Screwing Ourselves to Fly Over Others - The Lagrange Point Vol. I, Iss. 18

Welcome to issue #18 of The Lagrange Point! Big welcome to the latest subscribers. If you need a primer on what this e-newsletter is, check it out here:

Thank you for signing on, and please, continue to spread the word to others!

I went back-and-forth whether to send this out on a public holiday, and I ultimately landed on "yes," mainly because I posted on my Instagram and FB that it would, but also because after I started writing out my thoughts, I realized I had enough to say to cover two posts.

That's right, I've pulled a Hollywood and split the conclusion into a two-parter. I am The Hunger Games: Mockingjay. I am The Deathly Hallows. Or worse, I am the fucking Hobbit films.

At any rate, I hope you'll stick with me as I muddle through processing this latest trauma of our Torment Nexus-powered world. Let's get to it.

In This Issue

Distant Early Warnings

• New books, and a shoutout for a great fundraising event!

Crafter's Corner

• The Vic Viper from Gradius (V)

Rantables

• Screwing Ourselves to Fly Over Others — Trump's re-election and young men

We've got some lovely new releases in SF&F literature, and some nifty geek news to boot. Check it out!

This weekend saw the launch of Zegaajimo, a collection of Indigenous horror fiction from Kegedonce Press. Eleven writers from across Turtle Island are featured in this anthology, edited by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, a member of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation on the Saugeen Peninsula in Ontario and a professor at the University of Toronto, and Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler, the two-spirit, Anishnaabe and Jewish author of Ghost Lake and Wrist. Zegaajimo is available now for delivery!

Over in the wonderful world of board games, Quebec-based Zeronimo Games, the fledgling company of designer Alain Matte, has funded its Kickstarter for Animalcatraz, a competitive battle game for 2 to 8 players. Matte's background as an illustrator shines in the stellar artwork for this game, which features anthropomorphized animal characters fighting for prison dominance. The Kickstarter is open til Nov. 21!

Two books are dropping TOMORROW in Canada's fantasy scene. The first comes to us from author J.M. Frey, who previously wrote the Bookie-nominated Triptych. Now, she's back with Time and Tide, a time travel and romance novel where a modern woman is thrown back to Regency England, and falls for a woman she knows will become a famous author. That comes to us from Penguin Random House!

The other fantasy novel launching tomorrow is A Wild and Ruined Song, the fourth book in Ashley Shuttleworth's young adult series, the Hollow Star Saga. I don't know much about the series, but it features queer and trans characters and received positive reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. It's published by Simon and Schuster!

Lastly, I'm going to sneak in a mention for Desert Bus for Hope Desert Bus for Hope, a geek fundraising event that is taking place now through the week ahead. The brainchild of Victoria-based Loading Ready Run, Desert Bus sees a group of friends playing the video game of the same name, a creation by Penn and Teller that has you drive a bus...through the desert. Along the way, thr group runs challenges, giveaways, and donation drives, with funds going to Child's Play, a charity that provides games to children. It's worth tuning in just for a goofy, hopeful time.

Growing up, one of my dad's favourite video games (indeed, one of the only games he regularly played on the Nintendo he bought for me and my siblings) was Gradius. It holds a special place in my heart as one of the first pieces of geek media me and my dad connected over.

So I was delighted to learn that PLUM had made a 1:144 scale model of the Vic Viper fighter from Gradius V.

Like other Japanese kits, this one is mainly a snap-together plastic kit with multi-coloured sprues. And like those kits, the main thing you have to watch for is tension marks arising from improper nipping. Like this next picture shows above the slit in the engine below.

The key to good clipping of parts off the sprue is to first cut partway onto the sprue, so the pressure is away from the actual part you're grabbing. Then, you can make another trim to remove the last nib of plastic. If there's still some plastic nib left, cut it away with a hobby knife.

I also found that some parts in this kit didn't QUITE line up, like the vents on this part:

Some careful filing helped make those gaps close up pretty nicely. The final assembled product is very much like a gunpla. It even comes with a display stand in the same kind of vein as Gundam kits.

Adding some weathering effects with a coat of Citadel Paint Nuln Oil helped tone down the "toy" effect and made it look more like a model kit. Some Japanese companies make these "grease pen" things you can use for weathering. I'm tempted to pick some up for my next Gunpla, just to compare how the effect works against the Nuln Oil.

