Tom Friedman actually had a surprisingly good column about this sort of thing last week. I don't ordinarily read Friedman, but the rabbi at my mom's synagogue mentioned it in his sermon on Friday night, which was sort of a follow-up to his discussion of the current climate of Islamophobia in his sermon on Yom Kippur. My mom and I both have some issues with this rabbi, but he's been quite good and vocal on this particular issue, which isn't always the case with rabbis.
Not even a thread about Muslims can avoid being taken over.
What could go wrong?
Somebody might get shot.
Or somebody might get stabbed by somebody who takes a broad reading of the Second Amendment.
Or something might get set on fire or even blown up.
I'm surprised Trump hasn't gotten in on a lot of this muslim hatred stuff. If he keeps focusing exclusively on (those particular you know the ones) immigrants he's going to get left behind.
National hero "Dude you have no Quran" guy needs to come out of retirement. Apparently he also refers to himself as the "Cadillac of men" which makes him even more of an American hero.
I'm surprised Trump hasn't gotten in on a lot of this muslim hatred stuff.
I wonder how much money he's taken from Saudi interests in his various deals. It's got to be in at least the hundreds of millions. I assume that the anti-Mexican stuff is fine with him financially because as a big player he's into cutting deals with corrupt wings of the various building trades unions, who hate the immigrant competition.
I feel like the entire world has been on a downward trend and then abruptly started getting much worse much faster in the past few months - sort of a runaway climate change for interpersonal stuff.
Between this nonsense and that Peeple app, I just cannot with humanity anymore.
There's this really rather weak and sentimental James Tiptree short story where this kid grows up thinking that he's an alien from a Star Trek-like band of interstellar explorers and of course this completely fucks up his life - but then, just as he's about to die in some awful dystopian near-future war, he is rescued by the aliens and it turns out that he was right all along. Lately, discovering that benign aliens are going to rescue me has pretty much turned into my life plan.
I think "you're a wizard" is better than "you're an alien." Because then all your prior sexual fantasies aren't bestiality.
12: Clearly you have not looked at nearly as much internet porn as you pretend. Consider all those people who buy the held-captive-by-bigfoot-and-or-Clippy kinds of erotic novels - discovering that they're all wizards won't help.
Don't mark me down too much in Peeple for the error.
12 Moby puts on his robe and wizard hat.
10: I found that story completely heartbreaking as an angsty teenager. Sure, the world sucks completely, and everyone wants to be rescued by people from enlightened topless Star Trek. No, it's not actually going to happen to you either.
17. It's the SF version of "you aren't my REAL parents."
17: It is!!!! Don't crush my last remaining dream, LB.
James Tiptree stories have always produced in me a combination of "geez, this is so sentimental and overblown, and the pseudo-cynical voice doesn't help either" and hysterical weeping. The thing about "Beam Us Home", I guess, is that unlike most of her stories (which are almost all basically "I don't fit in anywhere, I am going to be miserable, experience false hope and then die") is that it has an actual happy ending, sort of.
Which makes it worse, somehow. She didn't even gesture at plausibility -- just, yeah, they saved him from dying simultaneously of dysentery and crashing his fighter plane. That's what he was dreaming about. And that's exactly what will never, never, never happen.
21: Alien abduction is a fantasy by which we measure our pain.
It cancels out mouse orgasms in equal measure.
10 sounds like some kind of ironic play on "The Little Match Girl" with a way too positive ending for any Racoona I remember. My guess is that she intended you to be embarrassed about wanting a happy alien ex machina but with no way of directly writing it. Or something.
I don't know if it's really worse, because I tend - as an adult - to read most of Tiptree's work as saying "my situation [because it's always obviously about her own personal pain and feeling of alienation] is so terrible that I can't even envision even the most wildly implausible happy ending". Like, the one where the woman has the deformed face - Tiptree can imagine a world of all kinds of aliens and space whatever, but happiness is just outside the glass and forever inaccessible.
