I'm also pretty sure it was better than a couple of the movies in the previews, Bride Wars and Confessions of a Shopaholic, both of which made me sort of want to shoot someone in the face.

Twilight is frequently dull and pretty stupid, which is an unfortunate combination -- two strikes and its almost out. It didn't make me deeply, deeply angry, which was a plus. It has lovely scenery and an appealing cast. And some of the funny jokes are even intentional.
But, as a vampire movie, I just didn't like it. As a teen romance... well, I wouldn't have bothered to watch it, so I'm going to talk about it as a vampire movie.

Twilight tells a story that I know I liked when it was Buffy and Angel: trying-to-be-good-guy vampire falls for teenage girl, struggles with his blood lust and the other kind of lust, both of them confront trust issues, and there's lots of sexy temptation and whatnot. Sure, vampires struggling with abstinence can be a metaphor for teen sex, why not?

This version doesn't work, though, because it simply doesn't get vampires right. And I don't mean because they aren't vulnerable to holy objects, sunlight, or, apparently, stakings -- although that's part of it. And it's not because they don't have fangs, although that's part of it. And it's not even, good lord, because they sparkle, although, good lord, that's part of it.

It's because the story uses vampires (correctly) as a metaphor for ambivalence, and then isn't at all ambivalent about them.
I often have this complaint in the other direction, when straight-ahead horror movies ignore the fact that to be interesting vampires generally need to incite some kind of seduction or sympathy, and make them simple monsters instead of complex monsters. The problem with Twilight is that the vampires aren't monsters at all. AT ALL. Especially not Edward, the romantic hero. The only thing scary about him is his enormously high 80s-band pouf of hair, and the fact that he sparkles, and frankly, THAT'S THE WRONG KIND OF SCARY.

Really, nothing about the movie is sufficiently scary. It takes forever for something scary to happen, and then when it does, it's mostly offscreen. The good guy vampires aren't scary, the bad guy vampires are barely scary, the tribal native werewolves are cool but hardly on screen and they don't get to actually do anything scary although they manage to project the distinct sense that they could do something scary if the situation required, which is more than anybody else in the movie does, so, go werewolves!

The movie is certainly hampered by the source material, on all accounts. The director did not devise the plot, or the sparkling.

Okay, let me talk about the sparkling.

Oh, my god. Sparkling.

First of all, there is no way for the sparkling not to look stupid on screen, and that's because there is no way for it not to look stupid in real life, which, okay, I guess, the many fans of these novels simply never much thought about. But worst of all it's just a terrible gutless metaphor. These vampires hide from sunlight because it reveals their true nature, fair enough. But couldn't their true nature have been something just the teensiest bit unnerving or creepy, the tiniest bit, you know, monstrous? Like, I dunno, maybe they're translucent in sunlight and you can see their veins or something. That might have looked gross and kind of stupid, but at least it would have been heading in metaphorically the right direction.

And there's a scene where Edward chivalrously Rescues Our Hapless Heroine Bella from A Bunch of Port Angeles Toughs with Evil on Their Minds -- it might have been an opportunity to show Bella a little unnerved by his capacity for violence, to make him actually seem a little scary to the audience. But, alas, no. He doesn't fight them by ripping limbs or even bashing heads, he just kind of -- glares at them and they back down. Then he drives away. But in the car he talks about how he'd like to go back and kill them all!

All of Edward's monstrous nature is telling, not showing. He tells her that he feeds on animal blood, but we never see him actually do it. We don't even see a good strong indication that he does it, like, he never sniffs while a deer walks past and says, "Just a minute" and goes running off into the woods after it and comes back wiping his mouth.

He talks about how being in love with Bella makes him dangerous to her (well, really, it's some dumb thing about her very special personal scent which seems to blow out of her hair or whatever but I just pretended that whole concept didn't exist and that the reason he's so tempted by her is because he's in love), that he might eat her or something, but we never really see it. In this movie intense vampire lust is played with extreme closeups where Edward looks like he has a headache or something. And intense lust for a vampire is played with extreme closeups where Bella flutters her eyelids like she's about to faint and gnaws on her lower lip. Okay, really, the human is the one doing the gnawing? What kind of vampires are these, anyway?

Vampires who love baseball.

Which, uh, I don't know, I guess -- baseball? Maybe it could have worked in the context of a completely different story, but the scene in this movie is achingly cutesy, and serves only as yet another demonstration of cuddly, wholesome vampire superpowers. And then the bad vampires show up and want to play too, which strongly implies that all vampires love baseball, in fact, love it so much that they are lured from afar by the distinct sounds of other vampires hitting a ball so fast that they have to play during thunderstorms to hide the noise from humans (in Forks??!??) and also use a special reinforced ball and bat.

Okay, I made up that last bit. They don't use a special reinforced ball and bat. But they really ought to.

And... let's talk about superpowers for a minute.

Vampires usually have superpowers -- it's part of what makes them scary. They're really fast, really strong, they're immortal, they can see in the dark, maybe they have psychic abilities, maybe they're shapechangers, maybe they can fly. (I don't really mind that the vampires can fly, but I don't like to see it on screen because it usually ends up looking pretty stupid and this movie is no exception. In fact, it ends up looking stupider than usual.) But the thing that makes vampires different from superheroes is the downside -- the need for blood, the beast within, the vulnerability to ordinary things like sunlight.

Except these vampires don't have any of that.

