Alien Ball by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2021) opens with the narrator watching three-armed alien Ashtenga play basketball. After this we find out that the narrator has been brought in to report on whether the Ashtenga should be admitted into the professional leagues on Earth (there are conflicting views on the matter).
The rest of the story is a rambling and starry-eyed description of people and aliens playing the game, its history, and all of this is intermingled with a lot of what can only be called simplistic and patronising messaging about inclusion. This latter begins with the narrator doubting his own views:
I’m older now, and I’ve come to realize that some of the things I love are not things that others love. I know—I have always known—that none of us are exactly alike, that our tastes vary, that our opinions differ.
I also realize that some of those opinions become mired in the past. I worry about my own rigid tendencies, something I wouldn’t even have acknowledged twenty years ago.
I know those tendencies make my passage through this world difficult, as difficult as my aging face, and that moment a younger person looks at me, already judging me for things I haven’t said (and might never say) before I even open my mouth.
I don’t want to be a caricature of myself.
An older man opposing changes to his beloved Earth-based basketball—that might be a cliché. I might be the caricature that I was afraid of becoming. p. 39
There is a caricature in that passage for sure, but it isn’t the one suggested.
What the story is specifically about is eventually made explicit (although this is telegraphed pages earlier):
Transgender players were able to play professionally once the professional players were no longer segregated by gender. It didn’t matter how much (or little) testosterone a player had; all that mattered was that the player was exceptional. p. 42
Mmm, goodbye women’s sports then. I’m not sure that these matters are going to be resolved in such a straightforward manner—see the recent troubles in American swimming and British cycling.
Finally, after more interminable detail about the game, and a match where the Ashtenga trounce a human team, the story finally equates the idea of transgender inclusion with the desegregation of basketball in the middle of last century:
Am I really moved by the Ashtenga’s performance? Or am I trying to understand a change that is beyond me, one that is as inevitable as African-Americans joining the National Basketball Association in 1950, something that most open-minded people had seen as necessary in 1939, but others managed to ignore for more than a decade after? p. 45
In the end, it doesn’t matter what I think. Just like it didn’t matter what James Naismith thought about teaching “his” game to women and people of color.
Naismith’s book, Basketball: Its Origins And Development, makes no mention of the World Championship played in Chicago a few months before Naismith turned in the manuscript.
He didn’t want to see “his” game transformed. He didn’t like the additions and changes. He had designed the game for young white men, and for young white men it remained “pure” for generations.
I am not Naismith. I did not invent the game. I did not change any of its rules. I have just loved it forever. p. 46
I particularly dislike sports stories, and “message” stories even more, so this piece was a double fail for me. I’d also add that what makes most message stories so irritating is that (like this one) the complexities of the issues raised are never addressed (and in this case we have the bonus of people who have concerns about trans inclusion in women’s sport being likened to racists).
I wonder why it is that writers think their ability to string a sentence together means they are possessed of a some particular wisdom.
In conclusion I’d also add that, even putting the facile message of this story to one side (although that is probably the only reason it got published), this is a flabby, meandering, and tedious read.
– (Awful). 6,450 words.