| Some thoughts on the line between Fanfic and Original Fiction |
[May. 25th, 2012|11:39 pm] |
A caveat, before we begin: Not only am I speaking in generalities, but I haven't kept a close eye on fan studies for the past few years. So this may well not be as novel or useful a perspective as I think it is.
Anyway, I've been suspicious of the claim that there's no fundamental difference between fan fiction and original fiction for a while now, in large part because many of the examples people invoke to blur that line strike me as dubious. That said, I was only recently reminded of how I articulated it to myself a while back, which is that I feel like works like Wicked and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead have a fundamentally distinct attitude towards their source material than much-- perhaps even most-- fan fiction.
Fan fiction, in general, is invested in a particularly mode of engagement with its source text. Reverence doesn't quite describe it? But there's a concern for forms of textual (or emotional) fidelity to the source material in even the most deconstructive and recombinatory works-- a sense that even if you took Shinji Ikari and Asuka Soryu Langley and made them the Eleventh Doctor's companions, they should still be recognizable as themselves, via some combination of reference points. If you're doing a Tough Guide pastiche, you need to hit the right tone and textual form. Etc.
How I interpret this is that in fanfic, direct discourse with the source material is important, as is shared knowledge between the author and reader. In Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, it matters that the protagonist isn't just some random kid-- he's Harry revised in a specific way. If you add Ensign Mary Sue to the Enterprise, it matters that it's the Enterprise, however AU everything else is. You can't or don't want to file the serial numbers off of most fanfic, because they matter: they're why readers care about the work in the first place.
When work is less engaged with one or more specific texts and more about a larger genre or sub-genre discourse, when reverence and the specifics of textual derivation and deviation cease to be important... That's when I feel works cease to function as fanfic. I can describe A Choice of Damnations as "Isildur and Boromir team up with the Nazgul to take on Morgoth/Cthulhu", but that's not actually what's going on in the book-- it's a gesture at presumed common reference points, not a marker saying that the book is a direct response to Tolkien, because it's not.
Obviously other people can and do feel differently about this topic. But in light of all this, I don't feel like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is about Hamlet in the way that most Harry Potter or Twilight fic is about the source text in question. For the much same reasons, I don't feel like Wicked is all that concerned with fidelity to Oz. To my mind introducing them into discussions of fanfic is both a bit of a red herring, and an attempt to leverage taste hierarchies to give fanfic a better reputation. (The latter isn't necessarily illegitimate, mind you-- most criticism is an attempt to skew the conversation in a way that strikes the critic as congenial-- but it's as blatant a grab for social capital as claiming Frankenstein as the first SF novel.)
Anyway. That's where I'm coming from on this one. Hopefully someone other than me will find this useful or thought-provoking. |
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| So, I fed a friend's cat tonight |
[May. 26th, 2012|12:18 am] |
It is a fairly timid cat and I didn't get a good look at it when I dropped by to pick up the keys. My expectation is I would not see it at all.
What actually happened is I unlocked the door and the cat came charging into the room, meowing its head off. Then it saw who I was and a long, uncomfortable pause ensued. In the end it decided to keep meowing at me.
I could not help but notice it stopped being interested in socializing with me the second the wet food hit the bowl....
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are  comment(s); comment here or there. |
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| Yet more on X Minus One |
[May. 25th, 2012|11:37 pm] |
Yeah, the inhospitably radioactive surface of the Earth is pretty much never actually inhospitably radioactive.
Also, announcer Fred Collins sounds a lot like Phil Hartman when he delivers the line These are stories of the future; adventures in which you'll live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds. I am aware of the order of events and I do know it would be more correct to say Hartman sometimes sounded like Collins.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are  comment(s); comment here or there. |
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| Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 Notes |
[May. 25th, 2012|11:06 pm] |
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http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/25/galaxy-tab-2-7-0-notes/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18694 
You’ll recall that when I lost my Mac and bought the emergency netbook, I also picked up a Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 inch tablet, on the rationale that, damn it, I was grumpy and I wanted a toy. This is not an excellent reason to buy a piece of electronic equipment, I am the first to note. That said, I’d had my eye on this particular tablet for a bit, so it wasn’t entirely impulsive. I’ve lived with it now for a week and I’m ready to mention what I like and don’t like about it.
