I am soft sift in an hourglass

sci-fi author, sailpunk, sapphic 🚀 this was supposed to be an author blog but it is currently mainly a star trek blog 🖖 assorted works and science stuff at sheilajenne.com

[jennelikejennay]

I should probably write a pinned post, shouldn't I?

This blog is about 80% Star Trek. Currently I like TOS best. I write reams of Kirk/Spock fic here. I also love making up stuff about Vulcan culture, speculating on their biology, learning their language, etc.

I also write books. My Imperial Mars series is like if you put Master and Commander in space, and then it somehow morphed into Les Mis. Frock coats, solar sails, revolution, lesbians. You can get into the series here.

I also have a spinoff novella about the charming prince and his murderous valet here. You don't have to have read the rest of the series, but I think they enrich each other.

Then I have two standalones. In Bisection, two people in one body explore the stars and their relationship to each other. You can get it here. Invasive is about human colonists coming to a new world and trying to recreate the home they lost. It's available here.

I like it when you interact with me, so please don't be shy (unless you are a spambot). Make art of my stories, steal my fic ideas and do them again better, it's all good. But please don't pirate my books; if you want them and don't want to pay, just ask me. It's about ✨ consent.✨

I am looking for work as a copyeditor or really any writing related job. No job too small, no MS too messy!

Other things I like, in no particular order: The Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, Good Omens, Xena, Imperial Radch, Vorkosigan Saga, She-Ra, Becky Chambers, The Locked Tomb, CJ Cherryh's Foreigner series, basically if it's queer and/or in space I will eat it up with a spoon.

[cookiemom6067]

Chapter 47 of "Silent Star" by @jennelikejennay is up!

Spock’s first shift aboard the Enterprise was very trying.

Chapter 47 of "Silent Star" by Moreta1848 on AO3

[jennelikejennay]

Oh my gosh it's complete!!!

If you've been waiting to start listening to this podfic, your wait is over.

(My podfic listening tip: download an app (mine is Smart Audiobook Player, which works a treat) and download all the podfic files into there. This keeps your place better than the embedded player, plus it smoothly goes from one chapter to the next if you're listening in the car or something.

And then don't forget to go back to ao3 when you've finished and thank the narrator for creating it for you!)

[aphrostiel]

mr. spock & saavikam

they're my everything

[balrogballs]

I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.

Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:

If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.

I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.

I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.

What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?

Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.

No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.

There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.

Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.

The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.

Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.

Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.

I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.

Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.

I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?

This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.

You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.

So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.

But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.

Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.

We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.

[jennelikejennay]

Wow, this puts into words a lot of things that have been sloshing around in my mind a very long time.

I grew up in a similar soup to Tolkien's, especially in college, surrounded by people who really did believe in this stuff. If you read a lot of primary sources (as he did) you can hardly miss that throughout recorded history, people really did think that stuff like courage, laziness, criminality, even good and evil were inherited. And you can grow up today in a not-actively-racist home and kind of keep the two worldviews sitting uncomfortably in your head: on the one hand, people come in tribes that are actually predictive of what they're like as people, and on the other hand, you should not be mean to Black people. It's kind of like how you read a lot of fantasy about people's homelands and the long history and lore of the place where they are, while living on stolen land. It sits in the fantasy and lore part of your mind, where you don't reflect on it because you don't think it drives your actions in real life.

But in fact it is not true, not on a fact level nor on a symbolic, mythical level; if it feels true the reason is probably that you read a lot of fantasy where it's heavily baked into almost everything.

I think it's very easy, when Tolkien is criticized, to defend him because we're really defending ourselves. It can't be racist because I would have noticed if it was. He can't have been racist because I unconsciously agreed with him as I was reading, I lived in that world where race determined everything, and if that's racist then I'm a little racist and I'm nottt. Like him, I can believe race is real on a mythic level but act like it's not real in my day to day life, right?

