Et tu, Lara Croft – The Rape of an Icon

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Cora

The gamer site Kotaku has an interview with the producer of a new Lara Croft game that will apparently be a reboot of the Tomb Raider series. Now I haven’t played a videogame in ten years, probably more, so I normally pay about as much attention to videogame news as I pay to news about baseball, stained glass crafting or any other hobby in which I don’t partake. But this article caught my eye, when I saw it linked somewhere, because back when I still played videogames on occasion, I was very fond of the Tomb Raider series and Lara Croft. I even have a Lara Croft action figure.

So how are the powers that be planning on rebooting Lara? The new Lara will be less curvy and have less of a pin-up girl look, which sounds pretty good. She’ll also inspire the player to protect her, because apparently no player ever identified with Lara as a characters, which is news to me, because Lara Croft was one of the more relateable characters back when I still played videogames. And how do the producers of the new Tomb Raider game plan on making Lara more protectable and relateable?

By having her almost get raped.

Uh, what the fuck?

Yes, even Lara Croft who’s tough and awesome, who can blast away with two Desert Eagles and slug it out with all sorts of villains and wild animals and monsters, will now get raped (or almost raped), because she’s a woman. And everybody knows that women get raped. There is no other possible storyline for them. This goes double for “strong women”, because surviving rape is the only thing that makes a woman strong and angry enough to fight.

Pardon me, while I throw up in the corner. Continue reading →

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Alternatives to the Euro 2012 Linkdump

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Cora

The Euro 2012 seems to have usurped everybody’s attention in Europe to the point that even European e-book sales have just died. In case anybody cares, Germany won its first match against Portugal 1:0 by the way.

Still, for all those who have room in their heads for something other than football, here are some links:

Over at the Pegasus Pulp blog, I have a follow-up to last week’s post on gender roles in romantic fiction in which I examine the gender dynamics in my own work.

Talking of gender roles, The New Yorker has an interesting article about the various incarnations of Snow White to coincide with the release of the latest Snow White film. Unfortunately, the article mainly focuses on American versions of Snow White (apart from the Grimm version, of course), but that’s to be expected considering that the source is an American magazine.

At the Book View Café, Sherwood Smith has a good post on heroes and villains and what makes them compelling. I’ve always had a weakness for the clever and manipulative sort of villain myself, not so much the Dark Lord but the manipulative adviser or the prince who intrigues and poisons his way to the throne. Best of all if they don’t look like villains on the surface. The Mule from Asimov’s Foundation series is a good example, as is Jim Jaspers from the old Captain Britain comics. These are among the few villains who ever truly scared me.

Writer Suzanne O’Leary takes on the eternal conflict between British and American English. Now I use British spellings in my books and have never had the sort of negative review Suzanne O’Leary mentions. Indeed, if I got such a review I might even violate the “Thou shalt not reply to reviews” commandment and post a polite note that the book uses British spellings.

That said, I’m not a big fan of the “our way is the proper way” tone of the post. I had enough of that in school, where American spellings and usage were automatically marked as “wrong”, even for students who had lived in the US or were the children of American expats. The linguist in me considers all varieties of English equally valid and equally correct, though the highschool teacher in me still primarily teaches British spellings and usage, because that’s what’s required.

The website of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has an interesting article on the history of comic book burnings in the US only a few years after the end of World War II. Looking at those photos makes me sad, when I think of how many rare Golden Age comic books were destroyed by those idiots. Because book burnings – when carried out on a systematic and widespread basis – can really make the books in question inaccessible to future generations. Only the most famous of those books that the Nazis burned – works by Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Erich Maria Remarque, etc… – have been reprinted after the war. But plenty of lesser known authors, e.g. writers of popular fiction like pulp writer Walther Kabel or of zeitgeist novels from the Weimar Republic, are all but forgotten, their books nearly inaccessible even to scholars, because the Nazis destroyed most existing copies and they were never reprinted. Project Gutenberg and the e-book revolution can help to make those destroyed works accessible again. But of the many, many adventure and mystery novels Walther Kabel wrote during the 1920s, only one is available at Project Gutenberg.

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The New Yorker and some links for the Euro 2012 kick-off

Posted on June 9, 2012 by Cora

So I finally managed to purchase the science fiction issue of The New Yorker at the airport bookstore, which is the only place in town that carries the magazine. Had to pay twice the US cover price, too – wince.