First, a general note: I like it. We have an iPad here in the Scalzi household (it’s primarily Krissy’s) and while it’s surely a nice piece of equipment, I’m not in love with its size. A ten-inch tablet is too large for my tastes; unless you’re Shaquille O’Neal, it’s not something you can carry around or use in a single hand, and in other respects it’s also unwieldy. I understand the boffins at Apple have decreed that the iPad is the perfect size for a tablet and that if we have a problem with that there’s something wrong with us, not them. But screw them, they’re just wrong. In my case, a 7-inch tablet is just about perfectly sized: Large enough to give you enough space to see a lot of things, but small enough to operate with one hand. It’s paperback book-sized, basically, and there’s a reason paperbacks are the size they are: Because they make ergonomic sense for humans.
I am using my tablet primarily as a reading appliance, and to that respect it’s been pretty great. Both the Kindle and Nook apps look good and perform well on it, and the screen is a high enough resolution (1024×600) that I can read books without eyestrain (and, because its an LCD screen, I can read it without a nightlight). I’m also trying the Next Issue app, which works like a Netflix for magazines, and it’s for me at least a nice way to cruise through various magazines without them cluttering up my house.
Web browsing is fine — text is small in portrait mode (one needs to pinch zoom) and perfectly readable in landscape. One thing I do like that is that things don’t automatically default to mobile versions of Web sites. I also like that I can access my own site’s backend via the browser, so I can go in and moderate comments more completely than I can do on my phone. The Android 4.0 system means all the Google toys work in a fairly optimized manner, which is especially useful with GMail, which I use. The keyboard in portrait mode is easy to operate with two thumbs.
Although I don’t use it much for video, it handles video just fine; I ran a bit of Serenity on it via Netflix and didn’t have any problems. Haven’t played any games on it so far, but that’s not why I got it, so even if it were to choke on that I wouldn’t care much. The camera is definitely meh, but it’s another function that I did not buy the tablet for, so that’s fine.
Things not to like: It only comes with 8GB of resident memory and half of that’s devoted to apps that I didn’t pick and probably won’t use but come with the thing anyway. This is mitigated by the MicroSD slot and the fact that I just got a 32GB card in that format for $20 (and that it comes with a deal with Dropbox for something like 50GB of space for a year, which does not suck). The power button and the volume rocker button are close enough to each other that I’m always pressing the wrong button. This is annoying. The screen is occasionally less than perfect with touch response (particularly with small type websites), and gets smeary real fast. It’s slightly weird to think the 4.5-inch screen on my phone has a higher resolution than this 7-inch screen.
However, to be blunt, these criticisms for me are blunted by the fact that a) I paid $240 bucks for the thing, which is not a lot, all things considered, b) the tablets closest to it in capability/design — the Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire — have similar or lesser specs and are crimped by design in order to keep you in their respective ecosystems. With regards to a), I was not expecting genuinely top-flight specs for what I paid, and what I got for the price is more than satisfactory. With regards to b), why pay for crimped tools when you can get them uncrimped for essentially the same price?
So, for the price and for what I use the thing for, the Galaxy Tab 2 pretty much hits my needs dead on. If you’re looking for a solid, basic tablet in a smaller form factor and for not a whole lot of cash (relatively speaking), it’s worth giving a look.
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| This surprised me |
[May. 25th, 2012|10:50 am] |
I'm guessing a lot of Reynold's visibility comes from What Have they Done to the Rain?, Little Boxes, and Turn Around.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are  comment(s); comment here or there. |
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| [conventions] World Steam Expo, Day Zero |
[May. 25th, 2012|07:30 am] |
Yesterday waa a fine day. I got up too early, to be driven to the airport by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=1) lillypond, a/k/a my sister. The flights to Detroit were uneventful, other than being about 40 minutes late getting into DTW. I was able to start digging in to revising the Going to Extremes outline on the plane, plus answering a ton of email. Also had several pleasant conversations with various fellow travelers.
