Fantastika – Page 47 – Wis[s]e Words

The Dispossessed — Ursula K. LeGuin

Published on January 21, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Dispossessed

The Dispossessed
Ursula K. LeGuin
319 pages
published in 1974

After the Earthsea trilogy and of course The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed is arguably Ursula LeGuin’s most famous novel. It was one of a small group of novels in the early seventies –including e.g. Joanna Russ’ The Female Man that took the American New Wave and science fiction as a whole into a much more explicit political direction. It’s a novel that’s still controversial today, or at the very least can still lead to heated debates. The Dispossessed has been hugely influential in radicalising whole generations of fans, while there are plenty of conservative science fiction fans for whom its is a symbol of everything that went wrong with science fiction in the seventies.

The Dispossessed, firmly in the utopian tradition of Herland and looking Backward is a travelogue, set on the double planets of Urras, stand-in for seventies America and Anarres, the “ambiguous utopia” of the subtitle. The protagonist Shevek is a brilliant young physicist whose passion for science leads him to travel from his anarcho-syndicalist home planet to Urras because there he hopes to find the support he needs to finish his thesis. In alternating chapters we get to see his journeys to and on Urras as well as his upbringing and life on Anarres.

Self promotion: threat or menace?

Published on January 12, 20142 Comments

Adam Roberts doesn’t like the modern science fiction writer’s habit of self promotion. John Scalzi gets a bit defensive about it and explains why a little bit of self promotion is cool, but it shouldn’t be too much. Enter Amal El-Mohtar, who gets annoyed by both of them and explains why these attitudes about self promotion hinder writers coming from marginalised groups:

No hand-wringing or tut-tutting about reading widely or behaving with dignity or integrity or what have you is going to end the practice of brash, confident people telling other people, often and obnoxiously, to vote for them. But, crucially, the hand-wringing and tut-tutting does have an effect: it discourages the people who already feel silenced and uncomfortable from ever talking about or taking pride in their achievements.

You cannot with one breath say that you wish more women were recognized for their work, and then say in the next that you think less of people who make others aware of their work. You cannot trust that somehow, magically, the systems that suppress the voices of women, people of colour, disabled people, queer people, trans people, will of their own accord stop doing that when award season rolls around in order to suddenly make you aware of their work. You MUST recognize the fact that the only way to counter silence is to encourage speech and make room for it to be heard.

To be honest the self promotion of writers like John Scalzi has always annoyed me, all that relentless hyping and huckstering doesn’t fit the fandom I grew up with. Yet Amal El-Mohtar has a point here. Not everybody’s voice is equal in fandom and some people need to shout twice as loud to get their voice heard. And if nobody else does it, you have to do it yourself. Mohtar’s post is where it clicked for me how complaining about self promotion and crass commercialism can be privilege talking, especially in the context of the Hugo Awards.

The truth is that science fiction fandom, certainly that part of it that is defined by e.g. the Hugo Awards, still isn’t as welcoming and diverse as it should be, while the world of science fiction as a whole is much much larger than encompassed by the Worldcon/Hugo Award tradition. I’ve long held that the Hugos have lost much of their relevancy because they’re stuck with a voting audience no longer representative of science fiction as a whole. If left alone, these will keep voting for the same sort of writers they always vote for. Efforts to promote new and underrepresented writers therefore should be lauded, not scoffed at.

The Time Traders — Andre Norton

Published on January 7, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Time Traders

The Time Traders
Andre Norton
191 pages
published in 1958

If it wasn’t for Project Gutenberg I might’ve never read this novel. Though Andre Norton was one of the most prolific US science fiction writer, mostly writing what we’d now call young adult novels, she never was translated into Dutch much so was missing when I went through my personal Golden Age. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve started to catch up with her, in no small part thanks to Gutenberg’s collection of her works. Because until roughly the seventies, American copyright was only valid for a limited time and had to be explicitly renewed, a lot of science fiction pulp and early paperback stories entered the public domain. In this case, the copyright on the original 1958 hardcover publication of The Time Traders was never renewed, making it fair game for Gutenberg.

I picked this out of the available Nortons for two reasons: it was the first book in a series and more importantly, it was a time travel story. It had been a while since I’d last read a good, old fashioned time travel story and this seemed to fit the bill perfectly. After all, it has time agents who have to travel undercover through prehistoric times to find the ancient civilisation from which the Soviets are getting sophisticated weaponry and technology they couldn’t have possibly produced themselves.

We will make it to the ships

Published on January 6, 2014Leave a comment

Those are my people and this is the attitude C.S. Lewis warned against in That Hideous Strength because his grubby little provincial mind could not understand it, other than as blasphemy born out of hubris. It’s the attitude that led generations of fans to set up slan shacks or Ozark breeding camps, led us to try out every kook idea that offered a shortcut to the stars, from the Dean drive to Velikovskism, but it’s also what drives hundreds upon thousands of scientists and engineers to dedicate their lives to building, guiding and following unmanned probes to the far reaches of our Solar System, on missions that seem to mock our own aspirations to ever get there ourselves as they reveal how hostile even our benign corner of the universe is and how big.

Remnant Population — Elizabeth Moon

Published on December 30, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Remnant Population

Remnant Population
Elizabeth Moon
360 pages
published in 1996

Elizabeth Moon is a writer I didn’t pay much attention to until a year or two ago. I’d read one or two of her books and they were competently written military science fiction, better written than those of a David Weber or John Ringo, but nowhere near as good as Lois McMaster Bujold’s. When I decided I needed to read more female science fiction writers, Moon was one of the writers I was giving a second chance. Since then I’ve read roughly half a dozen or so of her novels and my initial impression of her has remained roughly the same. She’s a better writer than she needs to be to sell the sort of stories she usually writes and there’s a bit of hidden depth in her mil-sf stories that’s missing from many of her colleagues, that hint at a greater potential. Yet she seems content to keep on writing the same sort of adventure science fiction and fantasy.

Not always though. On two occasions Moon has attempted to write something else than military science fiction, something more ambitious. The most well known of these two novels is of course her Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke winning 2002 novel, Speed of Dark. The other one is Remnant Population, which is a novel about First Contact, between the hitherto unknown indigenous population of an alien planet and the last remaining inhabitant of a failed human colony. As such, it’s a good case study of Moon’s strengths and weaknesses.