~
Susan’s Salon is the place to chat,
Be nice to us all, for the host isn't a cat,
Discuss any topic from joyful to downcast,
But if you snipe at the others, you shall be out cast!
~
Adpated from a poem by Andrewnotwerdna
~
Susan’s Salon is the place to chat,
Be nice to us all, for the host isn't a cat,
Discuss any topic from joyful to downcast,
But if you snipe at the others, you shall be out cast!
~
Adpated from a poem by Andrewnotwerdna
The Doctor is back and for those of us not in the UK, that means Disney+. It also means TWO episodes have arrived at the same time: Space Babies and The Devil’s Chord. I’ve only watch Space Babies, so I probably won’t post a review of the second one until Tuesday (my time).
Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor is getting a long introduction. This episode serves as yet another introduction to the character with a lot of pauses for explanations of the background lore, and a well played joke about stepping on butterflies when visiting dinosaurs. When the story proper finally gets going there isn’t a lot to it.
A space station designed to incubate babies has been abandoned by its crew. In the lower levels is a fear inducing monster. Meanwhile, the station is being maintained by the babies themselves. Everything is held up by the idea that these cute babies in strollers with lip-synced dialogue will be just the right level of adorable to maintain the episode. And, yes they are but only just.
It feels more like a story that could have been in a Doctor Who comic book but it serves to do a lot of establishing work about the show, from bizarre situations (space babies), monsters that aren’t what they seem, running around corridors and a basic compassion for all beings.
Gatwa and Millie Gibson take things in their stride and their obvious charisma helps pull this story safely into charm rather than cringe. I don’t know how long it must have taken to film the babies but they genuinely feel like distinct characters.
This is an episode that will remembered for having space babies in it. Silly, fun but I feel like we are still stalling for time. It’s not clear with this one what this new iteration of the show will be like or what kind of Doctor Gatwa will prove to be.
Variety reports:
“In a press release from Warner Bros. later Thursday morning, the studio revealed that the working title for the film is “Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum,” and it will be directed by and star Serkis in his iconic titular role.”
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/lord-of-the-rings-movie-2026-release-warner-bros-1235997102/
Serkis’s Gollum was great but he’s not enough to carry a film and the premise is unappealing. I guess it could be a screwball comedy in which Gollum is chased across Middle Earth by Aragorn on the one hand and agents of Sauron on the other hand but he keeps escaping by accident.
There’s really only one dramatisation of Tolkien’s work that I’d like to see: an animated series retelling The Silmarillion. Ideally, each episode would be developed by different artists/studios. The Silmarillion should feel weird and mythic and essentially ungrounded. I’d watch that.
I think it is very unlikely I’d watch a Gollum movie and I’m not sure who it would be for?
Back in October last year, I cited Spinal Tap as an authority in the changes made in a graph of global temperatures: https://camestrosfelapton.wordpress.com/2023/10/05/global-temperatures-do-a-spinal-tap/ Back then, the unprecedented figures in the satellite temperature record meant the vertical axis on the graph had to shift to a new maximum (1.1) to accommodate them.
April 2024’s data have led to another change in the axis:
Indeed, the axis now is marked in step 0.2 deg C intervals instead of 0.1. It’s literally zoomed out to fit things in.
Meanwhile, in related news of oncoming disaster, The Guardian has published the results of a survey climate scientists:
“Hundreds of the world’s leading climate scientists expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) this century, blasting past internationally agreed targets and causing catastrophic consequences for humanity and the planet, an exclusive Guardian survey has revealed.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/08/world-scientists-climate-failure-survey-global-temperature
Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating above preindustrial levels,, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit will be met.”
Scheduling the star-studded cast of the 1941 classic to all be on set at the same time was compounded by none of the stars checking their Outlook Calendar or having reminders programmed on their smart watches. To cope with this, Timothy the Talking Cat would typically stand in for absent cast members during rehearsals. Unfortunately, sometimes multiple cast members were absent but due to low shutter speeds in the past, the cat could run around very quickly and play each of the roles at once.
Susan’s Salon, is a place to chat,
and be pleasant to each other.
Every topic, happy or sad,
is welcome but…
cranky arguments or angry disputes,
are not allowed.
Local government elections in the UK are a very imperfect measure of the national political temperature. The May 2 elections only covered some councils (all in England) and the nature of them means local issues and local party dynamics have a greater influence than they would on a general election.
Having said all that, by most measures the Conservative Party did very, very badly indeed. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/may/03/local-elections-key-charts-showing-tories-slump-to-worst-performance-since-1998
I profoundly dislike the current leader of the UK Labour Party but what I really would love to see is a nationwide electoral destruction of the Conservative Party when a general election finally happens. The Conservative Party has never been a nice party, it has always sought out ways to entrench power among the rich and privileged and yet over the past decade it has indulged in its very worst aspects and pandered to the worst impulses of the shittiest people, striving to find ways to be more abusive, petty and incompetent. Nothing short of a collapse of the Tories organizationally, financially and in terms of political influence should be their reward. Here’s hoping.