Coincidentally, the airport bookstore also carried Fifty Shades of Grey, which caused me to beckon over the friend who was with me. “Come on, you’ve got to take a look at this. This is it. The book that sold ten million copies. The book that everybody is talking about. You know, the mother porn.”

My friend wrinkles his forehead: “That doesn’t look like erotic fiction.”

Me: “Well, apparently there isn’t any sex until page 80. But the Americans are all over it, because there’s some BDSM”, whereupon my friend giggled.

The airport was almost completely deserted, by the way, as deserted as it’s normally around five AM. Actually, it’s busier around five AM, because the passengers of the six something AM flights to Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt are checking in. And the few people that were there, a handful of passengers and personnel, were mostly cluttered around a plasma screen at the airport café where the opening game of the Euro 2012 was playing. Even the lone bookstore clerk kept running out to watch the game and only came back when it was clear that I was going to buy something. The match was Poland versus Greece, by the way, i.e. not exactly the most interesting match for German viewers, though we do have quite a few Poles and a handful of Greeks as well in Bremen.

Talking about The New Yorker, Lisa Goldstein and Nancy Jane Moore both offer their take on the science fiction issue. I’ll offer my comments once I’ve done more than just flip through it.

And now for some other links:

Amal El-Mohtar posts about the problems of female exceptionalism, i.e. the fact that way too many female characters in books, films, TV shows, etc… are only there because they are the best ever at something or other and definitely better at it than the men. Now I adore awesome women as much as everybody else, though I agree that there should be a wider variety of female characters. As long as they let me have my awesome women who can outfight, outshoot, outdrink any man.

Apex Magazine has a great essay by Tansy Rayner Roberts about the gothic and why gothics are not necessarily romances.

The Atlantic has an article about how “the South” is probably the most important character in True Blood. Unfortunately, the author seems unaware that True Blood is based on the Southern Vampire novels by Charlaine Harris who – unlike True Blood producer Alan Ball – is a genuine Southerner. Plus, the author also falls into the trap of assuming that the supernatural must always be a metaphor for something (though True Blood really does use the supernatural as metaphor). Still a good article.

At The Baffler, David Graeber asks the old question that has been on the mind of every science fiction fan at some point, namely where are my flying cars and Mars bases and how come the future turned out to be so much less awesome than what we were promised. Graeber mainly blames capitalism, bureaucracy and those nasty neoliberals (and I can’t tell you how happy I am to see what appears to be an American article using “neoliberal” in the proper European sense). I’d definitely add the more strident and stupid parts of the ecological movement of the 1970s and 1980s, the sort of people who instead of trying to come up with alternative energy sources and more efficient forms of transport, thought that we should all rather ride bicycles instead and that we didn’t need all that progress anyway. Maybe this is my personal bias, but then I spent most of the late 1980s dueling with those people.

Finally, I just found out that my recent interview at Ty Johnston’s blog has been picked up by the World SF blog.

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RIP Ray Bradbury

Posted on June 8, 2012 by Cora

So I’m away from the internet for a day (yesterday’s post about gay comic characters was pre-scheduled) and what happens: Ray Bradbury dies at age 91.

Oddly enough, I first heard the news from my Mom, who told me when I dropped by at my parents’ after school, “Did you hear that a science fiction writer died? It was just on the radio news.”

Naturally, I asked her which SF writer had died. She didn’t remember the name, she said, but he was very old. In his nineties.

That narrowed it down, so I asked her, “Jack Vance, Frederick Pohl, Ray Bradbury? Which one was it?”

“I think the last one…”, she said, “…but I’m not sure. What did he write?”

So I rattled off a list of Bradbury titles and when I got Fahrenheit 451, she said, “Yes, that’s definitely the right one. They listed a book with Fahrenheit in the title.”

“And you’re sure it’s Bradbury?”, I asked, “Shit. This is unexpected. He just had an essay in The New Yorker this week.”

Everybody has been sharing their memories of how they first encountered Ray Bradbury’s work or even of how they met the man himself, so here’s mine:

The only problem is that I’m not sure when I first heard of Ray Bradbury. I suspect that it was either in John Clute’s original Encylcopedia of Science Fiction (which I bought as a teenager in a Rotterdam department store for the exorbitant sum of 80 Dutch guilders and used as a guide to discover SF books and authors that sounded interesting) or in one of my coffee table books about SF films from the 1980s, which I used for the same purpose before I found the Encyclopedia.

