Fantastika

Piers Anthony and the fungus

Natural World, science fiction
Published on

Way, way back in his career Piers Anthony was still capable of writing mildy interesting books, before he discovered just writing the same story –of adventures in a magical fairyland in which every male character is like their creator obsessed by the colour of panties– over and over again would make him much more money. Back then he wrote the only novel of his I’ve read all the way through and not regretted it afterwards, Omnivore. It had the interesting idea of having an alien planet full of fungi based lifeforms, including huge fungilike “plants”. Turns out that idea is not as crazy as it sounds at first, because it turns out a prehistoric plant species called Prototaxites was really a fungus capable of growing twenty feet high:

The enigma known as Prototaxites, which stood in branchless, tree-like trunks up to more than 20 feet tall and a yard wide, lived worldwide from roughly 420 million to 350 million years ago. The giant was the largest-known organism of its day, living in a time when wingless insects, millipedes, worms and other creepy-crawlies dominated, as backboned animals had not yet evolved out of the oceans.

“That world was a very strange place,” said researcher C. Kevin Boyce, a University of Chicago paleobotanist.

Prototaxites has generated controversy for more than a century. Originally classified as a conifer like a pine tree, scientists later argued that it was instead a lichen, various types of algae or a fungus .

“No matter what argument you put forth, people say, well, that’s crazy. That doesn’t make any sense,” Boyce said. “A 20-foot-tall fungus doesn’t make any sense. Neither does a 20-foot-tall algae make any sense, but here’s the fossil.”

Every day you can learn a little tidbit like that that makes you realise the world you live in isn’t just sttranger and more wonderful than you imagined, but it’s stranger and more wonderful than you can imagine. But not if you read any Piers Anthony novels.

Sharp on Philip K. Dick

Art & Criticism, science fiction
Published on

Ellis Sharp describes the appeal of Philip K. Dick:

In the case of Philip K. Dick, I don’t find the prose that bad. Yes, sometimes it’s very tired and lazy. Other times it’s dazzling. And when it comes to writing fiction, style and gleaming prose isn’t everything. Think about (for example) Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Henry James might well seem to be the better writer, with a massively accomplished oeuvre. But I would argue that ultimately he never wrote anything as important as what Stevenson achieved in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which manages simultaneously to be a hugely accomplished piece of writing and a brilliant exploration of the contradictory nature of human identity and a very insightful account of Victorian society and its hypocrisies. And Stevenson arrived there by way of genre writing. Interesting.

Dick reminds me of Stevenson in some ways. He’s more than just a great storyteller. He’s very good on paranoia, alienation and the self under stress. I first discovered Dick’s work as a young teenager, when I read his early work Eye in the Sky. At one point the characters discover their genitals have vanished, replaced by nothing more than smooth skin. I found that very disturbing. Rather more disturbing than, say, Gregor Samsa waking up and discovering that he’s turned into a giant insect.

But Dick is also very good on ideology and social control. The world he describes in his fiction continues to resonate today. Official reality is a vast simulacrum, is it not? Wars for freedom and democracy. Celebrity gossip. Grinning royals and loyal, flag-waving subjects. Important writers and journalists.

What I require from any piece of fiction is: does the writer’s vision engage me? If so, is it true to itself as art? And is it true to the world? In the case of Philip K Dick the answer is yes, yes, yes.

It’s easy to dismiss Dick as either a talented science fiction writer, interesting but ultimately limited by his subject matter or as a kind of half-crazed creator of hallucinary nightmares, interesting for their novelty but irrelevant to anything else, but that would be missing the true strength of his writing. Dick’s ultimate concern is the nature of reality, whether there can be such a thing as a fundamental realiy underlying our lives or whether it’s all a construct, no matter how natural it may look. Being a
science fiction writer Dick went slightly farther in this than just making the usual banal observations of the artificiality of American life, by reveling in unreality and constructed realities, yet almost always with their roots in that banal artificiality of white American suburban life.

His early short fiction, collected a few years ago in five large volumes, is illuminating in this regard, in the sheer number of stories that take place in suburban surroundings where everyday features of life have taken on a nightmarish aspect. They show how his fantasies were always grounded in the concerns of the “real world”, the paranoia, insecurity, powerlessnness and claustrophobia of day to day life, no matter how absurd or grotesk they seem at first sight.

(Speaking of science fiction, I do wonder what Ellis made of last Saturday’s Dr Who episode, featuring a certain Elizabethan playwright he’s blogged about occasionally…)

Science fiction and socialism

science fiction, socialism
Published on

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?

science fiction
Published on

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?

Vimes on chess

fantasy, funny
Published on

From Terry Pratchett’s latest, Thud!:

Vimes had never got on with any game much more complex than darts. Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could’ve been a republic in a dozen moves.

Courtesy of Outside a Dog