The Star Beast & Message Fiction

I’m returning to the weekend’s Doctor Who special. I was going to write a full review but there are so many reviews out there that another one feel superfluous. Instead I wanted to focus on an aspect of the episode that is closer to a recurring topic on this blog.

As many expected, there was some negative reaction to the episode. I’ll get to some of the more obvious right-wing reactions to the transgender representation in the episode but there was a different issue that bubbled up. Ruth Madeley plays UNIT Scientific Advisor Shirley Anne Bingham. Madeley has played many roles on British TV but notably was in Russel T. Davies’s 2019 dystopian drama of the UK sliding into fascist decline Years and Years. Madeley uses a wheelchair and so does her character in Doctor Who. At one point, she crosses her legs – an act that produced some very confused reactions from people who thought it was some sort of mistake as if it was a continuity error. I’d share some examples of Tweets but the ones I saw have since been deleted — presumably after the deluge of people pointing out that yes, many, many people who use wheelchairs can actually use their legs to some degree.

Later Shirley Anne Bingham stuns to UNIT soldiers and fires rockets from her wheelchair, as in the wheelchair comes with stun guns and rocket launchers. This, I am told by disability advocates, is less common but not unlike an actor doing a very normal thing like crossing her legs, there was a conscious and deliberate attempt by the show to not simply have a representation of a disabled character but to underline it. That’s not wholly new to Doctor Who. The first episode of the Chibnall era placed a lot of emphasis on Ryan having dyspraxia, although this aspect of the character tended to be forgotten later and was framed in terms of it being a problem that Ryan had. Anyway, I’m not trying to adjudicate disability representation in Doctor Who but rather to focus on the episode not just simply having a character who uses a wheelchair but has a character who uses a wheelchair and who challenges assumptions viewers might have about people who use wheelchairs and to make it unignorable.

With Rose Noble (Yasmin Finney) the show not only has an important transgender character but also integrated that she was transgender into the dynamic of the family and then into the whole technobabble Doctor-Whoeyness of the resolution of not just the main plot but also the lingering plot point from the previous iteration of Russell T. Davies/David Tennant/Catherine Tate version of Doctor Who. This was not just unignorable but woven into the whole fabric of the episode. At time the dialogue was corny, it had its misteps but it worked and by not just avoiding pulling any of its punches but layering them on thick, it was very enjoyable. Easily the most fun episode of Doctor Who in years.

Inevitably it upset some people but let’s face it, they were going to be upset anyway. There were people who were upset when Jodie Whittaker was cast as the Doctor despite the Doctor being, of all the iconic characters in science fiction, the one in which there’s no substantial reason why they shouldn’t sometimes be played by a woman. It wasn’t some deep commitment to the integrity of the plot, setting or the character that fueled the objections. Whatever Davies was going to do with Doctor Who, the people who complain about “wokeness” were going to complain. So, rather than simply have a transgender character, he had London being saved from imminent destruction by the magical power of modern ideas of gender.

It was absurd and corny and great, like a wheelchair with rocket launchers. And maybe you liked it and maybe you found it was too OTT or maybe you liked AND thought it was too OTT. But you knew all this already and that isn’t my point. My point is that we finally had a real, actual, genuine case of something that has been haunting discussions at this blog for eight years now, like a barely glimpsed cryptid in the forest: MESSAGE FICTION!

Message fiction! We all know what that is, right? Because it has been everywhere for over ten years now. 2014 Hugo Awards? Nothing but message fiction!

“And in recent years when we looked at the ballots it was like, awesome, let’s choose between these five items of approved socially conscious message fiction. Yay! We’ve got selections from: religious people are stupid bigots, capitalists are raping the earth, capitalists are stupid bigots, bigots are stupid, and I’m not quite sure what the hell this last thing is about and I’m not even sure if it qualifies as fantasy or scifi but it has bigots in it… Oh man, tough call.”

https://monsterhunternation.com/2015/04/09/a-response-to-george-r-r-martin-from-the-author-who-started-sad-puppies/

The thing was, pinning down what was “message fiction” always proved to be difficult when you asked for examples. Like mysterious pictures of Bigfoot, “message fiction” was surprisingly hard to spot despite being big and hairy and everywhere. Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice was “message fiction” apparently, as was John Chu’s The Water That Falls on You From Nowhere and perhaps most incoherently If You Were A Dinosaur My Love… Ask critics what the supposedly blatant, over-stated message was in these works and well, things got either very hand-wavey or the critics just made stuff up.

Don’t get me wrong, there were certainly elements in all three of those works which represented left-of-centre progressive thinking about gender and sexuality but groups like the Sad Puppies would expressely state that they did not, in fact, have a general objection to gay characters but only to “message fiction”. Sarah Hoyt could even point to her books actually having gay protagonists and hence that her objection had to be to something more than that. Representation was OK, we were told but not if it reached the level of “message fiction”.

Nor was this objection restricted only to the right. In January of 2022 there was an extended discourse here and on social media around the Rite-Gud podcast’s critique of “squeecore”. This supposed lacklustre dominant mode of modern award-winning, critically acclaimed science fiction had a variety of faults according to the podcast. As I said at the time, I didn’t find the analysis very coherent but I’ll focus on one point made:

“But yeah, as morally compromised as they are in real life, their stories are very black-and-white moral message stories. And I’m not gonna say there’s anything wrong with writing a story that’s political. My stories are all political; I think everyone’s stories are political in some way or another. Our politics get into what we write. But there’s a difference between your politics getting into what you write, and – versus standing on a soapbox and screaming at people and delivering a sermon.”

https://kittysneezes.com/squeecore-transcript/

The squeecore critique was also notably lacking in examples of this didactic style. Much of the focus was oddly on Chuck Wendig for reasons I still haven’t fathomed. Rite-Gud also didn’t have a general objection to either representation or diversity or politics in science fiction but did have a problem with it “delivering a sermon”. The similarity between this critique and the earlier Sad Puppies critique has been much commented upon but when brought up on social media it drew an angry reaction from Rite-Gud supporters who felt that such a comparison was defaming them as being far-right.

I don’t think it is unfair to say that the Rite-Gud people genuinely meant what they said whereas the Sad Puppies were largely just engaging in a bad-faith complaint. Yet if this kind of didactic sermonising is (as Rite-Gud claimed) the dominant mode then we’d also have to conclude that Larry Correia had some sort of point even if he was making it in bad faith.

Even so, the list of didactic, sermonising, message fiction remained remarkably small and just like those photos of bigfoot, very out of focus and probably a picture of something else entirely.

Except…well here we are. If Larry Correia wanted to point at this episode of Doctor Who and say it was message fiction then I wouldn’t have a good counter argument other than “yes it was but it was great fun and I loved it”. Likewise, while there were no literal soapboxes there were some bombastic sermons and some didactic moments. If Raquel S. Benedict et al were to point at it and say it was squeecore then I wouldn’t have a good counter argument other than “yes it was but it was great fun and I loved it”.

The power of art can be overstated. We are also right to view with some degree of cynicism when major corporation co-opt the language of social progress or diversity. Yet, getting on a soapbox and being unambiguous about the rights of people to be who they are is not nothing, indeed given the often literally murderous atmosphere in the UK it is a substantial something when the soapbox is a 60-year-old television institution.

I don’t want a steady diet of message fiction but I think I can handle one unambiguous does of it every few years.