Tag Archive : CULTURE

Late in Nier: Automata's runtime, the game takes an unexpected break from sci-fi action to share the backstory of two minor characters. It does so by turning itself briefly into a text adventure, the sort of thing you'd find in Twine, that tells you how these two came to be where they are. The pain and persecution they've been through; how they held onto each other through it. And then, at the end of the story, if you make a certain choice, the narrator sums up her journey:

"I won't stop. No one stops."

In that moment, Nier: Automata suggests that the experience of these minor characters, the suffering that gives way to perseverance and then, cruelly, even more suffering, isn't isolated to them, or the other unlucky members of the main cast. Instead, the game posits that this experience is a cycle. A universal one, catching everyone and everything in it. We suffer, and we go on, because have to. No one stops.

Nier: Automata is obsessed with cycles, and with breaking them. The game's genius lies in interrogating every element of itself, from the most cliched videogame trope to the most virtuosic narrative flourish, and pushing that obsession onto the audience. Nier: Automata is a series of resonant frequencies, one amplifying the other until everything is bathed in its rogue transmission.

This entire article could be spent recounting the fine details of the plot of Nier: Automata, which builds upon the stories told in Yoko Taro's previous games, but by way of simple summary: In the year 11,945, an army of androids created by humans fight an army of toy-like machines created by alien invaders for control of Earth, with what remains of the human race cordoned off on the moon. This war has gone on for centuries, and shows no sign of ending. For the androids of Yorha, a group of special forces who serve as the game's viewpoint characters, war—and death—is everything. The only thing.

At the end of the game's prologue, our protagonist, 2B, dies alongside her field partner, 9S. And then they're resurrected, their minds uploaded into new bodies, and sent back out into the fight against the machines. Not even total annihilation is an escape from what 2B calls, in her opening narration, "a never-ending spiral of life and death."

Nier: Automata plays like a traditional action role-playing game, with a combat system—courtesy of the veterans at Platinum Games—that gives depth and grace to a deserving title. Taro and his team's games are always thoughtful, but often broken and underfunded. Automata is neither, and it plays beautifully, and yet its gameplay flourishes further emphasize the cyclical purgatory of the life of the androids. Violence is routine, a means of filling up time, growing stronger, and even entertainment. But violence, both as game mechanic and as the core of life on Nier's earth, is drained of meaning by its inevitable repetition: War is background noise, ceaselessly droning toward tragedies that are doomed to repeat themselves over and over again, as androids and machines struggle with a growing degree of self-awareness they neither asked for nor know precisely what to do with.

How do you live when your life's path is predetermined? How do you possibly make meaning out of your existence within that kind of inevitability? Nier: Automata confronts that question with the somber gravity of tragedy, and the trickster's grin of a game designer in his element. If Nier: Automata wants to highlight the cycles its characters are trapped in, it also wants to highlight the way those cycles can be broken, made sense of, or subverted. Being alive might mean that we're all trapped. But it doesn't mean we have to play along nicely.

The game pulls this tension off by constantly undercutting and transforming its own play. One moment, the game will be precisely what you signed up for: a third-person action game about an android with a blindfold and a big sword. Then, a moment later, the game is a 2D bullet-hell jet-plane shooter. Then that jet plane transforms into a mecha. Then the android jumps out of that mecha again, you hack and slash for a little while longer, and the camera switches again as you turn a hallway. Now it's a 2D platformer. Later, the game throws hacking minigames at you in the form of twin-stick shooting straight out of Geometry Wars. One segment is reminiscent of a 2D Castlevania, as you fight and climb through a layered, ruined castle full of machine lifeforms. Another resembles an old-school fighting game. I could go on and on.

The big picture cyclicality creates, paradoxically, a space for near-infinite experimentation inside of it. Everyone in this world wants to make sense of their lives within the fixed elements—life, death, more life, an endless war on behalf of masters you've never even met—that keep them trapped. They will do anything for this goal, and the game will, too. The game transforms itself to discover itself, as if some mind confined deep within it believes that, by contorting this way and that, it can somehow understand what it's really made of. Nier: Automata "ends" several times, each finale serving as a chapter break, giving the game a chance to try out a new perspective, a new approach. It is a game constantly being made new.

And as Nier: Automata transforms, so do the androids, who try to find a way of living with little guidance from their human creators. And so do the machines, who begin to imitate governments and relationships found in archaeological records of present-day humanity, imitating their own mortal enemies in an effort to find something on this foreign planet worth holding onto.