What has got the right-wing super upset this week is interesting because they are particularly cross about a bipartisan bill in the US that attempts to codify a definition of antisemitism but in a wholly wrong way.
The bill (H.R.6090, the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act) was passed in the lower house with votes from both parties despite strong (and correct) opposition from groups like the ACLU who described the bill like this:
“This bill directs the Department of Education to take the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of “antisemitism” into consideration when determining whether alleged harassment was motivated by antisemitic intent and violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs receiving federal financial assistance, including in higher education. The federal government itself has interpreted Title VI to prohibit harassment or discrimination against Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs as well as others when that discrimination is based on the group’s actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics. These existing protections are critically important, particularly in the current environment.”
https://www.aclu.org/documents/aclu-urges-congress-to-oppose-anti-semitism-awareness-act
I’ve had arguments with people before with people about the IHRA’s definition and there is much of it that is fine, it was not intended to be the basis of laws and some of the more dodgy aspects (which I’ll get to) were intended to be illustrative.
The bit that is upsetting the far right though is not a bit that the ACLU or many of the other critics of the IHRA definition have any issue with.
Here is the far-right owner of the appalling social-media site Gab (which somehow still exists) trying to rally the chuds:
“The bill adopts the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of “antisemitism” which includes the basic Biblical Truth that the Jews killed Jesus Christ as “classic antisemitism.” The bill has raised serious concerns among Christians who believe that their First Amendment rights are being threatened. For example H.R. 6090 could potentially make it a crime for pastors to preach sermons that adhere to Biblical passages, of which there are many, which explicitly state that the Jews killed Jesus.”
Andrew Torba, Gab promotional email 3/05/2024
The IHRA definition is actually a definition followed by a list of illustrative examples to illustrate the definition (you can read it here https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism ). The issue the far right have is with the ninth example:
“Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.”
https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism
As an illustrative example, I don’t think this specific sentence is a problem although it is obvious why the far right does. Even though many extreme nationalists have often praised Israel and many on the evangelical US right are overtly pro-Israel, that support is heavily qualified within a framework that sees Israel as a nation within a specific Christian mythology and within the Right’s Islamophobia.
The intent of the example though (don’t use antisemitic tropes to criticise Israel) doesn’t make for good law. Israeli nationalists and their supporters have increasingly attempted to equate factual criticism of the Israeli government’s brutal attack on Gaza as tantamount to “blood libel”. Pointing out that the Israeli government is enacting an appalling death toll on children in Gaza is criticism that can (and should) be levelled at any country bombing civilians whether it be Israel, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the UK or the US. The IHRA’s attempt at a definition even overtly states that:
“However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.”
https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-antisemitism
So, outside of it being misused as an attempt at a legal definition of antisemitism, is the IHRA statement otherwise good? No, there are other illustrative examples that are at best muddle and at worst contradict the rest but I will only focus on one.
The overall, actual definition of antisemitism given at the start of the document is good and much of the direction of the examples is an attempt to capture the way antisemitic tropes and ideas permeate our culture. However, one example in particular is (at best) very poorly expressed:
“Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
I once had a long in-person argument with an otherwise reasonable person trying to get at what it could possibly mean for a people in general, living in multiple countries, with multiple intersecting ethnicities to have their own collective right to self-determination. Clearly, there are multiple ways of reading this example (and each of the other 11 examples) but this specific one does not, to me, have a reading that is both clear and universal i.e. which could be applied simply to any broadly recognised ethnic group not defined by nationality. A right to self-determination is attached to the people of a country (hence the mention of Israel), conflating it with an ethnicity more broadly is itself a recognised example of antisemitism:
“Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.”
This clearly is not just a clear example of antisemitism but it is also a specific example of a broader form of racism applied to other ethnic/national groups.
So, I end up with the far-right are angry for bad reasons against a bad law that is misuing a flawed attempt to define antisemitism. What a mess.
So I’ve read and reviewed (sort of) all the 2024 Hugo Best Novel finalists.
Overall, a decent variety of novels. We have two novels of unclear genre (Bright Doors and Starter Villain), two fantasy novels and two science fiction. Hugo voters this year really had a big beef with reality with two books in which time, space and history end up being at the whim of some questionable people (Bright Doors and Desperate Glory) plus physical space taking a bit of a battering in Translation State. Physical reality was also in more occasional trouble in Amina and Witch King with really only Starter Villain having a relatively secure grounding in a stable physical world.
The hardest book for me to rank here is Witch King by Martha Wells. This is a book I intend to re-read because I just didn’t click with it and I don’t really know if that was me or the book. It has many obvious good qualities but I don’t know, sort of never really got going for me.
Starter Villain I liked more than John Scalzi’s previous book but there’s not enough there for it to get a higher ranking than 6. It’s fine, it has cats in it, it passes the time but then so do lots of books. Unless you only read one SF&F book from 2023 then you probably read a better book that wasn’t a Hugo finalist.
That leaves four books that are very strong contenders and much harder to rank. Even so, for originality and a story that sucked me into a completely different reality, I think Vajra Chandrasekera’sThe Saint of Bright Doors is my clear number 1 pick.
