Articles with the Tag science fiction

Science fiction and socialism

science fiction, socialism
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More evidence socialism in science fiction was present long before Ken MacLeod and China Miéville:

MICHELISM (“MISH-el-ism”) At the Third Eastern in October 1937, Don Wollheim read a speech written by John Michel, which denounced the “Gernsback Delusion” and declared that stf had made idealists and dreamers of fans, since it is the best form of escape literature ever invented. Since we cannot escape from the world, science-fiction has failed in not facing the realities being fought out in Madrid and Shanghai [and later in other locations we’ll leave you to fill in as events unprogress] and in the battles between reaction and progressive forces at home and abroad. “THEREFORE: Be it moved that this, the Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention, shall place itself on record as opposing all forces leading to barbarism, the advancement of pseudo-sciences and militaristic ideologies [referring to the racist notions of Naziism], and shall further resolve that science-fiction should by nature stand for all forces working for a more unified world, a more Utopian existence, the application of science to human happiness, and a saner outlook on life.” Hot debate followed and the motion was defeated 12 to 8 (the 8 being the Futurians, voting en bloc).

From Fancyclopedia II, first published in 1959, a large encyclopedia of science fiction fandom and fanspeak. You’ll have to scroll down a bit to find this, as there are no links to the individual entries. Found thanks to mr rasfw, James Nicoll.

Science fiction magazines as innovators?

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I’m reading The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, a collection of deadly serious essays aimed at an audience aware of, but not that familiar with science fiction. It includes the usual history of the genre and the chapter on the sf magazines ends with the following statement:

A magazine was like the small independent film as opposed to the Hollywood blockbuster, which has to meet the expectations of the broadest possible audience. Magazines have subscribers and more-or-less guaranteed space on newsstands. Books must be promoted. Even now, well after the heyday of the magazines, most innovation within the field takes place in the remaining magazines or in their contemporary equivalents. The latter include small press volumes, semi-professional publications and on-line publishers.

In the first place does this analogy not hold water. Written science fiction in any form is a niche market; a profitable niche market, but still small peanuts. To compare any book publication to a Hollywood blockbuster is just absurd, as the pressures on a science fiction book to perform well are several magnitudes less than they are on even a “cheap” Hollywood film. This comparison is needlessly disparaging.

I consider myself reasonably well read within the genre, but I do not see the innovation within magazines that is supposedly not present in books. The best modern sf writers, like Iain (M.) Banks, Ken MacLeod, China Miéville, Liz Williams, Lois McMaster Bujold or Jon Courtenay Grimwood, started primarily as novelists, not short story writers and skipped the magazines more or less entirely. In the last five years or so I can only think of Charlie Stross as a writer whose reputation was largely made through his short stories.

Looking at the magazines, or at least at the various Year’s Best anthologies I do not see the innovation there. These anthologies should have the best in short fiction published in science fiction in a given year and should therefore particularly showcase innovative works, should they not? But looking at the stories published in them first seen in the core magazines (Asimov, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Analog and Interzone) there are quite a number of good stories there, but nothing as gloriously new as the best novels of MacLeod, Banks, Grimwood, Williams, Stross or Miéville.

So am I missing something? Or was this just so much blather?

Science fiction gets the reputation it deserves

science fiction
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With representatives like Vox Day:

But the greatest evil of women’s rights is demographic. Europe’s demise is all but assured, thanks to them, as women’s individual choices taken in the collective have stricken European society and brought on successive waves of feminist-friendly Islamic immigration by reducing Europe’s birth rates far below replacement levels. And women’s-rights advocates are now finding themselves in an ironic intellectual bind, as the onset of sex selection technology has them arguing that while a woman has a right to choose abortion, she can only do so for approved reasons.

Leo Frankowski:

I’d been getting less and less happy with America. I mean, I love my country, volunteered to join the service, paid taxes and all of that. But this Political Correctness thing was really getting me down. I was in my late fifties, a company president, a writer with lots of books under me, the holder of seven US patents, and a bachelor. Now, if I couldn’t speak my mind in public, just who in the hell could? The Feminists bothered me, too. It seemed to me that they were trying to be both men and women at the same time and failing badly at both. And there were a dozen other social changes going on that I didn’t like. I suppose that some of it was the way I was getting old, but I was sure that all of it wasn’t. I’ve often looked at the kids goofing off and thought “Amateurs! Hell, I’ve done dumber things than that!”. So there I sat, thirty miles from where I was born, old, fat, and lonely. Getting old just sort of snuck up on me. The fat was because I just didn’t much care about anything any more. Lonely happened because my family was gone, my friends were scattered across the country, and I couldn’t find a woman who wanted anything to do with me. And the more that I looked at the women of America, the less I wanted to do anything with them. I wanted a woman like my grandmother was. Intelligent, tough, and self reliant. Warm, loving, and absolutely straight. Compassionate with all that lived, caring and supportive, but don’t you DARE cross her! There don’t seem to be any of those any more in America.

And John Ringo:

“Well,” he said, grinning, “if you ever see me again, for the first time, be overwhelmed by a wave of lust and need to give me a blowjob right then and there, even if it’s in public. Okay?”
“Sure,” Ashley said, shaking her head. “Men. Maybe not in public, but we’ll talk, okay? This has . . .”
“Don’t let this put you off of men, God damnit,” Mike said, firmly. “I didn’t risk my fucking life to have you go lesbo. All men aren’t these filth. And if you decide they are, you’re spitting on what I did. Because the good guys want to get laid, too. Understand?”
“Understand,” Ashley said, nervously. “Christ, you sound like my dad.”
“Oh, that’s really what I needed to hear!” Mike said, spinning away.