But I don't think you can have these things in the mythic basement of your mind and not have them affect your actions at all. Myths have power, surely that's one true thing Tolkien taught us.

At the time when I realized this, I ended up simply abandoning fantasy altogether. I couldn't find a way to save it, because all the fantasy I had ever read was based on some folklore or other, from a time when people did believe this stuff. Without kings, without bloodlines, without magic tribes, what's left?

Science fiction can leave these problems behind, because it takes zero workarounds to imagine that space would be diverse, I'm not borrowing anything specific from the past, disproven theories can naturally be left behind in favor of fresh science. But in retrospect I didn't really have to ditch fantasy, I've since seen it done very well. You just have to ditch Tolkien. You can't write a Tolkien knockoff without either copying over the racism or seriously diverging from the way he built his world.

I think it's possible to have compassion for Tolkien as a guy who wanted a national myth and wanted to write about groups of people the way people in the past did, and also thought he could be kind in real life to real people. But I think he was wrong about that. I think these myths do drive a lot of awful, if not in his own actions, certainly in the actions of people inspired by him.

How to engage with Middle-earth without adopting that myth is beyond me. I do think it can be done, there are certainly people that do. But like OP says, it's got to go far beyond throwing a few Black elves in there.

[crabussy]

thinking about diatoms again

[crabussy]

microscopic living stars made of glass that eat the sun. and they're all around us. in every body of water. glass sun-eating stars.

[crabussy]

I like them a lot. they produce up to half of all earth's oxygen. the air you breathe is thanks to sun-eating stars made of glass. and that's pretty cool.

[crabussy]

and you know. like oblongs and triangles and some other bullshit

[a-glittering-universe]

thank you op, this post gave me such reality whiplash that I had to go read the wikipedia for diatoms and now I have Learned Things :D

[crabussy]

hooray!!! let’s all Learn Things every day [:

[vehder]

i miss u so much (pre ai internet)

[spiderace]

Remember when you could put a sentence from a movie into Google and get the correct title immediately instead of the title of every movie containing a word in the sentence from specifically the last 5 years?

[jennelikejennay]

Remember when you could put in a made up word that you made up yourself and find the place on the internet that you put it, instead of thousands of links that do not contain the word at all, with a helpful little note that you can actually search for the thing you searched for by putting it in quotes?

Remember when you could put in a line of poetry and get the poem? You wouldn't even have to put "poem." Now you add "poem" and it tries to write you a fresh poem using some but not all of those words 😭

[ymutate]

Helen Whitaker, England

" Sycamore Seed "

Glass , copper and brass

[respectissexy]

Having experienced a lot of it in my 20s, I think some of the worst, pettiest, most straight up this-is-just-bullying-you're-passing-off-as-praxis incidences of Queer Infighting endemic to young people can be best understood as attempts to exercise power by people with very little power.

Like you're 22, you're queer, you've just become a Marxist, the scope of World Suck is overwhelming and you have $30 in your bank account. What can you do to feel like you have any power? Well, you can try to get your frenemy cancelled for cosplaying a character from a problematic show. You can write a public callout post over someone's obviously friendly use of a slur you don't think they technically have the right to reclaim. Doing this stuff can make you feel like you have power and your actions have an impact. Unfortunately the impact in question is a negative impact on other marginalized people. But that often takes some maturity and self-reflection to notice.

[drtanner]

I'm reminded of this post from 2017. To paraphrase, OP took part in community service via their university and part of that was cleaning the bathrooms at the local homeless community centre, which would frequently get trashed, not because the homeless people using them disrespected the work of the people cleaning them but because they had so little control over other things that happened in their lives, and the bathroom was something they could affect.

This, too, is a trashed bathroom; young queer people living through hell and having precious little control over their circumstances or the world in which they exist can affect something by using the language of social justice as a cudgel on their would-be allies, as well as getting a brief feeling of power over someone else by doing it.

It's not worth it. Don't trash your community bathrooms.

