Genevieve Valentine

In Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture, Stephen H. Segal et al. argues that, "if geek culture can offer fresh, new, alternative paths to all the eternal truths that religion and philosophy have managed to discover over the past few thousand years - paths that welcome those who've been turned away from the more traditional routes - then I say, let there be geekery" (p. 11). If geekdom is a new religion, then Geek Wisdom is its Book of Hadith, but whereas the Hadith draws from show more the sayings of Muhammad, Segal casts a wide net, quoting film, television, books, video games, cartoons, comic books, scientists, philosophers, and more.
Segal and company dare to draw comparisons between Yoda and George Washington Carver, Optimus Prime and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rod Serling and Thomas Jefferson, all while using his selected quotes to speak to issues of truth, beauty, perseverance, and the struggles of being an outsider, whether due to one's interests or as a result of sex, race, or gender identity. He exhorts his readers to enjoy their passions without resorting to attacking or alienating their fellow geeks.
Segal and his co-authors open familiar texts to new interpretations, showing how these media are not simply cheap entertainment to be scoffed at. More to the point, as geek culture grows ever more mainstream and becomes an indelible part of our collective cultural mythology, Segal and company offer a way to interpret the texts of geekdom so that all may benefit from their wisdom and gain a greater enjoyment by pondering on the entertainment they consume. show less

The Girls At the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine is a reworking of the Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy tale. The story is set during the 1920’s in New York City and the princesses in this story are twelve sisters who are controlled by a distant, unloving father who barely acknowledges them, the only child he wanted was a male heir instead he was gifted daughter after daughter. He is ashamed at not being able to produce a male heir and keeps the girls locked away.

Sneaking out and show more going dancing at a speakeasy is the girl’s way of defying their father. The eldest daughter, Jo, has become a mother figure to the rest, although they don’t always understand that she is only trying to protect them from their cold father. Eventually rumors of society girls out dancing and running wild in the night surface and their father decides he will pick husbands for the girls and marry them off. Knowing that he will chose men much like himself, the girls are desperate to find a way of avoiding this fate.

Although there are no fantasy elements in this story, it has a strangely removed feeling with an almost dreamlike atmosphere. The author chose to highlight the special relationship that sisters share. I believe she captured this unique bond the sisters had, the love as well as the tensions and jealousies that arise in such a close relationship. Of course, over the course of the book we come to know some of the sisters better than others as twelve distinct personalities is hard to juggle. Overall this book reminded me of the 2001 film, Moulin Rouge. I can well imagine The Girls At the Kingfisher Club being put to music and filling a large screen. show less

Dream Houses is a separately published (something I have been reading a lot of recently) novella, and while it is comparatively short, Genieve Valentine manages to pack a lot into the small number of pages. The set-up is almost classical – Amadis (and I doubt the name is quite coincidental, in spite of the gender swap), our protagonist and first person narrator wakes up from cold sleep on board of the starship she is a crew member (or, more precisely, an auxiliary) to find out that show more everyone but her is dead and she somehow has to survive the next five years with insufficient food supplies and an AI named Capella as her only company.

That bare outline of the story might already remind you of several things, and indeed Genevieve Valentine cheerfully plunders a whole arsenal of famous Science Fiction movies: Alien (space truckers!), 2001 (possibly malicious spaceship computer!) and Dark Star (bored in space!) and probably a lot more I did not notice. She does make no attempt to hide it, either, because she does not need to: In spite of all the references, Dream Houses never feels derivative, but does very much its own thing. Part of which consists of not just describing how Amadis attempts to survive and stay sane while also attempting to figure out what exactly went wrong on board of her ship, but in also presenting the reader with long flashbacks from Amadis’ past, centered mostly around her relationship with her brother. Those parts are as bleak as the description of her struggle for survival on board of the space ship, and overall it has to be said that, in spite of occasional flashes of humour, Dream Houses is not a cheerful book by any standard, in fact it is quite depressing. This actually is in favour of the book, as it shows the emotional impact it has on the reader as well as Genevieve Valentine’s skill as a writer to keep us reading even as things become increasingly bleaker towards the unavoidable end – Dream Houses will leave you sad, but it will not leave you untouched.

This is very much a “Golden Age SF” novella – but Golden Age the way I define it, i.e. harkening back to the late 1960s / early 1970s when for SF the exploration of man’s Inner Space became at least as important as imagining bug-eyed aliens Out There – or rather, when there was a keen realization that both were pretty much the same thing, and when writers attempted to find weird new literary forms that would be able to embody all the weird new ideas buzzing around at the time. While Dream Houses is not exactly experimental in its form, it does not subscribe to a simple beginning-middle-end structure either; the flashbacks in particular stir up chronology to slowly coalesce into a picture of what happened in Amadis’ past. She is also not the most reliable of narrators (who would be, after years alone in space?) all of which makes reading Dream Houses a somewhat shifty, unsteady experience, where we can never be sure that things are quite what Amadis makes them appear. Maybe I’m just imagining it, but it seems to me that in recent years there has, after a decade or two where pretty much all published Sf (with, of course, the occasional exception) was either some TV/movie/whatever tie-in or Military SF an increasing trend back towards emphatically literary SF that is not afraid to explore and play with language and narrative structures. But whether it is part of a trend or not, Dream Houses is very recommended – especially for those who enjoy the work of authors like Robert Silverberg or Barry Malzberg. show less

Stephen H. Segal has gathered a collection of quotes from a wide variety of sources that don't have much in common except that they can all be described as "things enjoyed by geeks." So we've got Yoda and Kurt Vonnegut, Inigo Montoya and Nikola Tesla, Rod Serling and Carl Sagan and Monty Python and two different characters named Morpheus. For each, there's a little page of commentary on the quote or the character or the source material, relating it to some aspect of life, the universe, and show more everything. (And yes, of course, Douglas Adams is in here, too.)

As someone who deeply loves the stuff of "nerd culture" and who is infinitely more likely to ask herself "What would Mr. Spock do?" than "What would Jesus do?", this seemed right up my alley. But I'll admit I was a little trepidatious going into it. There are so many ways something like this can go wrong. It could be another insipid attempt at "inspirational writing." It could be painfully over-earnest or embarrassingly self-mocking, or even just a cynical attempt to cash in on an audience that tends to be enthusiastic to the point of obsession. I've seen stuff like that before. I don't remember All I Really Need to Know I Learned From Watching Star Trek very well -- which may be for the best -- but I do remember thinking it was terribly lame.

So I'm delighted to be able to report that this book avoids every one of those pitfalls. It really is genuinely thoughtful, sometimes even surprisingly insightful, but it doesn't take itself too seriously, either. In fact, it's got a terrific sense of humor; I repeatedly found myself laughing out loud. And the contributors are plugged into geek culture in a way that's impossible to fake. I can tell they love this stuff just as much as I do, and that alone is enough to make this entertaining in much the same way as those long-ago dorm room conversations in which my friends and I would sit around analyzing Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes.

And who knows? Maybe the next time I'm feeling in need of a little nugget of geeky wisdom, I'll pull it back down off the shelf, flip it open, and see if Gandalf or Galileo or has something worthwhile to say. show less