‘‘The Cold Equations’’ shoves every one of those questions out the airlock along with the young girl. It barks at us that now is not the time for pointing fingers, because there is an emergency. It says that now is the time to pull together, the time for all foolish girls to die to save brave explorers from certain death, and not the time for assigning blame.
But if a crisis of your own making isn’t the time to lay blame, then the optimal strategy is to ensure that the crisis never ends.
Which brings me to Farnham’s Freehold, a strong contender for the most offensive of all of Heinlein’s novels. Published in 1964, it features a nuclear holocaust and a post-apocalyptic world in which African-Americans are ascendant and have enslaved the remaining white people, whom they occasionally eat. Incredibly, this does not automatically qualify Farnham’s Freehold for Heinlein’s Most Offensive prize, because his typewriter also produced books like Sixth Column (America under the cruel dominion of the Yellow Peril), Friday (sure, rape’s bad, but hey, relax and enjoy it, why don’t you?), and I Will Fear No Evil (there are no words).
Most of the criticism of Farnham’s Freehold quite rightly focuses on its blatant racism and, secondarily, on its vile sexism. But for this essay, let’s focus on ‘‘Lifeboat rules.’’
Hugh Farnham, the hero of Farnham’s Freehold, has a signature move: when people disagree with him, he barks ‘‘Lifeboat rules!’’ at them and pats his sidearm. Hugh Farnham is the proprietor of a nuclear fallout shelter that has managed, thanks to his excellent timing and foresight, to have rescued his family and some of their friends. The shelter is their ‘‘lifeboat,’’ the only thing standing between them and certain death in an uncaring universe where the cold equations of nuclear fission dictate that rules must be followed.
Poor Hugh is a good guy, but he has the responsibility of taking care of the lifeboat’s passengers. That means that he’s got to bear the sidearm, and threaten his friends and famiy with lethal violence if they get out of line. It’s for their own good.
Heinlein’s Hugh Farnham is a character who is in charge of everything except the circumstances that led to him having to coerce, cajole, and terrorize the people around him. He’s that character because Heinlein wrote him that way.
Every once in a while you find yourself in a lifeboat where a single stupid move can kill everyone. But a science fiction writer whose story’s boundary extends to the boat’s gunwhales, and no further – not to the poleconomy that convinced a nation to build backyard bunkers rather than rising up en masse against Mutually Assured Destruction, say – is a science fiction writer who has considered the car and the movie and invented the drive-in without ever thinking about the sexual revolution or the database-nation.
The thing about Cold Equations is that they aren’t the product of unfeeling physics. They are paramaterized by human beings.
The thing about lifeboat rules is that they are an awfully good deal for lifeboat captains.
Even saints get exasperated with other humans from time to time. What a treat it would be if the rest of the world would just realize that what’s best for you is simply the best course of action, period. That’s the moral hazard in cold equations, the existential crisis of lifeboat rules. If being in a lifeboat gives you the power to make everyone else shut the hell up and listen (or else), then wouldn’t it be awfully convenient if our ship were to go down?
Every time someone tells you that the environment is important, sure, but we can’t afford to take a bite out of the economy to mitigate global warming, ask yourself what’s out of the frame on this cold equation. Every time you hear that education is vital and taking care of the poor is our solemn duty, but we must all tighten in our belts while our lifeboat rocks in the middle of the precarious, crisis-torn economic seas, ask yourself whether the captain of our lifeboat had any role in the sinking of the ship.
Science fiction is supposed to teach us how to think about the future. The intellectual dishonesty in ‘‘The Cold Equations’’ and Farnham’s Freehold are not isolated incidents, though: they’re recurring motifs that persist to this day (just have a look at Sandra Bullock’s struggles with the cold equations of Gravity if you don’t believe me, then watch Jack Bauer torture a terrorist on 24 to see some modern lifeboat rules).
They have something to teach us, all right: that stories about how we can’t afford to hew to our values in time of crisis are a handy addition to every authoritarian’s playbook, a fine friend of plutocrats, and they reek of self-serving bullshit every time they’re deployed.
–Cory Doctorow
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SPOTLIGHT ON: SF SIGNAL
John DeNardo is the co-founder and managing editor of SF Signal. He has been known to do things for free bagels.
JP Frantz is the co-founder and sometimes blogger/editor of SF Signal.
Patrick Hester is an author, blogger, and 2013 Hugo Award Winner. He produces/hosts the SF Signal and Functional Nerds podcasts and produces Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing Podcast. His fiction can be found via his Amazon author’s page.
Tell us about SF Signal, your Hugo Award-winning fanzine/blog. How did it start, how did it develop into its current form, and what’s your mission?
JP Frantz: SF Signal started in 2003 when we noticed a criminal lack of any science fiction-oriented blogs on the Internet. Being the tech geeks we are, we decided to start our own blog as a place to share interesting links and bits of SF/F and to avoid clogging the corporate e-mail servers with our stuff. Fast forward to 2014, and SF Signal has grown to become a two-time Hugo Award-winning fanzine with quite a large readership, so clearly people like and enjoy what we blog about. Though we still clog the corporate e-mail server. Mostly with cat pictures.
