Tag Archives: fiction

I’m watching #Twilight for the first time. This movie is awkward!

My takeaway:

*Breathe…..*

Everyone was jumping out to help her! Everyone was a robot! Exposition overload! Edward had a hard time with words! Carlisle is a mannequin! Jasper is Justin Timberlake circa 1999! Waylon was a weird uncle dude! James barely had any eyebrows! Werewolf dude’s father spoke only in cliches and dad jokes! I don’t know if I want someone to look at me like Edward was looking at Bella in chemistry because his head was shifting wayyyyyyyyyy too much!

*Breathe*

Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon Buries the Queer Folk

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So, Nnedi Okorafor’s “Lagoon” was a good read. Extraterrestrials coming onto the beaches of Lagos, blending in with fantasy creatures and superpowers of West African legend, human characters carving their own pathways in a changing Nigeria.

The one sticking point I have with the novel is the tragic fate of LGBT and gender-nonconforming characters in the novel. If you’ve read it, you know who and what I’m talking about.

I don’t know if anyone has brought it up yet with Ms Okorafor. But basically, ALL of the Nigerian LGBT characters met tragic fates or disappeared for some inexplicable reason at some point in the novel. The cross-dresser Jacobs, the LGBT activists Rome and Seven of the Black Nexus, every gender-nonconforming character.

Yes, Jacobs was unfortunately tied up with trigger-happy 419-scamming types like Moziz, but his entire experience in the novel feels like he played no further role than a dream deferred, a tragic sideshow who would needlessly die at the hands of his homophobic colleague Moziz in order to justify Moziz’s brutal death by extraterrestrial intervention. And the Black Nexus LGBT organization disappears as quickly as it appears.

If there was anything more that I wished from this novel in finishing it, I wish that queer African folks could survive and play a larger role in the unfolding drama.

I think Ms Okorafor made an unfortunate choice in burying her queer folk in the rubble of homophobia rather than letting them see the new day in Nigeria.

“Everworld” by K.A. Applegate

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For a while, I’ve been reading this K.A. Applegate series I found a while back, “Everworld”. I’m on Book 8. A pretty gripping YA book series about four teenagers from Chicago sucked into another universe ruled by old pantheons of gods and monsters by a fifth teen who was born with magic.

However, in Book 7, I don’t think I like how the Orisha are depicted in this. At this point, only Eshu has acted as a character. He is a pursuer who demands animal sacrifice to the orishas from the main characters for entering the orishas’ realm, and basically trolls them by playing with their heads and physics.

Unlike the other pantheons – Norse, Egyptian, Greek, Aztec – only Eshu speaks or shows himself to the reader on behalf of “his brothers and sisters”. Eshu, a trickster orisha who is also the messenger for the pantheon, has no depth for a (demi)god character in this book.

A Racial “Crystal Gems test”

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I was reading locuas642′s Crystal Gems omnibus test for representation of women, and thought back to proposals for Racial Bechdel(-Wallace) tests.

Deggans’ rule recommends the following:

  1. At least two non-white human characters in the main cast…
  2. …in a show that’s not about race.

Alaya Dawn Johnson’s test goes like this:

  1. It has to have two POC in it,
  2. Who talk to each other,
  3. About something other than a white person.

Ars Marginal posted the following test:

  1. At least one named character of color,
  2. Whose primary trait is not their race,
  3. Who does something important besides help a White person.

I also have an interest in whether such a character has a narrative arc of their own, as well as pushing the discussion beyond just 1 or two POC characters in a cast. Some who have discussed the Mako Mori test have criticized how the test is not usually utilized in relation to Mako Mori being a POC character as well as a woman. Basically, I would like to see the conversation about POC in fiction be elevated beyond mere quantity of representation to include the quality of representation.

So here’s my draft of a Racial Crystal Gems test:

  1. A work must have at least four POC characters.
  2. It must pass Deggans’ Rule;
  3. It must pass Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Racial Bechdel-Wallace test;
  4. It must pass the Ars Marginal test;
  5. At least one POC must have a narrative arc of their own, which is not about supporting a white person (literally the racial Mako Mori test);
  6. At least one POC must be meaningful enough to the plot that removing the character would have a significant effect.
  7. Each [major POC] character must pass at least one of these tests, and each test must be passed by at least one [major POC] character; the more times you can repeat the previous step, the better.

