eventually led to rule changes to, hopefully, decrease the ability of collaborating voters to nominate slates. There are a couple of criticisms one can make about the story. One: it's didactic. I agree, it is didactic. Now, "you shouldn't beat up people until they're comatose and shouldn't use bigoted epithets towards them either" is--hopefully--a message that everyone can get behind; I don't think anyone, even the Puppies, were critical of "Dinosaur" because it was harsh on the villains.
There are other stories that make less trivial claims. When person A writes a story that asserts, or even takes for granted, "every right-thinking person should believe X, only an utter troglodyte would believe Y," and person B (who believes Y) reads this, their reaction might be "this is insulting to me, because I don't agree with it," or "because of the didacticism about X, this is difficult to enjoy overall." And I've definitely been in that position.
In cases when the position being presented is something that everyone believes already, more likely reactions are "the story's conflict is kind of boring because everything is very clear-cut," or "the author seems to expect us to be impressed by the bold stance on X, but X isn't actually bold, they're arguing against a strawman/woman/entity." It's not impossible to write a good story that happens to be didactic, but in general, I think it does add an extra layer of difficulty (whether or not the moral is something everyone agrees on, there are easy parts and difficult parts to both approaches). And, of course, none of this justifies abusing or harassing authors who choose to do so, this should go without saying.
But a more relevant criticism of "Dinosaur," and of the fandom sentiment that led it to win a major award for speculative fiction, is that...it's arguably not speculative fiction. Now, I just said that the story-within-a-story clearly is science fiction. But the frame story is not. And, in my opinion, a story set in the mundane world doesn't become speculative merely by having subjunctive what-ifs. You could write a picture book about a kid who takes the bus to school and daydreams, "if I had a dinosaur, I would ride it to school;" I don't think that makes it a science fiction story. But nothing about the world in which the narrator and her love interest "actually" live suggest that that's a world where dinosaurs regularly perform on Broadway or humans transform into flowers, and in that sense, I would not call it SF. And so the fact that it won a Nebula suggests that the voters were much more impressed by the didacticism, which I find disappointing.
So with that, overly wordly, background, I want to talk about another short story Hugo/Nebula nominee from this year, one that several of my friends really liked: "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather." (Major spoilers below.)
( Spoilers )
Mostly tangential: the "fake documentation" format lends itself to a lot of fake links, for instance, this is a thing:
I'm teasing, but I also feel like some of my reaction is (uncalled for) sour grapes. Like, submission guidelines will say, "make sure it's polished, don't be too verbose, send only your best work!" And I feel like, if I tried to write a document with lots of tangential annotations, or put effort into rhyming an universe poem ("Oaken Hearts" doesn't rhyme, but it's a ballad, a lot of them don't anyway, so that's not a criticism), it would just be like "lol nope." Which, obviously, Sarah Pinsker is a pro and I am not a pro! I do not want to get an overinflated view of my mediocre efforts! But (and this is more relevant for something like the Escape Pod flash) when I see people who do similar things to me, mine fails, and theirs gets a pat on the back, I get frustrated because I wish I could be more specific about identifying what they have that I don't have. (And it's entirely possible, in some cases, that what they have is "ideological smugness" and I don't even want it, it would just be good to know!)
(This post is twice as long as "Dinosaur." I can either communicate in one-liner snarky aside mode or WALL OF TEXT mode, there is no middle option.)
"If You Were A Dinosaur, My Love" is a flash-fiction piece from 2013 that won a Nebula Award (and got nominated for a Hugo) in the short fiction format. Even though it's short, I would argue it sort of qualifies as a "story within a story" format, because there's a frame story and then the doubly-fictional world imagined by the narrator as a what-if. In the internal story, the narrator imagines her lover as a T-Rex, who eats goats and performs love songs on Broadway. When the T-Rex eventually marries another (cloned) dinosaur, the narrator is so overcome by emotion that she turns into a flower. Because dinosaurs who perform on Broadway and humans who transform into flowers are not things that happen in our world, such events certainly fall under the umbrella of "speculative fiction."
The frame story, however, is a lot more somber. The narrator is, "in fact," speaking to a comatose lover who's been the victim of a violent crime; the perpetrators use hurtful epithets while attacking him, for instance, anti-LGBT slurs, even though the victim isn't necessarily LGBT himself. She's both mourning him and decrying the violence of a world where these things happen.
