Alison Sinclair

At Farthing Party last August (good grief), I was on a panel on the question of “Who is Qualified to Write SF?”. My intro packed in an awful lot of thought, so I figured I would take the opportunity to unpack – though why I did not post this until now I can’t really explain, because it reached close to final form in the first couple of weeks after. Might have something to do with submitting Shadowborn, going out west, and starting a new job.

I raised four points:

• The usefulness of having a background (whether acquired through formal education or not) in the discipline (defined broadly) that is the focus of the story, which helps with the details, helps with getting the fundamentals right, and allows extrapolation (in any direction – forward, sideways, or backwards), as opposed to what I chose to call fabrication, which is just picking up the trappings [i]. At the panel we spent a lot of time on the big and small things that made us go ‘owww’ and – metaphorically or otherwise – throw books against walls.
• The need to know and avoid the ‘big dumb clichés’, the misperceptions of science promoted by news media that tend to normalize the aberrant and popular narrative media conventions that romanticize the deviant. Everyone who is a member of a social group or practitioner of an occupation or serious hobby has to deal with the ‘big dumb clichés’ around their domain. Others have written about the annoying and persistent myths around science; my personal pet peeves are the distortions of human research and medicine (a longer rant for a later time). This is about getting the culture, norms and ethics right [ii].
• The importance of being engaged with science. I spoke about the social awkwardness around being a young woman in science at social events – particularly those where the sexes were herded into different corners (we’re talking about the late 1970s and early 80s) – and saying what I did was the kiss of death to conversation. I still get the sense that many people who express judgments about science on the Internet are as checked out on the subject as those women who’d tell me that science was boring or too difficult for them [iii]. This is not a position to write SF from.
• However, being engaged does not mean being uncritical, which brings me to the fourth point, which is an argument that the best people to undertake the critique of science within SF may not be scientists [iv]. Science is a dominant, if not the dominant narrative in our society, and as much as we need competence and accuracy in the depiction of science in SF, we need competence and accuracy in the critique of science in SF – as a culture, as a system, as what my history lecturer would have said a ‘project of modernity’ – as the way it reinforces dominant narratives and power relations, and how it subverts and is subverted by them [v]. This requires a different position and a different toolkit, which is where SF needs people who don’t have a science background, and aren’t socialized and acculturated.

And this is by no means a complete list. Other thoughts:

• In my observation, it’s more likely that a writer who writes prose that makes me drool, purr, and mutter ‘envy is a sin, envy is a sin’, does not have a formal education in science than that they do (note the epidemiologist’s phrasing here). I may be biased by knowing how much my own style deteriorated from late high school to graduate school, and by the memory of having my style described as both ‘flowery’ and ‘insensitive’ during the same university term, by a science prof and an english prof respectively.
• Jo Walton and Jim McDonald both said the writing – the mastery of storytelling – was paramount. Yes, yes, yes! If a writer has the writing and storytelling part right, I’ll not only be more prepared to believe that they have the information right if I don’t know the subject, and more willing to accept implausibilities and forgive errors (having fact-checked) if I do.
• There’s also the problem of time.There’s that million words of garbage or that 10 000 hours of practice needing to be got over. Science-science doesn’t generally give one as much time as social sciences and the arts do for the simple exercise of putting words together to convey one’s meaning accurately, much less time to think about narrative or the production of story.

Expansions

[i] We can argue about whether or not extrapolation is a necessary criterion in the definition. It’s in my own, particularly on those odd Tuesdays when I define SF as a product of the present day in dialogue with the needs, concerns and technologies of the present day, and therefore needing a reference to the present day. Plus, I like to watch writers do the extrapolation. However, my definition of SF is anything but fixed. See also [v].

[ii] And for me personally, errors there are more offensive than errors in fact.

[iii] Today, I could offer a number of responses that might lead into productive conversations about how and why they had become checked out (if indeed they were) – public perception of science, science education, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion – but then I was too young and skinless to deal well with what felt like dismissal.

[iv] At the panel I mentioned butting heads with fellow listserv members on the subject of Margaret Atwood, and realizing upon reflection that the heat was actually being generated by a struggle over who did and did not have the dominant narrative. We were not arguing so much about whether Atwood is a SF writer, or whether she writes good SF or not; we were arguing about power, privilege, and who gets to be the authority. I saw the arts having the dominant narrative, and Atwood being granted disproportionate attention because she was such a major figure in CanLit. I suspect my fellow members saw science as having the dominant narrative, and myself as dissing Atwood because she was neither within the field of SF or the field of science.

