Daughters of SF Mistressworks

So we all know about Ian Sales’ SF Mistressworks blog don’t we, and how it showcases classic pre-2000 science fiction books by female writers? Well, it has inspired two people to start up their own blogs, showcasing female sf and fantasy writers.

First up is the new Fantasy Mistressworks blog, which is run by Amanda Rutter and is still in the process of starting up. It aims to do exactly the same as the SF Mistressworks blog has been doing, but for fantasy.

Second, there’s Michaela Staton’s Daughters of Promotheus, which goes on where the other two leave off, by showcasing twentyfirst century female sf writers. It’s already blogging up a storm, with several reviews up.

Both are open for submission of reviews, whether new or previously published.

Pointless fetishm of obsolete technology

This irritated me:

This essay is the first piece of writing I’ve done by hand, start to finish, since 5th grade, 1992. I drafted it using a Uniball Signo pen and black notebook while sitting at my desk. I edited it in the same way. When it came time to enter the essay into the computer so that it could appear on this website, I typed it in almost exactly as I’d put it down on paper.

[…]

Overall I think there’s greater variance in the quality of the writing I produce by hand. The good stuff I write is cleaner, more honest, less stylized, more well-considered. The bad stuff is more obvious, more ponderous, more self-involved, maybe weirder. In fact, this is definitely one of the weirdest pieces I’ve ever written. Writing on the computer drives my writing towards some average value — I think/write/delete/think/write until I have something that’s decent but maybe less vibrant than the ideas as they were conceived in my head.

What annoyed me is not so much the fact that this guy has rediscovered writing in with pen and paper, but the unconscious elitism behind it. Reading between the lines you can see the idea being pushed that writing longhand is more natural and simpler than writing on a computer, but in fact more people find it easier to use a pc to write: just look at the explosion of writing on the internet.

In contrast, writing in longhand is hard work physically cramps your hand, is less easy to edit, less easy to share, in short less accessible for most people. It’s no wonder most people didn’t bother with it after school until the computer and internet came along and made it easy to share your thoughts. This democratisation of writing is a good thing and I hate to see some hipster quest for authenticity endanger it.

Let’s leave out the cod psychology shall we?

Let’s talk about Damien G. Walter’s poorly thought out attempt to understand Christopher Priest for a moment. I mentioned it in passing in my last post, but it’s wrong enough for me to want to point this out at greater length. Walter’s core argument is as follows:

Christopher Priest has spent his entire career being close enough to the top table to smell the gravy, but has never quite been invited to sit down. His writing is extremely clever, but even in the ‘literature of ideas’ that is SF, “extremely clever” is really a way of saying rather unemotional, dry, and hard to love. It has all the qualities of someone who has spent decades studying, learning, dedicating every fraction of a considerable intellect to learning the rules and structures of fiction, but never quite managed to get his own soul on the page. Which, in the end, is the only thing we really demand of a novelist.

Walter also characterises Christopher Priest as having spent “most of his professional career not being J G Ballard”, as in driven by jealousy of his contemporaries and envy at their supposedly greater success, sublimated into this magnificent rant against the current generation of sf writers.

In other words, “he’s just jealous”, the most single predictable thing you can say about any critic ever. It’s something you learn on the playground and should stay there. We’re grownups now and we should be able to argue against criticism without subjecting our critics to amateur psychoanalysis.

The other idea, that Christopher Priest never quite made it as a science fiction writer is ridiculous as well. Walter’s portrayal of Priest as somebody who “has spent decades studying, learning, dedicating every fraction of a considerable intellect to learning the rules and structures of fiction, but never quite managed to get his own soul on the page” is a great invention, but not true of the real Priest. Let’s leave out the strange notion that what we all want from a writer is them “getting their own soul on the page” which is a) a meaningless cliche and b) no, not what we want at all; that’s the sort of thing somebody forced to study literature in middle school would think writing was all about, not at all what real writers universally do. Some writers may feast on their own neurosises and personality, others don’t.

If you look at Christopher Priest’s career, he has always existed at the literary end of the sf spectrum and has largely followed his own path. His early 1970ties works were inspired by the New Wave but not of it, he slowly meandered from science fiction into magic realism in the eighties and nineties, returning to more mainstream sfnal themes in the last decade. He’s never really been driven by commercial considerations or any burning desire to be the top dog in science fiction, as far as I can see.