This story's success at the Hugos and Nebulas was one of the factors in the escalation of the "Sad/Rabid Puppies" campaign for slate nominations at the Hugos (though some of that had preceded this story); this kind of brigading eventually led to rule changes to, hopefully, decrease the ability of collaborating voters to nominate slates. There are a couple of criticisms one can make about the story. One: it's didactic. I agree, it is didactic. Now, "you shouldn't beat up people until they're comatose and shouldn't use bigoted epithets towards them either" is--hopefully--a message that everyone can get behind; I don't think anyone, even the Puppies, were critical of "Dinosaur" because it was harsh on the villains.
There are other stories that make less trivial claims. When person A writes a story that asserts, or even takes for granted, "every right-thinking person should believe X, only an utter troglodyte would believe Y," and person B (who believes Y) reads this, their reaction might be "this is insulting to me, because I don't agree with it," or "because of the didacticism about X, this is difficult to enjoy overall." And I've definitely been in that position.
In cases when the position being presented is something that everyone believes already, more likely reactions are "the story's conflict is kind of boring because everything is very clear-cut," or "the author seems to expect us to be impressed by the bold stance on X, but X isn't actually bold, they're arguing against a strawman/woman/entity." It's not impossible to write a good story that happens to be didactic, but in general, I think it does add an extra layer of difficulty (whether or not the moral is something everyone agrees on, there are easy parts and difficult parts to both approaches). And, of course, none of this justifies abusing or harassing authors who choose to do so, this should go without saying.
But a more relevant criticism of "Dinosaur," and of the fandom sentiment that led it to win a major award for speculative fiction, is that...it's arguably not speculative fiction. Now, I just said that the story-within-a-story clearly is science fiction. But the frame story is not. And, in my opinion, a story set in the mundane world doesn't become speculative merely by having subjunctive what-ifs. You could write a picture book about a kid who takes the bus to school and daydreams, "if I had a dinosaur, I would ride it to school;" I don't think that makes it a science fiction story. But nothing about the world in which the narrator and her love interest "actually" live suggest that that's a world where dinosaurs regularly perform on Broadway or humans transform into flowers, and in that sense, I would not call it SF. And so the fact that it won a Nebula suggests that the voters were much more impressed by the didacticism, which I find disappointing.
So with that, overly wordly, background, I want to talk about another short story Hugo/Nebula nominee from this year, one that several of my friends really liked: "Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather." (Major spoilers below.)
( Spoilers )
Mostly tangential: the "fake documentation" format lends itself to a lot of fake links, for instance, this is a thing:
Listen to the Kingston Trio: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Joan Baez: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Windhollow Faire: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Steeleye Span: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to the Grateful Dead: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Metallica: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Moby K. Dick: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Jack White: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to the Decemberists: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”
Listen to Cyrus Matheson: “Where Broken Hearts Do Gather” [FLAGGED by BonnieLass67][UNFLAGGED by LyricSplainer ModeratorBot]
Full Lyrics for “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (traditional) (7 contributors, 95 notes, 68 comments, 19 reactions)
(see disambiguation for other versions)
(see related songs)
At 8 cents a word (the former cutoff for SFWA's "pro" threshold, I'm not sure what Uncanny's rate was at the time this was published, it's 10 cents now), that would earn you $9.84. :D
I'm teasing, but I also feel like some of my reaction is (uncalled for) sour grapes. Like, submission guidelines will say, "make sure it's polished, don't be too verbose, send only your best work!" And I feel like, if I tried to write a document with lots of tangential annotations, or put effort into rhyming an universe poem ("Oaken Hearts" doesn't rhyme, but it's a ballad, a lot of them don't anyway, so that's not a criticism), it would just be like "lol nope." Which, obviously, Sarah Pinsker is a pro and I am not a pro! I do not want to get an overinflated view of my mediocre efforts! But (and this is more relevant for something like the Escape Pod flash) when I see people who do similar things to me, mine fails, and theirs gets a pat on the back, I get frustrated because I wish I could be more specific about identifying what they have that I don't have. (And it's entirely possible, in some cases, that what they have is "ideological smugness" and I don't even want it, it would just be good to know!)
(This post is twice as long as "Dinosaur." I can either communicate in one-liner snarky aside mode or WALL OF TEXT mode, there is no middle option.)