My early experience did not suggest that science was privileged. The formative years of my education were at an all-girls school that came out of a particular tradition in female education that took the education and vocation of young women unusually seriously, but which nevertheless centred on the arts, leaving the sciences as something of an afterthought. Then, before I had finished school, we moved (back – it’s complicated) to Canada, in the mid-70s, where the arts were the chosen platform for the expression of Canadian identity. It was in America, where science and scientific prowess were one of the platforms for the battles of the Cold War, that science was being actively promoted.

In addition, as a woman training in science, I did not feel privileged. I felt a barely tolerated outsider, stumbling through the complicated dance that would keep the men around me seeing me as a scientist rather than as a female, and entirely too aware that my femaleness would be used to push me outside any time it suited them. I’d discovered feminism, but many feminist writers appeared to equate science with masculinity and condemn it as a tool of patriarchy (it is, it is), leaving me with the sense – rightly or wrongly – that they regarded as science as no place for a woman, and a woman in science as an unnatural being (… where had I heard that before?). It was a splendid moment for me when I picked up a 1982 issue of Ms magazine in which they published a long excerpt from Vivian Gornick’s “Women in Science: Portraits from a World in Transition”.

I got clued to the biases resulting from being embedded in science via various inputs. The ones that come to mind are:

• the inescapable experience of being female in science and observing how the science around gender was refracted through social expectations
• the work of critics of the sociology of science like Evelyn Fox Keller and Hilary Rose [vi]
• going into medicine, where there had been extensive work by feminists and sociologists looking at how the science of medicine intersects with the sociology of medicine and with the lines of power and privilege
• taking a course on the history of modern Europe, which turned out to be an intellectual and political history of Europe, which gave me the perspective of science as one of the projects of modernity – along with feminism, democracy and individuality.

And I also clue to the potential limitations of science fiction purely by scientists by reading a form of SF written primarily by insiders. I’ve been reading naval and military fiction and SF ever since I got into Hornblower via Star Trek [vii]. I recognize the writers’ authority – not only do most of them have the real-world credentials equivalent to having science degrees and writing SF, but the work gives off that particular resonance of an author confident both in story and subject. However, being an outsider, I also recognize the unexamined assumptions in many of the popular works [viii], and feel the tension of being pulled into the story  and yet being fully aware that as civilian, a physically unexceptional female, and someone whose politics – at least these days – is left of centre, I do not belong there. Well, other than as a shreddie. That’s another area where Lois McMaster Bujold stands out, because she takes the perspective both of the insider and the outsider, does not take for granted militarization as a norm (Barrayar is a militarized society in the process of demilitarization), and questions the power-relations. Furthermore, Miles is by birth, socialization, and ambition an insider, but because of his physical limitations is an outsider.

When I was writing Cavalcade, I was in the middle of medical school and conscious of the ongoing process of socialization to professional norms , and the difference between the realities of the profession and the ‘big dumb clichés’. I wanted a special forces team aboard, and I was sure that popular representations of the military were as distorted as those of medicine. I read a whole variety of books written by insiders, would-be insiders, and people who were consciously using an outside perspective and outside toolkit to look in. Ones I particularly remember were “The Company They Keep”, written by an anthropologist married to a special forces soldier, “The Militarization of Women’s Lives”, about the influence of even a peacetime military on women, families and society, a book about praetorianism (whose exact title I can’t remember), which picked apart the American republic’s history of profound ambivalence and indeed distrust of military power as a threat to democracy, fascinating to someone living next door to the post-WWII, post-Cold War, militarized republic. I never was sure enough of myself to present a point of view from the special forces unit, but their presence and the relationship between them and the forming government ran through the novel.

[v] There are a heck of a lot of my personal causes and beefs embedded in this viewpoint, and unpacking those would run for few thousand words or so. Suffice for the moment to say I Have Views about the social as well as the artistic purposes of science fiction. But see also point [i]. On alternate Wednesdays, I don’t care about the social purposes of SF; I just want some shiny, irresponsible fun.

[vi] Rose discusses science fiction as offering models for a feminist science in a later chapter in her book “Love, Knowledge and Power”, and Jane Donawerth uses Rose’s ideas to give shape to a broad discussion of women’s presentation of science in science fiction (with lots of examples) in “Utopian Science in Science Fiction by Women,” in “Frankenstein’s Daughters”.

