Discussion
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/116290338892571761
🤦🏿♂️Actually, nevermind.
Why is everything like this?
The author supposedly went on an anti-woke, right-wing podcast to promote the movie while trashing other books and movies that do have a "woke" message or that have inclusive representation? But... why?
Why was that necessary?
Hurry up and watch "Project Hail Mary" so we can talk about it!
Until then: no spoilers!
Edit: taking my own advice, I need to hurry up and read the book too!
☝️ As an SF (science fiction) buff this has been one of the best threads lately, and demonstrates what an amazing community we have here on Mastodon. Good on ya, all!
But, seems like we missed one stand out SF writer and they're actually on Mastodon! Today the New Yorker is featuring Cameron Reed @LateOnsetGirl and their prescient 1996 queer cyberpunk tale, “The Fortunate Fall”.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-sci-fi-novelist-who-disappeared-for-decades
Cameron only has 400 followers here, so maybe give them a follow
-more-
☝️ As an SF (science fiction) buff this has been one of the best threads lately, and demonstrates what an amazing community we have here on Mastodon. Good on ya, all!
But, seems like we missed one stand out SF writer and they're actually on Mastodon! Today the New Yorker is featuring Cameron Reed @LateOnsetGirl and their prescient 1996 queer cyberpunk tale, “The Fortunate Fall”.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-sci-fi-novelist-who-disappeared-for-decades
Cameron only has 400 followers here, so maybe give them a follow. 🤷
-more-
"The book portrays an authoritarian near-future Russia where most entertainment and all news comes through Cameras, people wired to transmit their experiences directly from their brains to the internet... Our tragic hero, a Camera named Maya, uncovers... [and] social media’s incessant threat to our inner life. What if we could replace our lived experience—our self-image, our values, our sexuality—with immersive videos, delivered fresh every day?"
-more-
And here's something interesting, “The Fortunate Fall,” was published in 1996. After this they wrote a short story, but then nothing for twenty-seven years...
"Then she reëmerged, posting on Bluesky and Mastodon as @LateOnsetGirl in 2024, her work’s lasting impact led Tor Books to reissue “The Fortunate Fall” in a series of modern sci-fi and fantasy classics..."
https://torpublishinggroup.com/the-fortunate-fall/
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-fortunate-fall-cameron-reed/1143881569
-more-
"And now Tor is set to release a new novel from Reed, “What We Are Seeking,” that’s longer, more joyful, more ambitious, and at least as devoted to cognitive estrangement, making new worlds whose structures and societies let us see ours with fresh eyes."
https://torpublishinggroup.com/what-we-are-seeking/
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/what-we-are-seeking-cameron-reed/1147243934
So, maybe give Cameron a follow and re-welcome them to Mastodon.🤷
Just about everything you say makes sense to me, Mekka.
And, at the risk of wading in where I shouldn't - because I'm a nerd who doesn't know how to read the room - I want to weigh in.
Also because I've been struggling with this issue of The Work vs The Author for some time now.
E.g. I enjoyed the puns in Harry Potter but then JK Rowling came out as a TERF. I loved Ender's Game but Orson Scott Card is an anti-LGBTQ nasty. And so on.
What do I do with that?
It's a genuinely complicated question to answer. Unfortunately, I can't tell you what to do. I can only say what I do, and say that as long as you're pausing to think about it and asking yourself before you make a decision to or to not support something or someone, that's in the right direction. ♥️
[Edit: I removed the CW, as I felt the post was just as meaningful without examples, so I removed the examples.]
Ah me and my cluelessness.
When I said "Just about everything you say makes sense to me, Mekka" I meant to add "but why do I feel itchy about this post?"
You did make me pause to think!
It's a long pause, I mean a long thread, I hope you read the third-to-last post, I thought it was amusing.
Like I said, I'll keep struggling with this.
@mekkaokereke
Firstly, thank you for kicking off a great thread on finding deserving sci-fi authors, there's some great additions to my reading queue.
Secondly, does anyone have any links to good news sources about this? Most I've found are right wing rags that I wouldn't trust to fold a sheet. The one source I could find that seemed balanced thinks this is being mis attributed?
https://bsky.app/profile/parkermolloy.com/post/3mi4oudz7yk2h
Was this s case of an author doing a promo tour and making a bad choice of who to be accepted by? Or is this a reflection of his real character?
I'm hoping more the former, but fear it's closer to the second (I liked his books and found them promoting inclusivity and a more progressive world view than what this sounds like)
I might have to bring myself to listen to the actual podcast so I can answer those questions myself.
Don't read the right-wing rags that try to exaggerate how anti-woke Weir is. Don't read Parker Malloy trying to downplay how anti-woke he is either.
Just listen to his own words and make your own determination.
@mekkaokereke thank you for providing that context, I'll listen to it.
It always makes me sad when we find out some of our icons (and authors are often mine) are like this...
