So I don't pay much attention to tempests in teapots, but sometimes they force their attentions on me, and I became aware that some reality show on A&E (about makers of duck calls? Seriously?) was having one when one of the actors/subjects made some ignorant remarks and A&E suspended him and then fast food chain Chik-Fil-A got involved somehow (good heavens, my burning need to Make Things Up can readily be understood as an attempt to live in a world that makes some kind of rational sense) and apparently now the ignorant have won and whats-his-name is back on air. Or something. Excuse me for not researching details more; I can contemplate frog falls, time travel, and dragons, but this kind of nonsense bends my brain too much, and the details are not relevant to the main topic here today.
This is not, technically, a censorship issue, since A&E is not a government body. Whats-his-name has a Constitutionally-protected right to say bigoted ignorant things, and A&E has an equally Constitutionally-protected right to disassociate itself from his bigotry and ignorant, and other bigoted and ignorant people have a right to rally behind him and none of it addresses any important issue, but rather distracts from them. You would think that we, as a species, would have learned by now that telling people to shut up makes them talk louder, and moreover gives them grounds on which to feel aggrieved and persecuted - even, or especially, when, as in this case, the speaker belongs to a powerful group and has been abusing his free speech to denigrate a less powerful one. When we tell such people to shut up, we make them stronger and don't help matters any. The constructive thing to do is to attempt to educate them. You can't force someone to become educated, but you can use the attempt to generate fruitful discussions and do good things all around him - and that works (albeit slowly) and has other incidental benefits - specifically, in actually lessening the oppression of an oppressed group.
I'm not a filmmaker or screenwriter and have no basis for pitching any of the following ideas to A&E, but any one of them would be more fruitful than trying to silence anyone, in that they expose more people to the denigrated group, decrease the level of ignorance, give members of that group a validated media presence, increase the diversity of media representation, and provide a potentially fruitful stage for demonstrating (rather than merely talking about) the humanity and legitimacy of different lifestyles and interpretations of basic values.
1) Recruit homosexual members of the subcultures addressed in the show to appear on a regular basis, generating both the personal conflict people who like reality shows appear to enjoy, and the softening-by-exposure that regularly happens when bigots meet the objects of their bigotry in the flesh and begin to perceive them as human beings rather than abstractions. Any decent person who, raised with a prejudice, meets on terms of equality - in which common courtesy is demanded of them - with those against whom he is prejudiced, will learn better if not subject to enough authoritative pressure to counter it. Even Hitler said that "everybody has his 'one good Jew,'" which was why the first step in the Final Solution was to separate the victims from the general population.
2) Start a new reality show, scheduled immediately after the one in question, following the fortunes of a group of Christians who interpret the Bible very differently from the folks who think God's love is conditional. I bet the Metropolitan Community Church could hook them up with any number of active, inclusive Christians living their faith in ways at least as interesting as the vicissitudes of the duck call business. A ministry to "thrown away" teens booted out of their homes for no reason other than an unacceptable gender identity and shunned by standard modes of public assistance (which treat all homeless teens as either delinquents or runaways) would be compelling enough for any audience.
3) Screen movies by members of neglected subcultures. Actively solicit the work of gay, bi, and transgender artists covering parts of life usually considered from heterosexual points of view: love stories, obviously, but also family and workplace dramas, animal stories, tales of midlife crisis or personal disaster, science fiction, mystery, and so on. Ditto, of course, work by and about people of color. By the way, did you know that it's possible to be a person of color and queer? Feminist and Mexican and Protestant? Mix it up, for pity's sake!
4) Seek out and develop properties which actually examine, rather than perpetuating cliches about, the lives and opinions of religious people. There is nothing vague, wishy-washy, or boring about the ways in which people interpret whatever scriptures they use, nor how they go about reconciling their imperfect selves with their principles. Yet serious treatment of religion in fiction is often left up to the most narrow, least talented artists who can't produce anything better than a tract. I would point you to The God Box, by Alex Sanchez, as the sort of thing that is ripe for a wider audience; featuring a closeted gay boy involved in the cruel lie of a relationship with a girl because he believes the prejudices he's been raised under, and an uncloseted Hispanic gay boy who is willing, even eager, to debate scripture with all comers. We could also use more ecumenical works illustrating in a realistic and engaging manner how the practical ethics of all the major religions align so much better than you'd think from the savage ways people fight over dogma. Most dogmas, looked at objectively, are simply silly; but the Golden Rule is sensible, practical, and universal.
5) Hunt up the overlooked queerness of history, and build entertainment properties around them. It's great that we're finally getting a star-vehicle biopic about Alan Turing and his unjust persecution; but how many similar stories lurk in the unjust corners of history? Did you even know that the first American soldier wounded in our interference in Iraq was (and still is, I'm happy to say) a gay man?
