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Wednesday 31 January 2018

#9: The A-Z of Therapeutic Parenting: Strategies and Solutions (Therapeutic Parenting Books) https://t.co/zBihJBig8F


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#9: The Girl Who Dared to Think 5: The Girl Who Dared to Lead

The Girl Who Dared to Think 5
The Girl Who Dared to Think 5: The Girl Who Dared to Lead
Bella Forrest
(5)

Buy new: £3.99

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#10: The Marriage Pact: the bestselling thriller for fans of THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR

The Marriage Pact
The Marriage Pact: the bestselling thriller for fans of THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR
Michelle Richmond
(255)

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#2: The A-Z of Therapeutic Parenting: Strategies and Solutions (Therapeutic Parenting Books) https://t.co/2pnZ4Uq0F3


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#10: Happy: The Journal: A chance to write joy into every day and let go of perfect (Journals) https://t.co/nLO79XPBVR


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#3: How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life https://t.co/21kNd3dNDP


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#10: Birdcage Walk https://t.co/9EgMYHLWbh


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#7: MURDER IN THE MANSION a gripping crime mystery full of twists

MURDER IN
MURDER IN THE MANSION a gripping crime mystery full of twists
FAITH MARTIN
(21)

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Review: Rosemarked - Livia Blackburne


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Helen Dunmore wins Costa book of the year for Inside the Wave https://t.co/bVH4h5zwNP https://t.co/A0zkhqIUQy


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#4: How to Break Up With Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life https://t.co/Me13eQfEkq


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#10: A Court of Frost and Starlight (A Court of Thorns and Roses) https://t.co/ZE0WzsTWyh


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New post: "Tremulous Hand stars in British Library's web showcase of medieval literature" https://t.co/7eoOA4PhGj Alison Flood Annotations of 13th-century reader, known for shaky notes that helped explain Old English to later generations, now survive in cyberspace The shaky w…


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Trash and Treasure: Something Old, Something New (January 2018)


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Trash and Treasure: Something Old, Something New (January 2018)

Trash & Treasure is a miscellany of monthly opinions on SFF, fandom and general geekness from Foz Meadows.

Welcome to the first instalment of Trash & Treasure, a monthly column where I get to review, rave and/or rant about the various bits of SFFnal media I encounter. Warning: HERE BE OPINIONS.

So far this year, I’ve consumed a pleasing balance of old and new stories. Most notably, I was finally able to watch the entire four seasons of Gravity Falls, a Disney Television Animation series which aired on the Disney channel between 2012 and 2016, and which proved to be every bit as wonderful as I’d hoped. The story follows Dipper and Mable Pines, twelve-year-old twins spending summer break with their Great-Uncle Stan, proprietor of the Mystery Shack: a tourist trap in Gravity Falls, Oregon. When Dipper finds a mysterious journal full of eldritch secrets about the town (and after Mable has a weird encounter of her own) the twins become caught up in a steadily escalating series of supernatural adventures, the truths contained in the journal juxtaposed against the fake attractions at the Mystery Shack.  

Like Steven Universe, Gravity Falls is ostensibly a kids’ show, but one whose characterisation, scripting and neatly executed long-game arc make it satisfying to watch at any age. My only complaint, which isn’t so much about Gravity Falls specifically as it is annoyance at the wider issue in general, is the extent to which Mabel and Dipper’s forays into romance and dating conform to some fairly stock, heteronormative tropes. Though a clear effort is still made to positively subvert the default forms – Dipper’s crush on his older co-worker, Wendy, ends with them being friends, even though his feelings don’t magically disappear overnight, while child psychic Gideon’s obsession with Mabel is always flatly decried as unhealthy – it irked me to see the same tired ground of Shy Logical Straight Boy and Overenthusiastic Romantic Straight Girl being firmly retrodden. In a show with a long-game villain like Bill Cypher, an otherworldly being who takes the form of an Illuminati triangle and speaks like an upbeat con-man, it would’ve been nice to see some more original romance, too.

