“Better Off Ted” as SF

I have several SF shows that I thought I couldn’t wait to watch: the 2009 remake of The Prisoner, the newly updated Day of the Triffids, the latest Doctor Who special, the last two eps of V, the last three eps of Paradox—I have them all right here, and despite my interest in them, I’m just not prioritizing them.

What do I watch instead? What show do I obtain instantly upon release? What show do I make time to watch in a day jam-packed with distractions?

Yes, I watch Better Off Ted (2009– ), a half-hour sitcom in its second season set in the office of a company, Veridian Dynamics, that makes various strange products and attempts to sell them to an unwitting public. Their motto is, “We can do that!” The blurbs for the show compare it to Arrested Development (2003–2006), a zany critical favorite awaiting its 2011 movie update. (Portia de Rossi is in both shows. Coincidence? Er, probably.) You can watch some full BOT eps on Hulu and some other full BOT eps at ABC.com.

“Better Off Ted”: Ted (Jay Harrington), Lem (Malcolm Barrett), Phil (Jonathan Slavin, back to camera), and Linda (Andrea Anders) [1]

I submit that BOT is one of the best sci-fi shows out there. Fringe? Uninteresting and too heavy on the impenetrable mythos; the blank lead actress means the show holds no emotional resonance for me. Defying Gravity? Bizarre antifeminist dystopia disguised as a soap opera, and they canceled it anyway—not a moment too soon. Stargate Universe? The usually clean-cut Stargate franchise meeting the dark handheld camera–ness and utter unlikeability of characters a la Battlestar Galactica is just wrong.

Before you exclaim that BOT is not SF but rather an odd workplace comedy, I argue that any text that deals with science, change, and its relationship to humanity is SF. BOT does all this. Further, it shows the scientific method in action—and when people try to circumvent rigorous testing, something horrible happens. Although the show focuses on a middle manager, Ted; his boss, Veronica; and his officeplace crush, Linda, a secretary, my favorite part of the show deals with Phil and Lem, two brilliant scientists who can invent like crazy.

BOT addresses pressing social issues, like in 1.04 “Racial Sensitivity,” which follows the travails of Veridian Dynamics’ employees as the newly installed motion sensors fail to recognize black people. It addresses the intersection between science and dating in 2.01 “Love Blurts,” when VD decides to post genetic matches for their employees, so that they might decrease health insurance costs by creating perfect children. In 1.01 “Pilot,” a scientist, Phil, is cryogenically frozen as a test, with disasterous consequences. Individuality and the psychology of groups are treated in 1.07 “Get Happy,” when people’s cubes are decorated for them by VD in one of several themes, leading to the creation of workplace cabals.

Many episodes deal with the ramifications of various scientific inventions: the compound that causes hair growth; the biocomputer that develops a toxic leak; the nonbeef beef; the transmitter that throws voices over long distances; a weaponized pumpkin; and so on, each invention more ridiculous than the last. But part of the humor lies in the fact that some of these inventions actually seem like a good idea. Nonbeef beef? What a way to ensure our food supply! Hair growth? Millions of bald people would be lining up for that one. Weaponized pumpkins? Honestly, they’ll never see that one coming.

BOT has gotten pretty good reviews. It was created by Victor Fresco, who created cult fave Andy Richter Controls the Universe (2002–2003). I think it resonates right now because it’s a cynical look at the workplace, but it’s not mean-spirited. It shows the company as inept, a product of its hugeness and inability to acknowledge and nurture true diversity. Although the company’s decisions appear to defy common sense, there is usually some kind of explanation for what they do, even if it ends up being ridiculous—like hiring white people to follow black employees around to operate machinery for them in 1.04 “Racial Sensitivity,” instead of simply switching to a motion sensor that can see people of color.

If you’re looking for fun SF that works on several different levels, give BOT a try. You won’t be sorry. Some of these eps would be a great teaching tool to discuss the scientific method and process, the relationship between science and the social, and the applicability of theory to practice. But mostly? They are just freaking hilarious.

Image credit

1. The image from Better Off Ted is from ABC’s Web site and is available here: http://abc.go.com/shows/better-off-ted/photos.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This post was originally written on December 30, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. The image is from ABC.com and is copyrighted by them. If you copy this post, please copy the image too and host it yourself. If you read this document at a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

Spork! An Erotic Love Story

The blogosphere has been abuzz with chatter about “Spork! An Erotic Love Story.” This audio slash fanfic has been both lauded (by bloggers) and reviled (by some humorless people in the comments) at sci-fi info sites like BuzzFeed, SciFiWire, and io9. Alas, the authorship of this hilarious artwork has been elided by misrepresentative journalistic headlines. Somehow, it’s all about Zachary Quinto.

SciFiWire‘s headline reads, “Totally NSFW sexy Kirk/Spock slash as read by Trek’s Quinto,” and io9‘s headline is “Zachary Quinto fulfills your Trek slash fantasies.” (Wait. This might be true. But they don’t mean it the way I’m taking it.) However, BuzzFeed is the worst:

Zachary Quinto reads a piece of gay slash fiction detailing an erotic encounter between Spock and Captain Kirk. In my opinion, The real triumph here is that he really nails the dynamic between the two characters and does a great job capturing their voices. [BuzzFeed]

Does he? Does he now?

He does not.