Representation is important. We all look for our reflections; we all model ourselves on those we recognize as similar to ourselves; we all feel oppressed and repressed and lonely if we can't find such models; we all mutilate ourselves when we try to change ourselves to match existing models that don't quite fit. Giving space on the cultural stage to as many different models as possible is much, much more productive than trying to hustle bad models off the stage.
Showing posts with label Idea Garage Sale: Series. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Idea Garage Sale: Series. Show all posts
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Annihilating Time and Space for Fun and Profit
One of my favorite themes is time travel. The prospect of full immersion in another time attracts me like open reading matter attract cats. I've thought about it enough to have a consistent, yet flexible, concept of how it needs to work for my stories; settled the predestination/paradox problem to my own satisfaction (though it's surprisingly difficult to get people to break out of their preconceptions enough to grasp my simple solution); and generally am comfortable with doing it. From a writing perspective, the main work in writing such a story now involves doing the research, evolving the characters and plot that arise naturally from the research, getting the butt in the chair - and, eventually, pitching/selling the damn thing, which is always the hardest part and no one wants to hear me whine about it.
But one aspect of the time travel concept remains largely unaddressed, and the gap is glaring. But it's so far removed from my own motivation for time traveling, that I have a hard time approaching it.
One of the technical difficulties of time travel, normally handwaved, is that the earth moves constantly through space. Not only does it orbit the sun, but the solar system moves through the galaxy, which in turn moves through the universe. If you go back in time a year, or a hundred years, or eleven millennia, without shifting in space (as my protagonists generally appear to do), you wind up in the vacuum of space where the earth is going to be at the time you leave. And if you go back in time and simultaneously shift in space (as so many books have people doing, with modern children winding up in Classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Medieval France, etc.) it'd take an astronomer and a high-powered computer to run the data to arrive safely.
An effective time travel method is also, ipso facto, an effective method for traversing or bypassing vast regions of space.
Which means you should be able to repurpose the method in order to enable instantaneous interstellar travel.
That's - a pretty freaking huge concept. Arguably, huger than would fit into one book; though one of the pleasures of speculative fiction is the way large numbers of mind-bending concepts can be evoked and compressed into a single work as backdrop.
This connection is hinted at in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which both time and space are spindled, folded, and mutilated as the plot/comedy requires and "Infinite Improbability Drive" covers a multitude of contingencies (well, an infinite number) - but the Guide is a special case.
You could spend a career writing a loose series, either setting-based like Darkover or character-based like the Vorkosigan Saga, exploring the consequences of such a technology. One book could depict the experimental phase, as the Laws of Paradox and Free Will are formulated; any number could be spent on the Exploratory Phase; the political, economic, and social ramifications would run constantly in the background as plot complicators. Ancient cultures. New planets. Ancient cultures on new planets. Rivals forming alliances with the same culture in different eras. Extreme anthropology, with "experimental archeology" taking on a whole new meaning.
The author would have terrifyingly few limits. Success would mean a terrifying professional commitment. Disappointing sales on the first couple of books would mean a frustratingly curtailed creative experience.
I wish I'd stop having Big Ideas.
But one aspect of the time travel concept remains largely unaddressed, and the gap is glaring. But it's so far removed from my own motivation for time traveling, that I have a hard time approaching it.
One of the technical difficulties of time travel, normally handwaved, is that the earth moves constantly through space. Not only does it orbit the sun, but the solar system moves through the galaxy, which in turn moves through the universe. If you go back in time a year, or a hundred years, or eleven millennia, without shifting in space (as my protagonists generally appear to do), you wind up in the vacuum of space where the earth is going to be at the time you leave. And if you go back in time and simultaneously shift in space (as so many books have people doing, with modern children winding up in Classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Medieval France, etc.) it'd take an astronomer and a high-powered computer to run the data to arrive safely.
An effective time travel method is also, ipso facto, an effective method for traversing or bypassing vast regions of space.
Which means you should be able to repurpose the method in order to enable instantaneous interstellar travel.
That's - a pretty freaking huge concept. Arguably, huger than would fit into one book; though one of the pleasures of speculative fiction is the way large numbers of mind-bending concepts can be evoked and compressed into a single work as backdrop.
This connection is hinted at in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which both time and space are spindled, folded, and mutilated as the plot/comedy requires and "Infinite Improbability Drive" covers a multitude of contingencies (well, an infinite number) - but the Guide is a special case.