Knowing that creator Alex Hirsch was deterred from overtly exploring explore queerness on screen due to fears of network censorship made it doubly frustrating, as I was constantly aware of straightness as a cultural default. In terms of the fantastic elements and the overall plot, nothing about Gravity Falls would’ve been different if, say, Mable was the one with the crush on Wendy, or if Dipper got tongue-tied around boys as well as girls, but even if Hirsch had been able to write that version of the story, I’m sure that many who saw the twins’ various canon straight romances as normal narrative subplots would’ve protested them as “forced” had even a whiff of queerness been permitted. Small wonder why so many of us fall, weeping with gratitude, into the arms of Steven Universe, which is unapologetically queer as fuck. Not that I’m pitting the two shows against each other, mind, especially as they’re key examples of a whole new style of cartoon narrative – I love them both dearly – but, well. You know what I mean.

(Plus and also: I have a Sekrit Headcanon that both stories exist in the same setting. Not only does this make perfect thematic sense, it also means that Robbie, Wendy’s emo boyfriend, and Lars, Steven’s emo kinda-friend, can one day meet up on their own awkward summer break and have Angry Emo Makeouts of Self-Discovery, I WILL FIGHT YOU ABOUT THIS, SHUT UP, IT WOULD BE AWESOME.)

On the retro side of things, I’ve been playing the newly remastered Crash Bandicoot trilogy on PS4, and it’s giving me feelings. Not, in fairness, universally pleasant feelings: as you traverse a vaguely antipodean island jungle in the first game, the generic “native people” designs of the only humanoid enemies you encounter in levels – brown skin, big ‘fros, no real facial features, leaf skirts, wooden spears and shields –means there’s a lot of lowkey racist squick at times, which I could do without. But there’s still something to be said for revisiting a thing you loved in childhood as an adult, even if from a more critical perspective.

In fact, revisiting the series made me wonder if part of the reason why comics and gaming are prone to so much vehement, territorial gatekeeping has to do with the inherently ephemeral nature of both mediums. It’s not something I would’ve considered prior to my current obsession with ice hockey, but – to indulge in a brief, relevant segue – the thing about falling in love with a sport as an adult is that, no matter how thorough your research or how keen your enthusiasm, you have to accept that there’s simply too much material for you to ever catch up with everything you’ve missed. Each team plays 82 games in a regular season, and as of this year, there are 31 teams; and that’s not even counting the extensive best-of-seven format for playoffs. Even though there are fewer teams the farther back you go, the NHL has been around for just over a century, and once you factor in international contest, minor leagues, juniors, and the Olympics, all of which can be hugely significant in the sport… well, you do the maths.

The only way to jump in is at random, is my point, researching forwards and backwards and learning whenever new information presents itself – but if, like me, you’re a person who prefers to start any new narrative from the beginning rather than halfway through, this can be an intimidating prospect.

And so it is with comics and gaming: the historical canon is simply so huge and so overwhelmingly inaccessible that, by definition, any newcomer is at a temporal disadvantage. We don’t tend to think of video games as occupying a closed-off historical niche, but with each new platform swiftly made redundant by its successor and with backwards comparability rarely prioritised, they really do. Some games are just unplayable now, and for those who define their identities by their lifelong commitment to the medium, knowing that any newcomer can’t possibly have shared in that set of unduplicatable early experiences is tantamount to an admission of neglect. Similarly, while it makes little sense to sneer at a child for failing to be alive when Silver Era comics were first being printed, many gatekeepers will happily do just this to anyone who discovers games or comics in adulthood, on the basis that they’ve already missed out on experiences that can’t be replicated, and that this must therefore be their fault for failing to see the light earlier.