Arriving at World Steam Expo was an interesting experience. It's been years since I walked into a Con cold, not knowing anyone or anything. (I think I know maybe two or three people here.) So once I got settled, I hung out in the lobby and talked to various folks. Eventually I fell in with low persons (a/k/a The League of S.T.E.A.M.), who led me into bad ways (a/k/a Abney Park). Strong drink was consumed, and gutter language was used. A few regrettable incidents may have occurred. I went to bed highly entertained around 2 am, which is the latest I've stayed up in forever.
Plus as a special bonus, I ran into @howardtayler, who in addition to being a brilliant cartoonist and storyteller, is also well on his way to becoming one of my favorite people anywhere, ever.
My schedule today consists of a massage. Oh, how shall I cram it all in?
See some, all or none of you around this joint.
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| [links] Link salad gets all steamed up |
[May. 25th, 2012|07:15 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | cars, christianism, climate, cool, gay, gender, links, nature, personal, politics, process, race, religion, reviews, science, stories, tech, weird, writing | ] |
Brief reviews of several short stories, including my own "'Hello,' said the Gun"
Writing Across Gender — A very interesting piece about gender, writers and fiction. Snurched from this blog post by beth_bernobich, who has some insightful comments on the topic.
Calvin and Hobbes on creativity and inspiration — Heh.
Cars That Fired Our Love-Hate Relationship With Fuel
Vintage ice cream trucks
Africa and Australasia to share Square Kilometre Array — That's a mighty big kilometer.
Where did dogs come from? It turns out we don't really know
Carbon in rocks from Mars comes from volcanoes, not life — Nearby minerals confirm a high-temperature origin deep within the planet.
Accusations that climate science is money-driven reveal ignorance of how science is done — The government, the argument goes, is paying scientists specifically to demonstrate that carbon dioxide is the major culprit in recent climate change, and the money available to do so is exploding. Although the argument displays a profound misunderstanding of how science and science funding work, it's just not going away. Huh. Ignorance. Among science denialists. Inconceivable.
Black Voters Evolving On Marriage Equality — Ta-Nehisi Coates on the intersection of race and gay issues. I'd really like to have lunch with this guy some day.
CNN host probes Tony Perkins: ‘Why do homosexuals bother you so much?’ — Read this. The intellectual and moral bankruptcy of Perkins' illogical response neatly reflects the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the conservative anti-gay crusade as a whole. (Snurched from Slacktivist Fred Clark.)
The Proposed Auction of Ronald Reagan's Blood Isn't Surprising — And lo, Republican hagiography becomes literalized. (Via threeoutside.)
?otd: Are you a little teapot, short and stout?
5/25/2012
Writing time yesterday: 1.0 hours (Going to Extremes proposal)
Body movement: 30 minute stationary bike ride
Hours slept: 6.75 (solid)
Weight: n/a
Currently reading: Shattering the Ley by Benjamin Tate; Of Blood and Honey by Stina Leicht
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| The Computers of Scalziland |
[May. 25th, 2012|01:31 pm] |
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http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/25/the-computers-of-scalziland/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=18684 
Since the disappearance (and eventual reappearance) of the MacBook Air, and the emergency purchase of the most recent Acer netbook, there has been some curiosity in among Whateverians about the current state of electronics at the Scalzi Compound. While I choose not to go into complete detail on the grounds that I would hate to give thieves a shopping list, I will note that as far as laptops go we have six functional ones at the moment, one for each human and each of the cats (the dog prefers not to go online). In chronological order, they are:
1. A 15-inch Toshiba (the one in the back on this picture), which I bought in 2007 when I was on my “Last Colony” book tour to replace the 12-inch tablet computer I had at the time, which died when I was in Ann Arbor. This computer wheezes and clicks and we bought a replacement for it because we were sure it was going to die, but like a silicon version of that old guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it is Not Dead Yet. This is my wife’s primary computer.