As they do so, the sides continue to fight. One of my favorite characters is an android named 6O who functions as 2B's mission control, giving her orders for a relentless series of suicide missions while also talking about her horoscope and crying about the crush she has on the girl on the other side of the room. At one point in the game, a side quest involves picking flowers to cheer her up. That juxtaposition between the frivolous and the terrible is everything to Nier: Automata. The tragedy of the story is so great that, if the game is to believed, that juxtaposition might be the only thing that matters.

Nier: Automata takes the weight of all that emotion, all its pain and playfulness, and focuses it into a personal story about a pair of androids struggling to understand themselves and their enemies, despite being so commodified by the war they're stuck in that they don't even merit proper names. It's in the telling of that story that Nier: Automata earns its spot as Game of the Year. Not just because it tells that story well, which it does. Nor because it remains entertaining to play throughout, which it does. Nor for its excellent localization, its stirring soundtrack, or any of the other small flourishes it absolutely nails.

Instead, Nier: Automata is the Game of the Year because it manages to tell its story with every part of itself. In the way every single element collaborates to dramatize the terrible, cyclical nature of life while simultaneously breaking from that focus to find moments of joy and pathos within it. The way it transforms itself, telling a story of hope and failure and death and rebirth from every angle it can think of. And the way it sees love, and kindness, and simple humanity in that story. Nier: Automata is a meticulously designed tragedy engine that somehow, improbably, manages to go beyond tragedy into something better. It is very much like an android of its own creation, her entire body fine-tuned for combat, taking a break from the never-ending cycle of life and death to pick flowers for a friend waiting somewhere far away.

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Fortnite, a free-to-play shooter by Epic Games (Gears of War), has taken over the world. That may sound like exaggeration, but I couldn't overstate the popularity of Fortnite if I tried. It is massively played, and even more massively watched—on Twitch, 66 million hours of Fortnite have been watched in the past two weeks, with about 200,000 viewers tuning in at any given time. (In March, the streamer Ninja played with Drake, raking in the highest single-game viewership Twitch has ever seen.) It is also, somehow, massively complicated.

Fortnite started off as something less than a success. As originally released last July, it was a cooperative third-person shooter with interesting but messy crafting mechanics—a little bit Gears of War, a little bit Minecraft, with some of the cartoonish glee of Team Fortress 2. Then, inspired by the unanticipated success of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Epic added a free-to-play "battle royale" mode in September: one hundred players on a large island, fighting for survival, with all the fort-building mechanics of the main game intact.

And it exploded.

There's a wisdom about crossover success, about the sort of games that become popular, not just among gamers, but among moms, and kids, and Drake: they're simple. They're Words With Friends, they're Angry Birds. Authentically huge games are simple, they're increasingly mobile, and they don't take up too much time. They're drop-in, drop-out affairs that don't require focus as much as they offer distraction. What's fascinating about Fortnite is that it defies, with aplomb, all of that wisdom. (At least mostly; Epic has since made the game available on iOS devices, subsequently invading classrooms all over the country.)

I had spent time in PUBG, Fortnite's spiritual predecessor, but for whatever reason I spent the first four and a half months of 2018 without spending a second in the biggest gaming phenomenon of the moment. Upon remedying that, my first sortie goes … poorly. I airdrop into a deserted neighborhood and go running. My only weapon is a pickaxe, which I can use to build simple structures with materials I find: wood, concrete, sheet metal. I'm going to need something tougher before another player shows up, so I go scavenging. For a solid five minutes, I gather up a small arsenal of brightly colored shotguns and assault rifles, and begin toying with building myself a fort, to protect myself, to see the surroundings.

Then: I run into another player. They get the first shot off. I die. So it goes.

During my next few sessions of Fortnite's Battle Royale mode, I learn that high-level play is as complex as it is invited. The best players dominate on these islands, building quickly and furiously, dueling each other with distance sniping and towering forts. The efficiency with which they craft and structure defensive facilities are impressive. They make split-second decisions that I can't yet imagine: when to build and when to shoot, how and why and whether to engage at any specific time. It is, in short, like any other complex, gamer-oriented multiplayer shooter, and chances are, I will never, ever be good at it.

And yet it's now one of the most immensely popular games of the world. The answer to why is complicated: a confluence of brightly colored, inviting images, the right game mode at the right time, and Drake, among others. But the fact that such a complex, gamer's game could become so popular is worth noting. It suggests that gaming's insularity is not for the reasons that many may think, that perhaps cultural factors are more responsible for the inaccessibility of games than their mechanical sophistication. What games might need, then, to reach new audiences are not to simplify, but to broaden: to find ways to hit cultural and aesthetic registers that appeal to demographics beyond the core gaming audience.