Strictly 4 My Blerds

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Here’s an idea, perhaps for fanfiction: bring all the best-known African-American nerds and geeks from television, film and comics together under one roof. To solve a mystery, to find love, to save the world (or some other planet, like America), to go Hunger Games on each other, to break out of a dystopian neighborhood/school together, to do a heist of somebody’s dream, I dunno.

I just want to see all the black nerds (blerds) and geeks to get together in an alternate universe. For once, they won’t be sidekicks and best friends, but the center of the story.

I’ll flesh this out more later.

A quarter-century of civil recognition of same-sex relationships

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Today, 25 years ago, we celebrate the first civil recognition of same-sex couples. On 1 October 1989, Denmark made history with approving a law for gender-neutral “registered partnerships” (registreret partnerskab). Among the first couples to be partnered in civil unions were activists Axel and Eigil Axgil, who had spent most of their 40-year-coupled lives fighting for rights for LGBT people in their country. Another couple that registered their union, Ivan Larsen, an ordained minister of the state-supported Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, and Ove Carlsen, a psychologist, were profiled in this recent BBC Witness clip:

http://emp.bbc.co.uk/emp/embed/smpEmbed.html?playlist=http%3A%2F%2Fplaylists.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fmagazine-29429961A%2Fplaylist.sxml&title=The%20day%20same-sex%20civil%20unions%20became%20legal%20in%20Denmark&product=news

via BBC News – The day same-sex civil unions became legal in Denmark.

What fascinates me about this is how things may have been different if civil unions, rather than marriage, would have remained the popular wisdom. What if the United States had been more accepting to civil unions at the federal level, and had not placed DOMA into place as a bulwark against any federal recognition? Even more so, even in the post-DOMA era of federal recognition for same-sex marriages, the present lack of federal recognition of state-level civil unions is perplexing.

Right now, there are three states which still have only domestic partnerships or civil unions: Wisconsin, Nevada and Colorado. Waiting for the judicial trajectory to move marriage equality to more states still doesn’t speak to the issue of unequal civil recognition of relationships, or the obvious overall federal favoritism to marriage as opposed to civil unions.

I’m of the opinion that marriage and civil unions should both be available as options to both same- and opposite-sex couples, at both federal and state levels.

Video games in public libraries

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I was just thinking about what else that public libraries could host as a service of information to the public. Libraries now serve books, CDs and DVDs, yet libraries still face budget cuts due to lower patronage in the Internet era.

What else can libraries offer that would be appreciated by the public?

I think video game discs and cartridges are the next big information medium that should be hosted at the library. Thankfully, just as I was starting on this post, I came across a CNN column from last year which stated the exact same thing. 

But rather than the good-for-funding angle that Ruben Navarrette brings up in his column, I think that hosting video games would fulfill one of any public library’s core functions in the community: providing access to information by lowering the profit motive from the equation. 

Granted, public libraries have been historically established to provide public access to knowledge, and they have done so (for all ages and levels of education). But at some point, fiction became a section of the typical library that was updated with ever more modern titles, and such titles are as entertaining as they are sources of knowledge (however trivial or vital they may be to the reader). Fiction media in the library was extended when films were donated on DVD and VHS to the typical library (for taking home or to watch in a private booth). 

So why not extend the service of fiction media access in the library even further? Video games, as engaging of the body as they are, are also (often) works of fiction. From a cinematic standpoint, video games allow the player to be visually immersed in the story being depicted (as much as they fuse cinematics and visuals with ludological participation). 

It would do for the fusion of cinematic and ludological entertainment what the earliest public libraries did for book-bound knowledge: take out the profit-making wall from the bridge between the public and the information which they seek to consume. Libraries can provide access to these works of “fiction” without the profit motive. 

Libraries don’t have to specifically focus on physical books, and neither do they need to chuck those books from the shelves. Books, eBooks, PCs, CDs, DVDs, Video game discs – they can all coexist in a venue built for the people’s sensory fulfillment. 

Let’s have more video games and video gaming rooms in public libraries. 

Steamfunk, Sword-and-Soul and Afrocentric Fantasy

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While reading about Black characters and authors within the speculative fiction genres, I came across two terms: “Afrofuturism” and “sword-and-soul”.