[vii] I once had a conversation with Marie Jakober about our shared fascination with war despite being unambiguously opposed to it IRL. I don’t recall that we reached a conclusion, but we were fully aware of the contradiction.

[viii] Unexamined within the work, at least.

Remnant Population

Elizabeth Moon; Del Rey 2003

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Courtesy of the Heroine’s Journey thread over at Tor.com, about which I’ll say more once I’ve dug myself out from underneath Bayesian analysis, counterfactual models, causality, directed acyclic graphs, fractional polynomials, splines, and simulation of datasets … I’ve been rereading Elizabeth Moon’s Remnant Population. There aren’t many protagonists in SF like Ofelia, whom the Scots (and we should know) would describe as a cussed auld besom. She’s nearly eighty, one of the oldest inhabitants of a human colony thwarted in its development by repeated disasters; of Ofelia’s several children, only one son, Barto, has survived into middle age. The colony has endured but not grown or progressed; education is purely vocational and individual talent and aspiration suppressed. The social order is narrow: Ofelia’s community impresses on her her dependency and diminishing worth as an old woman, and Ofelia in turn passes silent judgment on disruptive, sexually promiscuous women like her neighbour Linda and childless women like her daughter-in-law Rosara.

But within the first pages of the novel the colonists learn that their colony has been judged a failure and is to be abandoned by its corporate sponsor. Within a month, the colonists will depart for another planet, decades away, leaving the work of forty years behind them. As a further imposition, the sponsors are refusing to pay for Ofelia’s passage, charging it to her son and daughter-in-law.

Enough, Ofelia decides. When the time comes, she will walk into the forest with enough food for a few days, and wait until she is certain the last shuttle is gone. The company representatives will not trouble themselves to look for one woman too old to work. She will live the rest of her life alone, and for the first time in her life she’ll have nobody around to tell her what to do and who to be.

And she does. Once she has restored power to the deserted colony and established a routine of gardening and foraging, she has everything she needs. She gets up to mischief. She pokes into other women’s cupboards. She sleeps in other people’s beds. She sheds the drab clothing of elderly respectability and dresses in gaudy colours, walks naked in the streets, weaves herself a cape of netting and beads, daubs her body with paints. She annotates the colony’s official log with the stories of sexual strife and violence that lie behind single line entries of moves between households or ‘accidental’ deaths. The narrow inner voice of social censure is gradually silenced by a new voice. (These acts of throwing off social convention, that argument between the inner voice of social censure and the new voice of true experience turns up in other womens’ novels, too. Top of my mind is Joan Barfoot’s Abra, a mainstream novel of a woman who also chooses solitude and self-sufficiency, but on this earth.)

But she does not remain alone. Months later, the colonists’ successors arrive. Disdaining the site of her failed colony, the new settlers set down elsewhere on the planet—and Ofelia, silently listening over the radio, hears their unanswered pleas for help as they are slaughtered to the last man, woman and child by aliens that no one knew were there. Ofelia’s initial intense fear, loneliness and vulnerability are gradually easing with the familiarity of her surroundings and routine when, in the middle of one of the planet’s violent storms, she comes face to face with a small wandering band of the aliens. The recognition that one of them is injured, and exasperation at seeing anyone or anything too foolish to come out of the rain, pre-empts fear, and she throws open her door.

They spend an uncomfortable night huddled together in the dark, and each party (the aliens’ collective voices are represented in brief interpolated passages) emerges gratified to find themselves unharmed by the other. Ofelia would be quite happy to go back to her solitary life, but the aliens are social and curious, and Ofelia finds herself shooing them out of the kitchen and out of the colony control room and power-plant, convinced they’ll do themselves harm, and pushing towels and mops into their hands when they track mud and water across her floor. Children, she thinks, having reached the age where everyone looks like children, and exasperated all over again at losing her precious solitude. But she demonstrates how light-switches work, and how domestic appliances work, and struggles—despite her own truncated education—to explain how electricity is generated. She makes music with them. She dances with them. An elder, a nest-guardian, the People decide in their turn, and summon one of their senior singers, a diplomat, to treat with her as a representative of her people. And, half-understanding, she finds herself appointed as guardian to the newborn babies of one of the band.