People will, in fact, learn to play games, even the most complex and messy ones. Fortnite is proof of that. You just have to give them something to invest in. And if you can get Drake, that'll help.

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'Ready Player One' is in theaters now

In Hollywood, it’s all about size. Big budgets, supersized casts, boffo box office openings. And in that world, there is perhaps nothing larger than the Marvel Cinematic Universe. If Avengers: Infinity War proved anything, it’s that the MCU had earned its scope. It would make sense, then, that the latest installment—Ant-Man and the Wasp—would look to hitch its wagon to its bonafide stars. It doesn’t, and it doesn’t need to. It has, to borrow the internet’s latest mini-meme, BDE.

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Before we get into that, or any more size jokes, a few points of clarity. Ant-Man and the Wasp takes place pretty much concurrently with Infinity War. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) briefly mentioned in that movie that Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) would be sitting out the battle with Thanos, and in his standalone movie we find out why: His jaunt to Germany in Captain America: Civil War put him in violation of the Sokovia Accords, which forced him into house arrest in the Bay Area. So while the other Avengers were fighting Thanos out in the galaxy and in the fields of Wakanda, Ant-Man was stuck at home. How his story will tie in with the greater MCU isn’t even truly revealed until the (very good, but terrible to spoil) post-credits scene—a throwback to the time when all of the Marvel movies’ But wait, there’s more! moments teased the massive team-up to come.

And really, that’s exactly what an Ant-Man movie needs. Frankly, it’s what the MCU needs. After a few films where the fate of the entire universe hung in the balance—Infinity War, Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok—Marvel needed a palate-cleanser, a movie that wasn’t all-or-nothing. And while director Peyton Reed’s movie trashes a few San Francisco tourist destinations, no country is decimated, and no planet gets pummeled. Hela, the Goddess of Death, is nowhere to be found. It’s just a little side-hustle about Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) trying to rescue Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer)—their wife and mother, respectively—from the quantum realm. It's a Post-It Note reminder of an adventure.

And it's a fantastic time. The setup: Scott is a just a few days away from completing his house arrest when he has a dream about Janet Van Dyne, a quantum entanglement that provides the key her family needs to get her out after being stuck there for 30 years. (An unanswered question: Where does one eat/sleep/poop in the quantum realm, which basically looks like a floor-less hot-box tent at Coachella?) But, as is always the case, getting Janet out isn’t that simple—especially since they’re trying to do it while a gangster, played by a wonderfully maniacal Walton Goggins, and a new mysterious villain called Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) both vie for control of Pym’s lab and all the technology inside.

This kind of tightly-constructed story not only avoids the problems other recent Marvel movies have had with trying to do too much, it also gives the movie time to breathe, to develop characters and build worlds, without having to shift focus to a whole new location and collection of heroes every 10 minutes. All of which is to say, it lets Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp grow—and steal the show. Ant-Man may get top billing, but Hope is the one driving the action. (I mean that literally, she hits the streets of San Francisco like Steve McQueen in Bullitt.) Not only does she get the better fight scenes, she also delivers a fair share of one-liners, which isn’t an easy task in a movie that brought back Michael Peña’s Luis for some grand scene larceny. And when it comes to world-building, the Ant-Man sequel delves even further into the quantum realm, showing its many wrinkles and rainbows in a way reminiscent of how Doctor Strange built out its various mystical realms. It also, in a nod to super science nerds, features tardigrades, the microscopic "water bears" that look like pill bugs in khakis.

Then there's the matter of Ant-Man and the Wasp's breadth, which, wisely, focuses simply on Scott Lang's attempt to help Hank and Hope while not getting caught for violating his parole. It's efficient, and feels like a turn of events that could take place in the time allotted. Marvel movies have always had strange scopes: They’re massive events of global (or galactic) significance that often begin and end in under a week. It’s hard to tell since the sun never sets in space, but I’d estimate the massive fights of Infinity War wrapped up in about 48 hours of real time. Ant-Man and the Wasp completes its full arc in a smooth 36, give or take, along with a comfortably digestible two-hour run time. And that's all the time it needs—in both duration and story—to unspool its plot and catch Scott and Hope up with all of the Avengers, chronologically speaking. Everything you need in one tiny time capsule.

Truly, lean-and-meanness is Ant-Man and the Wasp’s greatest gift. After a few films full of all-you-can-eat chest-thumping, Reed’s movie is a necessary digestif, all the joys of a Marvel movie shrunk down into a quick caper that cuts through the post-Infinity War fog. Yes, this is all part of Marvel’s design. The studio knew it needed a breather between that film and next year’s Captain Marvel. But that doesn’t mean that Ant-Man and the Wasp, with all of their ease and banter, shouldn’t saunter in and have a little fun. The payoff is huge—even if the movie isn’t.