Dialogue from one of Ringo’s latest novels, not the one in which revitalised Waffen SS soldiers save Germany from an alien invasion.

It makes you ashamed to like science fiction, reading these assholes. Especially the latter makes me sick.

Ken MacLeod on the state of sf in the 1970ties

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Ken MacLeod has written a post about his perceptions of science fiction in the seventies and how wrong they are in hindsight. He also discusses the impact the science fiction of that period, from just after the New Wave movement had collapsed to sometime before Cyberpunk got going. Common wisdom has it this period was something of a wasteland, yet
MacLeod is able to name a long list of classic science fiction novels from that period, which have clearly
influenced modern science fiction as much if not more so as the New Wave and cyberpunk movements did. So what’s going on here? One reason this period is so maligned might have been because the influencial voices of the time were so critical themselves:

They contain some of my favourite stories from the time, and many that I loathed, but the main thing
that has stuck in my mind from them is the criticism, largely by John Clute and M. John Harrison. At
the time I enjoyed it. I still do, in a way. But what strikes me, on re-reading, is how negative it was.
Harrison, in particular, has with very rare exceptions (Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, Arthur Sellings’
Junk Day) not a good word to say about anything published as SF. It’s a tellingly selective range that he targets. Most of the books he notices are now forgotten, and were marginal at the time. (Colin Wilson’s The Black Room, anyone?) Those that weren’t (e.g. Tau Zero) are lined up to have their cardboard characters kicked and their clunky dialogue ridiculed. Their specifically science-fictional strengths – and come on, a competent book about travelling at relativistic velocities to the end of the universe has to have some science-fictional strengths – are passed over with a yawn. It’s like reading SF criticism by someone who despised SF; who just didn’t see the point of SF’s existence in the first place.

I’ve seen that attitude elsewhere as well; in the various anthologies people like Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison put together, a rock hard conviction that the best times for the genre lie in the past. It is even visible in the 1979 edition of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, where the focus again seems to be on past glories rather than contemporary developments. Compare it with the 1992 edition, which is far more optimistic and much broader.

But what made people so pessimistic? Charlie Stross, in that post of his I refered to earlier, has argued that in the UK at least, this was a period in which the “retreat from empire” as Stross calls it, hit the UK hard and that this worked through in the science fiction of the period. Certainly, much science fiction from that period is extremely gloomy, but then British science fiction has always been more pessimistic than US science fiction; just compare H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds with Garret P. Servis’ Edison’s Conquest of Mars.

I think there were two developments within the genre itself, that helped caused this impression that nothing good was happening in science fiction. The first and most important development is that this is the exact period where science fiction transformed from a genre based on the short form (short story, novelletes, novellas) to one in which the novel (and ever longer novels) reigned supreme. A side effect of this was the sidelining of the sf magazines (and one of the biggest magazines, Galaxy would not survive the decade).

The people who were influential in the genre at the time were people who grew up with the short story as the heart of science fiction and with less short stories published, with quite a few writers unable to make the jump from short story to novel, with the quality of the short story dropping as writers started to care less about them, no wonder people were so gloomy about the future of the genre.

The second development was the crashing of the New Wave, especially in the US, where it degenerated into decadence for a great part. There was no movement in the seventies on the scale of the New Wave in the sixties and Cyberpunk in the eighties to give form to science fiction, to enthusiase people. The biggest candidate, feminist science fiction, sort of died stillborn for all sorts of reasons (anti-feminist backlash, still inbred sexism of the field, etc.). Without a schema to fit them into, it becomes more difficult for people to see the forest for the trees.

There’s also an element of revisionist history in the common widsom of the seventies as stagnant, dating back to at least the propaganda of the Cyberpunk gurus (Bruce Sterling, I’m looking at you) or even the militant rightwingers of the mid-late seventies (Jerry Pournelle in particular…) The early seventies were an amazing fertile time for alternative science fiction, politicised science fiction, left wing science fiction and modern science fiction, certainly in America, is overwhelmingly rightwing in most of its attitudes.

Quickfire round

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A quick round of sf links.

  • The online science fiction zine Infinity Plus has a new interview up with Christopher Priest (the UK sf
    writer, not the US comics writer). I just read his latest novel, The Separation, which I liked very much and which this interview is largely concerned with.
    Infinity Plus
    Christopher Priest interview
    The other Chris Priest
  • Also in Infinity Plus, an interview with Ted Chiang, short story writer extraordinary. He doesn’t write
    much, less than a story a year, but his stories are always excellent. They’re clever stories, both for
    their sf content as for their stylistic tricks and they feature believable characters.
    Interview with Ted Chiang
    (Both this and the above interview found via Sore Eyes.)
  • Meanwhile, as you have noticed, famed socialist Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod has
    gotten a blog. Like his stories, it’s very politically orientated.
    The Early Days of a Better Nation
  • I found the following interview with Nicola Griffith while searching for something unrelated. Haven’t read any of her books yet, but the interview is still interesting. Not very up to date though, as it dates back to 1994. Explore the rest of the site too.
    Nicola Griffith
  • Finally, two Mary Gentle essays, one on worldbuilding and one on the attraction of villains and
    shop soiled heroes.
    Machiavelli, Marx And The Material Substratum
    Hunchbacks, Sadists, And Shop-Soiled Heroes