2. A 17-inch Asus (not pictured) which I inherited as President of SFWA; the previous president bought it for business purposes and then shipped it to me when I ascended. It’s a desktop replacement, and as I had a desktop, I sent it into my daughter’s room (after removing anything confidential to SFWA, of course). Its keyboard is partially broken (the computer works fine when you plug in an outboard keyboard), so at the end of my tenure rather than passing it on I’ll probably purchase it from SFWA at current value; giving my replacement an only-partially operating piece of equipment is laden with too much metaphor, I would say.
3. A 12-inch CR-48, the prototype Chromebook I was sent by Google two Decembers ago (it’s to the left in the picture), which I wrote about half of Redshirts on. I’ve written about this one a bit; I liked the form factor of it but the trackpad was (and still is) awful, and at the time I was trying to use it, it had bugs integrating with Google Docs, which is what I needed it for. I still use it from time to time for Web browsing.
4. The MacBook Air (facing you in the picture). Lovely computer, for which I would note I paid more for than all the other computers on this list (a fact mitigated by inheriting one computer and being sent another by Google). From a practical point of view I’m not at all convinced that the premium I paid for the thing is justified; on the other hand when I use a non-Apple laptop I want to scream at its trackpad. I’ll be curious to see if Windows 8 mitigates the UI advantage Apple has to any serious effect. This is my primary computer at the moment.
5. A 15-inch (widescreen) Hewlett Packard (to the right of the picture). This is the replacement for the Toshiba, which hasn’t died yet, although probably will at some point in the reasonably near future, so we’re prepared, as it were. The HP is at the moment the “family computer” in that it sits at a built-in desk in the living room area, which makes it easily accessible when we’re all downstairs. You’ll often find Athena here, checking in on Facebook, or Krissy looking up something. I used it yesterday to make a video for a thing I’m doing after iMovie on my Mac made it clear to me that it didn’t want to be used.
6. An 11.6-inch Acer: Bought a week ago and the emergency replacement for the Mac, since I needed an actual computer while I was traveling. Right now it lives in my office and stays on the desk; the Mac tends to wander around the house with me.
I’m the first to admit that six laptops in one house is ridiculous, but I like to think the number is mitigated by the following facts: a) I was gifted one by Google, b) inherited another, c) bought a third to replace a computer that’s in the process of dying, d) bought a fourth to replace on I had every reason to suspect was lost forever. Nevertheless: SuperNerd, Thou Art I.
From a practical point of view I will say it’s easier now to have a bunch of laptops in the house than it used to be, because almost everything I write/do on a computer these days is stored online in some way. I do a lot of writing on Google Docs at the moment, store documents in Google Drive and/or Dropbox, and otherwise store material redundantly. When I lost the MacBook Air, I didn’t lose any work, because I could access it by signing in with another computer. It’s nice basically to pick up what you’re doing no matter where you are or what computer you’re using, and I definitely use that to my advantage these days. I don’t even have to save things to a USB drive anymore. Mind you, if Google goes down, I’m doomed, but then, if Google goes down, we may all be doomed.
(Before anyone makes the objection: I still DO save things locally, because, you know what? Google might go down one day. Also, there’s some stuff I don’t want to put online. Like my collection of badger porn! Wait, forget I wrote that last sentence. Anyway: Redundant data storage is your friend.)
So there you have it: A Scalzi computer census.
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| Back into the valley |
[May. 24th, 2012|11:39 pm] |
So, I've been reading Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which is a quasi-pornotopia. Sex is utterly everywhere in the book, and it's post-capitalist—no scarcity and quantity becomes quality. There's a lot of fetishistic counting of orgasms, doses of semen and urine, etc. Being a Samuel Delany novel, the sex largely involves sucking off dirty and/or homeless guys, dickcheese under foreskins, ass-eating, piss-drinking, and lots of happy strangers. I had to take a break for a while—not because of the incest or the discussion of licking dried shit out of assholes, but because of the nose-picking. And the eating of mucus. And the sharing of mucus. And picking other people's noses.