At any rate, I already knew who Ray Bradbury was when I bought The Martian Chronicles sometime in the late 1980s. Then, a bit later, I bought Fahrenheit 451 in a Reclam foreign language edition, because it was the only one I could get at the time, and also picked up a used copy of The Golden Apples of the Sun at one of the places that sometimes sold used English language books. I guess I bought it as much for the swirly psychedelic cover art as for Bradbury’s name. I also remember an essay by Ray Bradbury (which I later realized was an excerpt from the marvelous Zen and the Art of Writing) in a dog-eared paperback on writing science fiction, fantasy and horror that I reread a lot, because I loved it so much.

But my first exposure to Ray Bradbury’s work was actually the Francois Truffaut’s 1966 film adaption of Fahrenheit 451, which a teacher made us watch shortly before the summer holidays, when all tests have been written and the grades are fixed and there’s nothing to do in school except watch movies. Initially, I was happy to get a science fiction movie and one that was not about nuclear war and the end of the world (being forced to watch On the Beach scarred me for life – I still hate both book and film), too. But then there was that scene near the beginning where Montag and colleagues discover the secret library and burn it up along with the old woman who has hidden the books away. And I watched as the old woman burned and thought, “This is me. This is me in sixty years or so” and had a veritable freakout right in the middle of a classroom full of twenty-four sweaty kids. As a result, it took me several years until I could even bring myself to read my Reclam copy of Fahrenheit 451.

But enough about me, let’s hear what others have to say: Here are obituaries from the Guardian, Time, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and iO9.

And here are tributes and memories from Barack Obama, John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman (there’s another one here), Sherwood Smith, Julie Ann Dawson, Lynn Viehl, Sarah Hoyt, MeiLin Miranda, Jeff Vandermeer, Chuck Wendig, Michiko Kakutani, Tobias Buckell, Orson Scott Card, Stephen Hubbard and Aliette de Bodard.

What is remarkable about all those tributes is not just how many lives were touched by Ray Bradbury’s works, but also how different those lives and people are. Barack Obama, John Scalzi and Neil Gaiman on the one side and Sarah Hoyt and Orson Scott Card on the other will likely never agree on anything, but they do agree that Ray Bradbury was a great writer who touched their lives. Only Only Nick Mamatas has something to complain about, as usual, though he doesn’t complain about Ray Bradbury but about the fact that some of those offering their memories and tributes fit his mental stereotype of catpiss geeks who can’t appreciate Bradbury.

Finally, the Guardian reprints a 1990 interview with Ray Bradbury, while the Paris Review has dug up an unpublished interview with Ray Bradbury and completed the old interview with some new questions. Lots of good stuff there. Oh yes, and he calls Edgar Rice Burroughs “the most influential writer in the entire history of the world” and John Irving “the bore of all time”.

So rest in peace, Ray. You will be missed.

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The Ultimate Death Match: One Million Moms versus Gay Superheroes

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Cora

The Guardian reports that a religious/conservative organisation calling itself One Million Moms is calling for a boycott of Marvel and DC Comics, until they remove those nasty gay superheroes Northstar and the Golden Age Green Lantern* (and presumably Apollo and Midnighter and the current incarnation of Batwoman, though those characters are not mentioned) from their respective line-ups. Because those self-proclaimed One Million Moms fear that reading about gay superheroes could turn children gay.

The image accompanying the Guardian article is misleading by the way, because it’s a still from last year’s Green Lantern film, which featured not Alan Scott but Silver Age Green Lantern Hal Jordan, who is not gay. And while I don’t know about the sexual preferences of Tomar-Re, the alien Green Lantern in the film still, I’m pretty confident that he and Hal Jordan are not a couple.

Now the complaint of the One Million Moms is completely ridiculous, because comics (or books or movies) don’t turn people gay, but seeing a hero like themselves can help gay or lesbian teens. Besides, children are hardly the core customer demographic for comic books and haven’t been for more than twenty years now.

