Norm Geras kindly asked me to write a Writer’s Choice piece for normblog. I chose, as you may have already gathered, to wax rapturously about Shaun Tan’s The Arrival.

Thanks to boingboing for linking to these ‘Nerd Merit Badges’ for Science Scouts. I can’t help envying those who actually qualified for the “I actually grew up AND became a paleontologist who studies dinosaurs” badge – or even the “rock licker” badge.

Thanks to Cheryl Morgan for liveblogging the awards ceremony at Conjecture and to Dave Cake for emailing the results in a handy CTRL-C-able format. Ain’t technology wunnerful?

A. Bertram Chandler Award
Rosaleen Love

William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism and Review
Kim Wilkins, “Popular genres and the Australian literary community: the case of fantasy fiction” in the Journal of Australian Studies

Best New Talent
Felicity Dowker

Best Professional Achievement
Angela Challis, for Black, the Australian Dark Culture Magazine

Best Fan Production
ASif!, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Gene Melzack

Best Fan Artist
Cat Sparks for Scary Food Cookbook

Best Fan Writer
Rob Hood, for Undead Backbrain

Best Professional Artwork
Shaun Tan, for Tales from Outer Suburbia

Best Collected Work
Dreaming Again, edited by Jack Dann

Best Short Story
Tie between Margo Lanagan “The Goosle” and Dirk Flinthart “This is not my story” (ASIM #37)

Best Novella/Novelette
“Painlessness” by Kirstyn McDermott

Best Novel
“Tender Morsels” by Margo Lanagan

Peter McNamara Award
Sean Williams

Congratulations all!

Purchased by Peter, a friend of the Squid, in a Wollongong food market.

Took the family to the school production of West Side Story on Saturday. Seriously, seriously well done. If we had paid to see this production on the theatre circuit in Melbourne, we would have gone home happy. Friends had tried to prepare their young children for the complexities of the story by renting the 1961 movie but found it difficult to watch; their suspension of disbelief kept getting crushed between the faithful rendition of New York and the bizarre antics of hoodlum gangs singing and dancing their stories. But, they told us during the intermission, on stage it all seemed perfectly natural.

This wilful cognitive dissonance was parodied in one of SNL’s greatest skits. Norm Macdonald is the leader of the Cobras; Robert Downey Jr and Will Ferrell play gang members.

Downey and Ferrell: What?

Norm: How’d you come up with a song so fast?

Downey: I don’t know, it just- just came to me. What do I-

Norm: Just came to you? What- what, it was perfect. It was like you rehearsed it, or something.

Downey: Aww… thank you.

Norm: Ok look, here’s what we’re gonna do. You go over to-

Ferrell: Hey, hey, hey, hey…

Norm: What?

Ferrell: Did you really like it?

Norm: What?

Ferrell: The song.

Norm: Did I really like it? Yeah yeah, I liked it. Hey- hey, I like another song too. You know- you know this one, it’s called, ah, “While you were singing, I got stabbed in the head by a Puerto Rican!”

So why did West Side Story work better on stage than on a TV screen? I’m sure the collusion of the audience is part of the answer. In a large group, we tend to be swept along by the prevailing mood. That’s why TV comedies add laugh tracks to simulate the experience of watching in a group. It really only works for comedy. They don’t add weep tracks to tragedies (although some scores come close).

But to me, the most interesting question is, why do we care about these characters? We don’t know them. We don’t share their environment or their concerns. (Has anyone reading this been a street hood trying to face off a rival gang or a Puerto Rican immigrant girl in love with her brother’s killer?) More than that: we know these characters are fictitious. They never existed. So why do we care?

I think the answer lies in our neurobiology, which itself lies at the end of a long chain of evolution as social primates. But this still doesn’t answer why some stories can make us care about fictitious characters breaking into ridiculous dances as they fight to the death (as in West Side Story) while other stories utterly fail to engage us, even if they are (intended to be) realistic about emotionally powerful topics (as in Crash or Taken).