Leaving aside Edward's singular blood lust for Bella, the good guy vampires never indicate that it's the least bit challenging for them to avoid chowing down on human necks. They seem even less passionate and violence-prone than regular teenagers. They're not vulnerable to sunlight, holy objects, or silver -- in fact, it seems like the only way to kill one is to dismember him and burn the pieces, and the only people with the strength to do that are other vampires. (And maybe werewolves, but that's probably in the sequel.)

It's also astonishingly easy to become a vampire in this story. All you have to do is get bit by a vampire that doesn't succeed in killing you all the way. Edward talks it up like this is very hard because vampires, once they start to feed, find it difficult not to go all the way. (Gosh, do you think that could be a metaphor for something?) And maybe it is hard for the vampire to just stop on his own. But geez, it's pretty easy to get interrupted, dude. With a scenario like this, I need an excellent explanation for why it's not all I Am Legend out there and 99 percent vampire within a few years.

Also, Edward makes a big deal about not turning Bella into a vampire, but this story gives him no conceivable reason on the face of the earth for not doing it. In this world, there is no downside to being a vampire.

Except the sparkling thing. That would drive me nuts.

I have a weird quirk to my personality, where I believe in failure, but have a hard time believing in success. Failure is always real -- knife-in-the-gut real. But success? Surreal. Kind of distant and fuzzy, like it's a dream I'm having and I'm going to eventually wake up.

This quirk serves no useful purpose. It has no upside. All it means is that I fear failure more than I crave success, as anybody who has looked at my dismal record on submitting my fiction could easily tell you.

On Tuesday night, a week ago, Paul and I went downtown to watch election coverage in a bar. This was partly because we don't have cable ourselves, but also because we wanted a support group, especially if things went badly. I didn't actually expect them to go badly, in fact, I'd been in a good mood all day in spite of myself. But I knew things could change in a moment. There's always something. A bullet, a hijacked plane, a single crazy person doing something crazy. Maybe a so-called "Bradley Effect" would come into play, maybe my more paranoid friends were right and the election was crucially rigged, maybe Sarah Palin had fired up the base enough for McCain to take a crucial swing state, maybe all those Obama-lovin' young people were going to stay home after all. I didn't know. But I felt like I had to prepare myself for things to go badly. I had to be ready for things to go badly.

Things did not go badly.

We walked into the bar at Bayou on Bay just after CNN had projected Ohio for Obama. One of the CNN guys, maybe Wolf Blitzer, followed this up with a little dog and pony show where he demonstrated how McCain could still win by taking, like, all the remaining states or something. It wasn't all that convincing, really, except that it was a vivid demonstration of why I was so cautious, why I had to sidle up to the concept of victory like an alley cat creeping out of her hiding place to snatch a little food.

Immediately after that, with Obama at something like 207 electoral votes and McCain at 86, there was a rash of McCain victories from the middle part of the country. None of them were surprising, places like Texas and Arkansas and Mississippi that were never considered seriously in play, but it was still nerve-wracking to watch McCain double his electoral vote count while Obama's stayed the same.

Then, there was a moment. Eight thirty or so on the west coast. The bar at Bayou had CNN on one TV, the one we were facing, and the sound was on. The other TV had MSNBC and I could see it in my peripheral vision. The MSNBC TV was showing a graphic I didn't understand, something that looked like a CG billboard with Obama's head shot and the words "Barack Obama 44th President of the United States." I literally couldn't make sense of it for a moment. I thought, "Are they just reminding us what number he'll be if elected? Is this a rehearsal? What?"

(Writing this now, I'm starting to choke up. Part of me does think it's real, I guess.)

Then, the CNN electoral map lit up blue on the west coast. The bar cheered. I think I heard cheering from outside. CNN started showing the same billboard graphic.

Barack Obama

44th President of the United States

I went into a daze. No, it can't be, I thought. It's... it can't be real. Somebody is going to find a way to take this away from us. Remember 2000? CNN called it for Gore and look what happened. Remember 2004? The exit polls? Shenanegins in Ohio? Kerry didn't concede until much later than this, midnight or so, did he? Could McCain really be ready to give his concession speech now?

McCain's concession speech was gracious and articulate and dignified, the concession speech from an entirely different and much nobler campaign. It seemed a bit ironic that all the cheering during McCain's speech was coming from the Obama supporters in the Bayou, none from his own crowd of supporters. Except once when he mentioned Sarah Palin. That drew cheers from everywhere. Something we can all agree on. Yes, Republicans, Palin in 2012. You go, girl!

We hung around waiting for Obama's victory speech. That's what we told ourselves we were waiting for. But deep down I think we were still waiting for that unexpected disaster. Instead, what we saw was Virginia and Florida go blue as well.

Virginia! The south! It seemed so extraordinary. And North Carolina was still too close to call, but Obama was leading. When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 he is reported to have said of the Democrats "we have lost the South for a generation." And he certainly seemed to be right about that, but was it possible? Could that generation now be done?

Obama delivered his speech. There was cheering on the television, cheering and hugging in the bar. I know I was as happy as anyone but what I said out loud was snark about Michelle Obama's dress. "She's a beautiful woman and normally has a really good fashion sense," I said. "But that bloody apron look is just peculiar and awkward. The girls look cute, though."

We walked home through a downtown scene that felt like New Year's Eve, Mardi Gras, and winning the Super Bowl all rolled into one. People were honking, hollering, lighting off fireworks, climbing on things, literally dancing in the streets. Apparently we didn't even see the bulk of it, a roving amoeba of celebrants who started at the University and partied their way through the downtown core, picking up people along the way until, according to the Western Front, they numbered more than 3,000 when they made it back to the University and gathered in Red Square.