One of the marvelous aspects of this novel is that the important events happen in Ofelia’s old age. Many novels with an old person as protagonist (eg, Margaret Lawrence’s The Stone Angel, itself a groundbreaking book) take place as much in the novel past as the novel present, and youth’s adventures and dramas pre-empt attention. Age seldom gets all the adventure all to itself, as it does here. Despite the arrival of a team of experts, all shiny, knowledgeable, and oblivious to their own human foibles (Children, thinks Ofelia), Ofelia—old, ill-educated, eccentrically clad, and cussed—and the alien diplomat whom she calls Bluecloak, succeed in making the human representatives recognize the outrage that provoked the massacre, and establish the terms for colonization of the planet in full partnership with the People.

Sunshine

Robin McKinley; Berkley Books 2003

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Could someone please tell me where to get a really good cinnamon roll in Montreal, bleached and tender and dripping with cream cheese icing (not sticky glaze)? If you’ve read Robin McKinley’s Sunshine, you’ll know why. If you haven’t, I must warn you about two things: spoilers (below), and food cravings.

Rae (“Sunshine”) Seddon, eponymous narrator and protagonist, does normal really, really well and really, really hard. She’s a marginal high school graduate who is contentedly working as a baker at her parents’ café. Her relationship with her stepfather and younger half-brothers is fond, though that with her mother, who does normal even harder, is strained. But Sunshine is testifying to her normalcy at fragrant detail (cinnamon rolls, pleeeease) while shackled to the wall of a deserted house, side by side with a vampire. In her world, humans are trying desperately to maintain privilege and order despite the rising population of non-humans, the most powerful, feared, and hated of whom are the vampires. Having let her guard down, Sunshine has become the pawn in a feud between vampires, the only thing preserving her life being her fellow captive’s determination not to gratify his enemies by feeding on her. Con – Constantine – is an atypical vampire in that he is a loner, without the retinue that vampires gather around them as age robs them of their tolerance for light. Direct sunlight would still kill him, and the torture of successive day upon day of captivity is eroding his sanity; he is a dangerous cellmate. “Speak,” are his first words. “Remind me that you are a rational creature.” But Sunshine has another reason for doing normal really, really hard. Her vanished father was a member of a family of powerful magic-handlers, and she has inherited a variety of abilities that have lain largely quiescent until now, including the ability to transform small objects, like a pocket-knife into a shackle-key … and to shield vampires from the sun. When she transmutes her pocket knife into a key and frees herself, she chooses, for reasons she does not fully understand, to take Con with her on a day-long walk to safety.

In Sunshine, Robin McKinley seems to set out to explore the nature of connection when all easy affinities are absent: the affinities of species, the affinities of erotic attraction, the affinities of sympathy. Con is not a scary-but-sexy vampire; Con is a scary-but-scary vampire. Sunshine’s initial descriptions dwell upon his grey skin, his horrific laugh, his terrifying swiftness of movement, the uncomfortable fit of his body as he carries her (so that her lacerated bare feet not leave a revealing blood-trail). An accidental, though charged, mutual carnal impulse ends equally quickly in mutual repulsion. Though familiarity makes him “Con”, a chance word or gesture shifts him back to “vampire”. Nevertheless, what begins on her side as an ill-understood impulse (“I hate bullies.”) and on his as recognition of an obligation, develops into a mutual commitment that is more than an alliance against Con’s enemies, now hers.

The price to be paid for this ambiguous but intense connection is alienation from her own species. Sunshine is virtually alone with her secrets, unable to confide in her family or the SOF (Special Other Forces) agents who have been part of her cafe ‘family’ and, who, she discovers, have been keeping watch over her for years. To them, Con is and always will be one of the enemy. Furthermore, Con has gifted her with the vampire ability to see in darkness, but it distorts her daylight vision as well, leaving her trying to conceal her stumbling disorientation. But by the end of the book, Sunshine has grown considerably – though far from painlessly – in understanding of herself and her power, and with Con at her side can begin to explore the night.

The fifteen-year-old protagonist of Dragonhaven, on the other hand, does not even bother to try to do normal. As the son of the Director of the only viable sanctuary for dragons – yes, flying, fire-breathing and all – in continental America, he has been raised within the sanctuary by his widowed father and the sanctuary’s staff, and wishes nothing more than to train as a park ranger. While in Sunshine, McKinley interrogated the limits of the cross-species relationship between adults, and a man and a woman, in Dragonhaven the cross-species relationship is the one between parent and child. For on his first solo expedition into the wilds of the park, Jake finds a dying dragon and the charred corpse of an unauthorized – and suspiciously well armed – trespasser. Beside the dragon are five newborn dragonets, four dead, one barely breathing. Years later Jake reflects that only someone like himself, raised in the park, and still grieving his own mother, would have been able to recognize the mother in the dying dragon’s eye. Responding to that imperative, he picks up the tiny dragonet and slips it – her – inside his shirt.

