
First, some housekeeping notes.
We are still running a few days behind schedule—our goal is to get the issue into your hands by the end of the month on the cover. We missed that goal substantially with the February issue and less substantially with this, the March issue. We are working on harnessing the ever-advancing power of technology to streamline our production process and eliminate points at which we can get hung up. That said, we’re also always looking for new staff to help us portage our longboats of words across the rocky bars of reality; if you’re interested in pitching in, drop me a line, especially if you can attend the monthly Work Weekends in Westchester County, New York.
We are freshly back from the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, spending most of a week hanging out with hundreds of wonderful people and submerging ourselves in discussion of science fiction, fantasy, the future, the past, and everything between, among, within, and without. (The editorial “we” in that last sentence encompasses David, Jen, Kevin and his family, and dozens of former and current contributors to this humble magazine. Just in case you were wondering.) We cannot recommend it highly enough.
I repeat this frequently, but not frequently enough: If you are a member of the International Association on the Fantastic (IAFA) or the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA), you qualify for an automatic 33% discount on subscriptions or back issues through Weightless Books. Please contact me for your coupon code.
Anyway, at the ICFA, I participated in a panel on themes of empire, colonialism, and post-colonialism in comic books. Of course because we’re American science fiction and fantasy comics readers, we talked about superheroes a lot though not exclusively. One very perceptive question from the audience addressed the question of whether superhero stories are “inherently conservative.” My first inclination was to answer that they are, because most superhero stories are, at their root, stories of crimefighters. Leaving aside superhero stories which are deliberately anti-conservative (e.g., Warren Ellis and John Cassady’s Planetary), everyone knows that the mystery/detective/police genre is a conservative one, right? If one were to map out the fundamental mystery story structure (à la John Clute’s models of the science fiction and fantasy story backbones), it would look something like violation → investigation → explanation → restoration. But of course there is a vast world of possibility in that final word and a great deal of deception as well.
An example: I unreservedly love the long-running police procedural CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which is a consistent celebration of the triumph of the intellect to a degree that would fit perfectly into John W. Campbell’s Astounding. Its stories generally match the model above, but periodically it serves up an episode like “The Fallen” (Season 14, episode 19; broadcast April 2, 2014 in the US). This episode involves a mass shooting in the Las Vegas police station by a disturbed teenaged boy, which leads to a prolonged hostage situation in which a civilian slowly bleeds out from a bullet wound in his abdomen. A mixture of hard science (the forensic miracleworking which is the true star of the show) and psychological insight reveal a hidden hand behind the rampage: while the shooter was acting out his anger over police brutality, another person encouraged him and aimed him at their own targets.
At episode’s end, the mastermind is exposed but explicitly refuses to give the investigators the satisfaction of an explanation. The station is littered with blood and bullets and the haze of the unanswerable. Nothing can heal the dead; nothing can restore the status quo. The violation stands.
All of that is a very roundabout way to say that, to the degree that the mystery is a “conservative” genre, its conservativism depends on accepting that the restoration provided by the explanation somehow weighs as heavily in the pans of Justice as the corpses that set the investigation under way. And we know in our hearts that no answer can ever do that, but we pretend not to notice so that we can achieve a satisfactory ending.
—Kevin J. Maroney and the editors
Comments