"Happy Obama Day!" yelled one young woman who was hanging out of a car window as the car drove past us. "Happy Obama Day!"

It was an outpouring of spontaneous joy like nothing I have ever seen. It was like the liberation of Paris.

It was difficult to imagine a McCain victory generating the same level of enthusiasm, even in a town as conservative as Bellingham is liberal. It was hard to imagine McCain supporters jumping around and kissing each other and generally looking like photos of returning GIs after World War II.

I went to bed still half-expecting that I would wake up to find that something had gone horribly wrong, or that it was all a dream. But the next morning things were still the same. Obama was still the president-elect. A couple more states had been certified blue.

On Thursday, Friday, Saturday, nothing had changed. Nobody yelled "psyche!" and reversed the electoral map colors. There was no ongoing controversy over counting or methodology, no lingering doubts about who really won. The news stories were about Obama picking his cabinet.

It finally started to sink in.

For the first time in my voting life, begun in 1984, my pick for President of the United States had won. Not just the lesser of two evils, or my preference given the options, but my PICK. The one I voted for in the primary. The one who, when I first heard him speak at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, caused me to think, "damn! Why isn't that guy running for president?" The moment he threw his hat in the ring I was ready to vote for him.

It's easy to explain my reasons. I like what he has to say, and I like the way he says it. He strikes me as a moderate and practical-minded Democrat, forward-thinking, but grounded in American history. He tends to express his ideas in a straightforward, but often elegant, manner. When he's asked a question he seems inclined to actually respond to the question that was asked, and respond directly, in plain language, with a minimum of politicalese. He seems smart and quick on his feet. He writes his own speeches. Plus, he has great body language and vocal resonance.

But, you know, that's all stuff that I thought. And I am never sure if I have my finger on the pulse of the mainstream or not. When I really like something I don't always know if it's going to be The Beatles or X, kittens or bats, tea or absinthe. On some level I have always felt sure that Obama was going to win, but I could never trust that feeling. I didn't know if it was instinct or wishful thinking.

In some ways it's hard to get exactly what you want. Now I have performance anxiety on his behalf. I want him to be the bestest president evah. I want him to bring peace and prosperity and affordable medical care and alternative energy and space exploration. I want him to save the environment, heck, I want him to save the world, like Superman or something. Is all that going to happen? Probably not.

But Obama's election -- no matter what happens now -- is still one of the great moments in the history of America, one of the moments when we delivered on our promise instead of falling short of it. His election proves that a lot of things that have been said about the American people over the past eight years are, simply, lies. A false narrative. It was a fantasy that people like Karl Rove wanted to believe. The rest of us were afraid, for a while, that it was true, because the evidence seemed to support him. But now, at this moment, reality has diverged too much from that narrative. We know that it's not the right story.

In that story, Americans are too racist to elect a black man. They are too xenophobic to elect a man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama who grew up partly in Indonesia and has Kenyan relatives. They are too fearful to vote for a promise of change. They are too right wing to elect a Democrat. They're too stupid to notice when they are being played, and it's easy to manipulate them into blaming the wrong people and policies for their troubles. They are still incensed with anger over the "culture wars" of the 1960s.

In fact, because the McCain campaign was so negative -- it had almost no narrative other than "be afraid of the other guy!" -- this feels like a referendum on negative campaigning in general, and it feels like maybe it doesn't work, or at least it doesn't work anymore. And it does work on some people. Certainly, there is a sad/amusing contingent of people out there stockpiling guns and waiting for the end times. (And a few scary racist hotheads as well.) But maybe the fact that those people are really extreme and crazy and obvious causes us to overestimate their numbers and influence. And maybe it's as simple as this: people are swayed by negative attack ads only if they already want to be.

If you were looking for a reason to hate and fear Obama -- not just a reason to prefer the other guy -- it was easy to seize on, say, William Ayers, and jump up and down about that for a while, and just get madder and madder when other people looked at you and said, "Who?"

And... one more thing. I am pretty sure, now, that most people who were looking for a reason to hate and fear Obama were doing so because he was the Democrat and not because he was the not-entirely-white guy. I think their crisis was political ideology more than race. Which is sort of encouraging and discouraging at the same time.

For the last hundred years or so, the contest for president has been between people from the same two parties: there's the Democrat, and there's the Republican. Two brands, if you will. Like Coke and Pepsi. So, the individual running for president might be a particular product, with individual characteristics, but the brand itself has certain expectations that go with it. There's a platform, a general approach to things, a philosophy on governance and defense and interpretation of the constitution which is carried with the brand, somewhat independent of the individual.

Now, in my narrative (which, like all reality narratives, is at least partly false) the increasingly partisan politics of the past fifteen years or so has been driven by an increased emphasis on brand over individual. I'm going to call this the Coulterization of politics, because it rolls off the tongue better than Limbaugh-ization. This is brand loyalty ramped up to an insane, unhinged degree, where the Pepsi drinkers rant and rave about the Coke drinkers as if they were some kind of supernatural evil, and the drinking of Coke causes people to transform into inhuman zombie monsters who will creep into your house at night and eat your children. Not only does this attitude mindlessly demonize Coke drinkers, but it also carries the unspoken assumption that Pepsi-drinking is some kind of automatic default from which Coke drinkers deviate.

Which is pretty absurd, when you look at it -- in most elections, approximately half the country drinks Coke. Sometimes a little more than half, sometimes a little less than half. Sometimes a little more, and they lose anyway, but this isn't about 2000 and the electoral college. It's about the long-term dangers of negative campaigning and brand over product.

