Twenty essential sf books from the past twenty years

Art & Criticism, science fiction
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Torque Control reports on the “20 essential science fiction books of the past 20 years” panel at the just finished Worldcon. These are the results of the jury:

  • The Culture Novels, Iain M Banks (starting 1987)
  • The Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons (starting 1989)
  • Grass, Sherri S Tepper (1989)
  • The Aleutian Trilogy, Gwyneth Jones (starting 1991)
  • The Mars Trilogy, Kim Stanley Robinson (starting 1992)
  • Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson (1992)
  • The Flower Cities sequence, Kathleen Ann Goonan (starting 1994)
  • Fairyland, Paul McAuley (1996)
  • Diaspora, Greg Egan (1997)
  • Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds (2000)
  • The Arabesks, Jon Courtenay Grimwood (starting 2000)
  • Light, M John Harrison (2002)
  • Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang (2002)
  • Evolution, Stephen Baxter (2003)
  • Pattern Recognition, William Gibson (2003)
  • Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell (2004)
  • Air, Geoff Ryman (2004)
  • River of Gods, Ian McDonald (2004)
  • Accelerando, Charles Stross (2005)
  • Spin, Robert Charles Wilson (2005)

It’s a bit heavy on the series and a bit light on female authors, but its worst flaw is that there is little variety in the type of science fiction books on display here. There’s only one short story collection (two if you count Accelerando, which started life as a series of short stories), but no less than six different series considered essential. There’s a lot of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk (Stephenson, McAuley, Egan, Gibson and Stross), as well as New Space Opera (Banks, Simmons, Reynolds, Baxter), some smattering of big literary books (Harrison, Ryman and Mitchell, arguably Gibson as well) and in general these are all Big, Important books liked by science fiction critics. Which is understandable, as this list was created by a a panel of science fiction critics after all. This is not to complain that this list is too literary, far from it. Most of these books are hardcore science fiction, beloved by fans and critics alike and which were paid a lot of attention when they were originally published. It’s a great list of books, but I think it will give you a skewed view of “the state of science fiction” of the past
twenty years.

For a start, if you really wanted to show how science fiction developed over this time period, one of the first books you have to put up would be Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, the first in his trilogy of Star Wars spinoff novels, because it was in no large part due to these that the fortunes of this franchise revived. Its success led to a veritable flood of other Star Wars spinoff books and comics, proved that there was still a market for Star Wars so ultimately paved the way for the prequels. Frnachise books have always been an important, if slightly embarassing part of science fiction, so a list of essential books needs to have at least one of them.

Also conspicious by their absence is any kind of mil-sf or alternate history novel. You could argue that the Jon Courtenay Grimwood series is alternate history, but there the divergence is only used as background. What’s missing is a novel like Christopher Priest’s The Separation or Jo Walton’s Farthing, where the point of the novel is to explore how history could be altered and what the consequences would be, rather than using this as just another exotic setting.

As for mil-sf, this is a genre that came of age exactly in the timeperiod covered by the list, yet you wouldn’t know it from this. Partially this might be because so much of it is so goddamn awful, but there have been some good examples of the genre as well. If David Weber is a step too far, what about any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan novels, or even Theodore Judson’s Fitzpatrick’s War?

But the most glaring mistake on this list is that it has Greg Egan’s Diaspora, rather than any of his short story collections, which are a) much better and b) much more representative. Egan was one of the last sf writers who came to prominence through writing short stories as opposed to novels. Sure, there have been many writers since then who’ve broken into science fiction with short stories, but I can think of only a handful who got the same buzz as Egan did solely on their short stories: Ted Chiang, Paolo Bacigalupi (even if I can’t stand them myself) and perhaps Charlie Stross. To leave out Luminous or Axiomatic in favour of Diaspora is just bizarre.

War is over (if Putin wants it)

Manufacturing Consent, War on south Ossetia
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And for the moment it seems he wants it, as long as Georgia agrees to his terms:

The key demands are that the Georgian leader pledges, in an agreement that is signed and legally binding, to abjure all use of force to resolve Georgia’s territorial disputes with the two breakaway pro-Russian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia; and that Georgian forces withdraw entirely from South Ossetia and are no longer part of the joint “peacekeeping” contingent there with Russian and local Ossetian forces.