Which leaves me with the thorny problem of 2nd, 3rd and 4th. I think Some Desperate Glory is a strong second choice. If Bright Doors wasn’t a finalist, then Tesh’s novel would be my likely number 1. I’ve then no idea how to pick between The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi and Translation State. I might have to toss a coin as they aren’t easily comparable books. One was more fun than the other and one was more thought-provoking than the other.
So here’s my initial ranking. I think the two ends aren’t likely to change but the middle might.
Like a lot of book-hungry readers of science fiction, I read Ender’s Game in the mid-1980s and, on balance, enjoyed it. The book was clearly packed full of problems (a child systematically bullied and isolated so that they will be the master tactician/strategist behind the total elimination of an alien species) but it wasn’t hard to read the book as implying in multiple ways that this was bad rather than celebrating the whole scenario as kind of cool. By the late 1990s, if you were online you’d meet people who had also enjoyed Ender’s Game and genuinely saw the whole thing as kind of cool rather than as a rather grim (but well-paced) dystopian tale. Taking utterly in isolation from its immediate sequels and its author (which arguably work in different directions) I suppose the book still has that aspect to it. Is it a from-the-inside-out critique of militarism and the idea that all things are permissible in the face of an existential threat or is it actually a kind of defence of genocide, where the fact that we are shown Ender regrets and feels empathy for the aliens he destroyed is there just to underline the thesis that intrinsically good people can/should commit mass murder.
Of course, the book doesn’t exist in isolation. Orson Scott Card’s increasingly bizarre and reactionary public views help clarify what kind of book Ender’s Game is. If readers had doubts at what Card’s thinking his 1996 novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is an even more contrived attempt to engage with the idea of redemptive views of historically genocidal people. It isn’t enough to give a clear answer as to what kind of book Ender’s Game is supposed to be because I suspect even Orson Scott Card doesn’t know that. It is a book of deeply confused ideas in which Card attempted to resolve his own personal and political contradictions that happened to hit a spot of ambiguity that launched his career and gave an impression of him being a more subtle writer than he actually was.
But what remains is an interesting idea for a science fiction book, one that looks at militarism, indoctrination and extremism from the inside out. A book that looks at children/young people bred and trained for a war for humanities existence but one that understands the intrinsic abusiveness of the concept.
In Emily Tesh’s Some Desperate Glory, humanity has set out to explore the stars and in the process encounters a large and benevolent society of alien species living largely in harmony. This is terrible news for all concerned because rather than being the plucky apes adopted by Vulcans in the Star Trek universe, humanity turns out to be equivalent of the Klingons crashing into other societies with our violence. Indeed, it turns out humans are bigger, stronger and more hardy than the aliens they encounter and humanity is unwilling to abide by the conventions of the multi-species society they are colliding into. War ensues and in that war Earth itself is destroyed (for reasons that don’t become clear until deep into some major twists in the novel.
Deep in space a radical remanent of humanity’s military maintains a space station assembled out of the ragged remains of Earth’s space fleet. The older generation are the veterans of the war but the station itself is populated by younger people, many of them tailored by eugenics for war. Here, humanity breeds, trains and indoctrinates the people who will avenge the destruction of billions of people. Their cause is just but their numbers are few.
Tesh, introduces this world through the eyes of Kyr, a young woman who is close to the end of her training to become an elite warrior ready to do what it takes against the oppressive Majoda. Kyr is an absolute true believer in the cause and one of the most accomplished fighters in the simulator where battle scenarios can be played out like a brutal video game. It is this drive to be the best that ultimately is her undoing. When she learns that rather than being deployed to kill aliens she will instead be allocated to the breeding program to birth another generation of human super soldiers, her loyalty to the cause is tested.
From here, it is hard to describe the rest of the plot. Suffice to say, Kyr’s limited perspective on human history is a deeply skewed view of the universe. However, the genocide against Earth is real (well…OK…reality is going to have some issues as the novel progresses but the atrocity wasn’t a lie or disinformation, the aliens did destroy Earth for reasons that, again are not easy to explain without revealing too much of the story).
Kyr’s journey takes her away from the space station to a planet inhabited by humans who now live peacefully under Majoda rule. There she has to confront painful truths about her own history and her family and the reality of her upbringing being one of systematic (and systemic) abuse.
I’ve seen a few reviews call this a space opera and it sort of is but it is perhaps better to think of it as quite a different book that happens to exist in a world in which space opera-like stories can happen (something that it has in common with Ann Leckie’s Translation State). There are questions here about historical political causes and questions about abuse. There are also plenty of fast-paced action sequences as well as some weirder concepts about reality and alternative futures.
I was deeply impressed by how well the novel manages to hold itself together with the multiplicity of themes and new perspectives on earlier events. Well paced and with a set of characters who reveal depths as the story takes some genuinely radical turns.
This was the last of the Hugo Best Novel Finalists I read and it 100% deserved a finalist spot. It probably isn’t going to be my number 1 pick but if it won Best Novel it would be an excellent choice and certainly made me have a long think about my choices.