George W. Bush's second term has been extremely damaging to the Republican brand.

Yes, it's about the economy.

But it's also about taxes and the public good and what Americans want out of their government. People are losing their jobs and their houses at the same time, after years of flat wages and marginal employment, when they are already deeply in debt. But the country as a whole is in the same boat -- Bush has presided over an absolutely insane explosion of the national debt. People look around at our crumbling infrastructure and strangled public institutions -- vividly demonstrated by first the failure of the federal levees and then the failure of the federal disaster response system during Hurricane Katrina -- and say, "Hey, where did all our money go?"

Bush's time in office has been a perfect object lesson in the dangers of one party getting to do what it wants for too long without any ameliorating factors. The Republicans have had their merry way with the country, and their schemes have been almost entirely unchecked by the mysteriously craven Democrats in Congress, the media, or a modicum of common sense.

This confluence of events is kind of a no-brainer. It's such a no-brainer that even Sarah Palin, would-be airhead-in-chief, identified it correctly: she blames Bush for her and John McCain's failed presidential bid.

But she and McCain had a problem, going into the race, a problem that went deeper than Bush. For years now, Republicans in particular have been emphasizing brand over candidate. When the brand is perceived positively, as it was during what I think of as our national 9/11 hangover in 2002 and 2004, people like Karl Rove could crow about establishing a "permanent Republican majority." But when that doesn't seem to be working out there's nowhere left for the brand to go.

The Republicans have backed themselves into a corner. By defining themselves negatively, as merely the alternative to those evil, evil Democrats, when people get too disgusted by all the dead mice in their Pepsi cans -- well, they don't immediately change their negative opinion of Democrats, they just vote for them anyway.

I believe it's possible that the Republicans have simply played out the narrative they chose to follow and must now follow a new narrative, or die and be reborn as something else. The most dedicated Coulterites (and where has she been this election cycle, anyway? Is she smarter than she acts, and she actually noticed that negative campaigning was failing in a big way this time around?) do not believe this. They are convinced that they failed not because they are at the natural end of that particular narrative, but because they strayed from that narrative. They are calling for more, louder, meaner. They are calling out for Sarah Palin to lead them to the promised land in 2012.

(Yeah, guys, you do that. It's a great idea! Really!)

In 2000, after the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, I called the first annual "wake for democracy" in the Ranch Room, Bellingham's diviest dive. (I say "dive" like it's a good thing.) I called another one in 2002, and in 2004, although in 2004 there was also an organized event called "a wake for democracy" -- I was no longer the only person who worried for the health of our nation.

But the term "wake" was a little tongue-in-cheek, a bit of a misnomer. Democracy isn't like an individual, it doesn't die and then move on. Democracy dies like the summer, fading and drooping into hard winters that might seem like they're going to last forever, but they don't. It seems very appropriate that we have our elections in the fall, immediately after Halloween, the holiday where we celebrate the death of summer.

When summer dies, we have faith that it will eventually be reborn. But sometimes it's a long road from the autumn to the spring.

Yesterday, I noticed that our neighbor's Obama/Biden sign had been torn up and the pieces thrown into the gutter and the bushes.

I will probably never know what motivated the sign-destroyers. But I'm inclined to imagine what motivated them, to construct a little narrative in my head. I imagine that the people destroying the Republican signs were 14-year-old-boys on a tagging mission, with no political motivations at all, and the signs simply attracted them by being larger than most campaign signs, like little billboards, the kind of campaign signs you see along the highway. Or maybe they think McCain is a creepy old guy and Sarah Palin is hot, which might explain the penis. Or maybe they actually do have nascent political leanings, albeit clumsily and stupidly expressed in 14-year-old-boy fashion.

(The part of the narrative I don't get is why the insurance place has left the defaced signs in place -- does it please their sense of aggrieved self-righteousness to look at the spray-painted penis and think "that, that's exactly what those horrible Obama supporters are like."? Or are they, like, really old and out of touch and they haven't even noticed? Maybe the insurance place has already gone out of business, and the signs were actually put there by whoever puts them up all along the highway and nobody really takes care of those, so now I have to go see if the insurance place is open for business because I'm curious. And who puts those highway signs up anyway? Large vacant lots are running 90 percent for Dino Rossi!)

I'm having more trouble imagining the Obama sign-destroyer. Was it one of those deeply angry people you see shouting "terrorist! Kill him!" at McCain/Palin rallies? But how did that person end up in downtown Bellingham? In a college neighborhood? Was it a college Young Republican (do they even have those anymore?) drunk, wandering the streets in a daze, able to focus only on his visceral loathing of the very shape of the letters that make up Obama's name? Or maybe there were a few of them, roaming the streets in a pack, and they dared each other?

And I've been kind of assuming that the sign-destroyers were male, but maybe they weren't. The spray-painters, almost certainly, but what if the Obama-sign-destroyer was female? In fact, what if she was a deeply committed Hillary Clinton supporter who was simply overcome with sudden rage because the sign didn't say Hillary/Whoever?

In fact, it's easier for me to imagine a drunken college student as an enraged Hillary supporter, rather than as an enraged McCain supporter. So, now, that's the person I imagine doing it, and now I'm kind of amused to imagine her as a women's-studies major who was deliberately trying to get in touch with her female anger power and maybe now she is deeply embarrassed to have done such a thing, especially because now she is a litterbug as well as a vandal, and now she will go up to their house with a new Obama sign and apologize and make friends and vote for Obama after all, so, yay! Happy ending!

Of course, I am just making all that up.

