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Dutch sf on the Skiffy and Fanty Show

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The Hugo nominated podcast The Skiffy and Fanty show has done a podcast about the state of Dutch science fiction and fantasy:

Literary festivities, multicultural wonders, and invading Dutch peeps, oh my! We’ve got a special World SF-themed episode for you all. Tiemen Zwaan, Marieke Nijkamp, Martijn Lindeboom, and Thomas Olde Heuvelt (a Hugo Nominee!) join us to talk about Dutch SF. We tackle the publishing world, literary conventions and festivals, fandom, the pressures of the market, and the Dutch “character” in SF — and more!

Worldcon has inspired me to get more involved with Dutch sf fandom and Dutch sf writing, which has always stood in the shadow of the Anglo-American sf tradition both for me personally and in general. It has always been cheaper and less of a risk to translate English sf than to take a gamble on a local author. Over the decades there have been a couple of course, but currently there seems to be a genuine renaissance of Dutch sf and fantasy, with Thomas Olde Heuvelt being the first Dutch writer to be nominated for a Hugo Award, not just once, but twice. I’m currently reading the Dutch version of his novel Hex, which will be translated and published by Tor next year and it’s excellent.

What I found most interesting about the podcast was the too slight discussion of what would be the specific character of Dutch science fiction, which focused on how the Dutch have less interest in solitary heroes and more in cooperation and compromise, etc. Personally I’m skeptical about that, I think the real difference is in language use and attitude. You can’t be as bombastic and hyperbolic in Dutch as you can in English because it quickly start sounding childish. There’s also a certain casualness in how people talk that’s lacking in UK and US cultures, with proper middle class people talking on a much more informal level than their counterparts abroad. We’re a fairly equalised society, without many of the overt class symbols that you have in the US or UK. Which is not to say those class differences aren’t there of course, but they’re much more subtle.

What I need to do now is to find more worthy Dutch science fiction and fantasy writers. Suggestions are always welcome.

The Big LonCon3 roundup post

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Below is my roundup of all the con reports and other blog posts about LonCon3 I could find, to be updated later. Be sure to also check out the comments for anything I missed:

On diversity and accessibility

  • What I Did On My Holidays (Nine Worlds, LonCon3) – LonCon was conscious about diversity to the point that I know a few people of colour felt they were only on panels about not being white and/or western, and there were still a number of well meaning con-goers** whose “welcome” to all these new young fans was more cringeworthy than encouraging (shoutout to Will, who not only rescued me from one of these situations but did so with wine). Occasionally Men Told Me Things.
  • Flat Out: Worldcon on Wheels – I rolled up at the Excel bright and early on Thursday 14th, and I have to say Access was excellent. I was greeted by one of the volunteers before I even reached the registration queue, which they told me was 45 minutes long at that point, and whisked away to the Access Desk, where I was given a seat while the volunteer dashed off to pick up my badge and registration packet. Even the failure of the Access ribbons to appear was being dealt with courtesy of improvisation with tape and a marker pen in the best traditions of fandom.
  • Conventions, hierarchies and forced diversity | The 13th Colony – And this was something that appears to be continually driven through over the weekend, or at the very least the panels that I’ve sat and spoken in: the ageism, sexism, racism, anti-academic-ism, hierarchism and various other -isms. I have no doubt Worldcon means a lot to the people who have been going to the convention throughout the decades it has been running and has forged a community there. I even understand the protectionism that they feel when hordes of media fans invade, because yes, sometimes we haven’t read the book or appreciate the fight to be legitimised back in the day but does that make our experience less valid, and therefore devalued?
  • On LonCon3, Diversity and Hierarchies | bethanvjones – And that wasn’t the only dismissive attitude I saw in relation to LGBTQIA people. Another panellist used the offhand ‘gender-whatever’ in discussing diversity. I tweeted about these instances, as did others, and from what I’ve heard they weren’t the only ones. But on the flip side I also saw how quickly the con organisers were to deal with racism and how supported one of my fellow panellists felt by them.
  • Diversity in Fandom: Lessons from Worldcon — Sean McLachlan

Read More

For a Link I Tarry

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SF, fantasy and horror fans get to grips with the reality of Japan crisis
“Now it’s the turn of the science fiction, fantasy and horror communities to give something back following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that has left the country dealing with the possibility of nuclear disaster.”

Genre for Japan
The online auction for science fiction, fantasy and horror fans to help Japan.

