Argy-bargy in the SF World

I found this on Twitter. Of all the authors mentioned the only ones I know are China Mieville and Sherri Tepper. I loved Grass by Sherri and most things that I've read by China (Kraken, The City and The City, King Rat very much, Perdido Street Station not quite so much, Embassy Town - umm, impressed by the invention).
I was particularly taken with one comment in the list. The commenter pointed out that, in this group, Arthur C Clarke would not have been shortlisted for his own prize. Interesting and probably true. The last thing I read by Arthur was The Light of Other Days, which, since it has clearly been done by someone who can do characters well enough to write the biros off Arthur, strikes me as being more a book by Stephen Baxter. I haven't read anything solely by him yet, so I don't know, but I have strong suspicions.
One point this brings up is the difference between the writers of the Golden Age and now. I loved Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke when I was a kid, but I wonder if anything but early Heinlein would keep me interested now. Later Heinlein was too full of people who were essentially Heinlein for my tastes. Asimov and Clarke were a bit like Kilgore Trout, great ideas.
Another point brought out by the commentators was that it was good to see a really good rant going on, especially when this was about SF, which they all cared about. I do too, so I like the fact that people are getting up and shouting about this. I might be going out on a limb here, but I would class The Hunger Games as being SF. In the suburbs of the genre at least. It's in the future, has genetically modified animals and a firm view that people are still going to be people, whatever the tech can do. It's also well written, doesn't have shiny boyfriends or girls who have a pathological obsession with guys who can kill them anywhere. (Is it something about teenage girls liking blokes who show restraint? He hasn't ripped your throat out in weeks, it must be love - and that counts).
I like this as a general trend. I'm really happy that the biggest selling film of the times is one that is set in the future, gets people to think about ethics, uses of technology (oppression), has a really strong independent female lead (father of a 12-year-old girl writing here) and is clearly leading towards revolution. I'm going out to buy the other two books to find out if the word 'occupy' sticks up in them in any way, but won't care if it doesn't.

Oh dear, oh dear.

Not about my book, but definitely about writing and the response it can get. If you look here you will find the story of how a parent complained that a school teacher read to her child from Orson Scott Card's classic SF book, Ender's Game. I haven't read it in a while, but rate it as an intelligent, well written book. For those who don't know, it tell the story of the battle school, which takes young kids in a future Earth and trains them for a war against an alien race, known in the book as the Buggers.
For the Brits who read, I have to point out that Card is American. For the Americans, you might want to know that that term translates as Sodomite in the UK (and maybe Australia/New Zealand, I'll have to check on that one, though.)
That wasn't the reason for the complaint, though. Apparently, the parent thought the work pornographic. It seems that the kids in the book use a few swear words. I won't argue, though I don't remember that standing out when I read it.
I would point out that the book is on a list of the 100 best books for Young Adult readers. That Card is a Mormon, so is a bit unlikely as a source of child corrupting porn. That the story, from one point of view, is all about comradeship and loyalty. The bit you might not like is that there are some murders and Ender does commit them. He doesn't know that, though. The adults who run the school keep that fact from both him and the others, as they don't want this very promising strategist to be put off, or kicked out. In the end, (I don't think this is a spoiler), Ender is tricked into fighting and completely destroying the aliens. He is led to believe it's a training exercise.
He finds out, too late, that the aliens - social insects - didn't realise that they were killing intelligent beings. They'd taken us to be like themselves and thought the creatures they could see must be just appendages of the hive queens. You don't kill hive queens - that would be barbaric - but the workers and drones they deal with as we would a termite infestation.
The writing is high quality, the characters ones that you can engage with, the story one to inspire thought. A number of people have decided that is the real reason the parent complained, as there is a very clear link that any intelligent child might make between the kids who get tricked into becoming genocidal murderers and the US army. Or any other to be honest, but this took place in America, so...
I don't know the parents, so I won't comment on that, but the idea of trying to raise your child in such a cotton-wool wrapped vaccuum strikes me as foolish. It won't protect them, it will just leave them without defenses in a world that has much worse to offer than a few swear words.
This matters to me as the father of a 12-year-old daughter and a writer who knows that the kids in my daughter's year group are already using words that they know better than to use in front of me. I think it's a part of growth, a phase that they need to go through. One of Aki's classmates once told her that you have to swear when you go into secondary. We all pooh-poohed that idea, but I'm sure that she can curse like an average 12-year-old (better than a nun, worse than a sailor) by now. They'll all play with it for a while and then grow out of it, meanwhile learning who not to get caught by.