To analogize - but about books, so it's allowed, right? - if you read a whole bunch of those Anne Perry novels, eventually she starts doling out just keeeerazy happy endings to various characters whose backstory is just average-to-grim - the older widowed mother takes up with a handsome significantly younger actor and there's no life destroying scandal and he really loves her, etc. It's totally out of character as she was written earlier, but I remember reading that one years ago and feeling like hey, the actual world is terrible, so if you happen to have a fantasy world that you control and you're inventing all these lurid Victorian sex scandal murders, why not dish out the happy endings?
Perry is like the opposite of Tiptree, and there's the interesting fact that both of them murdered someone.
24: If anything, I find Tiptree's grimdark-before-the-fact a bit embarrassing. I've taught a couple of her stories and the kids today think they're virtually camp in their depressingness. She's fascinating and important and I like her work, but when you put her beside someone like Joanna Russ, who can also be OTT sentimental, you really see that Tiptree is always, again and again, turning toward her own personal pain and away from the political. The political is always, always recaptured by personal trauma in Tiptree.
17,18: Asenath aka Domineditrix bought into that. Her real Martian parents were supposed to pick her up at age X (I don't remember X) and she was very disappointed when it didn't happen.
||
A group on campus is being jerks to me, really inflexible in a schedule conflict for which I have 6 years of precedent. I lost the battle.
Then I was able to be sneaky and determine that there will probably be a conflict for the next four years, at least through 2020, and so I was able to make reservations for the next four years. They won't discover my deviousness until this summer, when the next conflict officially comes to light.
YAY!
|>
In other words, my dates are pre-determined indefinitely, but theirs are not. I have reason to believe there will be a conflict, but they can't justify booking this far out.
Maybe. Tiptree wassmarter than fuck, and had more experience than ten people, an I grant the possibility that the world really is that bad. Tiptree had tons of contempt for her audience.
"Beam Me up" as "Little Match Girl" makes perfect sense, and the contempt we have for Anderson's "happy ending" was probably meant to be reflected in the sometimes despairing view I have of a culture that consumes impossible science fiction fantasies by the boatload yet despises religion and the supernatural.
And We Who Are About To is the honest Russ.
28: Have you retaliated by going to the peeple site and giving them all low ratings?
17: that's what happens to the main character in Use of Weapons... gets saved from death and offered a job with Special Circumstances. Jumps at it of course. Well, you would.
Facilities logistics is a dish best served cold.
Ah me. Straw Nihilist at tvtropes made me laugh at myself today.
But the accelerating public craving for superheroes, space operas, and time travel as we rush headlong toward species extinction should be as terrifying as group flagellants in time of plague.
30: Tiptree was - perhaps - "smarter than fuck". She was also capable of great self-delusion, as when she murdered her disabled husband and falsely claimed that this was because his quality of life was so poor, and I feel like that was very much of a piece with her life - a reading of her own personal pain onto the world that was so total that she could not admit the existence of any other narrative. Any story which is meant to choke you up and say "yeah, that's the way it is, man, you just can't win because people are terrible" has something wrong with it, e.g. "We Who Stole The Dream".
I mean, she's writing an earlier kind of science fiction, the kind where the short story is supposed to end with a thump, and I think that was part of what made her work seem so campy to my class.
We Who Are About To... is honest Russ? What, pray, is the dishonest Russ? Russ's actual, material commitments to socialism, feminism and lesbian liberation were just as "honest" even if less grim, than the worldview in We Who Are About To..... We Who Are About To.... is depressive Russ, just like "The Little Dirty Girl" and "Mr. Wilde's Second Chance" and "The Mystery of the Young Gentleman" are happy Russ.
Ah me. Straw Nihilist at tvtropes made me laugh at myself today.
But the accelerating public craving for superheroes, space operas, and time travel as we rush headlong toward species extinction should be as terrifying as group flagellants in time of plague.