The fact that you're even reading these words represents a victory.

WordPress-powered websites publish more than 77 million posts each week. The New York Times runs about 150 stories every day. (Here at WIRED, it's more like 15 or 20.) Last year, 687.2 million books were sold in the United States—and that's just print versions, not e-books. Speaking of which: even as Amazon opens more stores, independent bookstores continue to thrive, despite the fact that a quarter of adults haven't cracked a cover in a year. Words are everywhere. Not all of them are the best words, granted, but we're awash in them like at no other point in our history. They're in our books and our e-readers, in our newspapers and magazines, on our laptop and phone screens.

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If scale is your metric, there's never been a better time to be a reader. But by most other metrics, there's also never been a more confounding, daunting time to be a reader. There's less time, more options; less focus, more distraction. Perhaps in acknowledgment of that, reading with an old-timey capital R has begun to feel more urgently necessary. Not simply scrolling through feeds and timelines, wading into the tributaries of attribution and reference and losing any sense of how you got there. Not snacking, but feasting; cramming story by the fistful, holding on to a sentence to better coax out its subtext. And when your job can reach you in the middle of the night and your schedule is shared with multiple other people, to read—to engage single-mindedly, for art rather than application—is in its way an act of resistance.

So how are we all doing it? How are all these words getting into our eyes (inescapably) and ears (increasingly) and brains (hopefully)? How is the way we read changing? The short answer, as it always is, is: People are adapting. The longer answer is that there are almost as many answers as words—which is why, starting today and continuing throughout the week, we'll look at some of the many ways technology is shifting our relationships with books and stories. They won't be all of the answers, and some might not feel like answers at all, but with any luck, they'll make you reconsider your own. And maybe, the next time you're in line or on a bus, you'll pass the time not with a scroll, but with a book.

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High-speed cameras, commonly known as slow motion cameras, imbue milliseconds with the weight they’re so rarely granted. A balloon pops, with the water inside it still holding its shape; a bullet shot underwater leaves an attenuated cone of air in its wake. Daniel Gruchy and Gavin Free, known on YouTube as The Slow Mo Guys, have captured these moments and more than 150 others in painstakingly slow detail. (In one personal favorite, the duo recorded the fracture pattern in glass that was heated and then rapidly cooled. At 343,000 frames per second, five seconds of IRL action resulted in 19 hours of footage.)

“Everything looks cooler in slow mo,” says Free, who aside from his involvement in multiple RoosterTeeth productions also works as a slow-motion cinematographer on big-budget features (Dredd, Snow White and the Huntsman).

Since November 2010, the Slow Mo Guys channel has amassed millions of subscribers and nearly 1.5 billion views—which is a lot of frames, feats, and stories to share. In this Tech Support, the guys answer viewers questions about where they get all of the food they blow up, and which stunts were the messiest, the hardest and the most painful (like having a soccer ball thrown against your face). Gruchy shares that he’s tried much of that exploded food, and Free reveals his sound design technique for filling lapses in sound during the videos.

Watch the video to learn more. Don’t worry, it plays at regular speed.

Today WIRED unveiled more than 100 new illustrations of our staff. Created by New York–based artist Simone Noronha, the black-and-white profile portraits capture each person who works here. Browse all of them on WIRED’s redesigned staff page, and expect them to crop up in other places, too, such as on WIRED reporters’ social media accounts. (Sharp-eyed readers may have already noticed that WIRED’s editor in chief, Nicholas Thompson, has been using Noronha’s portrait of him on Twitter. The writers for our Ideas vertical also got their drawings early.)

WIRED design director Ivylise Simones and I worked closely with Noronha to refine the portraits, and WIRED photographer Beth Holzer shot reference photos of nearly every staff member.

I spoke to Noronha about how the WIRED design team discovered her work and how she creates lively digital portraits.

WIRED: At what point in your career did you start developing the illustration style that you have now?

Simone Noronha: I’m an illustrator and designer based in New York. Originally though I’m from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where I spent the first 18 years of my life, always drawing.

I’m not sure I can pinpoint when I developed the style I have now. It’s an ever-evolving thing as I try to improve my work. That said, I like to think of illustrative style as just our natural flaws shining through and doing the best with it.

WIRED: What tools do you use?