Which is, of course, utter bullshit, never mind the frequency with which such accusations are paired with raging misogyny, racism and other forms of bigotry. More to the point, even in contexts where newcomers do have a clear (or clearer, anyway) starting point – the first book in a series or the first episode of a TV show, the name of a specific author whose books are all in the library – the same sort of gatekeeping still appears. A starting point is a starting point, and even when we like to pretend that there’s some higher moral significance to discovering a thing early in life, there’s still no such thing as a universal set of experiences, even among people who did discover the same sort of fandom at roughly the same point in childhood. But acknowledging this fact means admitting that the perception of an inherently unified fanbase comprised of such early adherents is illusory: that, when we draw a line between Real Fans and those pesky, latecoming interlopers, we’re not actually deferring to the wisdom of some objective, inviolate yardstick, but are rather making choices based on our preferences, prejudices and – yes – politics.   

Nor, for that matter, are our memories of how we came to love something set in stone, impervious to decay or alteration. As demonstrated by my adult reaction to Crash Bandicoot, it’s very possible to reassess our views of beloved properties for any variety of reasons. To take another old/new example, I’ve always been a self-professed fan of natural disaster movies, but it wasn’t until I watched Geostorm this week that I realised many of my old favourites quite arguably form a canon of cinematic cli-fi.

Climate fiction is a comparatively recent genre term, and one which I’ve always viewed with a little scepticism as to its utility, given that the twin labels of apocalyptic and dystopian fiction are already doing a pretty good job of covering the bases. But then, if you look at trashtacular action films like Twister, The Core, The Day After Tomorrow, Volcano, 2012, Into the Storm, San Andreas and now Geostorm, neither of those terms quite fits. Each of these films is explicitly premised on an outbreak of catastrophic natural disasters in the modern day or not-too-distant future, sometimes due to human interference with the environment – whether through man-made climate change or some other conscious action – or else merely the result of Mother Nature’s cruelty and caprice. Regardless of this, scientists and their supporting institutions are called upon to speak truth to institutional power in every story, to varying degrees of success.

Set in the aftermath of a future in which human-directed climate change has already fucked up the planet, Geostorm – much to my surprise – was primarily focussed, not on averting a natural disaster, but on uncovering the sabotage of a space-based weather machine designed to prevent those disasters. It’s a completely ridiculous movie in every respect, replete with stilted dialogue and terrible acting, but it still has some popcorn value, and if nothing else, it provided the mental impetus to catalyse my thoughts about the genre.

Tackling the destruction of Earth from a more comic angle, I’ve finally got around to re-listening to the original BBC radio production of Douglas Adams’s seminal work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s been years since I last found the time to do so, and I’m not surprised to find that it’s just as brilliant this time around – and as scathingly salient. As such, given that we now live in a day and age when John Boyega is gloriously saving sci-fi via Star Wars, Pacific Rim and Attack the Block, and as the original Hitchhiker’s TV series was, despite its cult status, not great, I find myself with a sudden, powerful desire for Boyega to star as Arthur Dent in a new TV adaptation, preferably with Richard Ayoade as Ford Prefect and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Trillian and listen, listen, if anyone from Netflix or Amazon Original is reading this, I am willing and able to make this thing for you, okay? I have a MIGHTY NEED.        

Also, I’ve just reread Emily Rodda’s Rowan of Rin for the first time since my teens, and found myself moved nearly to tears at times by a mix of nostalgia for the story and sheer awe at how much it manages to achieve – narratively, emotionally, structurally – in so little time. It’s an absolute classic of Australian YA fantasy that I recommend unreservedly, and which would, in the right hands, make a truly spectacular film. (Dear Hollywood: HIRE ME, YOU COWARDS.)

How’s your January going?

The post Trash and Treasure: Something Old, Something New (January 2018) appeared first on The Book Smugglers.