Some observations on the new Star Trek movie:

• It’s fun. Lots of flashing lights and ’splosions.
• It will give Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy a year’s worth of material. Did you know that supernovas can get cranky and change their expansion rate after they blow?
• This is, without a doubt, the mother of all reboots. 
• More bad astronomy: Did you know that black holes have a much greater mass than the combined mass of the things that go into them?
• The actors nailed their roles. All of them. Except maybe Simon Pegg, who nails a different Scotty to the original character…and is great anyway.
• Iowa has its own grand canyon (well, really big canyon). I didn’t know that, but it’s true.
• The characterisation is excellent. Kirk, Spock, and Bones have been tweaked to give them a little more substance but not too much to undermine their essential natures.
• The Romulan villain Nero is a man with a plan. An angry, angry man with a stupid, stupid plan.
• The Romulan ship design concept came straight out of Babylon 5’s shadow ships.
• Apparently you can’t drop black holes onto planets directly due to the crust’s magical anti-black hole properties; you have to drill a hole through the crust and drop the black hole down the shaft.
• What happened to the women? The only one with anything approaching a role is Uhura, and although she’s got a lot more spark than the original TV character, she does nothing to advance the story at all. They could have replaced her with a talking watermelon and the plot would have been exactly the same. There were plenty of new characters introduced. Why couldn’t any of them be women? And where did Kirk’s mother disappear to after the opening sequence?
• And as for the miniskirt uniforms…it’s not the 60s any more.
• Speaking of women, it seems that Winona Ryder has made the Hollywood transition from girlfriend to mother in record time. Ryder is 37. In this fictional universe she must have popped out Spock when she was like 12 or so.
• Which means, I guess, that Spock’s father’s name should have been Humbert.
• It’s a J. J. Abrams show, so it has to have a torture scene. Like most torture scenes, this one only demonstrates the stupidity of torture as a means of getting useful information. In the future, cutting-edge cryptography will revert to static passphrases — a system that hasn’t been useful since the fall of Constantinople.
• James T. Kirk was born in the shortest labour in movie history.
• Standing orders for commanding officers in Star Fleet apparently call for pregnant wives to accompany their husbands on tours of duty. When there is a need for risky personal combat, the most senior ranking officers must undertake the mission. No wonder Kirk gets promoted so quickly.
• Like the original Star Trek, it has equal parts Great and Woeful. Unlike the original Star Trek, it really doesn’t have any interest in exploring ideas. It’s just a big, glorious spectacle.

This list of recommendations is neither exhaustive nor unbiased. Its purpose is not to sway votes but to share our enthusiasm for works and artists who impressed Talking Squid contributors and colleagues in 2008. This is not the only list. Shane Jiraiya Cummings of Smoke and Mirrors has posted his own recommendations for the professional categories, the fan categories, and the special categories, then added an update. Even if you don’t plan to nominate for the Ditmars (closes Monday, by the way) or have no interest in the Ditmars at all, you can treat this as Talking Squid’s recommended Australian science fiction, fantasy, and horror for the year.

NOVEL

The Changeling, Sean Williams
Daughters of Moab, Kim Westwood
Earth Ascendant, Sean Williams
Economy of Light, Jack Dann
Finnikin of the Rock, Melina Marchetta
How To Ditch Your Fairy, Justine Larbalestier
Incandescence, Greg Egan
Lamplighter: Monster Blood Tattoo Book Two, David Cornish
The Seance, John Harwood
Tender Morsels, Margo Lanagan
Two Pearls of Wisdom, Alison Goodman

