Alison Rowat and the Licensed Imagination

This post is possibly ever so slightly out of date, being a letter to the Glasgow Herald which I posted on the Intrepid forum three years ago but never quite polished to the extent that I was happy sending it to the herald itself.  Prompting this, and other rejoinders by Intrepid members, was an article by Alison Rowat about the then [Glasgow Science Fiction convention] which some of us considered tantamount to bigotry, had it been said against one of the traditional minority groups.  I've rewritten my rebuttal so that it flows better.  At the time of writing the original, I was very, very angry.  Perhaps it could function as an open letter to other media types – and there are many – who see us poor SF types as an easy and not altogether human target.

---

Dear Sir,
    It's long been a truism that to gauge the accuracy of a newspaper, you should simply read a column about a subject with with you are closely familiar. So it is rather disappointing to be presented with Alison Rowat's article 'You wouldn't believe the warp factor' which contains nary a shred of anything approaching a keen observation, let alone a solid fact.
A little research surely couldn't have gone amiss?

Such as this odd obsession with tin-foil. It's a nice little hook to hang the rest of the article from, so it's a shame that tin-foil hats are synonymous with 1950s paranoia about communist 'mind-control'. Not exactly Star Trek or Star Wars, which are precisely two entries in the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction out of some four and a half thousand. Perhaps it's a surprise that there can be such a thing as an Encyclopaedia, but sure enough it turns out that SF is even a literary genre stretching back hundreds of years. Surely the people described in her article couldn't be... atypical?

Of course, says Alison, why would anyone wish to dress up as their favourite character at all? It's not like anyone dresses as characters from soaps, after all, although the remarkable upsurge in little girls named 'Kylie' at the height of Neighbours should give pause for thought as to exactly who is 'sad'.   I'm sure that a few of us have waved a lightsabre, imagined or otherwise, in anger. But so far as I know, no SF fan has ever sent a real cheque for 5000 pounds to help free a fictional character from a fictional prison, as happened with Coronation Street.
    I'll save myself time by blithely assuming that all non-SF fans have a blurred line with reality.

Of course I myself cannot 'fathom the insanity' that makes grown men dress in football tops. After all, on the basis of the last few years, you're seemingly more likely to be killed or seriously injured by a footballer than a terrorist. What kind of aspiration is that?

But I'm not a football fan, I'm an SF fan and as such I'm generally fair game to be mocked in the press and on television.  Somehow I'm now a stereotype, not an individual, but of now part of a group whom you can malign with impunity.

How well do I measure up to this image that you have in your head?  Spandex?  Don't own any.  Social skills?  Got some.  Women? Some close friends.  Relationships?  Had them too.  In one now.  Beer belly?  I'm a man in my mid-thirties, what do you expect I'm going to look like?  Would you like to call me a fat bastard, or is that not politically correct?  I wear glasses too, so I expect you'd like to call me four eyes or speccy or something.  You know, make fun of my appearance in the absence of anything with any thought behind it.

Or don't we do things like that in the 21st Century?  Such niceties don't apply to SF fans it would seem.  I like SF and so I'm some kind of freak and to hell with how it makes me feel when I hear you say that.

How appropriately ironic, then,  that one of the central themes of Star Trek, which you deride, is that in the future we all have respect for one another.  Imagine that.

I did, however, manage to retain my imagination.

Not, admittedly, a valuable commodity in these cynical days, cynicism being a theme often reflected in... oh... modern SF. Just as the subtext of some of those old novels about aliens was about what's it's like for a society to look upon anyone, anything, point and laugh for being something different that we don't understand.
Hmm, now where have I heard that before...

But soft SF is OK apparently – I can imagine Alison campaigning for tolerance zones where one may have an imagination with an appropriate license – but anything more that is implicitly 'hard' and to be discouraged.

Well this is where research comes in handy (you were once columnist of the year weren't you, Alison? Do you remember what “research” is?) since there really is a term called 'hard SF' which deals stories more closely coupled to real, solid, actually existing science and logic. About as far away from dressing up as your favourite character as it's possible to get.
Enjoying a story where you have to think? Preposterous and dangerous!

At this point I do have to apologise for attempting to use a 'philosophical' and 'intellectual' defence of my 'art' without exploring believers in flying saucers, on the grounds that the two groups are not the same.  Is this a surprise to you?
Oh sure there are UFOs in Science Fiction, but only in the same way that Eastenders is a police drama.

Without getting deep about it, I simply like Science Fiction. I'm in a minority, and don't I know it when there are so many pejorative terms for me. To deny that there really are people – people, not just men – with a more than everyday interest would be plain wrong. But to say that all of them are like the colourful minority is equally wrong. I was at a convention just recently and almost an entire half of the attendees were woman. One of them was dressed as Lara Croft and nobody there or in the press, oddly, felt the need to complain about that...

I'll anticipate the defence that the article was humour. Not a gentle humour by any means, not well observed humour, definitely not original and with an obvious lack of contact with, or understanding of, anyone being talked about. Just mean-spirited barbs thrown at crudely sketched caricatures.

Alison, it's obvious that you don't even know who your target is and would it be churlish of me to point out the logical flaw of writing 'they want to stay in their safe little worlds, not connect with others' in an article about SF fans gathering together in the world's largest convention?

Seriously, did you really write that?  I must have just imagined it.

But the final word must surely go to one of my SF loving friends who saw the article, read the part about sad single men and exclaimed: “That's hilarious, I'll have to show my wife.”

Regards,
     Steve Hammond

Overpackaged

I ordered a keyboard adaptor - the tiny purple thing in the corner - and had to collect it from a neighbour, because it wouldn't fit through my letterbox.  So, Amazon.... what were you thinking?

