Fantastika

Handling criticism with dignity

science fiction
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As demonstrated by Tom Kratman, one of Baen Books ever increasing stable of rightwing milsf writers, in response to criticism of one of his books:

I thought it might interest you, you slimy little mincer, that sell-through on A State of Disobedience was 88%. This is extremely good and indicates how impotent you, and the rest of the left wing swine who infest usenet and lie on Amazon, really are. Impotent? No, that would be funny. And while you are a joke, you are not funny. (Besides, real impotence is likely untrue. You probably _can_ get it up…with fat little boys.)

Pussy.

  • Homosexual slur: check
  • Sales as measure of quality: check
  • Accusations of impotence: check
  • Accusations of pedophilia: check
  • Use of “fat” as a slur: check
  • “Pussy”: check
  • Writer making a complete ass of himself and losing the respect of everybody but his most dedicated fans:
    check

Impressive…

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.

Miéville on fantasy

Art & Criticism, fantasy
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I know I’m banging on a bit about China Miéville, with two entries on him in one day, but I missed this article in The Independent when it came out last year:

The real distinction between the tourists and what has become the “generic” fantasy tradition shows up in the weaknesses of the mainstream. When writers don’t respect the field from which they borrow, let alone when (cough, Theroux, cough) they despise it, their work doesn’t believe itself. On every page, nervously scrawled in invisible ink, are the words “It’s ok! It’s not fantasy! It’s really about oppression/marginalisation/exploitation/etc!” The curiously philistine and simplistic belief is that fantasy is only “meaningful” so far as it’s narrowly allegorical.

By contrast, writers within genres know perfectly well that they are writing about refugees, or economics, or gender oppression, or whatever else, but they also enjoy the strangeness they create for its own sake. And they always have done. Gulliver’s Travels is a vicious satire on various social ills, but it also revels in the uncanny spectacles it creates: squadrons of tiny people tethering a man to the ground; talking horses; islands floating with a giant lodestone. It trusts the reader to get on with the tasks of understanding, and of enjoying the strange. It is a book that delights in fantasy.

One of the great signs of fantasy’s health is that often these days, those who borrow its tropes from
outside genre, like David Mitchell, the hot favourite to win Man Booker prize, do so with facility and
respect. Mitchell writes brilliantly about human society and emotion, and about ghosts, sentient computers and transmigrating souls, without sneer, anxiety or generic despite.

China Miéville wins Clarke Award

fantasy
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Via Lenin’s Tomb comes the news that China Miéville has won the 2005 Arthur C. Clarke Award for his 2004 novel Iron Council. According to the Clarke Award’s administrator Paul Kincaid:

“Iron Council by China Miéville focuses sharply on political change, but note how many things feed into
that change: wealth and suffering and sexuality and hope. This is the point at which the conflict between the moral and the political which has underpinned his previous books bursts into the open. There are many wrongs in Miéville’s world, but very few rights, and politics in all its forms from simple co-operation to bloody revolution, is shown to be the frail and fallible attempt to find a way in the world. And in the last few dramatic pages, this is a novel about closing Pandora’s Box because of the necessity of preserving hope.

Iron Council is also still up for the Hugo Awards. So far however, not one Clarke Award winner has gone on to win the Hugo as well; might Iron Council be the first?

Ken MacLeod on the state of sf in the 1970ties

science fiction
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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.