Medvedev also insisted the populations of the two regions had to be allowed to vote on whether they wanted to join Russia, prefiguring a possible annexation that would enfeeble Georgia and leave Saakashvili looking crushed. If he balked at the terms, said Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister: “We will be forced to take other measures to prevent any repetition of the situation that emerged because of the outrageous Georgian aggression.”

Saakashvili wanted a quick blitzkrieg war to forcibly rejoin South Ossetia with Georgia, confident in his army’s ability to defeat the Ossetian militia after all the financial support and training it had gotten from the Americans. He never prepared for the worst case scenario, but that’s what he got. Even now he’s belligerent, despite the loss of not just South Ossetia, but also Abkhazia and with the Russians having crushed his army, when it actually fought and not ran away that is. He’s the perfect example of how infectious the neocon/Bushite mentality is, in that he seems to think that bellowing loudly about how evil the Russians are and dodgy metaphors about Munich 1938 can change the reality of the crushing, unnecessary defeat his country has suffered.

The Russians on the other hand must be nearly as happy as The War Nerd –who was just happy to see a proper war for once– with this war. At last they got to humiliate one of the upstart breakaway republics that used to be theirs, not to mention the yanks by proxy, got Abkhazia and South Ossetia handed them on a platter and an opportunity how magnanimous they are by not overrunning Georgia entirely.

Fair point to Saakashvili though, he does seem to have won the media war, as most western media seem to either accept that Russia was the outright agressor, or that it somehow “forced” Saakashvili to invade South Ossetia, despite all evidence to the contrary. As The Exile calls it, Georgia made full use of “the CNN effect”, by quickly getting its talking points about the war across to the opinion makers, as well as having Saakashvili looking all western and decent and talking English, contrasting well with the much less western looking, odd talking Russians. Even the Russian spokespeople speaking English did so with thick accents and saying loony things; one I heard threatened nuclear war if the Ukraine made good on its threat to deny Russia’s Black Sea fleet a return to harbour. Moreover, the Georgians were better at getting moral support by showing footage of Russian atrocities, as I wrote on Monday. This went so far that CNN used footage of Tskhinvali ruins caused during the Georgian offensive when talking about the Russian attack on Gori! Well played Saakashvili, but it didn’t matter in the end.

Print’s not dead; sf magazines are

Comix, science fiction
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Switching from the War for South Ossetia to a slightly less depressing subject, here’s Warren Ellis on the slow death of the science fiction magazine:

Don’t be daft. Of course print isn’t dead. I make a reasonable living off it. Over in the world of words-and-pictures, I can write 44 pages that do little more than fetishise the English longbow and make a profit. The peculiarities of distributing comics through a firm-sale system — one that is actually open to sf magazines, too, though I don’t doubt the process is difficult for them — have kept the Anglophone medium alive in all its weird breadth for almost thirty years now. Additional distribution systems are of course required, because that market is dependent on new stories opening faster than old stores die, and that’s not a trick that’s yet been pulled off to anyone’s satisfaction. And, you know, I could list a dozen other things wrong with it. And have. But when everyone else is muttering that Print Is Dead, comics continues to quietly move millions of units a month. Last month, I wrote a comic that did in excess of 100,000 copies on firm sale.

[…]

All of which is to say: when I run the sf magazine figures, I’m not saying that Print Is Dead. I’m not even saying that No-One Wants Short Fiction. I’m saying, I’m afraid, that something is wrong with those magazines. Not even, necessarily, with the content. That’s entirely subjective. The objective view seems to me to be inescapable: the packaging and marketing just isn’t working. And I think it’s
probably too late for them now.

I know why the magazines are dying: because they’re incredibly dull and have been for decades while they have ceased to be the centre of the genre for even longer. I’ve been reading science fiction since I could read, at first throught the local library and later the local second hand bookshop and even the specialised science fiction bookshop, but it was books I read, not magazines. There were no sf magazines
were I grew up, just science fiction books talking about them in awe so imagine my disappointment when I got my hands on my first ever sf magazine and it was this dull, grey, tiny wodge of newsprint. There was no need for the stories to be crap, as the magazine itself had already turned me off, looking like nothing so much as some granny orientated low rent Reader’s Digest clone.

To be honest, in my occasional samplings of the socalled big three science fiction magazines, — Analog, The Magazine of Science Fiction and Asimov — I’ve never been particularly impressed by the quality of either the stories or the editorial content. To read the best short story science fiction you don’t need the magazines, you just need to read one or more of the various Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. If these magazines die, I won’t mourn them.

