Let's play bingo!!!

[gryphonsegg]

I need to make cards for Wanky "Hard" SF Writer Bingo. These are the spaces I have so far:

Turing Test that Alan Turing wouldn't have passed- Proving an entity's sapience and personhood involves demonstrating that the entity has a prurient interest in young, female humans. In many cases of this, the entity in question does not even have an organic body.

Hide the white women- Young, thin, human women or teenage girls with extremely pale skin (and usually with blond hair too) are super-attractive to all beings.

Obsessed with their own breasts- Any being with breasts is constantly aware of their shape, size, movement, nipple size, color and size of areolae, how the breasts are squished or held in place or not by completely standard everyday clothing, etc.

You keep using that word- Rape used as a metaphor for a thing that has absolutely nothing to do with non-consensual sex.

There's a word for that- Non-consensual sex occurs, but the narrative voice or a sympathetic character takes pains to point out that it was NOT RAPE.

Naked for the greater good- A contrived situation emerges in which the only logical course of action for a character is to remove every stitch of clothing and perform some series of athletic feats that give a watching mixed crowd a great view of everything. While she's doing this, she thinks about how some women would refuse to do this or think badly of her for doing this because it's immodest, but it doesn't bother her at all because modesty is a frivolous luxury that a woman who has her priorities in order simply cannot afford.

Adult writer audibly drooling over teenage character- Self-explanatory. The older I get, the more disgusting I find this.

Species of rational misogyny- Alien species in which males are sapient and females are not.

Species of dirty old men- Alien species whose biology requires extremely young females to bear the children of much older males.

Species of hot space babes- Alien species whose members look like female humanoids who are super-attractive by the standards of the writer's culture; males are either non-existent or super-ugly.

Does anybody out there have more? I just started (and quit) a book that had Adult writer audibly drooling over teenage character, You keep using that word, Obsessed with their own breasts, Turing Test that Alan Turing wouldn't have passed, Hide the white women and some ultra-creepy emotional incest that I'm not sure how to describe all in the first 32 pages.

Comments

[hunningham]

Oh God. Was this a recent novel? It sounds like hardcore golden age Niven / Heinlein.

[gryphonsegg]

Sadly, no. It's Evolution's Darling by Scott Westerfeld, of all people. I picked it up because I enjoyed some of his YA work and expected his grown-up book to be similar, probably about older characters and less coy about sexuality. Unfortunately, one of the two viewpoint characters is a teenage girl who is even younger than some of his YA heroines, but the narrative voice portrays in a very sexualized and extremely creepy way. The other viewpoint character is her AI caretaker, and in order to keep her father from deleting its memories, she has to push it over the last four-tenths of a point on the Turing Scale and help it achieve full person status-- BY HAVING SEX WITH IT. IN GRAPHIC DETAIL. FOR TWO DAYS STRAIGHT in story-time.

These days, I'm very, very cautious about starting novels by male authors. I'd never read a review of this before, but I thought, "It's Scott Westerfeld. He's done great things with female characters when writing for a teenage audience. Maybe there'll be some great adult women in his adult novel. Adult novels are expected to have sex in them, but Scott Westerfeld's YA romances were better than most YA romances. I trust him not to get all gross and rapey." And then SURPRISE!

It was first published in 2000. :/

[hunningham]

That is just depressing. Do people never look and say "what have I just written?" or realise what the book says about themselves? I still read science fiction, but I'm very very focused on short stories and I tend to ignore the novels unless people are going "must read, must read" and smacking me around the back of the head with them. I also tend to use the Tiptree long list as a suggested reading list, which means that I really don't see a lot of this kind of crap.

[gryphonsegg]

Days later, I'm still reeling over the differences between this bullshit and Westerfeld's good portrayals of teenage girls in his YA fiction. It's like he has some supremely awful on-off switch. If teenage girls are the intended audience, flip the switch and write teenage girls with multifaceted, well-thought-out personalities, including a realistic and age-appropriate combination of curiosity and hesitation about sexual relationships, realistic insecurities about their bodies, and realistic non-sexual relationships that include a completely normal mixture of affection and frustration for the people they've known all their lives. If teenage girls are not the intended audience, flip the switch the other way and write a teenage girl who is a cardboard-thin collage of bog-standard jailbait wank fantasies. I feel kind of skeeved out about even his good stories now that I know what was hiding behind them all along.

[hannah]

I never knew I needed this in my life until now. Do you know someone who can make this into a graphic I can easily share?

There might also be some sort of 'melanin plague' where for whatever reason only white people are left. Because if there were any people of color, they'd be in the text, right? Something must have killed them off as the only possible reason only white people are around, right?

Stupid, stupid wanky sci-fi authors...

[gryphonsegg]

As a matter of fact, I do know someone who might be able to make a graphic.

Yes! Some cards should have a Melanin Plague space. There could also be a space for its slightly more subtle opposite, The Last Blond On Earth, in which the author makes a point of telling (not showing) that in the future almost everyone is multiracial by today's standards, and since almost no one is purely European anymore, there are almost no blond people left . . . and yet our main character just so happens to be one of the very, very few 100% Northern European, pale-skinned, blue-eyed, blond people remaining. Also, most of the other significant human characters turn out to be light-skinned, purely by chance of course. But systemic racism is a thing of the past because everyone is more worried about aliens than other humans now, and there totally are dark-skinned humans around and they are totally not discriminated against, it's just that none of main characters were all that dark when they formed in the writer's mind. There's no colorism going on, absolutely not, the writer has taken care to note the presence of very dark people in that one scene in the spaceport bar to drive home how cosmopolitan the milieu is. What more could you possibly want???

[hannah]

Even such a minimalist cast as Aliens had a black man and a couple of women. Maybe if there were five or fewer characters in total in the story...but that's such a big "maybe" it's not even worth counting.

I might also add a "reptiles are abhorrent/all mammals are good" square, because goddamn, as an amateur herpetologist am I ever tired of evil reptiles. Dammit.

[gryphonsegg]

That last one reminds me of the time a little girl told me that bears must be reptiles because they are "too deadly" to be mammals. She was five years old at the time. Published authors do not have that excuse.

[hannah]

If you're going to use a trope, be creative with it! Give us a good justification! Deconstruct and reconstruct and exploit and have fun!

I still want a Randall Boggs toy. Dude was super-cute.

[gryphonsegg]

Thanks to that comment, I've spent a couple of hours trying to think of a plausible justification for a "good mammals vs. evil reptiles" universe, and I just haven't managed to come with anything. I can work out a universe where all the sapient species are rather mammal-like and justify with arguments about what physical traits might be necessary to lay the groundwork for the brain capacity necessary for sapience, but nothing that can justify mammal-like and reptile-like aliens consistently having such mutually incomprehensible ways of thinking and behaving and justifying their behavior that they consider each other evil.

The closest thing I can imagine would be something like C.J. Cherryh's Kif, which seem to have evolved as a species of sociopaths because they're obligate carnivores whose feeding method doesn't work well enough unless their prey is still alive and struggling. The non-carnivorous sapient species in their universe, as well as the carnivores who can consume prey animals killed quickly and with minimal pain, were able to develop empathy as a standard species trait, and the Kif just couldn't afford empathy. But I have serious doubts about whether a species like the Kif could plausibly develop enough social organization to develop the technology to become the genuine threat to other sapient species that they are in Cherryh's books.