SF Signal basically started as a place for us to post interesting links and discuss them. Over the years we gradually added more original content which seems to have served us well. Much like the beginning, we see SF Signal as a place for like-minded SF/F fans to meet and discuss whatever topics interest them.
How did the current editorial staff come together, and how do you divide up your responsibilities?
JP: What started with both John and me as the main contributors has grown into the multi-headed hydra you see today. Blogging takes a lot of time if you want to do it right, so it seemed to make sense to invite others to share their passion for SF/F on our site. When an area of need presents itself, we ask around to see if anyone is interested in contributing. We now have numerous individuals contributing all sorts of posts to SF Signal on multiple aspects of the genre. Without them, the site would not be where it is today.
You’ve got a huge number of contributors. What are the advantages and disadvantages of working with so many voices? How are things organized?
John DeNardo: The advantage of having multiple contributors is that you get multiple viewpoints on different aspects of speculative fiction. We all bring our own worldviews and experiences to the table. The end result, hopefully, is offering readers a variety ways of looking at different elements of speculative fiction.
From a content perspective, having multiple contributors seems like a blessing. It is, in some ways; gone are the days where one person alone feels like they must… feed… blog. That said, that content still takes time to coordinate, edit, lay out, etc. That’s not a disadvantage, per se, but it’s not ‘‘free’’ content either, time-wise. And to be clear, we are incredibly grateful to our contributors and the guests who have come on to talk about the SF/F field.
Organizationally, people pretty much work at their own pace. The main idea behind SF Signal is that it’s supposed to be fun. Why do it otherwise? There are more important things in life than blogging, and people are contributing on their own free time, so I’m not super strict with editorial deadlines. There are enough contributors that there’s always something fun to post every day.
John DeNardo (2011); JP Frantz (2013); Patrick Hester (2011)
You
cover a lot literary SF/F and horror news, but also publish interviews, reviews, and commentary. Are you more interested in documenting the field, or in trying to shape it?
John: Our main motivation for doing any of this is to share our love of genre with like-minded readers through various types of posts. One of the best parts of interacting with fans – online or in-person at conventions – is talking about the books we like to read and the films and television we like to watch. Along the way, I suppose we are documenting the field, somewhat. Our daily link posts could easily stand as an archive of what people in the community were talking about at the time. I don’t think we’re actively trying to shape it. We don’t have an agenda. We’re just a bunch of folks having fun.
Tell us about your best – or most popular, or most controversial – entry on the site. What sparked the most conversation?
John: Traffic-wise, our Flowchart for Navigating NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books (
You also help run the SF Signal podcast, a Hugo-nominated fancast. How did that begin, and what’s it like?
Patrick Hester: A long time ago, singer/songwriter John Anealio approached me about combining our individual podcasts into a single podcast called The Functional Nerds, a term I’ve used to describe myself for years. When we were discussing that, it came up that we would need a place to host the podcast. I suggested SF Signal, but we didn’t think John D. would go for it, given that SF Signal is so well established within the community, and we were just starting up this podcast thing, so we decided not to pitch the idea to John D. at that time, and started building The Functional Nerds.
Once we had a few (quite a few, actually) episodes and interviews under our respective belts, we decided to revisit the idea of doing a podcast for SF Signal. By then, The Functional Nerds had a following and a brand all its own, and it didn’t seem to us that it fit to take that show to SF Signal. Instead, we pitched a new show that would include a lot of the content from SF Signal. John D. liked the idea, and gave us the go-ahead.
The SF Signal Podcast has changed a lot in the years since we started. John Anealio only did the first few episodes. The single format including a panel discussion – similar to what you might find at a con – followed by an interview, also went away. I split the shows up, giving listeners a panel on Mondays, and an interview on Thursdays, and that’s worked really well for us. As of this writing, we’ve done over 230 shows. Can it be a grind doing two hours of SF Signal, another hour of Functional Nerds, and two to four hours of I Should Be Writing every week? Absolutely. But I love it. I love the interaction and getting to know all these wonderful authors, editors, and artists within speculative fiction – and exposing our listeners to someone they might not have heard of before.
Nothing is better than coming to the site after an episode goes live, and seeing a bunch of comments from people who can’t wait to buy one of the books we discussed.
Talk a bit about your recurring Mind Meld feature.
JP: The Mind Meld feature was shamelessly ‘‘leveraged’’ from a similar idea on the now defunct Meme Therapy website: ask a question to various authors/bloggers/other interested parties and see what happens. We try to ask a variety of people their opinions on whatever topic strikes our fancy and, with a stable of four Mind Meld facilitators, we have a variety of viewpoints to keep questions interesting. We’ve been publishing this feature for just over six years now and it’s always one of our more popular items. Our first Mind Meld? ‘‘How have online book reviews affected the publishing world?’’, from Dec. 2007.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about you or your work?