[justalittlespore]

Perhaps important to note here is that this is not necessarily something people do consciously. I've seen people say "well I would never do that," assuming that because they would never intentionally hurt someone to make themselves feel powerful, they are immune to it.

This sort of thing tends to happen subconsciously. You don't say to yourself, "I'm feeling powerless and therefore I will lash out at the one thing I can control." You just feel angry and frustrated in ways you can't necessarily describe and then for no apparent reason you see someone do something that can be construed as problematic if you squint at it sideways and have an overwhelming impulse to DO SOMETHING about it. You don't know where that impulse comes from, you just know that giving in to it feels good. It feels righteous. You are doing the right thing and that's why it feels good. Right?

That's why it's so easy to fall into this sort of behavior. It doesn't feel like you're trying to regain a sense of control over your own life. It feels like you are doing something righteous and justified and correct, and anyone who says otherwise is probably a bad person. And the more often this happens, the more times you call someone out over some bullshit, the more righteous it feels! And the more "Bad People" start crawling out of the woodwork to attack you (defending the people you've attacked and trying to explain why you're mistaken), the more targets you have.

In the end it leads to increasing isolation. You wind up being pulled into hateful groups like terfs who see you as an easy target. They reassure you that yes, you are doing the right thing, those people are bad. We understand and support you! Join us!

Eventually, the only way you know to feel good is to attack others, but in your mind, it feels good because you're doing good, you're making the world better, you're protecting someone or something. You're fighting against the Bad Guys.

And all the while you're cutting yourself off from your own community. You're not healing, you're not regaining control over your life, you're not making the world a better place. You're just hurting the people who are on your side.

It's not easy to avoid doing this. You can't just tell yourself "I'm a good person who would never harm my own community." That's not enough. You have to be vigilant. You have to ask yourself, whenever you feel an impulse to lash out at someone, whenever you feel a sense of Justice rising up in you that is directed at another marginalized person or group, whenever you feel yourself thinking that someone isn't being queer the Right Way, whenever you find yourself worrying about who is the Most Oppressed... You have to question it. Every time. It is HARD to do this. It is HARD to admit that you have the capacity to do harm even though you don't intend to. But you have to. For your sake, and for the sake of your whole community.

[respectissexy]

Thank you so much for this addition, @justalittlespore.

You would not believe how many people have reblogged this post with tags that basically say "ummmm sounds like the people who do this are Bad People and you should be a Good Person by not doing this. I'm a Good Person and would never do this."

That type of thinking makes you VERY AT RISK of doing this!!!

[jennelikejennay]

When I see people say "abolish copyright, it only serves big corporations," I imagine saying, "The whole system of employment only serves big corporations....so abolish wages. People appreciate service workers and will tip them even if they don't have to."

Like. Clearly you have not tried to pay the bills on book sales.

We definitely need to reform the copyright system so they actually protect small creators instead of Disney, but a state of total anarchy has never yet been demonstrated to protect the vulnerable. In the absence of regulation, the strong oppress the weak. Bad regulation only helps them oppress the weak more, but no regulation is not the answer.

How to do that is a complicated question. I have some ideas. But I feel like once the end goal is protecting the individual who does the creative work, it's not that hard to brainstorm better solutions.

[jennelikejennay]

Stealing from the tags because you said it so perfectly!! This is true in so many areas.

[jennelikejennay]

Incidentally this is also true about police.

Does the current police system we have oppress the vulnerable and protect the powerful? Yes. Is it so corrupt that it should be dismantled completely before being built again from the bottom up? Probably!

But you do in fact need someone to call when your abusive boyfriend is hurting you, your boss won't pay you, or your car gets stolen and you can't get to work. The current set of people is very little good at any of these jobs but you do need somebody to do them!

That's why I get annoyed when people say "ACAB" about fictional cops in fantasy worlds. You're telling me you can't even imagine an organization you could call that would be a force for good rather than evil?

