Fantastika

What should’ve been the Rule 34 cover blurb

Published on July 19, 2011

From the humongous NotWMurdoch hacking scandal tread on Blood & Tresure comes this gem of a description of Charlie Stross’s Rule 34 courtesy of ajay:

A book of the same title has just been published – it’s by Charlie Stross and is basically ((“Ken MacLeod” – “explanations of Trotskyite splinter groups”) + (“Christopher Brookmyre” – “comedy violence”) * (“Ian Rankin” – (“jazz” + “whisky”)) + (“Cory Doctorow” – “inability to create convincing characters or dialogue)).

(Though I’d put “Rolling Stones albums” rather than jazz for Ian Rankin.)

Connie Willis: bland, bad, popular

Published on July 18, 20111 Comment

Andrew Hickey is not subtle in his criticism of Connie Willis and her latest novels Blackout/All Clear, concluding:

This is someone who has apparently had a successful writing career for as long as I’ve been alive. On the evidence of this utter, appalling, piece of shit, this travesty, this disgrace that makes Dan Brown look like a more elegant and refined version of F. Scott Fitzgerald, I can only assume that she has incriminating photos of the head of publishing at Spectra, her publishers, and of the people who choose the Hugo shortlists. In which case, I can only say to let her release the photos – they could hardly do more damage to your reputations than these books do.

I haven’t read these novels, but all the flaws Andrew mentions were also present in her older novels like e.g. To Say Nothing about the Dog. She has a fondness for screwball comedy plotting, where all the problems her protagonists have to deal with are largely caused by them not talking to each other, prefering to run around like headless chickens. She’s not very good at creating believable villains either, for whom cardboard would be a compliment as she just cannot imagine anybody wanting to oppose her characters. Don’t read her novels for their plot. What’s more, despite her genuine Anglophilia, she’s sloppy in her research, her vision of England barely a step above say the Phantom Rasberry Blower of Old London Town, to say nothing of the atrocities she allows her characters to perpetuate on the Queen’s English.

Idiot plotting, bad research, padding and yet Willis is incredibly popular and a perennial Hugo candidate and winner. She must be doing something right and indeed her saving grace is her gift at storytelling. She’s a good read, not too demanding, easily digestable and flatters the reader outrageously by hitting them over the head with her “subtle” allusions — she makes sure you know To Say Nothing about the Dog is a homage to Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat and praises you for getting it.

Connie Willis, like a whole slew of other bland but persistently popular sf writers (Robert J. Sawyer, Allan Steele, Mike Resnick to name three), is popular because she never underestimates her audience. She knows the trick of spoon feeding her readers without being blatant about it, ladling out easily digestable story and complimenting her readers’ ability to swallow. Judging from everything I’ve heard about Blackout/All Clear however, she has now lost that knack and all that remains are the flaws. If she wins the Hugo for it, it would be the final nail in its coffin.

The dead hand of Heinleinism

Published on July 12, 20112 Comments

Adam Roberts reviews a dreadful sounding novel, Charles Sheffield’s and Jerry Pournelle’s Higher Education, a “confection of right-wing ideological tendentiousness, bias, strawmannery, tedious earbending and downright banging-your-fist-on-the-edge-of-the-pulpit preaching”. It all sounded very familiar, reinforced by the extracts Roberts provided:

“You stated on your general knowledge quiz that Rome was founded in the year 753A.D. Would you be interested in revising that opinion?”

There was a long silence as Deedee opened her mouth and then closed it. Finally she said, tentatively: “753 B.C.?”

“Correct. A mere difference of fifteen hundred years, but what’s that between friends? Bravo. … Now listen all of you. You may be thinking, what the hell is all the fuss about? Barney French is nit-picking on things that don’t make a damn of difference. Well if you think that you’re wrong.” … She walked along the line of trainees, turning so that they could get a good view of her misshapen face. “See the scars? See the bone grafts? Take a close-up. You’re seeing me after thirty-seven operations and the best plastic surgery that money can buy. My body is in worse shape than my face—I have more metal than bone in my shoulders. And I’m one of the lucky ones. Four people died in the accident that did this. And do you know what caused it?”

It’s Heinlein isn’t it? Ersatz Heinlein, that is, inferior writers aping his style and his certaincies without having his skill to make you share them, at least for the duration of the story. The dead hand of Heinleinism, strangling science fiction from beyond the grave.

Heinlein could sell you a lot of nonsense, really rather stupid opinions and authoritarian bullshit but he could make you believe in all that bullshit. Especially if you are twelve, bookish and slightly smarter than your friends. He was like a kindly if slightly more cynical than your parents thought was appropriate uncle, calmly explaining to you how the world worked, trusting you were smart enough to follow his logic and never upset if you disagreed with him, as long as you could argue why you did so. He stacked the decks outrageously of course, but that didn’t matter when you were in the middle of the story. He made you trust him, if only until the book was finished.