For a break, I read The Primal Screamer (a recent quote of the day entry!) by Nick Blinko, and Green Girl by Kate Zambreno, both of which were fantastic. They also had some similarities—the main character is observed and manipulated by the narrator; that action is seen in bits and pieces, as though through to hands worth of laced fingers; both are thematically obsessed with another creative medium (music in Primal, film in Girl); both are set in England. In these attributes, they are also utterly different than Spiders, which carries on in a straightforward manner, offers minute detail, finds non-libidinal activity suspicious, and doesn't just take place in the US, but is all about it. And eating snot for sexual purposes.
I'll get back to it in the morning. At 800 pages, I actually left it at work rather than carry it on my commute while reading the other titles. I'm told the mucophilia gets a break about 400 pages in. We'll see... |
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| Books, April |
[May. 24th, 2012|08:53 pm] |
This post is so horrendously late it's not even funny, but I guess it could be worse - I actually still have the list of books I read in April.
Elizabeth Bear, Range of Ghosts: There's been a lot of good things said about this one, and I'm going to echo the praise. This is a good, fun fantasy epic that draws on real-world cultures and myths in interesting and enjoyable ways. I think my favorite detail was the heavens changing to match which deity held dominion over a particular bit of territory, and the bit with the moons vanishing from the skies when one of the Khagan's descendants died? But yeah. Hungry ghosts! Wizards who don't necessarily get magic! Awesome steppe ponies!
(I will admit that I got a little twitchy about the Song script, but I acknowledge that not everyone has my hangups about ideographic language and how it affects a culture's worldview. Nor should they, probably.)
Tim Eldred, Grease Monkey: This is a collection of comics which Mr. Eldred wrote and drew over the course of a decade (1992 to 2002), following the lives of an uplifted Gorilla flight mechanic (Mac) and his teenage human assistant (Robin) on a space station. I can see why it wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea, but there's a bunch of stuff I found cool, with squadron rivalries and gambling and race relations between humans and the uplifted gorillas. I also (like ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) mrissa) found the fact that the mechanics stayed NCOs and mechanics, instead of having to climb into fighters to be part of the action. There are some plausibility concerns with the spaciousness of the station/ship, and the military command structure is a little widgy (you have a Colonel and an Admiral in the same service), but overall I felt this was fun.
The first book is available in hardcover or TPB, or you can read it and the sequel online.
Tim Eldred, Grease Monkey Book 2: A Tale of Two Species: ...and of course, A Tale of Two Species steps in one the main things I liked about the first book, which was that Mac & Robin don't get shoved onto the front lines. There's a sense in A Tale of Two Species that Eldred was trying to make the story more actiony and marketable: more action-movie, if you will. And he succeeds at hitting that mark, introducing a plucky junior pilot to be Robin's foil and to drag him out into space combat as her gunner, but the problem was, I liked what he'd been doing in the first book better. If you like Grease Monkey, it's still worth reading A Tale of Two Species, but don't expect the same level of textual density, as it's just not there.
Randall Garrett, Too Many Magicians: Read as a part of the Lord Darcy omnibus, which I still haven't finished. I will confess that I have no idea who most of the '60s era detectives that Garrett was referencing with his characters were, but that didn't really impede my enjoyment of the book. That said, the revelation of the original murderer at the end of the book felt a bit like it was cheating.
Diana Wynne Jones, Fire and Hemlock: So I read this in large part because swan_tower cites it as the primary impetus for her becoming a writer, and while I can totally see how it would have done that, I found it a very strange book. Given Thomas Lynn's name, it's probably not a surprise or a spoiler to say that this is a Tam Lin story? But it's a very odd sort of Tam Lin story, with the majority of the book happening in flashback as Polly remembers the things that she'd been made to forget, as well as using forms of magic and relational logic that didn't make much sense to me while I was reading about them, and which actively annoyed me once I read Ms. Jones's explanation for them in the essay included in the Firebird edition.