This isn’t the first time that the One Million Moms have attempted to combat the rising tide of gayness in American mainstream comic books, by the way. They did the very same thing – writing letters and calling for a boycott of the offending issue – earlier this year when there was a gay wedding in an Archie comic (which are actually aimed at a younger demographic than Marvel or DC’s superhero comics). Interestingly, the gay couple in Archie is interracial, too, just like Northstar and his soon to be husband. Plus, one half of the couple wears a military uniform, which makes it even more controversial given the only recently revised policies of the US military on GLBT soldiers. The boycott call of the One Million Moms was a resounding success, by the way: The issue in question sold out.

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Beyond the Greek Alphabet – Romance and Non-Stereotypical Gender Roles

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Cora

So Fifty Shades of Grey has sold ten million copies (both in e-book and print) in six weeks. And since the article is already approximately a week old, it has probably sold another million or two since then. What is more, E.L. James strikes me as a nice person (potential legal ickiness of publishing fanfiction for profit aside, but if Stephenie Meyer herself doesn’t seem to have a problem with that, then who am I to comment?) who certainly deserves her success.

Nonetheless, the astounding success of Fifty Shades of Grey makes me uneasy. It’s not the fact that those books are about sex, because sex – even kinky sex – in popular fiction is nothing new. It’s not the fact that those books are supposedly not particularly well written, since badly written books becoming huge successes is nothing new either. It’s even not the deluge of condescending “mommy porn” articles in the mainstream press, which seem oh so shocked that women might be interested in reading about sex. And it’s not the fanfiction link either. Continue reading →

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A threesome of links and some really depressing books

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Cora

I hope I’ll have more to say soon, but for now here is a threesome of interesting links:

At the Bookview Café, Sherwood Smith discusses the trend towards ever darker and more violent fantasy and wonders what the appeal of torture porn is.

Talking of depressing, forced pregnancy seems to be the latest trend in dystopian young adult fiction, as this article at Slate suggests. The link to the current political discussion in the US is pretty obvious, just as the entire teen dystopia genre is an expression of current economic and political anxieties in the US, which is why those books don’t do nearly as well in Germany. By the way, I found it interesting that one of the dystopian YA novels in the article was written by a man.

Also at Slate, Sady Doyle reviews Looking for Mr Goodbar, a novel from 1975 which makes the gender politics of Fifty Shades of Grey look positively progressive by comparison. Basically, it’s about a young woman who has casual sex with men she picks up in bars and is then brutally murdered. Because having sex with multiple men and outside marriage must inevitably lead to death, don’t you know?

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Who’s gay at DC, where are all the women in adult SFF and a bit about archetypes

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Cora

DC Comics has finally unveiled its new gay character. No, it’s not Batman or Superman or any other of the first rank of DC heroes, but Alan Scott, the original Golden Age Green Lantern.

Considering Alan Scott’s appalling luck with women in the past (he ended up marrying not one but two of his archenemies), it’s certainly understandable why he’d look for happiness elsewhere. Though I guess this eliminates Alan Scott’s children Jade and Obsidian from the DC Comics continuity for good, which is a pity, because I always liked the characters. Infinity Inc., the team comprised of the children of Golden Age DC heroes, was the only mainstream DC comic I ever read regularly (I also read several Vertigo and Wildstorm comics).

At iO9, writer James Robinson explains a bit more about the reasoning behind the decision to rewrite Alan Scott as a gay man and his son Obsidian figures into it. I still don’t see why they couldn’t have kept established gay DC characters like Obsidian or the version of Starman who was gay, but then I’ve never understood DC’s decision to reboot their whole universe every fifteen years or so either.

At Tor.com, Emily Asher-Perrin wonders why speculative YA fiction has all of those great female heroes, while adult speculative fiction doesn’t. She also wonders whether that’s the reason why so many adult women are reading YA.

I guess it’s probably due to the subgenres I read, but I haven’t really noticed a dearth of female heroes in SFF, at least not lately. Urban fantasy is full of female heroes and even epic fantasy has its share. They are a bit thinner on the ground in SF (outside dystopian YA SF that is), but there’s still Honor Harrington and Cordelia Vorkosigan and the various heroines of Linnea Sinclair’s novels and Eve Dallas of course, even though the SFF community does not view the In Death books as part of the genre. Steampunk has its share of women heroes, too. True, there are books and subgenres which are full of manly men doing manly things, but I don’t read a whole lot of that these days.