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The latest The UK Books Daily! https://t.co/8XSJ7IG162 Thanks to @PalmMuteMusic @IngridPersaud @ajayidami #brexit


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#7: My Sweet Revenge

My Sweet
My Sweet Revenge
by Jane Fallon (Author), Jenny Funnell (Narrator), Antonia Beamish (Narrator), Whole Story Audiobooks (Publisher)
(224)

Buy new: £20.89 £18.28

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New post: "A prize for thrillers with no violence against women? That’s not progressive" https://t.co/xSvJxuS1YE Sophie Hannah Ignoring brutality may sound like a good idea but it won’t make it go away – we should challenge prejudice, not celebrate it Between 2008 and 2012, I…


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New post: "‘My life’s stem was cut’ – a final poem by Helen Dunmore" https://t.co/kEnhTkympD Claire Armitstead The writer is only the second person to posthumously win the Costa award. To celebrate, we present a poem from her winning collection, Inside the Wave Whatever the t…


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#7: My Sweet Revenge

My Sweet
My Sweet Revenge
by Jane Fallon (Author), Jenny Funnell (Narrator), Antonia Beamish (Narrator), Whole Story Audiobooks (Publisher)
(224)

Buy new: £20.89 £18.28

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New post: "Charles Hope: Michelangelo’s Drawings" https://t.co/6Cs8On9BSn


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New post: "Bee Wilson: The Littlehampton Libels" https://t.co/r9DFXi8kbG


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New post: "Susan Pedersen: Welfare States" https://t.co/K6DS89dYV5


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New post: "Alice Spawls: On the Road" https://t.co/EaMICwDEp8


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New post: "Frederick Wilmot-Smith: Environmental Law" https://t.co/kCDtlFd5xd


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#9: Inside the Wave: COSTA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017 https://t.co/X6RuUj3pEe


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New video by Penguin Books UK on YouTube

"Art of the Lie" by Penguin Live & Book Slam
Tickets available at http://www.bookslam.com Penguin Live emerges punch drunk and tardy from the political car crash of 2017 for our first collaboration event with London’s best-loved literary club night, Book Slam. Appropriately we’ll be hosting the show at iconic boxing venue York Hall to be joined by a big-hitting line up from across the political and cultural spectrum. Guests include former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg who will tell us How to Stop Brexit, one of the UK’s most astute political commentators, Matthew d’Ancona, to introduce us to Post Truth; and acclaimed historian and journalist, Misha Glenny, author of McMafia, DarkMarket and Nemesis. And to lift our spirits? Poetry from the utterly brilliant Deanna Rodger, and sublime music from Nathan Ball (think Van Morrison meets Bon Iver in Cornwall). Laughs are courtesy of double Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee Andrew Maxwell, flush with victory on Celebrity Mastermind, and our host, Felicity Ward. There will be food available from CULT, DJ sets from Nina Hervé & Will Burns and books on sale from Libreria. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe to the Penguin channel: http://ift.tt/2ygTzig Follow us here: Twitter | http://www.twitter.com/penguinukbooks Website | http://ift.tt/xNmtGX Instagram | http://ift.tt/2ygyyo2 Facebook | http://ift.tt/2wmBKky


View on YouTube

I get book covers


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New post: "The Beautiful Cure by Daniel M Davis review – how our immune system has shaped world history" https://t.co/MdX9IUnPTT Adam Rutherford A terrific book by a consummate storyteller and scientific expert considers the past and future of the body’s ability to fight disea…


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Writers chatting about their love of history, by Gillian Polack https://t.co/dk5QbQUURP


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“There is a kink in the mastering” – The Only Story by Julian Barnes


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“There is a kink in the mastering” – The Only Story by Julian Barnes

"Which isn't to say that we didn't like The Only Story - we liked it a great deal, as you'd expect it's a book written by a writer at the top of his game. The issue we have is ever so slight, a question of mastering, as if a beautiful song had been ever so slightly over produced, or perhaps it is even more slight than that, as if there is a kink in the mastering. We know that the book says "how many seemingly incompatible emotions can thrive, side by side, in the same human heart" but there is something about the actions themselves, action speaking louder than words, that jars - ever so ever so slightly..."

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Tuesday 30 January 2018

#3: 100 Greatest Walks in Britain (Country Walking) https://t.co/qpNMZreDvP


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#9: Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014

Robin Williams
Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014
Emily Herbert
(122)

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#10: Great British Walks: "Countryfile" - 100 Unique Walks Through Our Most Stunning Countryside https://t.co/yGyDzz2Zx8


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5 Famous Books Saved from the Dumpster


The road to publication is paved with headaches, heartaches, and crumpled up balls of paper. No one knows this more than the following authors. Their work went on to achieve worldwide acclaim, but in the beginning, it took an unlikely—and often unsung—literary hero to save their manuscripts from obscurity.