Part of this, I think, is that one of the levels on which I approach reading is as a structural/intellectual puzzle: What is going on? What tricks is the author using, and which stories are being invoked, and how does all this cool stuff work, under the hood? And "cursing you so whatever you make up becomes true somehow" strikes me as quite enough of a curse without adding on the rider that "and no, you can't ever use your powers for good, no matter how clever you are." That honestly felt like cheating to me; the cold dead hand of the author coming down and forcing her story to conform to an allegorical configuration, rather than following the internal logic of her own invention wherever it led.
(As an aside, I recently realized that my core narrative process is that I give my protagonists what they want and make them suffer the consequences. This is essentially the improv method, where instead of saying, "No, but..." you say "Yes, and...", and then clobber your character over the head with the implications of the magical power they used to avenge their dead comrades or save their girlfriend or whatever. Just because people want something doesn't make it what they need, or mean that they'll be happy once they've got it...)
I'm not unhappy I read Fire and Hemlock, mind you - it has lots of shreds of invention that are lovely - but the reversal of the usual "holding on" scene at the end didn't really do it for me, and I wasn't even really all that impressed by the structural tricks and trios of characters.
Honestly, I'm starting to think that I just not going to like Diana Wynne Jones's work as much as most of my friends do. I like the earlier Chrestomanci books, and Howl's Moving Castle, but the Tough Guide to Fantasyland doesn't do much for me, and I've never read Year of the Griffin because Dark Lord of Derkholm annoyed me so much.
Sherwood Smith, Banner of the Damned: Sherwood's books, on the other hand, do not leave me cold. Banner of the Damned is a kinda-sorta sequel to the Inda tetrology, which I loved to bits, and while I didn't imprint on Emras and Lasva and their associates the way I did with Inda and his friends, I still had a good time returning to the world of the Marlovans and Norsunder and the Sartoran Mage's Guild.
One of the things I liked best about this book was even though I spotted who a pivotal character was very early on, and guessed at large portions of their agenda, it didn't ruin the resolution for me. This is something which I feel more authors should do - that is, putting stuff in to make a book enjoyable even if your reader already knows how everything is going to turn out.
Another of the things about Banner of the Damned that impressed me was that I empathized fairly strongly with several characters who in many novels would have been portrayed as straight-up villains, and that the text supported me. (Part of that may have been the "Here, have what you want! It won't make you happy!" elements to one of those characters' arcs, of course.) One of the things I appreciate most about books is when they feel humane, and allow their characters the opportunity to grow and change, and that quality is very much on display here.
Some of the metaphysics and geopolitics of Sartorias Deles don't really work for me (I have a hard time believing in the treaty banning arrows, for example), but the many strengths of this book more than outweighed the handful of moments I blinked at the page and had to turn my cynicism meter down a notch for the duration. Recommended, though I really do suggest reading the Inda series first.
Ursula Vernon, Digger Vol. 1: I actually read the first 3 chapters online, but shh. That's 1.5 books about a wombat exploring a world of talking statues of Ganesh, tribes of warrior hyenas, libraries with library mice, and other really cool stuff. Digger is up for the Hugo this year in Best Graphic Story, and I'm not yet sure if I'm going to be voting for it first or The Unwritten Vol 4: Leviathan, which is a pretty big deal, since I really really really like The Unwritten. So yah. Very good and well worth your time and attention. |
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| My Father vs Katy Perry |
[May. 24th, 2012|08:14 pm] |
Regular readers may remember the time when my father met Tom Cruise and taught him how to fake operating a crane for The War of the Worlds. Well, yesterday, he met Katy Perry, also on the pier. She gave a private show for Fleet Week, and my father was involved on hanging a banner on one of the cranes—"Gloria" is the crane's name.
According to my sister who reported the claims of my father to me, Katy Perry managed the hanging of the banner herself and made him re-do it a few times to get it right. This was difficult work, as the banner was pretty high up. Later, he dropped a box of flags from the cherry-picker he was in, sending Perry running for safety. All went well though, and Perry got into her ridiculous outfit and put on a show for the sailors:
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