SN: I work primarily digitally. I’ll fuss over details, constant erasing, refining and redrawing, so working digitally complements my workflow. As far as software goes, for illustrations it’s Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, and for animations it’s a mix between Adobe After Effects, Animate (Flash), and Photoshop. And for the past year I’ve been working on a Cintiq, and that's helped speed up my work tremendously.

WIRED: Can you tell me about your experience with portraiture and how it plays into the rest of your work as an illustrator? When we reached out to you, we had just seen a few examples on your website: a side profile illustration of your friends for their wedding invitation and a portrait you made of Mike McQuade, an illustrator WIRED has worked with.

SN: I’ve always loved drawing portraits and getting lost in people’s faces. My earliest memory of truly impressing my mum was with a drawing I did of Luciano Pavarotti’s face at age 4. So that really started everything for me. I was hooked after that, drawing my friends and doing my own angsty teen self-portraits.

At art school I ended up majoring in graphic design, which was when all my work took on a graphic bent. And then my career started in branding design. It was good, but after a while I began to miss illustration and decided to make a switch. Serendipitously, one of the last projects I worked on as a graphic designer was rebranding Redscout, where I drew 128 graphic portraits of their staff for custom business cards. That was quite a project, so when this came about I understood what I’d be dealing with and had the confidence to take it on.

Because I have been drawing people a lot over the years, I’m aware that the way we see ourselves is slightly heightened compared to what real life or photos convey. I keep that in mind and try to strike a balance between being accurate and being complimentary.

WIRED: During the two months that we were working together, I noticed that your style evolved slightly.

SN: Yeah, good eye! It began to evolve as I worked on this series, but never straying far from the original vision. Over the course of drawing your diverse team, the initial rules I established began to modify, in a good way! Some of the things I was doing with one portrait wouldn’t work on another, so I had to adapt and then make sure it was consistent across the board.

WIRED: We wanted these portraits to capture the essence of each individual, but in an impressionistic way. How did you go about deciding the range of different tones, shades, and textures to apply to the portraits?

SN: As far as all the decisions in terms of tone, shade, and texture, those were defined in the early examples of work you were drawn to. As you mentioned earlier, Mike McQuade’s and my friends' save the date portraits were pieces you liked. I had gone through rounds of development to make those for Mike and my friends, so all that thinking easily translated over when you asked me to replicate that on a larger scale.

I treated each of the portraits as an icon that had to “read” well at large and small scales. When you have that thinking in mind, tiny details don’t matter as much as getting across gestures.

Also, my work is generally heavily textured. That’s part habit, part my calling card at this point, and part a very convenient way to deal with hair, both facial and otherwise.

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The Future of WIRED is Here

Introducing the all-new Backchannel, Ideas section, and WIRED Guides.

For as long as we’ve had TVs, videogames, smartphones, and tablets, there have been scientists, politicians, and parents worrying about whether too much screen time will make kids less healthy (maybe), more violent (debatable), and hopelessly distracted (Sorry, can you repeat that?). Here’s a short history of people fearing the worst.

1951

Anthropologist Earnest A. Hooton describes TV as “a visual education in how to do wrong.”

1954

Fredric Wertham writes, “I have found that children from 3 to 4 have learned from television that killing, especially shooting, is one of the established procedures for coping with a problem.”

1977

Following the release of a videogame called Death Race, Gerald Driessen, a behavioral scientist, describes gaming consoles as “definitely negative … The person no longer is just a spectator, but now an actor in the process of creating violence.”

2004

“Children with higher weight status played moderate amounts of electronic games,” a study in The Journal of Adolescence read, “while children with lower weight status played either very little or a lot.”

2017

“Social media has been described as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol,” says Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the UK-based Royal Society for Public Health. “It is no longer possible to ignore it when talking about young people’s mental health issues.”

Read More

How to Reverse Infertility •
Tools for Fetal Surgery •
Save the Preemies •
The Year's Best Tech Playthings •
Cashing in on Kiddie YouTube •
The #MiniMilah Effect •
Rethinking Screen Time •
A Brief History of Digital Worries •
Solving Health Issues at All Stages

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

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This is small of me, but I can’t help myself. Someone says they’re obsessed with the TV version of Game of Thrones—or The Expanse, Altered Carbon, The Shannara Chronicles, The 100, The Magicians, whatever. I tilt my head forward, peer over my nonexistent glasses, and inquire, with what I like to imagine is a sparkle of menace: Yes, but have you read the books?

The hiccup of guilt is so pure. Of course they have not. Of course they would like to. The corners of their eyes crinkle with regret.

