cool things

[kindkit]

1) Relevant to my interests and perhaps to yours is Kai Ashante Wilson's essay Whither Queer: a Genre At Midlife and a Rec-List. Wilson looks at an issue I've talked about a lot: the historical lack of queer male characters in sff, and the current glut of queer male characters . . . written by and largely for women.

I had moments of intense recognition reading this piece (Judith Tarr! making note of books with queer men and hoping to stumble into them in used book stores!), and also moments of disconnect, because I've been involved in fic fandom for 20 years and Wilson has not; he is intensely skeptical of the influence of fanfic on contemporary sff. I hate it when people use "fanfic" to mean "writing I don't like," and Wilson does a certain amount of that here. He never entirely specifies what these fanficcy tendencies in sff are, either.

And yet, I can't say I entirely think he's wrong. When I read contemporary sff by younger authors (not just the queer male stuff, either), it does feel fanficcy to me, in ways I too find hard to pin down but often don't love. I read the first few paragraphs of Gideon the Ninth in a sample somewhere and bounced hard off that fanfic voice. (One of the few specific things Wilson mentions is ironic banter.) A lot of m/m relationships in contemporary sff are written using fanfic tropes and a kind of fundamental narrative structure or assumption that, again, I can't pin down, but it feels like slash fic to me. *shrugs*

I think part of what gets my hackles up, when people use "it's like fanfic" as criticism, is that I immediately think of the kinds of fanfic I enjoy. I forget that there's a ton of fanfic I don't enjoy but that is hugely popular, and that, I fear, is what's influencing professionally published sff these days. Anyway, I'd love to hear what other folks think of Wilson's piece.

As for his recs list, there's not much on it that I didn't know about, but I'm pleased to see Melissa Scott there (twice!)--Wilson's criticism of "the female gaze" in queer-male-focused sff does not boil down to "doesn't like women writers"--and also trans male writer Billy Martin (publishing as Poppy Z. Brite). Wilson's discussions of all the books are illuminating--I may have to give Water Horse another try--even if you don't agree with his general approach.


2) Samba Schutte, the actor who plays Roach in Our Flag Means Death, has designed an awesome t-shirt to raise money for True Colors United, an organization that fights homelessness among LGBTQ youth. OFMD-inspired without quite being referential (or copyright-infringing; I doubt David Jenkins would object but HBO/Max is evil). Beware the checkout process, though--it steers you hard to sign up for Shop Pay, a Shopify-based instant payment thing. You can avoid it by checking out as a guest, but I got confused and managed to sign myself up accidentally. Must remember to de-activate it once my order has processed.

Comments

[sovay]

A lot of m/m relationships in contemporary sff are written using fanfic tropes and a kind of fundamental narrative structure or assumption that, again, I can't pin down, but it feels like slash fic to me.

If you do manage to pin it down, I would be interested in hearing about it. In the meantime, I'll check out Wilson.

[edit] I really like the variety of his list, both in terms of authorship and material—I don't think I had heard of Keith Ridgway's Hawthorn and Child, which sounds of definite interest to me, or John Keene at all. I also liked his point about instantiation.

[edit edit] I don't have a lot of useful thoughts about the state of contemporary speculative fiction, because for reasons still not clear to me I seem to have disengaged from a lot of it over the last four to five years; it's weird.

an awesome t-shirt to raise money for True Colors United

Thank you; I really appreciate knowing about this shirt.

[hagsrus]

Interesting article, thanks!

Drawing Blood was the first Poppy Z Brite I read, was impressed, but what I really fell in love with is the series of Rickey and Gman low-key New Orleans chefs. Given up hoping Dead Shrimp Blues will ever be written, alas!

[cathexys]

That was a great article and I found a couple of books I both hadn't read before but now want to read! Thank you :)

[thawrecka]

I think basically the vast majority of 'fanfic tropes' people mention are actually romance tropes, so it's more that people are getting tropey romance elements in their SF/F.