I think if I had one big complaint on the this kit's design, I think the little red highlights on the fin tips and front stabilizers are too tiny. I bet most of you didn't even notice them until I mentioned them!

Still, not a bad kit, and it's always fun to dip into nostalgia!

In June 1977, American psychologist and author Alice Sheldon published yet another soon-to-be-award-winning novelette, under the pen name Raccoona Sheldon. She more frequently and famously published under the pen name James Tiptree Jr., but with this other pen name, Sheldon adopted an identity that she felt was more close to her own identity, as opposed to "Tiptree," who she considered almost a character — one that allowed her to write SF&F in a manner that was thought of, at the time, as outside her gender.

But just months earlier, her true identity had been publicly exposed. Sheldon, writing as Tiptree, had let slip in a letter to the editor of fanzine Khatru, that "his" mother, a fellow writer, had died in late October of 1976. Amid swirling rumours and persistent fans, people were able to link that clue to an obituary for Mary Hastings Bradley, Alice Sheldon's mother, and the pieces fell into place.

The science fiction and fantasy community was shocked. There were multiple male SF&F authors who had sworn up and down that James Tiptree Jr. must be a man, as the stories published under that name were somehow "masculine" in nature.

Commenting on why she'd adopted the male identities in the first place, Sheldon wrote:

“A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed."

Indeed, after the exposure, the novelette she published in 1977 proved to be her last truly notable work. Biographer Julie Philips noted that: "although she eventually wrote a number of stories and another novel, nothing was ever as direct, honest and exciting as her work before she was exposed."

All of which is somewhat ironic, given the subject matter of that 1977 novelette, entitled The Screwfly Solution.

The Screwfly Solution is one of the most terrifying works of fiction I have ever read. Not in a "pull the covers up over your head" Stephen King fashion. It is so terrifying because it reads like a road map of humanity's recent turns towards extremist right-wing politics, crystalized most recently in the results of the American election.

In the story, a researcher who is about to embark on a sterilization program of insects (the titular "screwfly solution") in Columbia corresponds with his wife back home in America about a growing socio-religious movement centered around femicide. The "Sons of Adam" have proclaimed holy war upon women everywhere, openly murdering them by any means possible.

What makes the story so terrifying is not just the existence of this movement and its shocking effects, but in how the culture around them responds. At first, there is a general amount of disbelief and inept inaction. "Why can't they do something," Anne, the researcher's wife, laments, "even if it is a religion?"

The oblique reference to the special protections afforded misogyny, provided it arrives bearing a cross or star or crescent moon or any other religious iconography, is eerily reminiscent of the way we work ourselves into knots over Sharia Law, or the child brides of Christian sects, or any other institutionalized patriarchy that ducks scrutiny because "God said so."

Society continues to degrade, at first in subtle ways, such as when Alan, the researcher, reads a disturbing report that blithely notes the absence of women and children in a so-called "liberated zone" by the Sons of Adam, or when Anne comments that her friend, Lillian, is "on some kind of Save-the-Women committee, like we were an endangered species, ha-ha—you know Lillian." Before long, though, the signs become more obvious, as Alan returns back to the States through Miami and finds women there have begun huddling together in packs, adopting parkas and layers of clothing instead of the seasonally-appropriate swimsuits and bikinis.

"They're frightened," Alan thinks. "Afraid of attracting notice."

Things quickly go from bad to worse as Alan realizes that the phenomenon is related to some kind of disease which is spreading quite rapidly from the sub-tropical zone to more chilly climates. He tells Anne to flee, and she does so, up north into Canada, where she disguises herself as a young boy. Her flight merely prolongs her own existence, as she soon realizes she has become, as her friend Lillian had suggested, an endangered species.

The story, in my view, trips a bit at the end, as Anne encounters the cause of the plague: an alien lifeform that, to her understanding, is acting like a "real estate agent," taking samples from a remote area in preparation for more arrivals. It seems the aliens have come to Earth and decided to depopulate it so they can take it over. The explanation is a bit tidy, and comes out of nowhere in the closing paragraphs.

But it redeems itself by Anne's observation that the "screwfly solution" of the aliens is to "pinpoint the weak link" of humanity. In this case, they merely ratcheted up what was already there, and the change was so subtle from our normal behaviour that we failed to respond. A handful of women are said to have fought back, such as a crew of pilots seizing a bomber to attack a Sons of Adam enclave, but it proves useless as they lack organization.