Perry is like the opposite of Tiptree, and there's the interesting fact that both of them murdered someone.
Hold up what?
37: Spoiler alert! Don't look behind your drapes when you come home.
I tend - as an adult - to read most of Tiptree's work as saying "my situation [because it's always obviously about her own personal pain and feeling of alienation] is so terrible that I can't even envision even the most wildly implausible happy ending".
[delete delete]
Uh, do you want an argument? You sound like nothing's going to shake these foundations for you, and it's 99% certainly not worth my time to try.
37: Well, not the same someone.
Anne Perry was born Juliet Marion Hulme and was one of the two girls in the murder case dramatized as Heavenly Creatures. This came out in the 2000s, if I recall correctly.
Tiptree shot her husband and then herself. She alleged that this was a mercy killing because of his health, but actually all he had - IIRC - was deteriorating vision and general old age problems. The feminist science fiction community doesn't like to talk about it, which drives me up the wall. It was an able-ist murder that people put aside because she was so feminist and, well, she was depressed, so it must have been unavoidable. Contract with how that douchecanoe Hugo Schwyer's murder/suicide attempt gets discussed - and while HS is obviously a much worse person, there's still a lot of hypocrisy in how people talk about Tiptree. (The racism in her work and her own equivocal relation to colonialism tend to get papered over as well, because feminism.) Again, I like her work, and when I run classes in foundational feminist SF, we read her stuff. I don't think she was a terrible person, but I think we steer away from a lot of complex conversations about her and her work.
I'd like to take a firm stand against murdering husbands while they sleep.
39: A little of A, a little of B? I've read a lot of Tiptree and critical material about her a lot of times at this point, and I think I'm not going to suffer a sea change in my reading of her....but perhaps it's like how I feel about my old-hippie pagan friend who sees spirits, where I feel that parallel, incompatible views can, like, both exist and both be interesting.
Should go dig the Tiptree collections pout of the box, but the description of "Beam Me Up," besides "Little Match Girl" also reminded for some reason of Robert Lindner's Fifty Minute Hour and Saint-Exupery.
Science Fiction is pathological.
Do you also write fiction, or just read/teach it? Pure curiosity, no judgment, etc.
44: That doesn't come across as "no judgment".
I've written some deeply mediocre fiction that lurks on the depths of various hard drives, but that's about it. Could I write anything that even approximates the very least Tiptree story off her weakest anthology? Probably not.
I dunno - she's like a more skillful Sherry Tepper; there's just something really....I can't even find the word, something like ressentiment but directed at the whole world...in her work.
Let's all list how many novels we've written.
Because I think 5 sort of covers the OP.
Wikipedia describes her husband as "a nearly blind invalid."
"I can't even find the word,something like ressentiment but directed at the whole world...in her work."
Misanthropy? Could Dr Ain provide a clue?
I have always liked that in a writer
48: I am not home so I don't have the book to hand, but I'm pretty sure that the big Tiptree biography goes into all this in detail. I remember because I'd always heard the "well, he was very, very sick and so it was understandable" line from people about the whole thing and then I was extremely surprised and upset to learn that it was a much more equivocal situation.
Again, I'm sure this was about her depression, her isolation, her conflicted feelings about her sexuality and marriage, and I feel both sympathy and horror when I think about it. But I've also had a LOT of conversations with feminist SF fans who either minimize the whole thing or who are immediately shocked and horrified when they hear about it. When we read some Tiptree in the last iteration of my eternal feminist SF community ed project, I really, really had to do some fancy explaining to keep the class from thinking of Tiptree as an unacceptable person who should be expelled from the feminist canon.
I feel like I'm always in this really weird situation - when I'm around feminists who are SF fans (as opposed to fans specifically of 2nd wave feminist SF) I'm always cast in this sort of bad-guy role, where I'm explaining that The Female Man isn't really transphobic in the way that it seems to be, and that there's mitigating circumstances for the apparent Islamophobia in The Two of Them, and that Tiptree's ideas about colonialism are not as white-savior as they sound, etc. And then when I'm around fans of 2nd wave feminist SF I'm always the bad reader who just doesn't understand how wonderful and ur-feminist these writers are.