I also find it interesting that Emily Asher-Perrin usually envisioned herself as a male hero, when fantasizing herself into somebody else’s story. Because this isn’t what I did at all. Instead, I mentally rewrote those stories, so the women were the central characters. To this day, Star Wars is more Leia’s story than Luke’s, as far as I am concerned. Never mind that Leia got a much better deal than her brother. Leia got gorgeous hairstyles and clothes and she got to grow up a princess, she got to liberate the galaxy and she got Han Solo, too. Meanwhile, Luke got a lightsabre, got to meet his Dad and lost his hand. I know who I’d rather be. And if a narrative steadfastly refused to provide female character for me to identify with, I simply made up my own. Most of them probably were horrible Mary Sues – and the lack of good female characters in many popular franchises may well explain the widespread Mary Sue phenomenon – but they were mine.

Finally, Australian writer Rosie Dubb has an interesting post on archetypes.

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The New Yorker does SF, Doctor Who does the Olympics, a rightwing thinktank does Game of Thrones – all that and the German fixed book price agreement, too

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Cora

As already reported, we’re having our annual speculative versus literary fiction discussion, courtesy of The New Yorker, which has designated its current issue “the science fiction issue”. According to the table of contents, “science fiction issue” means a mix of the usual political, financial and arts reporting (there are articles about Syria and the financial crisis in Greece as well as a review of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom and an obituary of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) and a couple of science fiction related essays by the likes of Ursula K. LeGuin, Colson Whitehead, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, Ray Bradbury and William Gibson. The fiction, including Jennifer Egan’s Twitter story “Black Box” appears to be literary speculative fiction.

All in all, it seems to be a pretty good mix, though it means that I will have to go down to the airport (the airport bookstore is the only place that carries The New Yorker) this weekend to pick up the issue and likely pay two to three times the cover price.

Of course, the fact that The New Yorker devotes a whole issue to science fiction has not gone unremarked in the usual genre outlets. Michael Ann Dobbs at iO9 is quite impressed by the selection, Ryan Britt at Tor.com less so, because the fiction or rather its authors are not science fictional enough for his tastes. Which left me scratching my head, because Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz and Jennifer Egan all write speculative fiction with literary appeal. Lethem’s Gun with Occasional Music was originally published by an SF imprint as far as I recall and was a Nebula nominee. Sam Lipsyte is the only one who doesn’t quite fit here, at least based on what I know about his previous work.

Nick Mamatas also comments on Ryan Britt’s odd claim that Jonathan Lethem, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan and Sam Lipsyte aren’t science fictional enough, though he’s a lot harsher than me.

Doctor Who fans may remember that the otherwise unremarkable 2006 episode Fear Her had the Doctor pick up the Olympic torch and light the Olympic fire after stranded aliens had made the torchbearer and the entire stadium audience at the opening ceremony vanish, an act which promptly persuaded the aliens to go home, allegedly because there was so much joy in the air, though personally I suspect that the aliens realized that a summer which has both Olympic Games and a European Football Cup means wall to wall sports coverage everywhere, so they decided to invade a more promising planet. Still, whenever there are speculations about who will get to light the Olympic fire, I usually think, “Come on, I’ve seen Fear Her. I know already know who it’s going to be.”

Nonetheless, I never expected that the Olympic committee would really get the Doctor to light the Olympic fire. If only because that would be incredibly cool and the Olympics are not cool by definition. However, they are still cooler than I thought, for even though the Doctor does not get to light the fire (as far as we know), Matt Smith a.k.a. the Eleventh Doctor got to carry the Olympic torch through Cardiff Bay. Which must be the first time that the bloody 2012 Olympics have managed to make me smile.

The Claremont Institute, a rightwing thinktank, has a surprisingly nuanced article about George R.R. Martin and A Song of Ice and Fire. Nuanced, considering it comes from a writer whose other credits include “The persecution of Sarah Palin”.

Finally, I have a post about the German fixed book price agreement up at Pegasus Pulp.

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A Pulp Post

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Cora

There’s nothing to see here today, but why don’t you head over to the Pegasus Pulp blog and read my post about how the rise of e-books and indie publishing is resurrecting the spirit of the pulp era.

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