I realize that it’s really interesting to say, “Hey! Zachary Quinto is reading a Kirk/Spock slash story!” It conjures up images of a fangirl phoning up Zachary (he’s on speed dial, I bet) and saying, “Hee! I wrote this pretty hilarious slash fanfic. It would be awesome if you would read it aloud for an MP3 recording. Would you?” Of course Zachary (they’re on a first-name basis; see above re. speed dial), casting all caution to the wind, and careless of the ire of the owners of the valuable Star Trek franchise, his agent, and many, many lawyers, would happily agree.

But that’s not what’s happening here. Zachary Quinto read the Alan Dean Foster–authored Star Trek movie tie-in. “Spork” is a transformative artwork made out of a commercially available audio recording authored by Foster and voiced by Quinto.

Two authors, cirrocumulus and jiaren_shadow, took this audio recording and recut it to create a new artwork. As a story, it’s short and hilarious—longtime slash fans, like me, will get a kick out of it and think it’s adorable. As an audio, it’s a stunning technological masterwork of cut and paste. The authors of this audio aren’t just going for the words; they’re going for speed, tone, and emphasis, all to add to the hilarity. As the two authors of this transformative artwork say in their December 20 post at LiveJournal community ontd_startrek, where this little gem was posted, “This turned out surprisingly ribald for having been edited together from something almost entirely innocuous.”* It’s true: check it out, do, but it’s not work safe.

Let’s credit this properly, shall we? The artwork that everyone is citing is called “Spork!” and it’s by cirrocumulus and jiaren_shadow. The source text that they transformed was written by Alan Dean Foster, who transformed the 2009 film into a novelization. This text was in turn transformed by Zachary Quinto when he read it aloud. The text is set in a universe by and features characters originally created by Gene Roddenberry and rethought and transformed by J. J. Abrams.

Get it? Get it? The layers and layers and layers of referentiality? This is why I love fanfic, my friends. And you can get in on it too! Check out “Spork!” and admire it for not only its cheesy goodness and technological flair, but for its place in the pantheon of the Star Trek metatext.

Just don’t say that it’s by Zachary Quinto.

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*I’m purposefully not linking directly to the original post at ontd_startrek. See here for an explanation of why.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This post was originally written on December 24, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.

TWC and citation

My Transformative Works and Cultures coeditor, Kristina Busse, and I have written a document about “Fan Privacy and TWC’s Editorial Philosophy.” It addresses our editorial decisions about citation of publicly presented fan works in TWC. TWC’s submission guidelines strongly suggest that scholars seek fan permission before citing a fan artwork, but we fall short of requiring it. The document we wrote goes into detail to explain why this is so.

To summarize the problem: there is a divide between best practices in the academic and fan realms regarding the appropriateness of citing things like fan fiction, fan videos, or fan-manipulated art. In the academic realm, any text publicly posted is considered published, and it is not required to obtain permission of the writer to cite from it. Scholars wouldn’t ask Jane Austen (who is dead) or Philip Roth (who is not) if they could write about their works; such an idea actually seems ridiculous. It thus would probably never occur to your average scholar that there might be a problem with citing a freely available fan artwork. The text here is perceived as text only, separate from the creator. The academic stance assumes that citing the text violates no privacy concerns because it is publicly posted, and presumably the fan wouldn’t have posted it publicly if she didn’t want people to read it.

In some circles of the fan realm (but by no means universally), any fan artwork that is publicly posted is still considered a private document, meant to share with the community but not really the world at large. The idea of scholars publishing an article about a fan’s work without letting the fan know they are doing so is intolerable to many fans. The text here is perceived as a representation of the fan herself, an aspect of the creator. Citing the text is a violation of the fan’s expectations of privacy.

TWC’s policy is a middle-ground attempt to reconcile these two differing points of view. As we say in “Fan Privacy,” “We are an academic publication drawing from a myriad of different disciplines and fandoms. We have created an ethics guideline that forces scholars to seriously consider the potential costs of citing, referencing, and linking even publicly posted material.”

As a fan, I personally do not care if someone cites my fan fiction. I also don’t care if, for example, someone took it and disseminated it, maybe by putting it in a hard-copy zine, or maybe by adding it to a fic archive she wants to start. To make this stance abundantly clear, I have stated this preference in several places: on LiveJournal, it’s in my profile, and on my blog pages, in the navbar, I have provided a Creative Commons copyright that permits remixing and reposting, but with attribution. This is a signal to anyone, scholar or not, that they can take my work and I don’t care. There is no need to ask.

However, if I wanted privacy—if I wanted the documents I create to be part of the fan community but not the world at large—I would lock everything down. In LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, I would friendslock. On An Archive Of Our Own, I would adjust my privacy settings. I would take my fic down from any public fic archives, such as Wraithbait. The Internet is part of the reason fandom has gone mainstream: it’s just so easy to find these texts. Fans need to rigorously police their own online identities. The culture of silence that protected them is being broken—by fellow fans, especially ones who came to fandom recently via the Internet and who have no longtime background in fan culture, and by outsiders to fandom.

What it comes down to is risk management. Everyone who posts, fan or not, needs to balance the risks with the rewards: readership and the potential for new friendships, versus the possibility of intense and possibly unwelcome scrutiny.

This text is copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This post was originally written on December 5, 2009. It may be freely copied anywhere. If you read this document a site other than its original, I may not see any comments you might append, and I’d love to hear from you. Please comment at the original blog post if you wish me to see your remarks.