Ah, sorry. The "also" was ambiguous: I meant "do you write in addition to reading and teaching?" I generally agree with your assessment of Tiptree, which is why I was already 99% disinclined to quibble about it when I asked. I think we can both agree on the claim that this exchange has been a waste of time, however.
I mean, my end of it, not yours. You have been informative and gracious.
We might add to Henley's rule of buts that the use of "just" in the sense of "only" typically reads as "merely" and sounds judgmental.
Frowner's description of Tiptree has me thinking I might find her writing congenial.
I generally agree with your assessment of Tiptree, which is why I was already 99% disinclined to quibble about it when I asked.
Well, that's confusing.
What is the other reading of the "also" there, btw? It didn't seem ambiguous to me.
Oh, I guess it's what ogged mentioned in 53.1.
52: Yes indeed, I am always gracious! Well, thank you for interpreting my comments as gracious rather than bitey, anyway.
Now, of course, I'm thinking about all the stuff I do like in her work - I really like the messenger/mad girl's dialogue in "Your Faces O My Sisters", and I like all of "A Momentary Taste of Being" even though its dystopian future has so many right-wing tropes. And "Love Is the Plan The Plan Is Death" is so good. And I love the slow spaceships in "Houston, Houston, Do You Read", and the ways the clones talk about their relationships, and the books for each of the kinds of clone. And I've often thought about "The Only Neat Thing To Do" when I've had to nerve myself up to do something that's difficult but right.
I first read both Her Smoke Rose Up Forever and Tanith Lee's Dreams of Dark and Light in the unexpectedly nice BOMC editions which I got at the library back when I was eleven, and they get a bit muddled in my head. It's funny, Tanith Lee - whose reputation is so much the lesser and whose work is known for being all louche - is just such an emotionally healthier writer. I remember very clearly reading "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" and knowing so clearly that I too, like P.Burke, was a disgusting decaying cowlike living corpse, and the best that I could possibly hope for was to get a chance to hide this fact for a bit. The ambiguity about adult female bodies in Tiptree is really weird* - in theory, of course, one is supposed to sympathize with P Burke and understand the social critique in the story, but the obsessively loathing detail of the descriptions of poor P.Burke's body seem to me to undercut the critique.
*Actually, there were a couple of rather odd things quoted in her bio which made me wonder if she - given the social space - might not actually have identified as a trans man. I'm not attached to some kind of "Tiptree was really trans" silliness; it's just that there were several points where she actually said things about feeling like a man, etc. I know it was a different time and many smart women said stuff like that, but they were quite odd remarks.
I would recommend early Tanith Lee.
Tiptree was pretty literary at times (I have never completely gotten "Love is the Plan") and I think she wrote to/playing with her audience (the late 60s Nebula crowd) and too pessimistic to be any kind of committed feminist. I view her largely as a decadent, Huysman, Djuna Barnes?
"Are you also a writer, like Tiptree, or are you just a talentless scold who likes to tear down greater minds in the classroom?" I assume that was the disparaging reading.
To 54: okay FFS: I DO think that much of Tiptree's work is problematic, that she is focused on her own pain, and that murdering people is not okay, BUT I have zero dogs in the feminist SF fight and I think the account Frowner gave (at the time of the comment) was reductive, given the heterogeneity of the stories. I would also cede a greater role to "performativity" -- the camp thing, the pseuds -- and I'd say something like: she gambles on her own empathy with other human beings -- that imaginative empathy never "feels" like something reliable -- in her writing. It works a lot more often than most gambling does, though.
"Emotionally healthier than Tiptree" is a bar most people can clear. Possibly even Djuna Barnes, depending on the year (that's not a bad comparison, though I'm not sure I'd fly the decadence flag over it -- hard to choose).
