One of the things I was proudest to accomplish while at the University of Iowa was establishing an undergraduate curriculum for science fiction writing. I taught it for two years, first while a TA as a proof-of-concept class within the Fiction Writing track, then as an adjunct with an official course title: Writing and Reading Science Fiction. These classes were popular with students, and I was thrilled that even after I left the University the course continued, taught by Van Choojitarom. And it continues still, now under the steady professorial hand of Willa Richards. By the time she’s done with it, there will be a graduating class of Hawkeyes who’ve never known a semester when a course on writing genre fiction wasn’t offered by their university. That is perhaps the most satisfying thing I’ve yet achieved in my career. So thanks, again, to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and University of Iowa for championing science fiction, and to Van and Willa for keeping it going.
Category: Blog
Welcome to Vault 510, my creation in Bethesda Softwork’s new iPhone game, Fallout Shelter. The people here are happy. They have plentiful food, water, and power. They have a medical bay and a science lab. They have a radio station for entertainment, and a strong door protecting them from the uncivilized, irradiated wastes outside. On those rare occasions when raiders do break in, they have powerful weapons with which to defend themselves. And when they’ve been working too long, they can retire to the well-appointed living quarters for some romantic company. There is no jealousy in Vault 510, and as little incestuous behavior as I, their Overseer, can manage with a population this small. There are also no gay people, and apparently no birth control, because every liaison results in a pregnancy. Children scamper through the corridors, and most of the women are cheerfully pregnant.
That last bit shouldn’t be a problem, but it totally is.
All the Bethesda games I’ve played have had the unwritten rule that children shall not be harmed. In games like Fallout 3 and presumably the upcoming Fallout 4, when there is violence children will run, scream, and cower, but never get injured. They are functionally invulnerable. The player can fire bullets at them, and the only response will be a young voice declaring it mean. This is a perfectly defensible choice on Bethesda’s part, and they’ve carried it into this game as well.
The trouble is, in Fallout Shelter adult pregnant women get treated the same way as children. When a fire breaks out, or there’s an infestation of radroaches, non-pregnant women will calmly start dealing with it alongside the men, but pregnant women will run away and hide. They can’t handle emergencies at all. Presumably they act like this because they are considered to have an inviolable child inside of them (which is dubious enough), but the result is that pregnant women are thus significantly less capable. As I am trying to keep this bottled society as functional and happy as possible, this makes me have to do several uncomfortable things:
- In the early game I am incentivized to keep women pregnant as often as possible because it (a) makes them happy and (b) raises the vault’s population and thus my labor pool.
- I have to take weapons out of the hands of women and give them to men, because even if a woman is holding a combat shotgun, if she’s pregnant and a roach appears she will run and hide rather than shooting at it.
- I have to separate the pregnant women and lean toward having male-dominated working environments, because if an emergency breaks out and all the pregnant women flee, the situation could spread, whereas it will be contained if the room is staffed primarily by men or non-pregnant women.
The mechanics of this game are forcing me, as Overseer, to institute patriarchal norms into my society. If I want my vault dwellers to survive, I have to disempower pregnant women. And since the women want to be pregnant and I’m incentivized to keep them that way, this functionally means disempowering all women. While I’m otherwise enjoying this game, the post-apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout Shelter insists on being a big ol’ boys club. I really don’t like that.
Where’s Imperator Furiosa when you need her?
Here’s the relevant bit of the CT scan of my wrist. As the radiologist put it, “a mildly displaced intra-articular fracture involves the palmar aspect of the triquetrum.” The orthopedist explained that sometimes when a joint receives a sharp shock, the specific speed and angle can be such that a ligament, instead of tearing and resulting in a sprain, can break off a piece of bone. Apparently this is actually preferable, as bone-to-bone healing is less complicated than ligament-to-bone healing. I’m informed that, since the other bones in my hand are still lined up just fine, I don’t need surgery. The treatment for this is exactly what it would be for a sprain: keep wearing the wrist splint I’m already wearing for up to another four weeks.
You might have noticed I haven’t been posting here much lately. Short version: I got in a bicycle accident and broke my wrist. For the last two weeks my ability to type has been curtailed. It’s starting to feel better, though. Later today I’ll be meeting with an orthopedist to learn if I’m healing properly on my own or am going to require surgery on my hand.
The reading a week ago was fantastic. We had an audience of about 45 people, a table of Asimov’s issues and other books featuring Jessica Reisman’s fiction, and snacks provided by the bookstore. The room was full of strangers, friends, and strangers who I hope will become friends. By the time the reading started it was standing room only.
Jessica read first, with two pieces: an excerpt from her story “The Chambered Eye” in Rayguns Over Texas and all of “Boneshadow” from Phantom Drift. Then Janalyn Guo read a slipstream short story “Soft Breast Mechanism” from Birkensnake that had the crowd cackling with hilarious discomfort. She was tough to follow. I went up last, and read the first three sections of “The New Mother.” To my delight, the audience laughed in all the right places. After, it was all signing and selling and shaking hands, and then a contingent of us made the trip to Spider House cafe down the street for some triumphal drinks. My thanks to Malvern for hosting us, and to everyone who came to the event.
