Hello.

I had big plans for March, but managed to the do the classic thing where you time a bad case of the flu (or, actually, I think it was a bad cold that transitioned into a sinus infection, which I am prone to) so it lines up perfectly with days off of work. I couldn't focus enough to read, let alone write, which was frustrating. I rely heavily on the weekends and holidays/days off for the writing I do. I'm not prolific, but I am steady and getting sick knocked ten working sessions off of my schedule for the year (and also delayed this newsletter by a week).

Back when I was younger and more reckless, I would have tried to force things, but I know that that just makes things worse in the end, prolonging illness while often not leading to good work. The important thing is to get back into it when you're feeling better or, if your chronically ill, when you have a decent day.

That can be difficult to do after an absence, which causes you to lose momentum (which may not be real in sports, but is definitely real when it comes to creative work, especially when writing work that is novella length or longer).

The good news is that towards the end of it I re-read the novella I mentioned in my previous newsletter, and I still like it and will make the investment to revise it and publish it. It needs not just revising, but some major changes to the first three chapters (this often happens to me with first drafts—I write my way into the actual voice and plot and so need to go back and change the beginning); however, I think the structure, tone, and overall nature of the project hold up. Which is nice. That's never a given when you return to a first draft.

Other than that: I have two pieces of criticism I want to write and publish over the next four to six months, and a novel to revise for potential publication in 2027. Here's hoping my time off from work this summer is accompanied by good health.

For this month's newsletter I have a smattering of musing on work I've watched or read plus an analysis that builds off of Jake Casella Brookins's recent work in the Ancillary Review of Books on SF&F award nomination overlaps with the Hugos.

The East Bay-ness of Fremont (2023)

I graduated from high school in Fremont, California, at a time when, for all of its' problems, it was a multicultural mix of working class, blue collar, and white collar families still basking in the fumes of the investment California made in education and the arts in the 1960s and '70s. It was a pretty nice place to live for being a suburb, and when us teenagers got sick of it, we were just a BART ride away from Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco.

That Fremont is long gone, hollowed out in service to Silicon Valley.

But traces still remain, and so while others may have seen 2023 film Fremont, directed by Babak Jalali as a minor, mildly amusing, somewhat political, maybe too cute indie darling, I experienced it as a delightfully wry, rather trenchant piece of political and cultural commentary that warranted its' specific setting.

The official summary is: "Donya, a lonely Afghan refugee and former translator, spends her twenties drifting through a meager existence in Fremont, California. Shuttling between her job writing fortunes for a fortune cookie factory and sessions with her eccentric therapist, Donya suffers from insomnia and survivor’s guilt over those still left behind in Kabul as she desperately searches for love."

I won't spoil it in the hopes that you will watch it (in the U.S. it's currently free to watch on Kanopy and is also available on Hulu) except for one bit: Donya manages to get access to free therapy through a program that's supposed to help Afghan refugees. All she wants are some pills to help her sleep, but her therapist is, well, he's the most East Bay dude you've ever met, and while he eventually writes her the prescription for the pills, he believes that finding the right narrative to bond to and draw strength from is what's going to be of the most help.

As he is quick to share, the narrative that he personally draws strength from is Jack London's White Fang.

I found this absolutely hilarious.

There is a certain type of East Bay guy, most likely Boomer, but also Gen X, who is so steeped in his East Bay-ness that Jack London is his favorite author. Like, this guy in the film could totally have been the professor who taught the Western Regionalism seminar I took junior year of college if he were a therapist instead of an academic.

But it's not just a joke: the therapist's obsession with White Fang and Donya's reaction to it and the therapist's use of it speak volumes about the politics simmering underneath the seemingly quirky indie film—the subtext just may hit harder (along numerous fault lines) for those of us who are well-acquainted with the East Bay.

Two sources on SF&F and its' anxieties

While looking for sources to help inform the next essay I'm going to write, I ran across this fascinating-looking Ph.D. thesis from 2022 by Nathanial Harrington: Reading (in) Speculative Fiction (free download). I haven't read all of it, but I did read enough to hit this section: "As anxious as speculative fiction criticism has been about defining its object, these critics have nothing on the field of comparative literature, which has felt itself to be in a 'crisis' for decades."