To the OP, wasn't there some story recently about some white dude who was planning to blow up and/or shoot up some mosque and was let free on some ridiculously low amount of bail?
I'd say it was only a matter of time but it's already happened, what with those 3 kids in North Carolina, or that Sikh temple a few years back, and probably a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting about.
25.2, 40.2: Not that I've read Anne Perry since the latter half of the '90s, when all that came out, but Teen Me was fascinated and sickened both by what I remember as asides about how of course murder is always wrong and how of seemed like if you could figure out early on who in the story was queer, you had your murderer. I'm sure I was being unfair but I'd read two or three of her novels (in hopes of gay content) before the disclosure and was creeped out by those and only managed another one I think after.
murder is always wrong
You should at least wake up your husband and let him compose himself.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
I'm really enjoying playing with all of the ways these words can take on different meanings/parts of speech, especially the one in which a (forgive me) rastaman is explaining that she gets high on roses until the end of time.
I DO think that [...] murdering people is not okay
Yeah sure whatever.
I had Anne Perry confused with the dragon-rider book lady.
You should at least wake up your husband and let him compose himself.
For myself, if my wife was going to murder me I would rather she did it in my sleep and I knew nothing about it. But each to their own.
List of novelists who have killed people!
Anne Perry and James Tiptree, obviously. Cervantes as well, pretty sure. Pushkin fought a lot of duels - did he kill anyone? Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon? I can't remember "Goodbye To All That" clearly enough.
Well, if suicide counts...
...but the more interesting one is war. Mailer, Jones, maybe Heller whoever...interesting that we don't think of this as "killing people."
I certainly did, one of my first thoughts in the thread was how many deaths Tiptree was partially responsible for in WWII and CIA.
Lermontov, maybe? He certainly died in a duel, and apparently fought bravely against the Chechens.
70: Wasn't Norman Mailer actually an army cook? Not sure if he would have killed anyone (unless he forgot to wash his hands). Heller definitely, as a bombardier. Jones maybe.
interesting that we don't think of this as "killing people."
Er, I did bob, that's why I listed Graves, Sassoon and Cervantes.
Oh, and William Burroughs.
Tolstoy served in the Crimea, but I'm not sure in what capacity.
Let's not forget that monster Hemingway.
Saddam Hussein wrote a novel.
Did he ever actually kill anybody, rather than ordering people killed?
I recall reading that he was part of a team carrying out an assassination. I don't remember if he killed anybody but he was shooting. And I think got shot.
It's possible I read that in Cracked. It's not in the primary sources I checked (i.e. Wikipedia doesn't mention it).
Goebbels wrote at least one novel, and according to some versions, killed his wife before killing himself.
Tolkien was a signals officer, Somme.
The guy who wrote signals officer also. Not sure about the author of Human Condition, but if the story is autobiographical, he barely saw combat (trenches against Russian tanks at the very end, just terror), but murdered a sentry escaping. Oh, and an asshole fellow prisoner at a POW camp.
Don't remember beginning ofHarp of Burma well, but I think not.
Osamu Dazai double-suicided
Guy who wrote Fires on the Plain was a signals officer in Philippines, html fail. Remembering more clearly I think he kills a peasant and a fellow soldier who was a cannibal.
Hannah Arendt was tougher than I thought.
78: yes, he got shot in the leg and wounded slightly by one of his own guys. Probably never killed anyone himself.
Osamu Dazai double-suicided
Impressive determination.
Maybe he killed the guy who wounded him.
Seems he killed one of his own security men in 2003, at least. No doubt others.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/22/1071941665229.html
Anyway, he probably made some guy write the book for him.
Churchill's got to be near the top surely.
I assume Agatha Christie offed somebody at least once for research purposes.
I thought William Dean Howells had seen combat, but was wrong.
Major General Lew Wallace of course.
