Earth Girls are Easily Cast

Link: The Problem With The Lady Aliens In 'Guardians Of The Galaxy' (And Most Space Films)

I think many commenters are misunderstanding the article. As far as I can see, it's not against the casting of babe roles in scifi. The complaint is that in a multi-species main cast, the male characters, while certainly including some beefcake, will likely ALSO have a lot of diversity and extremes of phenotype, while any female character(s) are likely to be relatively more heavily anthropomorphized, if not plain human, and fit the one body type.

Photograph: Allstar/Lucasfilm/Sportsphoto Ltd

This has happened with other mixed-species scifi "super teams" too: Star Wars, Farscape, Andromeda, etc. As a general rule, it appears that xenomorphism in the main cast is more likely and more extreme with male characters than with female ones.

I'm guessing that one of the main reasons this happens is that mixed-species main casts in scifi -- because of the shows' intended audience of human males -- tend to be (a) disproportionately male and (b) disproportionately human, with the central characters almost always human or practically indistinguishable from human. If you only have one or two females on your team, and you need to have some potential for a romantic subplot for the human male lead, you can't make make them sexually incompatible from a biological perspective. If FemRocket, FemChewbacca, FemBem and FemPilot were the only females in their respective casts, pairing them with a human character would be imagined as some kind of zoophilia. You might argue for intra-species non-human pairing, but given that multi-species casts also typically have at most one of each non-human species (scifi tokenism), that does not look likely to happen either.

The only solutions I can imagine would be more visibly non-human leads and/or more female main cast members. And maybe junking romantic subplots, but I doubt we will ever see that day.

Science, history, and food at Dubai LitFest

With balmy weather outside and excited readers buzzing about the Intercontinental Hotel in Dubai Festival City, this year's Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, seems to have attracted far more people than in previous years; I had to park at the lower level on all three days, for one thing.

 

Identity panel; Arabizi debate

I went to more Arabic and bilingual events this year, one being "A Question of Identity", a discussion on identity among Arab emigrants and mixed-nationality parentage. The two half-Emirati panelists had especially interesting stories to tell, and one screened a nice documentary on mixed ancestry Emiratis.

Right after, I attended a rather heated debate on "Arabizi", the Arabic chat alphabet that uses Roman letters and numbers to represent Arabic phonology. It started well, but soon descended into a verbal brawl that went off into tangents about spoken Arabic, and sucked in even the moderator.

My last event at the festival was also bi-lingual, with three authors and one representative from the National Media Council discussing censorship in the UAE.

Amish; Sitwell

A couple of other events I really enjoyed had to do with one of my great passions: history. One was the chat with Amish, the author of The Shiva Trilogy, which is a semi-euhemeristic treatment of Indian mythology, set in the ancient Indus Valley civilization. I read the first book of the trilogy, Immortals of Meluha, way back in 2010; it was a pretty decent read, and still revolutionary in the subject it covers. I was anyway mesmerized by Amish's recounting of the role of the mythology in the culture in which he grew up, how he planned and then un-planned his writing process and the development of the story, and his struggles to get the book published. He also spoke at length about he upcoming film adaptation of his trilogy (much-anticipated), and his views on freedom of expression (particularly relevant, given the subject matter of his books).

Another had to do with both history and cooking (another passion of mine): William Sitwell's flip-through presentation of his book, A History of Food in 100 Recipes, in which he reproduces and explores historical recipes from their original sources.

Being a Sinophile of sorts, I also attended the China Panel. Unfortunately, it did not deliver as much as I had hoped it would; I thought the discussion was somewhat scattered, telling me a lot of what I already knew.

(clockwise from top left) Golden Age talk; Golden Age talk Q&A; With him at the book-signing; In the panel discussion

As a science researcher and science enthusiast, I naturally attended every single event featuring the modern giant of science and rationality: Jim Al-Khalili. These also segued nicely from SciFest Dubai the week before. Al-Khalili's talk about the Golden Age of Arabic Science (with a very good justification for calling it "Arabic" science, as opposed to "Islamic" or "Arab" science) was full of very interesting scientific and historical facts, including trivia like the origins of the word "jibberish" and the decimal point, as well as biographical details and anecdotes about some of the important figures from that era, including some of the lesser-known ones. He also did a great job representing science and science literature in a panel discussion about Big Ideas and in a closing ceremony address, respectively, with his characteristic charisma.

(clockwise from top left) Penguin Fringe word magic; A young performer beatboxing; LiTTLe MACHiNe; The play DNA from Short+Sweet Dubai

As usual, there were plenty of cultural shows at the Penguin Fringe and in the programme to fill in the time between events, including one of my favorite plays from Short+Sweet Dubai. I also loved the LiTTLe MACHiNe concert on Friday night; the very energetic trio using famous poems, from Sappho to Tennyson, as lyrics to their music was, for me, one of the surprise highlights of the festival.