Like I know it feels like a stretch but we've got to imagine it before we can make it. What would it look like? How would we keep it accountable?

[femboycatofmystery]

Something else that feels "weird" about Starfleet Academy, which I would simultaneously describe as the weirdest live-action Star Trek series to date, but also in a strange way the most grounded, is that unlike previous iterations of Star Trek, it is set much farther in the future, and this has a big impact on the vibes.

It's also, I suspect, one of the sources of criticism because Star Trek has historically indulged our sense of multiculturalist triumphalism, telling us that once we really get rid of these bad systems we're going to do so, so well forever, and in order for Academy to have any story at all, that can't have happened.

So the Burn happened.

And the Federation collapsed. And a generation of galactic citizenry grew up in a world where hope was in short supply, and not just because dilithium was too. Cultures regressed. Disasters went unanswered. People suffered. People lost their way.

Star Trek: Academy is about rolling up your sleeves and putting it all back together, and you know the real reason I think this is awesome?

Because people are starting to read the lore as if we weren't going to make it without the Vulcans.

Like any time I see someone talk about the human first contact lore of the Star Trek timeline, they almost feel obligated to point out that it doesn't look likely that we're going to get this hand up from the space elves, that our future looks more like Zefram Cochrane's present than the future he helped create.

So, potentially controversial opinion here, but about the best thing Star Trek could do right now is give us all a good kick in the ass, in the sense that Academy is set in a time a lot like ours, actually. One where if you're a certain age you remember when it felt like we were ALMOST THERE in terms of world peace and everything but it fell to pieces, and if you're a young person, you look at people with those memories and think "clearly you have nothing to teach me, you're from the good world".

And if you're older, Starfleet Academy grabs you by the shoulders and says "look you sad tired hippie, I know the last decade has made you mostly give up, but there's a new generation growing up and asking 'what could I do with my one precious life' out there and if you're not telling them what we care about, why we care about it, and how to rebuild it, then nobody else will!"

And if you're younger, Starfleet Academy (successfully, I hope, I'm in the first category so it's not mine to call it) sits down and almost whispers, "look, I know the older generations are in many ways responsible for all the crap you have to put up with... but not all of them were doing that on purpose. Most of them were trying their damndest NOT to let happen, and it did anyway. But the thing is, they DO remember how a lot of things work you've never even see happen, and if you can learn about them, you can do better than they did. And I'm not kidding about doing better. Not 'as good', better."

Hopefully, a lot better.

[remnantglow]

saw someone promote a book with a collage of out of context negative reviews recently, and i thought it'd be fun to do for some of the older lgbt sci-fi books i've read

[unamccormack]

Holy cow this is genius.

I briefly thought of doing this with some of my reviews then I thought actually Una there are more direct ways of punching yourself repeatedly in the face so go and eat your Calippo instead.

[jennelikejennay]

I wouldn't do it for myself but man now I want to read all four of these books!!

[moonlitdriver]

‘I asked chat gpt-’ well I asked Una McCormack and she managed to make it about Garak but I didn’t really mind

[unamccormack]

Commit to the bit, I say.

[tim-official]

neopronouns are all well and good but as long as we're adding words to the english language there's much cooler things we could add too. lets add inclusive and exclusive "we." a variant of "we" that distinguishes between "we (including listener)" and "we (including the speaker but not the listener)". other languages have this. Let's add the obviative case to our third-person pronouns so that we can distinguish between two people of the same gender - a him-[salient] and a him-[less salient]. this would make it much easier to write sex scenes where two people use the same pronouns. why aren't our proud pronoun warriors working on this

[alternatefuturesao3]

In ASL you can (at least theoretically) have an infinite number of third person referents in a given conversation, massive L for spoken English.

[cookiemom6067]

Chapter 42 of "Silent Star" by @jennelikejennay is up!

Sarek was at the computer, typing. Without pausing or looking up, he said, “If you are here to inform me about the altercation with the Andorians, I have already been briefed. The Andorians are choosing not to take offense.”