Read on for a behind-the-scenes look at the big books that barely made it to the shelf.





Stephen King's Carrie





Bad Beginnings: In 1973, King and his wife Tabitha lived in a trailer. Struggling to make ends meet, he began writing a story about a teen outcast named Carrie White. The process, however, was not an easy one; compounded by the fact that King was modeling his main character on two girls he knew in high school who had both died at an early age. Eventually, he gave up. "I couldn't see wasting two weeks, maybe even a month, creating a novella I didn't like and wouldn't be able to sell. So I threw it away,"
King wrote
in his memoir, On Writing.



To the Rescue... Tabitha! She fished the pages out of the trash and set them right back in front of her husband. "You've got something there," she told him—and she was right. Carrie sold over a million copies in its first year. Since then it's been adapted for film, television, and Broadway.







Bad Beginnings: Almost a decade after the publication of his classic and controversial novel, Nabokov admitted Lolita was a "difficult book" to write. Perhaps this was an understatement. At one point during the novel's creation, Nabokov set a fire in his backyard and fed his entire draft to the flames.



To the Rescue... Vera, Nabokov's wife! A Cornell student witnessed her running out of the house to pluck as many pages as she could out of the fire. Was Nabokov suitably grateful for this act of literary heroism? We'll let a snippet from one of his love letters to Vera answer that question: "How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden wonderful happiness, how much I am all yours—with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? Or explain that I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it?"






Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl





Bad Beginnings: Anne wrote her diary while she was hiding in an annex from the Nazis during World War II. The sweet, hopeful, and haunting account was abandoned when, on August 4, 1944, she and her family were apprehended and transported to concentration camps.



To the Rescue... Miep Gies. The Dutch woman, a loyal friend of Anne's family, snatched the diary out of the ransacked annex and kept it safe in her desk drawer. She returned the diary to Anne's father, the family's only known survivor, who submitted it for publication in 1946.






John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces





Bad Beginnings: Toole took the numerous rejections of A Confederacy of Dunces hard. He toiled on re-working it for years, writing to his editor, "Something of my soul is in the thing. I can't let it rot without trying." After eventually giving up on the novel ever getting published, Toole committed suicide on March 26, 1969. He was 31 years old.



To the Rescue... Toole's mother, Thelma. Two years after her son's death, she found a smeared carbon copy of the manuscript in Toole's old room. The novel would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.







Bad Beginnings: It's hard to imagine Lee's beloved novel absent from our bookshelves—and Scout and Atticus and Boo Radley absent from our hearts—but in the late 1950s, publication did not seem likely. The author later admitted to readers she found the writing process so frustrating that at one point she lost hope and threw the entire manuscript out the window and into a pile of snow.



To the Rescue... Lee's agent! He reportedly demanded she retrieve and finish the manuscript. The tough love worked. To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. It became an instant sensation and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year.









posted by Hayley on January, 30

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Five Ways To Build A More Believable Futuristic Military


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Five Ways To Build A More Believable Futuristic Military

Do you like military science fiction? I like military science fiction. I grew up reading a lot of historical fiction about wars and soldiers, and in time it melded with my other favorite genre, and so my lifelong fondness for military scifi was born.

But at the same time, there are things that bother me about a lot of what the genre has to offer, especially as a grown up, trained sociologist.

The thing about futuristic militaries is that they’re often used as a plot device, rather than an end in themselves. Which makes a lot of sense: they create built-in obstacles, hierarchies, even plot structures, that writers can take advantage of that to tell their stories.

Where many of these futuristic science fiction stories go wrong, however, is in their representation of the military. You see, the military–any military–is also a system. And I’d enjoy futuristic militaries more if they made internal sense, instead of sometimes feeling like poorly thought-out stereotypes of whatever military culture looks like in the author’s home country.