But, making stuff up is what humans do. Our perception of reality is largely narrative-based.We make up stories ourselves, and we turn to the people around us for assistance in constructing narratives. We turn to the media. News outlets are less about informing us of facts than they are about supplying a coherent reality narrative. These narratives are, usually, sort of, based on facts. But our brains probably don't care. Studies on how memory works seem to reveal that our brains don't automatically make a distinction between fiction and non-fiction. We don't store it in a different place or recall it any differently. A non-fiction narrative simply has an additional "this really happened!" tag.

The four people in the presidential race right now are, in fact, real people*, but in our minds they are characters. Even people we know really well are, sort of, characters to us. People we have never met can hardly be anything else. We cast them as this, we cast them as that -- there are the roles we want them to play, the roles they choose to play, and the roles they succeed in playing.

I think Republicans wanted McCain to play the role of elder statesman, but he hasn't really done that -- in fact, he hasn't picked a consistent role to play -- and so they are finding it hard to support him, because in the absence of a positive role to play, he has sort of defaulted to playing the doddering old fool. Instead, the role of elder statesman is being played by Joe Biden. Sarah Palin is playing Boudicca, the Warrior Queen defending the homeland against foreign invaders.This role is rather unnerving to people, because in this play "foreign invaders" are not only actual foreign invaders, but also anybody who is not a Republican.Still, she is an interesting character. She is such an interesting character that there are many people who see her as the hero of the piece, but only if they agree with her definition of "foreign invaders." Other people see her as a likely candidate for villain.

(I think maybe Hillary Clinton was playing an American Democrat version of Margaret Thatcher. Maybe?)

Obama is playing the role of how we like to remember John F. Kennedy -- after the announcement of the space program, say, before we all knew about Marilyn Monroe. He's playing Kennedy only better, a dream of Kennedy, what we wanted him to be, what we made him -- a symbol of our youthful optimism, our technical know-how, our can-do spirit. He's not only playing Kennedy-only-better, he's inviting us to play along, to play 1960-Americans-only-better. Better, because this time, post civil rights and feminism, everybody gets to play. Whether Obama wins the election or not -- whether he becomes president or not -- he is playing the hero in this story.

Unless you think Palin is actually the hero, in which case Obama becomes the false hero, the villain with the smiling face who acts like the hero, but he'll betray you in the final scene.

*Except possibly Sarah Palin. I think she might be a robot.

I would like to start with a little essay about how I came to this conclusion -- that science fiction is actually a subset of fantasy -- because it defines terms and addresses many counterpoints that have been raised.

First, when I say "fantasy" I refer to stories that are about things that aren't. This includes both the purely imaginative (probably won't happen) and the speculative (might happen). Fantasy in this sense is not on a continuum against science fiction, it is on a continuum against realism.

(Although "continuum" implies that it's something resembling a straight line, which I would not be willing to defend.)

One possible rule of thumb: it is a fantasy if filming it would require obvious special effects.

There is a smaller definition of fantasy, call it fantasy definition 2, which basically means "vaguely resembling Tolkien." I believe this is a marketing distinction rather than a literary one, since it doesn't even include most fantasy. It does have a vigorous fan base, however. That fact leads the term "fantasy" to be used as shorthand for "this particular type of fantasy involving elves and dragons and such." So -- those types of stories clearly are fantasy, but they are not the definition of fantasy. They are not the container, they are one of the things contained.

Most of what we think of as "genre" is really just marketing. They put the books in whatever section they expect people to look for them in. So, The Handmaid's Tale is in unclassified "literature" because Margaret Atwood isn't marketed as a science fiction writer. It doesn't have any bearing on whether the book is science fiction. And it's not supposed to. It's supposed to help Atwood fans find her stuff.

Sufficiently popular fantastic writers will often get moved to the "literature" section -- it doesn't make any difference to the content of the books.

One common way people attempt to distinguish science fiction from (other) fantasy is to claim that science fiction is about what is "possible." This definition is problematic because "possible" is not intrinsic to the work. Real world possibilities are always shifting -- some things that seemed impossible once are now possible, other things which once seemed possible are now thought to be impossible. Re: any 50s science fiction about faster than light travel, or life on the Moon or Mars.

This definition would lead us to the fairly awkward position of deciding that most "golden age" SF is no longer science fiction, because it is now known to be fantasy.

But, people don't tend to do that -- we still see Podkayne of Mars as science fiction. So obviously, we're using a qualifier other than "what is now possible."

You might at this point be tempted to use "what the author thought was possible at the time it was written" as a qualifier, but this is still problematic, because the author's personal beliefs are also not intrinsic to the work. We can't conclude that every SF writer who deals in time travel to the past actually believes such a thing is possible.

So, what makes something science fiction, if it isn't the fact that its scientific premise is possible, or that the author believed it was possible when the story was written?

Well, let's look at Frankenstein, held by many to be the first science fiction novel. Mary Shelley writes of a man assembling a new man out of parts of dead men, then bringing him to life through unspecified scientific means.

(Note: movies have implied that this means was electricity. The novel doesn't say, ostensibly because Dr. Frankenstein doesn't want anyone to replicate his methods. But other writings by Mary Shelley at the time show that she was familiar with experiments in galvanism and that her knowledge that a frog's limb could be brought to "life" with electricity probably did influence her thinking when writing the novel.)

There was no concept of scientifiction (early name for SF) in her day, so in her mind she was writing a horrific fantasy, and her twist on it was to involve modern science. Also, we now know that what she describes in Frankenstein is impossible -- an intact and very recently deceased body might be brought back to life through electricity, but a sewn-together collection of corpses never could.