I'm all for that they're allowed to be human - even make mistakes and have a chance to grow and learn - but sometimes 🤷♂️
@mekkaokereke any book by Connie Willis, but Bellwether is a personal favorite.
@GreatBigTable @mekkaokereke Bellwether is fun, and of course To Say Nothing Of The Dog is great, but I may never recover from the narrative fuckery of Passage (in a good way).
Kind of weird. I just finished his previous book, *Artemis*, which has a melting pot on the moon, run by a Kenyan (who turned Kenya’s position on the equator into an advantage getting to space), with a young woman born in Saudi Arabia as its heroine…..
I suppose Weir could argue there’s no “identity politics”, just lots of people’s identities.
But, book recommendations (you’re getting lots of good ones, here are a few I haven’t seen):
Ruthanna Emrys’ *The Half-built Garden* is about a post-dissolution Chesapeake Bay run by a “rhizomal democracy”. Who establish first contact with the aliens when they go out to investigate a change in the water quality (alien space-ship is stranded and leaking). Would sit comfortably next to Leguin’s *The Dispossessed*.
Emrys also has some great stories told from the point of view of a survivor of the people who lived in Lovecraft’s Innsmouth, and who were the first occupants of the camps where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during WWII.
Annalee Newitz’s *Automatic Noodle* is about some down-and-out robots that squat in an abandoned restaurant and start serving hand-pulled noodles. It’s joyful. Any of Newitz’s fiction is great (so is her non-fiction).
*Cahokia Jazz* by Francis Spufford. An alternate history in which Cahokia continued to exist in the American Midwest into the era of the European invasion, and maintained its political independence west of the MIssissippi. The protagonist is a mixed-race (Native American and Black) police detective investigating a murder. Takes place during the 1920s. Would sit comfortably next to Michael Chabon’s *The Yiddish Policeman’s Union*.
Spufford’s *Red Plenty*, a blend of history and fiction about the development of linear programming and mathematical economics by Kantorovich in the 1930s Soviet Union and how human foibles basically kept it from working out.
Let's see what he had to say about that character in Artemis:
"Just, writer to writer... what I did on that one... was... I tried for a female main character, and this was kind of in the peak woke era, so, a lot of people were just like, 'oh, this is a female character written by a man!' and they were just right from the beginning not willing to accept that."
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ezZ_QGBpaDo&t=1577s
So he dismisses criticism of the character as just "peak woke era🤡." But then immediately afterwards, he acknowledged the real problems with the character.
He could have made all of the good points that he made, without punching down at the "peak woke era."
Again, the anti-woke pushback has resulted in 300,000+ Black women being fired from the federal government, thousands of Black men and women being purged from the military, the number of Black journalists with national reach being decimated, and scientists having funding cut for using words like "bias" or "diversity" or "gender," in their papers. So this isn't just how a few white men feel about things.
@mekkaokereke @lain_7
That's an odd connection to make - there are a lot of ways to be anti-woke (which I'm not sure he is) without firing a bunch of people.
No it's not an odd connection to make at all. It's odd that you can't see the connection, when even the people that sparked the anti-woke backlash said explicitly that this was their end goal.
The anti-woke pushback is directly responsible for Black people being pushed out of media, higher education, government employment and more. It requires deplorable people to say "Woke is a bad thing!" and misguided people to fall for it and say, "Wait, pushing back on woke doesn't sound that bad?"
And if Weir going on an anti-woke podcast and knowing the in-jokes, the anti-woke host saying anti-woke things, and him saying "we're on the same wavelength" and "you don't have to worry about THE MESSAGE" and him complaining about "peak woke era" isn't enough to convince you, then that's fine. I don't argue with y'all, and I'm not here to change anyone's mind. I say what I say, and I collect my receipts later.
@mekkaokereke @lain_7 And yet other cis het white sci-fi dudes somehow succeeded at writing engaging diverse women characters (at least IMO).
Kinda reminds me of Naomi Klein’s explanation for Naomi Wolf’s turn to the dark side: the reaction of an injured ego to crticism she viewed as unfair.
There were a few points in *Artemis* where I wondered about the internal dialogue of the young woman: “this sounds like a guy writing what he thinks a whip-smart young woman would sound like.” Criticism along those lines is perfectly fair, but not to a fragile ego.
@mekkaokereke I fell for it and started reading the book. I'm definitely not a philologist but it feels like i'm reading some Dan Brown book more than anything else.
I don't know if the story has at least some satisfying climax and closure but might never find out because the author is a right wing douchebag.
Also, am i the only one who seeing this?
Whatever.
@mekkaokereke
Sounds like he hasn’t read his own books.
@mekkaokereke Why is everything like this? Thanks for letting me know
@mekkaokereke Has anyone mentioned N.K. Jemisin yet? I haven’t read all her work, but the Broken Earth trilogy is extremely inclusive, Afro-centric, and most importantly, beautifully written.
@mekkaokereke Noooo! I am so disappointed. And now I feel like a bit of a fool for recommending his books to everyone.
