I won.

That’ll do, haiku. That’ll do.

For the contest, write a haiku from the point of view of some who is either about to die or has just died, from one (or more!) of the following:

1. A spider monkey or monkeys;
2. LASERS
3. Poor GPS directions
4. And, of course, Spontaneous Human Combustion.

The most popular choice appears to be a death that combines all of these elements, but I chose to focus on just one.  You can see my contribution in the comments at #16.

Never tasted SPAM before, but I was just gifted a tin of it. Wild and ill-advised experimentation shall ensue.

I got many amusing responses.  First, from Nalo Hopkinson,

@glorioushubris Try frying slices of it. Also helps if you’re pre-menstrual, but that might be more difficult to achieve.

Then, on facebook where I can’t link to it, from John Scalzi,

Your spam virginity is gone! Now you will never catch the processed meat food product unicorn!

Finally, from Claude Ramey. the most unashamedly low-brow recipe I’ve ever seen.

Corn Patch Casserole:
2 cans of Spam
1 large can of corn
1 large bag of egg noodles
1 jar of cheez whiz

Boil the noodles, dice the Spam, and mix everything in a casserole dish. Bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

My mom used to make this for me when I was a kid. It’s delicious.

I ended up dicing it, frying it up with some yellow onions and eating it over white rice with aged soy sauce.  It wasn’t great, but it was edible.  I’d certainly take it over starvation, or a third consecutive meal of ramen noodles.

• We Who Are About To… by Joanna Russ — While I was at Clarion, Geoff Ryman told me that one of my stories needed to be a tale of grand adventure and escape, because he didn’t think I had the temperament to write an elegiac rumination on the inevitability of death, which was the only other way the story could work.  My response was approximately, “Pshh! Don’t label me, author man!  I’m confident I can write anything!” because I’m mature like that.  Geoff recommended We Who Are About To… as a novel to look at for how to do that well.  I’d heard of Russ as the author of The Female Man, often given as an example of early feminist SF, but I had never read any of her work.  I found this book interesting, but not really enjoyable.  The first 100 pages or so are a story of the survivors of a spaceship crash wrangling with gender roles and the tyranny of the majority, written in the tersest prose style I have ever encountered.  After only one of the initial survivors is left alive (not really a spoiler, it is made clear from the very start that none of them are surviving to the end of the book), the writing becomes more discursive and far less interesting for the last 70 pages.  It is certainly a rumination on the inevitability of death, but to this reader it failed to be an engaging one.  I found the book disjointed, and had to force myself to finish it.  I will still probably read The Female Man at some point.

• The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi — Scalzi’s writing is smooth and entertaining; I’ve never read a book of his that I haven’t enjoyed.  That said, I found this to be the weakest of the Old Man’s War novels, largely because it focused so heavily on a bit of future tech that didn’t work for me in the previous book.  The part of Old Man’s War detailing the transfer of consciousness from the soldiers’ original bodies to their fighting bodies felt fairly hand-wavey to me, treating cognition and identity as something akin to a videogame cartridge that gets removed from one brain and slammed into another.  Thus the uncomfortable “Think Like A Dinosaur” identity duplication problem is avoided, but not in a very convincing fashion.  It didn’t work for me in Old Man’s War, where it just showed up once, and continued to not work for me throughout all of The Ghost Brigades.  Also, the plot felt a little bit formulaic, in that it twice employed the “character has a minorly clever insight early in the story that turns out to be (surprise!) applicable under the much more dire circumstances of the climax” summer movie callback structure.  It was done well, but my reaction to it was that I was reading a very accomplished demonstration of something I had seen before, rather than being surprised by something new.

