After waiting around for more than half a year, ALA finally has a new article up. A standards compliant publishing tool for the rest of us. This is of the good - ALA is one of the better webdev ‘zines out there and I was beginning to loose hope that the “winter break” was ever going to end.
Though I gotta say, as nifty as Typepad sounds, I don’t think I’m going to stop hand rolling my stuff. I am just way too much of a masochist.
After watching the recent movie adaption of “The Time Machine” with Bill, we got to talking. First topic of discussion was the fact that the movie, while very pretty to look at, stank like week old fish. Much style, little substance, and no soul. (But every now and then, one really does just want to watch something pretty with no redeeming value, so that’s ok.)
Actually, that discussion happened *during* the movie. After, I started musing about why any modern adaption of Welles’s work was doomed to failure. Well, any modern movie adaption that Hollywood got it’s grubby mitts on. Why? Because even the most venerably old and honored stores, when adapted to movie form, have to get a whole honkin’ load of modern sensibilities dumped into them. Why? ‘Cause you just can’t make a move these days where there’s no happy ending, or an ignoble hero (unless he’s a suave, sexy, anti-hero), or bias (racial, gender, religous, etc…) of any sort being displayed. (Unless these traits reside in the villian. Then it’s ok.)
The problem being that most literature was written in far less “enlightened” times. Early steampunk, and golden/silver age pulp sci-fi authors were products of their times. Which means the can come across to modern readers as crass, sexist, racist, blah blah bliddy blah.
I don’t have a problem with this. I can deal with the fact that very few of the “classic” authors couldn’t write a decent female caracter to save their asses, over idealized “primitive” (non-western) cultures; or conversly, demonized them. To ask that the work of these (mostly dead) people conform to a current definition of “proper” (or worse, faking that PC-ness not out of a craven desire to avoid giving offense, but out of the crass desire for even more profits) kills the very story they are trying to make a buck off of.
When we write about the future, we are almost never correct. What we are envisioning, is a possible world shaped completely by what we know *right now*. Many of the steampunk stories were rendered obsolete when the atom was split and the old euro-centric political hegemony was replaced by the two nuclear superpowers. The golden age writers, basing much of their work on what was current (scientifically and politically) in the 30’s through the 50’s, were unable to forsee what changes global computer networks would wreak upon sciety, and on and on. Even William Gibson’s Neuromancer says more about the wide eyed “what-if” period of the early internet than it does about the world today. (Which it was, in theory, actually describing.)
So Sci-Fi isn’t about the future at all. And this is never so apparent as when we try to take a story that was the product of a very certain era (late 1800’s) and try to make it acceptable to an early 21st century audience. All the oomph gets drained out, and we’re left with pretty people running around.
If I want a sci-fi story that conforms to modern conventions, you know what I’ll do? I’ll go pick up a modern author. (Nancy Kress, Sharon Shinn, Edward Lerner, and Richard Chedwick all come to mind.) But if I *really* want to time travel, I’ll pick up some Welles, Shelley, Doyle, Asimov, or Clarke.
Been thinking about femslash lately, and my goodness but it can be hard to find some good examples. Didn’t used to be quite so hard, but once Xena was done with… poof! No more. All gone. For every good Buffy/Faith or Hermione/Ginny story I find, there are so many more that just suck. And that’s on the good days when there’s a wealth of fem stories to go through.
I guess I’m a very untypical slasher. (Being less interested in the boys than the girls when it comes to looking for fic) Of course, most (though certanly not all) slashers are female and *straight*. (Te comes to mind as an exception) Maybe that has something to do with it. Certanly, a lot of the mainstream media articles about slashfic seem to focus around the whole “straight women writing about gay men” angle.
So I’m thinking, forget about fic for a while, and lets go find some movies with a femslash undertone. Movies where there’s strong girl/girl UST, ST, or (maybe) kissing, but you still have to read between the lines for the relationship. (Meaning, I’m not counting “But I’m A Cheerleader” or “The Totally True Adventures of Two Girls In Love” for this list, ’cause there’s no subtext there. It’s all quite text.)
Hmm… I was hoping I could think of more than that. ::Goes off to ponder:: More to come later. (maybe)