I was more familiar with the first term, at least in reading about how African-descended writers incorporated vivid and challenging mishmashes of aesthetics and cultural experiences into their science-fiction writings, including Samuel Delany and the late Octavia Butler. But the latter term – “sword-and-soul” – was something less familiar to me, but it appealed to me a bit more.

“Sword-and-soul?” As in, “sword-and-sorcery”, but with Black people in it, set in Africa?

Then I searched into it, found several articles which helped to explain what is meant by sword-and-soul: “fantasy fiction which involves African/African-descended people and their mythologies in the same way that ‘sword-and-soul’ revolves around people of European descent and their mythology.”

This intrigues me. Finally, a term for the type of fantasy fiction I was looking for, even though the genre has only been revived and expanded from just one writer – Charles Saunders – to an entire publishing label – MVmedia – thanks to an Atlanta-based professional chemist and part-time writer, Milton Davis, who has taken strategic advantage of the e-book era to publish Afrocentric SpecFic.

Finally, we have “sword-and-soul” as another fiction genre to geek out over!

Steamfunk and the Question of Continuity

While we’re on the subject of Black SpecFic, I looked at the subgenre of “steamfunk”.

Again, it’s similarly set in the “steam” era of the 19th and early 20th centuries, just like the pseudo-Victorian “steampunk”.

But that’s it, though. Unlike the striking visual difference between Sword-and-soul and Sword-and-sorcery, the art used in current works of Steamfunk largely harkens to Steampunk’s Victorian-era European aesthetics. Why?

Instead, shouldn’t there be a continuity between steamfunk and African-themed sword-and-soul?

I cite Nickelodeon’s Avatar franchise for its setting in a pan-Asian fictional universe. The first series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, takes place during an earlier period that’s wedged somewhere within ancient/medieval (“sword-and-sorcery”) Asia with a bit of steampunk mixed in at certain points. The second series, The Legend of Korra, takes place 100 years after the Avatar, in a world that is between steampunk and dieselpunk, but still within a very pan-Asian setting and with harkenings to the “past” of sword-and-sorcery.

I think the way that Nickelodeon’s Avatar franchise handles this historic continuity from the medieval to the steam era within a thoroughly pan-Asian fictional universe is a model that can be followed for an “Afrocentric” fictional universe. Avatar, which I guess could be described as “sword-and-chi”, has a sense of alt-history chronology and technological succession that those who write Afrocentric SpecFic really need.

Simply placing Black characters in pseudo-Victorian-era garb, or medieval armor, is not enough. Let’s start with the aesthetic of Sword-and-Soul and work our way forward.

Sword-and-Soul in Fantasy Art

Finally, when talking about aesthetics, I feel that Fantasy Fiction Artworks, especially works which are commercialized, are seriously lacking in the inclusion of People of Color (PoC). The artistic depiction of sword-and-sorcery themes, at least here in the U.S., are typically steeped in medieval European culture and aesthetics. But I think there is precedent in works like Avatar for the medieval aesthetic to be shaken up and made more diverse.

The issue raised by the Racebending.com initiative against the “whitewashing” of lead characters in Nickelodeon’s Avatar franchise brings to mind just how non-diverse that modern fantasy fiction tends to be, or at least the commercial challenge faced by artists and writers of fantasy fiction which is affirmatively diverse in skin color. Avatar is perhaps the most groundbreaking Western-authored fantasy fiction franchise in terms of PoC inclusion, as the story universe of the franchise is set in a highly-inclusive pan-Asia-Pacific setting, pulling together anagramic ethnicities, languages, kingdoms, topologies, geographies, climates, skin pigments, clothing, cuisine and so on from the entire continent and almost all ends of the ocean.

With its ongoing realization of a newer pan-mythos from the entirety and vicinity of Asia, Avatar and other similar franchises have ship-tons-plenty of written history and mythology to draw from.

Unfortunately, as a PoC of African descent, I feel incredibly jealous for this pan-Asia-Pacific setting. I don’t feel that Africa, as a continent, lends as well to such an expansive pan-mythos as does Asia or Europe. Africa doesn’t have the the sort of geographic or climatological expanse that is endemic to the Asian continent, nor does it have the heritage of written language which is endemic to both Asian and European peoples, nor do its peoples – including our ancestors – have the best experience or history of relaying their own mythological, spiritual or artistic canons on their own terms, nor do Africans have the history of mass settlement outside of the continent like Europeans (the slave trade still constitutes the primary historic source of the African diaspora in the Americas).