I doubt Wallace, actually. Brigade commanders don't normally engage in actual combat, even in 1862. They command.
He didn't even command, did he? I thought he just got lost.
Primary sources say he did command. He wasn't lost the whole time, only the time when his troops would have been most useful.
Storm of Steel records several killings by Ernst Jünger.
Neal Ascherson? I don't suppose he qualifies as a novelist, though.
Wait, who did Neal Ascherson kill?
If you count Julius Ceasar as a famous author, he's got to win on the combined fame as author+numbers killed metric.
Having looked at the primary sources, I also want an answer to 97.1.
97.2: King David beats him out easily.
Hitler wrote a fairly well known book as well...
Yeah, but he's not famous as an author in the same way that Caesar is.
Maybe some day the Book of Psalms will be as widely read as The Gallic Wars.
I'm not sure Caesar is famous as an author at all. His generally recognized accomplishments have more to do with crossing rivers and getting stabbed.
And the slogan at the premature ejaculation clinic, "Veni, vidi, veni."
Catching up on the thread, I'm curious how many books Richard Macinko has written at this point . . . 20.
From that wikipedia entry, the section on "video game" is funny.
Marcinko has partnered with Bethesda Softworks to publish Rogue Warrior for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. Marcinko himself is the protagonist and is voiced by actor Mickey Rourke. In the game, Marcinko is sent on a classified mission into North Korea to disrupt an anti-ballistic missile program. Released in December 2009, the game was critically panned, with critics citing poor AI, excessive use of expletives, numerous bugs, poor graphics, a short single player mode and limited multiplayer mode. Since its release, Rogue Warrior has been listed as one of the worst video games of all time.
I'm not sure Caesar is famous as an author at all.
Literally 2000 years of people studying Latin say that you're wrong.
Or, I guess, 500 years. No idea if Caesar was widely read before the Renaissance, but he's been the core Latin intro text since then.
In the words of the famous author, "See Spot run. Jane, look at Spot run."
37: The house (well, stately home, really) where the Parkers lived in the Parker-Hulme case is now the Staff Club where I work. They do nice beer and you can sit in the garden.
Gene Wolfe probably killed a few Koreans. Invented Pringles, too.
wait, gene wolfe invented pringles, seriously? not just great literature but also dried-potato-slurry non-euclidian geometry spaces?
solzhenitsyn undoubtedly killed loads of people on the eastern front, and also seems likely to have presided over/not prevented some of the gang-raping women and girls to death when he was a captain; he wrote a poem about it in which the narrator is neutral about this form of revenge.
He helped invent the machine that makes Pringles, apparently.
I'm also curious to know who Neal Ascherson killed. His career and lifestyle don't seem likely to have included much mortal combat. Did he run someone over or something?
re: 114.last
A bit of Googling, he did his national service as a Marine Commando in Malaya.
"When you do what you are trained to do, this extraordinary experience of shooting at people and being shot at, it is a huge high when you are 18 years old. But afterwards it dawns on you. You remember the dead bodies and think: 'I'm responsible for that.' You reflect, rather self-consciously, why am I not considered worthy to vote in the British election [the age of franchise then was 21], but I'm not too young to take somebody's life?"
Which is a quote from:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/apr/12/history.politics
So, at the sharp end, with guns, doing colonial dirty work.
My brother's Dad, funnily enough, was similarly in Malaya in the late 50s. I can't remember what unit he was in, but he certainly saw active service, on foot, in jungles.
108/9: I'm not sure that "But literally everyone fluent in Latin knows that..." is going to go very far when it comes to establishing that something is well known.
WTF. Anne Perry is the girl from Heavenly Creatures. That's . . ..wow.
What I most remember about Caesar is the number of ablative absolutes concern striking camp.
We could have an unfogged meet up that's a combination of hiking, limping, and Aguirre, the Wrath of God recreating.
I thought we were restricted to homicidal novelists. If we're doing authors in general, why has nobody mentioned François Villon yet?