NOVELLA / SHORT STORY

“An Honest Day’s Work”, Margo Lanagan
“Ass-Hat Magic Spider”, Scott Westerfeld
“As We Know It”, Lyn Battersby
“Beyond the Sea Gates of the Scholar Pirates of Sarskoe”, Garth Nix
“Creeping in Reptile Flesh”, Robert Hood
“Crystal Nights”, Greg Egan
“Delivery”, Trent Jamieson
“Down to the Silver Spirits”, Kaaron Warren
“Dresses, Three”, Angela Slatter
“Ghost Jail”, Kaaron Warren
“The Goosle”, Margo Lanagan
“Infestation”, Garth Nix
“Lost Continent”, Greg Egan
“Machine Maid”, Margo Lanagan
“The Miner’s Tale”, Lara E. Goodin
“Night of the Firstlings”, Margo Lanagan
“Oh, Russia”, Simon Brown
“Painlessness”, Kirstyn McDermott
“Pale Dark Soldier”, Deb Biancotti
“Sammarynda Deep”, Cat Sparks
“Skinsongs”, Martin Livings
“This Is My Blood”, Chris Lynch and Ben Francisco
“Truth Window: A Tale of the Bedlam Rose”, Terry Dowling
“Watertight Lies”, Deb Biancotti

COLLECTED WORK

2012, ed. Alisa Krasnostein and Ben Payne
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume 2, ed. Jonathan Strahan
Canterbury 2100, ed. Dirk Flinthart
Creeping in Reptile Flesh, Robert Hood
Dark Integers and Other Stories, Greg Egan
Dreaming Again, ed. Jack Dann
Eclipse 2: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, ed. Jonathan Strahan
Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams, ed. Russell B. Farr
Midnight Echo, ed. Kirstyn McDermott and Ian Mond
The New Space Opera, ed. Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan
The Starry Rift: Tales of New Tomorrows, ed. Jonathan Strahan 
Tales of Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan
The Year’s Best Australian SF & Fantasy, vol. 4, ed. Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt

ATHELING

“Bad Film Diaries – Sometimes the Brand Burns: Tim Burton and the Planet of the Apes”, Grant Watson
“Popular genres and the Australian literary community: the case of fantasy fiction”, Kim Wilkins 
Science Fiction entry in Books and Beyond: The Greenwood Encyclopedia of New American Reading, Russell Blackford
“Three Views of Mount Solaris”, Chris Lawson

BEST ARTWORK

COSMOS: “A Place To Call Home”, Jamie Tuffrey
Creeping in Reptile Flesh cover, Cat Sparks
Dragonscarpe cover, Michael Dutkiewicz
Groom Lake #1, Ben Templesmith
COSMOS: “The Noise Machine”, Justin Randall
Tales of Outer Suburbia, Shaun Tan
Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse #3, Ben Templesmith

BEST FAN PUBLICATION IN ANY MEDIUM

The Scary Food Cookbook, a compendium of gastronomic atrocity, ed. Cat Sparks
Undead Backbrain, Rob Hood
 
BEST FAN WRITER

Rob Hood
Robin Pen

BEST ACHIEVEMENT

Angela Challis for Brimstone Press and for Black: Australian Dark Culture Magazine
Robin Pen for Planet Blog
Wilson da Silva, Alan Finkel, Kylie Ahern and Damien Broderick for COSMOS Magazine

An opinion piece in City Journal, “Heirs to Fortuyn” by Bruce Bawer shows just how badly the art of editorial has fallen. Bawer talks about the swing towards conservatism in Europe and the reasons behind it, but he makes such a mess of things that it’s hard to believe anything he says without triple-checking first. He’s particularly fond of non-sequiturs.

For much of the American left, Western Europe was nothing less than an abstract symbol of progressive utopia…This rosy view was never accurate, of course…Timbro, a Swedish think tank, found in 2004 that Sweden was poorer than all but five U.S. states and Denmark poorer than all but nine. But in recent years, something has happened to complicate the left’s fanciful picture even further: Western European voters’ widespread reaction against social democracy.

Well it didn’t take a Swedish think tank to work out that Sweden and Denmark have less wealth than most US states. The US has been the wealthiest nation on the planet for more than a century. It is also much larger than Sweden or Denmark. But, you know, on the ladder of GDP per capita, Sweden is 9th in the world and Denmark is 5th so they’re hardly economic failures. But what makes this a non-sequitur is that there never was a logical link between the American Left’s view of Europe and the wealth of America. The American Left, even accepting for the sake of argument that it represents a monolith of opinion, never claimed that Western Europe was superior to America on the basis of wealth.

