{"id":2677,"date":"2005-02-25T21:12:34","date_gmt":"2005-02-26T05:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2005\/02\/25\/2677.html"},"modified":"2022-10-02T11:45:11","modified_gmt":"2022-10-02T18:45:11","slug":"homosexuality-sf-and-the-unhei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2005\/02\/25\/homosexuality-sf-and-the-unhei\/","title":{"rendered":"Homosexuality, sf, and the unheimlich"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<style>\r\n.thought {\r\n  font-style: italic;\r\n}\r\n<\/style>\r\n<p>I really ought to be either editing or reading subs, but I'm gonna take a little time to point to a couple of really interesting entries in Kip Manley's blog <a href=\"http:\/\/www.longstoryshortpier.com\/\">Long story; short pier<\/a>&#8212;a blog I was either previously unaware of or else just not paying attention to.<\/p>\r\n<p>Manley's been writing about first exposures to the idea of homosexuality, and has been saying some fascinating stuff about sf in the process.<\/p>\r\n<p>Back when I wrote that \"<a href=\"http:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/non-fiction\/azimuth\/editorials\/the-future-of-sex\/\">Future of Sex<\/a>\" editorial, some readers responded that the problem with putting queer people in sf is that it distracts from the rest of the story&#8212;the idea being (more or less) that sex, and homosexuality in particular, is inherently so foregrounded that putting it in a story at all makes that what the story's about.  Here's <a href=\"http:\/\/www.longstoryshortpier.com\/vaults\/2005\/02\/16\/could_be_belongs_to_us\">Manley on <cite>The Tomorrow File<\/cite><\/a>, a 1975 novel by Lawrence Sanders that's set twenty years in the then-future and has a bisexual protagonist named Nicholas:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>Had Nicholas been narrating a contemporary beach-blanket thriller, he&#8217;d&#8217;ve been an alienating figure. No matter how exotic the locale, he&#8217;d&#8217;ve been insisting he was with all his queerness <em>here<\/em> and <em>now,<\/em> and I could look around me and see that this was not so. But science fiction ... gives him a certain license. He&#8217;s insisting that he and all his world <em>could be,<\/em> and inviting you to step awhile in his shoes and see the sights.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>An excellent point.  Though I would add that to some extent these days (thirty years after the Sanders novel was published), the presence of homosexuality in science fiction set in the future is <em>more<\/em> alienating than in contemporary-setting fiction, for a reason much like what I was talking about in my editorial: because there's so much more homosexuality in the real world (and in contemporary fiction) than in sf set in the future.<\/p>\r\n<p>(Aside: It occurred to me recently, while reading a Human Future In Space story in <cite>Asimov's<\/cite> in which there are actual homosexuals, that I neglected something in my editorial: it's traditionally okay to have queer and\/or kinky people in HFIS stories <em>as long as they're decadent and jaded and world-weary<\/em>.  This realization led me to decide that I want to write an <cite>Absolute Magnitude<\/cite>-style Starship Pilot Adventure Story in which the dashing starship pilot jock hero is gay but not at all decadent.)<\/p>\r\n<p>So then in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.longstoryshortpier.com\/vaults\/2005\/02\/22\/the_fulness_of_time\">later entry<\/a>, Manley goes on to discuss the terms <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/~lezard\/lexicon\/o\/ostranen.html\">ostranenie<\/a> (\"the experience of having the familiar and commonplace made strange or alien,\" says that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/~lezard\/lexicon\/xlex.html\">L&eacute;zard Lexicon<\/a> page) and <span class=\"foreign\">unheimlich<\/span> (apparently hard to translate, but often translated into English as \"uncanny\"; literally \"un-home-like\").  And then:<\/p>\r\n<blockquote>\r\n<p>But the thing about any tool no matter how mighty fine is that once you&#8217;ve used a hammer for a while you start to expect the nails. Read enough SF and you come to expect those <span class=\"foreign\">unheimlich<\/span> touches, the <span class=\"foreign\">ostranenie<\/span> of another world. It is itself familiar, usual, canny, <span class=\"foreign\">heimlich.<\/span> It&#8217;s what you opened the book for in the first place; that <a href=\"http:\/\/www-users.cs.york.ac.uk\/~susan\/sf\/cons\/e2003.htm#15\" title=\"Or deliquescing. It could deliquesce.\">door damn well better be dilating<\/a> by page three or you&#8217;re taking your custom elsewhere. &#8212;This is neither a good thing, nor a bad thing, it&#8217;s just a thing, and savvy writers and readers take it into account, ringing <span class=\"foreign\">ostranenie<\/span> games off their own expectations of the <span class=\"foreign\">unheimlich<\/span> as naturally as breathing.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n<p>Yeah.  I think this is at the heart of a lot of those \"but it isn't sf!\" arguments&#8212;and at the heart of a lot of the playing with genre boundaries that some authors do.<\/p>\r\n<p>(Aside: for a bit more on \"the door dilated,\" see Gunn's \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.ku.edu\/~sfcenter\/protocol.htm\">The Protocols of Science Fiction<\/a>,\" and a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.urth.net\/urth\/archives\/v0208\/1612.txt.shtml\">posting by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes<\/a>, and Langford's <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ansible.co.uk\/writing\/drabbles.html\">Drabbles<\/a>.)<\/p>\r\n<p>Sometimes I read a submission and I start to get a little tense, thinking <span class=\"thought\">This is really good, but there aren't any speculative elements yet.  I wonder if the author knows we're an sf magazine.<\/span>  And that tension sometimes lurks in the back of my head through the whole story, until I get to the last line and find out there's something sfnal going on after all, and I breathe a sigh of relief and start thinking, in effect, <span class=\"thought\">Will our readers trust us and the author long enough to wait for the dilating door?  Or will they decide the story's not <span class=\"foreign\">unheimlich<\/span> enough, and give up?<\/span><\/p>\r\n<p>And of course it makes things \"worse\" (in some sense) when we \"betray\" sf reader trust by publishing a story that doesn't actually contain any speculative elements at all, per se.  The hardened sf reader sits down to read, knowing that since we're an sf magazine a door is going to dilate at some point in the story&#8212;and then they get to the end and the doors all swung open on hinges, and they're caught short, trying to step down onto a final step that isn't there (to switch architectural metaphors).  <span class=\"thought\">Hey!<\/span> they think, <span class=\"thought\">where the hell are my dilating doors?  This isn't sf!  What's it doing in an sf magazine?<\/span>  I've thought that myself about more than one story published elsewhere, most notably Andy Duncan's brilliant novella \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.asimovs.com\/_issue_0206\/thechiefdesigner.shtml\">The Chief Designer<\/a>\" (and if you haven't read it, for heaven's sake, go read it!), which was my first real exposure to the idea that an sf magazine could publish a not-really-sf story, a story that has what Ellen Datlow calls \"speculative sensibilities.\"  (And it got nominated for a Hugo, and I voted for it 'cause it was the best story on the ballot even though it wasn't really sf, exactly.)<\/p>\r\n<p>And all of that leads directly to Manley's excellent question \"How do expectations of wonder and estrangement limit the otherworlds we can build within [sf]?\"<\/p>\r\n<p>Manley then goes on to talk about \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.strangehorizons.com\/2004\/20041115\/swell-f.shtml\">Time's Swell<\/a>\" and my editorial.  Good stuff, even though I disagree with various of the specifics.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I really ought to be either editing or reading subs, but I&#8217;m gonna take a little time to point to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,23,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-favorite-entries","category-queer","category-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2677"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19534,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2677\/revisions\/19534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}