Thank you for this thread. As sad as it is, I needed to know. And I love how you’ve sparked so many great book recommendations! Time to find some new favorite authors.
@mekkaokereke He didn't, the quote was from someone else
https://bsky.app/profile/parkermolloy.com/post/3mi4oudz7yk2h
@mekkaokereke I bought tickets for this last week before this broke. It's frankly the first movie I'm going to see in 6 years. I'm going in to watch the movie. Then put the author in the trash bin until further notice.
@mekkaokereke Dammit. Really liked PHM, and just picked up the book. Fck. And the Martian was a great read, and film. Fck! Fck.
@mekkaokereke milkshake duck strikes again
@mekkaokereke yikes. I was stressed over watching it before it left theaters, and now I find myself with more time.
There are those of us who really dislike Weir for promoting that what he does is 'scientifically accurate', when in fact it has lots of fantastictical aspects.
https://freethought.online/@pzmyers/116286803833013305
This type of dishonesty and self serving disinformation seems consistent with being an anti-woke jackass.
Just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with including impossible elements in SF, just don't present your work then as being scientifically plausible.
@mekkaokereke ah fudge I was looking forward to this one
That said, I was in a different thread saying I don’t normally like media where the author and/or fan base maintains a slavish devotion to “reality” because the authors and fans wind up being pro fascism or at least fascist adjacent.
This author was in an interview talking about how realistic the book was from a physics perspective and I had multiple recommendations from people I trusted so I felt good about it
Welp
@mekkaokereke
Andy Weir: “Oh thanks, man. Well, I never - I think you and me are kind of on the same wavelength there when it comes to fiction writing. I never put any politics or messaging in any of my stories at all. There's no, you know, there's - there's no deeper meaning. There isn't even any symbolism. My book, even non-political, there's just no symbolism at all. My books are always just purely to entertain.”
Wait, what? This is an absolutely insane thing to say as a writer. “My works are hollow fluff.”
https://www.resetera.com/threads/andy-weir-author-of-project-hail-mary-does-interview-with-right-wing-content-creator-shitbag-the-critical-drinker-to-promote-the-film-adaptation.1475038/
@c0dec0dec0de @mekkaokereke Not to mention, "I have no idea about the values expressed through my stories and the way I tell them."
@KatS @c0dec0dec0de @mekkaokereke I keep being baffled by SF fans and writers who apparently think that an inherently political genre like SF can be non-political.
@mekkaokereke I guess it was important to show people that even though it resembles a great story it just has no depth, the author has no spine, and he lacks the intellectual ability to live in the present moment.
@wronglang @mekkaokereke Just because he thinks he’s not using symbolism and talking about politics doesn’t mean that’s true. It just means he’s talking about the politics and using the symbols he is too incurious to realize are part of his own language and identity and political views. Not the sort of shallowness you’d expect from an author. But I guess it takes all sorts?
@wronglang @mekkaokereke The comment is spineless – but the story itself is very political whether he intended it or not. Simply giving a main character a core of empathy and decency towards someone seen as alien IS political today.
@trezzer @mekkaokereke he totally had the opportunity to ask the interviewer to interpret the story and lead it in a direction that wasn't fawning. The trouble with many authors tends to be that they don't do well in the moment seeing how meaning is made without revisions... so yeah of course we can read the work separate from the author... but then he should stay away from podcasts and shush... 🤷♂️
@wronglang @mekkaokereke that sounds like he's fucking with the interviewer, but maybe I'm giving him too much credit.
I wish that were true. It's not, but I wish it was.
@mekkaokereke @wronglang it's wild. What self-respecting author would ever say, "No I don't use themes or symbolism. I don't think about what I'm writing at all."
@mekkaokereke @tess I'm ok with mourning this loss and moving on. It's become such a common pattern and I hope he doesn't go full jk Rowling but that's up to him.
@wronglang @mekkaokereke when you said that "the author has no spine" I remembered something. I liked the film "The Martian in spite of the obvious political message of one good man surviving "in the wild".
but then I read that it was a book adaptation and you could get it with or without swearwords, the censored version being for schools.
You just have to be very shortsighted not to realise you're writing educational YA and adapt your style accordingly (or you just despise YA readership)... or you just have no style and no respect for your finished work, just dollar signs for eyes.
@laguiri @mekkaokereke I imagine the reason this happened is he was nudged by the publisher to go make the book/movie well received by fascists and he was just a little too excited to comply and not principled enough to say "guys, it's a book, you have to interpret it yourself". He had many ways to avoid this but he chose to prioritize the 🤑
@mekkaokereke can I ask where you found/heard about this? I couldn't find it.
I don't like the guy's writing - preferred the Martian in film form (don't make me read about how a guy is "raping" a ship for parts, you POS).
I thought I'd go see PHM but... Mebbe not
looks like you are getting a ton of great recs already, one i don't see mentioned yet that i've been reading a lot of is Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts is a good one to start with
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