So I don’t see where Walter gets the idea from that this is what drove Priest to write his rant, when he has form for sticking his oar in. Remember the Last Deadloss Visions? Why not just take him at his word rather than invent needless psychobabble theories as to why he was driven to write this?

Priest!

Whether you’re annoyed or amused by Christopher Priest’s broadside against the Clarke Award shortlist depends on how you rate the writers he attacked. For me, it was a mixed bag. On the one hand I loved his description of Sheri “genocide is too a proper tool for solving ecological problem” Tepper’s The Waters Rising:

how can one describe it? For fuck’s sake, it is a quest saga and it has a talking horse. There are puns on the word ‘neigh’.

Which is nicely hateful to a deserving target. But how to take his judgement of Charlie Stross:

Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet.

Charlie decided to take it as a joke and brought out a line of t-shirts to celebrate. Which is probably the best attitude to take as writer. Now you may know that I’m a bit of a Stross fan myself, but I can still see where Priest is coming from. Charlie can be quite enthusiastic about some very geeky things and if you don’t share those interests this might just be a bit wearing at novel length. But this is a question of taste more than of worth. Nobody can like every science fiction novel ever written and unless you want to argue that nobody should write novels like Rule 34, this isn’t a legitimate complaint.

His complaints about “PC Plod characters” and “och-aye dialogue” are more factual, but I find both of them unjustified. If you write a police procedural you’re bound to have coppers while Charlie has lived north of the border long enough to have a good ear for proper Scottish accents; he’s certainly no worse than a true Scotsman like Ian Rankin.

Meanwhile what Charlie Stross has tried to do with Rule 34 and in which for me at least he succeeded for the most part is to write a believable, proper near future science fiction thriller, in a future that we could actually be living in a few years from now. So for example there’s the subplot of exactly what a small time crook is creating with his illegal three-d printer/matter fab: creating highly realistic sex doll facsimiles of five year old girls for pedophiles. That is something you wouldn’t really imagine as an element of your standard near future setting, but you wouldn’t be surprised to be reading about in the newspaper in a decade or so.

So whether or not Rule 34 was the best sf novel published in Britain last year, it is a credible candidate and Priest’s irritation with Charlie’s writing style blinds him to this. Remains to argue why Priest wrote this attack in the first place, which is probably not, as Damien G. Walter wants to argue a belated jealousy of J. G. Ballard. More likely it’s just general irritation with a shortlist that ignores several worthy candidates for far weaker ones, expressed more strongly than other people might’ve done.

Genius, misused

Alex Toth art from Danger Trail 3

I got Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth last week and have been losing myself in that book and Toth’s art ever since. The page about is one example, seeing that reproduced in a huge format on crisp, clean paper where you can savour each detail makes me giddy with excitement. You cannot help but love Toth’s sense of composition, the ease and elegance he lays out a page, places his panels, places his figures within the panels, always drawing your eyes to the next element. But there also the figures themselves; just look at how the sergeant stands in the middle right panel, or the three legionaires in the bottom left one. Not to mention the line work and the use of black. It’s no wonder that this story, when it came out back in 1950 immediately became a guide and inspiration for almost all other cartoonists working in comics. It’s the perfect example of a style of comics storytelling, a distillation of everything the great comic strip cartoonists like Noel Sickles, Frank Robbins or Milton Caniff had taught Toth, everything he had absorbed looking at their art.

It’s just a shame it’s used in service of such a pedestrian story.

Which could be the theme for Toth’s entire career. He never really had a series or character he was synonymous with, but moved from assignment to assignment, taken meticilous care on each, whether it was Black Canary or Hot Wheels. And that’s a disappointment when you start reading those stories reprinted in Genius, Isolated, rather than just drool over the art. The writing is so dull, or bland or actively bad that it makes the art worse. Comics has always been an unequal partnership of writing and drawing, with good art more able to overcome bad writing than the other way around, and Toth was the greatest example of this.

There is always a tension when talking about comics between story and art, where I sometimes feel that despite our love for it, the art often loses out to the writing. For us fans and critics who ourselves can’t draw our way out of a paper bag, it is after all so much easier to talk about the plot and script than to talk about the nuances of artwork. We’re used to talk about the former, often lack even the vocabulary to talk meaningfully about the latter. A book like Genius, Isolated: The Life and Art of Alex Toth rubs our noses in this deficit. You have to talk about Toth in terms of his art and not worry too much about the banality of the stories he used it on.