The humanitarian cost of the War in South Ossetia

Manufacturing Consent, War on south Ossetia
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Lenny has a good point when he mentions that much of the reporting on the war for South Ossetia has reported extensively on Georgian victims of the war, but less so on Ossetian victims, even though Ossetia has borne the brunt of the fighting:

Incidentally, just so that this point isn’t lost in the deliberately confusing reportage. Yes, Russian jets are attacking Georgian targets and killing civilians. Yes, the reported civilian casualties “on both sides” is reported to be over 2,000. What is quite often not stated or just gently skated over in the reporting, so laden with images of Georgian dead and wounded, is that the estimate of 2,000 civilian deaths comes from the Russian government and it applies overwhelmingly to the Georgian attacks on South Ossetia on Friday. In fact, this is the basis for Vladimir Putin’s claims of a “genocide” against South Osettians by the Georgians (is he deliberately referencing the ICTY judgment about Srebrenica here?).
The Georgian side, by contrast, claims 129 deaths of both soldiers and civilians. So, if Russian figures are good enough to reference, why is the source of the figures and their context obscured? Why is being made to look as if Russian forces are behind most of those alleged deaths? Doesn’t this just amount to a whitewash of the actions of the Georgian army in South Ossetia? And why not mention 30,000 refugees too?

Seeing the reports on the various 24 hours rolling news channels over the weekend (Sky, BBC24, CNN, Euronews and Al-Jazeera) is that footage of the Russian bombardment of Gori was prominent on all of them, but I didn’t see the equivalent from Tskhinvali when the Georgians were bombarding that city. I don’t think this was a deliberate decision on the part of these channels as much as that there just wasn’t much coming in from there. It might seem harsh to talk this way when seeing the obvious suffering of the people cauhgt in the Russian bombardment, but with these images Georgia is winning the propagandawar, if not the war on the ground. Russia and South Ossetia might claim that many more civilians on their side were killed, wounded or driven from their homes, but without pictures these claims remain abstract, miss the immediacy of the Gori footage.

South Ossetia: why this war now?

Europe, War on south Ossetia
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map of Georgia, showing the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia

The one big question that I keep coming back to is what in hell possessed Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili to start this war in the first place. Yes, this has been a crisis that’s been building for some time, with tensions having mounted again in the past month, but there was nothing going on that forced Saakashvili to escalate so drastically. What made him think invading South Ossetia was a good idea when he should know this would bring Russia in and the balance of forces never favoured Georgia, to say the least. As the events of the past few days proved, the Georgian army was no matchfor a serious Russian counteroffensive. Over at A FistFul of Euros, Douglas Muir speculated that it was a gamble on Saakashvili’s part, taking his chance to overrun South Ossetia before the Russians could mobilise:

South Ossetia has always been vulnerable to a blitzkrieg attack. It’s small, it’s not very populous (~70,000 people), and it’s surrounded by Georgia on three sides. It’s very rugged and mountainous, yes, but it’s not suited to defense in depth. There’s only one town of any size (Tsikhinvali, the capital)
and only one decent road connecting the province with Russia.

That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.

So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains.

It is the sort of plan that is very tempting when the situation is right, if your own army is ready and willing and you can manage to find a situation in which the enemy is not. But it’s a high risk gamble, as we’ve seen again and it almost never pays off. In Georgia’s case, if Saakashvili did think this way and perhaps took Putin’s presence at the Olympics as a sign that Russia was distracted enough to risk the gamble, he made an awful mistake. He should’ve known the military commander on the gorund in North Ossetia also knows the facts as Doug sketches them above and that his first thought would beto get his troops through the tunnel as quickly as possible, just in case they do need to fight Georgian forces. Trying a blitzkrieg is the most obvious thing for the Georgians to try, so doubtlessly the Russians had contingency plans drawn up for this eventuality long ago.

But even had the Georgians succeeded in blitzkrieging South Ossetia, they still wouldn’t be in a good situation, as there still would be Abkhazia, the other, much larger breakaway region to content with. A Georgian victory would’ve brought them a long, slow guerilla war in South Ossetia and a Russian reinforced Abkhazia that would offer the constant threat of a second front. Which makes the decision to invade South Ossetia even more strange, with Abkhazia left alone. Perhaps Saakashvili thought that the latter was a lost cause anyway, even when conquered too easily invaded from Russia again and took the risk that had the gamble succeeded Russia would be content with bluster rather than military attack.