It’s a gruelling introduction to parenthood, adopting an baby creature – an embryo, really, since McKinley’s dragons are marsupials – that is kettle-hot to the touch and yet must have constant skin contact. As with Sunshine and her vampire, Jake gives detail, of the burns, the exhaustion, the chronic headaches that he eventually discovers are a consequence of the dragons’ (yes, plural) attempts to communicate. The uncertainty of the new parent is magnified by the complete lack of information on even the most basic care. His absorption with Lois’ needs leave him barely aware of the rest of humanity for months. His isolation is heightened by the need for secrecy: contradictions within the law concerning dragons – exemplifying human ambivalence towards them – make Jake’s adopting and raising Lois as much a criminal act as the poacher’s murder of her mother and siblings. Now the park visitors, social workers and educators whom he has hitherto regarded as a mere nuisance are the enemy. While Jake struggles through early parenthood, the park is besieged by the lawyers and supporters of the dead poacher’s wealthy and unforgiving parents. And as Jake makes a painful, incomplete, and imperfect breakthrough with Lois’ elders – another question, how do you communicate when you don’t even have a modality in common, much less a language – the park comes under literal siege.

Dragonhaven ends hopefully with members of both species continuing to build a relationship, despite their lack of a common language, through shared experience – an investment in goodwill that may end the dragons’ decline into extinction, as well as compelling humanity to better itself. Sunshine ends more ambiguously. One unusual young woman has ventured to build a relationship with one unusual vampire, but there is no evidence yet that it can or will influence humanity’s fate. There are also many unanswered questions: about Sunshine’s father and grandmother, who disappeared in the Voodoo wars of a decade before, about the connection between her family and the vampires, about whether or not she carries non-human blood and dangerous magic from that – possibly the reason for her mother’s intense and annoying protectiveness and SOF’s interest – about Con’s nature and his difference from other vampires, about Sunshine’s boyfriend Mel, tattooed motorcycle mechanic and possible mage, and a man whose surface is surely not all … Though in all honesty, I’m torn between wanting explanations and being convinced that it’s just perfect as it is – a book that has every right to hold on to its mysteries, even beyond the ending.

When: Thu 12:30
Title:  Bio-Ethics
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Judy T. Lazar, Laura Anne Gilman,
Russell Blackford, Tomoko Masuda
Moderator:  Laura Anne Gilman
Description:  Medical experiments, drug companies, cloning, insurance,
bookies and you.

When: Fri 12:30
Title:  Alison Sinclair Signing
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair
Duration:  0:30 hrs:min
Language:  English

When: Fri 20:00
Title:  Mad Social Scientists
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Sparks, Shariann Lewitt
Moderator:  Sparks
Description:  Why do the chemists get all the fun? Why do you have to
be a physicist to destroy the world? The panellists discuss the
possibility of using social science to destroy the universe.

When: Sun 10:00
Title:  Science for SF Writers
All Participants:  Julie E. Czerneda, Alison Sinclair, David Clements,
David D. Levine
Moderator:  David Clements
Description:  Where can you get crash courses on science for science
fiction writers? Is it actually useful?

When: Sun 11:00
Title:  Food for Writers
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Jon Singer, Sharon Lee, Debra
Doyle
Moderator:  Jon Singer
Description:  So you have 90000 words to write, tthree months to do it
in, and the fridge is bare. What foods keep you going?

When: Mon 10:00
Title:  Author Reading
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Edward Willett, Heidi Lampietti

Thought in response to Jo Walton's blog post on the Left Hand of Darkness and the ensuing discussion: To me the question at the center of Left Hand of Darkness was always, 'if you take away gender, what's left' – or as Le Guin herself put it it 'is gender necessary'. Which makes it a touch ironic that it has come to be seen as the prototypic book 'about' gender. In my course, a few years ago, on a history of Modern Europe, I was introduced to the concept of 'enclosure' as a societal strategy for managing disruptive elements – it seems to me that Le Guin practiced a kind of narrative enclosure of gender in LHD in her invention of kemmer, to free her to write about other things. What went out were aspects of the masculine, epitomized by warlike behavior, but also certain aspects of the feminine (a thought I must unpack further). What remained were politics, culture, creativity, imagination, love, vision and sacrifice, not even the complete list but already a grand lot.