And yet, the book is retroactively classified as science fiction, and nobody seriously objects. Why is that?

Well, its premise is scientific -- it can be expressed as "suppose, using science, we could do X." Also, it is concerned with the effect of technology and scientific discoveries on the human psyche and human society, addressing concepts such as unintended consequences and creator responsibility.

So, it is science fiction because it wrestles with scientific issues and concepts. "Being science fiction" is essentially an attribute of what is otherwise a fantasy novel.

But, if you still think SF and fantasy are two distinct and separate genres, consider: Is alternate history science fiction, because it is generally published as science fiction? Or is it only science fiction if it involves quantum multiple universes theory, or if the change catalyst is something specifically scientific? (I mean, The Difference Engine, which is alternate history specifically based on technology, as opposed to The Man in the High Castle which is alternate history based on a different military outcome to World War II.)

Or is all alternate history science fiction because Philip K. Dick, an SF writer, wrote the first one? Is Zelazny's Amber series SF with fantasy trappings, or fantasy with vague pretensions of being science fiction? Is Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars series science fiction, even though it has no scientific elements other than being set on Mars? How about the works of China Mieville, who writes extremely strange industrial alternate world fantasy which is also science fiction and horror? Or about Lovecraft -- his Dreamlands series is pure fantasy, but most of his Cthulhu Mythos stories are more or less science fiction. And what would you make of Terry Pratchett's novel Strata -- SF in which space explorers land on a disc-shaped planet and discover an absurd world built by beings so advanced that the result is indistinguishable from magic?

(He wrote it in 1981, so it predates any of the Discworld books -- however, the flat world is clearly a Discworld prototype.)

While there are certainly loose and generalized distinctions between most SF and most non-SF fantasy, I don't find that they hold up well under close analysis. There are too many exceptions. After a while it seems like everything is an exception and the distinction just isn't worth making any more.

So I'm writing an article inspired by this article in Slate which is mostly about an article in The New Yorker. Maybe somebody else will write an article about my article, although I doubt it. But it could be fun! How many levels deep can we get before we achieve reverse transcendence?

Anyway, the New Yorker article can be summed up pretty well by this quote from it:

"I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll <..> underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century?"

So from this you know that Sasha Frere-Jones is kind of an idiot (the very erudite New Yorker kind of idiot) and probably not black.

The structure of the article is like this: "Indie" rockers Arcade Fire are kind of boring, that is to say, white. Back in rock's golden age of the 50s and 60s and 70s, the performers were not so white. Of course, they were technically just as white, but their music was, in SFJ's opinion, more obviously influenced by blues and soul. So they weren't really so white. Then in the 80s there was Michael Jackson. Who wasn't actually white at all! At least, he wasn't white in the 80s when he was, like, the biggest superstar of all time! And there was Prince! Also not white! And then, starting in the 1990s, there was rap!

"You could argue that Dr. Dre and Snoop were the most important pop musicians since Bob Dylan and the Beatles."

(Er... I suppose you could argue that. You could argue almost anything. But my hyperbole-meter automatically goes into the red whenever anything is "the most important X since the Beatles!" or "the Beatles of X!")

Anyway, at this point the article proposes that during the 80s and 90s "racial sensitivity" caused white musicians to stop stealing from black musicians. Then SFJ goes on to talk at length about his own band, a funk band made up of white boys. (Okay, so SFJ is, as I suspected, white.) He seems to find it very telling that he couldn't quite find the right way to sing for the band's music, because he couldn't rap. In fact, he says "the problem was clearly related to race. It seemed silly to try to sound "black," but that is what happened, no matter how hard I tried not to."

I already know from panels at science fiction conventions that it is very hard to say, "well, in my book I do X" without sounding like a complete git. Turns out the same thing applies to, "in my band we do X." As a reader of the article, I keep thinking, "Dude, you seem to think there's some kind of racial politics involved, but maybe you're just not a very good singer."

Now, moving on to his main point, about "indie" rock, he says, "The indie genre emerged in the early eighties, in the wake of British bands such as the Clash and Public Image Ltd., and originally incorporated black sources, using them to produce a new music, characterized by brevity and force, and released on independent labels."

But what, exactly does he mean by "incorporated black sources"? English bands in the early 80s had a ska and reggae influence that eventually faded, but SFJ doesn't seem to mean "reggae" when he says "black." His example of the "blackness" of early indie rock is a single group, The Minutemen, and their blackness is established by "frantic political rants that were simultaneously jazz, punk, and funk, without sounding like any of these genres."

Okay, but. But. According to Wikipedia SFJ was born in 1967, which means that he was roughly my age while most of this was going on, and I don't know if he was listening to indie rock in the early 80s, but I know I was, and I know that we didn't call it "indie" then, we called it new wave or punk, and if there is a whiter style of music than new wave, I simply don't know what it is.

There is no discernible funk in new wave. Maybe there's a hint of jazz, sometimes. There is syncopation, of course, a bit of swing. Is swing "black" according to SFJ's criteria for blackness? Cab Calloway was black, anyway. I mean, he looks black in the pictures. Huh, this is weird, according to Wikipedia "In 1941 Cab Calloway fired Dizzy Gillespie from his Orchestra after an onstage fracas erupted when Calloway was hit with spitballs. He wrongly accused Gillespie, who stabbed Calloway in the leg with a small knife." Mr. Gillespie went on to a memorable guest spot on The Muppet Show, and Mr. Calloway appeared on Sesame Street, though I don't remember if I saw that one. But I really liked Mr. Gillespie on The Muppet Show.