John Scalzi reacts to the news that Diana Wynne Jones has died
“News is coming across the Twitter that writer Diana Wynne Jones passed away in the night; I imagine it will be confirmed by official sources soon enough. I have no connection to Jones other than as a reader, but I think that’s enough to celebrate her life and mourn her passing. My favorite book of hers was one called Dogsbody, in which the personage of the star Sirius, accused of murder, is sent to Earth, where he has to live in the body of a dog, and in that form discover the truth about his situation.”

M. John Harrison: On both yr houses
“If science fiction and “literary fiction” so clearly share the social, structural & economic qualities of a genre or marketing category–a clear & obvious commodification–is it any wonder that both so often represent the very worst of what writing has to offer ? The effect of “literary fiction” on literature has been as destructive as the effect of the sf & fantasy genres on the fiction of the imagination. It has reduced surface to a kind of Farrow & Ball blandness, experiment to some clever jokes & humanity to charm. It’s the fictional equivalent of John Lewis.”

Red Dawn as “a deeply left-wing, pro-Sandinista” movie
“Conclusion: the scenario of Red Dawn is far too ridiculous for it to be a credible warning, therefore it is an allegory; the egregious and unnecessary presence of Nicaraguan troops makes it clear that this is an allegory about Latin America and the US in particular; the message of the allegory is clearly anti-imperialist; therefore Red Dawn is an anti-imperialist, pro-Sandinista document.”

Great Expectations, by Dickens Charles
“Great Expectations is a novel which has been historically acclaimed as a portrait of the Victorian society of Eng-land, and of the social mobility that was taking place during this time of upheaval. Named for the autocratic monarch of the country at that time, this period was marked by a gradual liberalisation of the native warlords (who began taking on a more political than military role) and of the gender-segregated and caste-based society. The author of the novel, Dickens Charles (Man or Male-person, a common Eng-land name), was one of the most representative writers of Eng-land.”

On the differences and relative merits of Pratchett and Adams
“It follows from all of the above that Adams was never a world-builder; I think he felt that the world we had was an absurd and rather shoddy mess which didn’t bear too much investigating, and any other worlds we visited would almost certainly be no better.”

Damien G. Walter asks: can fantasy ever tell the truth? A: Yes.
An interview with John Norman, Pornographer of Gor.
The latest issue of Stone Telling, “a new poetry quarterly that seeks to publish literary speculative poems with a strong emotional core”.

Monday Night Linkage

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I was going to post this yesterday, but real life interfered:

An evening with China Miéville.
Paul Wiseall interviews China on his first clear science fiction book. I’d argue that most of his novels from Perdido Street Station have been science fiction, but that’s a matter of taste as much as anything.

Paul Kincaid: Learning to Read Adam Roberts & Rich Puchalsky: On Learning to Read Adam Roberts
How do you solve a problem like Adam Roberts, a writer every book of which I’ve read I’ve disagreed with and/or disliked? Whom, despite this, I still keep coming back to every few years or so. Bad writers you can dismiss, writers that you dislike you can dismiss, even writers you like and enjoy you can often set aside more easily than a writer that irritates you, like a piece of sand in an oyster. With Roberts, I find that his view of what science fiction should be is different enough from mine to be challenging, while at the same time I often can’t believe either his characters or the situations they find themselves in. Paul Kincaid has a similar problem and his post is an attempt to deal with it, to which Rich Puchalsky has replied.

Martin Lewis reviews Arslan.
A review which does not make me want to read this any more than Abigail Nussbaum’s review did. Arslan is a novel that starts with a horrific rape scene in which a teenage boy and girl are raped by Arslan the warlord, which in itself is enough to squick me out, but what both reviews also made clear is that the setup of the novel is far from realistic. Arslan is a warlord out of a fictional country in the former USSR, who by way of nuclear blackmail becomes ruler of the world, only to end up micromanaging a small town in flyover country USA. It’s an absurd setup that Arslan‘s author needs to tell the story she wants to tell. I can deal with novels that rely on either of these two authorical tricks, but novels that use both need to be very good to end on my to read pile and so far nothing I’ve read makes me think Arslan falls in that category.

The History of Science Fiction as depicted in one crazily detailed artwork by Ward Shelley.
Too gorgeous to nitpick.

Golden the Links were – Oh! Oh! Oh! — Sci-Fi Sundazes

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