One of the more freeing realizations I’ve come to in adulthood is that I’m allowed to go home when I’m not having fun anymore. I lean introverted, and while I enjoy being around people there comes a point where enjoyment gives way to effort. That’s the very point, now, where I start to make my goodbyes. After years of sticking around for fear of missing out, I’ve become a habitual party leaver. Rather than persist in the hope that external forces will turn my mood around, I take ownership of my experience and call it quits as soon as I run out of social energy. My life has been much improved by this practice.
This past week I decided it was time to leave the hair party.
When I was young my hair was my favorite physical feature. It was dense and soft and I had a lot of it. In those early High School years of awkward longing and crippling anxiety, conspiring to have peers touch and marvel over my excellent hair was an important step towards having actual human contact in my life. But in my early twenties my hairline began a gradual retreat up my scalp, and by my mid twenties the crown of my head began to thin, noticeable if you were looking for it. I dealt with this by getting shorter and more sculpted haircuts and by not thinking about it too much, which carried me a good few years. But as my hairline receded from the corners of my forehead, the erosion fronts curled in to meet each other, leaving a poodle-puff island of bang hair it was increasingly impossible to make look non-ridiculous. Then, a stark Facebook vision: a picture from the most recent International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in which I appear in the background, on the far side of a decorative lamp, facing away from the camera. Lit from above my bald spot glowed, alien as part of someone else’s body. I looked at that photograph and thought, “I’m not having fun anymore.”
I went in to my local Bird’s Babershop, sat in Susi’s chair, and told her she had free reign to experiment. She tried a few options, taking my hair off in layers, before finally deciding, “I think you’ll look best if we just go for a buzz cut.” Thus:
Response from everyone else has been fairly positive so far. Everyone, that is, save for my parents. My mother hates it, though loves me enough that she is trying gamely to pretend she doesn’t. And for my part, I’m still shocking myself whenever I see a reflection and trying to reconcile myself to a differently shaped head on top of my shadow, but am overall excited. A whole new look means whole new vectors for self expression and presentation. I get to experiment with different beard lengths to go with my cropped top. I’m learning my wardrobe anew–what works now, what doesn’t. And, since head sunburn is now a thing I have to concern myself with, my newest wardrobe addition is my first grownup hat.
I think this new party’s going to work out okay.
If you’ll be in Austin on the fourth of April, consider coming to A Speculative Evening at Malvern Books to hear me, Janalyn Guo, and Jessica Reisman read our fiction. Malvern is a lovely little bookstore that specializes in small press books, both fiction and poetry. I’ll be reading from “The New Mother,” and have copies of Asimov’s for sale. Reading starts at 7:00pm. Hope to see you there.
The trouble with mimetic fiction isn’t that you can tell what’s going to happen (I defy anyone to guess what’s going to happen in Middlemarch, even from half way through) but that you can tell what’s not going to happen. There isn’t going to be an evil wizard. The world isn’t going to be destroyed in Cultural Fugue and leave the protagonist as the only survivor. There aren’t going to be any people who happen to have one mind shared between five bodies. There are unlikely to be shape-changers. In science fiction you can have any kind of story—a romance or a mystery or a reflection of human nature, or anything at all. But as well as that, you have infinite possibility. You can tell different stories about human nature when you can compare it to android nature, or alien nature. You can examine it in different ways when you can write about people living for two hundred years, or being relativistically separated, or under a curse. You have more colours for your palette, more lights to illuminate your scene.
Now the problem with genre fiction is often that writers take those extra lights and colours and splash them around as if the fact that the result is shiny is sufficient, which it unfortunately isn’t. So the most common failing of genre fiction is that you get shallow stories with feeble characters redeemed only by the machinations of evil wizards or the fascinating spaceship economy or whatever. What I want is stories as well written and characterised as Middlemarch, but with more options for what can happen. That’s what I always hope for, and that’s what I get from the best of SF.
–Jo Walton, “What a pity she couldn’t have single-handedly invented science fiction! George Eliot’s Middlemarch,” republished in What Makes This Book So Great
I had a lunch date with a friend Saturday at a popular diner, a place that’s always packed on the weekends. I got there ten minutes early to get our names on the list, then sat reading in the crowded vestibule. But my friend still hadn’t arrived by the time my name crackled out of the speakers in the ceiling. I let the hostess know I was still waiting on the rest of my party, and she said to just come up and tell her when my friend arrived.
A few minutes later, another host looked over the sign-in sheets, and then his voice boomed over the PA system: “E. J.! Are you still incomplete, E. J.?”
I wanted to deny it, but the answer, unavoidably, was yes.