(This is probably a good time to mention that although I grew up reading fiction in a bunch of languages, today we’ll be talking exclusively about works written in English.)

What is it about futuristic military fiction that doesn’t make sense to you, Marina?, I hear you say. Well, let’s get started.

1. Equality in the bedroom and the bathroom

Many futuristic militaries would like the audience to assume they’re egalitarian systems, gender-wise. That is, everybody can hold the same positions and carry out the same jobs (although this often still somehow results in there being way more men protagonists) and in theory gender identity is not a barrier to enlisting or serving, including non-binary or trans folks. At least nominally, no matter how harsh or violent the futuristic military is, it accepts everyone and treats everyone the same.

One of the most standard shorthands for this, especially in TV and movies such as Battlestar Galactica and Starship Troopers, is the idea that there is only one shower facility and only one dormitory and no gender-based divisions even when soldiers are at their most vulnerable (such as when bathing and sleeping). This system is pretty unheard of in modern militaries as well as pre-modern ones (where usually only men were officially allowed to serve).

Whenever I see a futuristic military portrayed this way, I always get excited by what it implies about the fictional world of the story. The primary official reason we have divisions between men and women (or, really, between men and everyone else) when it comes to bathing and sleep in modern militaries is to avoid sexual harassment and violence between soldiers. So, if those barriers are gone in the future, it must mean the risk of violence is non-existent, or at least protected against in some meaningful way.

Starship Troopers

This means either the society the military recruits from has managed to get rid of rape culture, misogyny, and transphobia, at the very least, or the military itself has found a way to rid its soldiers of these things, so they could be trusted not to hurt each other even when vulnerable and unsupervised.

Unfortunately, the implicit promise of the worldbuilding usually isn’t kept by the text. It becomes clear pretty quickly that the world in which the story is set is not perfectly egalitarian, and is in fact patriarchal to some degree, like ours (for example, consider that only women, in the civilian world of Battlestar Galactica, wear visible makeup or shoes with heels, even though the military on the show makes no gender-based distinctions regarding living quarters). Which then leaves me wondering, what code has the military cracked to re-educate its soldiers and neutralize the threat of sexual violence? Do they have special seminars? Is it brainwashing? Is everyone implanted with a special chip to make sure they can’t sexually assault someone? Are there strict regulations and cameras in the showers and people to monitor them?

2. Who gets to talk about sex?

Another way this problem is manifested is in who gets to talk about sex. The trope of soldiers being perpetually horny and sexually frustrated is a common one, which leads to a lot of military humor and chit-chat being sex-based. But who gets to talk about their conquests in detail? About their fantasies? About sexualizing their fellow soldiers or superior officers? About what they’d like to do to the sweethearts they left back home?

In a lot of futuristic militaries the answer to all those questions is: men. (Most often straight men.) This dynamic tends to happen even when stories are written by authors who are otherwise committed to and aresuccessful at interrogating toxic masculinity tropes, such as Karin Lowachee’s excellent Warchild series of novels. The first two books in particular feature male protagonists who are either lifelong soldiers or spend most of the book around military personnel. However, while the books do a brilliant job of interrogating the tropes of masculinity in military scifi (for example, protagonists who are survivors of various kinds of sexual violence, or who have anxiety, and who test the boundaries of what counts as a “successful” or “powerful” soldier) they also portray a world where in a military with no distinctions between people of different genders when it comes to living quarters or ability to perform different jobs, only the men really talk about their conquests and fantasies.

But this phenomenon  brings out another problem of supposedly egalitarian militaries – either everyone gets to talk about sex-related  stuff, or no one does. When you limit the conversation about sexual conquests, fantasies, and desires to men only, the effect is pretty dystopian. This implies a work environment full of sexual innuendo and advances in which only men get to shape the narrative.

