Jason Sanford

My 2014 Nebula Award nominations

I almost waited too late this year to make my Nebula Award nominations. I could plead that life has been busy—which it has—and that what little free time I have has been consumed by my own writing—which it also has.

But that doesn't change the fact that I waited until the day before the Nebula nominating period closed to post my list of nominations.

Yes, I'm feeling guilty about this. I should have been out there promoting the amazing stories and novels listed below, all of which—in a just world—would make the short list for not only the Nebula Awards but also the Hugos.

Anyway, these are the stories and novels I'm both nominating and recommending. If you're considering your own nominations, take the time to check these out. And if you can't nominate, you should still hunt down these works and read them. They're absolutely worth searching for.

Best Novel of 2013

• A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar (Small Beer Press)
• Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
• Dust Devil on a Quiet Street by Richard Bowes (Lethe Press)
• Love Minus Eighty by Will McIntosh (Orbit)
• The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (Mulholland)

Best Novella of 2013

• Freefall by Mercurio D. Rivera (Immersion Press)
• Precious Mental by Robert Reed (Asimov’s)
• Six-Gun Snow White by Catherynne Valente (Subterranean)
• Spin by Nina Allan (TTA Press)
• Yseul's Lexicon by Yoon Ha Lee (Prime Books, Conservation of Shadows)

Best Novelette of 2013

• A Hollow Play by Amal El-Mohtar (Glitter & Mayhem, Apex Book Co.)
• Pearl Rehabilitative Colony For Ungrateful Daughters by Henry Lien (Asimov's)
• The Litigation Master and the Monkey King by Ken Liu (Lightspeed)
• The Waiting Stars by Aliette de Bodard (Candlemark and Gleam)
• They Shall Salt the Earth with Seeds of Glass by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Asimov's)

Best Short Story of 2013

• Effigy Nights by Yoon Ha Lee (Clarkesworld)
• Karina Who Kissed Spacetime by Indrapramit Das (Apex)
• Samsa in Love by Haruki Murakami (The New Yorker)
• Selkie Stories are for losers by Sofia Samatar (Strange Horizons)
• The Sounds of Old Earth by Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed)

2013 Bradbury

• Gravity by Alfonso Cuaron
• HER by Spike Jonze 
• Hunger Games: Catching Fire by Francis Lawrence
• Pacific Rim by Guillermo del Toro
• The Day of the Doctor by Stephen Moffatt

2013 Norton (Best Young Adult Novels)

• Sister Mine by Nalo Hopkinson (Grand Central)
• The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Arthur A. Levine Books)

In praise of virtual connections

My new essay "In praise of virtual connections" is now live on my Sci-Fi Strange Medium.com collection. In the essay I discuss why our interconnected world isn’t the cause of social disengagement, and might even fix it. For good measure I even throw in Sturgeon’s Law and apply it to human communications and lives.

If you like the essay, consider following my Sci-Fi Strange collection, which is updated regularly with works by myself and many others.

Ed Kramer: Science fiction and fantasy's Woody Allen

Yesterday the New York Times published a heart-rending and eloquent letter from Dylan Farrow describing the sexual abuse inflicted upon her by her adoptive father Woody Allen. Words can't describe the anger I feel at both Allen for doing this and at Hollywood for enabling him and looking the other way.

Roxane Gay gets to the heart of the matter in her must-read essay "Compartmentalizing Woody Allen," about how both America and Hollywood see what they want to see. But I also think it's much more than that, something Dylan Farrow alluded to in her letter when she calls out actors like Cate Blanchett, Louis CK, Alec Baldwin and Diane Keaton for looking the other way.

Basically, as Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" Add prestige and fame to that quote and you're close to understanding why Hollywood wants so desperately to ignore the truth about Woody Allen.

But it's easy to act like we're so much better than those Hollywood big shots, who refuse to see the truth screaming in their face. But some of those in the SF/F field haven't acted much better with our own Woody Allen, the infamous Edward E. Kramer.

For those who don't know, Kramer is a well-known editor and writer who was also a co-founder and former part-owner of Dragon*Con. In 2000 he was charged with molesting three teenage boys in incidents stretching back to 1996. However, instead of going to trial, Kramer fought to postpone any day of justice, saying severe health concerns made him unable to attend his trial. This dragged on for more than a decade until, in 2011, the too-ill-for-trial Kramer was—surprise—caught hiking in Conneticut and staying in an hotel room with an underage boy.

Kramer's long evasion of justice for his victims ended in December 2013 when he pleaded guilty to three counts of child molestation. However, since then I've yet to hear any words of apology from Kramer's many defenders in the SF/F genre.

You see, during all this a number of notable SF/F authors voiced their support for Kramer. Now obviously these defenders didn't enable or help Kramer commit his crimes. That was totally on Kramer. But by coming to Kramer's defense they enabled him to claim the role of victim in all this. That helped him draw out his trial for more than a decade, which delayed justice from being served. 

To the credit of SF/F fandom, people eventually threatened to boycott Dragon*Con unless they severed ties with Kramer, which they did. But I've heard no apologies from any of Kramer's other extremely vocal defenders in the genre.

Just like Hollywood, many in the SF/F community are too willing to look away from sexual abuse and child molestation when it is inconvenient to either themselves or the genre. However, doing this actually weakens the genre and harms all of us, as it encourages a culture of silence and allows predators like Kramer to continue harming new victims.

When yesterday became the forever template of the future

Something broke for me the other day. I was reading the latest explosion of anger and hate against a science fiction author for doing what SF authors are supposed to do and I realized that the genre I love and write in—the science fiction dreams which expanded and shaped how I see the world—are dying.

In this case, said explosion came at Alex Dally MacFarlane for writing about desiring "an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories." Specifically,  MacFarlane writes:

"Post-binary gender in SF is the acknowledgement that gender is more complex than the Western cultural norm of two genders (female and male): that there are more genders than two, that gender can be fluid, that gender exists in many forms."

MacFarlane is correct, and I urge people to read the essay. And if you want to know what MacFarlane is speaking about, read the novel Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, which deserves to make all of this year's major SF award short lists. Ancillary Justice is an amazing story and a mind-bending read, especially with regards to how the novel deals with gender issues.

The novel isn't the be-all and end-all on gender complexity—hell, what could be?—but it shows so clearly what an author can accomplish when we move beyond our staid ideas of what the present and future must be. When we actually realize that the universe isn't modeled after any one of us, and that the diversity of our existence is the diversity of us all.

And that's my problem with the attacks on MacFarlane's essay. That's why something has finally broken within me with regards to the science fiction genre.

The science fiction of today suffers from an extreme case of nostalgia, a nearly fatal case, to be quite blunt. Nostalgia for a white-bread 1950's Golden Age of SF which never really existed quite as everyone longing for it believes. Nostalgia for a future which doesn't even look like our diverse present-day times, let alone how the future might actually turn out to be.

Instead of celebrating new outlooks and ideas, today's SF regurgitates spaceship-filled Happy Meals complete with a side of forgetful fries—forgetting that the Golden Age of SF wasn't golden for so many people. Forgetting that science fiction without true speculation and insight into life is a dead, dead thing.

I'm tired as hell of all this. And I'm not the only one. Jonathan McCalmont ‏has written on this very topic in Interzone. 

I understand that many people don't like change and want to stay snuggled in their warm dreams of a past which never happened. But if you're reading science fiction, you must on some level be interested in expanding your horizons. On some level you must want to see beyond your own limitations. You must want the future to be more than a forever template of the past.

At least, I used to think this about science fiction. I'm no longer so sure it's true.