Here’s the twist: In this moment I love them. Their shame is beautiful. For them, literacy—having read the source material—endures as an ideal, something to strive for. More miraculous still, they feel this way about works of science fiction and fantasy. Perhaps they recognize the sacredness of these texts and wish they were better credentialed in contemporary nerddom.

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Relax, lovelies. Not everyone can read everything, and there’s something uniquely daunting about speculative fiction. As a genre, it’s known to sprawl. Contemporary page-to-screen megaseries like Game of Thrones and Shannara haven’t helped in this regard, serving only to fortify the Tolkien-powered reputation for density and interminability. You know: maps in the front, appendices in the back, tiny type smushed in the ten-thousand-billion-page middle, all in the service of quests within quests full of unpronounceable place-names and esoteric magicks that, unless elaborately flashcarded, have no chance of sticking in the feeble memory. Who or what is H’m-gh’la again?

So you’d be forgiven for thinking that these convoluted encyclopediae fantastica are the only thing the genre has to offer. They are not. If you’re new to speculative fiction, or just too exhausted to commit to seven volumes of anything besides Harry Potter, have hope. Because as long as there have been hobbitses, there have been hobbit-size stories: tales, as they’re sometimes called, “of medium length.” I’m speaking of sci-fi/fantasy novellas, a classic form that’s only recently emerged as the genre’s most vibrant—and, in the crazed modern era, readable—option.

Four years ago, Tor.com, the spec-fic magazine put out by Tor Books, launched an imprint “dedicated to publishing the best novellas and short novels from emerging writers as well as established authors.” To which not a few observers responded: Shwhat? Novellas? These in-betweener fictions, typically in the realm of 100 pages (17,500 to 40,000 words, say authorities), have never been known to fly off bookshelves. Or to sit on them at all. Stephen King once famously called the form “an anarchy-ridden literary banana republic,” so unstable as to be unmarketable.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. Sci-fi can claim as its own a number of bestselling classics of medium length, from The Stepford Wives and The Metamorphosis to A Clockwork Orange and I Am Legend. Or, if you prefer titles closer to the genre’s pulpy roots, there’s H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which tops out at 32,548 words, and, at just 25,642, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Best Novella has been a category at the Hugos and Nebulas since the ’60s.

Even so, King wasn’t wrong. For most of their existence, SFF novellas have been trapped in monthly magazines and anthologies, where only a fringe readership could visit them (along with short stories, but those babies can also live free in dedicated collections). At least, until Tor.com Publishing came along and liberated the novella, putting slender volumes in the hands of readers everywhere. In four years, they’ve published on the order of 100 and seem to announce new ones weekly, from a catholic stable of worthy practitioners. In 2016, capitalizing on the surge, Saga Press published the collected novellas of Ursula K. Le Guin. Last year, my local indie bookstore started populating a whole shelf with “Sci-Fi Novellas We Love.” All of a sudden, it was hip to be spare.

The form, after all, honors the genre: The novella traces its origins to fairytales and morality plays. Proto-fantasies, basically. In that sense, Tolkien’s world-building was never native to the genre. He simply blew up the balloon.

A balloon which is now about to burst. More than ever, successful world-building seems to require of creators a transmedia commitment to spin-offs and prequels and various other increasingly extraneous tie-ins like comic books and card games. Consumers are rightly overwhelmed. The joy of the sci-fi novella, by contrast, is in its one-off-ness, its collapsed space, its enforced incapaciousness. Authors can’t indulge family trees or maps; they must purify their storytelling. One or two main characters. A single three-act quest. Stark, sensible rules. (And no Starks.)

Containment need not mean compromise. In many cases, spareness heightens prose. My favorite of Tor’s wide-ranging catalog is Kai Ashante Wilson’s A Taste of Honey, a stunning romance that unfolds on the shores of a remote god colony. Something like math poeticized, or poetry mathematized, at novel size the book would’ve gone down way too rich. At 158 pages, though? Practically perfect. Deadlier serious but no less compelling is Laurie Penny’s Everything Belongs to the Future, in which the rich can extend their youth by centuries while the poor age and die naturally. The paltry page count lets Penny, in full author-activist fervor, get away with punking up the familiar biotech premise. Plus, you can read it in one sitting, the way the good lords of lit intended.

Other notables in the category include Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, Seanan McGuire’s Hugo- and Nebula-winning Every Heart a Doorway and, beyond Tor.com’s monopoly, China Miéville’s This Census-Taker, published by Del Rey. Novellas are cheaper to make and distribute than novels, so publishers can—and do—take risks on new voices and strange tales. The result is a richer, weirder genre, with more imagination per square inch.