Too Tasty for Geeks

For the last few years I've totalled up a conclusion that there must be some kind of undeclared cultural war going on. Whilst we've progressed as a civilisation to the point where denigration of all the obvious minorities is rightly condemned, you can always rely on marketers to find new and exciting demographics to be horrible to. I think myself and others like me have been identified as enemy combatants, or at least collateral damage in waiting, because we're now demonised as disgusting statistical outliers who can't be sold a lifestyle.

A handful of years ago, I decided that I wanted to get myself a new mobile phone. After a short while being wowed by failing my saving throw, as Charles Stross puts it, against “The Shiny” and I went for a Sony Ericsson. It looked good and came with all sorts of features I was partial to, including a camera which was still quite rare. Money spent, I was quite pleased with it, up until the advertising campaign began.

Inadvertently, I'd become an early adopter, and now it had hit the mainstream. For several weeks, whenever I watched anything on a commercial channel for longer than seven minutes, there was my phone; the same model being the centrepiece of an upmarket party. It was passed from trendy person to trendy person, free from constraints of gravity and any other physics you'd care to name as it floated, spun, bounced and was caressed by a light stoke of the hand. One might have assumed that its case was fashioned from a fragment of the True Cross(tm) with an operating system coded up by Jesus.

What a cool object this was!

All of which was the advert's opinion of course, which had on me the opposite effect of now being embarrassed to own phone because I looked like a pretentious tosser. In my daily attire of tattered jeans (wear and tear, not designer) and plain t-shirt, I worried that others would see me as though I had designs on being part of some nebulous happening scene.
I'm not sure who those 'others' were, exactly, because the sort of people I hang about with are more likely to say cool at the 'cool' at the number of colours, or size of memory or miscellaneous feature (such as having a built-in camera – yes it was that long ago) that the phone possessed, and not the brute fact of it existing at all. Geek cool, in others words and not some slick marketing bollocks. I caught myself yelling at the TV “But what does it do???” They had explained nothing. The entirety of the concrete information the advert had actually passed on to the viewer was: this is a phone. Wow.

Which was when it sunk in that had I seen the advert first I wouldn't have bought it. In fact I would have avoided it with festering prejudice. Because at no point in the ad campaign was any kind of feature mentioned. See this? It's cool. And that was it. I would have bought one based on what it could do, how it did it, and whether or not it would keep me occupied playing with it and figuring out what neat things I could do with it. (One of which turned out to be getting a photo of Saturn when I pressed the lens against the eyepiece of the large telescope at Mills Observatory).

Shorter version: I'm a Geek.

Or to state it another way, I am not concerned about style but about function. At least that's what I tell myself. A lecturer at my old college once told us that he'd analysed all the various features of cars and had plumped for a Skoda, at a time when Skoda was the single most derided brand in the country. We all laughed him down and I wasn't apart from it either. Brands are potent things.

It's not exactly a deep insight to observe that most products are selling a lifestyle not the product itself, but I worry when we've got to the point where the sort of critical thought needed to analyse the claims of the advertisers is actively derided. A current Tesco advert tells me that its typical shoppers' baskets are cheaper than Asda. The fine print at the bottom of the screen says 'based on 10% of clubcard transactions'. What happened to the other 90%? How is a typical basket defined? Is the 10% taken from all times of the day and all times of the week? Did they do this many times and cherry picked the favourable results? Does the typical basket for midweek vary from the typical basket On Saturday when we're restocking bread and milk? And is the typical basket different again on Friday when we're after cheep beer? Cheaper than Asda? They way they stated it is meaningless. But we take it all in.

Clearly this is not aimed at me, in the same way that the Sony advert appealed to a different group. Few of us take notice of these things, but us geeky folk care about the technicalities, about the numbers, about what's real. And aside from specialist websites, the geek demographic hasn't been targeted. Perhaps it's too small to market to, or more likely the ad bods just don't understand us. Most likely of all, they just can't conceive of a group of people for whom selling a lifestyle doesn't work. All they know is that we're different and different is bad.

Which is where the atomic artillery in the cultural war was unleashed. Can't market to them? Demonise them instead. I wish I could remember the brand – I think it was Shreddies - so that I could shame it, but in any case this was a cereal advert, aimed at children, simply, gaudily proclaiming that it was “too tasty for geeks”. Hey you! You at the back getting bullied? You getting picked last for the sports teams? You who actually enjoys learning? We'll we think you're worthless. Eat something else. We don't want you.

It's not cool to think.

Spooks Series 7: Episode 2

It's a terrible burden actually knowing stuff.  At least that's how the writer of this episode must feel.  There is a certain cuteness, it must be said, when the mainstream media tries to do technology, like a puppy trying to join in a game of football.  It'll make you go 'aw' but what you really care about is the team.

Strained analogy.  Sorry.

The episode had a distributed denial of service attack on the UK, carried out by a submarine tapping an underwater cable.  Which is, er, a single location.  The 'distributed' part of it was obviously merrily sidelined in favour of - gasp! - a big dangerous looking thing!

So of course the defence against this is to launch a 'zero day attack'.

Oh dear.

A zero day attack is making use of an undisclosed computer vulnerability, i.e. zero days have gone by since it was discovered and hence no defence is in place.

I actually laughed out loud when I heard this.  Politics and police procedures are carefully researched for that added authenticity, of course, but as soon as technology is involved, any old shit is made up.  In this case by someone who has heard the phrases but has clearly no idea what they mean.

And just for good measure, the zero day attack is also a virus.  Because as far as TV people are concerned, computer viruses can do anything.  Perhaps it should have been named the MacGuffin virus?

This kind of thing, being a flagship BBC program, should be beneath them; it turned the normally excellent Spooks into a cartoon.