Okay, back to SFJ. At this point, after making an assertion about early 80s rock that I don't buy, he makes an assertion about mid-90s rock that I also don't buy: "But by the mid-nineties black influences had begun to recede, sometimes drastically, and the term 'indie rock' came implicitly to mean white rock."

While it is true that "indie rock" of the 90s did, pretty much, implicitly mean "white," I seem to recall in the 80s and 90s that "rock" of any kind meant white. There was "rock" and that was white, and there was "R&B" and that was black. Remember the band Living Color? Late 80s rock band, one big hit "Cult of Personality"? They were black, and it was treated at the time as kind of a novelty, because rock bands just weren't black. Even when the bands did "funk metal."

Oh, right, I forgot -- SFJ isn't talking about actual blackness of performers, he is talking about "blackness" of music, so I suppose by his criteria a funk metal band would be sufficiently "black" on account of the funk. Which would make popular indie bands of the 90s Jane's Addiction, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More... blow his theory.

On to the next round. "During the same period, indie-band singers abandoned full-throated vocals and began to mumble and moan, and to hide their voices under noise. Lyrics became increasingly allusive and oblique." Erm... I'm getting from this that he really doesn't like Nirvana, which would explain why, in an article about musical trends over the past 20 years, he has somehow managed not to mention them. (Of course, he also manages to talk about early 90s rap without mentioning Public Enemy.)

Oddly, the absence of Nirvana -- which jumped out at me -- totally missed the author of the Slate piece, who blithely sums up from SFJ's article:

"To give bite to the accusation [that modern indie rock is boring], Frere-Jones names a few names, beginning with the Arcade Fire and adding Wilco, the Fiery Furnaces, the Decemberists, the Shins, Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear, Panda Bear, and Devendra Banhart, plus indie-heroes past, Pavement. He contrasts them with the likes of the Clash, Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Public Image Ltd., Bob Dylan, the Minutemen, Nirvana, and even Grand Funk Railroad as examples of willful, gleeful, racial-sound-barrier-breaching white rockers of yore."

According to SFJ, 90s indie music just kept getting whiter, because it was drawing on super-white 60s trends like psychedelic and country music. And now "in the past few years, I’ve spent too many evenings at indie concerts waiting in vain for vigor, for rhythm, for a musical effect that could justify all the preciousness. How did rhythm come to be discounted in an art form that was born as a celebration of rhythm’s possibilities? Where is the impulse to reach out to an audience -- to entertain?"

Okay, so, maybe neither one of us likes Cat Power, or Low (perpetrators of what I like to call "quaalude rock").

But, again I feel like he's missing the point. True, a lot of indie rock of the 00s isn't terribly danceable. I like to dance, so I notice things like that. But I don't find most "dance" music of the 00s terribly danceable either -- I don't really like to dance to electronica, and I don't really like to dance to modern rap/hip-hop/Justin Timberlake. In fact, that sexyback noise thing will hypnotize me into simultaneous immobility/murderous rage. Try it, if you have the stomach for it. It's fun. Play sexbacknoise and watch me glare at you for three or four minutes without being able to move.

So, my question would be, why is there generally such a deep chasm between "music that doesn't suck" and "music you can dance to" these days? Is it just a bad fit between my personal tastes and the whims of pop culture? Or is it a side effect of the increasingly minute stratifications of pop culture marketing? Is it the fault of those weirdly immobile Seattle audiences The Stranger liked to complain about, who set the stage in the 90s for the idea that indie rock and dancing were not in any way linked?

No, according the SFJ it seems to be related to laws against sampling. Except that he says, "For twenty years, beginning in the mid-eighties, with the advent of drum machines that could store brief digital excerpts of records, sampling had encouraged integration." Which, let me think, twenty years on from the mid-80s -- hey, that's now! Which, er, fails to make a case for something he claims started to happen ten years ago. Anyway, now he's talking about rap musicians having to write more of their own music, which I am having a hard time seeing as any kind of tragedy. But his point seems to be that anti-sampling laws discourage cross-genre musical influences. Which seems a little at odds with his main thesis, considering that in the 50s, 60s, and 70s they didn't have sampling. So, actually, I don't know what he's talking about here.

The Slate piece proposes an alternate theory: that you can't dance to modern indie rock because "compared to previous post-punk generations, the particular kind of indie rock Frere-Jones complains about is more blatantly upper-middle class and liberal-arts-college-based, and less self-aware or politicized about it."

So, it's not race, it's class. I suppose there might be something to that -- "indie rock" does have a long tradition of being interchangeable with "college rock." But when you look at what college costs these days, and how in debt your typical graduate is, and look at the jobs they're likely to get, and compare that to what the guy who fixes your car makes... well, maybe it is class, in a sub-culture sense, but I'm no longer sure that class has any predictable relationship to money.

(And I'm also not sure why, knowing that, we don't encourage smart kids with a mechanical inclination to learn how to fix cars, but that's a whole rant of its own.)

But now we're in the home stretch, the beginning of SFJ's final paragraph:

"The most important reason for the decline of musical miscegenation, however, is social progress. Black musicians are now as visible and as influential as white ones. They are granted the same media coverage, recording contracts, and concert bookings."

Well... yes and no. When you're not a big fan of rap or R&B ballads, it's easy to notice that black recording superstars are indeed huge, but only within a fairly narrow range of musical styles. Anybody working in a different black musical tradition -- blues, jazz, swing, funk, motown, gospel, reggae -- is kind of left out.