The final pleasure of these smaller works is that they can serve as gateways to larger ones. Nnedi Okorafor’s standalone epic Who Fears Death is currently in development as an HBO series—but I wouldn’t crack open the book right away; it may put off the unprepared. Instead, start with her novellas, the Binti trilogy, for a taste of Afrofuturism and Okorafor’s themes of homecoming. The final entry pulls off a death-defying feat no full-length novel would sanely attempt.

Binti, it turns out, is one of two blockbuster novellas of the moment. The other is Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, a planned quartet of which two are out. Both series are narrated by their main character: the former a human-alien hybrid, the latter a human-robot hybrid. Hey, the people love half-people.

I’m one of those people, but I struggle with the terminology. You’ll notice these aren’t so much novellas as novellae, sprawling in a suspiciously Thronesian manner. When the second Murderbot book came out earlier this year—hardcover! price tag of $16.99!—I balked. Surely this swell violates the spirit of the novella. Unless it represents the form’s evolution, a push into new territories, a reminder that imagination can’t always be contained.

More likely, readers just like it this way. Binti recently got a gorgeous hardcover rerelease; Wells is working on a Murderbot novel. It seems inevitable that both series will be optioned for TV. Maybe this time, at least, you’ll have read the books first.

How We Read: More in the Series

In 2016, RuPaul Charles told Nightline that he didn’t think that his work would ever be truly mainstream. At the time, his competitive-reality show RuPaul's Drag Race was airing on LGBTQ-focused cable network Logo, and the world's most famous drag performer still didn't think people took his work—or his show—seriously. "I haven't been accepted in mainstream media outlets," he said, "because the only ways they can actually have a conversation with me is to make fun of me, or [to] somehow make a joke about what I'm doing."

Less than a year later, RuPaul's Drag Race had moved to VH1, and even Saturday Night Live was acknowledging its outsized role in the cultural imagination with a sketch that was one giant bit of fan service. "You have to serve complete body," as one butch auto mechanic explained to his coworkers in the scene. "Tuck, hip pads—the face has to be beat for filth. The whole picture is fishy realness."

In fact, since that Nightline interview, Drag Race, which returns tonight for its tenth official season, has won four Emmys. After making the leap to VH1, the show more than doubled its viewership and has gained a huge audience—enough to support all kinds of fans, many of them outside of the queer community. It takes pains to educate viewers about drag history. And increasingly, it's serving as a linguistic vector, introducing drag slang in pop culture at large.

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If you’re new to drag culture, watching Drag Race—which debuted in 2009 and is part America’s Next Top Model, part Project Runway, and part SNL—can feel a little like stepping into unknown linguistic territory. In watching queens serve any and all manner of realness, viewers are absorbing an argot that has birthed everything from "realness" to "kiki" to "spilling the tea." And unless you've been living off the grid for the past few years, you've likely been "yas, queen!"-ed into oblivion via Broad City, 2 Dope Queens, or the umpteen million GIFs that celebrate the full-throated celebration.

Yet, for many, that slang—"work," "gagging," "eleganza," "hunty"—has been stripped of valuable context. Borrowing and stealing language, especially from communities of color, has been going on for a long time. (Look no further than the long history of hip-hop slang crossing over and ultimately finding its way into QVC watches.) And the vernacular of drag culture has been absorbed so quickly that few even know where the terms originated.

Drag Herstory Lesson

Though “yas,” the word of the moment, has undergone the most scrutiny, it has still become synonymous with hetero women. Urban Dictionary, for example, defines it as “An annoying expression used by girls expressing extreme liking.”

In fact, “yas” was used decades ago, as seen in the iconic 1990 documentary Paris is Burning. Considered by many to be the holy grail of drag films, as well as a piece of ephemera from a largely lost generation, Paris is Burning is an essential study in drag language—filmed over the course of seven years in the black and Latinx underground queer ball scene in New York City.

However, while the Paris is Burning-era of performers are often credited with coming up with this terminology, it actually began with drag balls that date as far back as the 1890s, says William Leap, a professor of anthropology at American University and a scholar of gay language.

The best description of these events may come from Langston Hughes, who famously attended a 1920s Hamilton Club Lodge Ball in Harlem as the guest of cosmetics heiress A’Lelia Walker. “It is the ball where men dress as women and women dress as men,” he wrote in his essay “Spectacles in Color”:

“These were splendiferous events,” Leap says of the drag balls. “You were running into people from all over a 400-mile radius and you mix and you talk and you listen. You ended up taking home a hangover and six new ways of talking.”

