Huggeddon and beyond

The Hugo awards were announced last weekend at the Worldcon in Spokane, and I couldn't not comment on them.  The results were nothing less than extraordinary.  It was very strange to watch so  many awards being announced as 'no award'.

Every SF writer wants to win a Hugo. Stories are nominated by fans and readers, and they have a special place in everyone's hearts.  But this year's events threatened to derail the awards for ever.  Google 'sad puppies' and 'rabid puppies' and you'll get the whole sorry story.  I'm more interested in what the result means for SF, and for women, in the future.

I have the sense that this is a time of change for the SF genre.  Over a year ago I attended a Women in SF panel event at Blackwell's Bookshop in London where five female published SF authors described the struggles they had to be recognized and reviewed.  Since then, it feels like the pressure to recognise female and diverse voices in SF has risen steadily.  

Which is good, but we women have to do our part too.  I won't deny that Twitter scares me as much as I find it useful.  It can be fabulous for raising awareness of issues, but it can also be a very nasty place.  Like many women, I dislike direct conflict, and I will sometimes pull my punches in comments, mindful of the snark that will ensue if I speak my whole truth.

I have to stop doing this.  We all have to stop doing this, and the Hugos this year was a watershed.  It was a time when we said 'this misognyy is not acceptable', and voted accordingly. The awards were about much more than the individual nominees.  This year the result sent a message to the world about what we want SF to be in the future - inclusive.  

Some good people lost out on awards they deserved in the midst of the 'no awards' carnage, but we had to take a stand.  For after all, if speculative fiction cannot speculate on a future where women and diverse people are equal, then it has no right to call itself SF.  The Hugos were a necessary calling to account and course correction.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Sensing the alien

Following on from last week's blog post on aliens, this week I'm back to editing my novel Genehunter.  One of the main characters in that story is Yull, an Ur-Vai leader.  The Ur-Vai are zebra-sized big cats, with the solidity of a lion.  As well as their four legs, they also have two arms and hands.

This is a rewrite of the novel, and I'm trying to deepen Yull's character.  One of the things I realised early on is that I'd totally missed references to his sense of smell.  But Yull is a cat, and I realised his sense of smell would be much stronger than humans'.  He will be able to scent things the human characters can't smell at all.   And when he is introduced to human tech, that will have strange scents to him too.

So I'm now rewriting all of Yulł's chapters to add details about how the world around him smells.  I've decided he can scent each individual Ur-Vai emotion.  This is going to come in handy when he has to decide who is friend and foe later on in the novel.  And I've realised that the scents of the humans, and their technology, will be totally unknown to him.  He's put in the position of trying to build a friendship with humans without having all his usual scent clues to help him.  I'm writing in his sense of dislocation and disorientation this unfamiliar task brings to him.

I haven't mentioned the cats' sight in detail, but I've decided they see in full colour.  I'm cheating, because I've had them retain the tapetum lucidum, that reflective layer of cells cats have that help them to see better than us in the dark.  Cats can see up to eight times better than us with these cells, but the trade-off is that they don't see full colour,  I've been greedy.  I wanted the Ur-Vai to see in full colour as well.  I'm sure evolution can design an adaptation that will allow that.  I reasoned that the cats are tech builders and users, and they might need to see in full colour in order to use their tech safely.  

Because the cats have hands I've been able to work in a little of their sense of touch too.  At one point in the story Yull comforts Aris.  I've had him stroking her hair, and observing how different its texture is to Ur-Vai manes. By twisting around familiar senses, I've managed to make Yull unique.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

The evolution of the alien

Among the many delights I experienced at Nine Worlds Geekfest last week was a talk by Śtevyn Colgan on aliens.  His thesis was that our idea of the 'other' has reflected our own popular culture, and in film, also the limitations of the medium.

He mentioned that the aliens pictured on the covers of pulp SF magazines looked humanoid, they often had outsized heads, because we thought that more advanced people would have bigger brains.

And before the advent of computer generated imagery most aliens were 'men in rubber suits'.  They were the same shape as we are, with a few superficial tweaks.  But as technology expanded we became fascinated by the idea of robot aliens. 

Our scientific discoveries have always driven our ideas of the alien.  In the 1990s the rise of CGI imagery let us create aliens in the computer that had no analogue basis on earth.  More recently, with the discovery of many new planets, we've begun to realise that life might be able to exist in many different places.  There could be whole ecosystems swimming around in oceans under the frozen surfaces of planets.  There might  be creatures that can breathe methane atmospheres.

And when we got to exploring the deep ocean we saw many wonderful alien forms swimming around. We've found extremophiles that can live in sulphur, scalding hot temperatures, and impossibly cold temperatures.  We've found creatures that don't need to breathe oxygen.  And Oxford University scientists have recently created a flexible silicon gel that can swim.  The boundaries between life and not-life are much more fluid than we once thought.

But there are some universals.  Eyes will probably appear.  Fur is probably a constant too.  Flight may also be universal.  And sexual reproduction is also likely to be common.  And a last sobering thought comes from Kevin Warwick, who wonders if intelligence might be a disadvantage for long- term survival.  After all, these so- called intelligent humans are hard at work destroying their planet.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com

Tribal reinforcement - Nine Worlds Geekfest

Today I'm off to Heathrow for the start of the Nine Worlds Geekfest SF convention.  It's been a while since my last con, at Easter, and I'm feeling in need of a genre boost.  Writers always have a feeling of isolationist when we're writing alone in whatever personal garret we choose, but for me as an SF writer that aloneness runs much deeper.

I have lots of writer friends, but most of them are crime or romance writers, and one is a comedy writer too.  Only a few of them have ever read a science fiction book.  They're good for giving general feedback on writing, commenting on plots and character motivation, but they have no feel for the SF genre.  Sometimes that means they question silly things, and it means I can't use them as a check for whether a scientific idea sounds plausible.

This has been a perennial problem for me, as the lone SF writer surrounded by all sorts of other writers.  I've been part of Havant and District Writers' Circle off and on for thirty years, and I'm now its  Chairwoman.  I can remember back twenty years when I used to read SF pieces and get the reaction "that's nice dear", or "that's interesting" - translation: I haven't a clue what you're talking about and can't critique it. This lack of people around me with genre knowledge has become incredibly frustrating at times.

So I'm off to Geekfest to mix with people who read the same books that I do, that understand the concept of a jumpdrive. Some of them will be scientists, and will understand much more than me.  In the events I'll get to discuss SF tropes, political systems of the future, sexuality, and speculate on the scientific breakthroughs of the future.

The convention has a broad programme, and I'm sure it will spark off many ideas for me through listening to the discussions.  And there are industry editors and agents there, talking about publishing in the genre.  Their insight will be absolute gold dust.  So I'm looking forward to a packed weekend, and to learning lots of things that can take my writing career onwards to a higher level.

Wendy Metcalfe is the author of Panthera : Death Spiral and Panthera : Death Song, and the short story collection Otherlives.  Find out more at www.wendymetcalfe.com