• The Last Colony, by John Scalzi — The third book in the series I enjoyed more, especially because it fixed another problem I had with the previous book.  Somewhere in The Ghost Brigades it is mentioned that our part of the galaxy has over 700 spacefaring races, and when I read that line my immediate thought was that I hadn’t been made to feel that the galaxy really was that heavily populated.  I didn’t buy that there were other aliens outside the edges of the page, and that the ones in the story were merely those most relevant to the characters at the moment.  But Scalzi does a much better job making the galaxy feel like a fully populated place in The Last Colony, which I appreciated.  Precisely what it means for the Obin to have intelligence without consciousness, and how their consciousness prostheses effect them is not really well explained, but that ended up bothering me much less than the similar level of handwaviness about consciousness transfer in the previous two books–probably because there was no issue of the potential for duplicated identity to be addressed.  I more or less just decided that they were all Data turning his emotion chip on and off and didn’t worry about it.  John, Jane, Zoë, Hickory, and Dickory are a delightful family to spend a novel reading about, and I didn’t even mind Zoë showing up with a deus ex machina toward the end because I knew I would get another whole novel worth of time to spend to them.

• Zoe’s Tale, by John Scalzi — I think that my friend Kat is correct when she opines in this comment thread that Zoe’s Tale is the strongest novel in the series.  Zoë’s voice is a real departure from the beats and cadences of the previous books, and is very convincingly realized.  I think Scalzi is justifiably proud of her.  While it still comes fifth in my ranking of this year’s best novel Hugo shortlist, it isn’t by as much as I thought it would be based on having only read Old Man’s War.  John Perry learns a lot, but doesn’t really change much as a person from the first moment we meet him.  Jane Sagan changes from a no-identity weapon into a person, which is an interesting character arc, but not one that is very universal or easy to relate to.  Jared Dirac’s path of personal development is even more divorced from standard human experience.  But Zoë is different.  Zoë Boutin-Perry is the first main character we really get to see grow as a person in a recognizable way, and that is what makes Zoe’s Tale the best of these books.  My only real complaint about it is that I think my enjoyment was much enhanced by knowing things about the story from the last book–such as the full details of the redacted Conclave video–that couldn’t be included in this book because Zoë never learned them.  I’m glad I read the series in order, and I do wonder whether the book wouldn’t seem significantly less nuanced if read on its own.  But I believe that the best moments in the book, such as Zoë’s thoughts about Enzo or her address to the assembled Obin on the space station, will be affecting for any reader.  Zoë is Scalzi’s strongest character, and that makes her moments of triumph more powerful than any that came before.

The cover of the just-released mass market paperback of Zoe’s Tale, the fourth novel in John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, with an unfortunate detail highlighted:

It seems that I am the first person to notice this.  I suppose that if you are going to have your novel retitled through typographical caprice, it’s nice to get a new title that does at least make sense with the story.  Still, poor John Scalzi.  This seems like the sort of thing it was probably someone’s job to make sure didn’t happen.

And then, if I’m not feeling burned out on fiction again, A Fire Upon The Deep.  Unless I get seduced by Martin Millar’s Lux The Poet, which I saw while I was getting my copy of The Ghost Brigades, and had to buy because, come on, I’m only human.  (I’m never going to get my unread books list under 40.  This is why I refuse to let myself buy books online.)

A caveat: I haven’t read Zoe’s Tale.  I’ve read Old Man’s War, the first book set in the series.  Zoe’s Tale is supposed to be able to stand on it’s own, but I understand that it covers the same period of time as the previous book set in this universe, The Last Colony, which makes reluctant to jump straight to it.  I enjoyed Old Man’s War well enough that I will probably read the rest of the series, but I found it to be solidly in the light entertainment, read-it-in-a-day category.  Combine that with my current attempt to read books I already have rather than buying more new books, and I might not get to it before the convention.  While I love Scalzi’s blogging, the fiction of his I’ve read makes me suspect that his contribution would be at the bottom of my ballot in this absurdly strong year.  But I could be wrong.  If I manage to get to Zoe’s Tale any time soon, I’ll update this.