Drag became a linguistic sponge in queer communities of color. “A lot of drag forms started among African American drag queens, which then spread and became widely appropriated,” says Rusty Barrett, a linguistics professor at the University of Kentucky and author of From Drag Queens to Leathermen: Language, Gender, and Gay Male Subcultures. “African American women in particular were symbolic of a strong femininity, and became a way for gay men to claim femininity in a stance against straight ideas of masculinity.”

The expressions that drag held onto reflected the same flair that gay men were looking for in the mid-20th century when they picked up French words to gain a certain je ne sais quoi. (“Miss Piggy spoke 1940s gay, elite English,” Leap says.) It also mirrors aspects of Polari, a form of intense slang that gay men in the UK used before homosexuality was decriminalized in 1967—a mix of Italian, Yiddish, and Romani that, like drag's vernacular, was used to help identify other members of the embattled subculture, and even encrypt their conversations.

As drag pageants started up in the 1970s, performers once again began intermingling and blending slang as they had for the drag balls in the 1920s. By the time Jennie Livingston started filming Paris is Burning, drag culture was a firmly established subculture with a vibrant history and a very particular vocabulary.

Drag’s position in pop culture changed in the 1990s. Vogueing—the stylized dance based on fashion shows and magazine poses—was the first trend to get snatched. Inspired by dancers in the underground gay scene, Madonna hired drag ball regulars to teach her how to do it and released her song “Vogue” in 1990. (It’s long been considered an unforgivable theft, even though it launched careers for several queer dancers.) Paris is Burning premiered in 1991; two years later, RuPaul Charles blossomed from the underground NYC club scene with his hit song “Supermodel (You Better Work),” which cemented Ru’s status as the world’s most famous queen.

Giving You Life

Because drag lingo mixes so many subcultures, it can be hard to parse which terms came from where. “Reading,” for example, can be traced back to African American women in the 1950s; “kiki,” an onomatopoeia for laughter, specifically comes from the queer black and Latinx community. Regardless, it was easy to think for a long time that drag’s specific, unique influence on language would remain unknown to most who used it.

Young, cis women seem to have been seduced by it the most. That alone is little surprise: That demographic is known for leading the charge on linguistic trends. Drag has a language of resilience and snark, even as it embraces its feminine side. It can be emphatic or emotional or guarded. It’s giving you side-eye or props or a scoff.

For those reasons, it’s also boomed online. Internet culture loves conveying meaning in a pithy, interesting way and, as Leap puts it, “drag language appeals to affect.” It’s the same reason emojis have become popular: It carries a certain depth, it’s evocative, and it’s funny. In the age of the meme, drag lingo goes far.

And all of this comes at a time when gender fluidity is not only becoming accepted, but cool. “I think that people are attracted to the freedom of it,” says Jeremy Calder, a drag performer and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado’s department of linguistics. “A lot of people may be embracing gender nonconformity because of the freedom it represents. One of the manifestations of that is the drag queen, and language is definitely a part of it.”

Is it problematic? Well … yas. Drag isn't just about queerness or femininity, but about race and marginalization. For all of the camp associated with drag, it’s a nuanced art and a political statement with a lot of complicated history behind it. “There’s something positive about normalizing something that was once seen as shameful,” says Calder. “On the other hand, it can erase the origin. Misappropriation comes when people lose sight of its history, and when it becomes a commodity that the originators don’t benefit from.”

It wouldn't be the first time that a vocabulary of resistance has been co-opted because it’s sparkly. As bell hooks put it in her essay "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance," “Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture. Cultural taboos around sexuality and desire are transgressed and made explicit as the media bombards folks with a message of difference no longer based on the white supremacist assumption that ‘blondes have more fun.’” As with hip-hop culture, there is a danger in erasing the people who created it—and now, the secret language that bound drag performers together decades ago is used by people who don’t know them, don’t remember them, and don’t care about their legacy.

Language isn't the only thing for which drag culture is responsible, but not credited—like the sudden popularity of lip syncing, long the bread and butter of queens trying to make a buck on the club scene. Or the contouring trend that many believe was pioneered by the Kardashians, but which began with queens trying to emphasize or diminish certain features of their face. But language is a particularly slippery, resilient thing.

“There’s always been a reinventing of terminology because of appropriation by white or straight communities,” Barrett says. “Terms repeatedly borrowed from young African American speech, for example, lose their ability to convey African American identity. So they come up with a new word. Drag queens will come up with another way of saying the same thing that’s new and innovative and a clear marker of drag identity.”

So cling to the lingo if you want to—but, like a lizard dropping its tail, it’s already regenerating, starting with the queens in the clubs, on the pageant circuit, and talking amongst each other online. Gag today, gone tomorrow.

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