In the distant future, humanity is scattered across a few different planets, none of them Earth; some are run by libertarians (controlled by a single family because that’s how power works) and others are run by a corporate nanny state, with only Polyglot having something like democracy. When the discovery of a new gate between worlds, promising access to a new planet, destabilizes things, war breaks out and internal dissent threatens to take down both non-Polyglot regimes. It’s got Kress’s standard pessimism about governance as well as a lot of palace intrigue and some sf on the nature of consciousness. ( )

Kress’s novels and stories fulfill my criteria for SF Worth Reading - some unique feature in SFnal world construction, decent plotting, and a decent amount of character development. When I’m not looking for Aliens and Human Allies in SF, Kress is almost always a safe bet. And why not show Aliens and Human Allies in World's Worst Traffic Jam? Not every near-future story has to be set in the USA of course, but I care where my SF takes place.

There’s a lot of contemporary bad SF out there written by women as well as men. Nancy Kress never had the buzz that Ann Leckie and of course it's unheard off that a debut novel wins all the major SF awards. Combine that with Hurley's sweep of the fan Hugos for her explicitly political writing and the rightwing attempt to stuff the ballot boxes with shitty writers that failed miserably and you do have a different year. All true and while developments in 2020 do not came out of the blue -- online fandom has been arguing for years about diversity -- this year maybe still different in kind, as things might come to a head as far as I’m concerned SF-wise. A visible example can be seen if we look back to 2002 when Michel Houellebecq was regarded as a shoe-in for the French Grand Prix literary award until he gave a very inadvisable interview condemning Islam by calling it 'stupid'. Overnight this controversy politicised his nomination and made it very unlikely he'd win. While I'm very happy to have a very wide fields of people to pick my SF books from, there may be a slight danger of the issue of diversity leading to publishers publishing books to capture the Zeitgeist with novels that otherwise might not see the light of day because they are simply not good enough. That happened with women's publishing on the early 70's and Cyberpunk in the late 80's/90's. Publishing like most other industries has trends and fashions. So I hope novels like Kress’s bring a wider range of people to SF. That would be cool. Although it wouldn't automatically make the books better, that's just wishful thinking on my part.

It was a breath of fresh air reading Kress’s novel in this day and age. There's a big difference between lack of diversity in authors and lack of diversity in characters. Characters are under the authors' control; the author himself is not. A white male author may not be helping the authorial diversity statistics, but surely he shouldn't give up writing because of that? If it were established that there was an editorial bias toward white male authors - i.e. that two stories of equal merit would see the white male authored one published and the other not - that would certainly be cause for action, but otherwise author diversity can only be addressed by encouraging less represented groups to submit material. Ultimately the key is the merit of the work - if it's good, publish it, no matter the gender or race of the author. If it isn't good, don't publish it, again irrespective of the gender or race of the author.

Kress, Banks, Reynolds, and Vernor Vinge are good examples ... they don't have white male leads. They have post-racial or futuristic mixed leads. Far more than any other branch of literature or art, these writers are writing about leads who are *not* their own race/class/sexuality/gender. And why would they try to replicate *contemporary* social diversity within particular Earth societies? Sci-fi isn't supposed to be a vehicle for congratulating ourselves on contemporary racial politics; it's not about imagining a future that validates a particular moment of racial politics in 21st century Earth and is "representative" of that moment's political pieties (such as representing certain 'good' social groupings in a positive light). That's a confused artifact of the impulse to moralize and constrain literature, an impulse which is particularly ill-suited to science fiction -- which, by definition, is looking to move far beyond the contemporary realm. That’s why I love most of Kress writes and I don’t usually like Hurley’s, Jemisin’s, etc.

You don't need to be gay to create an alternative sexual society. You just need to write well. And how do we know that the 'the majority' are straight? The genre came up in the 40s and found its niche right up to the late 60s whereupon it started gazing up its own orifice and tried to rename SF as 'Speculative Fiction'. As though all fiction were not that. But it was impossible, back then, to come out. We can only guess, were we to be in the least bit interested, about the sexual orientation of those early SF writer-heroes. Who needed only, as I mentioned above, to be able to write well.

As a writer, Kress benefits from the fact that she writes very good SF. In Kress’ “The Eleventh Gate” is able to step out of the zone of any particular group. Nowadays there's apparently an endless stream of "Dark Fantasy" about vampire boyfriends, all written by women. But if a woman writes straight horror it gets people interested. There really is no all-encompassing hegemony of evil white fanboys hold you down - in speculative fiction there are simply no limits apart from your own imagination.



SF = Speculative Fiction. ( )