(Although white British chick Amy Winehouse seems to be doing pretty well with her own little motown revival, how does that fit into the overall picture? And, here's a thought, if white artists borrowing from black musical traditions is what SFJ wants more of, how does he feel about black artists borrowing from white musical traditions? When I saw Kanye West at Bumbershoot he was accompanied on stage by a string quartet. Or, what about the grand tradition of black opera divas?

There seems to be an underlying assumption in SFJ's piece that musical influence goes one way and means one thing -- white artists borrow "ecstatic singing" and a "heavy African downbeat" from black artists. But rock & roll has been around for generations now. If Led Zeppelin broke new ground by going back to nearly-forgotten blues greats like Muddy Waters for inspiration, somebody Kanye West's age might have grown up listening to Led Zeppelin. Or, you know, not Led Zeppelin. He might have grown up listening to new wave. He might have grown up as fascinated by obscure, forgotten psychedelic garage bands as Zeppelin was by blues artists.

SFJ seems to be creating a narrative where black musical traditions come from some pure, primitive, untouched well of generic Africanness, which all European-descended musicians must drink from in order to achieve authentic rock soul. This narrative is naive, patronizing and reductionist. Why all the fuss about ecstasy and downbeats, and no mention of the blistering political and social conscience or the intricate poetic devices of modern rap lyrics?

(Although, you know, nowadays those intelligent lyrics are mostly found in indie rap of the kind I'm likely to hear on the college station.)

"The uneasy, and sometimes inappropriate, borrowings and imitations that set rock and roll in motion gave popular music a heat and an intensity that can’t be duplicated today, and the loss isn’t just musical; it’s also about risk."

Notice the way we have gone back and forth between talking about "popular music" and "indie music"? Which one has lost its soul? Both? Aren't we all just victims of the ever-increasing commodification of art?

Popular music used to be like a big open-mike night, where everybody would go and listen to everything and latch on to what they liked. Now we have headphones on all the time, listening to a pre-selected narrowcast of music by artists and sub-genres we already know we like. How can any cross-pollination occur under those circumstances?

I'm guessing the young lady is a Twilight fan.Also, I hate The Family Guy with the burning passion of a thousand suns. (And yet I sometimes watch it anyway, because I find it hard to resist cartoons. Heck, I used to watch Superfriends.)

The article is not terribly informative, but it is accompanied by a very nice picture of a Victorian widow's outfit.

It is also accompanied by a photo essay of various alleged "goths." This essay includes baggy-pantsed male youths (baggy pants = not in any conceivable way goth, no, not even if they're black), catwalk models (kinda goth... I guess... skeletal, anyway), a silent film star (très goth!), more catwalk models wearing sometimes gothic fashions (the ghostly wedding dress and the boots anyway), a top hat which has a bat on it but nevertheless manages to be extremely ugly (maybe it's supposed to be made from human skin?), and a pretty but not particularly gothic dress made of red feathers.

As a personal memoir of gothic history the article starts out well enough, but it takes a wrong turn early on when the quotes from random young people start. I think you are doomed to a certain level of inescapable stupidity if you start asking people "so, why do you do what you do?" Because they will make stuff up. And it's mostly nonsense.

(Although I do want to ask whoever put together the photo essay why they thought young gentlemen wearing long t-shirts and enormous draggy pants were goths. Really, I want to know. Did they tell you they were goths? Did you just assume that everyone in black is a goth? And, good lord, when is that trend going to die anyway? If anything it's getting worse. Just when I thought waistbands couldn't possibly get any lower, they established a new low below the butt. Yeah, young men who want to look really hip are now wearing pants that make them 1. Waddle awkwardly like they need a diaper change, 2. Resemble buttless old men who couldn't quite pull their pants all the way up. I know I'm an old curmudgeon and therefore expected to hate whatever kids today get up to fashionwise, but honestly, trust me on this one, you all look like morons.)

If teenagers who belong to Facebook groups are discovering gothic fashion, more power to 'em. But the attempt to make it mean something... I guess the presumption that it does mean something has always kind of irked me. It's not like fashion is ever completely neutral. Guys who wear khaki knee-length shorts, fanny packs, and yellow Crocs have decided how they are going to dress just as much as a guy wearing black velvet and eyeliner.People who listen to Britney Spears do so (presumably) because they enjoy hearing it, the same as people who listen to Bauhaus. People whose house is full of Thomas Kinkdade prints had to select and pay for them just the same as Edward Gorey prints.

(Although once your house is full of gothic geegaws and vampire books and Edward Gorey, it tends to attract more of the same as gifts. So, come to think of it, I didn't actually select and pay for all my Edward Gorey decor. But I think my point stands.)

(Hey! If you type "hate thomas kinkade" into Google I'm entry three!)

So, I am unable to imagine actually enjoying Ms. Spears' or Mr. Kinkade's oeuvre, nor am I able to imagine being able to bring oneself to leave the house in any combination of khaki knee-length shorts, fanny packs, or Crocs of any color. But that's not the point. The point is that black velvet is seen as a choice, while khaki shorts are seen as the absence of choice, as something that -- I guess -- just magically appears upon the body when you're not paying attention, because nature will not allow you to leave the house without pants.

And the decision to get a tan -- for people who work indoors anyway -- is just as much a choice as wearing sunscreen.

While partisan bloggers and the sun scare industry will use this as an opportunity to undermine Gov. Palin and demonize the indoor tanning industry, the fact is that Governor Palin’s decision to get UV light from a tanning bed positively impacts her health.

—The Indoor Tanning Association, regarding the tanning bed which vice-presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin had installed in the governor's residence