Patrick: John DeNardo is the hardest working person in fandom, and I am really, really glad to call him my friend. If you meet him at a con, buy him a bagel. If you’re interested in my stuff, you can find me hanging out at
–John DeNardo, JP Frantz, Patrick Hester
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GARDNERSPACE: A SHORT FICTION COLUMN BY GARDNER DOZOIS
Subterranean Winter ’14
Asimov’s 1/14
F&SF 1-2/14
Electronic magazine Subterranean starts the year with a Winter issue guest-edited by Jonathan Strahan. There’s lots of good fantasy stories here, but little SF – something of a disappointment for me, since Strahan is one of today’s active editors with the best understanding of and appreciation for core science fiction. Still, with that caveat, he’s produced a strong issue. The best story here is K.J. Parker’s ‘‘I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There’’, a sly and knowing story of characters attempting to outsmart and out-con each other, in typical Parker fashion, and a lesson in the dangers, some unexpected, of trying to get something for nothing. Eleanor Arnason tells another sly story in ‘‘The Scrivener’’, a retelling of classic fairy tales with deliberate anachronistic elements and a wink-wink breaking of the fourth wall, sort of like a more-intelligent and less cartoonish version of a Fractured Fairy Tale; the voice of the author here, clearly acknowledging that she is the author, in the midst of telling you a tale, is pleasant and persuasive. In ‘‘Caligo Lane’’, Ellen Klages takes us to San Francisco during World War II for the quiet but ultimately moving story of a woman trying to aid refugees in her own peculiar way to escape from the danger zone. Jeffery Ford spins an elegant fantasy about a young artist reluctantly accepting a commission to paint a portrait of the Devil, with unfortunate consequences, in ‘‘The Prelate’s Commission’’. Karen Joy Fowler’s chilling, enigmatic ‘‘Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story’’ seems to be about doppelgangers and the difficulty of telling which is the ‘‘real’’ one, narrated from the point of view of a child whose babysitter is slowly trying to turn herself into the child’s absent mother… but there is a question as to whether the child herself is a doppelganger, or her twin sister is. What’s happening and why is never clearly resolved, but the story generates a palpable feeling of sinister menace. Something terrible is about to happen – or perhaps already has.
In the issue’s one SF story, Greg Egan tells what ultimately turns into a rather compelling story of what it feels like to realize that you’re trapped as one of the ‘‘Bit Players’’ in a computer game, and what you can do to alter your fate while still working within the constraints of the game, but it starts off slowly, and I found it a bit hard to believe that a woman’s first actions upon awakening in a strange place not knowing who she was would be to rigorously work out the physical laws of her surroundings by trial-and-error experimentation, without even first bothering to ask her companion how she’d gotten there or where she was; maybe Greg Egan would react like this, but most of us wouldn’t. The longest story here is Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘crusaderpunk’’ story, ‘‘Pilgrims of the Round World’’, one of the few Bruce Sterling stories that I’ve ever found a bit dull; it’s clearly supposed to be an arch comedy of manners, but unless you can manage to catch more of the in-jokes than I did and figure out which real-life historical figures the characters are supposed to be (and what happened to them afterward), you might find this a bit slow at this length too. ‘‘H
ayfever’’ by Francis Hardinge, turns out to be an elaborate shaggy dog joke; although ostensibly SF as well, it’s too comic-bookish to really take seriously as such.
•
Asimov’s starts out its year with an uneven January issue that nevertheless has some strong material in it. The best stories in the January issue are Nancy Kress’s ‘‘The Common Good’’ and Aliette de Bodard’s ‘‘Memorials’’. The Kress is a sequel to her 2008 story ‘‘The Kindness of Strangers’’, in which aliens have disappeared 80% of the human race and subsequently set up mysterious compounds, guarded by force fields, into which they accept a few of the surviving human children. ‘‘The Common Good’’ takes us into one of the alien compounds for a look at what the aliens are up to and what their motivations for near-genocide may have been; this is a mature work in which all of the characters, including the aliens, are painted in shades of gray, and there are no easy answers. The de Bodard is another in her long series of Xuya stories, taking place in the far-future of an alternate world where a high-tech conflict is going on between spacefaring Mayan and Chinese empires. This one deals with a world where refugees from a bitter war have been settled on another world, where they form a despised sub-class and live in ghetto-like enclaves, and with a young woman who becomes embroiled in the risky business of obtaining life-memory recordings from the survivors of the war and smuggling them into a Virtual Reality Monument that recreates life in the vanished civilization. This in turn embroils her in a web of lies and deception where nobody’s motive is quite what it seems to be. Also good in January is ‘‘The Extracted Journal Notes for an Ethnography of Bnebene Nomand Culture’’ by Ian McHugh, drawn from field notes of an ethnographer studying a tribe of nomadic vegetable people on a distant planet; the aliens are something like Tolkien’s Ents studied from a more-rigorously science fictional perspective, more authentically alien than the humanoid aliens in most SF, and the story effectively demonstrates the gulf of misunderstanding and mistaken cultural assumptions that could exist between sentient species, even those making a good-will effort to bridge the gap.
Locus, March 2014 Page 7