You could spend a career writing a loose series, either setting-based like Darkover or character-based like the Vorkosigan Saga, exploring the consequences of such a technology. One book could depict the experimental phase, as the Laws of Paradox and Free Will are formulated; any number could be spent on the Exploratory Phase; the political, economic, and social ramifications would run constantly in the background as plot complicators. Ancient cultures. New planets. Ancient cultures on new planets. Rivals forming alliances with the same culture in different eras. Extreme anthropology, with "experimental archeology" taking on a whole new meaning.
The author would have terrifyingly few limits. Success would mean a terrifying professional commitment. Disappointing sales on the first couple of books would mean a frustratingly curtailed creative experience.
I wish I'd stop having Big Ideas.
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: A Display Piece
This one is not mine to give away. I'm just putting it up for show.
One of the many interesting people I talked to at the Paleoamerican Odyssey conference was (if I have all my information correct, and I think I do, but it's hard to keep track of names at a conference) Kelly R. Monteleone, who was presenting a poster showing a process of winnowing down the vastness of Beringia into a range of "most promising places to look for sites," including offshore sites. Since Beringia is mostly under the Arctic Ocean now, this is important work to do - underwater archeology is difficult and expensive enough when you do it in Florida or Texas; when you do it in Alaska, Siberia, and points between you want to be able to go straight to what you want when you finally commit to a dive, or even to sending out a boat with fancy technology to see through the water and ocean deposits to narrow down "most likely place" to "place where you'll definitely find something or other."
Since I got to her poster during a slow period in the poster room (these were rare; everyone wanted to see everything and it was hard to move a lot of the time) we had a little bit of conversation as well as her explaining the poster, and - as often happens when people find out what I do - she told me she had an idea for a children's book herself, but didn't mind if I stole it. She said she kept thinking, What if - you took an artifact, made in Siberia, and it got used and reused and handed down and lost and salvaged and repurposed and eventually wound up on the northwest coast of North America? You'd do it as series of connected short stories, illustrating the nature of the trip (which was almost certainly not conceived by the people involved as a trip at all, certainly not as a single one) and also how the nature, use, and meaning of an artifact, presumably made out of a rare resource that needed to be conserved, can change over time. By the time it reached North America, it would almost certainly have lost its practical value and gained some less tangible, but more vital, meaning, as objects that survive use by our ancestors do; until it is finally definitively lost, discarded, or destroyed. Perhaps eventually to be found by someone like her.
This, I believe, is a good and workable idea; and I also believe that she is the only one who can write it. She can't yet, because it's not ripe. She needs more information - which she is uniquely positioned to get if she pursues this line of inquiry - even to determine what the object is, much less who used it in what different ways and what kinds of stories it figures in over time. It could take her entire career to write it.
And that's fine. There's no point going off half-cocked with something like this, especially when writing isn't the center of your professional life. You have to let it get ripe.
If she keeps holding this in the back of her mind, she might sit down twenty, or thirty, or forty years from now, maybe on retirement, and find all the stories fully-formed in her head, ready to pour out of her in nearly final form. She might pick up an object in the lab one day and realize, This is it. This is the Thing that connects the stories.
This sort of thing happens.
So that idea you keep returning to - don't give up on it. Hang onto it. Take it out and turn it over in your hands sometimes, note how it's slowly transforming, swelling up and changing colors and acquiring an appetizing smell.
Be ready to pick it, the moment it comes ripe.
One of the many interesting people I talked to at the Paleoamerican Odyssey conference was (if I have all my information correct, and I think I do, but it's hard to keep track of names at a conference) Kelly R. Monteleone, who was presenting a poster showing a process of winnowing down the vastness of Beringia into a range of "most promising places to look for sites," including offshore sites. Since Beringia is mostly under the Arctic Ocean now, this is important work to do - underwater archeology is difficult and expensive enough when you do it in Florida or Texas; when you do it in Alaska, Siberia, and points between you want to be able to go straight to what you want when you finally commit to a dive, or even to sending out a boat with fancy technology to see through the water and ocean deposits to narrow down "most likely place" to "place where you'll definitely find something or other."
Since I got to her poster during a slow period in the poster room (these were rare; everyone wanted to see everything and it was hard to move a lot of the time) we had a little bit of conversation as well as her explaining the poster, and - as often happens when people find out what I do - she told me she had an idea for a children's book herself, but didn't mind if I stole it. She said she kept thinking, What if - you took an artifact, made in Siberia, and it got used and reused and handed down and lost and salvaged and repurposed and eventually wound up on the northwest coast of North America? You'd do it as series of connected short stories, illustrating the nature of the trip (which was almost certainly not conceived by the people involved as a trip at all, certainly not as a single one) and also how the nature, use, and meaning of an artifact, presumably made out of a rare resource that needed to be conserved, can change over time. By the time it reached North America, it would almost certainly have lost its practical value and gained some less tangible, but more vital, meaning, as objects that survive use by our ancestors do; until it is finally definitively lost, discarded, or destroyed. Perhaps eventually to be found by someone like her.