His imitators on the other hand…

All a Pournelle or Sheffield can take away of what Heinlein did so effortlesly is the authoritianism, the big man swagger and opinions stated as facts, but without the skills to make it work. They’re just bullies, Heinlein without Heinlein’s charm. And it’s this dead hand of Heinleinism that helps hold science fiction back, as all these wannabes try to ape the old man and fail and as he remains for so many writers and readers both the standard to measure everything new with, even though it should be obvious he isn’t just that relevant or interesting anymore. Just because we liked him when we were young doesn’t mean kids today should read him or that we should keep trying to imitate him and failing. Let him be.

Steph Swainston: “The internet is poison to authors”; quits writing

Published on July 10, 20112 Comments

Fantasy author Steph Swainston stops being a fulltime writer to pursue her dream of being a chemistry teacher:

But – cautionary tale alert! – the writer’s life isn’t what it could be. For starters, packing in the day job can be a mistake. Swainston says: “Writers have to have something as well as writing, something which feeds back into their work and makes it meaningful.” She references the 19th-century Scottish writer and reformer Samuel Smiles. “He said that if you are going to be an artist, you should have a job as well, so that you’re not relying on your art to pay your bills. If we don’t have external influences …” she pauses, “well, look at Stephen King. All his characters seem to be writers.”

Then there’s the lack of human interaction: “I suffer terribly from isolation while writing. I really need a job where I can be around people and learn to speak again. It’s much, much healthier to be around people. Human beings are social animals.”

[…]

“I don’t have a problem with fandom,” she says. “But I don’t think fans realise the pressure they put on authors. The very vocal ones can change an author’s next book, even an author’s career, by what they say on the internet. And writers are expected to engage and respond.” She pauses. “The internet is poison to authors.”

Swainston is also unhappy with the “book a year” ethos of modern publishing: “Publishers seem to want to compete with faster forms of media, but the fast turnover leads to poorer books, and publishers shoot themselves in the foot. And it’s as if authors have to be celebrities these days. It’s expected that authors do loads of self-publicity – Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forum discussions – but it’s an author’s job to write a book, not do the marketing. Just like celebrities don’t make good authors, authors don’t really make good celebrities.”

You can’t blame her for her decision, but it does point out a worry that in these much more commercially minded times, where writers do have to depend on their own gifts for self promotion, some writers will lose out because they aren’t good at playing this game. It certainly doesn’t help fantasy/science fiction to lose yet another prominent female writer this way…

The women sf writers men don’t see

Published on July 9, 20113 Comments

In the ongoing struggle to get greater recognition for female writers of science fiction, one of the fronts surely has to be that of history. One of the points Joanna Russ made in How to Suppress Women’s Writing is that each female author is seen as something singular, a freak, standing outside a history almost entirely defined by male writers. This goes for science fiction as much as for literary fiction: in both cases it’s much easier to imagine a history written without references to women than it is to imagine the opposite. I saw this happen two years ago with the Racefail debate in online sf fandom circles as well. When pushed upon it, well meaning liberal (white) sf & fantasy readers could mention two-three writers of colour, but these were always the same two-three (Delany, Butler, perhaps Barnes or Hopkinson) everybody knows, rather than any of the hundreds of other candidates, of whom most sf readers were ignorant to a degree they were not of their white counterparts. Most of Racefail was a struggle to teach this insight to people (willfully) blind to this and to find ways to make sure this insight was not lost, through e.g. the Carl Brandon society I linked to above.

Consciously or not, like writers of colour, female also sf writers get written out of science fiction’s collective awareness and sense of history, the vast mass of female writers ignored in favour of always the same outliers, their history lost in a way that means that every new high profile female science fiction writer is a novum, rather than standing in the same sort of tradition granted to male sf writers. instead she’s either evaluated in terms of that explicitely male tradition or seen as somebody who breaks with it. It’s not just that feminist or female themes and concerns get ignored and sidelined, but that the whole history of the genre can be and is defined in terms of the accomplishments of male writers, with only the occasional token female writer.

It’s this background that makes an effort like Pre-1923 Utopias and Science Fiction by Women: A Reading List of Online Editions, hosted by the Online Books Page, so important. Inspired by L.Timmel Duchamp’s list of Science Fiction and Utopias by Women, 1818-1949, it does exactly what it says on the tin, providing a list of science fiction and utopian writing by women written before 1923 and available online. Lists like these provide context to the male dominated mainstream history of the genre, by showing how many more writers other than Mary Shelly were active before Gernsback “invented” science fiction, that the genre is build as much on a now largely submerged field of female writers as it is on their much better known male colleagues.