I have to assume everyone who isn’t a man has to overcome challenges in order to be part of the military in these science fictional societies. That they’re put at a disadvantage and made vulnerable by this system. Which brings us back to the question: how does this military protect its structurally vulnerable (meaning, unprotected by institutional structures of privilege) soldiers from their peers?

(Since most military SFF deals with militaries in a state of war, not the kind of forces that are recruited and trained just for show, it’s a reasonable assumption that these militaries are actively interested in retaining personnel and limiting incidences of violence between their soldiers.)

3. Soldiers sleep with each other

“Marina, you’ve convinced me,” I hear you saying. “This is all too complicated. I wanted to write an adventure story with guns and uniforms in it! I don’t care about all this other stuff.” Maybe you’ve arrived at the conclusion that it’s better to make your military men- or women-only. You’ll definitely have a rich history to draw on (though of course, like in every historical military, not all of your soldiers will conform to the gender identity for which the military is selecting).   

Here’s the thing I’d like futuristic militaries of this kind to remember: historically, some percentage of soldiers have always had sex with each other. In a lot of pre-industrial militaries, especially in societies where the military was central to public life, it was actually assumed sex with a comrade, at some point, was a standard aspect of military life.

So if you’ve decided that the majority of your soldiers are men, for example, you have to assume some of those men are sleeping together at any given time. And then the question becomes: is the military OK with this? Does it encourage it? Does it criminalize it? How are any of those regulations enforced?

Black Mirror (3.05 Men Against Fire)

For example: Are soldiers encouraged to sleep with each other for unit cohesion, to enhance the bonds and loyalty soldiers feel to their commanders, their peers, their unit? Or is it that your futuristic military is extremely homophobic, to the point where two comrades blowing off steam is considered unacceptable? Is it because the society the military recruits from is homophobic or does the military take special steps to indoctrinate its soldiers to be more homophobic (for example by using same-gender relationships as slurs and examples of bad behavior during training)? And which military authority enforces the rules about sex and relationships anyway?

(A generally accepted rule of any kind of military life is that unless a military has a specific mechanism to enforce a particular rule, that rule might as well not exist.)

Whenever I see a futuristic military primarily made up of men (or any other gender) I have to assume at least 10% of the characters are or have at some point slept with each other. (Historically, those percentages were much higher.) And then I’m left with a sense of dissonance, because the system on the screen, or on the page, doesn’t seem to realize this or account for it at all. It’s extremely rare to find works of military scifi that address the fact that even in a single-gender military quite a few people will be sleeping with each other, and that the military system has to account for that one way or another.

4. But what about the children?

Speaking of sex, here’s another thing that rarely adds up. If we go back to our mixed-gender militaries and assume people who are capable of impregnating someone and people capable of getting pregnant are spending a lot of time together in close quarters, especially if they’re encouraged to be naked and unsupervised together in bathing areas and living quarters, I have to assume some percentage of those people are tempted to have sex.

(As we’ve covered before, assume a percentage of your soldiers are having sex with each other regardless, but if they’re capable of impregnating each other that introduces a specific set of considerations.)

So, what’s the futuristic military’s policy on this? Is it actively interested in preventing people from becoming pregnant? Apathetic to that possibility? Welcoming to it? Are all the soldiers injected with something to make them sterile? (Or just the people with uteruses? In which case, goodbye egalitarianism, see points #1 and #2.) Is there contraception always provided, on bases and in the field? Are there strict rules that govern sexual activity between soldiers, to prevent pregnancy? Who’s in charge of enforcing those rules and what happens to anyone who breaks them? (Is one party or both considered at fault?)

Or maybe your military is fine with babies because it offers generous parental leave, comprehensive childcare and flexible working environments for parents?

Most military science fiction doesn’t address these questions. Take Battlestar Galactica, which takes care to address the issue of relationships between soldiers (especially soldiers in the same chain of command) but doesn’t go into almost any detail when it comes to  military policies about pregnancy or children, even when some of its soldier characters have children during the course of the show. Even after the fall of humanity, when all normal military protocols are under strain or no longer relevant, we get the details of where and how soldiers spend their downtime, the politics between officers and NCOs, rivalries between pilots, extra projects the specialists take on, the standards of grooming and discipline that are still enforced, but we know nothing about what the Colonial Fleet’s policies were, before or after the Cylons, about pregnancy and childcare.