“No. I am here with a p…pro…an idea,” said Spock.

Sarek looked up from his computer. “Can you submit it as a written proposal? I am quite busy.”

“No,” said Spock, shocking himself

Chapter 42 of "Silent Star" by Moreta1848 on AO3

[tsunflowers]

reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way

[ariaste]

#okay but now what is the optimal way to be a good boss in this situation i genuinely wanna know#its easy to guess what makes a bad boss or a mid boss. but what is a good boss#specifically in such a highly structured hierarchal situation (via @rainbowroach)

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

(for more discussions of the ethics of fealty and what it means to be a good boss when you are an exquisitely beautiful twink of a prince with a hot beefy bodyguard.... [fingerguns] read A Taste of Gold and Iron)

[bethanydelleman]

A lot of people find Emma Woodhouse "condescending" towards the poor in Emma, and I'm like, "No, that's literally her being a good member of the gentry. That's how she's supposed to act!"

[specialagentartemis]

my petty gripe about anachronism in historical/fantasy/spec-fic worlds is attraction language.

We’ve all heard the “should you use modern queer labels or not” argument but honestly even when people go “true, they wouldn’t use the labels ‘aromantic’ or ‘asexual,’” so often the characters describe their experiences as “I never felt romantic attraction” or “I don’t feel attracted to anyone” in ways that makes me go. You are stilllllll thinking about this in an extraordinarily modern online way. That 19th century steampunk detective man will NOT be angsting about having never felt romantic attraction, he would be angsting about being unable to feel moved by the beauty or charm of a woman, or something. And I do think that “attractiveness” language is different from the identity-level idea of experiencing attraction—Sherlock Holmes does not talk about not experiencing attraction, but when Watson says “What a very attractive woman!” Holmes responds “Is she? I did not observe.” (And then Watson calls him an inhuman automaton and calculating-machine and Holmes calls Watson’s judgement biased). Never swayed by the attractiveness of a man or woman, never desirous of marriage, never charmed by the delights of love, all of these feel like some of the variety of ways that someone in this milieu might describe an ace- or aro-spectrum identity more than “never felt attraction” does. Mostly because, like the terms for aromantic and asexual themselves, nailing down an exclusively attraction-based definition of a-spec identities is a relatively new and extremely post-AVEN thing. And yet in fiction everybody knows to articulate their experience as feeling sexual/romantic attraction. And I always want to go nooo how would THIS character think about it?? Not how you think this character SHOULD think about it, how would THIS person in THIS context articulate their feelings?

[jennelikejennay]

This is definitely a thing I think about a lot. Some people prefer modern queer thinking in their non-contemporary stories, but personally I like to think about how queer people have actually lived in different parts of space and time, or different ways they could live in a different world. So I always want their thinking to be period-typical: the way real queer people of the time (who existed!!) really lived.

This is especially true with nonbinary characters. Nonbinary people have always existed, but the way we think about nonbinary identities today is younger than I am. So I get excited when I see nonbinary characters of history who crossdress, or identify as one thing in one setting and another in a different one, or who flout the gender rules of their own time in a way that might not make sense today. They don't have to use they/them and describe themselves as "neither a man nor a woman" to be nonbinary.

I'm currently reading a book with a eunuch MC who uses he/him and sometimes wears women's clothes and participates in both male and female rituals. And what I love about it is, this is genuinely a way I can imagine a person actually living in the classical world. Authentically nonbinary, but in a way that has nothing to do with specifically modern culture.

[punkrockopossum]

scans of an article about Spock from a 1967 TV guide (april 29-may 5), written by Isaac Asimov

psst i apologize for bad scan quality, i am no professional nor am i even competent lol

[jennelikejennay]

A thought that has clearly never occurred to Isaac Asimov even a little bit: women are different and like different things 🤣

However the article is hilarious. You can see the incredible effort he puts into being stupid in every line.