My favourite non-sequitur, though, is this:

…[C]onservative columnist Peter Hitchens recently charged that nowadays “you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.” That elite, alas—as vividly demonstrated last year by the archbishop of Canterbury’s speech contemplating the legitimacy of Shariah in parts of Britain—is bent on appeasing fundamentalist Islam.

Mr Bawer may not have noticed but the Archbishop of Canterbury is not part of the “media elite.” What’s more, the so-called “Centre-left media elite” was savagely critical of Archbishop Williams’s speech. The Independent called a parallel legal system “intolerable” and the Guardian thought Williams displayed hopeless “naïveté.”

This week Archbishop George Pell joined the Vatican’s war against truth with an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald claiming that condoms were not effective in preventing HIV and other sexually transmitted disease. Actually, he went two steps further than that:

…[A]ll of us who want to help prevent and reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS need to respect the evidence about what helps and what doesn’t. And the evidence is that it’s not condoms which make the crucial difference, but the choices people make about how they use the gift of sexuality.

Pell is not merely arguing against condom use based on Catholic theology, he claiming that the scientific evidence is on his side. Furthermore:

…[G]overnments and non-Catholic aid agencies can and will continue to hand out condoms in HIV/AIDS programs, although the evidence suggests they may on balance be exacerbating the problem.

So Pell is claiming that the scientific evidence says that condom promotion makes people behave more recklessly and may result in increased HIV rates.

Pell has every right to express an opinion on the morality of using condoms, but he does not have the right to misrepresent the scientific evidence. So here are some responses to Pell’s “evidence.”

What Pell says about behaviour modification: “In fact, the studies confirm that behaviour modification is possible and is occurring. In Cameroon the percentage of young people having sex before the age of 15 has gone down from 35 per cent to 14 per cent, United Nations AIDS said last year. Uganda has had a 70 per cent decline in HIV prevalence since the early 1990s, linked to a 60 per cent reduction in casual sex, says a 2004 report in Science. Similar evidence exists in Africa, from Ethiopia to Malawi.”

What the evidence says: In Uganda and in Malawi and several other African countries, the HIV prevention programs were based on an ABC strategy, that is, A for Abstinence, B for Be Faithful, and C for Condoms. As AVERT, an international HIV care charity, says: “What has been particularly important in Uganda has been the combination of messages and approaches that have been used, including the widespread promotion and distribution of condoms.” Pell is quoting the success of programs promoting condoms as evidence that condom use doesn’t make any difference.

 

ABC roadsign in Botswana

 

 

What Pell says about the effectiveness of condoms: “Earlier this year, the British Medical Journal reported: ‘In numerous large studies, concerted efforts to promote use of condoms has consistently failed to control rates of sexually transmitted infection’, even in Canada, Sweden and Switzerland.”

What the evidence says: The best evidence we have is a 2001 Cochrane Review of 4,706 research papers which concluded, “consistent use of condoms results in 80% reduction in HIV incidence” over an effective lifetime in heterosexual couples where one partner is HIV positive and the other is not. One wonders how, given this overwhelming evidence, Pell can find a report claiming the opposite. Well, it turns out that the “report” is not actually a report in the scientific sense of the word. It was an opinion piece by a Dr Stephen J Genuis. This opinion piece was very short on evidence. In fact, the sentence that Pell quoted approvingly is based on a single reference, and that reference turns out to be…another opinion piece by Dr Stephen J Genuis published back in 1994. And some of his other references are completely skewed. For instance, Genuis quotes a 2001 JAMA paper in support of the claim, “Only a minority of people engaging in risky sexual behaviour use condoms consistently.” Unfortunately for Genuis’s attempt to discredit condoms, the actual key finding of this paper is that “[c]ondom use offers significant protection against HSV-2 [herpes] infection in susceptible women.” How significant? Even though usage wasn’t perfectly consistent, condoms plus education reduced the rate of infection from 8.5 to 0.9 per 100 person-years.