You might be seeing, now, why I brought this story up in relation to Trump's re-election.

There are many targets being sighted up by the vicious, nationalistic, and, quite bluntly, ignorant masses that have found a home in the political camps of the alt-right. Immigrants. Trans people. But perhaps most insidious, and most vociferously denied by their leaders, is the targeting of women.

Donald Trump represents a homecoming for misogyny. Found liable for sexual assault, he has repeatedly and openly made misogynistic attacks on female opponents, whether they be from the right or left side of the political spectrum. In the resurfaced Access Hollywood tape, he boasted about his proclivity for "grabbing women by the pussy." And, of course, he was found to have paid hush money to a porn star, and was a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, notorious child sex trafficker.

His election to the highest public office in the United States is a deliberate assault on progress, particularly feminism. In the wake of his election, supporters like white supremacist Nicholas Fuentes took to Xitter and other social media platforms to hurl misogynistic statements and epithets out into the public sphere.

"Your body, my choice. Forever." Fuentes, who dined with Trump in 2022 alongside fellow antisemite Kanye West, posted.

While it may do your hearts some amount of good to know that Fuentes was doxxed shortly thereafter, it's clear that there is an emboldened, hateful generation of men entering power, many of whom were voting for the first time in the election.

The evidence lies in exit polls, which show that by gender, women were, yet again, onside with Kamala Harris (with the perpetual, noteworthy exception of white women), as they were with Clinton and Biden, though in both those cases their numbers were higher.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest voting blocs to emerge for Trump has been Gen Z men, aged 18 to 29, who turned out to vote for him in an amount larger than any other prior Republican nominee back to 2008.

These are men whose identities have been shaped by the perpetually-online culture that was driven into steroid-infused overdrive by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shredded the last vestiges of community right in their formative teenage and young adult years. They are being force-fed a steady diet of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, and much of that diet centres around attacking feminism and the evils of women, while playing up toxic masculinity and the alienation of young men.

Even as they say to friends and family, particularly female ones, that they are onside with the progress of women, multiple polls have shown that Gen Z men in particular were lying about their voting intentions. As Fortune Magazine reported:

The younger generations were most likely to lie, at 48% of Gen Zers and 38% of millennials compared to just 17% of Gen Xers and 6% of baby boomers. And men were more likely to lie than women, at 30% and 17%, respectively.

We know full well the intentions of the Trump presidency in regards to women's rights, thanks to the leaking of Project 2025 (which, no matter how strenuously the habitual liar denies it, is absolutely the blueprint for his second term in office (and, potentially, his third and more)). It is a rewriting of America's modest gains in progress to fully re-establish the dominance of men, and in particular, white men, in the workplace, in relationships, and in the household.

What's truly chilling is that we've seen this all play out before. In patriarchal societies where government control has fallen into lockstep with religion or other social movements dedicated to male dominance, the outcomes have been devastating. China and India, the world's two largest populations, have become ludicrously lopsided towards men in gender demographics, and that has had an outsized effect on their ability to repopulate in the future and to fill other societal needs.

This is to say nothing of long-term economic and health impacts, which are seen in places where violently patriarchal societies are being re-established.

The Screwfly Solution is about showing how humanity can tear itself apart by institutional prejudice taken to its logical extreme. While it may seem hyperbolic, we have just seen the first step taken towards that genocidal conclusion in the United States, as with other countries that are promoting institutional patriarchy, by way of religion, like Israel's ultra-right ministers slashing the Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women and programs to protect abuse victims while mulling "Torah Law," or secularly, like China's government now pressing women to have kids.

These movements are given opportunities by radicalizing people who are craving anything at all to validate their feelings of inadequacy and alienation. They are latching on to con artists and hate mongers a a fix.

Breaking the hold of the new reassertion of patriarchy, riding a wave of young, isolated men with closeted bigotry, will be the first step in fighting back against America's screwfly solution.

We'll talk more about that next week.

That wraps up issue #18 of The Lagrange Point! If you enjoyed this little e-newsletter, please consider subscribing, or, if you're already subscribed, sharing it with a friend or family member!

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Until next Monday, thank you for reading!

-Tim