The military of Battlestar Galactica is supposedly egalitarian, with all types of soldiers filling all types of roles, and without divisions in bathing and sleeping areas. And yet, the women who have children on the show are never shown to have a systemic, military framework to fall back on when it comes to parental leave or childcare. It’s not that Sharon or Cally would be able to rely on the same system the military had in place before everything exploded, of course, but some traces of that system, some expectations, some details, had to have remained. Just like there are echoes of every other part of a particular military system on the show, even if parts of it have disappeared. Instead, for both women, it seems like they are the first soldiers in history to give birth, and the solutions they have to find for childcare, for being soldiers and mothers simultaneously, are personal and anecdotal.

Examples of stories that show a military like this, where everyone serves together and sleeps together and bathes together and yet pregnancy is not addressed one way or the other are endless in military science fiction. From old classics like Ender’s Game (where the kids in Battle School with Ender were in their mid to late teens by the end of the first book) to newly released books, like Yoon Ha Lee’s excellent Ninefox Gambit.

A silence on the topic of pregnancy when it comes to worldbuilding always implies to me that the internal lives and calculations of soldiers are based on what internal organs they have. I have to assume the camaraderie between people who have a uterus and people who don’t is very different, because one group is vulnerable to getting pregnant as the result of blowing off steam with a coworker, and the other isn’t.

5. Yes, Ma’am.

For my final point I’d like to address the way futuristic militaries tend to handle forms of address between soldiers. Or rather, between superiors and underlings, since that’s when military forms of address carry the most weight.

In English, a lot of modern militaries use “sir” or “ma’am” as a sign of deference. But a lot of creators shy away from these distinctions as, I often assume, yet again an attempt to use a kind of blanket egalitarianism. I often assume this has to do with the story not wanting to concern itself with gender, If we have to assume a soldier has to determine whether someone is a “sir” or a “ma’am” before addressing them, it means putting gender front and center and that doesn’t go well with a military where everyone is supposed to be treated the same.  Which is a very solid line of thinking! Unfortunately, the solution creators often choose is to refer to everyone using a single, standard form of address, and having that form of address be “sir”. The aforementioned examples of Battlestar Galactica and Ninefox Gambit do this, but they are by far not the only ones. Perhaps the most recent example of this is Star Trek: Discovery.  

Instead of broadcasting equality of treatment, however, it mostly broadcasts “we wish everyone who enlisted was a man, so we’ll just pretend that they are”. (Unless you’re writing a world in which “sir” has a completely different genesis, not tied to patriarchal norms like it is in our world, but that has to be stated explicitly.)

Instead, if you’d like a standard form of address, why not choose “ma’am”? It’s equally modern and recognizable, and won’t imply that you’ve tried to paper over the patriarchy in your worldbuilding. Or why not use an even more neutral word, like “commander”?

In general, from a social standpoint, egalitarianism means more than removing the outward signs of inequality and pretending that makes everyone the same. It requires rethinking every familiar element and redesigning it so it goes from serving the dominant group to serving everyone.

Applying the same logic to futuristic militaries – it would be nice if more creators either put in the work of redesigning our modern militaries to be truly inclusive, or incorporated built-in inequality more believably into their stories. Although of course, some writers are already doing that work. Whether it’s Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice series that describes all of its soldiers using female pronouns, Kameron Hurley who creates single-gender militaries and shows off all their messiness and complications, or Yoon Ha Lee, whose soldiers habitually choose a gender based on their identities rather than their bodies.

The things military SFF is known for – action-adventure, moral philosophy, lessons on the futility of war – will only be enhanced by military systems that feel lived-in, logical, built around the actual soldiers they supposedly comprise.

And they’ll be more fun to read, too.

The post Five Ways To Build A More Believable Futuristic Military appeared first on The Book Smugglers.



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