What’s more, Genuis’s piece appeared in the same issue of the BMJ as an opposing opinion piece by Markus Steiner and Willard Cates and a quick look is all it takes to see that the references from Steiner and Cates are far more impressive (and accurately represented) than those drawn on by Genuis. Pell did not, of course, mention this contrary opinion. Pell’s idea of having the evidence behind him is to quote one unreliable essayist’s opinion as referenced by an earlier version of that essayist’s opinion and to pretend there are no countervailing arguments.

What Pell says about about condoms and risky sexual behaviour: “Condoms give users an exaggerated sense of safety, so that they sometimes engage in ‘risk compensation’. In one Ugandan study, gains in condom use seem to have been offset by increases in the number of sex partners.”

What the evidence says: One unnamed Ugandan study of unknown design and quality is not a very impressive counter to the many, many studies that show increased condom use is associated with reductions in high-risk sexual behaviour. I’m not going to list them all. (Pell can do his own literature search if he wants to claim the scientific high ground.) Here’s one recent study conducted by the CDC: “The decreased prevalence of HIV-related sexual risk behaviors has been accompanied by an increase in condom use among US high school students, according to a CDC analysis of data from 8 national Youth Risk Behavior surveys conducted from 1991 to 2005. These trends correspond with a simultaneous decrease in gonorrhea, pregnancy, and birth rates among adolescents.” And here’s another, a 2006 analysis of 174 studies of 116,735 participants that tested “whether condom-related interventions inadvertently undermine sexual health promotion efforts by increasing the frequency of sexual behavior.” And guess what? “HIV-risk reduction interventions do not increase the overall frequency of sexual activity. To the contrary, for some particularly at risk sub-groups, interventions reduce the frequency of sexual events and partners, especially when interventions include components recommended by behavioral science theory.”

What Pell says about abstinence-only prevention programs: “At the heart of Marr’s position is a fundamental misconception, which he states as follows: ‘And we know in our hearts – and every reputable study confirms – that the church’s call for abstinence is useless.’…In fact, the studies confirm that behaviour modification is possible…”

What the evidence says: Note that Pell misstates Marr’s argument. Marr says that abstinence programs don’t work; Pell says that behaviour modification programs do so work. But behaviour modification programs are not the same as abstinence programs and many, as we have already shown, promote condom use as one of the modifiable behaviours. As for abstinence-only programs, Marr is absolutely right. The best evidence we have is a 2007 Cochrane Review of over 20,000 reports and 326 published papers. Their conclusion? “Evidence does not indicate that abstinence-only interventions effectively decrease or exacerbate HIV risk among participants in high-income countries; trials suggest that the programs are ineffective, but generalizability may be limited to US youth.”

What Pell says about his own self-awareness: “Catholic teaching is opposed to adultery, fornication and homosexual intercourse, even with condoms, not because it denies condoms offer health protection, but because traditional Christian moral teaching believes all extra-marital intercourse contradicts the proper meaning of love and sexuality.”

What the evidence says: How is it, Mr Pell, that you can say your teaching does not deny the health benefits of condoms in the middle of an opinion piece denying that condoms offer health benefits?

What Pell forgot to say about reporting evidence: Exodus 20:16

I’ve defended Charles Darwin’s metaphorical Tree of Life previously; now I shall celebrate his vision by showing how it developed over time and why it is still relevant today.

Darwin’s first inkling (1837)

Charles Darwin had been back less than a year from his tour on the HMS Beagle and he had been thinking furiously about the paradoxical diversity and commonality of life when he had a flash of insight. He reached for his “B” notebook and scribbled this sketch showing species branching and sub-branching from each other. This is one of the most famous images in science and a popular tattoo among scientists. It does not, however, look a great deal like a tree; it looks like a leftover grape stalk. Darwin does not use the word “tree” or “branch” in his notebook; instead he refers to “gradation” and “greater distinction.” What is most important about this sketch is often edited out of images and tattoos. The large letters at the very top read, “I think”: simultaneously a recognition of his own uncertainty and an expression of his way of working through problems. Darwin was 28 years old.

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