This, I believe, is a good and workable idea; and I also believe that she is the only one who can write it. She can't yet, because it's not ripe. She needs more information - which she is uniquely positioned to get if she pursues this line of inquiry - even to determine what the object is, much less who used it in what different ways and what kinds of stories it figures in over time. It could take her entire career to write it.
And that's fine. There's no point going off half-cocked with something like this, especially when writing isn't the center of your professional life. You have to let it get ripe.
If she keeps holding this in the back of her mind, she might sit down twenty, or thirty, or forty years from now, maybe on retirement, and find all the stories fully-formed in her head, ready to pour out of her in nearly final form. She might pick up an object in the lab one day and realize, This is it. This is the Thing that connects the stories.
This sort of thing happens.
So that idea you keep returning to - don't give up on it. Hang onto it. Take it out and turn it over in your hands sometimes, note how it's slowly transforming, swelling up and changing colors and acquiring an appetizing smell.
Be ready to pick it, the moment it comes ripe.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Idea Garage Sale: Those Little Toss-Offs
This sort of thing happens to me a lot.
I'm reading a simblr (a tumbler site devoted primarily to pics from one's Sims game) in which the poster reveals the randomly-assigned name of her NPC Master Vampire, Count Jeffrey May. I respond: "Or, he may not. My own vampire's name is Count Ralph." Because it tickles me no end to have a Master Vampire named Count Ralph and I take every opportunity I can to tell people who might be even a tiny bit interested. She responds in turn that Count Ralph needed to partner with a werewolf named Moon Moon, to which I return: "Count Ralph and Moon Moon. Together they fight crime. I can see it."
And as I hit Post I think: "How is this not already a series on the CW?"
I don't mean Count Ralph and Moon Moon, specifically, but a vampire/werewolf detective team? That's got blinking neon lights all over it. Two hot leads, either very bromancy for the huge slash* audience out there or a female vampire and a male werewolf; either way they can have all sorts of power and interspecies political issues; supernatural framework; vampires and werewolves both come with huge wells of cultural capital to draw on and recombine in fresh ways; detective shows are always popular; if Supernatural really is in its final season the CW will have an open slot to fill - it could totally work!
Most fen toss off some perfectly viable concept like this as a joke every two or three fannish conversations. If you think about it, you've probably got a dozen or so kicking around your subconscious and/or your circle of friends right now. Why not pull one out and try to develop it?
Why not? Stupider ideas have hit it big. (I won't cite examples as I'm sure you have lots of your own, which may or may not correspond to mine, and I don't want to start any taste wars.)
*Though originally referring to any fanfic highlighting a fantasy romantic pairing between two characters, the term "slash" has come to mean specifically male homosexual relationship fanfic, as in "Kirk/Spock." Most slash fans are straight women.
I'm reading a simblr (a tumbler site devoted primarily to pics from one's Sims game) in which the poster reveals the randomly-assigned name of her NPC Master Vampire, Count Jeffrey May. I respond: "Or, he may not. My own vampire's name is Count Ralph." Because it tickles me no end to have a Master Vampire named Count Ralph and I take every opportunity I can to tell people who might be even a tiny bit interested. She responds in turn that Count Ralph needed to partner with a werewolf named Moon Moon, to which I return: "Count Ralph and Moon Moon. Together they fight crime. I can see it."
And as I hit Post I think: "How is this not already a series on the CW?"
I don't mean Count Ralph and Moon Moon, specifically, but a vampire/werewolf detective team? That's got blinking neon lights all over it. Two hot leads, either very bromancy for the huge slash* audience out there or a female vampire and a male werewolf; either way they can have all sorts of power and interspecies political issues; supernatural framework; vampires and werewolves both come with huge wells of cultural capital to draw on and recombine in fresh ways; detective shows are always popular; if Supernatural really is in its final season the CW will have an open slot to fill - it could totally work!
Most fen toss off some perfectly viable concept like this as a joke every two or three fannish conversations. If you think about it, you've probably got a dozen or so kicking around your subconscious and/or your circle of friends right now. Why not pull one out and try to develop it?
Why not? Stupider ideas have hit it big. (I won't cite examples as I'm sure you have lots of your own, which may or may not correspond to mine, and I don't want to start any taste wars.)
*Though originally referring to any fanfic highlighting a fantasy romantic pairing between two characters, the term "slash" has come to mean specifically male homosexual relationship fanfic, as in "Kirk/Spock." Most slash fans are straight women.
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