As someone who is both an SF&F critic and trained comparatist, I chuckled out loud in acknowledgment. What attracts me to such anxiogenic fields? [Please note that anxiogenic is a real word, and the first text I read as a comp lit major deployed and explained it in relation to the field].

Unsurprisingly, Harrington's project seems like a fascinating one to me. This is how he starts his abstract:

"Drawing on both recent and older debates in and about literary theory, this dissertation considers the relationship between 'theory' and 'literary texts,' arguing that we can and should learn to read literary texts as themselves a kind of theory. More specifically, I argue that speculative fiction (that is, fantasy and science fiction) makes the theoretical aspects of literature particularly obvious: by virtue of its ability to change or circumvent the 'rules of reality' that govern our day-to-day lives and the worlds and conventions of realist fiction, speculative fiction is uniquely positioned to explore theoretical questions and problems, in ways that I argue can inform our non-speculative reading and interpretive practices as literary critics."

I look forward to digging more into Harrington's thesis.

It also reminded me of something else I've been reading: John Rieder's Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System. Rieder is arguing a lot of things in this book [I still have two more chapters to go, so have yet to encounter everything], but foundational to his overall framing is that the mass culture system leads to stratification of genre fields, and that's why multiple, potentially conflicting things can be true about SF&F as a field. Specifically, I think this point in chapter two is a good one and a lot of the ongoing, fruitless debates in the field about prestige and snobbery could be, if not resolved, then become more nuanced, by acknowledging this:

"The first point to make about science fiction in relation to the stratification of the field of cultural production is that the genre is produced and circulates across the entire range of cultural locations in question; it is not and never has been confined to or defined by the limits of a 'genre ghetto.' Nonetheless there is no doubt that the uneven distribution of literacy and of access to it determines an unevenness in the modes and venues of reception that has a powerful impact on the history of science fiction" (58-59).

World Fantasy Award and Clarke Award nomination overlap

As I mentioned above, Jack Casella Brookins recently put together a painstaking but fascinating resource for comparing Hugo Award nominations with other awards over at Ancillary Review of Books.

The kind of field-level work combined with data is like catnip for me, and the first thing I did is use his Google Sheets tool to find where the overlaps are between the World Fantasy and the Clarke novel award nominees. Why would I do this when one is a fantasy award and the other is not strictly limited to but much more focused on science fiction?

The answer is two-fold:

1. I find that I'm likely to enjoy the novels that these two awards bodies tend to nominate (in comparison to, say, the Hugos or Nebulas)
2. I love novels that can be read as science fantasy or as science fiction or fantasy or as both science fiction and fantasy.

Here are the results from the overlap tool:

World Fantasy + Clarke Novel Nomination Overlaps

[Note that the Clarke Award started in 1987 so that was the first year with a potential for overlapping]

1988

Replay by Ken Grimwood
Aegypt by John Crowley

1990

A Child Across the Sky by Jonathan Carroll

1994

The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick

1995

Towing Jehovah by James Morrow

1996

The Prestige by Christopher Priest

2001

Declare by Tim Powers Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

2003

The Scar by China Mieville

2005

Iron Council by China Mieville

2010

The City & the City by China Mieville

2011

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes

The heavy presence of Mieville is not a surprise given that he's a UK author, his works tend to be SF and fantasy blends, and that he dominated awards ballots in the 2000s.

What I find more interesting is that any overlapping has disappeared since Zoo City in 2011 even though I'd say that science fantasy has seen a bit of a resurgence in the past decade. I don't know enough about either award to know why this might be (and haven't done a close examination of the nominated titles from 2012 until now), but something seems to have happened.

Maybe more on that in the future (if you have any ides/analysis, let me know). For now, I have a question I'd love to hear from you on: which literary award do you find is the most reliable source of reading that pleases your palate?

See you in May!