The ones I’ve read, in ascending order of how I would vote:

4) Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross.  Stross’s work has so far been hit-and-miss for me, but when it misses it’s a near miss and the hits are incredibly solid.  I found Accelerando and Glasshouse absorbing, but I put down Singularity Sky after about 100 pages, and I’m honestly unlikely to ever return to it.  (Can anyone tell me if Iron Sunrise stands alone?)  Halting State also failed to grab me, though I think I will give it another chance at some point.  The books that worked for me are hard, big idea SF carried out with astonishing verisimilitude, and Saturn’s Children follows in this mode.  In addition, it continues Stross’s trend of incorporating alternative sexuality and kink–especially BDSM–in a way that is neither judgmental nor sensationalistic.  So I loved Saturn’s Children, and the only thing that keeps me from putting it higher on this list is that there were several plot reveals crucial to the climax, and I saw all of them coming well in advance of where I thought I was supposed to.  I found it a brilliant but unfortunately predictable book, in a way that neither Accelerando nor Glasshouse were.  Almost any other year this would probably be higher.

3) Anathem by Neal Stephenson.  This was the hardest one for me to settle on a place for.  On the one hand there are few books that I’ve spent more time thinking about after I closed the cover.  On the other hand, there is no way for me to think of this book where it doesn’t seem to have a flaw right at its heart.  A big problem for me is that, for all of the interesting philosophy, Stephenson just gets the physics wrong.  He conflates multiversity and many-world QM in a way that, the more you follow through the implications, undermines nearly every scientific conceit in the story.  (Briefly: he’s internally inconsistent in his handling of the interactions between atoms from different universes.  It’s a big problem.)  My conception of Anathem is as a book that essentially fails to hit it’s target–but at the same time, the target itself is so grand that even coming close makes for an impressive work.  And I continue to just lap up Stephenson’s prose; I tore through this 1000 page novel in a matter of days.

2) The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman.  A gem, and my favorite of his works since American Gods.  If Anathem seemed to somehow miss its target, then The Graveyard Book is a milimeter-precision bullseye.  It is beautiful and sad and funny, and it’s lessons about bravery and self-sufficiency and how to make mistakes and respond to having made them are timeless.  And it is this timeless quality–which made it a supremely worthy winner of the Newberry award–that has me placing it second on the Hugo ballot rather than first.

1) Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.  My top two books this year are both YA, both engrossing, and both made me want to find the nearest precocious young person and put it immediately into their hands.  I think, and this is not hyperbole, that these are two books that have the potential to change people’s lives.  The Graveyard Book is perhaps the slightly more polished of the two.  But while the lessons of The Graveyard Book are timeless, Little Brother sets out to educate us about our own immediate, onrushing future.  That’s a task to which science fiction is uniquely suited, and the Hugo is science fiction award.  All other things being largely equal, it is this quality of Little Brother being more essentially SFnal that makes me think it the worthiest winner of the Hugo this year.

I wrote several paragraphs of not-very-focused rumination about this idea when I first encountered it, and I have thought back to it many times since.  And now I find myself thinking of it once again as I read the thoughts of one of my Clarion teachers, Mary Anne Mohanraj, talking about issues of race and its treatment in SF/F on John Scalzi’s blog. (“Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up To Speed” Part 1, Part 2)  A fair amount of this discussion concerns genre fiction and the genre fiction community, but there is much here that is a reflection of our culture as a whole.  Specifically, it was through the early rounds of this discussion (which has kind of unfortunately come to be known as RaceFail ’09) that I encountered Peggy McIntosh’s essay “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which helped focus for me some of the fuzzy edges of the concept of undeserved privilege and made me realize that while my thinking about privilege in terms of class was fairly developed, it was still very rudimentary on issues of race.

I’m still getting my thoughts in order on the subject of subverting undeserved privilege, and how doing so interfaces or fails to interface with rational self-interest.  It’s a sort of idealism vs. pragmatism in the face of preexisting conditions argument, and I am struggling to find my own clarity of thought about it.  But the RaceFail ’09 discussion has helped me learn to recognize kinds of privilege that were previously invisible to me, and even bereft of conclusions the improved perception is valuable.