Hence, for developing a fertile space for fantasy art and fiction, African-descended artists and writers who are conscious about PoC inclusion have more of a reason to improvise and derive. I guess that’s where Sword-and-soul kicks in.

On the Internet

These galleries provide good sources for PoC-affirmative fantasy fiction, and I’ll add more links in the future:

And MVmedia, Milton Davis’ publishing label, is the premiere house for Sword-and-soul fiction. Please check it out.

The Unprogrammable: The border between “Simulation fiction” and “simulation fantasy”

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Since first watching the Digimon: Digital Monsters series in 1999, I’ve been fascinated by the appealing science fiction and science fantasy behind the series.

But with growth in the application of virtual/augmented reality since that time, the number of works of fiction which dramatize virtual/augmented reality has greatly expanded.

One thing I’ve noticed is how a growing number of anime series are set in the drama of players logging into and playing inside MMORPGs. Most often, these series are intended as vehicles for the accompanying MMO franchise, while others are more interested in dramatizing the impact of the MMO – and the means by which the MMO is accessed – impacts the players’ offline lives and relationships.

But it is in this setting that one can find an interesting two-fold phenomenon:

  1. even though a debatable majority of MMORPGs like those depicted in these anime series are “fantasy”-oriented, the series themselves rarely lend themselves to what would quantify as “fantasy” plotlines; and
  2. it technically would not take much for such an anime series to cross the threshold to a “fantasy” plotline, only needing some event or manifestation which does not arise from, but interferes with, the MMO setting.

As far as genres are concerned, the specific niche occupied by works like Sword Art Online, Log Horizon, the .HACK series, Accel World and others which have straddled the fence between fantasy/sword-and-sorcery and science-fiction genres should be allowed to occupy their own specific genre of fiction. These works involve the trappings of sword-and-sorcery fantasy, except that they take place on a real-world-located server or network of servers which allow for programmed (and programmable) “acts of magic” or defiance of the laws of physics to take place.

At the same time, the configuration-centric and usually gameified mechanisms of the virtual world may serve as the means of propulsion and motion for the plot, the presence in-world of artificial intelligence with self-operative autonomy and the means of accessing magic adds a degree of unpredictability and complexity which pushes this niche away from too much of an overriding real-world basis.

It is this combination of a virtual world hosting a sword-and sorcery setting with autonomous AI which makes the border between “simulation fiction” and “simulation fantasy” such a seemingly-random, but critical border.

Breaking it down

With the above, I’m saying that we should understand and appreciate this border within our fictive depictions of virtual reality.

Through works of simulation fiction, we understand that MMORPGs demonstrate the capacity of our ability to program fictional universes of our own making into a virtual existence, to have control over how a virtual universe operates and affects the players, and – in the instance of our losing control over the functions of this universe through bad code or security flaws – how we try to correct errors in the universe through the coding of solutions or the “patching of the hull” of the MMORPG universe.

But through works of simulation fantasy, we could entertain the thought that MMORPGs could have moments in which an agent or event can manifest inside the MMORPG environment without originating from an outside player or being coded as an NPC, agents which are not programmed nor programmable by human fingers but which will affect the human players in mysterious, indelible ways.

And we could entertain the fact that a work from the former genre transforms into the latter as soon as that non-programmed agent, that uncontrollable force, enters the picture.

It could be an alien, or a highly-evolved and suddenly self-aware AI, or even a ghost of a dead player?

What else would potentially constitute the “unprogrammable” in a programmed environment?

Gay werewolves: a compendium

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Being in the furry thing for a bit, I think that the idea of the gay werewolf is a perfect androcentric counterpart to the lesbian vampire, which is why I’m surprised that the gay werewolf hasn’t been as fully utilized as an exploitation trope as the lesbian vampire in the 20th century.
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So I’m glad that someone outside of the furry fandom has gone through the trouble of creating an imaginative painting of Obama turning into a werewolf while playing basketball.


Thankfully, there’s a queer werewolf anthology, a list of gay werewolf works on another LJ, a gay werewolf on Flickr, and (I’m certain) plenty of other extra gay werewolf content to be found through Google.