[delphi]

Thanks for the t-shirt link! Also thanks for the Wilson link, which I'll be taking away to think further on.

I read almost exclusively SFF as a kid/teen/early 20-something, and then largely stopped. (Of the authors mentioned in the essay, I still really vibe with Samuel R. Delany's work - and I was very into Billy Martin's books as a teen but the appeal didn't stick for me when I got older, personally.) In retrospect, the accessible metaphorical queerness of SFF and the way actual queer content could sneak onto the shelves and be found by way of the Lambda Awards list that secretly lived in my wallet back in the day was a big part of that.

In the last few years, I've kept meaning to get back into reading more SFF or trying out romance, and the unprecedented amount of queer material in those genres has been a major motivating factor. But I just keep bouncing off almost everything I try, in a way that I generally haven't with the queer lit that has genre elements but generally gets positioned more on the literary side of the shelf.

I've been reading fanfic pretty much unceasingly for the last 25 years, but I'm aware that I read at the fringes of it. As a result, I know what I'm bouncing off in both published queer SFF and a lot of more popular fanfic, but I honestly can't tell if the queer SFF I'm trying is too fanficcy, or if both it and 'mainstream' fanfic have become more influenced by the romance genre and modern mainstream YA, or if romance and YA themselves were influenced by fanfic first, or if it's all just an expression of some bigger influence of internet age marketing forces.

[silveradept]

There's definitely a feel of "I'm going to recommend you the good stuff, rather than the pablum for teenagers and tenderqueers" in the article, even as he points out the places where the stuff he's recommending hasn't aged well or the authors have turned out to be less than upstanding people. It seems like when he's objecting to "fan fic" in stories, it's both about content and structure.

Content-wise, I think the "stop getting your romance tropes in my fantasy / spec fic" suggestion is an accurate one, especially for someone who is concerned about women writing queer men. There's still some underlying "boys' club" mentality when someone wants to say that they want hard science fiction or epic fantasy and they don't want it to be tainted by love stories or romance things, and an influx of women into those spaces is almost always accompanied by accusations of bringing romance tropes (or, in this case, slash fic goggles) into places where they aren't wanted, or that the genre is being watered down so that women and teenagers will find the stories acceptable and desirable. The recommendation that's basically about higher-register prose also feels like making an objection that fantasy is becoming too approachable and accessible as a genre and instead needs to be gatekept more so that fans will appreciate the good stuff instead of an endless diet of drek. (Note the "I've given up on science fiction since Delaney stopped writing it," which suggests a complaint about how SF has stopped being about extrapolating science of the new into a future situation and building a world from there that takes the science fiction as science fact.)

Structure-wise, it seems like the objection is to stories that follow a convention of nearly constant build, then a big peak and a sharp drop-off afterward, since fanfic audiences seem interested in their slow burns and not as much in what happens after they finally get all the way from friends (or enemies) to lovers, even if the narrative arc would like it to continue and explore the fallout from the decisions that get made. If the structuring of the story is around how the characters interact with each other, and there's a plot advancing in the background as this happens that the characters are contributing to, that reads differently than if the characters' primary function is to fulfill the plot that's central to the story, and any development that happens for them is carefully orchestrated in the gaps between the plot beats, as a filler that is supposed to also help set up the eventual plot payoff. "Fanfic" style is often character-centric to a strong degree because canon sources and materials tend to be plot-centric instead, and a lot of fic is about exploring spaces left behind, and speculating on how the characters might react to different situations as presented to them. I think it's telling how the recommendations prefer not to mention characters or characterization if he can get away with praising some other aspect instead.

The critique of the female gaze sounds like a certain amount of "I don't like being objectified, and I don't like being fetishized, and a whole lot of stories about queen men written by women do both," and some of the "fanfic" objection might also some from the stereotype that there's so much m/m material out there because there are a lot of women out there writing it with specific ideas, idealizations, and rose-colored glasses about what it's like being a queer man. (And possibly also inserting their ideas about who tops and who bottoms, too.)